continents both north and south. You've got to get behind the things that are happening and find out the motive force that's making them happen. One thing that makes things happen is money.'
He nodded towards Mr Robinson.
'Mr Robinson, there, knows as much about money as anybody in the world, I suppose.'
'It's quite simple,' said Mr Robinson. There are big movements afoot. There has to be money behind them. We've got to find out where that money's coming from. Who's operating with it? Where do they get it from? Where are they sending it to? Why? It's quite true what James says: I know a lot about money! As much as any man alive knows today. Then there are what you might call trends. It's a word we use a good deal nowadays! Trends or tendencies — there are innumerable words one uses. They mean not quite the same thing, but they're in relationship with each other. A tendency, shall we say, to rebellion shows up. Look back through history. You'll find it coming again and again, repeating itself like a periodic table, repeating a pattern. A desire for rebellion. A feeling for rebellion, the means of rebellion, the form the rebellion takes. It's not a thing particular to any particular country. If it arises in one country, it will arise in other countries in less or more degrees. That's what you mean, sir, isn't it?' He half turned towards Lord Altamount. 'That's the way you more or less put it to me.'
'Yes, you're expressing things very well, James.'
'It's a pattern, a pattern that arises and seems inevitable. You can recognize it where you find it. There was a period when a yearning towards crusades swept countries. All over Europe people embarked in ships, they went off to deliver the Holy Land . All quite clear, a perfectly good pattern of determined behaviour. But why did they go? That's the interest of history, you know. Seeing why these desires and patterns arise. It's not always a materialistic answer either. All sorts of things can cause rebellion, a desire for freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of religious worship, again a series of closely related patterns. It led people to embrace emigration to other countries, to formation of new religions very often as full of tyranny as the forms of religion they had left behind. But in all this, if you look hard enough, if you make enough investigations, you can see what started the onset of these and many other — I'll use the same word — patterns. In some ways it's like a virus disease. The virus can be carried — round the world, across seas, up mountains. It can go and infect. It goes apparently without being set in motion. But one can't be sure, even now, that that was always really true. There could have been causes. Causes that made things happen. One can go a few steps further. There are people. One person — ten persons — a few hundred persons who are capable of being and setting in motion a cause. So it is not the end process that one has to look at. It is the first people who set the cause in motion. You have your crusaders, you have your religious enthusiasts, you have your desires for liberty, you have all the other patterns but you've got to go further back still. Further back to a hinterland. Visions, dreams. The prophet Joel knew it when he wrote 'Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.' And of those two, which are the more powerful? Dreams are not destructive. But visions can open new worlds to you — and visions can also destroy the worlds that already exist.'
James Kleek turned suddenly towards Lord Altamount
'I don't know if it connects up, sir,' he said, 'but you told me a story once of somebody in the Embassy at Berlin. A woman.'
'Oh that? Yes, I found it interesting at the time. Yes it has a bearing on what we are talking about now. One of the Embassy wives, clever, intelligent woman, well educated. She was very anxious to go personally and hear the Fьhrer speak. I am talking, of course, of a time immediately preceding the 1939 war. She was curious to know what an orator could do. Why was everyone so impressed? And so she went. She came back and said, 'It's extraordinary. I wouldn't have believed it. Of course I don't understand German very well, but I was carried away, too. And I see now why everyone is. I mean, his ideas were wonderful… They inflamed you. The things he said. I mean, you just felt there way no other way of thinking, that a whole new world would happen if only one followed him. Oh, I can't explain properly. I'm going to write down as much as I can remember, and then if I bring it to you to see, you'll see better than my just trying to tell you the effect it had.'
'I told her that was a very good idea. She came to me the next day and she said, 'I don't know if you'll believe this. I started to write down the things I'd heard, the things Hitler had said. What they'd meant — but — it was frightening — there wasn't anything to write down at all, I didn't seem able to remember a single stimulating or exciting sentence. I have some of the words, but it doesn't seem to mean the same things as when I wrote them down. They are just — oh, they are just meaningless. I don't understand.'
'That shows you one of the great dangers one doesn't always remember, but it exists. There are people capable of communicating to others a wild enthusiasm, a kind of vision of life and of happening. They can do that though it is not really by what they say, it is not the words you hear, it is not even the idea described. It's something else. It's the magnetic power that a very few men have of starting something, of producing and creating a vision. By their personal magnetism perhaps, a tone of voice, perhaps some emanation that comes forth straight from the flesh. I don't know, but it exists.
'Such people have power. The great religious teachers had this power, and so has an evil spirit power also. Belief can be created in a certain movement, in certain things to be done, things that will result in a new heaven and a new earth, and people will believe it and work for it and fight for it and even die for it.'
He lowered his voice as he said: 'Jan Smuts puts it in a phrase. He said Leadership, besides being a great creative force, can be diabolical.'
Stafford Nye moved in his chair.
'I understand what you mean. It is interesting what you say. I can see perhaps that it might be true.'
'But you think it's exaggerated, of course.'
'I don't know that I do,' said Stafford Nye. 'Things that seem exaggerated are very often not exaggerated at all. They are only things that you haven't heard said before or thought about before. And therefore they come to you as so unfamiliar that you can hardly do anything about them except accept them. By the way, may I ask a simple question? What does one do about them?'
'If you come across the suspicion that this sort of thing is going on, you must find out about them,' said Lord Altamount. 'You've got to go like Kipling's mongoose: go and find out. Find out where the money comes from and where the ideas are coming from, and where, if I may say so, the machinery comes from. Who is directing the machinery? There's a chief of staff, you know, as well as a commander in-chief. That's what we're trying to do. We'd like you to come and help us.'
It was one of the rare occasions in his life when Sir Stafford Nye was taken aback. Whatever he may have felt on some former occasions, he had always managed to conceal the fact. But this time it was different. He looked from one to the other of the men in the room. At Mr Robinson, impassively yellow-faced with his mouthful of teeth displayed; to Sir James Kleek, a somewhat brash talker. Sir Stafford Nye had considered him, but nevertheless he had obviously his uses; Master's dog, he called him in his own mind. He looked at Lord Altamount, the hood of the porter's chair framed round his head. The lighting was not strong in the room. It gave him the look of a saint in a niche in a cathedral somewhere. Ascetic. Fourteenth-century. A great man. Yes, Altamount had been one of the great men of the past. Stafford Nye had no doubt of that, but he was now a very old man. Hence, he supposed, the necessity for Sir James Kleek, and Lord Altamount's reliance on him. He looked past them to the enigmatic, cool creature who had brought him here; the Countess Renata Zerkowski alias Mary Ann, alias Daphne Theodofanous. Her face told him nothing. She was not even looking at him. His eyes came round last to Mr Henry Horsham of Security.
With faint surprise he observed that Henry Horsham was grinning at him.
'But look here,' said Stafford Nye, dropping all formal language, and speaking rather like the schoolboy of eighteen he had once been. 'Where on earth do I come in? What do I know? Quite frankly, I'm not distinguished in any way in my own profession, you know. They don't think very much of me at the FO. Never have.'
'We know that,' said Lord Altamount.
It was Sir James Kleek's turn to grin and he did so.
'All the better perhaps,' he remarked, and added apologetically as Lord Altamount frowned at him, 'Sorry, sir.'
'This is a committee of investigation,' said Mr Robinson. 'It is not a question of what you have done in the past, what other people's opinion of you may be. What we are doing is to recruit a committee to investigate. There are not very many of us at the moment forming this committee. We ask you to join it because we think that you have certain qualities which may help in an investigation.'
Stafford Nye turned his head towards the Security man.
'What about it, Horsham?' he said. 'I can't believe you'd agree with that?'
