“Hello!” said the Spook. “Here’s OOO; he is laughing.”
“What is he laughing at?” Moïse asked. “He should be weeping, he is beaten.”
“What you say has made him laugh more than ever,” the Spook replied. “He is laughing at us. Wait a minute while I find out what has happened.”
There was a pause for perhaps thirty seconds, and the Spook spoke again: “It’s all right! OOO pretends to have controlled Price to dig it up—that’s all! You needn’t look so alarmed, Moïse. Even if anything has gone seriously wrong, we can always fall back on the Four Point Receiver. When you get back to Yozgad, if you don’t find the clue ask Price about it,[[50]] and if anything does go wrong remember the Four Point Receiver.”
Here the joint trance-talk ended. Hill’s eyes closed, his head fell back against the pile of butter boxes, and he seemed to go off into a deep trance-sleep. Sabit was snoring in his corner. Opposite Sabit, and diagonally opposite me, Bekir sat watching with glazed eyes, and moaning sometimes in semi-delirium. His weather-tanned cheeks were flushed, for the fever was heavy upon him, and under its coating of clotted “yaourt” his face looked like a badly white-washed red-brick wall. The Pimple paid no attention to the sick man, but kept his eyes fixed on my coat-button, and leant forward eagerly to catch the Spook’s words above the rattle of the train.
It was a grim audience, but the Spook made a memorable speech.
It began with the platitude that the world was in the melting-pot. Russia was broken for ever. Turkey was doomed. Britain, Germany, Austria, Roumania, Serbia, Italy, France,—all were bled white, nor could they ever recover their old place in the world. Their day of pride and power was over, and those nations which came through the war would survive only to sink beneath the tide of red anarchy.
It had all happened before, many, many times. Thus had died the civilisations of China and Mexico, of India and Assyria, of the Persians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans. And now it was the turn of Europe. It was but the evening of another day in the history of the world. Fear not. Out of the ashes a new and more glorious phœnix would arise. The torches of civilization, of science, of knowledge must be rekindled from the dying flames of the European conflagration and kept burning brightly to herald the dawn of the most glorious day of all, the day of international brotherhood, of universal peace and goodwill over the whole surface of the globe. But whose hand was to kindle the torch?
“America,” said the Pimple. “America will do it.”
“No,” the Spook answered. “It will not be America. The Americans have the wealth and power to hold the lead for a few years, but it will only be the material leadership, and even that will be short-lived. They will never sit upon the moral throne of the world, for they have one possession too many, a possession which will hamper their every effort, and which dooms them to share the death of all the nations. They have a country; they are tied down to a strip of land, of common earth, which they regard as peculiarly their own, and which they are never done extolling and comparing with the territory of other nations. To them, as to every other nation in the world, their country comes first, and the great moral forces come second. Like the French or the Germans or the British, they will lay down their lives for their country with a perfect self-sacrifice; but simply because they are not too proud to fight for themselves, simply because even if their country be in the wrong they are prepared to die for it, they belong to the vanishing era of the past. The leaders of the future will be a nation without a country, or rather a nation whose country is the whole world.”