A young man sat down at Henry's little table and ordered drink; a bright, neat, brisk young man, with an alert manner. Glancing at the British Bolshevist, he made a conversational opening which elicited the fact that Henry represented this journal at Geneva. For himself, he was, it transpired, correspondent of the Daily Sale, a paper to which the British Bolshevist was politically opposed but temperamentally sympathetic; they had the same cosy, chatty touch on life.
The two correspondents amused themselves by watching the delegates and other foreign arrivals strolling to and fro along the elegant spaciousness of the Quai, chatting with one another. They noticed little things to write to their papers about, such as hats, spats, ways of carrying umbrellas and sticks, and so forth. They overheard fragments of conversation in many tongues. For, clustering round about the Assembly, were the representatives, official and unofficial, of nearly all the world's nations, so that Henry heard in the space of ten minutes British, French, Italians, Russians, Poles, Turks, Americans, Armenians, Dutch, Irish, Lithuanians, Serb-Croat-Slovenes, Czecho-Slovakians, the dwellers in Dalmatia and Istria, and in the parts of Latin America about Brazil, Assyrio-Chaldeans, and newspaper correspondents, all speaking in their tongues the wonderful works of God. Geneva was like Pentecost, or the Tower of Babel. There were represented there very many societies, which regularly settled in Geneva for the period of the Assembly in order to send it messages, trusting thus to bring before the League in session the good causes they had at heart. The Women's International League was there, and the Esperanto League, and the Non-Alcoholic Drink Society, and the Mormons, and the Y.M.C.A. and the Union of Free Churches, and the Unprotected Armenians, and the Catholic Association, and the Orthodox Church Union, and the Ethical Society, and the Bolshevik Refugees (for it was in Russia, at the moment, the turn of the other side), and the Save the Children Committee, and the Freemasons, and the Constructive Birth Control Society, and the Feathered Friends Protection Society, and the Negro Equality League, and the Anti-Divorce Union, and the Humanitarian Society, and the Eugenic Society, and the Orangemen's Union, and the Sinn Feiners, and the Zionists, and the Saloon Restoration League, and the S.P.G. And hundreds of Unprotected Minorities, irresistibly (or so they hoped) moving in their appeals.
Many of the representatives of these eager sections of humanity walked on the Quai du Mont Blanc on this fine Sunday afternoon and listened to the band, and buttonholed delegates and their secretaries, and chatted, and spat. The Czecho-Slovakians spat hardest, the Costa-Ricans loudest, the Unprotected Armenians most frequently, and the Serb-Croat-Slovenes most accurately, but the Assyrio-Chaldeans spat farthest. The Zionists did not walk on the Quai. They were holding meetings together and drawing up hundreds of petitions, so that the Assembly might receive at least one an hour from to-morrow onwards. Zionists do these things thoroughly.
Motor-cars hummed to and fro between the hotels and the Secretariat, and inside them one saw delegates. Flags flew and music played, and the jet d'eau sprang, an immense crystalline tree of life, a snowy angel, up from the azure lake into the azure heavens.
Henry gave a little sigh of pleasure. He liked the scene.
“Will there be treats?” he asked his companion. “I like treats.”
“Treats? Who for? The delegates get treats all right, if you mean that.”
“For us, I meant.”
“Oh, yes, the correspondents get a free trip or a free feed now and then too. I usually get out of them myself; official beanos bore me. The town's very good to us; it wants the support of the press against rival claimants, such as Brussels.”