"Where's an encyclopædia?" I demanded excitedly.
To our own perfect conviction we established that Archangel could be kept ice-free till the end of August or—occasionally—of September. I left the office and drove down to the Club. On the steps I met Loring in uniform, with a suitcase in his hand.
"Russians?" he repeated; "I've just come up from Liverpool. All the traffic's being held up for them. I saw train after train go through Chester bung full of them."
"You're sure they were Russians?"
"Well, the blinds were down—quite properly. But one train pulled up alongside of us, and a man in my carriage got out and spoke to them—in Russian. A fellow who used to be our Consul-General in St. Petersburg. He ought to know."
I went from the Club to the City. The Stock Exchange was still closed, but I found little clusters of men bareheaded in Throgmorton Street, rapidly smoking cigarettes and discussing the great news.
"Brother of mine lives near Edinburgh," I heard one man say. "He keeps four cars, and he's had 'em all commandeered to shift the beggars. They're Russian troops, right enough. His chauffeur swears to it. They're sending half down from Edinburgh and the rest from Glasgow, to equalize the traffic. Fifty thousand, my brother says."
"Oh, I heard a hundred," his companion rejoined. "I've got some relations at Willesden, and they saw them. Euston was simply packed with trains, and they were stopping them outside as far as Willesden and Pinner. My people went out yesterday morning about three o'clock and gave the fellows something to eat and drink."
My cousin Greville was given the benefit of the Russian theme with all the variants I could find, and if it served no other purpose it may have shown him how little title the English people has to the traditional qualities of sobriety and intelligence. While the rumour ran, I believed and spread it; and, though the official contradiction came almost as a personal affront, I console myself with Mr. Justice Templeton's dictum when we met at the Club a few days later—"There may have been no Russians, but I've hanged men on flimsier evidence and no doubt I shall hang them again."
And side by side with the Russian myth came the mutilated Belgian children and the German secret agents. On a Sunday morning when I was spending the week-end in Hampshire, word was brought that a Belgian child was in the next village—a child of five with both hands cut off at the wrists. Within six hours the same story was told me of seven different children in as many villages within a ten-mile radius. We were beckoned on from hamlet to hamlet, always hastening to reach that 'next' one where the myth had taken its origin. And when we returned, it was to find an equally intangible neighbour had found his wife's German maid stealing away under cover of night with a trunk full of marked ordnance survey maps and suspicious, unintelligible columns of figures. That atrocities and espionage were practised, I doubt not: the wild, unsupported stories of those early weeks I take leave to discredit.