“The many have to suffer for the few. It is the same in all lands,” was his reply. “But really the matter doesn’t concern me, my dear Trewinnard.”
“It will concern you one day when you are blown up as I have been,” I exclaimed savagely.
Shortly afterwards he left, and for hours I lay thinking, my eyes upon that square gilt holy picture before me, the ikon placed before the eyes of every patient in the hospital. Nurses in grey and soldiers in white cotton tunics passed and repassed through the small ward of which I was the only occupant.
The pains in my head were excruciating. I felt as though my skull had been filled with boiling water. Sometimes my thoughts were perfectly normal, yet at others my mind seemed full of strange, almost ridiculous phantasies. My whole career, from the days when I had been a clerk in that sombre old-fashioned room at Downing Street, through my service at Madrid, Brussels, Berlin and Rome to Petersburg—all went before me, like a cinema-picture. I looked upon myself as others saw me—as a man never sees himself in normal circumstances—a mere struggling entity upon the tide of that sea of life called To-day.
We are so very apt to think ourselves indispensable to the world. Yet we have only to think again, and remember that the unknown to-morrow may bring, us death, and with it everlasting oblivion, as far as this world is concerned. Queen Victoria and Pope Leo XIII were the two greatest figures of our time; yet a month after their deaths people had to recall who they were, and what they had actually done to earn distinction.
These modern days of rush and hurry are forgetful, irresponsible days, when public opinion is manufactured by those who rule the halfpenny press, and when the worst and most baneful commodities may be foisted upon the public by means of efficient advertisement.
The cleverest swindler may by payment become a baronet of England, even a peer of the realm, providing he subscribes sufficient to Somebody’s Newspaper Publicity Agency; and any blackguard with money or influence may become a Justice of the Peace and sentence his fellows to fourteen days’ imprisonment.
But the reader will forgive me. Perhaps remarks such as these ill become a diplomat—one who is supposed to hold no personal opinions. Yet I assert that to-day there is no diplomat serving Great Britain in a foreign country who is not tired and disgusted with his country’s antiquated methods and her transparent weaknesses.
The papers speak vigorously of Britain’s power, but men in my service—those who know real international truths—smile at the defiant and well-balanced sentences of the modern journalist, whose blissful ignorance of the truth is ofttimes so pathetic. Yes, it is only the diplomat serving at a foreign Court who can view Great Britain from afar, and accurately gauge her position among modern nations.
For ten days I remained in that whitewashed ward, many of my friends visiting me, and Stoyanovitch coming daily with a pleasant message from His Majesty. Then one bright morning the doctors declared me to be fit enough to drive back to the Embassy.