CHAPTER VII
THE POISON FACTORY
Geoffrey Falconer stood at the window of the big old Adams room at the Savage Club, chatting with a journalist friend, Charles—alias “Doggy”—Wentworth, of the Daily Mail.
Before them lay Adelphi Terrace and beyond the Embankment and the broad grey Thames with its wharves on the Surrey bank, London’s silent highway.
It was the luncheon hour on a day in early spring. The trees along the Embankment, and in the Gardens below, wore their fresh bright green, not yet dulled by the London smoke, while along the Embankment the trams were rolling heavily between the bridges of Blackfriars and Westminster.
The room in which they stood was familiar to Bohemian London—the world of painters, poets, actors, novelists, sculptors, journalists, and scientists, who lunch and smoke in the same great room with its portraits, caricatures, and trophies—perhaps the only spot on earth where a man’s worth is nowadays not judged by his pocket or the estimation of his own importance. Confined to the professions, it is a club where as long as a man is a good fellow and has no side he is popular. But woe betide the member who betrays the slightest leaning towards egotism.
The members, leaving the little back bar, had already begun to drift in to take their places at the little tables which occupied half the big common-room. The unconventional shouts of “Hulloa, Tommie!” “Hulloa, Jack!” “Hulloa, Max!” were heard on every side—Christian names and nicknames of men some of whose names were in the homes of England and America as household words, men of mark whose portraits greeted one every day in the picture papers.
Just as “Doggy” was about to turn aside with his guest, a friend of his approached the pair. A tall, lank man with a furrowed face, “Dicky” Peters, foreign editor of the great London journal, the Daily Telephone, was known to both, as indeed he was known to every journalist in London.
“Well, Dicky, what’s the latest?” asked Wentworth, a man ten years his junior, but who was among the most brilliant men in Fleet Street.
“Oh, nothing much,” laughed the other good-humouredly. “Only that infernal Moscow wireless press. It gets on one’s nerves.”
“How?” asked Geoffrey, at once on the alert.