“Let’s go and feed, and I’ll tell you.”
The trio went past the row of old leather-covered couches from the “smoking-room” to the “dining-room,” between which there was no partition, and presently as they discussed a plain English luncheon which even peers as guests did not disdain—for every one is on equality in the Savage—Peters began to rail at the wireless reports from Moscow.
“Well, Falconer’s a Marconi man,” remarked Wentworth. “Perhaps he can explain.”
“I don’t understand it at all,” Geoffrey said. “Of course I’m on the engineering side. I don’t know much about the operating side—except in experimenting.”
“Well, I think the whole thing is most puzzling.”
“How?”
“Well, one day we get the wireless press from Russia and publish it. Next day we have an entirely different and contradictory version. And, oh! the Bolshevik propaganda—well, you see it in many papers. Sub-editors all over the country are using no discretion. We get all the jumble of facts, fictions, declarations, but I never publish any. This latest propaganda against Britain is most pernicious. In America they are publishing all sorts of inflammatory stuff against us regarding Ireland—all of it emanating from the Third International—or whatever they call themselves.”
“The Bolshevik press news should be wiped out,” declared “Doggy” Wentworth. “No sane man who reads it ever believes in the glorious and prosperous state of Russia under Lenin!”
“I agree,” said Falconer, interested in the conversation between the two journalists. “I often listen to ‘M.S.K.’ at night and read him, but his stories are of such a character that I wonder any newspaper publishes them. We never refer to it in our Marconi Press which we send out each night to the cross-Atlantic ships.”
“Yes, but how about the revolutionary propaganda regarding Ireland? We get a pile of it in the office every night,” said Peters. “I never publish it, but over in America they get it too, and I’m certain it does Britain incalculable harm.”