The Secret War Read Online Free Page B

he was certain now that her hair was not fair, but chestnut, and that those compelling eyes were grey. He could not account for the queer impression that he had been face to face with her on some occasion.
    Half an hour later the two men sat down to dinner. The mahogany was of an earlier period than the house, and the chairs were of the broad-seated comfortable variety: a memory of more spacious days when people liked ample elbow-room and men sat long over their wine. The Georgian silver was no purchase from an auction-room, but had come to the family straight from its maker in the hold of a sailing ship, when steam transport was still undreamt of.
    An elderly butler and one footman waited on them; they served a meal that was good but unpretentious. Christopher Penn drank only water, but Lovelace found the Burgundy, which was served with the duck, excellentand
chambré
to a nicety. The port, too, was a pre-prohibition vintage, which had lain undisturbed, steadily approaching maturity, during the years that the Volstead Act had been in force. Yet there was not the least suggestion of glitter and display in the quiet room, and Lovelace felt that he might have been enjoying a pleasant dinner with one of his less well-off friends at home, rather than with a young man who controlled enormous vested interests and was several times a millionaire.
    During the latter part of the meal the two discovered a mutual interest in fishing, and talked of flies, tackle, and of the red-letter days on which they had made their best catches.
    The heat, the dust, the rains of Abyssinia all had faded from the Englishman’s mind, and he was thinking of the brown trout which frequented a pool he knew on the Findhorn, when he realised with a little shock that, unobserved by him, the servants had left the room, and that his host was speaking.
    â€œI want to talk to you seriously, Lovelace, about the real possibilities of stopping war.”
    â€œYes; this society, the
Millers of God
, eh? I’d be most interested to hear more of that, if you care to tell me. It was taking a bit of a risk though, wasn’t it? To admit you’re a member, seeing that I’m, well—a comparative stranger.”
    Penn shook his dark head. “I don’t think so. You see, I’ve rather a gift for sizing people up, and I felt I could trust you all along. When you said that about chucking the easy life to go out and make things just a shade less terrible for the innocent who suffer in every war, I was certain that, even if you didn’t approve our methods, you wouldn’t give me away in a thousand years.”
    â€œThat’s so, of course. Has your society been operating for long?”
    â€œIt started at Oxford just after the Great War. Quite a lot of men went up there to take their degrees who should have gone up years before. Many of themwere broken and bitter. You know how it was, they’d been through it all and come out three parts wrecked in mind and body. There were others, too, who hadn’t seen the fighting but spent the war years at their public schools. Half starved, poor devils, and deprived of all the natural fun which goes with boyhood. They had listened on Sundays, week after week, to all those long lists read out in chapel; fathers, jolly uncles, chaps who had been in the eleven or fifteen a few terms before, cousins and friends; one by one posted as dead, casualties, or missing.”
    Lovelace sighed. “Yes, it was pretty grim.”
    â€œWell, some of ’em got together. They watched the Versailles Treaty in the making. Like a few of the more intelligent diplomats of the old school, who weren’t allowed to have a say, they felt that it was an instrument of vengeance which must lead to further war—instead of a step towards a permanent peace. They had no faith in Governments, either Democratic or run by some big political Boss. They’d been let down too badly, and they saw that the best of