Part 9 (1/2)

Immelan fetched two chairs, and they settled down to watch the set.

Nigel, with his clean, well-knit figure, looked his best in spotless white flannels. Chalmers, a more powerful and muscular type, also presented a fine appearance. The play was fast and sometimes brilliant.

Nigel had Maggie for a partner, and Chalmers one of her friends, and the set was as nearly equal as possible. Naida leaned forward in her chair, following every stroke with interest.

”I find this most fascinating,” she murmured. ”I hope that Lord Dorminster and his cousin will win. Your sympathies, of course, are on the other side.”

”You are right,” Immelan a.s.sented. ”My sympathies are on the other side.”

There was a lull in the game for a moment or two. The sun was troublesome, and the players were changing courts. Naida turned towards her companion thoughtfully.

”My friend,” she said, glancing around as though to be sure that they were not overheard, ”there are times when you move me to wonder. In the small things as well as the large, you are so unchanging. I think that you would see an Englishman die, whether he were your friend or your enemy, very much as you kick a poisonous snake out of your path.”

”It is quite true,” was the calm reply.

”But America was once your enemy,” she continued, watching Chalmers'

powerful service.

”With America we made peace,” he explained. ”With England, never. If you would really appreciate and understand the reason for that undying hatred which I and millions of my fellow countrymen feel, it will cost you exactly one s.h.i.+lling. Go to any stationer's and buy a copy of the Treaty of Versailles. Read it word by word and line by line. It is the most brutal doc.u.ment that was ever printed. It will help you to understand.”

She nodded slowly.

”Paul always declared,” she said, ”that in those days England had no statesmen--no one who could feel what lay beyond the day-by-day horizon. When I think of that Treaty, my friend, I sympathise with you.

It is not a great thing to forge chains of hate for a beaten enemy.”

”If you realise this, are you not then our friend?” Immelan asked.

She appeared for a few moments to be engrossed in the tennis. Her companion, however, waited for her answer.

”In a way,” she acknowledged, ”I find something magnificent in your wonderfully conceived plans for vengeance, and in the spirit which has evolved and kept them alive through all these years. Then, on the other hand, I look at home, and I ask myself whether you do not make what they would call over here a cat's-paw of my country.”

”Ours is the most natural and most beneficial of all possible alliances,” Immelan insisted. ”Germany and Russia, hand in hand, can dominate the world.”

”I am not sure that it is an equal bargain, though, which you seek to drive with us,” she said. ”Germany aims, of course, at world power, but you are still fettered by the terms of that Treaty. You cannot build a great fleet of wars.h.i.+ps or aeroplanes; you cannot train great armies; you cannot lay up for yourselves all the store that is necessary for a successful war. So you bring your brains to Russia, and you ask us to do these things; but Russia does not aim at world power. Russia seeks only for a great era of self-development. She, too, has a mighty neighbour at her gates. I am not sure that your bargain is a fair one.”

”It is the first time that I have heard you talk like this,” Immelan declared, with a little tremor in his tone.

”I have been in England twice during the last few months,” Naida said.

”You know very well at whose wish I came, I have been studying the conditions here, studying the people so far as I can. I find them such a kindly race. I find their present Government so unsuspicious, so genuinely altruistic. After all, that Treaty belongs to an England that has pa.s.sed. The England of to-day would never go to war at all. They believe here that they have solved the problem of perpetual peace.”

Immelan smiled a little bitterly.

”Dear lady,” he said, ”if I lose your help, if you go back to Petrograd and talk to Paul Matinsky as you are talking to me, do you know that you will break the heart of a nation?”

She shook her head.

”Paul does not look upon me as infallible,” she protested. ”Besides, there are other considerations. And now, please, we will talk of the tennis. I do not know whether it is my fancy, but that man there to your left, in grey, seems to me to be taking an interest in our conversation.

He cannot possibly overhear, and he has not glanced once in our direction, yet I have an instinct for these things.”

Immelan glanced in the direction of the stranger,--a quiet-looking, spare man dressed in a grey tweed suit, clean-shaven and of early middle-age. There was nothing about his appearance to distinguish him from a score or more of other loiterers.