'Do you wonder?' he cried. 'For three
hundred years they have been persecuted, and this is the return match for the pogroms. The Jew is everywhere, but you
have to go far down the backstairs to find him. Take any big Teutonic business
concern. If you have dealings with it the first man you meet is Prince von und
Zu Something, an elegant young man who talks Eton-and-Harrow English. But he
cuts no ice. If your business is big, you get behind him and find a prognathous Westphalian with a
retreating brow and the manners of a hog. He is the German business man that
gives your English papers the shakes. But if you're on the biggest kind of job
and are bound to get to the real boss, ten to one you are brought up against a
little white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a rattlesnake. Yes,
Sir, he is the man who is ruling the world just now, and he has his knife in
the Empire of the Tzar, because his aunt was outraged and his father flogged in some one-horse location on
the Volga.'
I could not help saying that his
Jew-anarchists seemed to have got left behind a little.
'Yes and no,' he said. 'They won up to a
point, but they struck a bigger thing than money, a thing that couldn't be
bought, the old elemental fighting instincts of man. If you're going to be
killed you invent some kind of flag and country to fight for, and if you
survive you get to love the thing. Those foolish devils of soldiers have found
something they care for, and that has upset the pretty plan laid in Berlin and
Vienna. But my friends haven't played their last card by a long sight. They've
gotten the ace up their sleeves, and unless I can keep alive for a month they
are going to play it and win.'
'But I thought you were dead,' I put in.
Riots in Germany amidst a climat of anti-Semitism, 1819 |
'MORS JANUA VITAE,' he smiled. (I
recognized the quotation: it was about all the Latin I knew.) 'I'm coming to
that, but I've got to put you wise about a lot of things first. If you read
your newspaper, I guess you know the name of Constantine Karolides?'
I sat up at that, for I had been reading
about him that very afternoon.
'He is the man that has wrecked all their
games. He is the one big brain in the whole show, and he happens also to be an
honest man. Therefore he has been marked down these twelve months past. I found
that out—not that it was difficult, for any fool could guess as much. But I
found out the way they were going to get him, and that knowledge was deadly.
That's why I have had to decease.'
He had another drink, and I mixed it for
him myself, for I was getting interested in the beggar.
'They can't get him in his own land, for
he has a bodyguard of Epirotes that
would skin their grandmothers. But on the 15th day of June he is coming to this
city. The British Foreign Office has taken to having International tea-parties,
and the biggest of them is due on that date. Now Karolides is reckoned the
principal guest, and if my friends have their way he will never return to his
admiring countrymen.'
'That's simple enough, anyhow,' I said.
'You can warn him and keep him at home.'
'And play their game?' he asked sharply.
'If he does not come they win, for he's the only man that can straighten out
the tangle. And if his Government
are warned he won't come, for he does not know how big the stakes will be on
June the 15th.'
'What about the British Government?' I
said. 'They're not going to let their guests be murdered. Tip them the wink,
and they'll take extra precautions.'
'No good. They might stuff your city with
plain-clothes detectives and double the police and Constantine would still be a
doomed man. My friends are not playing this game for candy. They want a big
occasion for the taking off, with the eyes of all Europe on it. He'll be
murdered by an Austrian, and there'll be plenty of evidence to show the
connivance of the big folk in Vienna and Berlin. It will all be an infernal
lie, of course, but the case will look black enough to the world. I'm not
talking hot air, my friend. I happen to know every detail of the hellish
contrivance, and I can tell you it will be the most finished piece of
blackguardism since the Borgias. But it's not going to come off if there's a
certain man who knows the wheels of the business alive right here in London on
the 15th day of June. And that man is going to be your servant, Franklin P.
Scudder.'
Vocabulary
Pogroms: “ … First, there is
the propaganda; secondly, some squabble that supplies the pretext; thirdly,
little boys go forth to see if the authorities are willing, and if they are not
punished for smashing the windows then the fourth act begins and the mob breaks
the furniture and scatters the feathers of the bedding. Finally, at the fifth
act, the lowest passions finding themselves unrestrained, rape and murder
terminate the drama.” (The Russian
Pogrom, The Times, Monday, Dec 07, 1903)
Prognathous: Having jaws that project forward to a
marked degree.
Flogged: To beat severely with a whip or rod.
Tangle: a complicated problem, condition, or
situation
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