Copyright & Information

Bulldog Drummond

First published in 1920

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The right of H.C. McNeile (Sapper) to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore St., Looe,

Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

Typeset by House of Stratus.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

EAN	ISBN	Edition
1842325434	9781842325438	Print
0755122860	9780755122868	Pdf
0755123034	9780755123032	Mobi
0755123212	9780755123216	Epub

This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

www.houseofstratus.com

About the Author

Herman Cyril McNeile, who wrote under the pseudonym Sapper, was born in Bodmin, Cornwall, on 28 September 1888 to Captain Malcolm McNeile RN and his wife, Christiana Mary. He was educated at Cheltenham College, and then went on to the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, before joining the Royal Engineers in 1907, from which he derived his pseudonym – ‘sappers’ being the nickname of the Engineers.

During World War One he served first as a Captain, seeing action at both the First and the Second Battle of Ypres, and won the Military Cross before retiring from the army as a Lieutenant-Colonel in 1919. Prior to this, in 1914 he met and married Violet Baird, daughter of a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Cameron Highlanders. They eventually had two sons.

Somewhat remarkably, he managed to publish a number of books during the war and whilst still serving, (serving officers were not permitted to publish under their own names – hence the need for a pseudonym), commencing with The Lieutenant and Others and Sergeant Michael Cassidy, R.E. in 1915. Lord Northcliff, the owner of the Daily Mail, was so impressed by this writing that he attempted, but failed, to have McNeile released from the army so he could work as a war correspondent.

McNeile’s first full length novel, Mufti, was published in 1919, but it was in 1920 that his greatest hit Bulldog Drummond, was published. This concerned the exploits of a demobilised officer, Captain Hugh ‘Bulldog’ Drummond, ‘who found peace dull’. This was an immediate and enduring success and has been filmed and performed on stage both in the UK and USA. Further Drummond adventures were to follow, along with other novels, notably those featuring the private detective Ronald Standish.

Much of his writing is based upon the atmosphere, rather than experiences, he absorbed from public school and London Gentleman’s Clubs. His heroes are most decidedly ‘English’ in character and ‘do the right thing’, whilst his villains are foreign and ‘do not play by the rules’. Ian Fleming once noted that his own hero James Bond was ‘Sapper’ from the waist up.

McNeile died in 1937 at his home in Sussex, having lived a relatively quiet and content life, in sharp contrast to the characters in his books. His friend Gerard Fairlie, thought to be the model for Drummond, went on to write seven more adventures. Many of his books are collections of short stories, with most having a twist in the tail, usually surprising the reader by totally flawing anticipations with regard to their ending within the last few sentences. They are as popular today as ever and eagerly adopted by succeeding generations as amongst the best of their genre.

House of Stratus was pleased to gain the right to publish from McNeile’s estate in 1999 and has since continually held his major works in print.

INTRODUCTION

Captain Hugh Drummond, DSO, MC, late of His Majesty’s Loamshires, defends England against a wicked world of fiends and foreigners. He is rich, strong, charmingly ugly and, at first, a bachelor. He rescues a pretty damsel in distress and, since this is 1920, marries her at the end of the first book. He has to rescue dear ever-loyal Phyllis many times in subsequent stories. But Husband-Rescues-Wife doesn’t have much mileage in sequels, serializations, plays and films. In later books the romance, such as it is, is given to Hugh’s pals – Algy, Toby, Peter – and their topping girls. But Drummond remains leader of the pack, captain of The Gentlemen, a blunt instrument powered with brain, brawn, cheerful courage and good contacts with Whitehall and Scotland Yard.

Hugh’s enemy, England’s enemy, in the first four novels is an international villain who, though he appears under various other names and in any number of disguises, is basically Carl Peterson. We never learn what either his nationality or his real name is. His retinue of henchmen in England seems to be mostly Boches or Bolsheviks. When Carl goes down in The Final Count, his mistress Irma is good for several more books, bent, under those slinky gowns, on terrible revenge against the man who killed her man.

Sapper, Conan Doyle, Haggard, Hornung, Buchan and Dornford Yates were the enchanters and life-enhancers of my boyhood. They were writing stuff that I greatly preferred to the works of the authors I was supposed to be reading: Dickens, Thackeray, Homer, Virgil and those boring Lake Poets. I know ‘belief’ can mean anything, everything or nothing. When I was fourteen I believed in Drummond and Carl Peterson more intensely than in the Holy Ghost or the Communion of Saints to which I testified aloud, in church or chapel, every Sunday. Among other enthusiastic readers of Drummond’s exploits, from the start shortly after World War I, was an exact contemporary of mine, Ian Fleming. Fleming, shortly after World War II, remembered the Drummond books shrewdly in planning his James Bond. He gave Bond a sex life more in keeping with the demands of the fiction of the 1950s and ’60s. But he went, professionally and gratefully, for the essentials of the Sapper plot, movement and supra-national villainy.

In revisiting, in the 1980s, the bestsellers those wonderful authors wrote for (these were Conan Doyle’s words) ‘the boy who is half a man and the man who is half a boy’, we must measure their messages against the values of their own days. We speak today of Britain; a much reduced Britain, and it includes people of many colours, religions and lifestyles. They spoke of England and, notionally if not overtly, that meant the white man (‘clean white through and through’ in character, too), home or colonial, probably upstanding, certainly a match for any two foreigners: a society led by gentlemen, with Royalty at the top. Starting at Calais were the niggers, the Frogs, the Boches, the Bolshies, the dagoes and the stateless Jews. England had the Navy and command of the seven seas. Of course the foreigners envied us, and with many of them envy meant hate. I can remember thinking like that and believing that my values were certainties.

Sapper, perhaps most confidently of all those authors, put the Englishman on a pedestal above the lesser breeds. His favoured Englishmen fought with their fists, punched to the jaw, shot straight, rode straight, played straight, lit cigarettes all the time, spoke in jovial ‘old boy’ slang to each other when relaxed, curtly when speaking to cads. His foreigners fought dirty, carried knives, emitted guttural snarls, used thumbscrews and little known Asiatic poisons: and their eyes were full of malignant hate. Sapper’s narrative style set a pace that encouraged very fast reading. He used a remarkably small vocabulary, with frequent repetitions of formulaic phrases. You could virtually read down the middle of a Sapper page and know you weren’t missing anything near the margins.

Sapper’s stance was doctrinaire, if not chauvinistic. But I wolfed his books first at an age when I wanted to be taught: how to shoot the pip out of the Ace of Diamonds at twenty paces; how to order a Martini cocktail; how to belong to a West End club; how to twist a poker into knots; how to drive a Bentley; how to survive when, doped rigid by villains, I was put at the wheel of my Rolls and sent over the weir into the river; how to disguise myself and get instantly taken on as a waiter in the Ritz in Paris, or taken for a fanatical Moslem in Cairo; how to catch an ugly-looking knife thrown at me in a barroom brawl in Valparaiso and throw it back to pin the dago to the wall by his arm; how to wear riding boots and a monocle: how to be a Man, my son. Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond series and Jim Maitland stories were my textbooks for all this.

Although the Sapper style hardened long before any of his books were made into films, his narrative always seems to me remarkably cinematic, with many of its effects calling for under-the-chin lighting and the cosy close-up. Drummond’s eyes, showing him to be a ‘a sportsman and a gentleman…an unbeatable product’; Phyllis’ feet, ‘perfectly shod’; a villain’s eyes ‘full of malignant fury’; ‘a cold, merciless face’ (Lakington’s); Carl Peterson’s fingers tapping on his knee; Carl’s hands, ‘large and white and utterly ruthless’; the hooded cobra in the Lakington curtains; the face (Lakington’s again) in which ‘shone a fiendish satisfaction’. In this book you will find a woman shuddering audibly. And surely only the cinema could do justice to Phyllis’ facial expression for the sentence ‘…with an inscrutable look at Hugh, in which thankfulness and apprehension seemed mingled, the girl left the room.’ All this, and car chases, sudden blackouts (Drummond has shot out the single light in the villain’s drawing-room), a fight with a partially grown gorilla and Drummond’s rooftop singing in the dawn in Godalming.

I didn’t feel that Samuel Goldwyn, his scriptwriters and cameramen did anything like full justice to Sapper’s book when, in Hollywood, in black and white, in the 1920s, they produced the film with Ronald Colman and Constance Bennett (an American Phyllis). They got practically everything hilariously wrong in their portrayal of English manners and customs. I saw the film again on television recently. It was full of delicious memories and absurdities for me. Drummond and his silly-ass friend Algy (who was dressed in evening tails, white tie and monocle from start to finish of the picture) put on their hats (Algy’s was an opera hat, of course) to sit up at the bar of their West End club, the Senior Conservatives. In the bar-parlour of the Green Bay pub in Godalming (Drummond had taken the bridal suite upstairs) the local yokels were singing the ‘Wine inspires us and fires us’ song in close harmony, waving beer mugs and long after midnight. And, when the peasants had left, in the small hours, the counter-tenor was, in an inglenook near a huge open fire, canoodling with the barmaid and, accompanying himself now on an accordion, singing the ‘You are the only girl in the world for me’ song. There was no acid bath and Drummond had to kill Lakington off-stage in shadow-play. There was no crack when the neck broke.

I never saw the du Maurier/Sapper play in the West End. But it can’t have been any more of a smash hit than the one-night version that was played in Hall at Charterhouse at the end of the short Spring Term (or Long Quarter, as we whimsically called it) in 1927. It was chosen, produced, directed and (as a last-minute substitute for an Algy Longworth who went down with mumps) acted in by Lionel Hale. Lionel, one of the best, and far the laziest, classical scholar of his year, went on to write plays, to review books and plays for the old News Chronicle and to become a name on BBC radio. A very clever fellow, Lionel.

Of course we all, from new boys to Sixth Formers, had read Bulldog Drummond: it was in every House library. And many had seen the play in London. Lionel’s determined, and probably unauthorized, adaptation of the script for school use was masterly. I can remember the frisson produced in the audience by his rewriting of the curtain-line of Act I to end with the single word ‘Godalming’. Much of the action of Bulldog Drummond does take place in Godalming. But Godalming was also the school’s postal address. ‘Charterhouse, Godalming, Surrey’ was the address on the envelopes of our parents’ letters, and at the top of our letters home to them. Tomorrow we would all be taking a dawn train home from Godalming Station. Lionel’s curtain-line was a brilliant emendation. The thumb-screwing, the acid bath, the cobra on the darkened stairs – that was all happening down the hill, and we ought to be seeing it in Act II. Thrill, thrill.

Lionel’s substitute for the infernal gas-making machine, secreted in the coal scuttle, that has Drummond and his pals sprawling insensible in their chairs, was equally daringly emended: doped cigarettes… Smoking at Charterhouse in those days rated a Headmaster’s beating, but Lionel had talked the authorities into letting Drummond and his friends smoke on stage, knowing the added spice of danger this would give to the scene. And the wicked Irma Peterson was played by the wife of one of the school chaplains. She had never smoked in her life and was now required to chain-smoke cigarettes through a 24-inch holder. She hated it and did it unconvincingly.

Lionel also put an extra snap, literally, into the great fight between Drummond (John Fletcher, later an RAF bomber pilot and killed in a raid over Germany) and Lakington (Noel Carlile, grandson of the Prebendary and later Racing Correspondent on The Times). He gave Drummond a pencil to hide up his sleeve. When he had got Lakington in a strangle-hold (Olaki the Jap had taught him this for use in No-Man’s-Land on nights out from the trenches in France) and was bending his head further and further back, he contrived to break the pencil with a crack that resounded through Hall and utterly convinced us that Peterson’s evil henchman had become an instant corpse. Yes, a clever lad, Lionel. He would go far. Incidentally, Drummond’s neck was swelling with incipient mumps as he broke Lakington’s. John Fletcher joined the original Algy in the San for the first week or so of the holidays.

Was there a real-life Bulldog Drummond? The more one establishes favourites in fiction, the more one wants to know who it was that their authors had in mind when shaping them. The answer is almost always dusty, and for Hugh Drummond the answer is dustier than usual because his author was such a compulsive storyteller. (How often in his books does a character – good at games, plenty of money, lazy smile and all that – get extra marks for being good at telling a story?) Instead of the modest ‘Oh, I don’t know, you know’ with which many authors wriggle out of this boring (to them) question, Sapper seems blithely to have spun yarns. He once said in a radio interview, when he was with his young friend Gerard (Joe) Fairlie, that Joe was his idea of Hugh Drummond. Fairlie would have been the last to claim that there had been much of a likeness. He had been just too young to have fought in the 1914–18 war, though he was a subaltern in a smart regiment shortly afterwards. He was a good golfer, and got through five rounds in one Amateur Championship. Golf was not one of Drummond’s sports. Joe had been a good boxer and, like Drummond, had had his nose broken at it. With the best will in the world, you have to admit that Drummond in the books seems to be almost illiterate. Joe was already a writer and was to follow in Sapper’s footsteps as author of Bulldog Drummond’s doings. He very much admired Sapper’s writings. Sapper, knowing that Joe wanted to establish himself as a writer, taught him not a little of the tricks of the trade and helped get him started in print. When Sapper knew he was dying, he gave his blessing to an arrangement whereby Joe should go on ‘following Sapper’ with the Bulldog Drummond character and stories, sharing the rewards with the Sapper estate.

Sapper gave his elder son to believe that a certain Colonel Stapleton-Cotton had been his inspiration for Drummond. As Michael McNeile now recalls and records, his father had told him that they had met, the two officers, McNeile the sapper and Stapleton-Cotton the gunner, when they were both on leave from France in 1917. Sapper, getting off a tram, found this huge man standing in his way and lightly touched him on the shoulder to suggest that he might move sideways. The colonel, resenting this, had picked up the major and dumped him inescapably in a large litter bin. The big man had extracted the smaller one after some minutes of futile struggle, and they went off to a pub on the Victoria Embankment and became friends for life. Stapleton-Cotton was rich, a boxer, a golfer, a bachelor, and he drove a Bentley. They met again in France, where, Sapper told his son, Stapleton-Cotton helped to hold up one end of a pontoon bridge on his shoulders, standing in a stream, while men, vehicles and horses crossed. And, on another leave, they were playing golf together in Scotland when someone drove a ball into Stapleton-Cotton’s back. He bided his time and then picked up the offender (who happened to be a General) and dumped him in a boggy patch of the course head first. Sapper had other vivid stories about this big, strong, rich, attractive, bachelor colonel.

One difficulty about Colonel Bill Stapleton-Cotton is that none of the three officers of that name in the Army Lists of 1914–18 fits this heroic hunk of a man. The only one with a W in his initials, V W Stapleton-Cotton, was a Captain in the Chinese Labour Corps: not a gunner, not a colonel. Not, arguably, Hugh Drummond. And, if you look carefully, you’ll find that in this first volume of the saga Hugh Drummond, though strong, isn’t yet egregiously tall. He visibly acquires height, breadth and strength in the next novel, The Black Gang, and keeps it thereafter.

Sapper must have wished he hadn’t married Hugh to Phyllis at the end of this first book. She gets short shrift in the books that follow. If she isn’t ignominiously bundled off to France for golf and gambling with friends in the first pages, she is soon wishing she had been. She is kidnapped, threatened, sent rat-sized whistling spiders in boxes marked ‘Aspreys’, knocked out by poisonous fumes blown at her down the speaking tubes of taxis and manhandled by Russian soldiers in Essex mansions. She does, however, in a later novel, prove her worth as a wife by killing, with a spanner, one of the circumambient baddies.

Those were the days. Yea, verily (as Hugh might have said when he had been at the Bible again). They were the days when you lunched your ‘birds’ at the ‘Cri’; when you left your two-seater in the Haymarket in front of the Carlton while you went in and had tea with a topping girl; when a villain could surround his Surrey grounds with a lethal electric fence and have a murderous young gorilla roaming the bushes; when the gorilla or a Boche could tear a man’s throat out; when you thrashed swine to within an inch of their lives on the steps of their clubs; when snarls came thick and fast; when the hoot of an owl meant ‘Hugh’s coming, you priceless old beans!’ (Blakeney in Baroness Orczy’s Pimpernel books sang ‘God Save The King’ in disguise in the shadow of the guillotine in Paris during the Revolution, and summoned his pals back to his yacht in the Channel with the cry of a seamew thrice repeated.) Those were the days when your cigarette case had ‘Turkish this side, Virginians that’; when there was always a lounger under the lamppost outside your house; when the Director of Criminal Investigation in Whitehall was old ‘Tumpkins’ whose fag you had been at school; when the villain lashed his victims to chairs, kissed the hero’s wife (also lashed to a chair), hit the hero across the face with a rhinoceros-hide whip and, when he was unconscious, kicked him in the ribs. Those were the days when Drummond and his Mayfair friends could disguise themselves and baffle their Scotland Yard Inspector colleague, whose own disguise they had, of course, spotted instantly. Sapper knew his Sherlock Holmes stories and adopted disguise as an essential mechanism in plot-making.

There is an enormous narrative energy in everything that Sapper wrote. His short stories were a staple of the ‘dear old’ Strand Magazine. Many, but not all, have been collected, a dozen at a time, into books. Fifty-one stories ‘of thrill and adventure’ were collected into the fat Hodder and Stoughton Omnibus, in parallel with the ‘Four Rounds’ of Drummond v. Peterson and the collection of the first four Scarlet Pimpernel novels of Baroness Orczy. Gerard Fairlie wrote that ‘Mac’ said that a short story should be like a good iron shot to the green at golf, streaking away up to a peak and then dropping plop, with spin-back to stop it dead. The dénouement, the drop and the full-stop might be in a short, final paragraph, or even in a single, last sentence.

Sapper had clearly read, and remembered consciously or unconsciously, his O Henry, Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Baroness Orczy and Guy Boothby. I possess a copy of an 1895 novel, A Bid for Fortune or Dr Nikola’s Vendetta, by the copious Guy Boothby. It is interesting to compare the Prologue of A Bid for Fortune with the Prologue of Bulldog Drummond. In both there is a dinner party at which neither the host nor his guests have met each other before. Dr Nikola’s party is in the Imperial Hotel on the Embankment in London; the Comte de Guy (who is Carl Peterson, whoever Carl Peterson is) gives his party in Room X at the Hôtel Nationale in Berne. Each has ordered the dinner by letter sufficiently in advance for the guests to be able to come from the ends of the earth, if necessary, for the date. Dr Nikola specifies a saucer of milk for his cat, a constant companion, and his purpose is to set up a complicated strategy for the achievement of personal revenge on someone who has done him down in an earlier book. The Comte de Guy’s plan is simpler: to bring England to her knees through strikes and lower-class disaffection, and thus (somehow) become enormously rich himself. He has no cat-companion, unless you count dear Irma.

Dear Irma! She is clearly Peterson’s mistress, and we think of her as such. But we call her Irma Peterson, though Carl changes his name, face and status from book to book and they never marry. (In The Black Gang he is the Rev. Theodosius Longmoor, a dear old American clergyman staying at the Ritz in London, and Irma, his alleged daughter, sits around knitting while Carl prepares poisons in the bathroom.) We know Peterson isn’t this great villain’s real name, but when he dies, as a Mr Wilmot, at the end of the fourth novel, it is Irma Peterson who lives on, not Irma Wilmot. All rather baffling. But Irma is a great girl. She smokes too much, but we love her.

Hugh, Algy, Toby, Peter, Ted – the comrade-gang of footloose do-gooders goes back though Baroness Orczy’s Percy Blakeney and his lot, through Dumas’ three musketeers to Malory’s Knights of the Round Table, if not further. I am sure that, for his Hugh Drummond, Sapper was strongly influenced by Sir Percy Blakeney (the Scarlet Pimpernel). Sir Percy’s gang of rich, foppish Regency friends cheerfully risked the guillotine in obedience to his orders. Note Sir Percy’s own wealth, his constantly specified lazy smile, and most particularly his quest for sport. ‘Why do you do this?’ ask characters in the know of Sir Percy and his rich friends. The answer is ‘For sport’, and this is constantly echoed in the Drummond books of Sapper. Near the end of this novel, you’ll find, Drummond positively rejoices that Carl slips out of his, and the police’s, grasp. With the battle won, ‘the tedium of respectability positively stares us in the face’. Blakeney’s team was more numerous than Drummond’s, but loyalty to their captains was never questioned by either team. They did their good deeds because they were sportsmen. It was grand sport rescuing aristos from the guillotine. It was sport for Drummond and Co. to be standing on chairs, locked in a room near the great tanks in Cornwall where the ghastly liquid (one touch and you’re dead) laps higher and higher up the chair legs.

That’s not in this book. If this is your introduction to Bulldog Drummond, I bet it leads you by the nose to the rest of the novels built around this fine sportsman-hero, and to the other Sapper books. Go to them.

Prologue

In the month of December, 1918, and on the very day that a British Cavalry Division marched into Cologne, with flags flying and bands playing as the conquerors of a beaten nation, the manager of the Hôtel Nationale in Berne received a letter. Its contents appeared to puzzle him somewhat, for having read it twice he rang the bell on his desk to summon his secretary. Almost immediately the door opened, and a young French girl came into the room.

‘Monsieur rang?’ She stood in front of the manager’s desk, awaiting instructions.

‘Have we ever had staying in the hotel a man called le Comte de Guy?’ He leaned back in his chair and looked at her through his pince-nez.

‘Do we know anything about him? Has he ever fed here, or taken a private room?’

‘It seems on the face of it a peculiar request from an unknown man,’ he remarked as she laid it down. ‘A dinner of four covers; no expense to be spared. Wines specified, and if not in the hotel to be obtained. A private room at half-past seven sharp. Guests to ask for Room X.’

‘No.’ The manager tapped his teeth with his pen thoughtfully. ‘But if by any chance it was, it would prove an expensive one for us. I wish I could think who this Comte de Guy is.’

‘He sounds like a Frenchman,’ she answered. Then after a pause: ‘I suppose you’ll have to take it seriously?’

‘I must.’ He took off his pince-nez and laid them on the desk in front of him. ‘Would you send the maître d’hôtel to me at once?’

Whatever may have been the manager’s misgivings, they were certainly not shared by the head waiter as he left the office after receiving his instructions. War and short rations had not been conducive to any particular lucrative business in his sphere; and the whole sound of the proposed entertainment seemed to him to contain considerable promise. Moreover, he was a man who loved his work, and a free hand over preparing a dinner was a joy in itself. Undoubtedly he personally would meet the three guests and the mysterious Comte de Guy; he personally would see that they had nothing to complain of in the matter of service at dinner…

And so at about twenty minutes past seven the maître d’hôtel was hovering round the hall porter, the manager was hovering round the maître d’hôtel, and the secretary was hovering round both. At five-and-twenty minutes past the first guest arrived…

He was a peculiar-looking man, in a big fur coat, reminding one irresistibly of a codfish.

‘I wish to be taken to Room X.’ The French secretary stiffened involuntarily as the maître d’hôtel stepped obsequiously forward. Cosmopolitan as the hotel was, even now she could never bear German spoken without an inward shudder of disgust.

‘A Boche,’ she murmured in disgust to the manager as the first arrival disappeared through the swing doors at the end of the lounge. It is to be regretted that that worthy man was more occupied in shaking himself by the hand, at the proof that the letter was bona fide, than in any meditation on the guest’s nationality.

Almost immediately afterwards the second and third members of the party arrived. They did not come together, and what seemed peculiar to the manager was that they were evidently strangers to one another.

The leading one – a tall gaunt man with a ragged beard and a pair of piercing eyes – asked in a nasal and by no means an inaudible tone for Room X. As he spoke a little fat man who was standing just behind him started perceptibly, and shot a birdlike glance at the speaker.

‘He’s not French,’ said the secretary excitedly to the manager as the ill-assorted pair were led out of the lounge by the head waiter. ‘That last one was another Boche.’

‘Two Germans and an American.’ He looked a little apprehensive. ‘Let us hope the dinner will appease everybody. Otherwise–’

But whatever fears he might have entertained with regard to the furniture in Room X, they were not destined to be uttered. Even as he spoke the door again swung open, and a man with a thick white scarf around his neck, so pulled up as almost completely to cover his face, came in. A soft hat was pulled down well over his ears, and all that the manager could swear to as regards the newcomer’s appearance was a pair of deep-set, steel-grey eyes which seemed to bore through him.

‘M’sieur le Comte de Guy?’ The manager bowed deferentially and rubbed his hands together. ‘Everything is ready, and your three guests have arrived.’

The maître d’hôtel stepped forward to relieve him of his coat, but the Count waved him away.

As he followed his guide his eye swept round the lounge. Save for two or three elderly women of doubtful nationality, and a man in the American Red Cross, the place was deserted; and as he passed through the swing doors he turned to the head waiter.

No – business decidedly was not good. The waiter was voluble. Business had never been so poor in the memory of man… But it was to be hoped that the dinner would be to Monsieur le Comte’s liking… He personally had superintended it… Also the wines.

‘If everything is to my satisfaction you will not regret it,’ said the Count tersely. ‘But remember one thing. After the coffee has been brought in, I do not wish to be disturbed under any circumstances whatever.’ The head waiter paused as he came to a door, and the Count repeated the last few words. ‘Under no circumstances whatever.’

As he spoke he flung open the door and the Count entered. It cannot be said that the atmosphere of the room was congenial. The three occupants were regarding one another in hostile silence, and as the Count entered, they, with one accord, transferred their suspicious glance to him.

For a moment he stood motionless, while he looked at each one in turn. Then he stepped forward…

‘Good evening, gentlemen’ – he still spoke in French – ‘I am honoured at your presence.’ He turned to the head waiter. ‘Let dinner be served in five minutes exactly.’

‘During that five minutes, gentlemen, I propose to introduce myself to you, and you to one another.’ As he spoke he divested himself of his coat and hat. ‘The business which I wish to discuss we will postpone, with your permission, till after coffee, when we shall be undisturbed.’

In silence the three guests waited while he unwound the thick white muffler; then, with undisguised curiosity, they studied their host. In appearance he was striking. He had a short dark beard, and in profile his face was aquiline and stern. The eyes, which had so impressed the manager, seemed now to be a cold grey-blue; the thick brown hair, flecked slightly with grey, was brushed back from a broad forehead. His hands were large and white; not effeminate, but capable and determined: the hands of a man who knew what he wanted, knew how to get it and got it. To even the most superficial observer the giver of the feast was a man of power: a man capable of forming instant decisions and of carrying them through…

And if so much was obvious to the superficial observer, it was more than obvious to the three men who stood by the fire watching him. They were what they were simply owing to the fact that they were not superficial servers of humanity; and each one of them, as he watched his host, realised that he was in the presence of a great man. It was enough: great men do not send fool invitations to dinner to men of international repute. It mattered not what form his greatness took – there was money in greatness, big money. And money was their life…

‘Mr Hocking, I believe,’ he remarked in English, holding out his hand. ‘I am glad you managed to come.’

The American shook the proffered hand, while the two Germans looked at him with sudden interest. As the man at the head of the great American cotton trust, worth more in millions than he could count, he was entitled to their respect…

‘That’s me, Count,’ returned the millionaire in his nasal twang. ‘I am interested to know to what I am indebted for this invitation.’

‘All in good time, Mr Hocking,’ smiled the host. ‘I have hopes that the dinner will fill in that time satisfactorily.’

He turned to the taller of the two Germans, who without his coat seemed more like a codfish than ever.

The man whose interest in German coal was hardly less well known than Hocking’s in cotton, bowed stiffly.

‘And Herr von Gratz?’ The Count turned to the last member of the party and shook hands. Though less well known than either of the other two in the realms of international finance, von Gratz’s name in the steel trade in Central Europe was one to conjure with.

‘Well, gentlemen,’ said the Count, ‘before we sit down to dinner, I may perhaps be permitted to say a few words of introduction. The nations of the world have recently been engaged in a performance of unrivalled stupidity. As far as one can tell that performance is now over. The last thing I wish to do is to discuss the war – except in so far as it concerns our meeting here tonight. Mr Hocking is an American, you two gentlemen are Germans. I’ – the Count smiled slightly – ‘have no nationality. Or rather, shall I say, I have every nationality. Completely cosmopolitan… Gentlemen, the war was waged by idiots, and when idiots get busy on a large scale, it is time for clever men to step in… That is the raison d’être for this little dinner… I claim that we four men are sufficiently international to be able to disregard any stupid and petty feelings about this country and that country, and to regard the world outlook at the present moment from one point of view and one point of view only – our own.’

‘It will be my object after dinner,’ continued the Count, ‘to try and prove to you that we have a common point of view. Until then – shall we merely concentrate on a pious hope that the Hôtel Nationale will not poison us with their food?’

‘I guess,’ remarked the American, ‘that you’ve got a pretty healthy command of languages, Count.’

‘I speak four fluently – French, German, English, and Spanish,’ returned the other. ‘In addition I can make myself understood in Russia, Japan, China, the Balkan States, and – America.’

His smile, as he spoke, robbed the words of any suspicion of offence. The next moment the head waiter opened the door, and the four men sat down to dine.

It must be admitted that the average hostess, desirous of making a dinner a success, would have been filled with secret dismay at the general atmosphere in the room. The American, in accumulating his millions, had also accumulated a digestion of such an exotic and tender character that dry rusks and Vichy water were the limit of his capacity.

Herr Steinemann was of the common order of German, to whom food was sacred. He ate and drank enormously, and evidently considered that nothing further was required of him.

Von Gratz did his best to keep his end up, but as he was apparently in a chronic condition of fear that the gaunt American would assault him with violence, he cannot be said to have contributed much to the gaiety of the meal.

And so to the host must be given the credit that the dinner was a success. Without appearing to monopolise the conversation he talked ceaselessly and well. More – he talked brilliantly. There seemed to be no corner of the globe with which he had not a nodding acquaintance at least; while with most places he was as familiar as a Londoner with Piccadilly Circus. But to even the most brilliant of conversationalists the strain of talking to a hypochondriacal American and two Germans – one greedy and the other frightened – is considerable; and the Count heaved an inward sigh of relief when the coffee had been handed round and the door closed behind the waiter. From now on the topic was an easy one – one where no effort on his part would be necessary to hold his audience. It was the topic of money – the common bond of his three guests. And yet, as he carefully cut the end of his cigar, and realised that the eyes of the other three were fixed on him expectantly, he knew that the hardest part of the evening was in front of him. Big financiers, in common with all other people, are fonder of having money put into their pockets than of taking it out. And that was the very thing the Count proposed they should do – in large quantities…

‘Gentlemen,’ he remarked, when his cigar was going to his satisfaction, ‘we are all men of business. I do not propose therefore to beat about the bush over the matter which I have to put before you, but to come to the point at once. I said before dinner that I considered we were sufficiently big to exclude any small arbitrary national distinctions from our minds. As men whose interests are international, such things are beneath us. I wish now to slightly qualify that remark.’ He turned to the American on his right, who with his eyes half closed was thoughtfully picking his teeth. ‘At this stage, sir, I address myself particularly to you.’

‘I do not wish to touch on the war – or its result; but though the Central Powers have been beaten by America and France and England, I think I can speak for you two gentlemen’ – he bowed to the two Germans – ‘when I say that it is neither France nor America with whom they desire another round. England is Germany’s main enemy; she always has been, she always will be.’

‘I have reason to believe, Mr Hocking, that you personally do not love the English?’

‘I guess I don’t see what my private feelings have got to do with it. But if it’s of any interest to the company you are correct in your belief.’

‘Good.’ The Count nodded his head as if satisfied. ‘I take it, then, that you would not be averse to seeing England down and out.’

‘Wal,’ remarked the American, ‘you can assume anything you feel like. Let’s get to the showdown.’

‘Now you two gentlemen must admit that your plans have miscarried somewhat. It was no part of your original programme that a British Army should occupy Cologne…’

‘The war was the act of a fool,’ snarled Herr Steinemann. ‘In a few years more of peace we should have beaten those swine…’

‘And now – they have beaten you.’ The Count smiled slightly. ‘Let us admit that the war was the act of a fool if you like, but as men of business we can only deal with the result…the result, gentlemen, as it concerns us. Both you gentlemen are sufficiently patriotic to resent the presence of that army at Cologne I have no doubt. And you, Mr Hocking, have no love on personal grounds for the English… But I am not proposing to appeal to financiers of your reputation on such grounds as those to support my scheme… It is enough that your personal predilections run with and not against what I am about to put before you – the defeat of England…a defeat more utter and complete than if she had lost the war…’

‘Don’t think that I am proposing this through motives of revenge merely. We are businessmen, and revenge is only worth our while if it pays. This will pay. I can give you no figures, but we are not of the type who deal in thousands, or even hundreds of thousands. There is a force in England which, if it be harnessed and led properly, will result in millions coming to you… It is present now in every nation – fettered, inarticulate, uncoordinated… It is partly the result of the war – the war that the idiots have waged… Harness that force, gentlemen, coordinate it, and use it for your own ends… That is my proposal. Not only will you humble that cursed country to the dirt, but you will taste of power such as few men have tasted before…’ The Count stood up, his eyes blazing. ‘And I – I will do it for you.’

He resumed his seat, and his left hand, slipping off the table, beat a tattoo on his knee.

‘This is our opportunity – the opportunity of clever men. I have not got the money necessary: you have…’ He leaned forward in his chair, and glanced at the intent faces of his audience. Then he began to speak…

‘There is my proposal, gentlemen, in a nutshell. Unforeseen developments will doubtless occur; I have spent my life overcoming the unexpected. What is your answer?’

He rose and stood with his back to them by the fire, and for several minutes no one spoke. Each man was busy with his own thoughts, and showed it in his own particular way. The American, his eyes shut, rolled his toothpick backwards and forwards in his mouth slowly and methodically; Steinemann stared at the fire, breathing heavily after the exertions of dinner: von Gratz walked up and down – his hands behind his back – whistling under his breath. Only the Comte de Guy stared unconcernedly at the fire, as if indifferent to the result of their thoughts. In his attitude at that moment he gave a true expression to his attitude on life. Accustomed to play with great stakes, he had just dealt the cards for the most gigantic gamble of his life… What matter to the three men, who were looking at the hands he had given them, that only a master criminal could have conceived such a game? The only question which occupied their minds was whether he could carry it through. And on that point they had only their judgment of his personality to rely on.

Suddenly the American removed the toothpick from his mouth, and stretched out his legs.

‘There is a question which occurs to me, Count, before I make up my mind on the matter. I guess you’ve got us sized up to the last button; you know who we are, what we’re worth, and all about us. Are you disposed to be a little more communicative about yourself? If we agree to come in on this hand, it’s going to cost big money. The handling of that money is with you. Wal – who are you?’

Von Gratz paused in his restless pacing, and nodded his head in agreement; even Steinemann, with a great effort, raised his eyes to the Count’s face as he turned and faced them…

‘A very fair question, gentlemen, and yet one which I regret I am unable to answer. I would not insult your intelligence by giving you the fictitious address of – a fictitious Count. Enough that I am a man whose livelihood lies in other people’s pockets. As you say, Mr Hocking, it is going to cost big money; but compared to the results the costs will be a flea-bite… Do I look – and you are all of you used to judging men – do I look the type who would steal the baby’s moneybox which lay on the mantelpiece, when the pearls could be had for opening the safe?… You will have to trust me, even as I shall have to trust you… You will have to trust me not to divert the money which you give me as working expenses into my own pocket… I shall have to trust you to pay me when the job is finished…’

‘And that payment will be – how much?’ Steinemann’s guttural voice broke the silence.

‘One million pounds sterling – to be split up between you in any proportion you may decide, and to be paid within one month of the completion of my work. After that the matter will pass into your hands…and may you leave that cursed country grovelling in the dirty…’ His eyes glowed with a fierce, vindictive fury; and then, as if replacing a mask which had slipped for a moment, the Count was once again the suave, courteous host. He had stated his terms frankly and without haggling: stated them as one big man states them to another of the same kidney, to whom time is money and indecision or beating about the bush anathema.

‘Take them or leave them.’ So much had he said in effect, if not in actual words, and not one of his audience but was far too used to men and matters to have dreamed of suggesting any compromise. All or nothing: and no doctrine could have appealed more to the three men in whose hands lay the decision…

‘Perhaps, Count, you would be good enough to leave us for a few minutes.’ Von Gratz was speaking. ‘The decision is a big one, and…’

‘Why, certainly, gentlemen.’ The Count moved towards the door. ‘I will return in ten minutes. By that time you will have decided – one way or the other.’

Once in the lounge he sat down and lit a cigarette. The hotel was deserted save for one fat woman asleep in a chair opposite, and the Count gave himself up to thought. Genius that he was in the reading of men’s minds, he felt that he knew the result of that ten minutes’ deliberation… And then… What then?… In his imagination he saw his plans growing and spreading, his tentacles reaching into every corner of a great people – until, at last, everything was ready. He saw himself supreme in power, glutted with it – a king, an autocrat, who had only to lift his finger to plunge his kingdom into destruction and annihilation… And when he had done it, and the country he hated was in ruins, then he would claim his million and enjoy it as a great man should enjoy a great reward… Thus for the space of ten minutes did the Count see visions and dream dreams. That the force he proposed to tamper with was a dangerous force disturbed him not at all: he was a dangerous man. That his scheme would bring ruin, perhaps death, to thousands of innocent men and women, caused him no qualm: he was a supreme egoist. All that appealed to him was that he had seen the opportunity that existed, and that he had the nerve and the brain to turn that opportunity to his own advantage. Only the necessary money was lacking…and… With a quick movement he pulled out his watch. They had had their ten minutes…the matter was settled, the die was cast…

He rose and walked across the lounge. At the swing doors was the head waiter, bowing obsequiously…

It was to be hoped that the dinner had been to the liking of Monsieur le Comte…the wines all that he could wish…that he had been comfortable and would return again…

‘That is improbable.’ The Count took out his pocketbook. ‘But one never knows; perhaps I shall.’ He gave the waiter a note. ‘Let my bill be prepared at once, and given to me as I pass through the hall.’

Apparently without a care in the world the Count passed down the passage to his private room, while the head waiter regarded complacently the unusual appearance of an English five-pound note.

For an appreciable moment the Count paused by the door, and a faint smile came to his lips. Then he opened it, and passed into the room…

The American was still chewing his toothpick; Steinemann was still breathing hard. Only von Gratz had changed his occupation, and he was sitting at the table smoking a long thin cigar. The Count closed the door, and walked over to the fireplace…

‘It goes. With one amendment. The money is too big for three of us: there must be a fourth. That will be a quarter of a million each.’

‘Yep,’ said the American shortly. ‘These two gentlemen agree with me that it should be another of my countrymen – so that we get equal numbers. The man we have decided on is coming to England in a few weeks – Hiram C Potts. If you get him in, you can count us in too. If not, the deal’s off.’

The Count nodded, and if he felt any annoyance at this unexpected development he showed no sign of it on his face.

‘I know of Mr Potts,’ he answered quietly. ‘Your big shipping man, isn’t he? I agree to your reservation.’