Mystery at Geneva | Page 3

the Morning Post and the British Bolshevist,
for both could be taken for granted. One of these journals feared that
the League sought disarmament, the other that it did not; to one it was a
league of cranks, conscientious objectors, and (fearful and sinister word)
internationals, come not to destroy but to fulfil the Covenant, bent on
carrying out Article 8, substituting judiciary arbitration for force, and
treating Germany as a brother; to the other it was a league of militarist

and capitalist states, an extension of the Supreme Allied Council, bent
on destroying Article 18 and other inconvenient articles of the
Covenant, and treating Germany as a dog. To both it was, in one word,
Poppycock. Sincerely, honestly, and ardently, both these journals
thought like that. They could not help it; it was temperamental, and the
way they saw things.
Hqnry descended the broad and shallow double stairway of the Palais
des Nations, up and down which tripped the gay crowds who knew one
another but knew not him, and so out to lunch, which he had poorly,
inexpensively, obscurely and alone, at a low eating-house near the
Secretariat. After lunch he had coffee at a higher eating-house, on the
Quai, and sat under the pavement awning reading the papers, listening
to the band, looking at the mountain view across the lake, and waiting
until the other visitors to Geneva, having finished their more
considerable luncheons, should emerge from their hotels and begin to
walk or drive along the Quai. Meanwhile he read UHumeur, which he
found on the table before him. But VHumeur is not really very funny. It
has only one joke, only one type of comic picture: a woman
incompletely dressed. Was that, Henry speculated, really funny? It
happens, after all, to nearly all women at least every morning and every
evening. Was it really funny even when to the lady thus unattired there
entered a gentleman, either M. 1'Amant or M. le Mari?
Was only one thing funny, as some persons believed? Was it indeed
really funny at all? Henry, who honestly desired to brighten his life,
tried hard to think so, but failed, and relapsed into gloom. He could not
see that it was funnier that a female should not yet have completed her
toilet than that a male should not. Neither was funny. Nothing, perhaps,
was funny. The League of Nations was not funny. Life was not funny,
and probably not death. Even the British Bolshevist, which he was
reduced to reading, wasn't funny, though it did have on the front page a
column headed "Widow's Leap Saves Cat from Burning House.''
A young man sat down at Henry's little table and ordered drink; a
bright, neat, brisk young man, with an alert manner. Glancing at the
British Bolshevist, he made a conversational opening which elicited the

fact that Henry represented this journal at Geneva. For himself, he was,
it transpired, correspondent of the Daily Sale y a paper to which the
British Bolshevist was politically opposed but temperamentally
sympathetic; they had the same cosy, chatty touch on life.
The two correspondents amused themselves by watching the delegates
and other foreign arrivals strolling to and fro along the elegant
spaciousness of the Quai, chatting with one another. They noticed little
things to write to their papers about, such as hats, spats, ways of
carrying umbrellas and sticks, and so forth. They overheard fragments
of conversation in many tongues. For, clustering round about the
Assembly, were the representatives, official and unofficial, of nearly all
the world's nations, so that Henry heard in the space of ten minutes
British, French, Italians, Russians, Poles, Turks, Americans, Armenians,
Dutch, Irish, Lithuanians, Serb - Croat - Slovenes, Czecho- Slovakians,
the dwellers in Dalmatia and Istria, and in the parts of Latin America
about Brazil, Assyrio-Chaldeans, and newspaper correspondents, all
speaking in their tongues the wonderful works of God. Geneva was like
Pentecost, or the Tower of Babel. There were represented there very
many societies, which regularly settled in Geneva for the period of the
Assembly in order to send it messages, trusting thus to bring before the
League in session the good causes they had at heart. The Women's
International League was there, and the Esperanto League, and the
Non-Alcoholic Drink Society, and the Mormons, and the Y.M.C.A. and
the Union of Free Churches, and the Unprotected Armenians, and the
Catholic Association, and the Orthodox Church Union, and the Ethical
Society, and the Bolshevik Refugees (for it was in Russia, at the
moment, the turn of the other side)? and the Save the Children
Committee, and the Freemasons, and the Constructive Birth Control
Society, and the Feathered Friends Protection Society, and the Negro
Equality League, and the Anti-Divorce Union, and the Humanitarian
Society, and the Eugenic Society, and the Orangemen's