The Secret Of The League Part 20

"There are only two short flights," apologised Hampden. "Yes; I saw that even the financial papers dismissed it as a 'Pied Piper rise.' Here we are."

They had not lingered as they talked, although the journalist ranked physical haste and bodily exertion--as typified by flights of stairs--among the forbidden things of life.

Hampden had brought him to the instrument room. In view of what he was asking of Lidiat, some explanation was necessary, but he put it into the narrowest possible form. It was framed not on persuasiveness but necessity.

"Salt is away, something has happened, and we have to move a week before we had calculated."

Lidiat nodded. He accepted the necessity as proved; explanation would have taken time. His training and occupation made him chary of encouraging two words when one would do, between midnight and the hour when the newspapers are "closed up" and the rotaries begin to move.

"I should like," continued Hampden, "in to-day's issue of every morning paper a leader, two six-inch items of news, one home one foreign, and a single column six-inch advertis.e.m.e.nt set in the middle of a full white page."

Lidiat had taken off his hat and overcoat and placed them neatly on a chair. It occurred to him as a fair omen that Providence had dealt kindly with him in not giving him any opportunity of changing his clothes. He now took out his watch and hung it on a projecting stud of the telephone box.

"Yes, and the minimum?" He did not think, as a lesser man with equal knowledge of Fleet Street might have done, that Hampden had gone mad. He knew that conventionally such a programme was impossible, but he had known of impossible things being done, and in any case he understood by the emphasis that this was what Hampden would have done under freer circ.u.mstances.

"That is what I leave to you. The paragraphs and comment at some length I shall look for. The provinces are out of the question, I suppose? The eight leading London dailies _must_ be dealt with."

"You give me _carte blanche_, of course--financially?"

"Absolutely, absolutely. Guarantee everything to them. Let them arrange for special trains at all the termini. Let them take over all the garages, motor companies, and cab yards in London as going concerns for twelve hours. They will all be in it except _The Tocsin_ and _The Ma.s.ses_. We can deal with the distributing houses later. You see the three points? It is the patriotic thing to do at any cost; they can have anything they like to make up time; and it is absolutely essential."

"Yes," said Lidiat; "and the matter?"

Hampden had already taken a pencilled sheet of paper from his pocket. He had written it on his way up to Kilburn. He now handed it to the journalist.

"Between four and five o'clock that will be telescribed over the entire system," he explained. "Those who are not on the call will see it in the papers or hear from others. Every one will know before to-night."

He watched Lidiat sharply as he read the statement. Apart from the two princ.i.p.als, he was the first man in England to receive the confidence, and Sir John had a curiosity, not wholly idle, to see how it would strike him. But Lidiat was not, to use an obsolete phrase, "the man in the street." He absorbed the essence of the manifesto with a trained, practical grasp, and then held out his hand for the other paper, while his large, glabrous face remained merely vacant in its expression.

The next paper was a foreign telegram in cipher, and as Lidiat read the decoded version that was pinned to it, the baronet saw, or fancied that he saw, the flicker of a keener light come into his eyes and such a transient wave across his face, as might, in a man of impulse, indicate enthusiasm or appreciation.

"Are there to be any more of these--presently?" was all he said.

"I think that I might authorise you to say that there will be others to publish, as the moment seems most propitious."

"Very good. I will use the instruments now."

"There is one more point," said Hampden, writing a few short lines on a slip of paper, "that it might be desirable to make public now."

Lidiat took the paper. This was what he read:

"_You are at liberty to state definitely that the members.h.i.+p of the Unity League now exceeds five million persons._"

There was a plentiful crop of grey hairs sown between Charing Cross and Ludgate Hill in the early hours of that summer morning. With his mouth to the telephone, Lidiat stirred up the purlieus of Fleet Street and the Strand until office after office, composing room after composing room, and foundry after foundry, all along the line, began to drone and hum resentfully, like an outraged apiary in the dead of night. When he once took up the wire he never put it down again until he had swept the "London Dailies: Morning" section of Sell and Mitch.e.l.l from beginning to end. Those who wished to retort and temporise after he had done with them, had to fall back upon the telescribe--which involved the disadvantage to Fleet Street of having to write and coldly transmit the indignant messages that it would fain pour hot and blistering into its tormentor's ear. For two hours and a half by the watch beneath his eye he harrowed up all the most cherished journalistic traditions of the land, and from a small, box-like room a mile away, he controlled the reins of the Fourth Estate of an Empire--a large, fat, perspiring man of persuasive authority, and conscious of unlimited capital at his back.

By the end of that time chaos had given place to order. _The Scythe_ had shown an amenable disposition with a readiness suggesting that it possibly knew more than it had told in the past. _The Ensign_ was won over by persuasion and the condition of the Navy, and _The Mailed Fist_ was clubbed and bullied and cajoled with big names until it was dazed.

For seven minutes Lidiat poured patriotism into the ear of _The Beacon's_ editor, and gold into the coffers of _The Beacon's_ manager, and then turned aside to win over _The Daily News-Letter_ by telling it what _The Daily Chronicler_ was doing, and the _Chronicler_ by reporting the _News-Letter's_ acquiescence. _The Morning Post Card_ remained obdurate for half an hour, and only capitulated after driving down and having an interview with Hampden. _The Great Daily_--well, for more than a year _The Great Daily_ had been the property and organ of the League, only no one had suspected it. The little _Ill.u.s.trated Hour_, beset by the difficulty of half-tone blocks, and frantic at the thought of having to recast its plates and engage in the mysteries of "making ready" again after half its edition had been run off, was the last to submit. So long was it in making up its mind, that at last Lidiat sarcastically proposed an inset, and, taking the suggestion in all good faith, the _Ill.u.s.trated Hour_ startled its sober patrons by bearing on its outside page a gummed leaflet containing a leaderette and two news paragraphs.

So the list spun out. Lidiat did not touch the provinces, but sixteen London dailies, including some sporting and financial organs, marked the thoroughness of his work. At half-past three he finally hung up the receiver; and taking the brougham, rode like another Wellington over the field of his still palpitating Waterloo. His appearance, bovine and imperturbable despite the shameful incongruity of his garb when revealed in the tremulous and romantic dawn of a day and of an epoch, and further set off by the unimpeachable correctness of the equipage from which he alighted, was a thing that rankled in the minds of lingering compositors and commissionaires until their dying days.

A few minutes after his departure Hampden returned to the telephone and desired to make the curious connection "1 Telescribe."

"Who is there?" he asked, when "1 Telescribe" responded.

The man at the other end explained that he was a clerk on the main platform of "1 Telescribe"--name of Firkin, if the fact was of Metropolitan interest.

"Is Mr Woodbarrow there yet?"

It appeared, with increased respect, that Mr Woodbarrow was in his own office and could be informed of the gentleman's name.

"Please tell him that Sir John Hampden wishes to speak with him."

In two minutes another voice filtered through the wire, a voice which Hampden recognised.

"What are you running with now, Mr Woodbarrow?" he asked, when brief courtesies had been exchanged.

Mr Woodbarrow made an enquiry, and was able to report that a 5 H.P.

Tangye was supplying all the power they needed at that hour. Nothing was coming through, he explained, except a few press messages from America, a little business from Australia, and some early morning news from China.

"I should be obliged if you would put on the two Westinghouses as soon as you can, and then let me know when you can clear the trunk lines for a minute. Within the next hour I want to send an 'open board' message."

There was no response to this matter-of-fact request for an appreciable five seconds, but if ever silence through a telephone receiver conveyed an impression of blank amazement at the other end, it was achieved at that moment.

"Do I rightly understand, Sir John," enquired Mr Woodbarrow at the end of those five seconds, "that you wish to repeat a message over the entire system?"

"That is quite correct."

"It will const.i.tute a record."

"An interesting occasion, then."

"Have you calculated the fees, Sir John?"

"No, I have not had the time. You will let me know when the power is up?"

Mr Woodbarrow, only just beginning to realise fully the magnitude of the occasion and tingling with antic.i.p.ation, promised to act with all possible speed, and going to his own room Sir John took up an agate pen and proceeded to write with special ink on prepared paper this encyclical despatch.

A library of books had been written on the subject of the telescribe within two years of its advent, but a general description may be outlined untechnically in a page or two. It was, for the moment, the last word of wireless telegraphy. It was efficient, it was speedy, it was cheap, and it transmitted in facsimile. It had pa.s.sed the stage of being wondered at and had reached that of being used. It was universal.

It was universal, that is, not in the sense that tongues are universally in heads, for instance, but, to search for a parallel, as universal as letter-boxes are now on doors, book-cases in houses, or cuffs around men's wrists. There were, in point of number, about three millions on the index book.

It was speedy because there was no call required, no intervention of a connecting office to wait for. That was purely automatic. Above the telescribe box in one's hall, study, or sitting-room, was a wooden panel studded with eight rows of small bra.s.s k.n.o.bs, sixteen k.n.o.bs in each row.

These could be depressed or raised after the manner of an electric light stud, and a similar effect was produced: a connection was thereby made.

All the country--England and Wales--was mapped out into sixteen primary divisions, oblong districts of equal size. The top row of bra.s.s k.n.o.bs corresponded with these divisions, and by pulling down any k.n.o.b the operator was automatically put into communication with that part of the system, through the medium of the huge central station that reared its trellised form, like an Eiffel Tower, above the hill at Harrow, and the subsidiary stations which stood each in the middle of its division.

The second stage was reached by subdividing each primary division into sixteen oblong districts, and with these the second row of k.n.o.bs corresponded. Six more times the subdividing process was repeated, and each subdivision had its corresponding row. The final division represented plots of ground so small that no house or cottage could escape location.

Pulling down the corresponding studs on the eight rows instantly and automatically established the connection. The written communication could then be transmitted, and in the twinkling of an eye it was traced on a sheet of paper in the receiving box. There was no probability of the s.p.a.ces all being occupied with telescribes for some years to come. A calculation will show that there was provision for a good many thousand million boxes, but only three million were fixed and attuned at this period.