he cried, ‘how I loathe our new manners in foreign policy. The old English way was to regard all foreigners as slightly childish and rather idiotic and ourselves as the only grown-ups in a kindergarten world. That meant that we bad a cool detached view and did even-handed unsympathetic justice. But now we have got into the nursery ourselves and are bear-fighting on the floor. We take violent sides, and make pets, and of course, if you are -phil something or other you have got to be -phobe something else. It is all wrong. We are becoming Balkanized.’
We would have drifted into politics, if Pugh had not asked him his opinion of Gandhi. That led him into an exposition of the meaning of the fanatic, a subject on which he was well qualified to speak, for he had consorted with most varieties.
‘He is always in the technical sense mad—that is, his mind is tilted from its balance, and since we live by balance he is a wrecker, a crowbar in the machinery. His power comes from the appeal he makes to the imperfectly balanced, and as these are never the majority his appeal is limited. But there is one kind of fanatic whose strength comes from balance, from a lunatic balance. You cannot say that there is any one thing abnormal about him, for he is all abnormal. He is as balanced as you or me, but, so to speak, in a fourth-dimensional world. That kind of man has no logical gaps in his creed. Within his insane postulates he is brilliantly sane. Take Lenin for instance. That’s the kind of fanatic I’m afraid of.’
Leithen asked how such a man got his influence. ‘You say that there is no crazy spot in him which appeals to a crazy spot in other people:’
‘He appeals to the normal,’ said Sandy solemnly, ‘to the perfectly sane. He offers reason, not visions in any case his visions are reasonable. In ordinary times he will not be heard, because, as I say, his world is not our world. But let there come a time of great suffering or discontent, when the mind of the ordinary man is in desperation, and the rational fanatic will come by his own. When he appeals to the sane and the sane respond, revolutions begin.’
Pugh nodded his head, as if he agreed. ‘Your fanatic of course must be a man of genius.’
‘Of course. And genius of that kind is happily rare. When it exists, its possessor is the modern wizard. The old necromancer fiddled away with cabalistic signs and crude chemicals and got nowhere; the true wizard is the man who works by spirit on spirit. We are only beginning to realise the strange crannies of the human soul. The real magician, if he turned up today, wouldn’t bother about drugs and dopes. He would dabble in far more deadly methods, the compulsion of a fiery nature over the limp things that men call their minds.’
He turned to Pugh. ‘You remember the man we used to call Ram Dass in the War—I never knew his right name?’
‘Rather;’ said Pugh. ‘The fellow who worked for us in San Francisco. He used to get big sums from the agitators and pay them in to the British Exchequer, less his commission of ten per cent.’
‘Stout fellow!’ Burminster exclaimed approvingly.
‘Well, Ram Dass used to discourse to me on this subject. He was as wise as a serpent and as loyal as a dog, and he saw a lot of things coming that we are just beginning to realise. He said that the great offensives of the future would be psychological, and he thought the Governments should get busy about it and prepare their defence. What a jolly sight it would be—all the high officials sitting down to little primers But there was sense in what he said. He considered that the most deadly weapon in the world was the power of mass-persuasion, and he wanted to meet it at the source; by getting at the mass-persuader. His view was that every spellbinder had got something like Samson’s hair which was the key of his strength, and that if this were tampered with he could be made innocuous. He would have had us make pets of the prophets and invite them to Government House. You remember the winter of 1917 when the Bolsheviks were making trouble in Afghanistan and their stuff was filtering through into India. Well, Ram Dass claimed the credit of stopping that game by his psychological dodges.’
He looked across suddenly at Medina. ‘You know the Frontier. Did you ever come across the guru that lived at the foot of the Shansi pass as you go over to Kaikand?’
Medina shook his head. ‘I never travelled that way. Why?’
Sandy seemed disappointed. ‘Ram Dass used to speak of him. I hoped you might have met him.’
The club madeira was being passed round, and there was a little silence while we sipped it. It was certainly a marvelous wine, and I noticed with pain Medina’s abstinence.
‘You really are missing a lot, you know,’ Burminster boomed in his jolly voice, and for a second all the company looked Medina’s way.
He smiled and lifted his glass of water.
‘Sit vini abstemius qui hermeneuma tentat aut hominum petit dominatum,‘1 he said.
Nightingale translated. ‘Meaning that you must be a pussy-foot if you would be a big man.’
There was a chorus of protests, and Medina again lifted his glass. ‘I’m only joking. I haven’t a scrap of policy or principle in the matter. I don’t happen to like the stuff—that’s all.’
I fancy that the only two scholars among us were Nightingale and Sandy. I looked at the latter and was surprised by the change in his face. It had awakened to the most eager interest. His eyes, which had been staring at Medina, suddenly met mine, and I read in them not only interest but disquiet.
Burminster was delivering a spirited defence of Bacchus, and the rest joined in, but Sandy took the other side.
‘There’s a good deal in that Latin tag,’ he said. ‘There are places in the world where total abstinence is reckoned a privilege. Did you ever come across the Ulai tribe up the Karakoram way?’ He was addressing Medina. ‘No? Well, the next time you meet a man in the Guides ask him about them, for they’re a curiosity. They’re Mohammedan and so should by rights be abstainers, but they’re a drunken set of sweeps, and the most priest-ridden community on earth. Drinking is not only a habit among them, it’s an obligation, and their weekly tamasha would make Falstaff take the pledge. But their priests— they’re a kind of theocracy—are strict teetotal. It is their privilege and the secret of their power. When one of them has to be degraded he is filled compulsorily full of wine. That’s your—how does the thing go?—your “hominum dominatus.”’
From that moment I found the evening go less pleasantly. Medina was as genial as ever, but something seemed to have affected Sandy’s temper and he became positively grumpy. Now and then he contradicted a man too sharply for good manners, but for the most part he was silent, smoking his pipe and answering his neighbours in monosyllables. About eleven I began to feel it was time to leave, and Medina was of the same opinion. He asked me to walk with him, and I gladly accepted, for I did not feel inclined to go to bed.
As I was putting on my coat, Sandy came up. ‘Come to the Club, Dick,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to you.’ His manner was so peremptory that I opened my eyes.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ve promised to walk home with Medina.’
‘Oh, damn Medina!’ he said. ‘Do as I ask or you’ll be sorry for it.’
I wasn’t feeling very pleased with Sandy, especially as Medina was near enough to hear what he said. So I told him rather coldly that I didn’t intend to go back on my arrangement. He turned and marched out, cannoning at the doorway into Burminster, to whom he did not apologise. That nobleman rubbed his shoulder ruefully.
