Esprit de Corps: Sketches from Diplomatic Life

11. Cry Wolf

“The case of Wormwood,” said Antrobus gravely, “is one which deserves thought.”

He spoke in his usual portentous way, but I could see that he was genuinely troubled.

“It is worth reflecting on,” he went on, “since it illustrates my contention that nobody really knows what anybody else is thinking. Wormwood was Cultural Attaché in Helsinki, and we were all terrified of him. He was a lean, leathery, saturnine sort of chap with a goatee and he’d written a couple of novels of an obscurity so overwhelming as to give us an awful inferiority complex in the Chancery.

“He never spoke.

“He carried this utter speechlessness to such lengths as to be almost beyond the bounds of decency. The whole Corps quailed before him. One slow stare through those pebble-giglamps of his was enough to quell even the vivid and charming Madam Abreyville who was noted for her cleverness in bringing out the shy. She made the mistake of trying to bring Wormwood out. He stared at her hard. She was covered in confusion and trembled from head to foot. After this defeat, we all used to take cover when we saw him coming.

“One winter, just before he was posted to Prague, I ran into him at a party, and finding myself wedged in behind the piano with no hope of escape, cleared my throat (I had had three Martinis) and said with what I hoped was offensive jocularity: ‘What does a novelist think about at parties like these?’

“Wormwood stared at me for so long that I began to swallow my Adam’s apple over and over again as I always do when I am out of countenance. I was just about to step out of the window into a flower bed and come round by the front door when he … actually spoke to me: ‘Do you know what I am doing?’ he said in a low hissing tone full of malevolence.

“‘No,’ I said.

“‘I am playing a little game in my mind,’ he said, and his expression was one of utter, murderous grimness. ‘I am imagining that I am in a sleigh with the whole Diplomatic Corps. We are rushing across the steppes, pursued by wolves. It is necessary, as they keep gaining on us, to throw a diplomat overboard from time to time in order to let the horses regain their advantage. Who would you throw first … and then second … and then third …? Just look around you.’

“His tone was so alarming, so ferocious and peremptory, that I was startled; more to humour him than anything else, I said ‘Madame Ventura.’ She was rather a heavily-built morsel of ambassadress, eminently suitable for wolfish consumption. He curled his lip. ‘She’s gone already,’ he said in a low, hoarse tone, glowering. ‘The whole Italian mission has gone — brats included.’

“I did not quite know what to say.

“‘Er, how about our own Chancery?’ I asked nervously.

“‘Oh! They’ve gone long ago,’ he said with slow contempt, ‘They’ve been gobbled up — including you.’ He gave a yellowish shelf of rat-like teeth a half-second exposure, and then sheathed them again in his beard. I was feeling dashed awkard now, and found myself fingering my nose.

“I was relieved when I heard he had been posted.

“Now, old boy, comes a series of strange events. The very next winter in Prague — that was the severe one of ’37 when the wolf packs came down to the suburbs — you may remember that two Chancery guards and a cipher clerk were eaten by wolves? They were, it seems, out riding in a sleigh with the First Secretary Cultural. When I saw the press reports, something seemed to ring in my brain. Some half-forgotten memory.… It worried me until I went to the Foreign Office List and looked up the Prague Mission. It was Wormwood. It gave me food for deep thought.

“But time passed, and for nearly ten years I heard no more of Wormwood. Then came that report of wolves eating the Italian Ambassador on the Trieste-Zagreb road in mid-winter. You remember the case? The victim was in a car this time. I do not have to tell you who was driving. Wormwood.

“Then once again a long period of time passed without any news of him. But yesterday …” Antrobus’ voice trembled at this point in the narrative and he drew heavily on his cigar.

“Yesterday, I had a long letter from Bunty Scott-Peverel who is Head of Chancery in Moscow. There is a passage in it which I will read to you. Here it is.…

“‘We have just got a new Cultural Sec., rather an odd sort of fellow, a writer I believe. Huge fronded beard, pebble specs, and glum as all highbrows are. He has taken a dumka about twenty miles outside Moscow where he intends to entertain in some style. Usually these hunting lodges are only open in the summer. But he intends to travel by droshky and is busy getting one built big enough, he says, to accommodate the whole Dip. Corps, which he will invite to his housewarming. It is rather an original idea, and we are all looking forward to it very much and waiting impatiently for this giant among droshkies to be finished.’

“You will understand,” said Antrobus, “the thrill of horror with which I read this letter. I have written at length to Bunty, setting out my fears. I hope I shall be in time to avert what might easily become the first wholesale pogrom in the history of diplomacy. I hope he heeds my words. But I am worried, I confess. I scan the papers uneasily every morning. Is that the Telegraph, by any chance, protruding from the pocket of your mackintosh?”