This is some years ago now—the actual date isn’t necessary. I was crossing the Green Park one lovely day of early June when a very young voice ordered me to stop. I obeyed at once. I was in the mood to find an omen in any occurrence, however trivial. My name was called, “George! George!” I looked round, only to be once more disappointed. The call had come out of the air, a clear bell full of promise. But there rose up from a seat my cousin Agatha.

“I want you to come with me,” she cried in the breathless way she had—at all events when she talked with me.

I guessed a church or a picture gallery, but I had hardly the time to shake my head, when she added: “To the Caledonian Market.”

Could any proposal be more crazy? Yet just for that reason more appealing. The Caledonian Market, where junk jostled treasures, or so they say. Of course, I would go, and the blood rushed into her face when she clutched my arm as I told her so. We stopped a taxi in the Mall and drove out past Smithfield. I was careful, you’ll understand, not to ask Agatha the reason for her choice. Only fools analyse inspirations, wise men act on them. There might be something in those old Arabian stories.

“Suppose I found a bottle with a genius in it!” I said, laughing heartily.

“Oh, dear, I wish you’d always be like this to me,” she answered. Boring? Yes, but Agatha did bore.

In the market it was junk, junk all the way, and imitations under my feet like mad. No doubt there were pieces of Ming under the Doulton, but there was no stoppered bottle from the dreams of Scheherazade, and I couldn’t see the Ming. I was feeling deflated when, looking up from a job lot of culinary articles, I saw a man whom I knew, Herr Kapitan von Kluckner, the foreign Military Attaché. I should not probably have paid to him any attention had he not met my eyes with a frown of displeasure and changed his quick, purposeful step into the saunter of an idle foreigner, sneering at the oddities of London. I watched him curiously from a distance and was still more surprised to see him entering a barber’s shop on the east side of the market.

“Now, what in the world induces the elegant Military Attaché to come up to the Caledonian Market to get himself shaved?” I asked, and Agatha, for once on the spot, pointed to the name above the shop, and said: “Do you think that Mr. Straws alters his name and writes music in his spare time?”

A week or so later I began to meet the Herr Kapitän here and there at luncheon or at dinner. I suppose that he had his spies poking their noses and their sharp ears into all sorts of places. Anyway, at one house, where I had been losing a great deal of money, he took aside for a drink and talked. It was absurd that there should be any enmity between the two countries. In fact, they could now help each other very considerably without compromising each other’s independence. Each country stood primarily for itself—that was clear. But; apart from that clear principle, there were many smaller opportunities of mutual help. “For instance . . . ” he began, and broke off as others approached us. He talked for a few minutes, and then said he must be off, for he had a busy day in front of him. “I must get myself shaved, today,” he said with a laugh as he smoothed his chin, and away he went. He had made an appointment with me. That’s what it came to I had long since made up my mind that the barber’s shop was a letter-box in which spies could post their letters. But it was more than that. It was a house of assignation, and I felt that it was a duty to discover what the Herr Kapitän was up to.

But he wouldn’t know my motive and it was like his impertinence to expect me. A curtain covered the doorway of Mr. Straws’ establishment. It led into a passage at the side of the shop, and a man was waiting in the passage. He marched off to the back of the house without a word and, in a room too mean and undistinguished for a design so vast, a proposal was made to me. The destruction of a race. The death of Egypt. Not by shells or bombs or fire but by subtler weapons. Heroin, cocaine, hashish! Children would not be born, work would not be done, starvation would follow, and a decadent people would make place for the legions of the North.

I was dazzled. England would share, of course, and England, in contributing the Dagger Line, could pull an oar. It was a nightmare turned into an idea. It was colossal. It was a prairie fire with its rolling smoke, its roar and its crackle and its glare, eating up the dead dry grass. I walked out with a good fat cheque in my pocket and my head up.

It wasn’t so difficult. We had freighters as well as passenger ships. I had served in both the South American and the Eastern trade, and knew the routine of the ports. We shipped a good deal of furniture, most of it sound, of course, but, betwixt and between, pieces which held a fortune. We had help, too. A consul would want a new consular outfit—not that he, good man, was ever aware of it. But the outfit would arrive all right in a fine big trunk and would be collected on the quay by a dragoman (of sorts) who could pass his stuff through the Customs without examination. Sometimes it was a case of books, which never reached the library of the Minister who didn’t expect it. We picked the cargo up in our small freighters from surprising places. Sofia gave us—when I say gave, there was no giving in that trade—a good deal at ports in the east of Europe. But, of course, notes had to be written, commitments acknowledged, receipts sent. The trading bills were all Sir Garnet, of course. But, keeping pace with those bills, there were more intimate acknowledgments to be made. My Herr Kapitän saw to that.

I don’t think that I was careless. There was once a letter which I wrote in Pevensey Crescent and which I thought that I had posted. I had a new servant just about then. There was another which was not received, a little too frank about some freight from Sofia which we were to pick up at Salonika. Those two letters worried me a little, and I got rid of my servant, thinking that the carelessness was his. Until one morning a message came over the telephone from Horbury. It came to Pevensey Crescent. He said that he had two interesting documents upon which he would be honoured if I would give him my advice. I was alarmed. I didn’t know Horbury, but I knew that blackmail was his business, and the fact that I was comfortably paying off my debts may well have attracted his attention. But I did know Olivia. I had met her at supper parties and at dances more than once. I couldn’t believe that she had married that pigeon-toed old beetle for anything but his money. She was always easy to look at and she had moments of great beauty. I had nursed an idea that one day, when I had a bit more time, we might see a good deal more of one another. So I thought that it might be prudent if I probed her a little before I answered Daniel.

So I called on her in her ormulu flat in Park Lane that afternoon. As a rule with women I have fairly astute. I have made my approaches with discretion and, on the whole, I have not been unfortunate. But this time I was out of breath, as it were, and I rushed my fences.

She was difficult. I stammered a few love passages and she supplied with a kindly smile the words for which, in my passion, I was supposed to be at a loss. Disconcerting! I gave her my private telephone number at the office and I told her that I gave it to very few, She wrote it down carefully in a little book, saying, “Harem, I suppose, is the operative word.”

I asked her casually whether Daniel had spoken to her about me, and she replied “Oh, no,” as if I were not nearly grown up enough to interest Daniel. Then she gave me a cup of China tea and a cucumber sandwich and sent me away. I ought to have left in a rage, but I felt like a cat. If you say “Puss, puss, puss, lovely pussie,” it just walks away, but if you pull its tail and turn your back on it, it rubs itself against your legs. I began, in fact, to ring her up on my private line.

But I had, nevertheless, to make an appointment with Daniel. He had the receipt and the details of the cargo at Salonika, and there was no getting round them. Horbury was formal and grave. As a legislator, he had his duty to do. I must see that. He ought to send these papers straight to the Public Prosecutor. But he had no wish to be hard, and if he sent them to Septimus, the harm would be stopped, and I should escape a long term of penal servitude.

“Why not say a stretch?” I inquired, foolishly disdainful.

“Because a stretch is only a year, and I couldn’t promise you that,” he answered.

“Boys will be boys,” was his next line, “but happily you can’t sin without payment, or civilisation would be down the drain.” Oh, Daniel Horbury knew his stuff, and I left his office a slave. What I got from Herr Kapitän Peter I had to pay to Legislator Paul, and the more the better. But that wasn’t the worst of it . . . ”