He walked up St. Swithin's Lane,
looking at the strange forms of foreign fruit exposed
at the shop-doors, and finding in them some fleeting
recurrence of the hint that travel was what he needed.
Then he stopped, to look through the railings and open
gateway at an enclosure on the left, and the substantial,
heavily-respectable group of early Victorian buildings beyond.
Some well-dressed men were standing talking in one of
the porches. The stiff yellowish-stucco pilasters of
this entrance, and the tall uniformed figure of the porter
in the shadow, came into the picture as he observed it;
they gave forth a suggestion of satisfied smugness--of
orderly but altogether unillumined routine. Nothing could
be more commonplace to the eye.
Yet to his imagination, eighteen months before,
what mysterious marvels of power had lurked hidden
behind those conventional portals! Within those doors,
in some inner chamber, sat men whose task it was to
direct the movements of the greatest force the world had
ever known. They and their cousins in Paris and Frankfort,
or wherever they lived, between them wielded a vaster
authority than all the Parliaments of the earth.
They could change a government, or crush the aspirations
of a whole people, or decide a question of peace or war,
by the silent dictum of their little family council.
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