‘It is essential to watch ’em like hawks, I would say,’ Reynolds commented.
‘Alas, I thought we had made him see the light,’ the Count mourned. ‘Perhaps we never will.’
‘Perhaps not,’ Jansci agreed. ‘But he’s right, all the same. In the one hand the big gun, in the other the olive branch. But the safety-catch must always be on, and the hand of peace always a little in advance, and you must be endlessly patient — rashness, impatience could bring the world to catastrophe. Patience, endless patience. What matter a blow to your pride when the peace of the world is at stake?
‘You must try to meet them in as many fields as possible — culture, sport, literature, holidays, all those things are important enough — anything that brings people into contact with one another and lets them see the idiocies of Chauvinism is bound to be important — but the great opening lies in trade. Meet them in trade, and never care how many concessions you make — the losses would be negligible in exchange for the goodwill gained, the suspicions allayed. And get your churches to help, as they are helping now here and in Poland. Cardinal Wyszinski Who walks hand-in-hand with Gomulka of Poland knows more about the way to achieve the peace of the world that must eventually come than I ever will. People all over Poland today walk in freedom, talk in freedom, worship in freedom, and who knows what another five years may bring — and all because men of vastly different creeds but of an equally great goodwill, determined that they were going to get on together, and get on well, no matter what sacrifices they had to make, no matter what blows to their pride they had received.
‘And that, I think is the real answer — not the proposing of courses of action, as Dr. Jennings suggested, but in creating the climate of goodwill in which those actions can flower and bear fruit. Ask the rulers of the great nations who should be leading our sick world to a better tomorrow what their greatest need of today is, and they will tell you scientists and still more scientists — those luckless, brilliant creatures Who have long since traded in their birthright of independence, buried their consciences, and sold out to the governments of the world — so that they can strive harder and still harder until they have in their hands the ultimate weapon of destruction.’
Jansci paused and wearily shook his head. ‘The governments of the world may not be mad, but they are blind and their blindness is but one step removed from insanity. The desperate, most urgent need this world knows or will ever know, is the need for an effort without parallel in history to get to know ourselves and the other people of the world even as well as we know ourselves, and then we will see that the other man is just as we are, that right and virtue and truth belongs to him as much as it does to us. We must think of people not as a conglomerate mass, not conveniently, indiscriminately, as a faceless nation: we must always remember that a nation is made of millions of little human beings just like we are, and to talk about national sin and guilt and wickedness is to be wilfully blind, unjust and un-Christian; and while it is true that such a nation may go off the rails, It never goes off because it wants to, but because it couldn’t help it, because there was something in its past or in its environment that inescapably made it what it is today, just as some forgotten incidents, some influences that we can neither recall nor understand, has made each one of us what we are today.
‘And with that understanding and knowledge there will come compassion, and no power on earth can compete against compassion — the compassion that makes the Jewish Society issue world-wide appeals for money for their sworn but starving enemies, the Arab refugees, the compassion that made a Russian soldier thrust his gun into Sander’s hands, the compassion — & compassion born of understanding — that made nearly all the Russians who were stationed in Budapest refuse to fight the Hungarians, whom they had come to know so well. And this compassion, this charity will come, it must come, but men the world over must want to make it come.
‘There is no certainty that it will come in our time. It’s a gamble, it must be a gamble, but better surely a gamble from hope, however tenuous that hope, than a gamble from despair and pressing the button that sends the first intercontinental missile on its way. But for the gamble to succeed, understanding comes first; mountains, rivers, seas are no longer the barriers that separate mankind, just the minds of mankind itself. The intolerance of ignorance, not wanting to know — that is the last real frontier left on earth.’
For a long time after Jansci had finished speaking only the crackling of pine logs in the fire and the gentle singing of a kettle broke the silence in the room. The fire seemed to fascinate, to hypnotise everyone sitting there, and they stared into it as if by staring long enough they could see the future of Jansci’s dream. But it wasn’t the fire that fascinated them, k had been the effect of Jansci’s quiet, insistent hypnotic voice, and what his voice had said and the memory lingered long. Even the professor had lost all his anger, and Reynolds reflected wryly that if Colonel Mackintosh could only know the thoughts that were running through his mind at that moment he would be unemployed as soon as he arrived back in England. After a time, the Count rose to his feet, walked round replenishing the empty glasses, then took his seat again, and all in silence. No one even looked at him as he was doing it, no one, it seemed, wanted to be the first to break the silence, or even wanted the silence to break. They were all deep sunk in their own private thoughts, Reynolds was thinking, almost inevitably, perhaps, of the long dead English poet who had said centuries ago almost exactly what Jansci had been saying then, when the interruption came, the harsh strident ringing of a telephone bell, and it came so pat with Reynolds’ thoughts, the bell tolled. The answer was not long to wait: it tolled for Jansci.
Jansci, startled out of a deep reverie, sat up, transferred his glass to his right hand and picked up the telephone with his other. As the phone was lifted off its receiver, the ringing stopped abruptly, and in its place, clearly audible to everyone in the room, came a high-pitched