2

It seemed natural to Rud to take the loyal co–operation of his colleagues in the Group as a matter of course. He never felt in the slightest degree beholden to them. He took his leadership over them as confidently as he had taken his bottle from his nurse in his cradle. They served the Common Man and gave themselves without stint to the release of this Common–sense World State from all the foetal wrappings that entangled it. What else could they do? What else was there to do? So why should the embodied Common Man thank and flatter them? He snatched their ideas out of their mouths.

And they chanced to make a team that could co–operate. They kept together throughout twelve crucial years in human history. He did little deliberately to hold them together, but his instinct was for management. His egotistical dominance, his impartial acceptance of the role of the representative Common Man, seemed to check the development of internecine jealousies. During those years remarkably little force was wasted by the Group in internal friction. Day by day it grew. Insensibly and yet rapidly it became a factor, and ultimately a leading factor, in world affairs. Even when it was already attracting public attention, its members still seemed for a time mere incidental outsiders adventuring into politics; commentators rather than combatants. It was by insensible degrees that they became a revolutionary force of the extremest efficiency. They did not appear; they grew.

They differed in one essential from the revolutionary groups from which the earlier dictatorships, the Russian and Italian, for example, sprang. They had no conspiratorial past whatever, less even than the Nazis. They were innocent of the underground methods and free from the tortuous mental habits of the traditional nineteenth–century revolutionists. And after Bohun's collapse no trace was left of any of his Fascist or Hitlerian plagiarisms. Shirts, salutes, symbols, banners, were got rid of. He and his organisation made just their jumping–off board. They had an auction of "unsold stock" in aid of the Movement. "Shirts," they advertised, "can be dyed any colour. Zips not guaranteed." So far they justified their claim to be a new sort of revolutionary drive altogether. They developed the opportunity given them by their picturesque capture of the Purple House and the great fight in the Canton Hall; with skill and vigour. It was their first introduction to political realities. They set about their business with immense seriousness, and they did not only a lot of hard work but a lot of very hard thinking. They tried over definitions and classifications and cleared them up; they listed, they documented, they mapped. They turned the drawing–room floor of number seventeen into a permanent council–chamber; they vetted and incorporated new–comers; they were wary of fresh blood but not jealous of it; they were too desperately anxious to succeed to waste any possible co–operation. Bodisham's growing conceptions of organisation, Chiffan's flow of shrewd ideas and Steenhold's ready welcome and support for any entertaining initiative pervaded the place from the outset, and Rud went about masterfully, convinced that he organised everything he learnt and endorsed.

That room still exists for the curious to visit. It is exactly as they left it when three years later they transferred their Headquarters to the Sloten Aerodrome. They kept it on, because at first they thought the Sloten move was a temporary one. The chairs, the tables, and many of the earlier files and charts are still there, but over it all now is that faint, faded quality of things disused. No morning dusting, no sedulous cleaning can avert that retrocession from reality. All historical showplaces acquire that progressive incredibility. It seems a little room to have sheltered so tremendous an initiative. The custodians of the place have added a collection of photographs of the chief members of the Group before it moved to Holland. As near as possible they are early portraits, and each one stands in its frame at the place where the original was either known or supposed to have sat. (There is no gavel. Rud always banged with his fist on the table.) There they talked out the ultimate revolution and laid the foundations for the Peace of the World.

"Did they think they were playing with their imaginations or did they realise the tremendous reality of what they were doing?" asks Lipping. The answer is "Both". Every war, every revolution and every important invention the world has ever seen, began as a dream. How else can human enterprises begin?

And they end with the voice of the caretaker, reciting his scrap of history, showing round the tourist. "That is where He sat, and generally it seems Chiffan sat to the left of him, rather close to him to whisper things to him, and there, where the chair is pushed back, was Steenhold's place. He was the tallest of them all except Rogers and he used to push his chair back to stretch out his legs…"