The Ministry of Fear by Greene Graham

Author:Greene, Graham [Graham, Greene]
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2010-05-18T23:00:00+00:00

4

In the mornings a servant brought him breakfast in bed: coffee, toast, a boiled egg. The Home was nearly self-supporting; it had its own hens and pigs and a good many acres of rough shooting. The doctor did not shoot himself; he did not approve, Johns said, of taking animal life, but he was not a doctrinaire. His patients needed meat, and therefore shoots were held, though the doctor took no personal part. "It's really the idea of making it a sport," Johns explained, "which is against the grain. I think he'd really rather trap. . ."

On the tray lay always the morning paper. Digby had not been allowed this privilege for some weeks, until the war had been gently broken to him. Now he could lie late in bed, propped comfortably on three pillows, take a look at the news: "Air Raid Casualties this Week are Down to 255", sip his coffee and tap the shell of his boiled egg: then back to the paper — "The Battle of the Atlantic". The eggs were always done exactly right: the white set and the yoke liquid and thick. Back to the paper: "The Admiralty regret to announce. . . lost with all hands." There was always enough butter to put a little in the egg, for the doctor kept his own cows.

This morning as he was reading Johns came in for a chat, and Digby looking up from the paper asked, "What's a Fifth Column?"

There was nothing Johns liked better than giving information. He talked for quite a while, bringing in Napoleon.

"In other words people in enemy pay?" Digby said. "That's nothing new."

"There's this difference," Johns said. "In the last war — except for Irishmen like Casement — the pay was always cash. Only a certain class was attracted. In this war there are all sorts of ideologies. The man who thinks gold is evil. . . He's naturally attracted to the German economic system. And the men who for years have talked against nationalism. . . well, they are seeing all the old national boundaries obliterated. Pan-Europe. Perhaps not quite in the way they meant. Napoleon too appealed to idealists." His glasses twinkled in the morning sun with the joys of instruction. "When you come to think of it, Napoleon was beaten by the little men, the materialists. Shopkeepers and peasants. People who couldn't see beyond their counter or their field. They'd eaten their lunch under that hedge all their life and they meant to go on doing it. So Napoleon went to St Helena."

"You don't sound a convinced patriot yourself," Digby said.

"Oh, but I am," Johns said earnestly. "I'm a little man too. My father's a chemist, and how he hates all these German medicines that were flooding the market. I'm like him. I'd rather stick to Burroughs and Wellcome than all the Bayers. . ." He went on, "All the same, the other does represent a mood. It's we who are the materialists. The scrapping of all the old boundaries, the new economic ideas.

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