Mystery at Geneva: An Improbable Tale of Singular HappeningsMacaulay, Rose
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Mystery at Geneva: An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings
Macaulay, Rose
Detective and mystery stories; Geneva (Switzerland) -- Fiction
A young man sat down at Henry's little table and ordered drink; a
bright, neat, brisk young man, with an alert manner. Glancing at the
_British Bolshevist_, he made a conversational opening which elicited
the fact that Henry represented this journal at Geneva. For himself,
he was, it transpired, correspondent of the _Daily Sale_, a paper
to which the _British Bolshevist_ was politically opposed but
temperamentally sympathetic; they had the same cosy, chatty touch
on life.
The two correspondents amused themselves by watching the delegates
and other foreign arrivals strolling to and fro along the elegant
spaciousness of the Quai, chatting with one another. They noticed
little things to write to their papers about, such as hats, spats,
ways of carrying umbrellas and sticks, and so forth. They overheard
fragments of conversation in many tongues. For, clustering round about
the Assembly, were the representatives, official and unofficial, of
nearly all the world's nations, so that Henry heard in the space of
ten minutes British, French, Italians, Russians, Poles, Turks,
Americans, Armenians, Dutch, Irish, Lithuanians, Serb-Croat-Slovenes,
Czecho-Slovakians, the dwellers in Dalmatia and Istria, and in the
parts of Latin America about Brazil, Assyrio-Chaldeans, and newspaper
correspondents, all speaking in their tongues the wonderful works of
God. Geneva was like Pentecost, or the Tower of Babel. There were
represented there very many societies, which regularly settled in
Geneva for the period of the Assembly in order to send it messages,
trusting thus to bring before the League in session the good causes
they had at heart. The Women's International League was there, and the
Esperanto League, and the Non-Alcoholic Drink Society, and the
Mormons, and the Y.M.C.A. and the Union of Free Churches, and the
Unprotected Armenians, and the Catholic Association, and the Orthodox
Church Union, and the Ethical Society, and the Bolshevik Refugees (for
it was in Russia, at the moment, the turn of the other side), and the
Save the Children Committee, and the Freemasons, and the Constructive
Birth Control Society, and the Feathered Friends Protection Society,
and the Negro Equality League, and the Anti-Divorce Union, and the
Humanitarian Society, and the Eugenic Society, and the Orangemen's
Union, and the Sinn Feiners, and the Zionists, and the Saloon
Restoration League, and the S.P.G. And hundreds of Unprotected
Minorities, irresistibly (or so they hoped) moving in their appeals.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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