Passenger to Frankfurt - Agatha Christie [26]
‘Very interesting.’
‘It’s so frightening, this same idea that always recurs. History repeating itself. The young hero, the golden superman that all must follow.’ She paused, then said, ‘Same idea, you know. The young Siegfried.’
Chapter 7
Advice From Great-Aunt Matilda
Great-Aunt Matilda looked at him. She had a very sharp and shrewd eye. Stafford Nye had noticed that before. He noticed it particularly at this moment.
‘So you’ve heard that term before,’ she said. ‘I see.’
‘What does it mean?’
‘You don’t know?’ She raised her eyebrows.
‘Cross my heart and wish to die,’ said Sir Stafford, in nursery language.
‘Yes, we always used to say that, didn’t we,’ said Lady Matilda. ‘Do you really mean what you’re saying?’
‘I don’t know anything about it.’
‘But you’d heard the term before.’
‘Yes. Someone said it to me.’
‘Anyone important?’
‘It could be. I suppose it could be. What do you mean by “anyone important”?’
‘Well, you’ve been involved in various Government missions lately, haven’t you? You’ve represented this poor, miserable country as best you could, which I shouldn’t wonder wasn’t rather better than many others could do, sitting round a table and talking. I don’t know whether anything’s come of all that.’
‘Probably not,’ said Stafford Nye. ‘After all, one isn’t optimistic when one goes into these things.’
‘One does one’s best,’ said Lady Matilda correctively.
‘A very Christian principle. Nowadays if one does one’s worst one often seems to get on a good deal better. What does all this mean, Aunt Matilda?’
‘I don’t suppose I know,’ said his aunt.
‘Well, you very often do know things.’
‘Not exactly. I just pick up things here and there.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ve got a few old friends left, you know. Friends who are in the know. Of course most of them are either practically stone deaf or half blind or a little bit gone in the top storey or unable to walk straight. But something still functions. Something, shall we say, up here.’ She hit the top of her neatly arranged white head. ‘There’s a good deal of alarm and despondency about. More than usual. That’s one of the things I’ve picked up.’
‘Isn’t there always?’
‘Yes, yes, but this is a bit more than that. Active instead of passive, as you might say. For a long time, as I have noticed from the outside, and you, no doubt, from the inside, we have felt that things are in a mess. A rather bad mess. But now we’ve got to a point where we feel that perhaps something might have been done about the mess. There’s an element of danger in it. Something is going on–something is brewing. Not just in one country. In quite a lot of countries. They’ve recruited a service of their own and the danger about that is that it’s a service of young people. And the kind of people who will go anywhere, do anything, unfortunately believe anything, and so long as they are promised a certain amount of pulling down, wrecking, throwing spanners in the works, then they think the cause must be a good one and that the world will be a different place. They’re not creative, that’s the trouble–only destructive. The creative young write poems, write books, probably compose music, paint pictures just as they always have done. They’ll be all right–But once people learn to love destruction for its own sake, evil leadership gets its chance.’
‘You say “they” or “them”. Who do you mean?’
‘Wish I knew,’ said Lady Matilda. ‘Yes, I wish I knew. Very much indeed. If I hear anything useful, I’ll tell you. Then you can do something about it.’
‘Unfortunately, I haven’t got anyone to tell, I mean to pass it on to.’
‘Yes, don’t pass it on to just anyone. You can’t trust people. Don’t pass it on to any one of those idiots in the Government, or connected with government or hoping to be participating in government after this lot runs out. Politicians don’t have time to look at the world they’re living in. They see the