'Metal-fatigue!' she repeated, and tinkled again.
Harold said hurriedly: 'We were talking about the funny noise the car was making, dear.' Tuny paid him no attention.
'Metal-fatigue!' she repeated.
Since there is nothing intrinsically funny in metal-fatigue, we judged that her amusement was the kind that invites inquiry. In our lack of response we were not being wilfully unkind, merely contra-suggestible; besides, it was ten minutes to three a.m. Harold pushed back his chair.
'It's been a pretty long run,' he said, 'I think ' But Tuny was not to be stalled.
'Oh, my dears,' she said, 'you don't mean to say that people down here really believe all that stuff about metal-fatigue?'
I caught Phyllis's surprised eye. I was somewhat taken aback myself. Earlier I had been saying that it was well done, and that the general public would believe it because they would prefer to believe it. Now here was Tuny confuting me almost at once. I glanced at Harold who was looking at his plate. He would not, I decided, be the one who had enlightened Tuny. She belonged irretrievably to the class of woman who believes from the church-door that, having let her bring it off, her man must be a mental weakling, and that any views he may put forward should be treated accordingly.
'Why not?' asked Phyllis. 'There's nothing very new about the idea of metal-fatigue.'
'Of course not,' Tuny agreed, 'that's where they are being clever in putting this out. I mean, it's the kind of thing lots of quite sensible people will fall for,' she added kindly. 'But in this case it's all quite phoney, of course.'
I was about to speak when a look from Phyllis quenched me. It was the kind of look I sometimes get when she is doing her stuff.
'But it's practically official. It's in all the papers,' she said.
'Oh, my dear, surely you don't believe official statements any more,' said Tuny, indulgently. 'Of course they had to make some kind of statement, or else do something about it. And it being only a Japanese steamer made a difference. But it's pretty much like Munich over again.'
'Oh, come, I'd not go as far as that,' said Phyllis in mild expostulation, while I was still wondering how on earth we had arrived at Munich.
'Near enough,' Tuny told her, 'if they can do it once and have the whole thing explained away for them, they'll just be encouraged to do it again, and go on doing it. The only proper way of dealing with it is to take a firm stand. It's simply no good appeasing and dodging. We ought to have called their bluff months and months ago.'
'Bluff?' repeated Phyllis, raising her eyebrows.
'All this story about things in the sea, and those balloon things, and all that silly stuff about Martians, and so on.'
'Martians?' Phyllis said, bemusedly.
'Well, Neptunians it's the same sort of thing. The rubbish that that Bocker man put about. I can't think why he wasn't arrested long ago. I happen to know from somebody who used to know him that he joined the Party when he first went up to the University, and of course he's been working for them ever since. He didn't invent it, I don't mean that. No, the whole thing was thought up in Moscow, and they just used him to put it across because he was influential. And he did it very well that story about the things in the sea was all over the world, and a whole lot of people believed it for a bit, but of course he's quite done for now. That doesn't matter to them, they do that to people. He was just wanted to lay a foundation, you see.'
We had begun to see.
'But the Russians tried to explode the idea. They said at the time it was just a smokescreen to cover the preparations of warmongers,' I pointed out.
'That,' said Tuny, 'wasn't even subtle. It's their regular technique to get in the first accusation against someone else of what they are doing themselves.'
'You mean that the whole thing has been engineered by them right from the beginning?' asked Phyllis.
'But of course,' Tuny told her. 'Quite a long time ago now they had their first try with the flying-saucers, but that didn't come off because most people didn't believe in them, and nobody was really scared. So this time they improved it. First they sent out the red balloons to puzzle people. Then there was all this business about the bottom of the sea that Bocker helped to spread, and to make that more convincing they cut cables, and even sank a few ships '
'Er what with?' I inquired.
'With these new midget submarines of theirs, of course; the same kind that they used on this Japanese ship. And now they'll just be able to go on sinking ships because once people have seen through this metal-fatigue business they'll just say it's being done by the Bocker things in the sea. As long as people believe that, there'll be no popular backing for reprisals.'
'So the metal-fatigue idea was just put about to keep people quiet?' Phyllis asked.
'Exactly,' Tuny agreed. 'The Government doesn't want to admit that it's the Russians, because then there would be a demand that they should take action, and they can't afford to do that with all the Red influence there is. But if they officially pretend to think it's these Bocker things, well, then they'd have to pretend, too, that they were doing something about that, and that'd make them look pretty silly later when it is all exploded. So this is their way out, and as it's only a Japanese ship it's all right for the moment. But it won't last long. We can't afford to have the Russians getting away with this kind of thing. People are starting to demand a strong line, and no more appeasement.'
'People ?' I put in.
'People in Kensington and some other places,' Tuny explained.
Phyllis looked thoughtful as she collected the plates.
'It's shocking how out of touch one gets in a little place like this,' she said, with a slightly apologetic air, and for all the world as if she had been immured in Rose Cottage for several years.
Harold choked a little, and coughed. Then he yawned largely.
'More fresh air than I'm used to,' he explained, and helped to break the party up by carrying out the plates.
In the course of the week-end we learnt more about Russian intentions, though their reasons for sinking a harmless passenger-liner never emerged very clearly. The Sunday papers all had articles, informative in different degrees, on metal-fatigue, and Tuny had a nice day reading them with the smile of a cognoscenta.
Whatever might be the opinion in Kensington, and the lesser Kensingtons of other towns, it was clear that the official theory was being well received in Cornwall. The public bar of The Pick in Penllyn had its own expert on the crystalline structure of metals, with several tales to tell of mysterious collapses of mine machinery which could be attributed to nothing but brittleness induced by prolonged vibration. All old miners, he said, had known this by instinct, long before the scientists got at it. And also, since matters of the sea are of perennial interest to all Cornishmen, heads were knowledgeably shaken over the behaviour of certain Liberty-ships.
Harold looked a little worried as we left there to walk back to the cottage.
'I can see a busy time ahead,' he said, gloomily. 'Months of writing stuff to prove that none of our products can possibly suffer from metal-fatigue.'
'What's it matter? They'll have to use your products,' I said.
'Yes, but all our competitors will be saying how their goods aren't affected by it, so it'll look bad if we don't do the same. I'll have to put in for an extra allocation,' he grumbled. 'If only the damned ship had turned turtle nobody would have been greatly surprised, seeing its nationality, and there'd have been no need for all this. What's more,' he added, 'there's such a lot of trouble for so little result. A good many million people may be lapping it up, but it isn't going home in the places that matter. How much of that is due to Tuny's friends with their usual universal political solvent, and how much to other causes, I wouldn't know, but the fact remains that the number of passage-cancellations has risen well above average, and the number of extra airline bookings about balances it. Also, do you happen to have noticed the shipping shares?'