to know whether I could go round to the Admiralty at once. That we must have a talk at the earliest possible moment was a foregone conclusion. I therefore replied that I would be on my way in ten minutes, and, hastily swallowing the cup of tea that had been placed on my desk and telling Willett to carry on, I took up my hat and stick, sought the lift, threaded my way through the Record's carts and bicycles and boarded a passing motor-bus in Fleet Street. [Pg 47] [Pg 47] I had no very clear notion of the nature of the job that kept Hubbard in town that spring, and that had caused him to envy Esdaile his luck in being able to get away into the country. Indeed, I can tell you very little about the organization of that mysterious Service that moves, familiar yet isolated, in our midst. I understood that originally he had been a torpedo man, but had later been drafted into the Inventions branch. It is quite possible that the scope of his work had been expressly left rather ill-defined. So many amazing extemporizations had to be hurriedly made and applied. Still, these war-improvisations have to be overhauled afterwards, so that it may be seen which disappear with the emergency, and which are to be permanently incorporated in the strategy of the future; and I knew that one at any rate of Hubbard's tasks was to explain to a certain Parliamentary Committee a number of technical and basic facts that have a way of not varying very much however the political situation may change. I found him alone in his room on the third floor. The screen just within the door was so disposed that, in the spot to which your eyes naturally turned on entering, the officer you had come to see was not. They are old in cunning in the Senior Service, and I had never seen Hubbard at work before. His voice came to me from quite a different part of the room, and I had the feeling that if I had been a stranger there would have been a moment in which I should have been pretty thoroughly looked up and down. "Come in and take a pew," he said. "Hope I haven't fetched you away from anything important. But I couldn't stop to talk this morning. I only got rid of my By-election Blighters half an hour ago. Well——" [Pg 48] [Pg 48] And, as I sat down in the chair at the end of his desk, he plunged straight into the matter by asking me how long I had known Esdaile.
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