Complete weird tales of.., p.921
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 921
“He is here, there, everywhere; he turns up in Brazil one day, and is next in evidence in Moscow. What he is so eternally about God only knows: what Chancellery he serves, which he betrays, is a question that occupies many uneasy minds this very hour, I fancy.
“But of this I, personally, am now satisfied; Karl Breslau is responsible for the robbery of your papers today, and the entire affair was accomplished under his direction!”
“And yet I know,” said Neeland, “that after he and Kestner tried to blow up the captain’s cabin and the bridge aboard the Volhynia yesterday morning at a little after two o’clock, he and Kestner must have jumped overboard in the Mersey River off Liverpool.”
“Without doubt a boat was watching your ship.”
“Yes; Weishelm had a fishing smack to pick them up. Ilse Dumont must have gone with them, too.”
“All they had to do was to touch at some dock, go ashore, and telegraph to their men here,” said the Princess.
“That, evidently, is what they did,” admitted Neeland ruefully.
“Certainly. And by this time they may be here, too. They could do it. I haven’t any doubt that Breslau, Kestner, and Ilse Dumont are here in Paris at this moment.”
“Then I’ll wager I know where they are!”
“Where?”
“In the Hôtel des Bulgars, rue Vilna. That’s where they are to operate a gaming house. That is where they expect to pluck and fleece the callow and the aged who may have anything of political importance about them worth stealing. That is their plan. Agents, officials, employees of all consulates, legations, and embassies are what they’re really after. I heard them discussing it there in the train today.”
The Princess had fallen very silent, musing, watching Neeland’s animated face as he detailed his knowledge of what had occurred.
“Why not notify the police?” he added. “There might be a chance to recover the box and the papers.”
The Princess shook her pretty head.
“We have to be very careful how we use the police, James. It seems simple, but it is not. I can’t explain the reasons, but we usually pit spy against spy, and keep very clear of the police. Otherwise,” she added, smiling, “there would be the deuce to pay among the embassies and legations.” She added: “It’s a most depressing situation; I don’t exactly know what to do.... I have letters to write, anyway — —”
She rose, turned to Rue and took both her hands:
“No; you must go back to New York and to your painting and music if there is to be war in Europe. But you have had a taste of what goes on in certain circles here; you have seen what a chain of consequences ensue from a chance remark of a young girl at a dinner table.”
“Yes.”
“It’s amusing, isn’t it? A careless and innocent word to that old busybody, Ahmed Mirka Pasha, at my table — that began it. Then another word to Izzet Bey. And I had scarcely time to realise what had happened — barely time to telegraph James in New York — before their entire underground machinery was set in motion to seize those wretched papers in Brookhollow!”
Neeland said:
“You don’t know even yet, Princess, how amazingly fast that machinery worked.”
“Tell me now, James. I have time enough to write my warning since it is already too late.” And she seated herself on the sofa and drew Ruhannah down beside her.
“Listen, dear,” she said with pretty mockery, “here is a most worthy young man who is simply dying to let us know how picturesque a man can be when he tries to.”
Neeland laughed:
“The only trouble with me,” he retorted, “is that I’ve a rather hopeless habit of telling the truth. Otherwise there’d be some chance for me as a hero in what I’m going to tell you.”
And he began with his first encounter with Ilse Dumont in Rue Carew’s house at Brookhollow. After he had been speaking for less than a minute, Rue Carew’s hands tightened in the clasp of the Princess Naïa, who glanced at the girl and noticed that she had lost her colour.
And Neeland continued his partly playful, partly serious narrative of “moving accidents by flood and field,” aware of the girl’s deep, breathless interest, moved by it, and, conscious of it, the more inclined to avoid the picturesque and heroic, and almost ashamed to talk of himself at all under the serious beauty of the girl’s clear eyes.
But he could scarcely tell his tale and avoid mentioning himself; he was the centre of it all, the focus of the darts of Fate, and there was no getting away from what happened to himself.
So he made the melodrama a comedy, and the moments of deadly peril he treated lightly. And one thing he avoided altogether, and that was how he had kissed Ilse Dumont.
When he finished his account of his dreadful situation in the stateroom of Ilse Dumont, and how at the last second her unerring shots had shattered the bomb clock, cut the guy-rope, and smashed the water-jug which deluged the burning fuses, he added with a very genuine laugh:
“If only some photographer had taken a few hundred feet of film for me I could retire on an income in a year and never do another stroke of honest work!”
The Princess smiled, mechanically, but Rue Carew dropped her white face on the Princess Naïa’s shoulder as though suddenly fatigued.
CHAPTER XXVII
FROM FOUR TO FIVE
THE PRINCESS MISTCHENKA and Rue Carew had retired to their respective rooms for that hour between four and five in the afternoon, which the average woman devotes to cat-naps or to that aimless feminine fussing which must ever remain a mystery to man.
The afternoon had turned very warm; Neeland, in his room, lay on the lounge in his undershirt and trousers, having arrived so far toward bathing and changing his attire.
No breeze stirred the lattice blinds hanging over both open windows; the semi-dusk of the room was pierced here and there by slender shafts of sunlight which lay almost white across the carpet and striped the opposite wall; the rue Soleil d’Or was very silent in the July afternoon.
And Neeland lay there thinking about all that had happened to him and trying to bring it home to himself and make it seem plausible and real; and could not.
For even now the last ten days of his life seemed like a story he had read concerning someone else. Nor did it seem to him that he personally had known all those people concerned in this wild, exaggerated, grotesque story. They, too, took their places on the printed page, appearing, lingering, disappearing, reappearing, as chapter succeeded chapter in a romance too obvious, too palpably sensational to win the confidence and credulity of a young man of today.
Fed to repletion on noisy contemporary fiction, his finer perception blunted by the daily and raucous yell of the New York press, his imagination too long over-strained by Broadway drama and now flaccid and incapable of further response to its leering or shrieking appeal, the din of twentieth-century art fell on nerveless ears and on a brain benumbed and sceptical.
And so when everything that he had found grotesque, illogical, laboured, obvious, and clamorously redundant in literature and the drama began to happen and continued to happen in real life to him — and went on happening and involving himself and others all around him in the pleasant July sunshine of 1914, this young man, made intellectually blasé, found himself without sufficient capacity to comprehend it.
There was another matter with which his mind was struggling as he lay there, his head cradled on one elbow, watching the thin blue spirals from his cigarette mount straight to the ceiling, and that was the metamorphosis of Rue Carew.
Where was the thin girl he remembered — with her untidy chestnut hair and freckles, and a rather sweet mouth — dressed in garments the only mission of which was to cover a flat chest and frail body and limbs whose too rapid growth had outstripped maturity?
To search for her he went back to the beginning, where a little girl in a pink print dress, bare-legged and hatless, loitered along an ancient rail fence and looked up shyly at him as he warned her to keep out of range of the fusillade from the bushes across the pasture.
He thought of her again at the noisy party in Gayfield on that white night in winter; visualised the tall, shy, overgrown girl who danced with him and made no complaint when her slim foot was trodden on. And again he remembered the sleigh and the sleighbells clashing and tinkling under the moon; the light from her doorway, and how she stood looking back at him; and how, on the mischievous impulse of the moment, he had gone back and kissed her ——
At the memory an odd sensation came over him, scaring him a little. How on earth had he ever had the temerity to do such a thing to her!
And, as he thought of this exquisite, slender, clear-eyed young girl who had greeted him at the Paris terminal — this charming embodiment of all that is fresh and sweet and fearless — in her perfect hat and gown of mondaine youth and fashion, the memory of his temerity appalled him.
Imagine his taking an unencouraged liberty now!
Nor could he dare imagine encouragement from the Rue Carew so amazingly revealed to him.
Out of what, in heaven’s name, had this lovely girl developed? Out of a shy, ragged, bare-legged child, haunting the wild blackberry tangles in Brookhollow?
Out of the frail, charmingly awkward, pathetic, freckled mill-hand in her home-made party clothes, the rather sweet expression of whose mouth once led him to impudent indiscretion?
Out of what had she been evolved — this young girl whom he had left just now standing beside her boudoir door with the Princess Naïa’s arm around her waist? Out of the frightened, white-lipped, shabby girl who had come dragging her trembling limbs and her suitcase up the dark stairway outside his studio? Out of the young thing with sagging hair, crouched in an armchair beside his desk, where her cheap hat lay with two cheap hatpins sticking in the crown? Out of the fragile figure buried in the bedclothes of a stateroom berth, holding out to him a thin, bare arm in voiceless adieu?
And Neeland lay there thinking, his head on his elbow, the other arm extended — from the fingers of which the burnt-out cigarette presently fell to the floor.
He thought to himself:
“She is absolutely beautiful; there’s no denying that. It’s not her clothes or the way she does her hair, or her voice, or the way she moves, or how she looks at a man; it’s the whole business. And the whole bally business is a miracle, that’s all. Good Lord! And to think I ever had the nerve — the nerve!”
He swung himself to a sitting posture, sat gazing into space for a few moments, then continued to undress by pulling off one shoe, lighting a cigarette, and regarding his other foot fixedly.
That is the manner in which the vast majority of young men do their deepest thinking.
However, before five o’clock he had scrubbed himself and arrayed his well constructed person in fresh linen and outer clothing; and now he sauntered out through the hallway and down the stairs to the rear drawing-room, where a tea-table had been brought in and tea paraphernalia arranged. Although the lamp under the kettle had been lighted, nobody was in the room except a West Highland terrier curled up on a lounge, who, without lifting his snow-white head, regarded Neeland out of the wisest and most penetrating eyes the young man had ever encountered.
Here was a personality! Here was a dog not to be approached lightly or with flippant familiarity. No! That small, long, short-legged body with its thatch of wiry white hair was fairly instinct with dignity, wisdom, and uncompromising self-respect.
“That dog,” thought Neeland, venturing to seat himself on a chair opposite, “is a Presbyterian if ever there was one. And I, for one, haven’t the courage to address him until he deigns to speak to me.”
He looked respectfully at the dog, glanced at the kettle which had begun to sizzle a little, then looked out of the long windows into the little walled garden where a few slender fruit trees grew along the walls in the rear of well-kept flower beds, now gay with phlox, larkspur, poppies, and heliotrope, and edged with the biggest and bluest pansies he had ever beheld.
On the wall a Peacock butterfly spread its brown velvet and gorgeously eyed wings to the sun’s warmth; a blackbird with brilliant yellow bill stood astride a peach twig and poured out a bubbling and incessant melody full of fluted grace notes. And on the grass oval a kitten frisked with the ghosts of last month’s dandelions, racing after the drifting fluff and occasionally keeling over to attack its own tail, after the enchanting manner of all kittens.
A step behind him and Neeland turned. It was Marotte, the butler, who presented a thick, sealed envelope to him on his salver, bent to turn down the flame under the singing silver kettle, and withdrew without a sound.
Neeland glanced at the letter in perplexity, opened the envelope and the twice-folded sheets of letter paper inside, and read this odd communication:
* * * * *
Have I been fair to you? Did I keep my word? Surely you must now, in your heart, acquit me of treachery — of any premeditated violence toward you.
I never dreamed that those men would come to my stateroom. That plan had been discussed, but was abandoned because it appeared impossible to get hold of you.
And also — may I admit it without being misunderstood? — I absolutely refused to permit any attempt involving your death.
When the trap shut on you, there in my stateroom, it shut also on me. I was totally unprepared; I was averse to murder; and also I had given you my word of honour.
Judge, then, of my shame and desperation — my anger at being entrapped in a false position involving the loss in your eyes of my personal honour!
It was unbearable: and I did what I could to make it clear to you that I had not betrayed you. But my comrades do not yet know that I had any part in it; do not yet understand why the ship was not blown to splinters. They are satisfied that I made a mistake in the rendezvous. And, so far, no suspicion attaches to me; they believe the mechanism of the clock failed them. And perhaps it is well for me that they believe this.
It is, no doubt, a matter of indifference to you how the others and I reached safety. I have no delusions concerning any personal and kindly feeling on your part toward me. But one thing you can not — dare not — believe, and that is that I proved treacherous to you and false to my own ideas of honour.
And now let me say one more thing to you — let me say it out of a — friendship — for which you care nothing — could not care anything. And that is this: your task is accomplished. You could not possibly have succeeded. There is no chance for recovery of those papers. Your mission is definitely ended.
Now, I beg of you to return to America. Keep clear of entanglement in these events which are beginning to happen in such rapid succession in Europe. They do not concern you; you have nothing to do with them, no interest in them. Your entry into affairs which can not concern you would be insulting effrontery and foolish bravado.
I beg you to heed this warning. I know you to be personally courageous; I suppose that fear of consequences would not deter you from intrusion into any affair, however dangerous; but I dare hope that perhaps in your heart there may have been born a little spark of friendliness — a faint warmth of recognition for a woman who took some slight chance with death to prove to you that her word of honour is not lightly given or lightly broken.
So, if you please, our ways part here with this letter sent to you by hand.
I shall not forget the rash but generous boy I knew who called me
Scheherazade.
CHAPTER XXVIII
TOGETHER
HE SAT THERE, holding the letter and looking absently over it at the little dog who had gone to sleep again. There was no sound in the room save the faint whisper of the tea-kettle. The sunny garden outside was very still, too; the blackbird appeared to doze on his peach twig; the kitten had settled down with eyes half closed and tail tucked under flank.
The young man sat there with his letter in his hand and eyes lost in retrospection for a while.
In his hand lay evidence that the gang which had followed him, and through which he no longer doubted that he had been robbed, was now in Paris.
And yet he could not give this information to the Princess Naïa. Here was a letter which he could not show. Something within him forbade it, some instinct which he did not trouble to analyse.
And this instinct sent the letter into his breast pocket as a light sound came to his ears; and the next instant Rue Carew entered the further drawing-room.
The little West Highland terrier looked up, wagged that section of him which did duty as a tail, and watched her as Neeland rose to seat her at the tea-table.
“Sandy,” she said to the little dog, “if you care to say ‘Down with the Sultan,’ I shall bestow one lump of sugar upon you.”
“Yap-yap!” said the little dog.
“Give it to him, please — —” Rue handed the sugar to Neeland, who delivered it gravely.
“That’s because I want Sandy to like you,” she added.
Neeland regarded the little dog and addressed him politely:
“I shouldn’t dare call you Sandy on such brief acquaintance,” he said; “but may I salute you as Alexander? Thank you, Alexander.”
He patted the dog, whose tail made a slight, sketchy motion of approval.
“Now,” said Rue Carew, “you are friends, and we shall all be very happy together, I’m sure.... Princess Naïa said we were not to wait. Tell me how to fix your tea.”
He explained. About to begin on a buttered croissant, he desisted abruptly and rose to receive the Princess, who entered with the light, springy step characteristic of her, gowned in one of those Parisian afternoon creations which never are seen outside that capital, and never will be.
“Far too charming to be real,” commented Neeland. “You are a pretty fairy story, Princess Naïa, and your gown is a miracle tale which never was true.”
