Читать книгу The Celestial City - Baroness Orczy - Страница 6

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In this part of Russia the winter comes along unheralded. Three days ago at the Koursk races the ladies in the stands had to hold up their parasols to shield themselves against the hot sun; to-day it was snowing. It had been snowing for the past twenty-four hours. The winter had suddenly set in with a blizzard, and now in the bridle-paths the snow lay a quarter of a metre thick, and in the fields the maize bent under its heavy crystal load. In the pope’s garden the crimson zinnias, still in bloom, held each a little pointed hillock of snow, so that they looked like rows of cherry tarts capped with a mound of whipped cream.

It was long past midnight, and the snow still fell, although the weather-wise were prophesying that there would come a thaw before the real winter finally settled down. In the small village isba, doors and windows were hermetically closed; the huge tiled stove in one corner of the low-raftered room gave out an intense, almost over-powering heat. The wooden floor, innocent of covering, exhaled an odour of ill-kept stables and of stale grease. From the rafters hung bunches of orange-coloured maize, the only vivid note in the drab harmony of blacks and greys, just a compound of half a century of smoke and dirt. It was impossible to see through the small windows—not more than a foot square, either of them—what went on outside. But indoors it was cheery enough. Drab and primitive as was the whole aspect of the place, it was lighted by an electric lamp which hung from the ceiling just above the square centre table fashioned of solid, dark pine, on the smooth top of which numberless past libations had left patterns of sticky rings.

Round the table half a dozen men sat smoking and drinking silvorium. Four of them were engaged in a game of Tarok. The fumes of black tobacco and pungent spirit, mingled with the odour of perspiring humanity, hung like a pall between the rafters and the shaggy heads of these men. The noise in the room was at times deafening. The four Tarok players invariably all talked at once, and when they did not happen to have anything to say, they either swore lustily at the caprices of Chance, or else cleared their throats and expectorated with a sound like the grinding of an ungreased wheel upon its axle.

These four men had the strong facial characteristics of the Semitic race. Three of them, in fact, wore the long black gabardine buttoned from chin to ankle, and greasy at the shoulders, the skull-cap, and the ringlets in front of the ears, the distinctive wear of the Israelites in this part of Europe. The other, whose features were no less strongly marked, wore Western clothes of black broadcloth that showed numerous marks of wear and dirt. He appeared to be a man of wealth and of authority among his companions; he had on an old-fashioned, heavy gold watch-chain and a ring on his finger set with a huge solitaire diamond; he was chawing the fag-end of an excellent cigar, and he seemed to be the only man in the room who could command silence when he chose, and this he did now and then by bringing the palm of his hand down with a crash on the table.

Of the other two occupants of the isba, one, dressed in a rough tweed suit, his trousers tucked into huge leather boots, had upon his face and all about him that pronounced Slav type which approaches the Mongol. He was slight of build but looked wiry and even powerful; his skin was of a yellow parchment-like colour; his high cheek-bones looked like polished ivory; his eyes were shrewd, light brown in colour and almond-shaped. But for the long oval shape of his face and the tously pale brown of his hair, he might have been taken for an Asiatic. He talked little, and there was an endless number of cigarette ends on a metal tray before him. His coarse, spatulated fingers were stained with nicotine, and bits of stale tobacco and of ash had settled in his sparse moustache and beard.

The sixth man, on the other hand, was obviously a foreigner. For one thing, when he did talk, he did not raise his voice to a screech like the others, nor did he expectorate or noisily clear his throat. He, too, was dressed in a rough tweed suit, which though travel-stained looked not only as if it had known better days, but also as if it had recently been in contact with a clothes-brush; his chin and upper lip were shaved, his hair tidy, even his hands looked as if they had recently been washed. Amongst these loose-limbed Israelites he looked a regular giant, powerful of build, with fists that looked as if they could fell an ox. His hair was of a rich sandy colour slightly tinged with grey, his face was florid, and his eyes full and blue. He, too, was smoking an excellent Havana whilst watching the game of Tarok—which obviously he did not understand—with a mixture of unwilling interest and thinly veiled contempt.

“Wait! wait!” the player in the broadcloth exclaimed at one moment with an excited flourish of the arm. “I win this Pagat Ultimo—a wonderful Pagat Ultimo—and then I tell you what I think of the whole affair.”

He spoke German with that peculiar lisp characteristic of his race and which always sounds to foreign ears like an expression of mock humility. Now he rapped his cards down on the table one by one.

“Tarok!” he shouted in a stentorian voice that caused the rafters to shake and the electric pendant to quiver above his head. “Can you beat the twelve, Aaron Mosenthal? No? Then the eight? No? The seven, and the four? No one any more Tarok, and here comes the little Pagat, and I get twenty for tricks and fifty for the Ultimo! Now, Mr. Kilts,” he concluded, turning a triumphant, perspiring face to the foreigner, “what do you think of that? Have you ever seen a better-played Ultimo in your life?”

“I can’t say I have,” the stranger replied in a moderately fluent German that had a distinctly North-country—not to say Scottish—intonation in the pronunciation of some of the consonants; “but then I don’t understand your silly game. We don’t play it in my country.”

“No,” one of the players retorted with a loud laugh, “but you will one day. Why, you have just started to play Mah-Jongg, which the Chinese gave up as old-fashioned two hundred years ago.”

This sally was evidently considered to be very witty, for it was greeted with loud guffaws; one man nearly rolled off his chair, laughing. The man in authority slapped the foreigner familiarly on the back, which was a great condescension, as he was a great man, was Peter Abramovitch Stanko, justice of the peace and people’s commissary for the district of Ostolga in the province of Koursk.

The perpetrator of the joke, delighted with his success, whisked an exceedingly dirty, bright-coloured handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his streaming forehead. The ringlets in front of his ears were ginger-coloured, as were the wisps of lank hair that protruded from beneath his skull-cap. His eyes were the colour of burnt sienna, innocent of eyelashes, and his nose, sharp and pointed above a narrow, receding jaw, gave his whole face a ludicrous resemblance to a dachshund.

Commissary Peter Abramovitch Stanko gazed with unconcealed triumph on the faces of his opponents, who were taking their defeat with a great fund of philosophy and were already engaged in counting out some greasy paper money, which they then pushed across the table toward the winner. There ensued a hullabaloo on the merits and demerits of the Ultimo, and on the tactics that should have been followed in order to avert the catastrophe. The winner shouted louder than the rest; in the intervals of mopping his forehead he demonstrated how he would have defeated any combination set up against him. The babel of raucous voices, in which the man with the almond-shaped eyes took his full share, once more became deafening; alone the foreigner took no part in the discussion: he sat in silence smoking his excellent Havana, the fumes of which were a sweet and welcome odour in this reeking hovel. Anon he drew his watch out of his pocket, and when he had caught the eye of the man in the broadcloth, he tapped the watch significantly with his forefinger, whereupon the other stopped arguing and shouting and banged the table with his fist, causing the mugs of silvorium to jump and to spill their contents.

“Hold your jaws now, all of you,” he shouted at the top of his stentorian voice, “and put the cards away. Mr. Kilts and Sergine are going by the train at five o’clock; it is past two already. So if you have any serious questions to ask, now is the time to do it; but every time Mr. Kilts begins to talk business, you all make such a noise, he can’t hear himself speak.”

“You speak good, Peter Abramovitch,” the red-haired Jew said sententiously. “Let us talk a bit now, if you like. I see you don’t want to play any more,” he added rather spitefully, as he pushed the cards together in a heap; “you have won.”

And as the others shrugged their shoulders, obviously resigned to defeat, he went on airily: “you can give us our revanche to-morrow——”

“Did I not tell you to hold your jaw, Jakob Grossman?” Peter Abramovitch broke in sternly. “If I don’t have silence until Mr. Kilts has told us about the business, I send you all packing, and the affair is finished as far as you are concerned. Is that clear?”

Apparently it was. The other players looked shamefaced. One or two of them muttered something under their breath; but within a minute or two silence reigned in the room.

“Now, Mr. Kilts,” Peter Abramovitch said pompously, “you speak.”

“What do you want me to say?” the man they called Kilts retorted.

“Well, you see,” the other condescended to explain, “the comrades here don’t know much about the business. I shouldn’t have told them anything,” he went on naïvely, “only we shall want their help—if the thing is going to be successful.”

“I don’t see how it can help being successful,” Kilts rejoined with a dry laugh. “But you may be sure that my friends and I wouldn’t have troubled about you fellows either, if we could have carried on without you.”

“But you couldn’t,” retorted Peter Abramovitch complacently. “I am commissary of this district; without my visa no one can come in or out of here, and as the Bobrinsky belong to my district as you say——”

“It would be better,” here interposed the red-haired Jew drily, “if Mr. Kilts could tell us first just how things stand. Then we can judge—not?” And he glanced round for approval at his companions.

“Jakob Grossman is right,” one of them said, “I for one know nothing. All I was told was that——”

“Never mind what you were told, Aaron Mosenthal,” Peter Abramovitch broke in impatiently; “let comrade Kilts have his say. You begin at the beginning, Mr. Kilts,” he continued, addressing the Britisher, “then there is no dispute—no argument—what?”

“All right,” the other assented. “And in the devil’s name let me speak without interruption.” He paused for a moment and leaning his arms over the table, his cigar between his fingers, he cast a comprehensive glance upon the eager faces before him. “As far as me and my mates are concerned,” he then resumed, “the matter stands like this. One of us is a floor-waiter in an hotel in London: he has sharp ears; he is a Swiss by birth, but speaks several languages fluently. One day he took a tea-tray up to a visitor whose name is Princess Bobrinsky——”

“Bobrinsky!” ejaculated Grossman, unable to restrain his excitement. “Oh! but the Bobrinskys——”

“Didn’t I say you were not to interrupt?” Peter Abramovitch shouted at the top of his voice. “Do you want me to throw up the business, or do you not?”

“So, so, Peter Abramovitch,” the other retorted meekly, “do not lose your temper. Are we not all listening?”

“Go on, comrade,” Peter Abramovitch rejoined, addressing the Scot, who, with the stolidity of his race, had calmly waited until the interruptions had subsided into a repressed murmur. Then only did he go on.

“This Princess Bobrinsky,” he said, “had a friend with her. They were talking English, but Rudolph—that’s our mate, the waiter—caught a word or two that made him prick up his ears, not only while he was in the room, but when he had got the other side of the door. He gathered from the conversation that Prince Bobrinsky has been reported dead since the Wrangel retreat to Odessa——”

“Yes! I know,” Grossman once more broke in with a gasp of excitement, but relapsed at once into a kind of agitated silence under the stern eye of Peter Abramovitch, whilst the Scotchman continued:

“Rudolf also learned that at one time the Bobrinskys were very rich, and that among other things they had a quantity of jewellery which was of enormous value. The Princess Bobrinsky was talking about this to her friend, and said that before her husband had joined Wrangel’s army he had put these jewels in a safe place which, now that he was dead, was known only to herself.”

But at this point not even Peter Abramovitch’s authority was strong enough to quell the tumult that ensued. Apparently every one of those present knew something about the Bobrinsky valuables and each wanted to put in a word telling what he knew. Grossman, of course, was to the fore. He was landlord of the isba; he sold silvorium to every man and heard all the gossip within five versts of the place. What he didn’t know of the affairs of his neighbours was not worth a kick on the shins. But he was quite modest about his knowledge; with a condescending wave of the arm he pointed to the yellow-faced Russian, who, up to now, though he had talked at times as much and as loudly as the rest, had seemed to be more an observer of events than an active participant in the discussions.

“Tell them, Paul Alexandrovitch,” Grossman said sententiously. “You know!” And he added comprehensively to the rest of the assembly:

“Paul Alexandrovitch Sergine here knows all about the Bobrinsky emeralds. He was a menial for a long time in the household—a secretary or something—and if our wonderful revolution hadn’t broken out when it did, why, those emeralds would have been ours before now. Eh! comrade Paul?”

Paul Sergine shrugged his shoulders; perhaps he was not altogether prepared to say that. As for the emeralds—well! he certainly knew all about them. “I have seen them,” he said, “dozens of times. The old Bobrinsky woman—the mother of the present man—used to put ’em on when she went to Court. Besides, they were famous all over Russia.”

“Sergine is right,” Peter Abramovitch explained to the Scotchman. “Those emeralds were spoken of with as much awe as the diamonds of the Queen of England. I have seen them myself. I was deputy administrator to the Bobrinskys at one time, and I know that their family jewels were insured for something like eight million roubles—that would be about eight hundred thousand pounds of your money in those days.”

“Anyhow, I gather that they are worth getting,” the Scotchman rejoined with a dry laugh. “My mates and I found that out at once. They sent me out here because I could speak German. I even know a word or two of Russian, and of course our friend Sergine looked after me; so I’ve got on quite well so far. When Rudolf came to us with the tale, we got at once in touch with Paul, who’s got a job with the Russian grain commission in London, and Paul knew the ropes all right enough, didn’t you, mate? He thought of you at once, Mr. Peter Abramovitch. ‘Peter Abramovitch is the man for you,’ he said at once. Great man, Paul—ain’t you, mate? He knows the ropes; he’ll tell you what me and my mates want to do, and if you do it—why, there you are,”, he concluded, speaking the last three words in his native tongue, because he didn’t feel that any German phrase would render the full force of his argument.

“There you are!” It meant: “We in England have set this thing going. It is for you to help us do the rest.”

Strangely enough, the Scotchman’s tones, if not the exact words, had set them thinking. There they were! no question about that. But the fact had not started one of those tumultuous discussions when each man strove to shout the other down. No! They were all silent now. Brooding. Thinking of those emeralds and marvelling what each individual man would make out of the affair. And what, anyway, this affair was going to be. It sounded fairly simple and feasible, but——

All the same, they were glad that Paul Alexandrovitch Sergine was in it. Paul was one of themselves. One never knew with those foreigners—but Paul was all right. Paul would see that his compatriots didn’t get cheated. Oh, yes, Paul was all right. Mosenthal, for instance, knew him intimately.

“How should we not know one another, eh, Paul?” he said genially. “You and I was in gaol together in ’15, you remember, because we ran away before the Austrians at Dorna Watra. You remember?”

Paul nodded genially in return. He remembered perfectly. The army was fighting like mad. They had no ammunition; what they had was worthless, supplied by a venal contractor who was a great man in Moscow since the revolution. The Austrians were well mounted, well equipped—their disaster had not yet come; and the army—the Tsar’s army—having no ammunition, fought to the death, fought their way to Lvoff with the butt-end of their rifles. Great time that!—Paul remembered thinking that it was not good enough and that he and some of his mates—amongst whom Mosenthal—decided that running away was a great deal better. They were caught and dragged to Lvoff, where they were to have been shot, only the superior officers had other things to think about than shooting a few cowards.

Anyway, that was a long time ago. There had been a good many revolutions of the social wheel since then; and now chance was going to give it yet another turn, all in favour of Paul Alexandrovitch Sergine and his mates. Peter Abramovitch Stanko had now taken the direction of affairs; he had no need to demand silence, because what conversation there was after that final “There you are!” was carried on in whispers; but he wanted to know just what that foreigner and his mates would expect and what they were prepared to offer in exchange for services rendered.

“Fifty-fifty,” the Scotchman said firmly. “We want your help and you can’t get on without us. So don’t let’s argue.”

“Let’s hear the plan,” Grossman suggested, and everyone nodded approval.

It was past four o’clock of this cold October morning before every phase, every eventuality of the plan had been discussed, argued over, nearly fought over, and finally approved. Then only did they all rise and cheerfully bid one another good-night. The Scotchman—Mr. Kilts—was to catch the slow train from Koursk which would get him to Lvoff the following afternoon. Paul Sergine would follow a few days later. Peter Abramovitch Stanko, who was justice of the peace and commissary for the district, had seen to it that permits and visas were all in order. Mr. Kilts had come with a fine proposition, one of the finest ever brought to the notice of this international organisation of thieves, forgers, and other miscreants, and as the Russian members of the organisation were important men in their own country, it was up to them to arrange for the safety and comfort of their British associates.

On a row of pegs against the wall hung half a dozen fur-lined coats. Each man selected his own and arranged the big fur collar about his ears. They wore shabby clothes, all of them, and were apparently very short of soap, but they all had valuable fur coats and their wives wore priceless gems in their ears.

Peter Abramovitch with Paul Sergine and the foreigner from England were the first to leave.

Grossman, with the obsequiousness peculiar to his race, opened the door to them and bowed them out with many scrapings and arching of his long, lean spine. When he pulled open the door, the snow and wind hit him in the face. It was the coldest hour of the night; some two hours later the cold pale dawn would break behind the pine-clad hills. Grossman busied himself with a couple of storm-lanterns and gave one to Peter Abramovitch, and together the three men went out into the night.

The others tarried a while longer. It was a big affair that they had been discussing. No doubt the thought of it would keep them awake a long while yet.

“How would you like to go to England, Aaron Mosenthal?” the innkeeper asked, when at last they were all ready to go.

“I shouldn’t mind England,” Mosenthal replied blandly; “it’s the journey I shouldn’t like. It’s all right for Paul Sergine. He likes the sea, but I’m mightily afraid of it.”

“Bah!” Grossman retorted with a guffaw, “you were born to be hanged, Aaron Mosenthal, not to be drowned.”

But somehow the jest fell flat. One of the others instinctively passed a quivering hand across his throat.

“Make no such jokes, Jakob Grossman,” he said. “If we should fail——”

“Who’s going to fail?” the other broke in with a high cackle. “I say, ‘when we succeed,’ not ‘if we fail.’”

One by one they trooped out of the isba.

“I think the sunrise will bring a thaw,” one of them said irrelevantly.

“Well, good-night all,” Grossman called out at the last. “Good luck to us all, I say. We’ll need it.”

When they had all gone, he bolted the door after them, and having banked up the fire and switched out the light, he went contentedly to bed beside his frau, who was already snoring and knew nothing of the fortune which her lord and master hoped to get with the help of his comrades in far-off England and that of Peter Abramovitch Stanko, justice of the peace (save the mark!) and people’s commissary for the commune of Ostolga in the province of Koursk.