Читать книгу The Vanishing Point - Coningsby Dawson - Страница 9

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Even to myself,” the Major sighed, “the story which I am about to tell sounds incredible. My reason for confiding it to a stranger is that, when you have heard it, you may dispense with chivalry and become stern enough to do your duty. To protect a woman, whatever her age or looks, is an instinct as primitive as religion. When she happens to be beautiful and the object of your affection, not to protect her is a kind of blasphemy. You and I, though you deny it, are both in love with Santa. I am her husband, while you are no more than her chance-met admirer. Yet you, in her hour of danger, are prepared to shield her with your honor, whereas I am among the most relentless of her pursuers.

“The best part of my life has been spent in India. I went there with my regiment when I was little more than a boy. The fascination of an ancient civilization took possession of my imagination. I became a student of it and soon acquired a knowledge of native habits which was more fitting to a secret agent than to a soldier. I learned to speak many dialects and could pass myself off as an Asiatic with the minimum amount of disguise. Instead of frequenting clubs and idling away my leisure in the usual round of social futilities which make up the average Anglo-Indian's life, I formed the practice of slipping out into the night and losing my identity in the teeming, Oriental shadow-world by which I was surrounded.

“On one of my wanderings—when or where it is not necessary to particularize—I strolled into a temple and saw a young girl dancing. As perhaps you know, girls are dedicated to the worship of certain gods and goddesses at a very early age. They are for the most part deities who symbolize fecundity; the ritual with which they are celebrated is gross. The temple girls are chosen for their beauty and are trained by the priesthood to perform sensual dances, which are as old as time. They are not nuns or priestesses; their social status, if they may be said to have any in a land where woman is at best a plaything, approximates to that of temple slaves. They are taken from their parents at an age when sahibs' children are in nurseries. From the moment they are dedicated, their minds and souls are left to stagnate; they are treated like performing animals—fed and drilled and degraded that they may employ their bodies with the utmost grace.

“This girl, the moment I saw her, impressed me as being the most fascinating human creature I had ever set eyes on. I had pressed in with the crowd from the evil-smelling, moonlit street. The temple was dim with the smoke of swaying censers. Its walls seemed vast with the flash of gold and jewels. At the far end, scarcely discernible, a huge god squatted, gloating and sinister. From somewhere in the shadows, swelling into frenzy, came the pounding of drums and the clash of barbaric music. Across the open pavement, between the god and the spectators, a chain of girls coiled and twisted like a snake.

“At the time I entered, the dance was nearly ended. It had evidently been going on for a long while. One by one the girls were slipping down exhausted. There they lay disordered, with their hair twined about them and their slim, bronze bodies twitching.

“But one girl danced on, ever quickening her pace, till she alone remained. She was like a streak of flame, a will-o'-the-wisp, a spring petal blown before the wind: she seemed the symbol of everything that is young and pagan. Her childish face was masked in an unchanging smile. Her lips were parted; her body gleamed golden among the muted lights. She stooped and darted like a lizard across her fallen comrades; with one leap she floated through the air, perched for a moment on the knees of the god, and vanished into his bosom. Instantly the censers were extinguished, and I was carried out into the evil-smelling street by the rush of the perspiring crowd.

“From that night it was as though I were bewitched. There was never an hour when that drifting blossom of a girl was absent from my mind. I idealized her into a nobility that was more than earthly. I flung aside all sense of caste and race. I forgot that I was a sahib and over thirty, whereas she was a dancing girl and little more than a child. I excused my infatuation on the ground of magnanimity, telling myself that if I could possess her, I could save her from certain degradation. Above all, I wanted to wipe out her houri's smile and to cause the soul to appear in her eyes. Every hour that I could spare, I disguised myself as a native and haunted the temple. At rare intervals I caught glimpses of her. And so six months went by.

“Gradually my desire strengthened into determination. I was insane with chivalry—utterly quixotic, as quixotic as you are now. I had raised her to such a pinnacle of worship that a liaison was not to be contemplated. What I planned was to carry her off and marry her. When you remember the gulf which the Anglo-Indian places between himself and the races he governs, you can estimate the measure of my madness. Such an act would entail resigning from my regiment and inviting social ostracism on every hand. It meant ruin, but to my impassioned mind no price seemed too high to pay.

“There was an old priest who, unknown to me, had observed my comings and goings. One evening he addressed me by name. While I was hesitating as to what could be his motive, he volunteered to obtain the girl for me if I would reward him with a sufficient bribe.

“Three nights later, as I waited, a door in the temple wall opened, and a muffled figure emerged. Without a word, obeying the instructions I had received, I turned away, and she followed. Through the sleeping city we crept, like a pair of shadows.

“In the European quarter I had secretly rented a bungalow which had long been deserted. It stood in a wilderness of overgrown shrubberies; a high wall went about it. Not until the rusty gate had closed behind us did I dare to acknowledge her presence; then, taking her in my arms, I carried her up the path to the unlighted house. We entered. There were just the two of us; I had not risked engaging servants. In the darkness I set her down and lighted a lamp. As the flame quickened and I knelt beside her, she uncovered her face. So far, I had seen her only distantly. It was the moment for which I had waited. Her face was white.”

The Major passed his hand across his forehead. His lips tightened. He betrayed every sign of a man doing his best to conceal an overpowering emotion. He leaned back and gazed up at the ceiling, blowing out a cloud of smoke. When he had watched it disperse, he turned to Hindwood with a deprecating smile.

“I hope I don't bore you. I'll omit the ardors and ecstasies of my love-affair and stick to the bare outline. What I discovered was that she was an Eurasian. She was fourteen years of age—a woman by Indian standards, but still a child by ours. Her eyes were gray, and her complexion was so light that, with any one but an expert, she could have passed for a European. There are millions of darkhaired women with her coloring to be found in any Latin country. Given the proper manners and a European setting, scarcely a soul would have suspected her. Certainly no one would dare to voice his suspicions who met her as my wife.

“Her history I pieced together from many conversations. Her father had been a tea-planter—an Englishman of good family. Her mother had been a Burmese. They both had died in a cholera epidemic; their half-caste child had been picked up from the highways and placed in the temple.

“Seeing that I was out to be chivalrous, I made up my mind to do the thing thoroughly. I hurried up a furlough that was due me and, taking her to France, placed her in a convent. My reason for choosing France was that, when she became my wife, there would be fewer chances of discovery if she passed as French instead of English. In the south, especially in Provence, there are many women of her type descended from the Saracens. If you've been to Arles, you must have noticed them. At the end of three years, when she was seventeen, I returned, married her, and took her back to India. If any one detected the deception, no one was bold enough to proclaim it. Every circumstance argued against such a surmise. She had forgotten much of the English she had known, and pretended to speak only French. I had coached her in her part; she acted it to perfection. By no hint or sign did she let the knowledge escape her that she could understand a word of any native dialect. So far as I am aware, she was accepted at her face value, as a young Provençal whom I had courted in her own country.

“For some time my romantic folly brought us nothing but happiness. We invented a legend to account for her family, which, through continual repetition, we almost came to believe ourselves. No two people were ever more in love. Despite our difference in age and the racial gulf which divided us, no man and woman ever seemed more wisely mated. Apparently whatever shameful knowledge she had acquired in the temple had been blotted out by her superimposed refinement. Even to me she betrayed no hint of grossness; she appeared to be as sweet and innocent as the girl I claimed her to be—the girl I said I had surprised in the passionless tranquility of a French convent.

“Her devotion to myself was pathetic—it verged on adoration. She was continually contriving new ways of rewarding me for the horrors from which I had saved her. To me the ground she trod was sacred. I delighted in making myself her slave. We competed with each other in generosity. With each of us the other's slightest whim was law. She was unbelievably beautiful, the most mysteriously beautiful woman in India. I was more than twice her years and the envy of every man who saw her. Her beauty seemed only the outshining of her goodness. Save for an accident, I should never have known otherwise.

“We had been married two years when she bore me a child. Our dread, when we knew that she was to become a mother, was that our offspring might reveal the Asiatic strain. We took every precaution to hide the fact, if this should happen. But even this was spared us. Our boy was blue-eyed and flaxen-haired as any Anglo-Saxon. She worshiped him. He seemed to symbolize Heaven's blessing on the lie we practiced. He was never out of her sight. In her fear lest he might develop some native characteristic, she refused to have an ayah and cared for him entirely. Wherever she went, she kept him with her; he slept in our room at night. So perfectly had she drilled herself that, up to this point, I can not recall an instance in which she had fallen below the level of a well-born white woman. It was the finest instinct in her nature that proved her undoing—her mother-love that trapped her into the self-revelation which produced our tragedy.

“Our child was a sturdy little fellow of nearly two, just beginning to run about, when suddenly he died. We had a house-party at the time. His mother was playing tennis. While she was playing, he was strangled and thrown down a well by a native servant who believed he had been slighted. My wife, missing the child, went in search of him in panic and caught the native in the act of getting rid of the body. Instantly she reverted to what her mother had been before her. Snatching the man's knife, she killed him before any of her guests could restrain her. In the abandonment of her grief, she became an out and out Burmese woman, scattering dust on her hair, beating her breasts, and rending her clothes with the wildest lamentations. The fiction of her French origin was utterly destroyed. There was no longer any doubt among those who witnessed her that I was married to an Eurasian.

“Our position at once became intolerable. A halfcaste is despised the world over, but in India especially. That night every servant left. None of our friends came near us. We sat alone with our grief in a deserted house. As her calmness returned, she grew tragically contrite—not contrite from any moral sense, but because she had given away our secret. She seemed incapable of appreciating that she had done any wrong in depriving justice of its victim. When I tried to explain to her that she had committed a crime, she shook her head impatiently, insisting that she had done what any mother ought to do under the circumstances. When I pressed the subject she became persuaded that I, too, was blaming her, and then that I had never properly loved either her or her child. And yet I think I never loved her more tenderly than at that moment.

“A week later, after miserable days and nights of suspense, we received our sentence. Native sedition was running high. The Government did not dare to bring the wife of a British officer to trial. Such a course would have proved too damaging to the prestige of Anglo-Indian officialdom. I was promised that the scandal would be hushed up and I should be given a new employment, if I would agree to ship her out of India at once and to see to it that she never returned. What it amounted to for me was perpetual separation and for her perpetual banishment.

“I have often tried to arrive at a sane conclusion as to how far I am the author of what she has become. Had I shared her banishment there can be little doubt that her white blood would have kept control of her poisoned heritage. Unfortunately I had a living to earn. Professionally I was broken. My savings were inconsiderable. I had her to maintain. I was past mid-life and by leaving India would have sacrificed the pension that was already in sight. Moreover, I knew of no way of marketing my training in any country outside India. So I played safe and bowed to authority. I resigned from my regiment and was transferred to the department of military intelligence. After knowing the security of a home and wife, at past forty I became a secret agent, a spy and a wanderer, a friendless and unfriendly man, unsociable and socially unacceptable. As for my wife, aged only twenty-one, she was exiled to England, a stranger in a gray, chill country, bankrupt in her happiness, with no one to defend her, taking with her the temptation of her unusual beauty and the treacherous inheritance of her intermingled blood.

“There seemed no justice in the world for either of us. The offending cause of our punishment was the protective motherhood which had prompted her to slay the killer of our child. But, to use your terse Americanism, we were 'up against' blind angers and racial prejudices, which no amount of bucking on our part could change. So far as she was concerned, even before her life had started, she had been condemned. The initial sin had been her parents' when they had allowed themselves to create her. Before she had seen daylight, the uncharity of mankind had proclaimed her a half-caste and a pariah. From her inherited fate I had tried to snatch her when I had bought her from the temple. You may say that my recklessness was nothing more than selfishness, pharisaically parading as chivalry; in allowing her to bear me a child, I had only reduplicated the crime of her parents. Nevertheless, I had tried to rescue her and could have succeeded, had not her mother-love ensnared her. She was betrayed by the purest instinct in her nature; she was shown no more leniency than if it had been the basest. There lay the cruelty that rankled. She was judged not by motives, but by results. She would have been pardoned and applauded, had she been a full-blooded white woman.

“In spite of all these accumulated injustices, I believe she would have retained the strength to go straight had there been any limit to our separation. There was none. For all the comfort that I could be to her, I might just as well have been dead or divorced from her. I was all that remained out of the ruin that had overtaken her, yet the most to which she could look forward, save for brief meetings at long intervals, was that I would be restored to her in my useless old age, when the glorious floodtide of her youth hud receded. You see I am sufficiently unbiased to be able to plead her case.”

The Major rose and, going over to the window, stood with his back toward Hindwood, gazing out into the night. Some minutes had elapsed, when he turned quietly.

“Where had I got to? Ah, yes! To where I had to send her to England! I accompanied her to Calcutta to see her safely on the liner. Shall I ever forget that journey? It had the gloom of a funeral and the frenzy of an elopement. Actually my rôle was that of a policeman deporting a miscreant who happened to be his wife. We tried to pack into moments the emotions of a lifetime. As background to our love-making was the poignant memory of the puzzled child, whom seven years earlier I had escorted on the same journey, en route for France, where she was to be made over into a sahib's lady. In her wondering attitude toward the fortunes that assailed her, she was little changed. She was still startlingly unsophisticated—a child-woman, dangerously credulous and deceivingly unversed in masculine wiles. I had taught her to be so dependent that I dared not imagine how she would do without me. She was so artless. She took such pleasure in admiration. Love was so necessary to her; it was the breath of her life. Its misuse had been the breath and the means of life of her Burmese mother before her.

“Her complete lack of comprehension that I in any way shared her sacrifice formed the most distressing part of my ordeal. She assumed that she was being exiled by ray choice. She persisted in talking as if she could stay, if I would only change my mind. Though she did not accuse me in words, she believed that I was ridding myself of her because she had disgraced me—that I was pushing her across the horizon, where she would be forgotten and out of sight. Up to the last moment she pleaded with and coaxed me, as though it were I who was refusing to repeal her sentence. The ship cast off, bearing her from me with her broken heart and her embittered memories of the newly-dug grave, while I turned back to ferret through the gutters of Asia, that I might earn the wherewithal to provide for her.

“At first she wrote many times a day; then every day; then regularly to catch each outgoing mail. In the whole of England she knew nobody. In her anger against British justice she wished to know nobody. She was inconsolable, bruised in spirit, and crushed in her pride. After the pomp and hubbub of the East, she found London drab and melancholy. From her lodgings in Kensington she poured out her soul on paper. Much of what she wrote consisted of memories, the tender trifles which a mother treasures about her child.

“Gradually, almost imperceptibly, there came a change. A querulous note crept in, a questioning of motives. Why had I sent her as far away as England? Why had I sent her away at all? If it were true that it was not I who had exiled her, why had I not accompanied her? Was it because I was tired and ashamed of her? It would have been kinder to have left her to dance in the temple. Then a new suspicion grew up, which betrayed an evil that I had never traced in her. With whom was I living? Some white woman? Was that why I had rid myself of her?

“What answers could I make? It was like arguing with a spiteful child. Our misunderstandings were as wide as the distance that separated us. She implored and finally demanded that I should join her. The more I stated obstacles, the more convinced she became that I was cruel, like all the sahibs who were torturing her—the proud sahibs who thought nothing of a murdered baby, when it was only the child of a half-caste woman.

“From then on her heart hardened, till at last I failed to recognize in her any resemblance to the gentle wife who had been so much my companion. She wrote vaguely about revenge, a revenge that should embrace the whole white race. Contempt should be repaid with despising, hatred with blows, blood with blood. Her beauty should be the weapon. She seemed to have gone mad. Suddenly her letters ceased. My remittances were returned; they had failed to reach her.

“For what follows I have but one explanation. By some species of unconscious hypnotism, so long as I had exerted physical influence over her, I had had the power to make the European in her predominate. As my influence weakened with time and distance, she relapsed into the woman she always would have been, if I had not found her: a smiling menace to the nobilities of both the races from which she was descended, a human jackal following the hunt. That sounds harsh? Then listen to the conclusion of my story.

“One day, six months after I had lost touch with her, I was glancing through an illustrated weekly when, on turning a page, I found her portrait gazing up at me. She was photographed in almost the attitude and attire in which I had first caught sight of her in the temple. The very setting was similar; behind her the huge god squatted, gloating and sinister—on her face was the unchanging houri's smile. On reading the text I discovered that she had leaped into instant fame as an exponent of Indian dancing. You will remember that in the last two years before the war the dance craze was at its height. She had been acclaimed a great artist; everything she said, did, and wore was fulsomely praised and described. There was no false reticence about either her or her admirers; she was frankly advertised as being possessed of the most beautiful body in Europe. She had given herself a French name and was announced as being of French ancestry. According to her printed biography, her father had been an orchid-hunter who had taken her with him on all his expeditions. On his last, in India, he had died; she had been kidnaped for her beauty and sold into the service of a Hindoo temple. From this bondage she had been rescued by an Englishman of title who had chivalrously restored her to her family in Marseilles. There was much more to the same effect—a jumble of perverted truth and romantic lies, precisely the kind of adventurous nonsense which appeals to the sensation-seeking public.

“From then on, via the press, I was always getting news of her. London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, each in turn went mad over her. She captivated a continent. Kings and emperors commanded her to appear before them. Her tours were royal triumphs. Little by little ugly rumors began to spread. There was a Parisian banker who, when he had lavished his all upon her, committed suicide, leaving his wife and children penniless. There was another scandal; it had to do with a Russian general who had betrayed his country. At his court-martial he poisoned himself when her name was introduced into the evidence. As though a conspiracy of silence had broken down, now that she began to be gossiped about, scandals gathered thick and fast. Each new one was more infamous than the last; out of each she emerged unpitying and smiling. It was only her victims who suffered. Her progress was marked by a trail of death and ruin. Nevertheless, infatuated by the exquisiteness of her body, men fluttered about her unceasingly, like moths, shriveling their souls in the flame of her fascination. When the peace of the world was violated by the Germans—”

Hindwood leaned forward, tapping the Major's knee. “I can spare you your eloquence. The rest of your story is common property. The woman you describe stole the Allies' anti-submarine defense plans from her lover. He was a British naval officer, temporarily in Paris. She was caught red-handed. There was a sentimental agitation in her favor—an attempt to argue that as a physical masterpiece of feminine perfection she ought to be exempted. It accomplished nothing. She was a German spy, who had sold men's lives for profit. She received and deserved no more mercy than a rag-picker. After having been encouraged in her sins because of her unrivaled loveliness, she was led out at dawn in the woods of Vincennes, where the body which had maddened thousands of eyes was riddled with bullets.”

The Major's lips were smiling crookedly. “How could she have been riddled with bullets,” he questioned, “when you crossed the Atlantic in her company?”

Hindwood shrugged his shoulders. “If you insist on propounding conundrums, it's up to you to supply the answers.”

“I can supply them. The person executed in the woods of Vincennes was not a woman.”

“That's a daring assertion. Who was it?”

“A distinguished French officer, a man who had been crippled in defending his country and held the highest awards for gallantry. In pre-war days he had been an old flame of hers, whom she had abandoned with more than her ordinary callousness. On hearing of her predicament, he begged to be allotted the duty of seeing that her sentence was properly executed. The reason he gave was that he might clear himself of the taint of ever having associated with a traitress. He was put in charge of the guard on her last night. Making use of his opportunity, he exchanged clothing with her and—”

Hindwood stifled a yawn. “You expect me to believe this?”

The Major mastered his anger. “I expect you to believe nothing. I'm here to state facts and to warn you that your friend, who now calls herself Santa Gorlof, is the same woman. My appeal to you for assistance in bringing her to justice is both personal and patriotic. I am her husband; my honor is involved. I am also an Englishman; all her intrigues, even this last, in which Prince Rogovich met his fate, are aimed against the friends of England—one of whom, I may remind you, is your own great nation. All I can say is that each man has his separate standard of loyalty. For me, an old soldier, my devotion to my country is more important than my compassion for an erring woman.”

Hindwood rose. Uncomfortably, against his will, he had been impressed by the stoical dignity of his persistent guest. “You deserve that I should be frank with you. Here's the truth—I accept very little of what you've told me. Either you've mistaken my traveling companion for another woman, or else you've been trying to prejudice me with a fantastic story. But even though I accepted your supposed revelation, I should refuse to help you. On your own showing, you're endeavoring to bring the mother of your child to the scaffold. I should respect you more if you left her fate to other hands. Disbelieving you, as I do, I regard the introduction of Miss Gorlof's name into the discussion as rank impertinence. Your coupling of my name with hers increases the cowardice of your discourtesy. If you had convinced me and I were eager to assist you, I couldn't. I know nothing about her—our acquaintance was the most casual. In all probability I've seen her for the last time; I haven't the vaguest notion where she's to be found. If your half-caste vampire actually escaped the bullets in the woods of Vincennes, I advise you to search for her in another direction. You may take my word for it that if Santa Gorlof learns of your activities, you'll find yourself in trouble. I reckon myself some judge when it comes to character.”

The Major drew out his silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and flicked a speck of dust from his immaculate white spats. With the utmost deliberation he recovered his hat and gloves. For a few seconds he gazed out of the window thoughtfully; then, turning slowly, he crossed the room. With his hand on the door knob, he glanced back solemnly. He passed his fingers across his lips and cleared his throat. “When she has added you to her list of victims, if she gives you time before she kills you, remember that I warned you.”

When Hindwood had recovered sufficiently from his surprise to follow him out into the passage, every sign of his unwelcome visitor had vanished.

He had scarcely closed the door and reseated himself, when again there came a tapping.