Читать книгу Aaron Rodd, Diviner - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 4

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Mr. Paul Brodie walked, unannounced, into Aaron Rodd's office, a matter of ten days after the episode of the changed diamond. He had lost a little of his bombast, and he carried himself with less than his usual confidence. His eyes, however, had lost none of their old inquisitive fire. He was perfectly aware, even as he greeted the two men who rose to welcome him, that Aaron Rodd was wearing a new suit of clothes, that the office had been spring-cleaned, that the box of cigarettes upon the desk were of an expensive brand, and that the violets in the buttonhole of Harvey Grimm's immaculate coat had come from a Bond Street florist.

"Good morning, gentlemen," he said airily, subsiding into the chair which the latter had vacated for him. "Nice little trio of conspirators we are, eh?"

Harvey Grimm shrugged his shoulders.

"It's rough on you," he admitted—"gives you kind of a twist, of course, with the police—but I can't see any sense in the thing yet. They weren't meaning to trade off that bit of paste on a diamond expert surely!"

The detective scratched his chin.

"That bit of paste," he declared, "was all they had on them, anyway. Seems as though they hadn't quite sized you up—you and Mr. Rodd here—and were paying you a test visit. Gee, they're clever!"

"You had them searched, I suppose," the other enquired, "to be sure they hadn't the real goods with them?"

"You bet!" the detective assented gloomily. "Made it all the worse for us afterwards. I tell you I daren't show my face at Scotland Yard these days."

Harvey Grimm nodded sympathetically.

"Still, they must know that these people aren't what they profess to be," he observed.

"That's all very well," Brodie agreed, "but every one goes about with kid gloves on in this country. That's why I threw up my job and went over to the States. Even a criminal, a known criminal, has got to be treated as though he were a little God Almighty until the charge is right there and the proof lying handy. I spent last night with Inspector Ditchwater. He's as sure as I am that the young man is no other than Jeremiah Sands, but he'd sooner let him slip through his fingers than take a risk."

"How does it come about, then," Aaron Rodd asked quietly, "that a famous diamond thief is wearing the uniform of a Belgian officer, that he is decorated and wounded?"

"Simple as possible," Brodie explained. "We knew perfectly well that Jeremiah Sands was a Belgian. That little fact had been in every description of him that's ever been issued. He chucked his little enterprises in New York, the moment war was declared, and sailed for Europe, bringing the loot with him. He was as clever as paint, though. He played the old game of sending a double to Chicago, and he was in Belgium before we knew the truth. There, from what we gather, he handed over the stuff to the old man and his sister, and took up his soldiering job. The worst of it is he's covered up his traces so well that we haven't a chance unless we can catch him, or one of the three, with the goods. Meanwhile, there he is, less than a quarter of a mile away, with half a million of loot under his nose; there's a reward of twenty-five thousand dollars for his apprehension; and here we three men sit, needing the money, and pretty well powerless."

"I wouldn't go so far as that," Harvey Grimm said quietly. "I don't fancy you've come to the end of your tether yet, Brodie."

The detective knocked the ash from his cigar and rose to his feet.

"Well," he admitted, "I ain't giving up, sure. All the same, this little failure has made things difficult for me. If I put my head in at head-quarters and whisper 'Jeremiah Sands,' they're down my throat. I just looked in to see how you boys were," he added. "They'll have tumbled to you both now, so I'm afraid the game's off so far as you are concerned. So long! See you round at the Milan about cocktail time, Harvey, eh?"

Mr. Brodie took his leave, with more expressions of cordiality. Aaron Rodd closed the door carefully after him and came back into the room. For several moments neither of the two men spoke. Harvey Grimm carefully selected a cigarette and lit it. Then he walked to the door, opened it and peered down the stairs.

"Too damned amiable!" he muttered as he returned to his place. "Did you see the way he peered around? You have brightened things up a bit, Aaron."

"I haven't done more than was absolutely necessary," the young lawyer protested. "The place was simply filthy."

Harvey Grimm suddenly burst into a hearty laugh and slapped his knee.

"That's all right, old fellow," he declared. "It don't matter a snap of the fingers. That chap Brodie does get me, though. A baby could see through him. He's got just sense enough to believe that we pinched the diamond—that's why he's been round here. It just don't matter a damn, Aaron, what he suspects. That diamond doesn't exist any longer. Neither our friends whom we—er—relieved of its incriminating possession, nor Paul Brodie, will ever see that stone again. Let's lunch."

Aaron Rodd reached for his hat and followed his friend out into the street. At the end of the little dingy thoroughfare, as they made their way up towards the Strand, Harvey Grimm paused abruptly in front of what seemed to be a small book-shop. There were only one or two volumes in the window, of what seemed to be editions de luxe of some unknown work. There was a single modern engraving and a water-colour of Futurist propensities for background. Harvey Grimm eyed these treasures appreciatively.

"This place pleases me," he announced. "It has an air of its own. We will spend a few minutes here."

The two men entered and looked about them, a little bewildered by their surroundings. They seemed to have stepped into a small and feminine sitting-room, the walls of which were hung with water-colours of unusual subjects and colouring. There was a little pile of paper-covered volumes upon the table. A young lady of sombre and uncertain appearance came forward, and Harvey Grimm promptly removed his hat.

"We have perhaps made a mistake?" he observed tentatively. "From the exterior appearance of your establishment, I gathered that we might possibly be able to procure here something unusual in the way of literature. In a small way I am a collector of old books."

"We are entirely modern here," the young woman replied. "I can show you hand-made pottery, or the water-colours of a young Futurist artist, or I can offer you the poetical works of one or two of our most modern poets. Second-hand books or objets d'art we do not deal in. We consider," she concluded, "that modernity, absolute modernity, is the proper cult."

Harvey Grimm fanned himself for a moment with his hat. His companion was gazing, with his mouth a little open, at a picture upon the wall which appeared to him to represent the bursting of a ripe tomato upon a crazy landscape.

"An impression of war," the young woman remarked, following his gaze. "A wonderful piece of work by a young Futurist painter."

Harvey Grimm studied it for a moment through his eyeglass, and coughed. He turned back to the table and picked up a paper-covered volume.

"Poetry," he murmured, "is one of my great solaces."

"Have you met with the work of Stephen Cresswell?" the young woman enquired, almost solemnly.

Harvey Grimm repeated the name several times.

"For the moment——" he confessed.

"Eightpence," the girl interrupted, depositing one of the paper-covered volumes in his hand. "Perhaps your friend would like one, too. I can promise you that when you have read Cresswell's Spring Lyrics, you will find all Victorian poetry anæmic."

Harvey Grimm handed a copy to his companion, laid down two shillings and pocketed the eightpence change a little diffidently.

"You would perhaps like to look around," the young lady suggested.

She vanished into an inner room. Almost at that moment the door leading into the street was violently opened, and a young man of somewhat surprising appearance abruptly entered. He was over six feet in height, he wore a flannel shirt and collar much the worse for wear, a brown tweed coat from which every button was missing, and through an old pair of patent boots came an unashamed and very evident toe. The two visitors stared at him in amazement. The young man's eyes, from the moment of his entrance, were fixed upon the paper volume which Harvey Grimm was carrying.

"Sir," he enquired, "am I to conclude that you have purchased a copy—the copy of poems you hold in your hand?"

"I have just done so," Harvey Grimm admitted, "also my friend."

The young man pushed past him towards the inner room.

"Bertha," he exclaimed loudly, "eightpence, please! You have sold two copies of my poems. The eightpence!"

There was a momentary silence and then the clinking of coins. The young man reappeared and made for the door with an air of determination in his face. Harvey Grimm tapped him on the shoulder.

"Sir," he said, "forgive me if I take a liberty, but am I right in presuming that you are the author of this volume?"

"I am," was the prompt reply, "and I am going to have a drink."

"One moment, if you please," his questioner begged. "This, you must remember, is an impertinent age. Modernity demands it. Are you not also hungry?"

"Ravenous," Mr. Stephen Cresswell confessed, "but what can one do with eightpence?"

"You will join my friend and myself," Harvey Grimm declared firmly. "We are going to take a chop."

The young man's tongue seemed to wander around the outside of his lips.

"A chop," he repeated absently.

"At a neighbouring grill-room," Harvey Grimm went on. "Come, I have bought two copies of your poems. I have a claim for your consideration."

"Do I understand," the young man asked, "that you will pay for the chop?"

"That will be my privilege," was the prompt assertion.

"You are doubtless mad," the poet observed, "but you are probably opulent. Let us hurry."

They left the place and crossed the street, the young man in the middle. Aaron Rodd was speechless. His eyes seemed fascinated by the deficiencies of their new friend's toilet, a fact of which he himself seemed sublimely unconscious. Harvey Grimm, however, proceeded to make a delicate allusion to the matter.

"Some little accident, I gather," he remarked, "has happened—forgive my noticing it—to your right shoe."

The poet glanced carelessly downwards.

"It occurred this morning," he sighed. "To tell you the truth, I had scarcely noticed it. There was a green streak in the sunrise. I hastened——"

Harvey Grimm had paused in front of a boot shop.

"This place," he said firmly, "will do as well as another."

"Why not?" the young man agreed, entering promptly, seating himself upon the nearest vacant chair and holding out his foot. "Something light," he begged. "You will observe that my foot is long and narrow."

The shopman withdrew the tattered remnants of shoes and stared in amazement at his prospective customer's bare feet. The latter held out his hand for a cigarette and tapped it against the side of Harvey Grimm's case.

"It appears to me," he continued, gazing at his mud-stained feet, "that I came out without socks. The sunrise again. However, it is a deficiency which I perceive that you are in a position to remedy."

He selected without embarrassment a pair of socks and shoes, and was perfectly willing to don a tie which they purchased from a small haberdasher's shop at the end of the street. That affair disposed of, however, he became quite firm.

"The affair of the chop——," he insisted.

"We are there," Harvey Grimm interrupted, leading him to an hotel grill-room.

The young man paused before the large, open grid and carefully indicated the chop which he considered suitable for his consumption. He then seated himself opposite his two friends and expressed himself in favour of a mixed vermouth.

"A very pleasing encounter, this," he declared, drawing the eightpence from his pocket and looking at it thoughtfully. "May I ask, sir, whether you are acquainted with my poems?"

"Not yet," Harvey Grimm confessed.

"Your purchase, then, was accidental?"

"Entirely," his patron explained. "My friend and I are adventurers. We seek the unusual. The appearance of the shop where we met you attracted us. The young lady to whom we addressed some enquiries tendered us a copy of your verses."

The young man sighed.

"It is a scandalous thing," he said, "to be published in paper covers at eightpence—fourpence to the author. So you are adventurers. You mean by that thieves?"

"Sir," Aaron Rodd interrupted, "I am a solicitor."

"My ignorance," the young man declared, "is amazing, but that, I presume, is a legalised form of robbery? I am one of the few persons in the world who give value for the money I earn. I produce, create. If only ten thousand people in the city were to pay eightpence for a copy of my works, I should be affluent, as you two are. I should lunch here every day and drink Burgundy."

"Then in a very short time," Harvey Grimm reminded him, "you would cease to write poetry."

His protégé shook his head.

"A well-nurtured body is an incentive to poetic thought," he insisted. "There is a richness of imagery which comes with after-dinner composing; a sort of mental starvation, an anæmic scantiness of similes, which follows the fruit luncheon and cold water of necessity. Adventurers, gentlemen, are you? That is to say you are people with wits. Tell me, then—bring me an idea from the practical world—how shall I make ten thousand people buy a copy of my poems?"

"Come, that's an interesting problem," Harvey Grimm declared. "Of course, if one were to answer you in a single word, that one would be advertisement."

"If I could write my name across the heavens, or flash it from a million lights through the clouds," the young man remarked, "I would do so, but these things call for either miraculous powers or money. I have neither."

"Your case," Harvey Grimm promised, "shall have our attention, my friend's and mine. In the meantime, the moment seems opportune, pending the arrival of our chops, for a glance at your work. Permit me."

The poetaster crossed his legs, leaned back in his chair, thrust an eyeglass into his eye, and turned over the pages of the paper volume which he had been carrying. Aaron Rodd followed his example. The poet, entirely unembarrassed, eyed hungrily each covered dish which passed. At the arrival of the meal, Harvey Grimm solemnly pocketed his book and replaced his eyeglass. Aaron Rodd went on reading for a moment. Then he glanced surreptitiously at their guest and laid his volume face downwards upon the table.

"Your poems, I perceive," Harvey Grimm observed, as he helped himself to a potato, "are not written for the man in the street."

"They are written," the poet declared, falling hungrily upon his chop, "for any one who will pay eightpence for them."

Conversation faded away. It was not until the service of coffee and cigars that anything more than disjointed words were spoken. The young man's face was still colourless but his eyes were less hard. He took out his pencil and toyed for a moment with the menu.

"Some little trifle," he suggested, "commemorative of the occasion?"

"I would rather," Harvey Grimm confessed, "think out some scheme for advertising your work. There's a little thing here about a lame 'busman——"

"Any scheme you suggest," the young man assented dreamily. "I frankly admit that the dispersal of my productions is a matter in which I have failed. The appreciative few may have purchased but the man of the day passes on, ignorant of the great need he really has of poetry. Ten thousand copies of my poems, sold in London, would produce at once a more gracious spirit. You would observe a difference in the deportment, the speech, the greater altruism of the multitude. How shall I force my works into their hands and their eightpences into my pocket?"

"Fourpence only," Aaron Rodd reminded him. "The publishers get half."

"In the event of a large circulation," the poet pointed out, with a wave of the hand, "better terms might be arrived at. You, as a legal man, can appreciate that possibility."

"There is only one idea which occurs to me," Harvey Grimm declared, after a brief pause. "Come and we will make an experiment."

They marched out into the streets and walked solemnly along towards Leicester Square. Suddenly Harvey Grimm stopped short and accosted a small, grey-haired man who was carrying a bag and walking quickly.

"I beg your pardon, sir," the former began.

"What is it?" the little man demanded.

Harvey Grimm took him gently by the lapel of his coat. The little man seemed too surprised to resist.

"I want the privilege of a few minutes' conversation with you," Harvey Grimm continued. "You are one of the uneducated ten thousand who, on behalf of my friend here, Stephen Cresswell, the great poet, I am anxious to reach. Have you read Cresswell's poems?"

"I am in a hurry," the little man insisted, gazing at his interlocutor in a bewildered manner, and struggling to escape.

"The whole world is in a hurry," Harvey Grimm observed, drawing the paper volume from his pocket with the other hand. "This volume of poems will cost you eightpence. It will bring relief to its impoverished author, you yourself will become an enlightened——"

"I wish you'd let me go," the little man protested angrily. "I don't know you, and I don't want to stand about the streets, talking to a stranger. Let me go or I'll call a policeman."

"A policeman can afford you no assistance," Harvey Grimm assured him. "I shall remain polite but insistent. You will buy this volume of poems for eightpence, or——"

"Or what?" his victim demanded.

Harvey Grimm leaned down and whispered in his ear. The little man's hand shot into his pocket. He produced sixpence and two coppers, snatched at the book and hurried off. The victor in this little rencontre turned to his companions with an air of triumph and handed the eightpence to the poet, who immediately pocketed it.

"The whole problem is solved," he declared.

"You are a great man, sir," the poet exclaimed, grasping him by the hand, "but what was it you whispered in his ear?"

"I simply told him," Harvey Grimm said blandly, "that I should biff him one. The cost of a new hat is ten and sixpence; the price of your poems is eightpence."