Читать книгу The Colossus of Arcadia - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 5

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The dinner party given by the Princess a few nights later was, as usual, gay and amusing. Townleyes, who was seated on her left, seemed delighted to find as his neighbour on the other side Lydia Domiloff, who entertained him readily with all the gossip of the place. It was not until after the first course had been removed that the Princess was able to engage his attention.

“Tell me,” she begged, “about your adventures in that intriguing-looking yacht of yours. Did you bring it all the way from England?”

“All the way. For the size of the boat we have quite powerful engines.”

“And you were your own navigator, Léon tells me.”

“I have my certificate,” he confided. “Yachting on a small scale has always been my chief recreation.”

“And the name of your boat is the Silver Shadow. Hadn’t you a little trouble somewhere down the coast—was it at Marseilles?”

“Yes,” he admitted. “I had a little trouble. It was my own fault. I took on board at Barcelona a refugee who had been thrown out of his own country and who was hanging about there in danger of his life.”

“And after playing the Good Samaritan,” she observed, “you apparently shot him.”

“Not without reason,” Townleyes assured her calmly. “The man tried to rob me and scuttle the boat. I saw no reason why I should risk a life which is of some value to myself in an uneven fight with a desperado, so I took the advantage of having a revolver in my pocket. The—er—Court at Marseilles, where we put in afterwards, sympathized with me.”

“So do I,” she agreed. “I like to hear of a man who acts quickly in his own self-defence. I was just interested in the affair because I had read about it. My French is not very good so I take the Éclaireur de Nice and read about some of these terrible things that go on around us. You know, Sir Julian, no one has the faintest idea what a country of dramas this really is, unless they read the Éclaireur de Nice. You learn of happenings there which never seem to get into the other papers.”

“Your tastes lead you into the sensational byways of life, Princess,” he murmured.

“How clever of you to find that out! Yes, I like life served up with all its side dishes—perhaps that’s because I am American.”

He drew his chair a trifle nearer to hers. The floating shawl of a dancer as she passed had touched his cheek.

“The trouble of it is,” he observed, “that so many of these seasonings are simply the exaggerations of the journalist. If we could only be sure that they were true, the life of a police agent in this part of the world might seem to be a very exciting one.”

“But isn’t it?” she asked. “Look at Monsieur Bernard over at that table with his fat wife and his two dowdy daughters. Did you ever see a more, to all appearances, typically bourgeois quartette? Yet Bernard could make your hair curl with his reminiscences if he were allowed to write them, which he is not in this country.”

“Who is he?” Townleyes enquired.

“He is the under Chef de la Sûreté in Nice,” she confided. “You see him in those ill-fitting clothes and paternal aspect and you will see him dancing presently with one of those lumpy daughters, and you are just as likely as not before the evening is over to see him tapped on the shoulder by one of the officials and hurried off to Nice—a murder or something of that sort! Those things happen to him often.”

“An interesting fellow, I should think,” Townleyes observed carelessly. “All I can say about it, with due respect to his profession, is that he doesn’t look the part.”

“Why is Nice such a centre of crime, I wonder?” Lydia Domiloff speculated.

“Because it is the danger spot of France, as Barcelona was of Spain,” Lord Henry declared, leaning across the table. “There are more Red Flaggers there to the kilometre than there are anywhere else in the country.”

“It is a rotten world,” Oscar Dring, the great Scandinavian agitator, pronounced from the other side of Lydia Domiloff. “To plan for war is barbarous. To hope for peace is imbecile. To find a quiet corner where one can settle down, read philosophy and try to give the world a little food for real and serious thought is becoming an impossibility. The world whose byways we tread is corrupt, poisonous with intrigue and fanaticism.”

Lord Henry rose to his feet.

“Meanwhile we must live,” he ventured with the air of one a little bored with the conversation, “and it is our duty to enjoy ourselves in order that we can pass on the spirit of enjoyment to others. May we dance, Princess, and will you honour me?”

“It is an opportune idea,” she assented. “We can make the world no better, can we, by sitting and gloating over her sad condition? There in the corner is the girl I envy,” she added as they glided into the throng. “She is young, she is beautiful, she is, I imagine, unburdened with over-much intelligence. She sits alone watching the dancing and obviously hoping that someone will find an excuse to present himself. For the moment she is thinking of nothing else. Will heaven send her a partner for this delightful waltz?”

“Heaven has given me one, anyhow,” he declared.

“Heaven is always kinder to you than you deserve,” she told him. “You go through life without a care—without an effort.”

“What would you have me do? Join one of the foreign legions of lost causes?”

“There are many causes not yet lost which are worth supporting.”

“Are you serious?”

“I am never serious,” she assured him. “You ought to know that. I choose for my associates the most frivolous people I can find, and look what happens! That strange man, Oscar Dring, forced himself upon me to-night when we were assembling for dinner in the foyer. Do you know what he had the impertinence to tell me?”

“Dring would say anything to anybody. Fortunately no one ever listens to him.”

“He told me,” the Princess went on, “just before we came in, that Monte Carlo had become the European centre of international intrigue and that I had several well-known international spies amongst my guests to-night!”

“Oscar Dring has one serious fault for a man who is really a brilliant thinker,” her partner commented. “He does enjoy pulling your leg sometimes.”

The Princess, in a diaphanous costume which even a French couturière had regarded with mingled admiration and doubt, laughed quietly.

“I am showing as much of my leg as any woman in this room,” she confided, “but I should hate to have it pulled by Mr. Dring. You think then that I need not put black crosses against the names of any of my guests?”

“I am sure of it,” he answered. “We are all too much occupied in ourselves and in our affairs. Espionage, with all its risks, was never a paying game. Every novelist whose works we have devoured has assured us of that. Fellows like Dring are simply scaremongers—wild asses braying in the wilderness.”

Oscar Dring was dancing with Phyllis Mallory. She was rather afraid of her partner with his almost patriarchal beard, his flashing eyes, his upright presence, so upright that he seemed to be continually pushing her away from him.

“All this talk—talk—talk—” he muttered. “It is maddening!”

“Why?”

“Can you not divine,” he went on, “that there is trouble coming over all the world? You can read it in the faces of the people. It is the logical outcome of all this cynical indifference on the part of the world’s rulers towards the suffering proletariat.”

“I should think we are as safe here as anywhere against anything in the nature of a revolution,” Phyllis Mallory observed hopefully.

“We are safe nowhere,” was the angry retort. “Science has conquered geography.”

“What an unpleasant thought,” she said, wondering how soon she could escape from this man with his fierce awkward movements and cascades of bitter speech.

“And therefore you reject it,” he replied quickly. “That is so always. Dig your head into the ground at the first signs of danger, close your eyes if anything ugly comes along! Let me tell you this,” he continued, breaking into what was almost a run but keeping time so perfectly that she was forced to follow. “Last year I worked ten hours a day. I wrote a hundred and fifty thousand words. I addressed the world in three languages, of all three of which I am a perfect master. I stretched out my right hand and I pointed to the writing on the wall. What do you think I earned?”

“I have not the faintest idea,” she confessed.

“Four hundred pounds,” he told her furiously. “Not enough to starve on. And why? Because not even with my name there would anyone read. I might as well lay down my pen forever. I have no audience. The ears of the world are stuffed with cotton wool. They will tear it out only to listen to the music of the machine guns!”

“Why do you work so hard,” she asked, “to make people believe unpleasant things?”

He stopped in the middle of the floor but he had instinct enough to keep that slight swaying to the music which would enable him to start again whenever he liked.

“Why do it?” he repeated. “Your question possesses common sense. Sometimes I ask myself that. All I can say is that I dream of myself sometimes as a prophet and that the words which come to me I must speak. I find no pleasure in writing. I give none to those who read me. Come—I find you not unintelligent. Listen and I will tell you something. It is the secret of my life.”

He recommenced dancing. Her curiosity was excited.

“Well?” she asked.

“If I did not write,” he confided, “if I did not get rid of this burning weight of prophecy, of prescience I call it, do you know what I should do? Just this. I should drink. I should benumb my agony. I should become the wild man of the cafés of Stockholm, of Berlin, of Paris. That is why I go on. That is why I shall go on until someone thrusts a knife into my back or a bullet into my chest. They will do it some day. I have been threatened.”

The music stopped. Phyllis Mallory drew a breath of relief.

“Shall we sit down?” she suggested, already leading the way to her chair.