Читать книгу The Colossus of Arcadia - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 8

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“I am not sure,” Joan confided, later on in the evening, “that I like to watch you people gambling.”

“Why not?” Townleyes, who had just joined her, enquired. “It is as good a way of passing the time as any.”

“People seem to lose their individuality.”

“Not a bad thing to escape from sometimes,” he replied. “I don’t want to be always remembering that I have responsibilities.”

“What are your responsibilities?” she asked curiously.

He paused to exchange a passing word with an acquaintance.

“My responsibilities,” he repeated, as he fell into step with his companion again. “Oh well, I am still in our Foreign Office, you know.”

“Yes, I have heard that,” she said, “but I don’t think you are very serious about it.”

“Wrong time this for being serious about anything,” he declared.

“Why? Is the world coming to an end or anything of that sort?”

They had gravitated somehow or other towards the bar, which was now almost deserted. He established her at a retired table and ordered drinks.

“To tell you the honest truth,” he said, and it was the first time he had spoken seriously for several days, “I should not be the least surprised if a cataclysm did happen before long.”

She lit a cigarette.

“You alarm me!” she exclaimed, her eyes mocking him. “I wish I had started life a little earlier, then.”

“Oh, you may live on,” he replied, “although this world goes crash. A few of you will survive. I don’t think they will give me a chance. They won’t even let me walk to the scaffold like my great-great-grand-mother, who was a Frenchwoman, and show the world how the really well-bred people go marching into eternity. When the madness comes, it will be a fury such as the world has never known before and they won’t stop to cut off our heads in gentlemanly fashion. They will come out of their hiding places in all the great cities with knives in their hands and the red fire before their eyes.”

“Are you being serious?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” he assured her. “I am not often. I think that the world is moving on towards drastic and horrible changes. Very likely there may be a wholesale purification in the years further ahead than we can see. If so, there will be such an orgy of massacre first, as history has never recorded or the mind of man dreamt of.”

She set down her glass and looked at him fixedly.

“Am I really talking to that butterfly of fashion, Sir Julian Townleyes?”

“You are talking to Julian Townleyes all right,” he acknowledged, “but I assure you I can be a very serious fellow now and then. I am over forty, you know, and I have poked about in all manner of odd corners in Europe. I suppose it was a sort of reaction after Eton and Oxford and doing everything to pattern that when I got old enough to travel I took a fancy to slumming, and I have seen things—things I shouldn’t like to talk to you about. Oscar Dring knows all about them. He belongs to a club in Nice which is about one of the most poisonous spots in Europe.”

The Princess came hurrying in, fanning herself vigorously. She made directly for their corner.

“Sir Julian, get me a drink at once,” she begged. “A glass of champagne—not a cocktail. They’re making the cards and the place is getting hotter and noisier every moment. Present your friend, if you please. I thought you two looked so nice dancing together this evening.”

He summoned a waiter, gave the order and presented Miss Joan Haskell almost in the same breath.

“Sir Julian is not in the least inclined towards such frivolities as dancing, just now,” the girl observed as she smiled at the Princess. “He is foretelling all the horrible things that are likely to happen to the world, or to Europe, at any rate. I think I am beginning to feel like getting back to my own safe country.”

“Not so safe as you imagine,” he assured her. “However, the mood has passed. Henceforth I promise to be frivolous for the rest of the evening.”

“The game is rather tiresome to-night but exciting in patches,” the Princess told them as she sipped her wine approvingly. “That mad young compatriot of ours, Hayden Smith, has lost a million and just cashed in with another.”

“And you?”

“I am two or three hundred thousand up,” she admitted, “chiefly because that queer little grey man whose name I always forget was on our side of the table. He plays a very quiet, pleasant game but he is more like a machine than anyone I ever knew. One cannot imagine his making a mistake. Sir Julian, will you make a fourth at eleven o’clock to-morrow morning, if Léon wants to play, and have a light lunch afterwards? My tennis is pretty rotten these days but I promise I will do my best.”

“You won’t be up at eleven o’clock,” he replied dubiously.

“I shall be if I make a date,” she answered. “If Léon can get Phyllis Mallory—or what about you, Miss Haskell, do you play?”

“Only moderately,” Joan confessed. “I am very fond of it, though.”

“You will be quite good enough for us. We will give the professionals a cold shoulder for once. Shall we meet in the bar at a quarter to eleven and have one little drink before we go down? We might lunch at the Country Club afterwards.”

“I’ll take you to Beaulieu,” Townleyes suggested.

“Fine,” she agreed. “And bring Miss—Miss—”

“Haskell,” the girl reminded her.

“If Miss Haskell is agreeable, I shall be delighted,” he acquiesced, taking the Princess’s glass. “We will come and watch you in a minute or two. Perhaps if you see my reproachful figure in the background you won’t sit up so late.”

The Princess sighed. She was looking very beautiful in her apparently simple but wickedly alluring white gown.

“It’s a filthy game,” she said, “but it’s the hardest to leave so long as it is still going on. Au revoir, anyhow.”

She flitted away with a little gesture of farewell. Joan Haskell looked after her admiringly.

“No wonder everyone is fascinated by her,” she murmured. “Do you really mean that I am to come to luncheon?”

“Of course,” he answered. “You heard what the Princess said.”

“But you don’t know anything about me or who I am,” she protested. “You had not the slightest right really to ask me to dance.”

“Oh, this is Monte Carlo,” he reminded her. “This is the place where we realize that life is short, and if we want to do a thing we had better do it quickly. What about ten minutes more watching the Baccarat and then a sandwich upstairs and a few minutes’ dancing before we finish up?”

“It sounds delightful,” she admitted. “But what about the rest of your party?”

He smiled as he led her across the still crowded salon.

“Dinner parties in Monte Carlo,” he told her, “break up when you leave the restaurant. You look for your hostess towards the end of the evening and make your adieux, but except for that you have no responsibilities. You enter the Salle des Jeux and that is the land of liberty.”

“I felt there must be something like that about it,” she observed. “I am feeling almost lightheaded. It must be this new sense of freedom.”

“You said you knew no one here,” he remarked as they strolled across towards the increasing crowd round the Baccarat. “Didn’t I see you speaking to that strange man, Ardrossen?”

She hesitated.

“I don’t really know him,” she confided. “He spoke to me very much as you did. What is a poor girl to do? Especially if she is lonely.”

“You won’t be lonely long,” he assured her. “I don’t suppose I should have noticed you together but I have not yet seen him speak to another soul. If you pass him anywhere he has the trick of looking as though he were gazing into another world.”

“Do you know anything about him?” she asked.

He paused for a few seconds before he replied.

“No. I can’t say that I do. I shouldn’t think anyone does,” he went on meditatively. “He is like one of those people you meet in life who seem to come from God knows where and pass on off the edge of the world. There’s nothing remarkable about his appearance, either. He might be anything from a chartered accountant to a gangster.”

“There is nothing remarkable about his appearance,” she agreed, lowering her voice as they approached the table, “and yet in a sort of way he is interesting. I am perfectly certain that I met him in Geneva twice with a very dangerous man—a Russian—but when I tried to remind him of it he assured me blandly that he had never even been in Geneva. As you say, he might be anything.”

“Anything at all. If he is a chartered accountant, I should think he is top of the profession. If he is a gangster, well, I should hate to be a policeman.”

Ardrossen passed them almost at that moment on his way to the caisse, a trim, neat figure, correct in his clothes, correct in his leisurely walk, absolutely negative in his expression. He was carrying plaques in either hand. Sir Julian watched him curiously as he laid them down in neat little piles before the cashier.

“Has he won or lost?” the girl asked.

Her companion took the question seriously. There was a little frown upon his forehead as he shook his head.

“That’s why the fellow gives me such a queer feeling,” he confessed. “I have watched so many of them in the rooms and for a good many years, and he is the first person I have ever seen whom I could not sum up on the spot. He is worse than a professional croupier. He is inscrutable.”

She watched his fingers as he passed over the plaques to the cashier, who was rapidly counting a huge pile of notes. When she turned away, she, too, was puzzled.

“I am rather glad that I don’t really know Mr. Ardrossen,” she confided. “I don’t think I should like him, and to tell you the truth, I am just a tiny, tiny bit afraid of him.”