Читать книгу Miss Brown of X. Y. O - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 4

Table of Contents

It had been twenty minutes to five when the door of the house in Lombertson Square had opened and Miss Brown had been transported into her new world. It was a quarter past eight when, after a brief pause, the man on the couch half closed his eyes.

“That’s all,” he announced.

Miss Brown remained with the pen still poised in her hand. Her eyes seemed to have grown larger. There was a new expression in her face—the expression of the visionary. She sat quite still, gazing steadily through the opposite wall of the room. Her thoughts were aflame. She was travelling in strange cities, burning under strange suns, feeling the breath of unexploited dangers, looking on, powerless, at horrible deeds, all the time tight-lipped, silent, walking with circumspect indifference through a maelstrom of diverse passions. There had been sunny patches at first in that variegated scheme of achievement—passages of luxury and wonder. It was only towards the end that she felt as though she had been led by the hand through the mazes of some inferno, had paused to see the whole world rocking before the terrors to come. The full significance of the story to which she had listened and to which her pen had given effect, had at that moment scarcely dawned upon her. All that she realised were her own newly discovered emotions, the difference in herself which this amazing flashlight into an unknown world had brought about. She suddenly fancied herself once more making her sedate way, satchel in hand, along Holborn, her notebook and pen ready to take down from dictation a price list of surgical appliances, jewellery, ladies’ underclothes, or some commodity of the sort, and the thought set her shivering. “So practical and full of common sense,” the principal of her college had said about Miss Brown when she left to start for herself. “A girl who could be trusted anywhere.” The new Miss Brown was not so sure. She forced herself back to the present, closed her book reverently, adjusted the elastic-band around it, and placed it in her satchel. Then she rose to her feet.

“Don’t you think,” she ventured, “that you ought to send for a doctor?”

“Why?” he asked.

Once more she sniffed the rather close atmosphere of the room.

“Because,” she said, “you have apparently been shot, you are ill and your wound ought to be properly dressed.”

“The time hasn’t come for the doctor yet,” he told her. “Mergen will send for him presently, as a matter of form. It really doesn’t matter. I’m going to die.”

He spoke with an indifference free from bravado yet somehow convincing. She found herself accepting the situation with perfect calmness.

“All the same,” she insisted, “you ought to have a doctor and you must remember that as yet you have given me no instructions.”

“Ring the bell, please,” he enjoined.

She obeyed, and the manservant who had let her in entered.

“Some brandy for me, and a glass of port and some biscuits for the young lady,” he directed.

Already she knew him better than to refuse. As a matter of fact, although she was conscious of no fatigue, she was glad of the wine. He moved himself a little and rested upon his elbow looking at her.

“What do you think of all that?” he asked, motioning towards the satchel.

She touched her forehead with her hand.

“As yet, I can’t think about it,” she confessed. “It is all here—every sentence. I feel that it is going to live with me for the rest of my life.”

He nodded approvingly.

“I am not a braggart,” he said, “but there is no other man who has lived through what I have lived through, who has seen the things I have seen, and come back alive. They’ve got me now though. I made one slip in Warsaw, of all places. I lost my temper. You must never give way to any human feeling, Miss Brown, when you’re carrying your life in your hands, and the lives of other people.”

The wine was brought. He sipped his brandy meditatively; she drank half a glassful of her port at a gulp.

“So you smelt the gunpowder?” he asked abruptly.

“I smelt it directly I entered the room.”

“Observant,” he remarked. “As a matter of fact, though, it was I who shot him, not he me. His long trek is ended anyway. He is dead.”

Miss Brown did not flinch. She looked around the room, and her eyes conjured up the horror which must rest behind that heavy leather screen. She stared at the protruding foot.

“The best man they ever had,” Dessiter continued. “It has been a duel between us since I left the East and began to get hold of the threads of this horrible business. I had scoffed at the whole thing before. I never believed there was anything definite—anything to be really feared from this generation of madmen. I obeyed orders though. Perhaps it’s lucky for the world I did. The alarmists were right for once.”

“And this man?” she reminded him.

“A genius!” Dessiter muttered. “The most wonderful of all the black shadows who have been doing their work through China, India and Afghanistan, in every British colony, in every civilized country. It was his task to hunt me down. Sometimes we missed one another by minutes in a race across a continent, sometimes we were in the same city, the same café, the same hotel, and he never knew. This last time, though, I played my first false card. Since then he’s never left my heels. They generally hunt in packs. He outdistanced the others, and he paid. Have you ever seen a dead man, Miss Brown?”

“Never in my life,” she acknowledged.

“Are you afraid?”

“Not now. I’m afraid of nothing.”

“Go and look,” he invited.

She rose to her feet and crossed the room with unfaltering footsteps—she, the daughter of a country lawyer, who had never seen men fight even in merely quarrelsome mood, whose ways had lain always along the humdrum thoroughfares of life, boarding school and tennis parties, genteel poverty and work, always respectable, always doing the correct and ladylike thing. She passed the overturned chair which apparently marked the spot where the struggle had taken place, glanced at the tablecloth and smashed vase of flowers lying upon the floor, and with her hand upon the screen peered round behind it. To her it always remained a tragic memory, although at that moment she was unconscious of feeling the slightest emotion. The dead man lay there, smallish in stature, dark; an undoubted foreigner, with blue chin, jet black hair, clothes of un-English cut, with a small, round hole in his forehead, waxen pale, a thin cambric handkerchief over his eyes. One knee was a little doubled up and the collapse of death had relaxed his features. There was an impression of shrunkenness about the lips. Miss Brown looked at him long and thoughtfully, placing him in those long journeyings through that strange, phantasmagoric story. She came back to her place with steady footsteps, resumed her seat and finished her glass of wine.

“What are you going to do about it?” she asked calmly. “You’ll have to ring up the police or something, won’t you? You can’t keep him in the room.”

There was a gleam almost of admiration in Dessiter’s eyes as he looked at his questioner.

“Mergen will arrange something later on,” he said. “You see, I shall die myself before midnight, and although this is London and not Bagdad, I can assure you nothing that happens in this house will be talked about very much.”

She could have cried out in passionate protest against his calm acceptance of his fate, have reminded him wildly that a man who had lived his life and achieved what he had achieved should defy even death. She could have fallen upon her knees and implored him to have his wound dressed, to keep his feet upon the earth—but she did none of these things.

“I cannot see any reason why you should die,” she said, in her ordinary matter-of-fact tone. “You should give yourself a chance, at any rate, by sending for a doctor and a nurse. If you will not, I think I could arrange that bandage myself.”

He shook his head.

“There is no time,” he declared. “He was just a second too soon for me. He’d cut the telephone and his knife was at my chest just as I was drawing. All that is necessary now is to live long enough to tell you what to do with those notes. After that, it really doesn’t matter very much. My career is ended anyway. You see,” he went on, “for fifteen years the world has known of me only as Dessiter, the explorer, the traveller, the man who, because he knew every language, could visit countries the frontiers of which no one else dared cross. They have credited me quite correctly with an occasional commission from the Government to the rulers of these countries and lately I have encouraged that side of my reputation. I have dined with kings and chieftains who have never even spoken to any other European. I have a gift of understanding the Oriental mind, and before this other greater thing came I did good work. We kept that always in the foreground. What people have never known, what even now only you and three others do know, is that for some years all these activities have been merely subterfuge, camouflage for the greater work.”

She tapped her satchel reverently.

“It is not finished,” she reminded him.

“But I am, alive or dead,” he rejoined. “There isn’t a city in the world in which our enemies are established where their agents are not warned against me. There’s a sort of Holy War amongst them to destroy me. I shall never again be able to wander across Europe at will. Even here—in London—well, you see what has happened. They’re cowardly killers, but they kill all right.”

He sipped some more brandy. Outside, the sound of traffic seemed to have died away. Little wisps of fog had penetrated into the room through the tightly closed windows. A yellow shaft of it hung from the lamp to the curtains.

“Go and look out,” he directed. “Be careful that you are not seen.”

She pushed the curtains a few inches on one side and looked towards the square.

“I can see nothing,” she reported. “The fog is if anything denser. The world seems dead. Even the traffic has ceased.”

“Good!” he murmured. “Ring the bell, please, and come back to your place.”

She did as she was told. The same manservant at once presented himself. His master addressed him in a language which Miss Brown had certainly never heard before, and the origin of which she could not pretend to divine. She judged it to be either Russian or Czechoslovakian, and looked once more curiously at the servant. Notwithstanding his smooth face and perfectly trained manner, she decided that there was after all something un-English about him. He listened to all his master had to say without change of expression, replying often, fluently but respectfully. Presently, with some keys which Dessiter produced from his trousers pocket, he opened a drawer and took out a linen bag of cigarettes and a thin packet of letters which, in obedience to a gesture from his master, he laid before Miss Brown. Dessiter lit one of the cigarettes and waved him away.

“My servant, like you,” he explained, “wants me to go to the hospital. Will you listen carefully now, please, Miss Brown?”

“I am listening,” she assured him.

“The mechanical side of our work is over. Will you accept a trust from me?”

She looked across at him. Her eyes were very blue, her tone almost solemn.

“I will,” she assented.

“It is possible,” he warned her, “that it may entail even an additional amount of personal risk.”

“I am not afraid.”

“It may interfere with your present scheme of life to some extent,” he went on, after a moment or two of reflection.

“My present scheme of life counts for nothing,” she declared. “I find it detestable.”

She was surprised at her own words. Up to an hour ago it seemed to her that she had plodded along the level ways if not joyously, at least with a certain measure of content.

“The letters which you have there,” he confided, “are almost as important as the subject matter which I have dictated. There are the addresses of the secret meeting places and the names of the principal conspirators whom we have to fight in most of the large towns of Europe. There are two original letters also, one of which explains the whole of the Chinese movement, and another which, if it were published ill-advisedly, must mean an instant European war. They are to be kept with your book awaiting my instructions. No one must ever know that they are in your possession. They are for the guidance of the person who comes after me.”

“No one shall ever know,” she promised.

“I am convinced that you are trustworthy,” he continued, “but these people are clever. There were more of them on the heels of our little friend behind the screen, and but for the fog they would have found their way in somehow or other, dealt with me and helped themselves to these letters. You may get home safely to-night, especially as the fog is really thicker, but their own secret service is more than equal to ours, which here in England may be said not to exist at all. They’ll find you out in the long run. Only, it must be too late. This is what I want you to do, Miss Brown. You will sleep to-night with your door locked and the book under your pillow. Have you a banking account?”

She shook her head.

“I have only twenty-four pounds in the world and that is in the Post Office.”

“Open that drawer on your left-hand side, please,” he directed.

She obeyed and discovered a sealed envelope which she held out towards him.

“There are five hundred pounds there in Bank of England notes,” he said. “To-morrow morning you will go to the South Audley Street Branch of the Central Bank and open an account. You will deposit your notebook and those letters in the vaults of the bank.”

“You don’t wish me to transcribe my notes then?” she asked.

“Not for the moment,” he replied. “I want you to wait until the man who takes up my work appears.”

“How shall I know about him?”

“You will subscribe to the Times,” he told her. “Every morning you will read the personal column. You will wait until there is a message for ‘Edith’ from ‘Algernon.’ A tube will be mentioned in the message. It will probably sound ridiculous. You must not mind that. Most of those foolish-looking advertisements you see, apparently from young people who have met in ’buses, or from wives who are terrified of jealous husbands, are really code messages from members of the criminal world or from people in my position.”

“What am I to do with the five hundred pounds?” Miss Brown enquired practically.

“You can count it as part payment of your fee for the work you have done and the work you may do. Don’t alter your manner of life, but spend it as you wish. I am going to tell you quite frankly,” he went on, after a moment’s pause, during which he had changed his position slightly, “that in time to come you may consider that five hundred pounds a very inadequate sum. You may find that from now on life may become a more difficult undertaking with you.”

She saw the anxiety in his eyes and did her best to reassure him.

“If it does,” she declared, with a confident little smile, “I shall be glad. I don’t think I knew it, but I was very tired of life as it was.”

He gave a nod of content, threw away his cigarette and lit another. There were beads of sweat upon his forehead and his hand more than once sought his side.

“I do wish you would let me try to arrange that bandage better,” she begged. “It is absurd to have made up your mind that you are going to die.”

He smiled enigmatically. His voice was still firm and his eyes remained clear, but she realised from the way he moved that he was in increasing pain.

“Mergen will bring me a fresh bandage in a few minutes,” he told her. “He is quite expert. If anybody can keep me alive, he will, but after all—it doesn’t really matter—now. For seventeen years I have kept alike my nerve and my temper. I have seen men tortured without interfering, women baited almost to death, hideous deeds perpetrated before my eyes, simply to make me betray myself. I have never flinched until that night in Warsaw. That was my end. As soon as it is possible, Miss Brown, you shall be given an opportunity of transcribing those notes in safety. You will be free then of your trust. You can go back to your life of yesterday, and forget.”

She looked at him steadily.

“I shall never forget,” she said.

“I don’t think you will. I don’t think you will forget, and I know that you will be faithful. It was a wonderful chance which brought you to rest upon my doorstep.”

“Can I come and see how you are to-morrow?”

“You must on no account come near this house,” he insisted gravely. “You must look upon me from to-night as a person who has passed out of your life. If ever there is need for any further communication between us, you can trust Mergen, and only Mergen. Until you receive the message, carry on with your everyday life.”

She rose to her feet and began to button up her mackintosh. She looked doubtfully at the shaft of fog which seemed to have become denser.

“I am not in the least nervous about myself,” she said. “I am only afraid of getting lost outside, because I shall have the book with me. How do you think I had better try to get back to Shepherd’s Market?”

“All that is arranged,” he told her. “Mergen saw to it while we were at work. He is waiting outside for you.”

On the corner of the mantelpiece was lying a trifle at which she had gazed with fascinated eyes more than once. She leaned over and took it into her hand—a small but deadly looking automatic, loaded in five chambers.

“Will you give me this?” she begged. “If you do, I promise I will use it sooner than have the book taken away.”

He smiled quietly.

“The time for that sort of thing,” he remarked, “has almost passed. I remember when I had to use a revolver every week of my life. I used that little affair this afternoon for the first time for a year. Yes, take it if you will, but be careful.”

She reopened her satchel and slipped it in. She shivered a little as she remembered that the one empty barrel meant a man’s life. Then she finished buttoning up her mackintosh, set her hat straight and looked down at him timidly. He held out his hand.

“Good-bye, Miss Brown,” he said. “I am very thankful to the fog for having sent you here.”

“And I am thankful too,” she declared fervently. “You will have your bandage arranged at once if I go?”

“Immediately,” he assured her.

Upon the threshold she gave a farewell glance around the room. Its unreality seemed suddenly overpowering—a dead man behind the screen, a dying man upon the sofa, and all the throb and glamour of that marvellous story reproduced in cold black ink in the book she was carrying. She closed her eyes, half expecting to reopen them and find herself still sitting in the fog upon the bottom step outside the house. As a matter of fact she reopened them in the hall to find Mergen waiting for her.

“Will you please come this way, Miss, and follow me closely,” he begged.

He relieved her of her typewriter, and, gripping the satchel in her hand, she followed him out of the back door and down a flight of steps into an area. Finding his way by hugging the wall, he opened another door which led into what seemed to be a mews. There were two lights burning fiercely yet dimly through the fog from some vehicle, the nature of which she could scarcely distinguish. Mergen whispered for a moment with a vaguely seen figure. Then he turned back to his companion.

“I am afraid you will find it a little uncomfortable, Miss,” he said; “but it will not be for long. Do you mind getting in?”

They let down some steps. Miss Brown climbed into what seemed to be a furniture delivery van, empty save for a single chair. A man scrambled in after her and stood by her side. The van started off. Through the window she could faintly discern another figure seated by the driver.

“Tell me your address, please, Miss,” her companion begged.

She told him, and, as soon as they had emerged into a wider thoroughfare, he opened the window and repeated it to the driver. Afterwards he resumed his place, standing by the door and holding on to the handle with the air of an attendant guarding a prison van. Miss Brown, whose stock of curiosity was almost exhausted, nevertheless asked him one question. Notwithstanding his plain clothes there was certainly something official about his manner.

“Are you a policeman?”

He smiled down upon her in noncommittal fashion.

“Not in the ordinary sense of the word, Miss,” he replied, “but I’m going to look after you all right.”

They blundered their way through the streets, climbed the kerbstone near Hyde Park Corner, and, finally, finding a clearer patch in Piccadilly, rattled along at a quite respectable speed, until they came to a standstill before the strange, shabby little house, squeezed in between a stationer’s and a baker’s shop which was Miss Brown’s abode. Her escort helped her to descend, gripping her tightly by the arm.

“Don’t stand about, Miss,” he begged. “This fog isn’t wholesome.”

The driver had also descended from his seat, and with the third man, who had followed him, formed a complete little bodyguard around her. Miss Brown inserted her key and opened the door.

“All right inside, Miss?” one of the men asked anxiously.

Miss Brown looked into her room which was on the ground floor.

“Quite all right, thank you,” she replied.

The door, which fastened with a spring lock, was closed with a little slam. Miss Brown had reached home safely.