Читать книгу Exit A Dictator - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 7

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“I am better,” Anna Prestnoff declared two hours later. “I believe that I am quite as well as you are. We have recovered. I think that we are very fortunate.”

“So do I,” he assented.

She pressed his arm. They had just finished a vigorous promenade on the boat deck and were seated side by side with the wind in their faces.

“You were so quick,” she said. “You did everything so wonderfully. It was quite an adventure—yes?”

“It might have been a very serious one,” he agreed.

“Just now,” she confided, “I feel physically almost myself. The trembling has left my knees. I am not so depressed, yet I feel somehow stirred up. Something has happened to my mind. I do not know what it is. Perhaps I have lost what they used to call my poise. Do I look any different?”

“Not at all,” he declared, regarding her critically. “You are very good-looking, Anna Prestnoff, and you know it.”

She laughed musically.

“Well, if it is the drug that has made you say that,” she said, “I have something to be thankful for. You never looked at me before as though you remembered 54 that I was a woman and that you were a man. I think I rather like that you should see me sometimes that way, my noble Chief.”

“Bad for the work,” he assured her laconically.

“What do you mean?” she demanded. “Bad for the work. What is the most important part of my work, then?”

“To attract bad men who may be working against our country,” he explained. “To find out their secrets, to convert those that are worth converting, to hand over the unregenerate to me, then to use that clever pen of yours in writing articles to proclaim the truth to people of other countries.”

“That part of it I do not mind,” she confided, “but I do not wish to make myself attractive to anyone—only to you.”

“But I am already a convert,” he reminded her. “Very soon you and I will be looking into the future with the same eyes. Then our work will begin in earnest. Our close contact during these few days will be of immense importance.”

“Work,” she repeated a little petulantly. “It is always work. Is there nothing else, then, worth a thought in life?”

“Many things,” he assured her, “and as they come to us, Anna Prestnoff, so shall we deal with them. Just now we have been through purgatory together. We have to remember—”

“I am always remembering,” she interrupted. “You are a tiresome man, but, in the most respectful 55 of fashions, I am very fond of you. Now I have done all that you told me. I have had a hot sea bath and a cold one afterwards. I have taken my tonic, I have gulped down this sea air for one hour, I have walked for half an hour, I have been preached to all the time. Now we will have a cocktail—yes? Just in that corner of the lounge bar.”

“I suppose that until you are perfectly recovered,” he reflected, “you must have your own way.”

“In that case I will have a champagne cocktail,” she decided. “I am beginning to live again. That walk—it was wonderful. When do we talk seriously, my friend? When do we really discuss what has happened to us?”

“No hurry,” he answered. “There are several considerations to be taken into account.”

They found a retired corner in the bar lounge. The cocktails were ordered and served. She drew close to him.

“Now, my master,” she said, “for I suppose I must call you that, I shall tell you what I have been thinking, since I was able to think again. What happened to us, in a small degree—has it not occurred to you?—is exactly what has happened to Adek and Morodkin—to all those other men.”

He remained silent.

“A man like Adek—brilliant, a great speaker, a man of brains—to plead guilty, to remain a dumb white figure in the dock, a nervous wreck in the hands of his accusers,” she continued. “Is it common 56 sense? He acted as I felt for a few hours, as I should still be feeling if you had not rescued me. Do you believe in that theory that those Moscow men were drugged whilst they were in their cells, drugged so that they lost their nerve and their will and had to be helped into court?”

He passed her a cigarette and lit one himself. She threw back her head and inhaled luxuriously. Alexander began to wonder whether this period of convalescence was not in its way a dangerous time. He was uneasily conscious of the warmth of her presence, of the pleasure of listening to her speech with its slight foreign accent so much more pronounced than his, and the thrill which her changed manner, the sudden breaking down of the barriers between them, gave him. Stretched out in her chair, with her fur cape thrown back from her throat and her closely fitting dress which followed so seductively the lines o her delicate figure, he became conscious of what he had felt so seldom in life—the joy of that sense of proprietorship which, since their adventure together, he seemed, without any definite reason, to have acquired.

“You have instinct as well as intelligence, Anna Prestnoff,” he admitted. “I believe that what you suggest is the truth. There are two of the most dangerous men who were ever born in Russia on board this ship. They are aware of the work I have already begun and the chain of workers I am trying to establish through Europe. Without a doubt last 57 night’s attempt came through them—indeed, I am absolutely convinced of it. I am hesitating as to what steps to take. We are safe from anything except blatant assassination and that is not the way of these men. But all the same Likinski and Grodin are here to do us a mischief if they can.”

She sipped her cocktail thoughtfully and took another luxurious puff of her cigarette.

“Oh dear!” she exclaimed—“and I thought this was going to be such a dull voyage. What are you going to do?”

“I have not made up my mind,” he told her. “The circumstantial evidence against Likinski is overwhelming, but of definite proof we have none. They are already under suspicion—Grodin because his dossier is an open book for anyone’s inspection, even though he has been appointed Minister to Great Britain, and Likinski because—he does not look as though he had the courage, does he?—he forced the doctor here, at the point of a revolver, to give him a phialful of that foul drug which he is conveying to Southampton.”

“Where did the drug come from?” she asked breathlessly.

“A laboratory in New York which Likinski has visited several times lately,” he told her. “He had an introduction from the principal chemist at the Kremlin Laboratory but he never seemed to win the confidence of the people in America. I do not believe, as a matter of fact, that they trusted him.”

“You think that it is the same drug—that the Americans, too, have discovered the formula, or that it has been passed on to them from Moscow?” she asked eagerly.

He touched her arm and she broke off in her speech. Likinski and Grodin were passing through the room together. Grodin caught Alexander’s eye and bowed an unctuous good morning. His companion passed them without apparent recognition. They continued their progress towards the bar. Alexander looked after them, a queer, almost contemptuous, smile parting his lips.

“They have not much luck, those two,” he observed.

“Explain, please,” she begged.

“I have no certain knowledge, but I believe that Grodin is on his way back from an unsuccessful journey to Mexico. If news of that journey ever reaches Moscow, I should think that his appointment to London would be cancelled.”

“And the little one?”

“He took his chance with us and he failed,” Alexander reminded her. “Fate does not treat too kindly in these days the men who fail.”

“Grodin has brains and vision of a sort,” she remarked. “Of the two, he is the one I fear.”

Alexander watched them for a moment. Grodin was drinking champagne out of a pewter mug; Likinski was imbibing some cloudy mixture through a straw.

“Dangerous fellows!” Alexander exclaimed with sudden emphasis. “Dangerous fellows, both of them, although of a different genus. One should deal with them severely. There are times when civilisation is too fettered.”

She smiled at his so readily kindled anger.

“You should be a Dictator,” she said. “How would you like that? Sit on a throne of iron, try your prisoners logically and according to the facts and wave them off to execution. Yet when our own country does that same thing—do not be angry with me—you find it barbaric.”

He looked at her in surprise.

“Are you serious?” he asked coldly.

“Not altogether,” she admitted. “The trouble is that you fancy you would destroy crime by destroying the criminal. It is not good logic, my friend.”

“You would turn the world into a huge reformatory, perhaps?” he suggested.

She yawned slightly.

“Perhaps it is the effect of the poison still in my veins,” she said. “Perhaps it is because I have once or twice known great men who were also criminals.”

“Are you judging them by the deed or the motive?” he asked.

She hesitated.

“I shall go carefully with you,” she warned him. “You are trying to lure me into a cul-de-sac. Nevertheless, to kill a man because you have a personal grievance against him—say jealousy—is murder. 60 To kill a man because he has a foul disease, whether of the mind or the body, which is poisoning the world, is justifiable.”

“If I ever have the slightest ambition to be a Dictator, it is not because unlimited power would give me the least pleasure,” he said. “It is simply because if I saw clearly and had the power to act, I should be cleansing the world of all these burdens of evil government.”

“I am beginning to believe that I have stumbled upon the truth,” she sighed. “You are ambitious to join those others. You wish to become one of those autocrats—the dread figures of Europe.”

He leaned back in his chair smiling.

“You were right,” he declared. “The poison is still lingering in your veins.”

She laughed—a vibrant, delicate little gesture, musical and intriguing—then she met his eyes with their critical, uneasy light and the impulse of mockery passed.

“I think you did not say that seriously,” she said, “but it was a wise speech, nevertheless. I am not myself. You are not quite yourself this morning. We will be serious no longer. I will break the stern habits of my long life of comparative abstinence. We will have another cocktail. Please do not say no, my master.”

“I had no idea of discouraging you,” he assured her. “I should say this was the one morning in your life when wine was good for you.”

He touched the bell and gave the barman an order. Presently they walked on the main deck until the lightly falling rain drove them into shelter. They sat in a small alcove close to the Marconi office. Overhead was a rustling and crackling of electricity. Closer at hand two of the operators were bending over their work, and they could hear the harsh, uneven ticking of the instruments.

“Someone has a great deal to say to the Queen Anne this morning,” Anna observed.

“Perhaps,” he meditated, “the news is already being flashed in black headlines on the front pages of the American papers:

The owner of the mightiest vehicle of thought in the western world—the European Review—has joined hands with its most wonderful contributor.

How does that sound?”

She drew her long fingers through his.

“Entrancing,” she murmured.