Читать книгу The Magnificent Hoax - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 9

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On his way across the crowded floor Gregory Fawsitt was stopped by many acquaintances—even some of the dancing couples leaned towards him to shake hands. All of them he greeted courteously, but he showed no desire to linger. Just as he was reaching the shelter of his own table he was accosted in the crush by a young man from whom he found it impossible to escape.

“You remember me, I hope, Sir Gregory?” the former said in a pleasant, rather drawling voice. “Granderson my name is. I was in the Dragoons with your cousin.”

“I remember you perfectly,” Gregory admitted. “I’m surprised to find you alive, though, if you spend many nights in an atmosphere like this. Too many people.”

The young man smiled.

“We hadn’t that complaint to make the last time we met,” he remarked.

“The last time?”

“You didn’t seem to remember me so I didn’t intrude,” Granderson went on. “It was in the suburbs of Basra. You seemed to have just come in from the desert.”

Gregory shook his head.

“We all look alike out there in pith helmets and 63 white riding suits,” he remarked. “I started my diplomatic career at Teheran, which isn’t so very far away, but I’ve never been back.”

“An odd resemblance,” Granderson observed quietly.

“What were you doing in those parts?” Gregory asked, managing to squeeze along another foot or two.

“I was on a sort of Government commission,” Granderson explained. “I suppose because I was the only person they could get hold of who could speak a little Persian. I was one of the under-intermediaries between the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and the Shah.”

“Interesting job, I should think,” was the other’s polite comment. “You will excuse me, won’t you? This is my table and I expect my friends are getting impatient.”

Gregory reached his chair with a little grunt of content. He ordered a whisky from the sommelier and mixed himself a drink in a long crystal tumbler. Lady Judith leaned towards him curiously.

“That was Major Granderson with you, wasn’t it?” she asked.

Gregory nodded. He glanced casually around. His late companion had passed out of sight and the table next to them was vacated by a couple who were dancing.

“That was Granderson all right,” he confided. “Rather took my breath away the fellow did, too. It appears he saw me at Basra two months ago. I 64 must have been on my way back from Teheran with that last haul.”

“What on earth was he doing there?” Lady Judith inquired.

“It seems he speaks Persian,” Gregory explained, “and he was acting for the Government in this Oil Company business. Damn’ bad luck. Fancy meeting a man in Basra.”

“Did he see me too?” Lady Judith asked.

“He didn’t mention it if he did. I shouldn’t think so. You were in the caravan, you know.”

“Why didn’t he speak to you then?”

“Perhaps he thought I was on the same sort of job as himself and wanted to be left alone,” Gregory reflected. “It’s a queer entrance to the city, too, you know. The road’s about half a mile wide.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him that he was mistaken. It saves a lot of trouble. No one could prove that I was there. I needn’t tell you that I didn’t leave a card on the British Minister.”

Lady Judith fanned herself for a moment thoughtfully.

“Of all men in the world,” she reflected, “it seems odd that it should have been Granderson.”

“I shall have a few enquiries made about that fellow,” Gregory promised. “Ordino seems to have found him a trifle inquisitive once or twice. This is not the sort of establishment where one likes to hear of overcurious people.”

“What about the finances?” Judith enquired. “I have a perfect shoal of dressmakers’ bills.”

“Finances are all right,” he assured her. “The news is good. Everything has been safely stored away and is selling like hot cakes. Ordino has an idea, I believe, that it’s because they can get the stuff safely here that there’s such a run on the place. He says it’s the same at luncheon, dinner, and supper—every table is taken. There are eight hundred names up now for election. He decided to wait for my return before he did anything about it. The dummy committee are all for electing them.”

“There’s just one point to be considered,” Judith meditated. “People will begin to wonder before long, I think, if there isn’t some special reason for the popularity of the place.”

Gregory shook his head.

“I don’t think so,” he objected. “It’s always the same in London and Paris. A restaurant or a club becomes the vogue and while it lasts it is filled to overflowing. Ours won’t be merely a vogue, because we have a solid reason for attracting the people. There is only one risk in the world and that is the discretion of the members themselves.”

“Ordino,” Judith murmured, “has an amazing vein of secrecy in his composition.”

Gregory nodded acquiescence.

“He has the most ingenious lot of rules, too—unprinted, of course, but thoroughly understood 66 by our six barmen and four of the selected maîtres d’hôtel. . . . What about the next few months?” he went on, changing the subject a little abruptly. “Have you made any plans, Judith?”

“I thought of going down to Dorset and playing the dutiful,” she told him. “Afterwards I shall make my way to Cannes. What about you, Gregory?”

“I must put in a week or two at the University,” he replied, after some hesitation. “Afterwards I shall have to stay on here for some little time. I feel that I must get into touch with the whole organisation again, especially as Ordino wants us to start on our travels again so soon. I may get down to the Riviera later.”

“So that after all we may probably meet,” Lady Judith observed a little wistfully. “Queer world, isn’t it?”

“We get what we can out of it,” Gregory remarked, with a touch of cynicism in his tone.

“Be a perfect philosopher and say that we get as much out of it as we put in, anyway,” Judith sighed. “What’s your idea, Gregory?”

“I suppose,” he reflected, “it depends upon ourselves and our capacity for happiness. We heap up the bonfire all right. There are no other two people in our world, I should think, who keep the fires of excitement burning as we do. We live on the edge of a volcano. We haven’t a moment of stagnation.”

“You are content?” she asked.

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Seems to me it’s as worth-while as anything could be. Gunrunning down at Uruguay or Ecuador was all right whilst it lasted, but you lose your money at that if you don’t mind because those excitable countries are always likely to make peace just as one arrives with a fine cargo of Mausers! Happened to me once and cost me over five thousand pounds.”

“After all, didn’t you find it rather an impersonal sort of excitement?” she ventured.

“There’s no going over the top these days,” he reminded her. “Wars, even in the Foreign Legion, have become tedious, mechanical affairs. You can’t feel the rush of the wind around you and go galloping down a grass field on a hard-mouthed horse, and see the wire a few seconds too late more than once in a season. The world is short of thrills, you know, Judith. Our enterprise may have its ugly side but to my mind the risks we run kill the sordidness. With the whole of the police of several nations combing the earth for us, we don’t really have a moment of absolute safety.”

“I sometimes wish,” Lady Judith sighed, with a faraway look in her eyes, “that I had not this accursed plague of temperament, this furious craving for excitement, or mind wanderlust, or whatever you like to call it.”

“How should you replace it?” he asked.

“There are times,” she confessed, “when I think it would be wonderful to settle down, say at the 68 Dower House at home, with a husband, and have babies, and watch for the spring flowers, and loll about in the perfume of the summer ones. I should like to look forward to that for my old age, only then, of course, I could not have babies. . . .”

Ordino, who seemed to have the gift of passing through the crowd with more ease and success than any other person, arrived at their table and bowed. He handed a sealed packet to Lady Judith.

“Your ladyship will please to accept,” he begged. “It is a small offering from the établissement—a little offering to prove that we are happy to have you back again.”

“You wonderful man!” Lady Judith murmured. “If you knew how I adored presents.”

“If your ladyship would be so kind as to open it when you reach home,” Ordino suggested, as he saw her fingers playing with the silk ribbon. “Alas, I have wonderful patronesses here, all, alas, with jealous dispositions—”

“I understand,” she interrupted. “But I warn you that I shall look at it in the taxi.”

“Your ladyship will stay in London?”

“One week. I shall give a dinner party one night—twelve people. Your extension is still Thursday, I suppose?”

Ordino bowed.

“Is it you or I who order the dinner?”

“You, by all means.”

“Shall I be a guest?” Sir Gregory enquired.

“Placed in such an awkward position I can only say yes. One other whom I shall invite might perhaps surprise you.”

“Woman or man?”

“Man. I’m thinking of asking Major Granderson.”

“Why?”

“I do not understand him. I am interested in anyone whom I do not understand.”

“You have suspicions?” Gregory queried. “If your suspicions have any truth in them you are simply offering him an opportunity to investigate.”

“On the contrary,” she smiled, “I am creating an opportunity to discover whether he is dangerous or not.”

“You’re backing your wits against his.”

She smiled cryptically. It was distinctly a smile but it possessed a significance which had no kinship with humour.

“If it comes to that I shall win.”

He glanced around at the thinning room.

“Supposing you dance with me once,” he invited, “a sort of tribute to our return to civilisation.”

“I shall love to,” she answered.

Gregory was a better dancer than the Honourable Algernon Veasey. He and his partner were moving to the music even as they stood up. They made their way in and out of the little crowd gracefully and easily.

“Why do I ever dance with anyone else?” she murmured. “You make a different thing of it, Gregory.”

“Why do we waste our time with other people and other occupations?” he rejoined. “Why don’t you invite me to share your Dower House and all the terrible results?”

There was a gleam in her eyes, a marvellous softening of her mouth.

“Ah, my dear, how long should we be content?” she sighed. “It was born in our blood, this passion for adventure.”

“We might exercise it,” he suggested.

“It seems queer that we should spend such tragic hours together,” she murmured, “that we should feel death near and all sorts of terrible things pressing upon us; then we come back to this for a brief respite and you talk for a moment as if you cared. If I could only believe you!”

“If I could only trust myself,” he whispered. “And yet I don’t know why I hesitate, Judith. I’m tired of this business with its hateful associations. There’s danger enough in it but it’s ugly danger. It is not conscience, mind. It is a sort of disgust. There is a hideous side to our work. We are too good for it, really. Shall we shock the world? Shall we march into a registry office to-morrow morning?”

She laughed happily.

“Gregory, my dear, you’re wonderful. I shall 71 never grow old while you are near. Ten years ago we could have done that very thing.”

“And ten years hence it will be too late,” he lamented.

There was an abrupt change in this woman whom lately, with the fierce thrill of danger always round them, he had come to think of as just the companion of his adventures. He felt suddenly in his arms the warm pulsating body of one of the most beautiful women in the world. Her fingers had tightened a little around his coat sleeve. It had become a critical moment. She had drawn closer to him, but her head was thrown back as though to read what she might find in his face. It might have seemed as though she were not wholly satisfied. As he led her back to the table he put into plain words some part of his own sense of confusion.

“Judith,” he said, and he held her fingers half under the tablecloth, as one of the clumsiest beginners in the art of flirtation might have done. “Perhaps we can yet find the way out. I never thought it possible before. Now I believe that we might.”

“We must learn to feel once more,” she declared feverishly, her eyes shining, a throb in her voice. “We were fools to think that the life of ordinary man and woman was finished because we had plunged into this mad adventure. Feel my fingers, Gregory. They are burning. If I have seemed hard lately it has been repressed fear that has turned me 72 into an icicle. To-night I feel that there is a new passion eating me up. Do you remember when we really loved simple things before the world grew tragic—the first time you kissed me, for instance?”

“Perfectly well,” he answered. “We were on the balcony of Grantley House. I believe that it was my twenty-first birthday.”

“Amazing man. If you look at me like that I shall begin to be frightened. I do not think I shall drive home alone with you.”

There was a note of bitterness in his voice.

“We have drunk too deep of the waters of sophistication,” he said. “I shall not rumple your hair or crush your dress.”

“Then I don’t think I want to be kissed,” she pouted.

He touched a passing maître d’hôtel on the arm.

“I should like to sign my bill, if you please,” he demanded.