Читать книгу Up the Ladder of Gold - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 4

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Shop was very seldom talked at the Sheridan Club, but on the evening when Warren Rand’s great plane sloped downwards from the clouds and left him at Croydon, Harold Nickols, who was dining there with three or four of his intimate friends and associates, departed from the usual custom. Over his second glass of port he leaned forward in his chair at the end of the table—a place which he usually occupied by reason of his constant attendance and seniority—and addressed his friend Andrews, the editor of a famous monthly.

“So the Sphinx of New York is on his way over, I hear,” he remarked. “Coming to set Europe right about something or other, I suppose.”

“Who is the Sphinx of New York?” Herbert Dring, the playwright, enquired, moving from a lower place at the table into the charmed circle.

“Who is he? What is he driving at? How have we deserved him?” Harold Nickols rejoined. “There are a hundred questions one could ask about Warren Rand—which is his name in real life, if you want to know it.”

“To begin with, then,” Dring continued, “why ‘Sphinx’?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Nickols went on. “He is one of the richest men in the world. He owns more newspaper interests than any one else. He could do almost more mischief than any other breathing man, and yet I’ll wager there isn’t a soul in this room who’s ever seen his photograph or could tell you what he looks like. Why, you don’t even read about him! He seems to use his tremendous Press influence to avoid publicity instead of courting it.”

“That sounds like the Sphinx, all right,” Dring agreed. “What’s the idea of all this super-modesty? I never associated it with the giants of your profession.”

“You are without the powers of observation, my dear Herbert.”

“Which is why you write such damned good plays,” the man on Harold Nickol’s right remarked.

“What’s he coming to Europe for?” one of the others queried.

“No idea,” Nickols confessed carelessly. “He owns some shares in our show, but I’ve never seen him in my life and don’t expect to this time. He launches his thunderbolts from the clouds or sends up his poison gases from the caverns of the world. No one ever sees him. He never attends any public meeting, never signs an article, never allows his movements to be chronicled. The compositor who sets up in type the name of ‘Warren Rand’ knows about it afterwards, I can promise you, or rather his employers do.”

“How does he manage all that?” Dring persisted.

“He controls more newspapers than you’ve ever written plays,” Harold Nickols explained. “He travels with a staff who go about bullying the world. That sort of thing’s all very well in America, where multimillionaires rule the roost, but even over here there’s scarcely a paper issued that doesn’t somehow or other understand his wishes and which isn’t damned sorry for it afterwards if they don’t respect them. The man’s a sphinx, all right. He’s after something in life, and something definite, but there’s no one I know of who’s been clever enough yet to find out what it is.”

“Sounds interesting. Any chance of meeting the fellow?”

“Not the slightest,” was the uncompromising reply.

“What about sending him a card for the Club?”

“His secretary would throw it into the waste-paper basket. I don’t believe he’s ever crossed the threshold of a club in his life.”

“Rather an inhuman person,” Dring observed, dealing lightly with the port.

“He is inhuman,” Nickols agreed—“to judge by his actions, that is to say. No one knows anything about him personally. We used to call that fellow who lived down in Monte Carlo ‘The Mystery Man of Finance and Politics.’ Warren Rand is the ‘Mystery Man’ of our profession.”

“And you mean to say,” Andrews demanded, leaning across the table, “that, although he owns a share of the Sun, you have never met him and aren’t likely to meet him?”

“Perfectly certain I sha’n’t. If, at any time, he has anything to say to me, it will come through a third person. I don’t suppose Harrison himself will see him. He’ll sit behind those great windows of his enormous flat over the offices in Kingsway, which Teddy Gage called the ‘Spider Eyes of London,’ and he’ll just look out, and what he wants to see he’ll see, and what he wants to do he’ll do, curse the fellow! I always hate talking about him. Think I must have a complex that way. What about a rubber of bridge?”

The little party broke up and, after a brief delay at the cashier’s desk, they made scattered procession for the card room. The porter, however, detained Nickols in the hall.

“There’s a gentleman enquiring for you, sir,” he announced.

“A gentleman? Who is he? What name?” Nickols asked, pausing to light a cigar.

“He wouldn’t give his name, sir—said he wouldn’t detain you more than a minute. He’s in the strangers’ room.”

“Sha’n’t be long, you fellows. Cut me in,” Nickols enjoined, swinging round to the right. “I must just see who this chap is and what he wants. Some one from the office, I suppose, only I should have thought they would have telephoned.”

He opened the door of the strangers’ room and found, to his surprise, that the apartment was almost in darkness. A man was standing by the electric switches, dimly visible in the light from the single lamp left burning. Nevertheless, from the first moment, Nickols felt that there was something sinister in the solid, motionless figure with which he was confronted. He leaned forward to get a better view of the stranger’s features. Without further light, however, this was impossible.

“I was told you wished to speak to me,” he began. “My name is Harold Nickols. Who are you and what do you want? Do you mind turning on another light?”

The stranger ignored the request.

“I want you,” he said, “to go back at once to the offices of your newspaper and substitute some other editorial, on whatever subject you choose, in place of the leader you have written for to-morrow’s issue.”

Nickols was for a moment dumbfounded. The colossal impertinence of the unknown visitor’s request, and the crisp, unhesitating speech, nearly took his breath away. Besides, so far as he knew, no one’s eyes save his own and the proof reader’s had even glanced at his production.

“Who the devil are you and what do you know about anything I have written?” he demanded, advancing a little farther into the room. “Turn that light up and let’s have a look at you.”

“The lights will do very well as they are,” was the impatient response. “My name is Warren Rand, and however impossible you may think it, I have seen a proof of your article on the situation in Geneva, advocating the reception of those murderous swine Postinoff and Vitznow. That article must not appear in the Sun.”

In later days, when men discussed the real greatness of Warren Rand, there were critics who, amongst other so-called weaknesses, found fault with his lack of tact. There were others who argued that this was a deliberately acquired gesture, a proof of the man’s real genius; that he struck at the root of all vital matters, regardless of his victim’s feelings or prejudices, and that, by this method, he achieved success more quickly. Certainly, in the present instance, he shortened discussion by bringing matters to a crisis. Harold Nickols had Irish blood in his veins and he lost his temper completely and irrevocably.

“I don’t care whether you’re God Almighty,” he shouted. “You’re not going to interfere with the Sun so long as I’m editor. My leader is in type by this time and by five o’clock a hundred thousand copies of the newspaper will be on their way north.”

“That is your considered reply to my injunction then?” Warren Rand asked coldly.

“That is my considered and my only reply,” was the swift retort. “You may be the greatest newspaper man in the world, Warren Rand, on your side of the ocean, but you don’t own the Sun yet.”

The room was suddenly in complete darkness.

“What the devil are you meddling with those switches for?” Harold Nickols exclaimed angrily.

There was no reply. The somewhat squat, yet not undignified figure of this unexpected visitor was already near the door. Nickols stumbled across to the switches and flooded the room with light. The place was empty. He stepped quickly out into the hall.

“What’s become of that gentleman who came to see me and who was here a minute ago?” he asked the hall porter.

The man looked up from his desk in surprise.

“The gentleman has just driven off in a motor car, sir.”

Harold Nickols stood at the top of the steps, indulging in a few moments of brief but confused reflection. He could scarcely realise that he had actually been in conversation with the man who had been the subject of their discussion at dinner time—the Sphinx of New York. Perhaps he ought to have been a little more tactful. The man had irritated him, though, with his melodramatic desire for obscurity and his absurd request. He turned away and relit his cigar. Some curious impulse prompted him, when he reached the card room, to keep this visitation to himself. The whole episode, he decided, had better pass out of his mind as a thing that had never happened. Nevertheless, although a careful player, he revoked twice in the first rubber he played.

As the hours wore on, Harold Nickols became more and more oppressed with the consciousness that there was something wrong about the atmosphere of the Club that night. He failed entirely to concentrate upon his bridge. His whisky and soda tasted flat. The friendly chaff of his pals lacked savour. He left earlier than usual, and instead of taking a taxi at once to his modest little home in Ebury Street, he strolled down the Strand and turned eastward. In about ten minutes he reached a fine stone building, from the roof of which a great sky sign announced in the best Broadway manner the morning rising of the Sun. He was not, under ordinary circumstances, an emotional man, but his heart beat a little faster as he listened to the roar of the machinery. Lights flared from nearly every window. The shutters in front of the low plate-glass windows were purposely lifted to display to the passer-by a section of the marvellous plant—great wheels roaring their way through space; iron arms reaching out in every direction; news, the happenings of the world, flung on to that endless roll of virgin paper, happenings from the far corners of the universe, the written and spoken thoughts of men in their studies, advice to the world, deliberate, profound advice. He thought of those suites of private rooms upstairs, each presided over by a master in his own line of thought, men whose names were household words, giving of their best to their fellow citizens. His own—as he honestly believed—inspired message, which had taken him many hours to clothe in living, vital words, proclaiming to the world the studied and deliberate policy of a great newspaper, lingered still in his memory. To-morrow, the whole world would know what the Sun thought of this tangled and over-elaborate scheme of bringing peace into a world where there was no peace.

He crossed the road and looked with a great pride at the immense building. There were lights burning in most of the editors’ offices. His sub, whose duty it was to see the paper through, would be there until daybreak. He felt a curious disinclination to cross the portals, but he could see it all, the panting energy, the pulsating waves of thought and mental vigour, driving into concrete form all that his brain had brought together—his brain and the brain of others. Then, in those sensitive moments, he seemed suddenly to realise what had brought him here, the nature of that vague disquietude that had haunted him all the evening. There was a traitor in that organisation somewhere if Warren Rand spoke the truth, and, curiously enough, he never disbelieved him for a single moment. He thought over the names of his immediate assistants one by one. To steal and disclose the policy of a great newspaper at this time of momentous crisis was akin to the theft of a secret treaty or the suborning of an ambassador in the diplomatic world. This thing had happened. Warren Rand knew twelve hours before any human being should have known the jealously guarded secret of his editorial room. With his hands thrust deep into his overcoat pockets he gazed almost savagely up at the flaming windows. It was as though a great, defacing fissure had sprung like a streak of lightning from basement to attic of that magnificent edifice, tearing its way through brick and masonry, leaving a hideous scar. He even fancied that the music of the machinery was failing, that there was something lacking in its solemn and portentous rhythm....

A man passed him and turned round in the act of entering the building. He was one of the night reporters on his way back from a profitless commission.

“Anything I can do for you, Mr. Nickols?” he asked, a little curiously.

The editor came down to earth with an effort.

“Nothing at all, thank you, Jackson,” he answered. “I just paused to have a look at the old shop from outside. Great show, isn’t it?”

“Marvellous, sir,” the man assented. “Sure there’s nothing I can do for you?”

“Nothing whatever, thanks,” Nickols replied. “I was just hanging around for a taxi. Here it comes. Good night!”

“A lot of talk in the Press Club, sir,” the young man confided, as he hailed the vehicle, “as to what your pronouncement about Geneva will be in the Sun to-morrow morning.”

Nickols smiled as he stepped into the taxi.

“And a lot of abuse waiting for me when they know, I expect.... Good night!”

“Where shall I tell the driver, sir?”

Nickols hesitated. If he went back to the Club, he was in the humour to drink.

“I’m for an early night,” he decided. “Number seven, Ebury Street.”

The reporter transmitted the address, slammed the door, and went off. Harold Nickols was driven away westward, with the thunder and storm of his disquieting evening still hanging over him like a cloud of depression.