Читать книгу Up the Ladder of Gold - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 7

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At six o’clock that evening, Miss Stanley Erdish closed down her desk, touched a bell, and handed to the uniformed boy who answered it a pile of fifteen to twenty letters. With a little wave of her hand, she dismissed her secretary, and a few minutes later she pushed the button of one of the general lifts and, entering it upon its arrival, had descended to the famous rotunda hall before she realised the identity of her solitary companion.

“A word with you, if you please, Miss Erdish,” John Glynde begged.

She nodded indifferently and followed him towards one of the reception rooms. It happened that there was a late rush of news from the East, and it was filled with people waiting to see the Syndicate Editor. They tried another with the same result. The round hall, almost as big as a church, was still more impossible. There were little crowds gathered before the finely displayed news announcements, and every chair was occupied. The headquarters of over a hundred newspapers, even though its administration was perfect, collected at all hours of the day a stream of polyglot humanity. Mr. John Glynde coughed.

“If I felt I knew you well enough, Miss Erdish,” he said, “I would suggest a cocktail at some neighbouring restaurant.”

“For heaven’s sake, don’t let that trouble you,” she begged. “We’re in the same ship, aren’t we? I’ll take you to Cramp’s, round the corner.”

They left the place together, crossed the street, threaded another narrow thoroughfare, and turned in at a brown-stone building of rather foreign appearance, with boxes of flowers in the windows. In a large room on the ground floor was a curved bar and a semicircle of comfortable armchairs and tables; in the distance beyond, a grillroom.

“You ought to feel at home,” Miss Erdish remarked, as they selected places. “American barman, Canadian Rye whisky, if you like Manhattans, and all that sort of thing. Most of the American journalists in London come here.”

“Great little place!” Mr. Glynde agreed.

They gave an order and asked for sandwiches.

“I’m going to pay for the cocktails,” she announced. “You’ve been rather a dear to me, Mr. Glynde. I meant to keep my post, but without you it might have been more difficult.”

“Yes,” he admitted, “it would have been more difficult. I asked to have a few words with you privately, Miss Erdish, because I wanted to reassure myself. An American business man’s conscience isn’t much to brag about, but you’ve been a little on mine the last few hours.”

She took off her hat and threw it upon a divan. Then she leaned back in her chair and took a huge bite out of her sandwich. John Glynde was quite sure that he had never seen such beautiful brown hair in his life or such flawless white teeth.

“Now just what do you mean by that, Mr. Glynde?” she asked. “Be frank with me.”

“I will,” he answered. “I know more about you than I told the Chief.”

“No harm, I hope.”

“No harm,” he acknowledged, “but I fancy that if the Chief had known what I know, he wouldn’t have been so easy to deal with.”

“What is it that you know?” she demanded.

“That Stanley Erdish is the name which you took when you went on the stage for a year or so,” he replied. “Your real name is Stanley Nickols. You are the daughter of Harold Nickols, the late editor of the Sun.”

She finished her sandwich in silence, brushed away a few crumbs, and disposed of her cocktail.

“Now I wonder how you found that out?” she reflected, answering with a nod the barman’s interrogative gesture. “I am going to have another cocktail to get over the shock of the disclosure. Do you mind?”

“Not in the least. I’ll have one myself.”

“Tell me how you made this great discovery? I thought I’d covered up my traces pretty well when I left home.”

There was a shade almost of pity in John Glynde’s weakly blue eyes as he looked towards her.

“Miss Erdish,” he said, “have you realised that in the Kingsway Building there are six hundred and seventy-two people, all employed by our Chief?”

“I had no idea there were quite so many,” she admitted. “What on earth does he find for them all to do?”

“Just at present,” he continued, “let us concern ourselves only with rooms numbered twenty-seven, twenty-eight and twenty-nine, which are directly below yours. They are occupied by a little company of enquiry agents and detectives, I suppose you would call them over here, all selected by and controlled by one of the cleverest men who ever left Scotland Yard to treble his salary. Every one who enters the Chief’s service is passed through the sieve. The reports are brought to me, and if there is anything the Chief should know, I put it up to him. This is the first time in my life I have not been entirely honest. The Chief is a man of prejudices. A hint at your parentage, and he not only would have refused to listen to anything you had to say, but if you had ventured upon those same threats, something would assuredly have happened to you.”

She looked at him incredulously.

“Do you mean—?”

“Do not let us waste more words upon this than are necessary,” he begged. “We are an organisation—nearly a perfect one—controlled by the Chief, brought together, and working under his directions mostly, for the attainment of one particular end. To gain that end, the organisation is conscienceless and unscrupulous. The Chief would have considered your suggestions as an attempt at blackmail. Blackmail is a crime. He would have met crime by crime. Nothing could have saved you, and whatever was done—I can assure you of this—would have been done in such a manner that no one attached to the Kingsway Building would ever have been connected with it in the slightest degree.”

Miss Stanley Erdish lit a cigarette. She was terribly attractive as she leaned back in her chair, full of animation and interest.

“This is too exciting!” she exclaimed. “You mean, in plain words, that I should have been done away with?”

“Something of the sort,” John Glynde agreed calmly. “The affair would not have troubled the Chief for a single second. You committed what was in his eyes a crime by threatening him with blackmail. He would have equalised the matter by removing you. I don’t say he would have done so by extreme measures, but you would have been rendered harmless. By to-morrow, he would have forgotten your very existence.”

“A nice crowd I seem to have got mixed up with,” Miss Stanley Erdish remarked, with a little gleam in her eyes.

“We are such a crowd,” John Glynde affirmed, “as has never been known before in the history of the world, or, at any rate, since the days of the Inquisition. Millions have gone to the riveting of every link. We are a perfect piece of human machinery, working towards one guarded and definite aim, and protected on every possible side from interference.”

“Very terrifying,” she murmured. “It all sounds most intriguing, though. Are you going to tell your Chief of my parentage and plod after my lonely hearse to the cemetery?”

“That depends,” John Glynde replied, sitting a little more erect in his chair. “Will you give me your attention for a moment?”

She looked at him in some surprise. John Glynde, during the last few minutes, seemed to have become more of a man. His shoulders had stiffened, his voice was deeper.

“Miss Stanley Erdish,” he said, “I am a judge of men and women and I hope I am not going to be disappointed in you. I have credited you with three important qualities—courage, probity, and common sense. I hope I shall find that I have not been mistaken. Let me put you through the first test. Do you believe what I have told you?”

“Well,” she admitted, withdrawing the cigarette from her lips, “I regret to say that I do. I am never afraid to face the unusual. I believe you.”

John Glynde smiled.

“I was right,” he congratulated himself. “We come to this, then. You realise that you are in danger?”

“Yes, I suppose I am.”

“It is my great desire,” he continued, and his tone was almost solemn, “to keep you in your present position, to have you one of our organisation—a small part of it, perhaps, but still one of the links. There have been times in my life when I have preferred to trust the word of one man to the bond of another. I, a banker, admit that, Miss Erdish. I shall trust your word if you give it to me.”

“What have I to promise?” she asked.

“That, regardless of your parentage, or of any real or fancied wrong suffered by your father, you will remain a faithful member of the organisation. You see, I make it easy for you. I make evasion, perhaps, easy. That I waive. I ask for your simple word, Miss Stanley Erdish, and when you have passed me that word, you are safe.”

She looked at him intently. She was an epicure in life and its sensations, but she had never dreamed of a situation quite so enthralling as this. From forty yards away came the roar of Fleet Street; from more immediately outside, the wailing of a street organ; from close at hand, Charles, the barman, greeting his customers with his habitual smile, his usual friendly gesture to his intimates. Fragments of chaffing conversation broke now and then upon the tense atmosphere which this little man by her side seemed to have created. It was all very wonderful, and Miss Stanley Erdish began to feel that she was going to enjoy life. Her tone when she spoke was very unlike her usual one.

“I give you my promise, John Glynde,” she said. “As a matter of fact, you need have no fear. I understand your point of view, but my father and I are entirely out of sympathy. It is more than six years since I left home, and we rarely see each other.”

He smiled happily, bit for the first time into his own sandwich, and sipped his cocktail.

“You take a great weight off my mind,” he acknowledged. “A gesture from me, when we leave this place, and you will be as free as the air to go where you like, unfollowed and unsuspected.”

“Were we followed here then?” she asked.

“Certainly. You have been followed all day. You left your rooms in Coburg Crescent at a quarter past nine, I think it was. You summoned a taxi, disputed with the man about something, and called another. You stopped for a moment at a club in Hay Hill and asked the porter for letters. From there you came to the Kingsway Building. I forget what time you left for lunch, but anyway, it’s down in the records. You went to the Berkeley Grill and you lunched with a young man named Childers, who has, apparently, no significance.”

“Poor dear!” she murmured. “He’s very nice but he has no brains. Jack Childers, the cricketer, you know.”

“You returned to the Kingsway Building in good time,” John Glynde went on. “With your work there, I have nothing to do. You left the Building at a quarter after six with an elderly idiot who has a perfectly ridiculous admiration for you, and you have just concluded a very satisfactory conversation with him.”

“I always said you were nice,” she declared. “You know I have. It is terribly uncanny, though, to feel that one has been watched like this.”

“It’s finished now,” he assured her. “You belong.”

She drew a little closer to him.

“Since I belong, my dear Sub-Chief, or whatever you think I ought to call you, can’t I be given at least just an idea as to what it all means, what new hemisphere we are going to crash into, what new world within a world we are to discover?”

He sighed, and there was genuine wistfulness in his sigh.

“My dear,” he said, “there are many things I scarcely know myself. A time will come, I think, when the whole machinery will stop, when we shall turn either to the right or to the left, which way only one man knows. For myself, I have but one duty, and that, in a sense, is already accomplished. My duty is to make our Chief the richest man in the world. That I have done. I have given him such control over the money markets in both hemispheres that I can sit at the end of the cable morning by morning and force the markets to rise or fall as I choose, and at the close of banking hours each day I can make just as much as I think well to make.”

John Glynde had come into his own, temporarily at any rate. The girl’s eyes were distended. He talked as one of the masters of the world.

“And for yourself?” she gasped.

“Money is nothing,” he replied equably. “A good many people have said that, but few have meant it. I mean it. I left the finest bank in New York to come here at twice the salary and a bonus. The bonus alone has made me a millionaire. I have simple tastes; in a sense I am like the Chief himself. Money has lost its allure. Figures attract because they appeal to the imagination, but money has no longer any significance.”

“I should like to marry some one like you,” Miss Stanley Erdish confided.

“My dear,” he replied, “with your sense of humour, your finely poised brain, and your delightful personality, you might marry a prince, and if I wasn’t number two in the greatest organisation in the world,” he sighed, as he beckoned for his bill, “I rather think I should like to be a prince.”