Читать книгу The Dumb Gods Speak - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 6

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Seated opposite to one another at a small table on the terrace of the restaurant of the Colombe d'Or, drinking the white wine of the country out of thick tumblers whilst they waited for their trout, they breathed the atmosphere of a different world. Spring was warm in the air. The early butterflies were flitting round them. Fleecy clouds were being driven lazily across the blue sky by the south wind.

"Was this wise?" she asked.

"It was not only wise," he answered, "but it was necessary. For days, Catherine Oronoff, you have been looking pale and tired. It was time we broke away. You work too hard. For you, at any rate, it is not worth it."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because," he said, leaning slightly forward in his chair, "you work too conscientiously, and you are simply doing the work which finishes each day when the Bureau is closed. You are just where Mr. Cheng has placed you and where I found you."

"I am an automaton, of course," she agreed a little impatiently.

"Do not resent it," he begged. "Every task that comes to you to perform is done, and perfectly done. If the French Government closed us down tomorrow, if Cheng or I were assassinated or exiled, as might very well happen, you would still have done your daily work without a moment's failure or without a single responsibility concerning it."

"Even that," she replied, "can scarcely bring happiness, can it? I have a country which is merely a memory. Almost all my friends and relations I lost before I was old enough to know what they meant. Nearly all of the few connections I have pass their time crawling miserably through life and praying for death. I am the fortunate one, it is true, but do you wonder that I find life bitter?"

"Not on a morning like this—" he begged. "Forget it. Look at those trout. Delicious! I am going to forget for a time this great business of living. There—I am filling up your glass. We will drink red wine with the chicken when it comes, but we will finish every drop of this Vin Blanc de Saint-Paul."

"Spoken like a hero," she laughed. "I believe that I am silly. When I think of you and Mr. Cheng I know that I am. But then, you see, you are up in the high places, you are working amongst the clouds. It is only now and then that you come down to move the pawns."

"We are working at a great scheme," Mark admitted. "We will talk of it sketchily," he added glancing around at the empty tables close at hand. "I'll tell you one thing, Catherine, which impresses me more every day. Mr. Cheng is one of the greatest personalities I have ever come near."

She nodded.

"I am interested," she acknowledged. "He seems always so remote and yet he never makes a mistake. He seems to have mastered the philosophy of quietism."

"He lives in the clouds," Mark observed, "and yet when he comes down to earth he seems to know everything that has happened. He moves about just as naturally as a courtier or a statesman. And work! Do you know, Catherine, that we were up in the great dispersing room for fourteen hours with those army men from Washington? We had food and wine carried up, but they scarcely left off work. That was all very well for me because I am stronger than most people and my work lies up there, but Cheng never left us. He ate and drank scarcely anything and when we had finished he was the freshest of the lot."

"Some day," she remarked, "I suppose I shall know what it is all about."

"Some day, perhaps very soon, you will know everything," Mark assured her. "Cheng has the same idea as I have. We both of us trust you, as you know, with everything, but we build our scheme as we proceed and there is a great deal which we can tell nobody."

"I am not curious," she told him with a touch of her former weariness. "I walk along the broad level pathway of life and it seems to me when night comes I am breathing the same air, I am looking down the same hopeless avenue. You bring me here to lunch. I wonder why, Mark Humberstone. I cannot amuse you. My heart is always heavy. Why do you not take out one of these gay little French girls who can chatter away and keep you amused?"

"Mayn't I choose for myself?" he asked.

She shrugged her shoulders. The cape she had been wearing had fallen back and he saw how thin they were.

"You choose ill," she sighed.

"I still maintain that I am the best judge of that," he answered smiling. "I watch you every day and you grow more like a ghost the whole of the time. You are going to drive me into an indiscretion. I am perfectly certain of that. I am not sure that I care very much. Take your eyes off that chicken for a moment and look at me."

It was a thin sort of smile, yet it was almost a smile.

"Your position at the present moment," he went on, "is that you are private secretary to Mr. Cheng when he needs you, and to myself. You do a great deal of work during the day. You think that it is leading nowhere and you are just as disheartened at night as you are in the morning. The days have lost their savour for you, is it not so?"

"They have never had any," she told him. "I have never been anything but miserable since I went to that wretched school in that famine-stricken nunnery. Since I came out to share starvation and misery with the others, now in Paris, now in London, I have never known what it was to live or to feel that I wanted to live."

"That will do," he begged. "The red wine, waiter. Good. Now for my great indiscretion."

"Alas," she sighed. "I am still incurious."

He looked into her still cold face, into those beautiful eyes which were like pieces of glass under her perfectly shaped eyebrows. She was probably telling the truth.

"Catherine Oronoff," he said, "you realise, I suppose, that there is some meaning behind the establishment of the International Bureau? You don't think that we are keeping hundreds of people working night and day just to do a little ordinary spy business?"

"I have given up wondering about it," she acknowledged frankly.

He reached across the table and clasped the fingers of her left hand. Notwithstanding the warm spring sunshine he was conscious at once of their icy chill.

"We are working for a great end, Mr. Cheng and I," he said. "Years ago we talked and dreamed of it when we were at Harvard together. Since I became one of the legatees of my father's great discoveries we have gradually, step by step, evolved a definite plan of campaign."

"For what purpose?" she asked.

He saw with delight the birth of that faint light of interest in her eyes.

"We are working," he confided, "at a vast scheme which is now beginning to take definite shape day by day. We want to succeed where all the more experienced statesmen of the world have failed. We want to bring to the world the genesis, at any rate, of permanent peace."

She shook her head dubiously.

"You are both dreamers," she said, "you and Mr. Cheng. He lives apart from other men—too far apart—to know what an ugly and sordid place the world has become. And you, my dear Mark—"

"Leave me out of it for a moment," he interrupted. "You know very little of Mr. Cheng, Catherine. Let me tell you this: not only has he travelled continually in his own country and brought about the beginnings of great changes there, but he has lived in Russia, he has lived in Germany, he has visited Paris. He was partly educated in England and partly in the United States. He absorbs in a flash what it would take some men weary years to assimilate. His judgments seem to come to him almost as naturally as the breath he draws, and he is always right. You may smile, my dear, but I know him better than anyone else and I tell you that there is something sanctified, godlike, in his swift mastery of all the great problems we set ourselves years ago to solve. As for myself I plod a long way behind, but where he has conceived some marvellous ideas I have been able to carry them out. Everyone who is going to move in the great places of life, Catherine, has to start by being a dreamer; but, believe me, we have our hands upon the great levers which will rock futurity, and we are going to use them."

He withdrew his hand from hers and poured out wine. They continued their lunch. Every now arid then he glanced at her. There was a change already, he told himself joyfully.

"All this coming and going of strangers, of men of every nationality," he went on presently, "has meant something. I could tell you wonderful things, and I shall before long, of what is happening on the top floor of our huge building. We may not be able yet to speak to the stars, Catherine, but there is never a night when we do not speak for hours, never a day when we are not making plans with Mr. Cheng's friends in China. We are in touch in a new way with a new world and all the time we are building and making ready. The next thing I shall tell you—well, that will be very soon now," he went on, watching the waiter who was hovering close at hand, "will do more than awaken a little mild interest in those wonderful eyes of yours. You will begin to feel that this is a real world and that you are a real human being with your feet planted firmly upon it."

"Mark," she exclaimed, "why are you telling me all this?"

"I trust you," he answered.

"But ought you to? You know the sort of people we are surrounded with at the Bureau. Everyone who comes is suspect. All the time they are expecting to be spied upon just as we use these creatures such as Suzanne to spy upon other people. You know so little about me."

"More than you think," he assured her. "I know, for instance, that Catherine Oronoff is about a tenth part of your name. I know that you are a kinswoman of all the Romanoffs. I know that Alexander is your cousin and I know that it is he, in the eyes of a few at any rate, who is the legitimate ruler of your people. Mr. Cheng knew this when he brought you here. The secrets of the Bureau pass through your hands. Mr. Cheng has placed his absolute trust in you because he possesses that wonderful instinct which never fails him. I trust you, too, for another reason."

"You may," she said softly. "I am beginning to wonder what there is left that you can have to tell me."

He leaned across the table. He stretched out his hand and she clasped it eagerly.

"Our plans," he told her, "will involve vast changes in your own country, Catherine."

His words were quietly spoken but to her they seemed vibrant things. Her fingers gripped his. Her lips were parted. There was a subdued light which he had never seen there before, never even the symptoms of it, blazing in her eyes. Her right hand was pressed against her bosom. Simple words, but a new world seemed to be unfolding itself. She sat for a while in a state in which speech was impossible.

"We will talk of this again, Catherine," he said, withdrawing his hand and reaching for the coffee machine. "It is enough, I hope? There is nothing more to be said. Plans are still to be made, and until they are—silence."

"There shall be silence," she promised.

They drank their coffee and smoked cigarettes in the lazy spring sunlight. There was actually a faint flush of colour in Catherine's cheeks, a new life in her face and movements. She sighed with regret when Mark called for the bill and rose to his feet.

"We must go?" she asked reluctantly.

He nodded. He, too, was a different man.

"Do you know where we are going?" he asked, as they walked hand in hand across the little palisaded garden.

"Back to the Bureau—yes?"

"Not for the moment," he answered. "We are going to the Jetée Casino. I want to see our new friend's performance."