Читать книгу Double Dan - Edgar Wallace - Страница 4

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Neither by nature crazy, nor by inclination eccentric, Mr. Gordon Selsbury had at moments serious but comfortable doubts as to whether he was not a little abnormal; whether he was not, in fine, one of those rare and gifted mortals to whom was given Vision beyond the ordinary. His environment was the commonplace City of London; his occupation a shrieking incongruity for a spiritual man—he was an insurance broker. And a prosperous insurance broker.

Sometimes he sat before the silver fire grate of his sitting-room, amazed at the contradictory evidence of his own genius. Here (said he, thinking impartially) was a man with a Conscious Soul, beside whom other men were clods, vegetables, animals of the field, slaves to their material demands. Lifted above the world and its peculiarly grimy interests, he was a man whose spiritual head rose above fog and was one with the snow-capped mountains and the blue skies. And yet—here was the truly astonishing thing—he could grapple most practically with these materialists and could tear from the clenched and frenzied paws large quantities of soiled and greasy money....

"No, Trenter, I shall be out to-morrow afternoon. Will you please tell Mr. Robert that I will see him at my office. Thank you, Trenter."

Trenter inclined his head respectfully and went back to the telephone.

"No, sir, Mr. Selsbury will not be at home to-morrow."

Bobbie Selsbury was annoyed.

"Will you tell him that he promised to play in a foursome with me, tell him —ask him to come to the telephone."

Gordon got up from his tapestried armchair with an expressionless face. Before the servants he revealed nothing in the least degree emotive.

"Yes, yes, I know!" wearily. "But I had a prior engagement. You must get somebody else. Old Mendlesohn ... what's the matter with him? Rubbish, my dear fellow. ... At any rate, you must get somebody—I'm tremendously busy to-morrow. ... I don't feel like discussing my business on the telephone."

He paced his dignified way to his den. Gordon Selsbury once rowed six in the Varsity boat—there were crossed oars above his fireplace, though he thought the display in bad taste. He had once been a fresher whose chief joy in life had been to steal policemen's helmets and ride a bicycle down forbidden pathways, and to sprint from proctors. It seemed difficult to believe. He was tall and good-looking in the Apollo Belvedere manner. Fair, with a forehead which was large and thoughtful, he baffled instant analysis by carrying through life two inches of sidewhisker on either cheek. Men seeing him first thought he wrote music or played a 'cello. Women on introduction guessed him as a dancer of amazing agility, or possibly a film artist.

"Trenter . . ."

Trenter waited, his head attentively thrust forward, a simulation of intense interest on his sharp features. He continued to wait, even as Gordon continued to frown at the fireplace.

"Trenter . . ."

..."Yes, sir?"

Slowly Mr. Selsbury turned his head until his eyes met Trenter's. "I saw you kissing the parlourmaid this morning. You are a married man, I believe?"

Trenter blinked apprehensively. He was indeed married.

"I do not wish that sort of thing to happen again," said Gordon, mildly scandalised. "You are a married man with responsibilities which cannot be ignored or set on one side. Eleanor, as I understand her name to be, is a young girl, possibly inflammable, certainly impressionable. To cloud a young girl's life by awakening in her heart a passion which you cannot return is most reprehensible. Even I have been rocked by the current which the stone you cast has set into motion. My shaving water was late this morning. This must not occur again."

"No, sir," said Trenter.

News comes instantly to the servants' hall in any event. Now, telepathy lagged behind Trenter's spoken word.

Eleanor, tall, svelte, pallid of face, black eyebrows and eyes that flashed, interrupted the operation of a lip-stick to listen. She was tremulously indignant.

"Because he's a St. Andrew, does he think that we haven't any human feelings? The poor cold-blooded fish! I'll let him know that I won't be talked about and my name took away—taken away, I mean—by a prying, sneaking, rubber-soled spy. He is too!"

"Who's this St. Andrew?" Trenter was suspicious of all saints, being by marriage a Primitive Baptist.

"He's the man that women tempted and he wouldn't," said Eleanor, prepared to drop the illustration. But Trenter was of another mind.

"Who's been tempting him?" he asked, darkling eyed.

"Nobody: not if it's me you mean. I'd like to see him put his arm round my waist! He'd never forget it!"

"He wouldn't forget himself anyway," said Trenter, relieved.

She tossed her head sceptically.

"Oh, I don't know!" she said, and nodded to a warm, large woman in the gingham and apron of her profession. "Ask cook!"

Trenter was dazed.

"Good God!—not you, cook?" he asked in a whisper.

Happily Mrs. Magglesark was not a quick thinker.

"Yes; I saw him too," she said, and Eleanor, in terror that the telling of the story should go elsewhere, trod on the opening of the cook's narrative.

"Me and cook—that is to say cook and I—were on top of a 'bus last Sunday—"

"In Knightsbridge." Thus the cook claimed her equal share of the copyright.

"We were laughing and talking when cook said 'Look, Nelly—there's the boss.'"

"I said 'If that isn't his nibs!'" amended Mrs. Magglesark.

"And there he was!" said Eleanor. "With a girl, very tall and dressed in black, and he was holding her hand!"

"In the street?"—incredulously.

"In the car: from the top of a 'bus you can look down into cars, if they're open. Many a sight I've seen!"

"Was she pretty?" asked Trenter, man-like.

Eleanor's lips pursed.

"Well, I suppose some people would call her pretty. Did you think she was pretty, cook?"

Mrs. Magglesark, having reached the age when she regarded all young people as passable, thought she was pretty.

"Holding her hand!" Trenter was very thoughtful. "It wasn't Mrs. van Oynne?"

"Who is she?"

"She's been here twice to tea. An American lady, rather well-dressed. Heloise! That's her name. And a good-looker. She usually wears black and paradise feathers."

"She wore paradise feathers!" said cook and Eleanor together.

Trenter nodded.

"That's her," he said, "but there's nothing in it. She's a highbrow. Reads books and all that. Last time she was here, she and him discussed the Ego Soul. The little bits I heard I couldn't make head or tail of."

Eleanor was impressed.

"Funny for him to be discussing eggs," she said.

It was not funny for Gordon Selsbury to discuss anything. With Heloise van Oynne there seemed to be no subject, from kidney beans to metaphysics, that he could not examine profitably. It is true that he did most of the talking, but her rapt gaze rectified deficiencies of speech.

Gordon sat with her that afternoon in the tearoom of the Coburg Hotel, and they were comparatively alone.

"There is something I have wanted to say to you ever since I met you, Heloise," he said softly. "A month! It almost seems incredible! If our theories are substantial it is incredible. We met before in the Temple of Atlantis, where the bearded priests chanted the day through. And you were a great lady and I was a humble gladiator. That the gladiatorial games and even the factions of the circus have a more remote antiquity than Rome, I am certain. Who knows but that the last remnants of dying Atlantis were not the first peoples of Etruscan civilisation....?"

Her fine eyes agreed with that theory. They said as plainly as though the words were spoken: "How brilliant of you to associate Etruria with the mythical civilisation of Atlantis!"

On the other hand, her eyes did not say many things that she thought.

"What is so fine about friendship," Gordon was going on, "is that we have lifted common interest above the sordid range of philanderism."

"How's that?"

Her head was bent forward eagerly, enquiringly. Trenter had the same trick, only he looked pained.

"I mean"—Gordon Selsbury flicked a crumb of cake daintily from his knee—"we have never tarnished the bright surface of our friendship with that weakness which is so glibly styled 'love.'"

"Oh!" Heloise van Oynne sat back in her basket chair. "That's so," she said, and if there was a sense of immense satisfaction in her tone, even one attuned to her spiritual wavelength would not have observed the circumstance.

"The perfect sympathy, the perfect understanding, the dovetailing of mind into mind, the oneness of a mutual soul—these transcend all sentient impressions, whatever be the label they bear."

She smiled slowly and with infinite sweetness and comradeship. Heloise invariably smiled at Gordon that way when she wasn't quite sure what he was talking about. Though, as to souls—

"The soul is certainly the finest thing we have around," she said, in deep thought. "That's where we've got most people skinned—I should say, at a disadvantage, you and I, Gordon. One doesn't like to bare one's heart; one shrinks instinctively even from self-revelation."

She sighed as one who had got through an exercise of considerable difficulty. Then, observing by certain signs that he had only, so to speak, removed the lid of his introspections and that the real contents of his mind would shortly spill, to be gathered up and replaced by her none too sure hands, she interjected hastily:

"You were telling me, Gordon, about a cousin of yours in Australia—she must certainly be interesting, and I'm just mad to hear about your relations. I like you, Gordon—a lot. There's nothing about you that doesn't fascinate me."

She laid a gloved hand on his knee. No other woman could lay a hand, gloved or ungloved, on Gordon Selsbury's knee without his calling for the police. But Heloise... he laid his hand gently on hers.

"Diana? Well, really, I know nothing about her except that she had that tremendous affair with a fellow called Dempsi. I told you that. She's very well off, I believe. I've taken a little notice of her—sent her a few books and a word or two of advice. I often think that a man's advice is ever so much more acceptable to a young girl than a woman's. When were we talking about her? Oh, of course, I remember! It was when we had that tremendous talk on the growth of the Ego...."

"Is she fair or dark?" Heloise nimbly blocked the road to metaphysics.

"I really don't know. I had a letter from my aunt—her aunt also—just before the poor creature died. She said that Diana had forgotten Dempsi and wondered where she could get his photograph—the man is dead. Has it ever occurred to you, Heloise, how absurd are such terms as life and de—"

"Diana!" mused Heloise, aloud. "Poor little Australian girl. I should like to meet her, Gordon."

Gordon shook his head, smiling gently.

"I cannot imagine anything less likely," he said, "than your meeting her."