Читать книгу The Seven Sleepers - Francis Beeding - Страница 4

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I left the train and found myself on the platform of an ill-lighted station, in company with a large number of my fellow-passengers, who seemed to have entirely monopolised the few available porters. With some difficulty, I carried my two suit cases for a little distance, intending to leave them in a waiting-room while I went in search of the officials necessary to trace the missing trunk.

I pushed my way along the platform until I saw a notice “Chef de Gare” above a small, brightly lit office. There I was received by a magnificent functionary with a gold-braided cap, who told me that I must wait until the mails had been removed from the train.

“But not in here,” he added, seeing that I was about to sit down on the only vacant chair; “this is the office of the stationmaster”—from which I inferred that, even in a democratic country, lése majesté may be committed unintentionally.

I accordingly betook myself to the platform again, where I presently found an enormous blue-smocked porter, to whom I explained my difficulties. I found it hard to convince him that anyone could have sent a trunk to Geneva instead of to Genoa. But at length we went together to the douane, only to discover it was locked. I enquired where the douanier might be, but was told that I could not see him that night.

“If you come to-morrow morning, perhaps you will be able to get it,” said the porter hopefully.

Clearly the Swiss were a patient race.

I remembered the golden rule for travellers abroad, which is never to argue with anybody in a uniform, and I told the man to get me a taxi.

A thin, sharp rain, almost a mist, was falling as I left the station, and the air was very cold. I was wondering where to stay when I remembered that Beatrice, with whom I had kept up a regular correspondence, had put up for some time at the Pension de la Reine, on the Quai du Mont Blanc, where I had addressed letters to her. This seemed as good a place as any other, and would probably be not too expensive.

The drive there was short. We went down a broad street with cafés and shops on either side, turned off abruptly into a quiet square backed by tall, thin houses, and pulled up under an arch.

I took my room for a week. It was on the third floor, looking out over the square, in the middle of which was a dreary garden, the last leaves of the almost bare trees dripping with icy moisture, and a rusty fountain adding to the general dampness in the centre.

I had arrived too late for dinner, but they gave me some excellent ramequins and a rather tough steak, which I washed down with a bottle of thin Swiss wine. It was a meal that struck at once the prevailing note of the city—adequate but uninspired.

It was my first visit to the place, but I knew it well from hearsay—a city of spies and refugees and international organisations, where the more ancient traditions survived precariously in the snobbisme of its older families, entirely without distinction for the foreign visitor. I knew it best from the letters of my old friend Dick Braithwaite of the British Secret Service, who had been stationed there during the War, when Geneva had swarmed with agents of every nationality, who made of it a city of fantastic adventure.

Come to think of it, Geneva has always been a nest of unsavoury conspiracy. Here Elizabeth of Bohemia was murdered by a witless anarchist of twenty. Here Lenin lived for six years, hatching his great enterprise, and it was interesting to reflect that the town which had once resounded to Knox and Farel should have been the incubator of another and even more sinister revolution. Here too, it was said, Signor Mussolini had made his début as a Socialist, before he realised that the black shirt became him better than the red.

To-night, it seemed, Geneva was en fête, and was even now completing the first of a three days’ festival in honour of the annual carnival of the Escalade, held in commemoration of the attempt of the Duke of Savoy to capture the town in 1602. The Savoyards got into the town by night and were driven out after three days of desperate fighting by the gallant burghers in the bloodiest contest of the last three hundred years. The total casualties numbered fifty-four.

I was informed by my hotel proprietor that a number of bals costumés were in progress, and that some of the cafés would remain open all night.

Thinking it might be amusing to see how the Swiss enjoyed themselves, I went into the streets, being recommended by my host to go to the Moulin Rouge, where he said I should see dancing and other attractions. As I walked along, I met parties of disconsolate revellers, most of whom were masked, their hands, blue with cold, sticking out from soiled Pierrot costumes surmounted by bedraggled ruffs. Every now and then someone would blow a wheezy note on a tin horn, but for the most part the revellers moved silently along with linked arms, seemingly conscious of their absurdity. Groups of young children would occasionally pass, wearing tall, conical paper hats, very moist and damp, walking hand in hand, singing a dull monotonous tune in shrill voices. At any other time I might have found all this depressing, but my spirits were proof against anything that auspicious evening.

I went down the street, the Rhone on my left side until, turning towards it, I crossed it by a footbridge in the middle of which was situated the dam controlling the water power for the electric light. Nearly all the sluices were up and the water roared through the confined space in a mass of foam and whirlpools. Turning again to the right and then to the left, I walked up a long broad street called the Corraterie, bounded on the left by the tall houses of the old town mounting to the cathedral. At the top I asked a gendarme the way, and was directed across the Place Neuve, with its opera house and conservatoire, until I reached a large open space called the Plain de Plainpalais, where a fair was in progress. Merry-go-rounds and swings were active, but the crowd was not large, and it seemed a dreary sort of business. Evidently the Genevese had exhausted their vitality on that famous night three centuries ago. Since then Calvin and the climate had been too much for them.

I crossed a corner of the plain and presently arrived at a side street in which was situated the Moulin Rouge.

On entering, I found the room very full, and with some difficulty secured a seat near the door, ordering a brandy and soda. A good proportion of the company were in some form of fancy dress. An orchestra arrayed in short black coats and white flannel trousers was in full blast at one end of the room, and when it paused for breath an electric organ crashed out behind me. The place was full of a mist of tobacco smoke, and the whole show seemed to me to be a tawdry imitation of Montmartre. Crudely painted women, alone, or in the company of what I presume were the local tradesmen, were seated against the walls, those on the dais which ran around the room sipping champagne, while the humbler, at tables on the dancing floor itself, contented themselves with glasses of a deep red liquid filled with an assortment of sliced bananas, oranges and apples.

Soon after I arrived, the lights were lowered and a tall, very thin girl in clumsily arranged draperies danced a classic dance barefoot among the tables, her expressionless face, framed in peroxide hair, bobbing up and down among the seated company in the room like a foggy lantern in the hands of a drunken man. There was a good deal of noise from several parties, and serpentins were being thrown about, so that the whole place was covered with dirty strips of coloured paper, which wound themselves over the tables, the chairs and the thick necks of the merrymakers.

So this was Geneva. It seemed at that moment a city in which most forms of excitement were at a discount, and at the end of half an hour I decided to go to bed in pleasant anticipation of my forthcoming meeting with Beatrice.

Then, quickly enough, it began. A man suddenly entered the room and, after a glance round the tables, came straight over and sat down in the vacant chair beside me.

He was a thin, undersized rat of a fellow, with black hair and a very prominent nose and teeth—obviously a Jew. He was breathing heavily, as though he had been running, and I noticed that his hands were trembling. I had scarcely had time to mark these details, however, when, to my utter astonishment, he suddenly put his hand on my arm.

“You’re two days late,” he said abruptly in German. “And what the devil do you mean by coming to this place? You’ll hear of this from Ephesus.”

I was staring at him incredulously when his expression changed. It was as though the words had been wiped from his lips, and he was looking with a fixed stare of terror across the room at a group of persons in fancy dress seated in the opposite corner.

Two of them rose and walked swiftly towards us. One was a tall, slim harlequin in black and silver, masked to the chin, who slipped easily between the revolving couples on the floor. The other was short and dressed as a clown in a single baggy garment and a tall conical hat. His face, which was painted in the conventional manner, seemed to me to be vaguely familiar. I could not quite place him at the moment, however, especially as I was much more interested in my companion, who, while these men were crossing the room, appeared to be stupefied with terror. He stared at them as though fascinated, and it was not until they were quite close to us that the spell was broken. They were only two tables away when he rose quickly, with a sort of gulp thrust something violently into my hand, and, turning, made for the door.

He reached it simultaneously with the harlequin and the clown, who bowed low, and, as it seemed, ironically, when he approached them. The harlequin tapped him lightly across the shoulder with his wand, while the clown grasped him by the arm.

To an ordinary onlooker, it appeared to be merely the unexpected encounter of three friends, but to me, who had seen the pitiable state of fright to which this little unknown Jew had been reduced, the gestures of the harlequin and the clown seemed charged with a sinister significance.

The clown immediately pushed open the door, and they all disappeared simultaneously.

I was too astonished to do anything for the moment, but, as the door swung to behind them, I came to my wits and got up, grasping the object which had been thrust into my hand, and which was apparently, from the feel of it, some form of pocket-book. I reached the door and entered the vestibule.

As I did so, the street door slammed. I fancied that I heard a scuffle going on outside and an instant later the chasseur who guarded the door reappeared in the vestibule from the street, breathing a little quickly.

I went up to him immediately and asked him if a small, black-haired man had just left the building with two companions.

“No, Monsieur,” he replied, “no one has left. No one at all.”

“But I’m sure of it,” I said. “He left a moment ago. I saw him go out myself.”

At this the chasseur brazenly changed his note. “For the good of the house,” he said, “I beg Monsieur to say nothing. The man Monsieur mentions has just been arrested. Monsieur will realise we do not want any scandal.”

“Oh, very well,” I assented, “it isn’t any business of mine.”

I was still holding in my hand the pocket-book which had so mysteriously come into my possession, and I should then and there have handed it over to the chasseur if he had not already lied to me and given me every reason to doubt his honesty.

As it was, I called for my coat and returned to the Pension de la Reine, still in possession of the property of the little Jew.