Читать книгу Mystery at Geneva: An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings - Macaulay Rose - Страница 5

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Henry descended the broad and shallow double stairway of the Palais des Nations, up and down which tripped the gay crowds who knew one another but knew not him, and so out to lunch, which he had poorly, inexpensively, obscurely and alone, at a low eating-house near the Secretariat. After lunch he had coffee at a higher eating-house, on the Quai, and sat under the pavement awning reading the papers, listening to the band, looking at the mountain view across the lake, and waiting until the other visitors to Geneva, having finished their more considerable luncheons, should emerge from their hotels and begin to walk or drive along the Quai. Meanwhile he read L'Humeur, which he found on the table before him. But L'Humeur is not really very funny. It has only one joke, only one type of comic picture: a woman incompletely dressed. Was that, Henry speculated, really funny? It happens, after all, to nearly all women at least every morning and every evening. Was it really funny even when to the lady thus unattired there entered a gentleman, either M. l'Amant or M. le Mari?

Was only one thing funny, as some persons believed? Was it indeed really funny at all? Henry, who honestly desired to brighten his life, tried hard to think so, but failed, and relapsed into gloom. He could not see that it was funnier that a female should not yet have completed her toilet than that a male should not. Neither was funny. Nothing, perhaps, was funny. The League of Nations was not funny. Life was not funny, and probably not death. Even the British Bolshevist, which he was reduced to reading, wasn't funny, though it did have on the front page a column headed “Widow's Leap Saves Cat from Burning House.”

A young man sat down at Henry's little table and ordered drink; a bright, neat, brisk young man, with an alert manner. Glancing at the British Bolshevist, he made a conversational opening which elicited the fact that Henry represented this journal at Geneva. For himself, he was, it transpired, correspondent of the Daily Sale, a paper to which the British Bolshevist was politically opposed but temperamentally sympathetic; they had the same cosy, chatty touch on life.

The two correspondents amused themselves by watching the delegates and other foreign arrivals strolling to and fro along the elegant spaciousness of the Quai, chatting with one another. They noticed little things to write to their papers about, such as hats, spats, ways of carrying umbrellas and sticks, and so forth. They overheard fragments of conversation in many tongues. For, clustering round about the Assembly, were the representatives, official and unofficial, of nearly all the world's nations, so that Henry heard in the space of ten minutes British, French, Italians, Russians, Poles, Turks, Americans, Armenians, Dutch, Irish, Lithuanians, Serb-Croat-Slovenes, Czecho-Slovakians, the dwellers in Dalmatia and Istria, and in the parts of Latin America about Brazil, Assyrio-Chaldeans, and newspaper correspondents, all speaking in their tongues the wonderful works of God. Geneva was like Pentecost, or the Tower of Babel. There were represented there very many societies, which regularly settled in Geneva for the period of the Assembly in order to send it messages, trusting thus to bring before the League in session the good causes they had at heart. The Women's International League was there, and the Esperanto League, and the Non-Alcoholic Drink Society, and the Mormons, and the Y.M.C.A. and the Union of Free Churches, and the Unprotected Armenians, and the Catholic Association, and the Orthodox Church Union, and the Ethical Society, and the Bolshevik Refugees (for it was in Russia, at the moment, the turn of the other side), and the Save the Children Committee, and the Freemasons, and the Constructive Birth Control Society, and the Feathered Friends Protection Society, and the Negro Equality League, and the Anti-Divorce Union, and the Humanitarian Society, and the Eugenic Society, and the Orangemen's Union, and the Sinn Feiners, and the Zionists, and the Saloon Restoration League, and the S.P.G. And hundreds of Unprotected Minorities, irresistibly (or so they hoped) moving in their appeals.

Many of the representatives of these eager sections of humanity walked on the Quai du Mont Blanc on this fine Sunday afternoon and listened to the band, and buttonholed delegates and their secretaries, and chatted, and spat. The Czecho-Slovakians spat hardest, the Costa-Ricans loudest, the Unprotected Armenians most frequently, and the Serb-Croat-Slovenes most accurately, but the Assyrio-Chaldeans spat farthest. The Zionists did not walk on the Quai. They were holding meetings together and drawing up hundreds of petitions, so that the Assembly might receive at least one an hour from to-morrow onwards. Zionists do these things thoroughly.

Motor-cars hummed to and fro between the hotels and the Secretariat, and inside them one saw delegates. Flags flew and music played, and the jet d'eau sprang, an immense crystalline tree of life, a snowy angel, up from the azure lake into the azure heavens.

Henry gave a little sigh of pleasure. He liked the scene.

“Will there be treats?” he asked his companion. “I like treats.”

“Treats? Who for? The delegates get treats all right, if you mean that.”

“For us, I meant.”

“Oh, yes, the correspondents get a free trip or a free feed now and then too. I usually get out of them myself; official beanos bore me. The town's very good to us; it wants the support of the press against rival claimants, such as Brussels.”

“I should enjoy a lake trip very much,” said Henry, beginning to feel that it was good to be there.

“Well, don't forget to hand in your address then, so that it gets on the list.”

Henry was damped. 24 Allée Petit Chat, Saint Gervais—it sounded rotten, and would sound worse still to the Genevan syndics, who knew just where it was and what, and were even now engaged in plans for pulling down and rebuilding all the old wharfside quarter. No; he could not hand in that address....

“I suppose you've got to crab the show, whatever it does, haven't you,” said the Daily Sale man presently. “Now I'm out to pat it on the back—this year. I like that better. It's dull being disagreeable all the time; so obvious, too.”

“My paper is obvious,” Henry owned gloomily. “Truth always is. You can't get round that.”

“Oh, well, come,” the other journalist couldn't stand that—“it's a bit thick for one of your lot to start talking about truth. The lies you tell daily—they have ours beat to a frazzle. Why, you couldn't give a straight account of a bus accident!”

“We could not. That is to say, we would not,” Henry admitted. “But we lie about points of fact because our principles are true. They're so true that everything has to be made to square with them. If you notice, our principles affect all our facts. Yours don't, quite all. You'd report the bus accident from pure love of sensation. We, in reporting it, would prove that it happened because buses aren't nationalised, or because the driver was underpaid, or the fares too high, or because coal has gone up more than wages, or something true of that sort. We waste nothing; we use all that happens. We're propagandists all the time, you're only propagandists part of the time; and commercialists the rest.”

“Oh, certainly no one would accuse you of being commercialists,” agreed the Sale man kindly. “Hallo, what's up?”

Henry had stiffened suddenly, and sat straight and rigid, like a dog who dislikes another dog. His companion followed his tense gaze, and saw a very neat, agreeable-looking and gentlemanly fellow, exquisitely cleaned, shaved, and what novelists call groomed (one supposes this to be a kind of rubbing-down process, to make the skin glossy), with gray spats, a malacca cane, and a refined gray suit with a faint stripe and creases like knife-blades. This gentleman was strolling by in company with the senior British delegate, who had what foreigners considered a curious and morbid fad for walking rather than driving, even for short distances.

“Which troubles you?” inquired the representative of the Daily Sale. “Our only Lord B., or that Secretariat fellow?”

“That Secretariat fellow,” Henry replied rather faintly.

The other put on his glasses, the better to observe the neat, supercilious figure. He laughed a little.

“Charles Wilbraham. Our Gilbert. The perfect knut. The type that does us credit abroad. Makes up for the seedy delegates and journalists, what?... He is said to have immense and offensive private wealth. In fact, it is obvious that he could scarcely present that unobtrusively opulent appearance on his official salary. They don't really get much, you know, poor fellows; not for an expensive place like this.... The queer thing is that no one seems to know where Wilbraham gets his money from; he never says. A very close, discreet chap; a regular civil servant. Do you know him, then?”

Henry hesitated for a moment, appearing to think. He then replied, in the pained and reserved tone in which Mr. Wickham might have commented upon Mr. Darcy, “Slightly. Very slightly. As well as I wish. In fact, rather better. He wouldn't remember me. But I'll tell you one thing. But for a series of trivial circumstances, I too might have been ... oh, well, never mind. Not, of course, that for any consideration I would serve in this ludicrous and impotent machine set up by the corrupt states of the world. Wilbraham can: I could not. My soul, at least, is my own.”

“Oh, come,” remonstrated the other journalist. “Come, come. Surely not.... But I must go and look up a few people. See you later on.”

Henry remained for a minute, broodingly watching the neat receding back of Charles Wilbraham. How happy and how proud it looked, that serene and elegant back! How proud and how pleased Henry knew Charles Wilbraham to be, walking with the senior British delegate, whom every one admired, along the Quai du Mont Blanc! As proud and as happy as a prince. Henry knew better than most others Charles Wilbraham's profound capacity for proud and princely pleasure. He loved these assemblies of important persons; loved to walk and talk with the great. He had, ever since the armistice, contracted a habit of being present at those happy little gatherings which had been, so far, a periodic feature of the great peace, and showed as yet no signs of abating. To Paris Charles Wilbraham had gone in 1919 (and how near Henry had been to doing the same; how near, and yet how far!). To San Remo he had been, to Barcelona and to Brussels; to Spa, to Genoa, even to Venice in the autumn of 1922. Besides all the League of Nations Assemblies. Where the eagles were gathered together, there, always, would Charles Wilbraham be.

Henry winced at the thought of Charles's so great happiness. But let him wait; only let Charles wait.

“Holy Mother of God!” (for Henry was a Roman Catholic), “only let him wait!”