CHAPTER XXIV
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The grim hand of tragedy was suddenly lifted. Charles’s depression disappeared. He was unexpectedly aware of a glow of happiness. It certainly was not the appearance of the trim, broad-shouldered Mr. Blute who had wrought the change. It was the sight of the girl by his side in the neat travelling coat, smart little hat and graceful carriage, whose unrestrained cry of joy and upraised arms had brought the thrill into his pulses and lifted the weight from his heart. Charles was not in the least a demonstrative person but it seemed the most natural thing in the world to stoop down and kiss the eagerly lifted lips, to smile into those beautiful dancing eyes and draw her hand underneath his arm.
“It’s awfully nice to see you people again!” he exclaimed. “How goes it, Blute?” he added, dropping his voice.
“So far according to plan,” was the impassive reply.
Charles’s relief shone out of his face.
“Excellent,” he chuckled.
“It seems ages since yesterday,” Patricia sighed. “But oh, how wonderful all this is!”
They were crossing the road slowly towards the Schweizerhof, unnoticed units of the crowd. She was laughing now at the discomforts of the journey.
“Nine people in the compartment,” she confided. “No water to wash in, wine and biscuits for lunch. Everyone eating horrible messes, windows that opened with difficulty—English, French, a few Austrians and dozens of Americans all jumbled up together. Everyone talking at the same time. But Mr. Blute as silent as the Sphinx. Charles, will there be any danger?”
“Not a hope, I should think,” was the cheerful reply.
“Who cares?” she laughed. “We shall be in Switzerland to-morrow—the land of plenty. Charles, do you love Switzerland?”
“To look at—not to live in. I shall probably love it passionately to-morrow for a short time.”
“Mr. Benjamin used to say that he got nearly the best food in the world at Geneva. What do you think, Mr. Blute?”
Blute was watching the crowd amongst whom they were slowly making progress. His eyes seemed to be studying every person there. He walked like a man self-absorbed yet always watching.
“Switzerland is a great country,” he conceded, “but a little difficult to get into, except during the tourist season. There are times when it is equally difficult to get out of.”
They reached the hotel. The same state of confusion prevailed. An angry crowd was besieging the telephone booth—journalists, a French professor who was frankly pushing people out of his way in his anxiety to reach the closed door, a screaming woman and two students with knapsacks on their backs who were loudly lamenting their interrupted holiday. Blute turned away in disgust.
“I shall try the manager’s room,” he whispered to Charles. “Come this way for a moment.”
He led them down the passage. A perspiring little waiter greeted Blute with a grin. The latter caught him by the arm and made a few rapid enquiries. He turned to Charles.
“This fellow says there is not the slightest chance of any dinner. The manager himself is dining off the last tureen of soup in his room here. There is plenty to drink, though. I have ordered you two a vermouth and cassis. Will you both pass out through the door in front into the garden? The waiter will find you there.”
Blute, who appeared to be perfectly at home in the place, knocked at the manager’s door and disappeared. Charles and his companion passed on into the grounds, which were rather reminiscent of a tea garden in a London suburb on a Bank Holiday. People were lying about on the lawn and every seat and bench was occupied. One man with a map in his hand was already lecturing about the war; another, an exiled Pole, was making a furious attack upon England and France who, he said, had guaranteed his country and then were going to declare war a fortnight too late to save her. Charles and Patricia found a grassy bank at the far end of the lawn where they seated themselves and looked tolerantly out upon the scene. The French professor, finally ejected from the room which contained the telephone box, was striding up and down in silent fury. The waiter who had recognized Blute came running across the devastated stretch of turf. He had a bottle in each of his coat pockets and he carried three glasses.
“Vermouth and cassis,” he announced to the two as he paused breathless. “Herr Blute—he ordered.”
Charles took the bottles from him.
“Vermouth and cassis,” he remarked. “It’s a good enough drink, Patricia. How much for the three, waiter?”
“Five francs, Monsieur L’Anglais.”
“How much for the two bottles?”
“Twenty francs.”
Charles handed out the money, added five francs and motioned him away. The waiter departed, his face wreathed in smiles.
“Delicious!” Patricia exclaimed, sipping hers.
They drank a glassful each. Charles also nodded his approval.
“The civilized person,” he observed, “becomes awfully narrow about his drinks. If I lived to be a hundred I should never have ordered a vermouth and cassis. Here comes Mr. Blute. We’ll mix his.”
Blute approached them, walking a shade more quickly than usual, but otherwise preserving his attitude of stony abstraction. He accepted his drink, however, and sipped it appreciatively.
“I regret to say,” he announced, “that there is not a room to be had in the hotel. For forty people the lounge is reserved. The dining hall being empty—there is no food here to be served—it is also turned into a dormitory. Two American tourists, students from Grenoble, a man and a girl on their honeymoon, have commandeered the billiard table. There seems really to be not an inch of space vacant. I did not book rooms in advance because having done so for Mr. Mildenhall I did not wish it to appear that we were travelling in his company.”
Charles laughed gaily.
“You’re over-scrupulous, my friend,” he declared. “I still hope to be in London only a day after I was expected, and when I am on the sort of mission I have been engaged on during the last two months I make my own plans and choose my own company.”
“They would not have been able to keep the rooms, in any case,” Blute remarked. “The people on the first train forced their way in.”
“And things otherwise are going all right?” Charles asked, a lingering note of anxiety still in his tone.
“Everything goes like clockwork. The guards have permission to sleep in the van. That I arranged in Vienna. They brought their food with them. I paid them a farewell visit just before we reached this place and found them at their posts perfectly satisfied and ready for anything. The guard of the train has already taken possession of the cases which are supposed to contain the effects of the victims and he assures me that there is not the faintest chance of trouble with the Customs. I shall not worry any longer about these by-way telephones. We shall go through to Zürich and from there I know I can ascertain Mr. Benjamin’s whereabouts.”
“In the meantime I have an idea,” Charles said. “We mount from here to my bedroom. There we can talk undisturbed. Afterwards, naturally. Miss Grey will occupy it. You and I, Blute, can easily sleep out of doors if necessary.”
“I could sleep very well where we are,” Blute assented, “but your room will be an excellent refuge for a short time. I don’t fancy this mixed crowd of people all around us.”
They rose to their feet and made their way through the uneasy mob into the hotel and up the stairs. Charles unlocked his door and threw open the windows.
“Not so bad,” he declared cheerfully. “There is soap, water and one clean towel for Miss Grey if she should care to use them. The air which comes in through the windows is not at all bad and furthermore—”
“Something left from your luncheon?” Patricia exclaimed, jumping up with a whirl of her skirts and seizing the basket which he had been holding out.
He drew back the fastenings and lifted the cover, raised a serviette and smiled.
“Behold! The offering of the best hotel manager in
Europe left neglected at the time it was meant to be eaten but welcome as never was food welcomed before by us three hungry mortals.”
“And I never knew I was really greedy,” Patricia murmured as she lifted the second serviette. “A whole chicken, a delicious cheese, rolls, butter, fruit! Charles, I must be greedy! I am going to cry.”
“A sure sign,” he observed, undoing the inside straps, producing a dish and beginning to carve the chicken. “Well turn my suitcase off the luggage. Stand and use that for a table. We must sit on the bed. But wait a moment—you carve the chicken, Blute.”
He rummaged in his dressing-case and produced the cocktail shaker.
“I have no words of gratitude and thanks left,” Patricia sighed. “My greed has conquered my emotions. You men had better divide the cocktail. I can have more vermouth and cassis. Besides, there’s a delicious bottle of white wine here.”
“The wine I drank for my dinner last night—Gumpoldskirchner,” he remarked, drawing it from the basket. “A terrific name but an excellent flavour.”
“The best Austrian wine that’s grown,” Blute declared. “You two can play about with the apéritif—I’ll wait for the wine.”
They finished their meal in supreme content. Patricia insisted upon rolling up her sleeves and washing the plates. Afterwards, they sat by the open window and over the station roof watched the outline of the mountains in the distance. Darkness had come and Charles broke up a somewhat spasmodic conversation.
“I think we’d better leave you, Patricia,” he suggested. “We’re all tired and we shall have to be up early in the morning.”
“Nothing of the sort,” Patricia protested. “I am not going to take your room, Charles. I shouldn’t think of it. You were up long before we were this morning.”
“The matter,” Charles declared, “is not worth an argument. I am no Sir Philip Sidney but I should hate to go through life remembering that a few nights before our wedding I let my wife sleep with all the rest of this picnicking Bank Holiday crowd whilst I revelled in the luxury of this—er—truckle bedstead!”
“Please, Charles!” she begged with something suspiciously like a blush on her cheeks. “I’m much more used to roughing it than you are.”
Charles abandoned the discussion. He took a couple of bottles from his dressing-case and a clean handkerchief and joined Blute at the door.
“Sleep well, my dear Patricia,” he enjoined. “Brace yourself up for those few minutes of agony tomorrow. I have a feeling somehow or other that no one will do more than glance at our passports, that the Customs men will be so busy that they will just wave our baggage on one side and that we shall be making our brief farewells within half-an-hour of crossing the frontier. What do you say, Blute?”
“When I am engaged upon a serious enterprise,” the latter replied, “I concentrate the whole of the time upon its successful accomplishment. I think of nothing else. The details are always before me. This time I feel that nothing has been forgotten, there is nothing that can intervene. We shall miss you, Mr. Mildenhall, and I know that Mr. Benjamin will not rest until he has thanked you personally for all your assistance.”
“What shall you do with all your treasures if you find that Mr. Benjamin is in London, say?”
“I shall deposit everything in the safety vaults of a Zürich bank,” Blute confided. “Switzerland is the most secure country in Europe for anything of that sort. I shall then buy half-a-dozen maps, read all the newspapers which I have neglected for the last fortnight and absorb myself in a study of the war. I take a great interest in wars. I regret to say that so far I have come to the conclusion that there would be no wars but for the professional politicians and the newspapers.”
“What about the little trouble over at Carthage?” Charles asked.
“The world of to-day lacks primitive passion,” Blute declared. “It no longer exists as a motive.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Charles meditated. “They say that even the great man of Germany is crazy about a dancing girl. Personally, I can see myself purchasing a second-hand suit of armour and a two-edged sword to rescue my princess from an invader.”
“But as your princess,” Patricia reminded him, “happens to be a little red-haired typist with green eyes and not in the least like any princess that was ever dreamed of, and as she has a father, by the by, who is a college professor and doesn’t approve of fighting, what are you going to do about it?”
“I should win her with song and written words,” he replied. “The troubadour might triumph where the warrior had failed! Come along, Blute. We will leave this young lady to her dreams.”
“I’m terribly ashamed,” she confessed with a glance at the bed. “Still—good night, both of you. Please kiss me, Charles. Mr. Blute isn’t looking.”
“Mr. Blute,” that gentleman remarked, “is a person of discretion.”
The two men wandered out into the garden and found a retired, unoccupied seat. There were still muffled scraps of conversation from all around but very little gaiety. One of a small party of students struck up a few notes on a ukulele but was driven into retreat by a shower of miscellaneous missiles. The night itself was curiously still and there was a sense of thunder in the air. Blute began to talk. His voice had no expression—it was changeless in its tone. He began to talk of wars, of chance words spoken in secret places by irresponsible people, of the crackle of inflammable materials as gossiping tongues trifled with serious subjects and lit the bonfires which were to scorch the world.
“All wars,” he said, addressing himself to no one in particular, “would die out and the spirit of warfare would perish if it were not for the gross things of life. There are no more Wars of the Roses, no more passionate journeys across the desert on the part of holy men, although they wore armour and carried swords by their sides. No more struggles to free the world from tyranny and barbarism, to set free the nations that have fallen by the wayside. Nowadays, the armament makers light the flame and the newspaper millionaires fan it. It has become a sickly and a horrible thing—but so long as the world exists war will continue because evil will dominate. There are more evil qualities in the world than good ones and behind it all, deep enough underneath, there is the fascination of the struggle to the man who has brain but no emotion. That is the man who enjoys warfare.”
Charles, who had been half dozing, sat up.
“I have never heard you talk so much in my life, Blute!”
“I never have a chance to talk. I am always afraid of speech. I am a man of action, of secret underground action. I like to work where no other men can intrude. I am a rich man but I am not a money grabber. I am a man who loves gratitude but I am not a philanthropist. Within a few hours I shall bring, I hope, to a successful end one of the greatest enterprises of my life. You are a newcomer, Mr. Mildenhall, to the world I have made my own. I saw what was coming to the Jews years before they dreamed of it themselves. As far as I ever feel friendship for anyone I felt friendship and reverence for Leopold Benjamin. I set myself to work on his affairs. Millions upon millions that his father and grandfather had made I removed quietly, inconspicuously from the dangerous places. I made that the business of my life. I encouraged him in those great sums he used to pay for objets d’art. A work of genius is always a marketable thing. Sometimes he was puzzled. It seemed to him that he must be growing poorer. The millions that used to be in Hamburg, the huge iron works that were run entirely with his capital, the ships that took the seas, the streets of palaces in Berlin and Frankfurt—all the money which had brought these things into being and which supported them slipped quietly away. There was always more money to take its place from a hundred different sources. Leopold was sometimes frightened. ‘Blute,’ he used to say to me, ‘you are making a poor man of me.’ And I smiled. It will be a moment of triumph for me when we meet. Not only shall I restore to him the pictures he loves, the treasures of his life, but I shall tell him, and it is a wonderful thing to tell any man, aye, not only tell him b
ut prove to him with the figures which weary him so much, that he is the richest man in the world.”
“Are we still talking fairy stories?” Charles asked.
“I talk because I feel like it,” Blute said calmly. “I very seldom feel like it. You must be a good listener, Mr. Mildenhall. You have an inborn gift for it. Now I am going to sleep.”
He closed his eyes. All around them the murmur of voices was growing fainter and fainter.
Charles was awakened by someone pulling his arm. He heard a scared foreign voice in his ear.
“Wake up, sir, please wake up!”
He opened his eyes and sat up quickly. It was the sandy-haired little manager still in his soiled grey-linen suit.
“It is the young lady who travels with Mr. Blute,” he declared. “She rang the bell. She declares that two men have been in her room. She declares that they were tampering with your luggage, sir.”
Charles, followed by Blute, crossed the lawn swiftly and mounted the now deserted stairs. The door of number seven stood ajar. Patricia was standing upon the threshold clad in a dark green dressing-gown, with slippers upon her bare feet. She was breathing rapidly and there was fear in her eyes.
“I awoke suddenly,” she called out to Charles. “I felt there was someone in the room. There were two men. They were trying to open your tin case.”
“What’s become of them?” Charles asked quickly.
“I turned on the light and screamed,” Patricia told him. “I rang the bell and screamed—”
The little proprietor nodded.
“Mademoiselle did indeed make herself heard,” he chimed in. “I am sitting up all night myself to collect money from these people before they leave. I ran upstairs. I passed one man on the landing. He was running with his head down.”
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