“I did not know it,” repeated Neeland.
“It is the truth, mon ami. It is inevitable that Turkey fights if Germany goes to war. England, France, Russia know it. Ask yourself, then, how enormous to us the value of those plans — tentative, sketchy, perhaps, yet the inception and foundation of those German-made and German-armed fortifications which today line the Dardanelles and the adjacent waters within the sphere of Ottoman influence!”
“So that is why you wanted them,” he said with an unhappy glance at Rue. “What idiotic impulse prompted me to put them back in the box I can’t imagine. You saw me do it, there in the taxicab.”
Ruhannah said:
“The chauffeur saw you, too. He was looking at you in his steering mirror; I saw his face. But it never entered my mind that anything except idle curiosity possessed him.”
“Perhaps,” said the Princess to Neeland, “what you did with the papers saved your life. Had that chauffeur not seen you place them in the box, he might have shot and robbed you as you left the cab, merely on the chance of your having them on your person.”
There was a silence; then Neeland said:
“This is a fine business! As far as I can see murder seems to be the essence of the contract.”
“It is often incidental to it,” said the Princess Mistchenka serenely. “But you and Ruhannah will soon be out of this affair.”
“I?” said the girl, surprised.
“I think so.”
“Why, dear?”
“I think there is going to be war. And if there is, France will be concerned. And that means that you and Ruhannah, too, will have to leave France.”
“But you?” asked the girl, anxiously.
“I expect to remain. How long can you stay here, Jim?”
Neeland cast an involuntary glance at Rue as he replied:
“I intended to take the next steamer. Why? Can I be of any service to you, Princess Naïa?”
The Princess Mistchenka let her dark eyes rest on him for a second, then on Rue Carew.
“I was thinking,” she said, “that you might take Ruhannah back with you if war is declared.”
“Back to America!” exclaimed the girl. “But where am I to go in America? What am I to do there? I — I didn’t think I was quite ready to earn my own living” — looking anxiously at the Princess Naïa— “do you think so, dear?”
The Princess said:
“I wanted you to remain. And you must not worry, darling. Some day I shall want you back —— But if there is to be war in Europe you cannot remain here.”
“Why not?”
“In the first place, only useful people would be wanted in Paris — —”
“But, Naïa, darling! Couldn’t I be useful to you?” The girl jumped up from the sofa and came and knelt down by the Princess Mistchenka, looking up into her face.
The Princess laid aside her cigarette and put both hands on Rue’s shoulders, looking her gravely, tenderly in the eyes.
“Dear,” she said, “I want James Neeland to hear this, too. For it is partly a confession.
“When I first saw you, Rue, I was merely sorry for you, and willing to oblige Jim Neeland by keeping an eye on you until you were settled somewhere here in Paris.
“Before we landed I liked you. And, because I saw wonderful possibilities in the little country girl who shared my stateroom, I deliberately made up my mind to develop you, make use of your excellent mind, your quick intelligence, your amazing capacity for absorbing everything that is best, and your very unusual attractions for my own purposes. I meant — to train you — educate you — to aid me.”
There was a silence; the girl looked up at her, flushed, intent, perplexed; the Princess Mistchenka, her hands on the girl’s shoulders, looked back at her out of grave and beautiful dark eyes.
“That is the truth,” said the Princess. “My intention was to develop you along the lines which I follow as a — profession; teach you to extract desirable information through your wit, intelligence, and beauty — using your youth as a mask. But I — I can’t do it — —” She shook her head slightly. “Because I’ve lost my heart to you.... And the business I follow is a — a rotten game.”
Again silence fell among those three; Rue, kneeling at the elder woman’s feet, looked up into her face in silence; Neeland, his elbows resting on his knees, leaned slightly forward from the sofa, watching them.
“I’ll help you, if you wish,” said Rue Carew.
“Thank you, dear. No.”
“Let me. I owe you everything since I have been here — —”
“No, dear. What I said to you — and to James — is true. It’s a merciless, stealthy, treacherous business; it’s dangerous to a woman, body and soul. It is one long lifetime of experience with treachery, with greed, with baser passions, with all that is ignoble in mankind.
“There is no reason for you to enter such a circle; no excuse for it; no duty urges you; no patriotism incites you to such self-sacrifice; no memory of wrong done to your nearest and dearest inspires you to dedicate your life to aiding — if only a little, in the downfall and destruction of the nation and the people who encompassed it!”
The Princess Mistchenka’s dark eyes began to gleam, and her beautiful face lost its colour; and she took Rue’s little hands in both of hers and held them tightly against her breast.
“Had I not lost my heart to you, perhaps I should not have hesitated to develop and make use of you.
“You are fitted for the rôle I might wish you to play. Men are fascinated by you; your intelligence charms; your youth and innocence, worn as a mask, might make you invaluable to the Chancellerie which is interested in the information I provide for it.
“But, Rue, I have come to understand that I cannot do this thing. No. Go back to your painting and your clever drawing and your music; any one of these is certain to give you a living in time. And in that direction alone your happiness lies.”
She leaned forward and kissed the girl’s hair where it was fine and blond, close to the snowy forehead.
“If war comes,” she said, “you and James will have to go home, like two good children when the curfew rings.”
She laughed, pushed Rue away, lighted another cigarette, and, casting a glance partly ironical, partly provocative, at the good-looking young man on the sofa, said:
“As for you, James, I don’t worry about you. Impudence will always carry you through where diplomacy fails you. Now, tell me all about these three unpleasant sporting characters who occupied the train with you.”
Neeland laughed.
“It seems that a well-known gambler in New York, called Captain Quint, is backing them; and somebody higher up is backing Quint — —”
“Probably the Turkish Embassy at Washington,” interposed the Princess, coolly. “I’m sorry, Jim; pray go on.”
“The Turkish Embassy?” he repeated, surprised that she should guess.
“Yes; and the German Embassy is backing that. There you are, Jim. That is the sequence as far as your friend, Captain Quint. Now, who comes next in the scale?”
“This man — Brandes — and the little chalk-faced creature, Stull; and the other one, with the fox face — Doc Curfoot.”
“I see. And then?”
“Then, as I gathered, there are several gentlemen wearing Teutonic names — who are to go into partnership with them — one named Kestner, one called Theodore Weishelm, and an exceedingly oily Eurasian gentleman with whom I became acquainted on the Volhynia — one Karl Breslau — —”
“Breslau!” exclaimed the Princess. “Now I understand.”
“Who is he, Princess?”
“He is the most notorious international spy in the world — a protean individual with aliases, professions, and experiences sufficient for an entire jail full of criminals. His father was a German Jew; his mother a Circassian girl; he was educated in Germany, France, Italy, and England. He has been a member of the socialist group in the Reichstag under one name, a memb
er of the British Parliament under another; he did dirty work for Abdul Hamid; dirtier for Enver Bey.
“He is here, there, everywhere; he turns up in Brazil one day, and is next in evidence in Moscow. What he is so eternally about God only knows: what Chancellery he serves, which he betrays, is a question that occupies many uneasy minds this very hour, I fancy.
“But of this I, personally, am now satisfied; Karl Breslau is responsible for the robbery of your papers today, and the entire affair was accomplished under his direction!”
“And yet I know,” said Neeland, “that after he and Kestner tried to blow up the captain’s cabin and the bridge aboard the Volhynia yesterday morning at a little after two o’clock, he and Kestner must have jumped overboard in the Mersey River off Liverpool.”
“Without doubt a boat was watching your ship.”
“Yes; Weishelm had a fishing smack to pick them up. Ilse Dumont must have gone with them, too.”
“All they had to do was to touch at some dock, go ashore, and telegraph to their men here,” said the Princess.
“That, evidently, is what they did,” admitted Neeland ruefully.
“Certainly. And by this time they may be here, too. They could do it. I haven’t any doubt that Breslau, Kestner, and Ilse Dumont are here in Paris at this moment.”
“Then I’ll wager I know where they are!”
“Where?”
“In the Hôtel des Bulgars, rue Vilna. That’s where they are to operate a gaming house. That is where they expect to pluck and fleece the callow and the aged who may have anything of political importance about them worth stealing. That is their plan. Agents, officials, employees of all consulates, legations, and embassies are what they’re really after. I heard them discussing it there in the train today.”
The Princess had fallen very silent, musing, watching Neeland’s animated face as he detailed his knowledge of what had occurred.
“Why not notify the police?” he added. “There might be a chance to recover the box and the papers.”
The Princess shook her pretty head.
“We have to be very careful how we use the police, James. It seems simple, but it is not. I can’t explain the reasons, but we usually pit spy against spy, and keep very clear of the police. Otherwise,” she added, smiling, “there would be the deuce to pay among the embassies and legations.” She added: “It’s a most depressing situation; I don’t exactly know what to do.... I have letters to write, anyway — —”
She rose, turned to Rue and took both her hands:
“No; you must go back to New York and to your painting and music if there is to be war in Europe. But you have had a taste of what goes on in certain circles here; you have seen what a chain of consequences ensue from a chance remark of a young girl at a dinner table.”
“Yes.”
“It’s amusing, isn’t it? A careless and innocent word to that old busybody, Ahmed Mirka Pasha, at my table — that began it. Then another word to Izzet Bey. And I had scarcely time to realise what had happened — barely time to telegraph James in New York — before their entire underground machinery was set in motion to seize those wretched papers in Brookhollow!”
Neeland said:
“You don’t know even yet, Princess, how amazingly fast that machinery worked.”
“Tell me now, James. I have time enough to write my warning since it is already too late.” And she seated herself on the sofa and drew Ruhannah down beside her.
“Listen, dear,” she said with pretty mockery, “here is a most worthy young man who is simply dying to let us know how picturesque a man can be when he tries to.”
Neeland laughed:
“The only trouble with me,” he retorted, “is that I’ve a rather hopeless habit of telling the truth. Otherwise there’d be some chance for me as a hero in what I’m going to tell you.”
And he began with his first encounter with Ilse Dumont in Rue Carew’s house at Brookhollow. After he had been speaking for less than a minute, Rue Carew’s hands tightened in the clasp of the Princess Naïa, who glanced at the girl and noticed that she had lost her colour.
And Neeland continued his partly playful, partly serious narrative of “moving accidents by flood and field,” aware of the girl’s deep, breathless interest, moved by it, and, conscious of it, the more inclined to avoid the picturesque and heroic, and almost ashamed to talk of himself at all under the serious beauty of the girl’s clear eyes.
But he could scarcely tell his tale and avoid mentioning himself; he was the centre of it all, the focus of the darts of Fate, and there was no getting away from what happened to himself.
So he made the melodrama a comedy, and the moments of deadly peril he treated lightly. And one thing he avoided altogether, and that was how he had kissed Ilse Dumont.
When he finished his account of his dreadful situation in the stateroom of Ilse Dumont, and how at the last second her unerring shots had shattered the bomb clock, cut the guy-rope, and smashed the water-jug which deluged the burning fuses, he added with a very genuine laugh:
“If only some photographer had taken a few hundred feet of film for me I could retire on an income in a year and never do another stroke of honest work!”
The Princess smiled, mechanically, but Rue Carew dropped her white face on the Princess Naïa’s shoulder as though suddenly fatigued.
CHAPTER XXVII
FROM FOUR TO FIVE
The Princess Mistchenka and Rue Carew had retired to their respective rooms for that hour between four and five in the afternoon, which the average woman devotes to cat-naps or to that aimless feminine fussing which must ever remain a mystery to man.
The afternoon had turned very warm; Neeland, in his room, lay on the lounge in his undershirt and trousers, having arrived so far toward bathing and changing his attire.
No breeze stirred the lattice blinds hanging over both open windows; the semi-dusk of the room was pierced here and there by slender shafts of sunlight which lay almost white across the carpet and striped the opposite wall; the rue Soleil d’Or was very silent in the July afternoon.
And Neeland lay there thinking about all that had happened to him and trying to bring it home to himself and make it seem plausible and real; and could not.
For even now the last ten days of his life seemed like a story he had read concerning someone else. Nor did it seem to him that he personally had known all those people concerned in this wild, exaggerated, grotesque story. They, too, took their places on the printed page, appearing, lingering, disappearing, reappearing, as chapter succeeded chapter in a romance too obvious, too palpably sensational to win the confidence and credulity of a young man of today.
Fed to repletion on noisy contemporary fiction, his finer perception blunted by the daily and raucous yell of the New York press, his imagination too long over-strained by Broadway drama and now flaccid and incapable of further response to its leering or shrieking appeal, the din of twentieth-century art fell on nerveless ears and on a brain benumbed and sceptical.
And so when everything that he had found grotesque, illogical, laboured, obvious, and clamorously redundant in literature and the drama began to happen and continued to happen in real life to him — and went on happening and involving himself and others all around him in the pleasant July sunshine of 1914, this young man, made intellectually blasé, found himself without sufficient capacity to comprehend it.
There was another matter with which his mind was struggling as he lay there, his head cradled on one elbow, watching the thin blue spirals from his cigarette mount straight to the ceiling, and that was the metamorphosis of Rue Carew.
Where was the thin girl he remembered — with her untidy chestnut hair and freckles, and a rather sweet mouth — dressed in garments the only mission of which was to cover a flat chest and frail body and limbs whose too rapid growth had outstripped maturity?
To search for her he went back to the beginning, where a little girl in a pink print dress, bare-legged and hatless,
loitered along an ancient rail fence and looked up shyly at him as he warned her to keep out of range of the fusillade from the bushes across the pasture.
He thought of her again at the noisy party in Gayfield on that white night in winter; visualised the tall, shy, overgrown girl who danced with him and made no complaint when her slim foot was trodden on. And again he remembered the sleigh and the sleighbells clashing and tinkling under the moon; the light from her doorway, and how she stood looking back at him; and how, on the mischievous impulse of the moment, he had gone back and kissed her ——
At the memory an odd sensation came over him, scaring him a little. How on earth had he ever had the temerity to do such a thing to her!
And, as he thought of this exquisite, slender, clear-eyed young girl who had greeted him at the Paris terminal — this charming embodiment of all that is fresh and sweet and fearless — in her perfect hat and gown of mondaine youth and fashion, the memory of his temerity appalled him.
Imagine his taking an unencouraged liberty now!
Nor could he dare imagine encouragement from the Rue Carew so amazingly revealed to him.
Out of what, in heaven’s name, had this lovely girl developed? Out of a shy, ragged, bare-legged child, haunting the wild blackberry tangles in Brookhollow?
Out of the frail, charmingly awkward, pathetic, freckled mill-hand in her home-made party clothes, the rather sweet expression of whose mouth once led him to impudent indiscretion?
Out of what had she been evolved — this young girl whom he had left just now standing beside her boudoir door with the Princess Naïa’s arm around her waist? Out of the frightened, white-lipped, shabby girl who had come dragging her trembling limbs and her suitcase up the dark stairway outside his studio? Out of the young thing with sagging hair, crouched in an armchair beside his desk, where her cheap hat lay with two cheap hatpins sticking in the crown? Out of the fragile figure buried in the bedclothes of a stateroom berth, holding out to him a thin, bare arm in voiceless adieu?
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 829
