BUT for Olivia’s unquestioning faith in him he would not have pulled
through this passport quagmire. At every fresh lie he dreaded lest her
credulity should reach the breaking point. For he had to lie once
more—and this time with revulsion and despair.
He began the abominable campaign the next evening after dinner. He had
been absent all day, on the vague plea of business. In reality he had
walked through London and wandered about the docks, Ratcliffe Highway,
the Isle of Dogs. He had returned physically and spiritually worn out.
Her solicitude smote him. It was nothing. A little worry which the sight
of her would dispel. They dined and went into the drawing-room. She sat
on the arm of his chair.
“And now the worry, poor boy. Anything I can do?”
He stared into the fire. “It’s our trip.”
“Why, what has gone wrong?”
“Everything,” he groaned.
“But, darling!” She gripped his shoulder. “What do you mean?”
“I’m afraid it’s a beautiful dream, my dear. We must call it off.”
She uttered a breathless “Why?”
“It’s far beyond our means.”
She broke into her gay laugh and hugged him and called him a silly
fellow. Hadn’t they settled all that side of it long ago? Her fingers
were itching to draw cheques. She had scarcely put pen to pink paper
since their marriage. Hadn’t he insisted on supporting her?
“And I’ll go on insisting,” said he. “I’m not the man to live on my
wife’s money. No, no——” with uplifted hand he checked her generous
outburst. “I know what you’re going to say, sweetheart, but it can’t be
done. I was willing for you to advance a certain amount. But I would
have paid it back—well, I would have accepted it if it gave you
pleasure. Anyhow, things are different now. Suddenly different.”
He writhed under the half-truths, the half-sincerities he was speaking.
In marrying her his conscience absolved him of fortune seeking. It had
been the pride of his Northumbrian blood to maintain his wife as she
should be maintained, out of his earnings—this draft on her fortune for
the jaunt he had made up a Tyneside mind to repay. Given the passport,
the whole thing was as simple as signing a cheque. But no passports to
be given, he had to lie. How else, in God’s name, to explain?
“My dear,” said he, in answer to her natural question, “there’s one
thing about myself I’ve not told you. It has seemed quite unimportant.
In fact, I had practically forgotten it. But this is the story. During
my last flight through Russia a friend, one of the old Russian nobility,
gave me shelter. He was in hiding, dressed as a peasant. His wife and
children had escaped the Revolution and were, he was assured, in
England. He entrusted me with a thousand pounds in English bank-notes
which he had hidden in a scapulary hanging round his neck, and which I
was to give to his family on my arrival. I followed his example and hung
the few paper roubles I had left, together with his money, round my
neck. As you know, I was torpedoed. I was hauled out of the water in
shirt and drawers, and landed penniless. The string of the scapulary had
broken, and all the money was at the bottom of the North Sea. I went to
every conceivable Russian agency in London to get information about the
Vronsky family. There was no trace of them. I came to the conclusion
that they had never landed in England, and to-day I found I was right.
They hadn’t. They had disappeared off the face of the earth.”
“To-day?” queried Olivia.
“This morning. I had a letter from Vronsky forwarded by the publishers.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” cried Olivia. “I had an idea you weren’t quite
yourself.”
“I didn’t want to worry you without due reason,” he explained, “and I
was upset. It was like a message from the dead. For, not having heard of
him all this time, I concluded he had perished, like so many others, at
the hands of the Bolsheviks. Anyhow, there he was alive in a little
hotel in Bloomsbury. Of course, I had to go and rout him out.”
“Naturally,” said Olivia.
“Well, I found him. He had managed to escape, with the usual
difficulties, and was now about to search Europe for his family.”
“What a terrible quest,” said Olivia, with a shudder.
“Yes. It’s awful, isn’t it?” replied Triona in a voice of deep
feeling—already half beginning himself to believe in the genuineness of
his story—“I spent a heart-rending day with him. He had expected to
find his family in England.”
“But you wrote to him——”
“Of course. But how many letters to Russia reach their destination?
Their letters, too, have miscarried or been seized. He hadn’t had news
of them since they left Petrograd.”
Carried away by the tragedy of this Wandering Jew hunt for a lost
family, Olivia forgot the reason for its recital. She questioned, Triona
responded, his picturesque invention in excited working. He etched in
details. Vronsky’s declension from the ruddy, plethoric gentleman, with
good-humoured Tartar face, to the gaunt, hollow-eyed grey-beard, with
skinny fingers on which the nails grew long. The gentle charm of the
lost Madame Vronsky and the beauty of her two young daughters, Vera and
Sonia. The faithful moujik who had accompanied them on their way and
reported that they had sailed on the _Olger Danske_ from Copenhagen for
London. He related their visit to Lloyds, where they had learned that no
such ship was known. Certainly at the time of the supposed voyage it had
put into no British port. Vronsky was half mad. No wonder.
“Why did you leave him? Why didn’t you bring him here?” asked Olivia,
her eyes all pity and her lips parted.
“I asked him. He wouldn’t come. He must begin his search at once—take
ship for Denmark. . . . Meanwhile, dearest,” he said after a pause,
“being practically without resources, he referred to his thousand
pounds. That’s where you and I come in. He entrusted me with the money
and the accident of losing it could not relieve me of the
responsibility—could it?”
He glanced a challenge. Her uprightness waved it aside.
“Good heavens, no!”
“Well, I took him to my bank and gave him the thousand pounds in Bank of
England notes. So, my dear, we’re all that to the bad on our balance
sheet. We’re nearly broke—and we’ll have to put off our trip round the
world to more prosperous times.”
Although, womanlike, she tried at first to kick against the pricks,
parading the foolish fortune lying idle at the bank, that was the end of
the romantic project. Her common sense asserted itself. A thousand
pounds, for folks in their position, was a vast sum of money. She
resigned herself with laughing grace to the inevitable, and poured on
her husband all the consolation for disappointment that her heart could
devise. Their pleasant life went on. Deeply interested in Vronsky, she
questioned him from time to time. Had he no news of the tragic wanderer?
At last, in February, he succumbed to the temptation to finish for ever
with these Frankenstein monsters. He came home one afternoon, and after
kissing her said with a gay air:
“I found a letter at Decies Street”—the house of his publishers—“from
whom do you think? From Vronsky. Just a few lines. He tracked his family
to Palermo and they’re all as happy as can be. How he did it he doesn’t
say, which is disconcerting, for one would like to know the ins and outs
of his journeyings. But there’s the fact, and now we can wipe Vronsky
off our slate.”
In March the novel appeared. Reviewers lauded it enthusiastically as a
new note in fiction.
The freshness of subject, outlook, and treatment appealed to the vastly
superior youth, the disappointed old, and the scholarly and
conscientious few, who write literary criticism. The great firm of
publishers smiled urbanely. Repeat orders on a gratifying scale poured
in every day. Triona took Olivia to Decies Street to hear from
publishing lips the splendid story. They went home in a taxi-cab, their
arms around each other, intoxicated with the pride of success and the
certainty of their love. And the next day Olivia said:
“If we can’t go round the world, at any rate let us have a holiday. Let
us go to Paris. We can afford it.”
And Triona, who for months had foreseen such a reasonable proposal,
replied:
“I wish we could. I’ve been dreaming of it for a long time. In fact—I
didn’t tell you—but I went to the Foreign Office a fortnight ago.”
She wrinkled her brow.
“What’s the Foreign Office got to do with it?”
“They happen to regard me as an exceptional man, my dearest,” said he.
“I’m still in the Secret Service. I tried last summer to get out of
it—but they overpersuaded me, promising not to worry me unduly. One
can’t refuse to serve one’s country at a pinch, can one?”
“No. But why didn’t you tell me?”
She felt hurt at being left out in the cold. She also had a sudden fear
of the elusiveness of this husband of hers, hero of so many strange
adventures and interests that years would not suffice for their complete
revelation. She remembered the dug-up Vronsky romance, in itself one
that might supply the ordinary human being with picturesque talk for a
lifetime. And now she resented this continued association with the
Foreign Office which he thought he had severed on his return from
Finland.
“I never imagined they would want me again, after what I told them. But
it seems they do. You know the state of things in Russia. Well—they may
send me or they may not. At any rate, for the next few months I am not
to leave the country.”
“I call that idiotic,” cried Olivia indignantly. “They could get at you
in Paris just as easily as they could in London.”
“They’ve got the whip hand, confound them,” replied Triona. “They grant
or refuse passports.”
“The Foreign Office is a beast!” said Olivia. “I’d like to tell them
what I think of them.”
“Do,” said he with a laugh, “but don’t tell anybody else.”
She believed him. He breathed again. The difficulty was over for the
present. Meanwhile he called himself a fool for not having given her
this simple explanation months ago. Why had he racked his conscience
with the outrageous fiction of the Vronskys?
About this time, too, in her innocence, she raised the question of his
technical nationality. It was absurd for him to continue to be a Russian
subject. A son of English parents, surely he could easily be
naturalized. He groaned inwardly at this fresh complication, and cursed
the name of Triona. He put her off with vague intentions. One of these
days . . . there was no great hurry. She persisted.
“It’s so unlike you,” she declared, uncomprehending. “You who do things
so swiftly and vividly.”
“I must have some sort of papers establishing my identity,” he
explained. “My word won’t do. We must wait till there’s a settled
government in Russia to which I can apply. I know it’s an unsatisfactory
position for both; but it can’t be helped.” He smiled wearily. “You
mustn’t reproach me.”
“Reproach you—my dearest——?”
The idea shocked her. She only had grown impatient of the intangible
Russian influences that checked his freedom of action. Sometimes she
dreaded them, not knowing how deep or how sinister they might be. Secret
agents were sometimes mysteriously assassinated. He laughed at her
fears. But what else, she asked herself, could he do but laugh? She was
not reassured.
The naturalization question settled for an indefinite time, he felt once
more in clear water. Easter came and went.
“If I don’t move about a little, I shall die,” he said.
“Let us move about a lot,” said Olivia. “Let us hire a car and race
about Great Britain.”
He waxed instantly enthusiastic. She was splendid. Always the audacious
one. A car—a little high-powered two-seater. Just they two together.
Free of the high road! If they could find no lodgings at inns they could
sleep beneath the hedges. They would drive anywhere, losing their way,
hitting on towns with delicious unexpectancy. The maddest motor tour
that was ever unplanned.
In the excitement of the new idea, the disappointment over the
prohibited foreign travel vanished from their hearts. Once more they
contemplated their vagabondage, with the single-mindedness of children.
“We’ll start to-morrow,” he declared.
“To-morrow evening is the Rowingtons’ dinner-party,” Olivia reminded
him.
He confounded Rowington and his dinner-party. Why not send a telegram
saying he was down with smallpox? He hated literary dinner-parties. Why
should he make an ass of himself in a lion’s skin—just to gratify the
vanity of a publisher? Olivia administered the required corrective.
“Isn’t it rather a case of the lion putting on an ass’s skin, my dear?
Of course we must go.”
He laughed. “I suppose we must. Anyway, we’ll start the day after. I’ll
see about the car in the morning.”
He went out immediately after breakfast, and in a couple of hours
returned radiant. He was in luck, having found the high-powered
two-seater of his dreams. He overwhelmed her with enthusiastic
technicalities.
“You beloved infant,” said Olivia.
But before they could set out in this chariot of force and speed,
something happened. It happened at the dinner-party given by Rowington,
the active partner in the great publishing house, in honour of their
twice-proved successful author.
The Rowingtons lived in a mansion at the southern end of Portland Place.
It had belonged to his father and grandfather before him and the house
was filled with inherited and acquired treasures. On entering, Triona
had the same sense of luxurious comfort as on that far-off day of the
first interview in Decies Street, when his advancing foot stepped so
softly on the thick Turkey carpet. A manservant relieved him of his coat
and hat, a maid took Olivia for an instant into a side-room whence she
reappeared bare-necked, bare-armed, garbed, as her husband whispered, in
cobweb swept from Heaven’s rafters. A manservant at the top of the
stairs announced them. Mrs. Rowington, thin, angular, pince-nez’d, and
Rowington, middle-aged, regarding the world benevolently through gold
spectacles, received them and made the necessary introduction to those
already present. There was a judge of the High Court, a well-known
novelist, a beautiful and gracious woman whom Olivia, with a little
catch of the heart, recognized as the Lady Aintree who had addressed a
passing word of apology to her in the outgoing theatre crush in the
first week of her emancipation. She envied Alexis who stood in talk with
her. She herself was trying to correlate the young and modern bishop, in
plum-coloured evening dress, with the billow of lawn semi-humanized by a
gaunt staring head and a pair of waxen hands which had gone through the
dimly comprehended ritual of her confirmation.
He explained his presence in this brilliant assembly on the ground that
once he had written an obscure book of travels in Asia Minor. St. Paul’s
steps retraced. He had fought with beasts at Ephesus—but not of the
kind to which the apostle was presumed to refer; disgusting little
beasts! He also swore “By Jove!” which she was sure her confirming
bishop would never have done.
A while later, as the room was filling up, she found herself talking to
a Colonel Onslow, an authority on Kurdistan, said her hostess, who was
anxious to meet her husband. She glanced around, her instinctive habit,
to place Alexis. He had been torn from Lady Aintree and was standing
just behind her by the chimney-piece in conversation with a couple of
men. His eyes caught the message of love in hers and telegraphed back
again.
He no longer confounded Rowington. The central figure of this
distinguished gathering, he glowed with the divine fire of success. He
was talking to two elderly men on Russian folk literature. On that he
was an authority. He knew the inner poignancy of every song, the bitter
humour of every tale. Speaking sober truth about Russia he forgot that
he had ever lied.
Suddenly into the little open space about the hearth emerged from the
throng, a brisk, wiry man with a keen, clean-shaven, weather-beaten
face, who, on catching sight of Triona, paused for a startled second and
then darted up to him with outstretched hand; and Triona, taken off his
guard, made an eager step to meet him.
If, for two days, you have faced death alone with a man who has given
every proof of indomitable courage and cheerfulness, your heart has an
abominable way of leaping when suddenly, years afterwards, you are
brought with him face to face.
“You are Briggs! I knew I was right. Fancy running up against you here!”
Triona’s cheeks burned hot. The buried name seemed to be shrieked to the
listening universe. At any rate, Olivia heard; and instinctively she
drifted from the side of Colonel Onslow towards Alexis.
“It’s a far cry from Russia,” he said.
“Yes, and a far cry from the lower deck of an armoured car,” laughed the
other. “Well, I am glad to see you. God knows what has happened to the
rest of us. I’ve been one of the lucky ones. Got a ship soon afterwards.
Retired now. Farming. Living on three pigs and a bee. And you”—he
clapped him on the shoulder—“you look flourishing. I used to have an
idea there was something behind you.”
It was then that Triona became conscious of Olivia at his elbow. He put
on a bold face and laughed in his careless way.
“I have my wife behind me. My dear—this is Captain Wedderburn. We met
in Russia.”
“We did more than meet, by George!” cried Wedderburn breezily. “We were
months together in the Column——”
“What Column?” asked Olivia, puzzled.
“The Armoured Car Column. I forget what the humour of war rated him as.
Able Seaman, I think. I was Lieutenant then. It was a picnic, I assure
you. And there were the days—he and I alone together—I’ll never forget
’em—we got cut off—but he has told you all about it.”
“No.”
“My dear Mrs. Briggs——”
“Pardon me,” Alexis interrupted hastily. “But that’s not my name. It was
literally a _nom de guerre_. My real name is Triona.”
“Eh?” Wedderburn put his hands on his narrow hips and stared at him.
“The famous chap I was asked to meet to-night? Mrs. Triona, your husband
is a wonderful fellow. The months that were the most exciting time in my
life, anyhow, he hasn’t thought it worth while mentioning in his book.
And yet”—his keen eyes swept like searchlights over the other’s
face—“you were knocked out. I remember the day. And you must have been
a long time in hospital. How the deuce did you manage to work everything
in?”
“I was only scratched,” said Triona. “A week or two afterwards I was
back in the Russian service.”
“I see,” said Wedderburn with unexpected frostiness.
He turned to greet a woman of his acquaintance standing near, and
husband and wife were left for a few seconds alone.
“You never told me about serving with the British forces.”
“It was just an interlude,” said he.
The hostess came up and manœuvred them apart. Dinner was announced. The
company swept downstairs. Olivia sat between her host and Colonel
Onslow, Lady Aintree opposite, and next her, Captain Wedderburn. For the
first time in her married life Olivia suffered vague disquiet as to her
husband’s antecedents. The rugged-faced, bright-eyed man on the other
side of the table seemed to hold the key to a phase of his life which
she had never heard. She wished that he were seated elsewhere, out of
sight. It was with a conscious effort that she brought herself to listen
intelligently to her host who was describing his first meeting with the
now famous Alexis Triona, then valiantly driving hireling motor-cars
under the sobriquet of John Briggs. She felt a touch of ice at her
heart. For the second time that night she had heard the unfamiliar name.
Alexis had told her, it is true, of his early struggles in London while
writing _Through Blood and Snow_, but of John Briggs he had breathed no
word.
The talk drifted into other channels until she turned to her neighbour,
Colonel Onslow, who after a while said pleasantly:
“I’m looking for an opportunity of a chat with your husband, Mrs.
Triona. From his book, he seems to have covered a great deal of my
ground—and it must have been about the same time. It’s strange I never
came across him.”
“I don’t think so,” she replied. “His Secret Service work rather
depended on his avoidance of other European agents.”
Colonel Onslow yielded laughingly to the argument. Of course, that was
quite understandable. Every man had his own methods. No game in the
world had more elastic rules.
“On the other hand, I knew a Russian on exactly the same lay as your
husband, a fellow Krilov, a fine chap—I ran into him several times—who
was rather keen on taking me into his confidence. And one or two of the
things he told me were so identical with your husband’s experiences,
that it seems they must have hunted in couples.”
“Oh, no, he was on his own, I assure you,” said Olivia.
“Anyhow, I’m keen to meet him,” said Onslow, unaware of the growing fear
behind the girl’s dark eyes. “I only came home a month ago. Somebody
gave me the book. When I read it I went to my friend Rowington and asked
about Alexis Triona. That’s how I’m here.”
Presently, noticing her air of constraint, he said apologetically, “You
must be fed up with all this ancient history. A wanderer like myself is
apt to forget that the world is supposed to be at peace and is even
rather bored with making good the damage of war.”
Olivia answered as well as she could, and for the rest of the
interminable meal strove to exhibit her usual gay interest in the talk
around.
But her heart was heavy with she knew not what forebodings. She could
not see Alexis, who was seated on the same side and at the other end of
the long table. She felt as though the benevolent gold-spectacled man
had deliberately convened an assembly of Alexis’s enemies. It was a
blessed relief when the ladies rose and left the men; but in the
drawing-room, although she was talking to Lady Aintree, most winningly
gracious of women, her glance continuously sought the door by which the
men would enter. And when they came in his glance, for the first time in
their married life, did not seek or meet hers. She scanned his face
anxiously. It was pale and drawn, she thought, and into his eyes had
crept the furtive look of a year ago which happiness, she thought, had
dispelled for ever. He did not come near her; nor did Wedderburn and
Onslow; nor did the two latter talk to him; he was swallowed up in a
little group at the further end of the room. Meanwhile, the most
up-to-date thing in bishops sank smilingly into a chair by her side, and
ridden by some ironical Imp of the Inapposite described to her a visit,
in the years past, to the Castle of Schwöbbe in Hanover, where dwelt the
Baron von Munchausen, the lineal descendant of the famous liar. A
mythical personage? Not a bit. Munchausen was one of Frederick the
Great’s generals. He had seen his full-length portrait in the Rittersaal
of the old Schloss. Thence he began to discourse on the great liars of
travel. Herodotus, who was coming more and more into his own as a
faithful historian; John Mandeville; Fernando Mendez Pinto, a name now
forgotten, but for a couple of centuries a byword of mendacity; Gemelli
Carreri, the bed-ridden Neapolitan author of a _Voyage Round the World_;
the Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela who claimed to have ridden a hippogriff to
the tomb of Ezekiel; George Psalmanazar, who captivated all London
(including so level-headed a man as Samuel Johnson) with his history of
the Island of Formosa and his grammar of the Formosan language; de
Rougemont, the turtle-riding impostor of recent years; and the later
unfortunate gentleman whose claim to have discovered the North Pole was
so shockingly discredited. The bishop seemed to have made a hobby of
these perverters of truth and to look on them (as in theological duty
bound), wriggling through the lake of fire and brimstone, in the light
of Izaak Walton’s counsel concerning the worms threaded on the hook, as
if he loved them. Then there were the notorious Blank and Dash and Dot,
still living. Types, said he, of the defective criminal mind, by mere
chance skirting round the commonly recognized area of crime.
Olivia, with nerves on edge, welcomed the matronly swoop of Mrs.
Rowington.
“My dear Bishop, I want to introduce you——”
He rose, made a courtly bow to Olivia.
“I’ll read your lordship’s next book of travel with great interest,” she
said.
* * * * *
As the home-bound taxi drove off:
“Thank goodness that’s over,” said Triona.
She echoed with a sigh: “Yes, thank goodness.”
“All the bores of the earth.”
“Did you have a talk with Colonel Onslow?” she asked.
“The biggest of the lot. I’m sick to death of the Caucasus,” he added
with unusual irritation. “I wish I had never been near it. I hate these
specially selected dinner parties of people you don’t want to meet and
will never meet again.” He took her hand, which was limp and
unresponsive. “Did you have a rotten time, too?”
“I wish we hadn’t gone,” she replied, withdrawing her hand under the
pretext of pulling her cloak closer round her shoulders.
He rolled and lit a cigarette and smoked gloomily. At last he said with
some impatience:
“Of course, I didn’t mention the little episode with the British Force.
It would have been out of the picture. Besides, nothing very much
happened. It was a stupid thing to do—I had no right. That’s why I took
an assumed name—John Briggs.”
“And you used it when you landed in England. Mr. Rowington told me.”
“Of course, dear. Alexis Triona, chauffeur, would have been absurd,
wouldn’t it?” He turned to her with the old eagerness.
This time it was she who thrust out a caressing hand, suddenly feeling a
guilty horror of the doubts that had beset her.
“I wish you would tell me everything about yourself—the details you
think so unimportant. Then I wouldn’t be so taken aback as I was this
evening, when Captain Wedderburn called me Mrs. Briggs.”
“I’ll write you a supplementary volume,” said he, “and it shall be
entitled _Through Love and Sunshine_.”
The ring in his voice consoled her. He drew her close to him and they
spoke little till they reached their house. There, in the dining-room,
he poured out a stiff whisky-and-soda and drank it off at a gulp. She
uttered a startled, “My dear!” at the unusual breach of abstemious
habit.
“I’m dog-tired,” said he. “And I’ve things to do before I go to bed.
Don’t wait for me.”
“What things?”
“To-night has given me an idea for a story. I must get it, dear, and put
it down; otherwise—you know—I shan’t sleep.”
She protested. His brain would be fresher in the morning. Such untimely
artistic accouchment had, indeed, happened several times before, and,
unless given its natural chances had occasioned a night of unrest; but
never before had there been this haggardness in his face and eyes. Again
the doubts assailed her. Something that evening had occurred to throw
him off his balance.
“If anything’s worrying you, dear, do tell me,” she urged, her clasp on
the lapels of his dress-coat and her eyes searching his.
He took her wrists, kissed her, and laughed, as she thought, uneasily.
Worries? He hadn’t an anxiety in the world. But this idea—it was the
germ of something big. He must tackle it then and there. Led, his arm
around her body, to the door, she allowed herself to be convinced.
“Don’t be too long.”
“And you go to sleep. You must be tired.”
Left alone, Triona poured himself out another whisky and soda. In one
evening he had suffered two shocks, for neither of which his easy nature
had prepared him. The Wedderburn incident he could explain away. But
from the blind alley into which he was pinned by Colonel Onslow, there
had been but a horrible wriggling escape. It was a matter, too, more
spiritual even than material. He felt as though he had crawled through a
sewer.
He went to his desk by the window, and from a drawer took out his
despatch case, which he unlocked with the key that never left his
person; and from it he drew the little black book. There, half-erased,
in pencil on the reverse of the cover, was the word, in Russian
characters, “Krilov.” Hitherto he had regarded this as some unimportant
memorandum of name or place. It had never occurred to him that it was
the name of the owner of the diary. But now, it stared at him accusingly
as the signature of the dead man whose soul, as it were, he had robbed.
Krilov. There was no doubt about it. Onslow had known him, that
fine-featured grizzled-haired dead man, in his vehement life. He had
heard from his lips the wild adventures which he had set down with such
official phlegm in the little black book, and which he, Alexis Triona,
had credited to himself, and had invested with the wealth of his poet’s
imagination. Of course, he had lied, on his basis of truth, to Colonel
Onslow, disclaimed all knowledge of Krilov. It had been the essence of
the old Russian régime that secret agents should have no acquaintance
one with another. It was a common thing for two men, unsuspectingly, to
be employed on an identical mission. The old Imperial service depended
on this system of checks. If the missions were identical, the various
incidents were bound to be similar. He had defended his position with
every sophistical argument his alert brain could devise. He drew, as red
herrings across the track, the names of obscure chieftains known to
Colonel Onslow, whom he had not mentioned in his book; described
them—one long-nosed, foxy, pitted with smallpox; another obese and
oily; to Colonel Onslow’s mind irrefutable evidence of his acquaintance
with the country. But as to narrated incidents he had seen puzzled
incredulity behind the Colonel’s eyes and had felt his semi-accusing
coldness of manner when their conversation came to an end.
He replenished a dying fire and sat down in an arm-chair, the despatch
case by his side, the book in his hands—the little shabby black book
that had been his Bible, his mascot, the fount of all his fortunes. His
fingers shook with fear as he turned over the familiar pages. The dead
man had come to life, and terrifyingly claimed his own. The room was
very still. The creak of a piece of furniture caused him to swing round
with a start, as though apprehensive of Krilov’s ghostly presence. He
must burn the book, the material evidence of his fraud. But the fire was
sulky. He must wait for the blaze, so that there should be no doubt of
the book’s destruction. Meanwhile his nerves were playing him insane
tricks. His ordeal had shaken him. He sought the steadying effect of
another whisky.
He leaned back in his chair. It had been an accursed evening. Once more
he had to lie to Olivia, and this time she appeared to be struggling
with uncertainty. There had been an unprecedented aloofness in her
attitude. Yes. He spoke the words aloud, “an unprecedented aloofness,”
at first with strange unsuccess and then with solemn deliberation; and
his voice sounded strange to his ears. If she suspected—but, no, she
could not suspect. His head grew heavy, his thoughts confused. The fire
was taking a devil of a time to burn up. Still, he was beginning to see
his way clearer. The whisky was a wonderful help to accurate thinking.
What an ass he had been not to recognize the fact before! Besides—the
roof of his mouth was parched with thirst.
The diabolical notebook had to be destroyed. But first there must be
flame in the grate. That little red glow would do the trick. It was only
a question of patience.
“Just a matter of patience, old man,” said he.
* * * * *
A couple of hours afterwards, Olivia, in nightdress and wrapper, entered
the room. The fire had gone out under its too heavy load of coal. Before
it sprawled Alexis, asleep. On the small table beside him stood the
whisky decanter, whose depleted contents caused Olivia to start with a
gasp of dismay. His drunken sleep became obvious. She made an
instinctive vain effort to arouse him. But the first pang of horror was
lost in agonized search for the reason of this amazing debauch. He, the
most temperate of men, by choice practically a drinker of water, to have
done this! Could the reason lie in the events of the evening which had
kept her staringly awake? She cowered under the new storm of doubt.
On the floor lay open a little dirty-paged book which must have fallen
from his hand. She picked it up, glanced through it, could make nothing
of it, for it was all in tiny Russian script. The horrible relation
between this derelict book and the almost emptied whisky decanter
occurred to her oversensitive brain. Then came suddenly the memory of a
stupid argument of months ago at The Point and his justification of the
plagiarist. Further, his putting of a hypothetical case—the finding on
the body of a dead man a notebook with leaves of the thinnest
paper. . . . She held in her hand such a notebook. It dropped from her
nerveless fingers. Suddenly she sprang with a low cry to her husband and
shook him by the shoulders.
“Alexis. Alexis. Wake up. For God’s sake.”
But the unaccustomed drug of the alcohol held him in stupor. She tried
again, wildly.
“Alexis, wake up and tell me what I think isn’t true.”
At last she realized that he would lie there until the effect of the
whisky had worn off. Mechanically, she put a cushion behind his head and
adjusted his limbs to a position of comfort. Mechanically, too, she put
the stopper in the decanter and replaced the siphon on the silver tray,
and with her scrap of a handkerchief tried to remove the ring which the
wet siphon had made on the table. Then she looked hopelessly round the
otherwise undisturbed and beloved room. What could be done until Alexis
should awaken?
She would go to bed. Perhaps she might sleep. She felt as though she had
been beaten from head to foot.
The despatch box lay open on the hearthrug, the key in the lock. Its
secrecy had hitherto been a jest with her. She had sworn it contained
locks of hair of Bluebeard victims. He had given out a legend of Secret
Service documents of vast importance. Now it was obvious that, at any
rate, it was the repository of the little black book.
She hesitated on the threshold. Her instinct of order forbade her to
leave the despatch box open and the book trailing about the floor. She
would lock the book up in it and put the key in one of Alexis’s pockets.
But when, having picked up the small leather box and carried it to the
desk, she prepared to do this, a name written on a common piece of paper
half in print—an official form—stared brutally at her. And there were
others underneath. And reading them she learned the complete official
history of John Briggs, Able Seaman, from the time of his joining the
Armoured Column in Russia to his discharge, after his mine-sweeper had
been torpedoed in the North Sea.
Olivia, her dark hair falling about the shoulders of her heliotrope
wrap, sat in her husband’s writing-chair, staring at him with tragic
eyes as he slept, his brown hair carelessly sweeping his pale brow, and
kept a ghastly vigil.