LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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