Fantastic Stories Presents the Weird Tales Super Pack #2. Уильям Хоуп Ходжсон

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СКАЧАТЬ Seabury Quinn

      Last minute shopping at Liberty’s and the Garelies LaFayette had taken more time than I’d reckoned, and the six-seated compartment to which I’d been assigned on the Treves rapide was nearly filled when I finished checking through the provost marshal’s booth at the Gare del’Est and scuttled down the inner platform. Three of the four early arrivals I recognized: Amberson, who as a former New York police lieutenant had been assigned to the Intelligence; Weinberg of the Medical Corps, like me assigned to base hospital work in Treves; and Fontenoy apKern, an infantryman about to take up duties at the provost marshal’s office at the old walled city.

      The fourth man was unknown to me and, for no reason I could think of, I disliked him with the sudden spontaniety of a chemical reaction. The double braid on his cuffs marked him as a captain, and where the raccoon collar of his short coat was thrown back, I saw crossed rifles on the neckband of his blouse. His uniform was well-cut and expensive—English-made, I guessed—his blond hair neatly trimmed, his slim, long, white hands sleekly manicured. More of a fop than a soldier he seemed, some dandy from the fashionable East Fifties with a bullet-proof commission going from the secretariat at Paris to staff headquarters at Coblenz; but in the army one goes where he is sent and does the work they set him at.

      It wasn’t mere resentment of a grime-and-blood veteran for a pantywaist soldier that stirred my quick, instinctive dislike. It was the smug arrogance of him. Clear-cut as the image on a coin, his profile silhouetted against the window, high-cheeked, hard-eyed, sharp-chinned. Prussian as an oberleutnant of the Elite Guards Corp, that face would have seemed more in its proper setting above the field gray of a German uniform than the olive drab of our army.

      The stranger glanced up quickly at my advent, and I had a momentary glimpse of faintly sneering mouth and hard, cold, haughty eyes, then he resumed his reading of the Paris edition of the London Daily Mail.

      Greetings were in character: “Hullo,” said Amberson, sweeping me with the quick look of suspicion which is the mark of the professional policeman.

      “Thought you’d gone A.W.O.L.,” grinned Weinberg. “Wouldn’t blame you if you had. Lot o’ flu up Treves way; lots o’ work for us poor suckers in the M.C.”

      “Hi lug!” apKern saluted me. “Mopped ‘em all up on the Paris sector and goin’ up to croak a few in Germany?”

      The blond captain of infantry took no notice of me, nor any of us.

      I stumbled over an assorted lot of feet, stowed my duffel in the rack above my seat, and dropped down on the hard cushions. The place across from me was vacant, but a white card indicated it had been reserved. “Wonder who’ll draw it?” apKern wondered. “Pity the poor bloke, havin’ to look at your ugly mug from here to Treves. Gosh, when I came to up at Catigny and saw you starin’ at me, I thought I still was under ether and havin’ a bad dream! If I could a’ talked I’d a’ asked the nurse to slip me a fresh dose of anesthetic—”

      “Quiet!” cut in Weinberg. “Who’d know when you were conscious or anesthetized, anyhow? If I’d been there, I would a’ operated on you as they brought you in, you—” His amiable insults stopped half uttered, and a sudden blankness wiped expression from his face as he looked past apKern to the compartment door.

      Followed by a railway porter, a girl stood at the entrance. I felt my own heart skip a beat as I looked at her. Mentally I commented, “There ain’t no such animal.”

      She was quite young, not more than twenty-three or -four, quite breathtaking in her loveliness. A red cross gleamed upon her overseas cap, and beneath her heavy dark coat with its wide fur collar showed a white stock and the well-cut, smoothly-fitting whipcord uniform of the Red Cross Motor Corps. Three service chevrons on her left cuff showed she was no post-Armistice importation, and her utter lack of self-consciousness showed she was at home with soldiers. More like an effeminate boy than a young woman she seemed as she stepped lissomely between the rows of booted feet and dropped down in the seat across from me. I realized her eyes were golden, a light brown that was almost orange, harmonizing to perfection with her copper hair, her smooth pale cheeks, and slim red lips.

      When she took her cap off and shook her hair, I saw that it was close-cropped, almost like a man’s, and riotous with curls.

      I cast a glance at apKern, sitting two seats from her, and he must have read the malice in my eyes, for almost instantly he sounded off.

      “See this?” he tapped the dispatch case that rested on his knees. “Lot o’ valuable dope in here; list o’ suspected enemy agents and so forth I’m takin’ up to Treves. ‘Captain apKern,’ the general says to me, ‘I’ve got some very confidential documents to go to Germany. They’re so secret that I daren’t trust ‘em to an ordinary courier. Only a man of proved sagacity, indomitable courage, and more than usual cleverness can be entrusted with these papers, Captain. You’re going up to Treves, aren’t you?’

      “‘Sure, General,’ I tells him. I’m fed up with all this work in Paris; want to get where there’s a chance for action, so I’m joinin’ the M.P.’s at Treves. I’ll be happy to accommodate you by taking those papers, and you need fear nothing. They’ll be safe with me as if—’”

      “‘You published ‘em in the New York Times,’” completed Amberson sarcastically.

      I glanced across the narrow aisle at the girl. She was joining in the laugh that followed Amberson’s deflation of apKern. Her lips were opening like a flower, and a smile glowed in her orange eyes. “Lovely!” I whispered to myself. “Perfect—” as I eyed the long sweet line from her waist to knee, from knee to ankle, the small gentle bosom and the long slim hands and feet—“she’s just perfect.”

      The guard blew his absurd tin trumpet, and we slid out of the station, past the platform bright with French officers in fur coats or long capes of horizon blue, like birds of brilliant plumage among the somber O.D. of our own and British uniforms, through the blinking lights that marked the station yard and out into the fog-blurred night.

      The train had a wagon-restaurant, and presently the girl went forward, followed in a moment by apKern, Weinberg, and Amberson. I’d lunched late at the Café de la Paix and had no wish for food, so settled back in my seat with a copy of the Bystander.

      Our coach was German, taken over by the Allies, and a sign phrased with Teutonic arrogance stared at me from the farther wall of the compartment with the information that such indiscretions as smoking or falling from the window were stringently verboten under penalty of heavy fine. I grinned at it. I was an American soldier on my way to conquered territory. Presently their officers would be saluting me as I walked down the street, their civilians crowding to the curb to give me sidewalk-room. Their signs meant nothing to me, and I broke out a packet of Fatimas.

      “Smoke?” I proffered the pack to my silent companion.

      “No,” he returned shortly, never glancing up from his paper, and with renewed irritation I realized that he had not added “thank you,” to his refusal.

      In a little while the diners came back from their meal, on the best possible terms with each other, and I was duly presented to Miss Felicia Watrous of Philadelphia. Moved by common courtesy, I bent to catch the aloof infantryman’s eye, intending to introduce him. For just a moment he looked up at me above his paper, and I was fairly chilled by the cold challenge in his agate stare. To hell with him! All of us, except Amberson who was a major, were his equals in rank. Where did he get off treating us like a lot of railway porters? Let him read his London Daily Mail and be damned to him!

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