Operation Pax Read Online Free PDF

and disagreeable to him. This being so, he had not gone another fifty yards before entrenching himself firmly in his first conviction. There was something very deep in the situation with which he had involuntarily become involved. And out of its depths Routh with all his wits about him might conceivably fish what, for him, would be fabulous wealth. He was proceeding to entertain himself with some details of this beatific vision when he and his conductor rounded the larch spinney and came full upon the house.

 
     
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    He had often enough seen such places from the road, but never before had he come so close up to one as this.
    Squire’s house – if it was indeed his – was very large, and Routh knew that it had grown up over the centuries. The chief architectural feature of the side at which he was directly looking was an affair of high Corinthian pillars running up past three storeys of windows to a blank entablature and pediment. All this, he saw, was not of stone but of some stuff that needs to be painted. It was, in fact, painted dead white, giving an impression that Routh was supposed to be American. But to the left of this was warm red brick enclosing mullioned windows and rising to a succession of gable-ends behind which stood tall Tudor chimneys. Beyond this again, and running off at an angle, was a wing that had at some date been heavily Gothicized, and that now lurked behind meaningless buttresses and groaned beneath improbable battlements. These vagaries accounted for about half the building, the rest of which was a solid Georgian.
    Routh’s awareness of all this was intuitive rather than technical. The effect, as of several houses backing awkwardly into each other, was for a moment as disturbing to him as some horror glimpsed in a doctor’s medical journal in a railway carriage, a monstrous birth of twins or triplets fantastically conjoined. But he told himself that once more he was unprofitably fancying things. All the more tangible suggestions that the condition of the place evoked were of prosperity, serenity and cheerfulness.
    Well-kept lawns and gravel walks, tall dark hedges trimmed to severe perpendiculars, a few broad beds of massed chrysanthemums: these seemed to speak of a taste in gardens that was mature and good. There was a wide shallow terrace now steeped in sunshine and serving as a promenade for half a dozen miniature poodles of expensive appearance and extravagant clip. Several French windows were thrown open to the air, and gave upon expanses of turf or paving so lavishly equipped with garden furniture of the elaborated modern sort, that the effect was of handsomely equipped drawing-rooms tumbling out of doors to breathe. Nor was the placid scene without its congruous humanity. A five-year-old boy, sturdy and flaxen-haired, was playing with the poodles. And on a lawn directly below Routh and Squire a company of ladies and gentlemen were enjoying a game of croquet.
    A variety of impulses jostled in Routh. Here were half a dozen demonstrably sane persons, engaging in one of the mildest of civilized pleasures. Would it not be best to seize the chance of rushing forward, throwing himself upon their mercy, and claiming their protection from the abominable Squire? For whatever was the truth about Squire he was certainly dangerous, and the shadowy possibilities of financial exploitation which he represented lurked amid hazards quite out of Routh’s common line.
    But even as Routh debated with himself this course of action, he became aware of a further bewilderment in his situation. The croquet players puzzled and alarmed him quite as much as Squire did. The sharp clop … clop … clop of wood upon wood as a military-looking man with a grey moustache achieved a brisk break was obscurely frightening. If Squire was patently sinister and his house indefinably so, then this spectacle was like a calculated effect designed to enhance the fact. The croquet players were disturbingly enigmatical. Routh