The Confidential Agent Read Online Free PDF Page B

quaintness: superstition was interesting. There would be excellent libraries, but no new books. He preferred the distrust, the barbarity, the betrayals . . . even chaos. The Dark Ages, after all, had been his ‘period’.
    He said, ‘It isn’t really any good our talking. We have nothing in common – not even a manuscript.’ Perhaps this was what he had been painfully saved from by death and war. Appreciation and scholarship were dangerous things: they could kill the human heart.
    L. said, ‘I wish you would listen.’
    â€˜It would waste our time.’
    L. gave him a smile. ‘I’m so glad,’ he said, ‘at any rate, that you finished your work on the Berne MS. before this – wretched – war.’
    â€˜It doesn’t seem to me very important.’
    â€˜Ah,’ L. said, ‘now that is treachery.’ He smiled – wistfully; it wasn’t that war in his case had killed emotion: it was that he had never possessed more than a thin veneer of it for cultural purposes. His place was among dead things. He said whimsically, ‘I give you up. You won’t blame me, will you?’
    â€˜What for?’
    â€˜For what happens now.’ Tall and brittle, courteous and unconvincing, he disengaged himself – like a patron leaving an exhibition of pictures by somebody he has decided is, after all, not quite good enough: a little sad, the waspishness up the sleeve.
    D. waited a moment and then went back into the lounge. Through the double glass doors of the restaurant he could see the narrow shoulders bent again over the veal.
    The girl wasn’t at her table. She’d joined another party: a monocle flashed near her ear: the manager was imparting a confidence. He could hear their laughter – and the harsh childish voice he had heard from the bar in the third class, ‘I want another. I will have another.’ She was set for hours. Her kindness was something which meant nothing at all; she gave you a bun on a cold platform, offered you a lift and then left you abandoned half-way; she had the absurd mind of her class – which would give a pound note to a beggar and forget the misery of anybody out of sight. She belonged really, he thought, with L.’s lot, and he remembered his own, at this moment queuing up for bread or trying to keep warm in unheated rooms.
    He turned abruptly on his heel. It was untrue that war left you no emotions except fear: he could still feel a certain amount of anger and disappointment. He came back into the yard, opened the door of the car; an attendant came round the bonnet and said, ‘Isn’t the lady . . . ?’
    â€˜Miss Cullen’s staying the night,’ D. said. ‘You can tell her I’ll leave the car – to-morrow – at Lord Benditch’s.’ He drove away.
    He drove carefully, not too fast; it would never do to be stopped by the police and arrested for driving without a licence. A finger-post read, ‘London, 45 miles.’ With any luck he would be in well before midnight. He began to wonder what L.’s mission was. The note had given nothing away; it had simply said, ‘Are you willing to accept two thousand pounds?’; on the other hand, the chauffeur had searched his coat. If they were after his credentials they must know what it was he had come to England to get – without those papers he would have no standing at all with the English coal-owners. But there were only five people at home concerned in this affair – and every one of them was a Cabinet Minister. Yes, the people were certainly sold out by their leaders. Was it the old Liberal, he wondered, who had once protested at the executions? or was it the young pushing Minister of the Interior who perhaps saw more scope for himself under a dictatorship? But it might be any of them. There was no trust anywhere. All over the world there were people like himself who didn’t