Read Online The Alien by Josephine Bell - Free Book Online Page B

the Curtain – I am in a position to pass on – If you understand me?’’
    â€œI will do my best,’’ said Boris, gravely.
    The old man showed him out, but did not go downstairs with him to the door of the house. He watched from his top landing until he saw Boris reach the hall at the foot of the stairs. Then he went inside and closed and chained the door of his flat.
    â€œWell?’’ he said to the general. “He is indeed the son of my old friend.’’
    The general said, “Yes. ‘I am Boris Sudenic,’ he said, ‘to you and all of my friends.’ He has other names, you know. Or perhaps you don’t know that.’’
    â€œHe spoke freely.’’
    â€œBut we have learned nothing. His feelings seemed to be perfectly sincere. All that he said was true. Except—’’
    â€œExcept what?’’
    â€œI will bring someone else to see you. Then you will know. But Sudenic will of course deny anything unfavourable to himself.’’
    â€œHe is my friend’s son. I think he spoke the truth to us tonight.’’
    â€œHe always does.’’ The general laughed and held out his glass again. “He always does. He always has.’’

Chapter Six
    The offices of the Baltic Trading Company took up one corridor, a quarter of the square building’s fourth floor. The lift-shaft was central. The four corridors went off diagonally from it. This made the rooms leading from them a peculiar shape which charmed or maddened visitors according to their various temperaments. Some, of course, noticed nothing because they never did take any interest in their surroundings. About a third of the Baltic Trading Company’s clients were like that. They dealt in wood.
    The rooms in the B.T.C. corridor opened on either side of it in a staggered pattern so that secretaries and messengers rushing out on an errand could not collide with one another. All the first six rooms had half-glassed walls on to the corridor, but those farther along, where the higher executives worked, and the two rooms of the managing director’s working suite at the very end, had plain surfaces of enamelled paint. In the sharp angle of the two outer walls where they met at one corner of the building a large pseudo-classical urn in concrete sustained a very large arrangement of leafy branches and heavy flowers, spot-lit from below and at the sides. This arrangement, taken with the fact that the wood-tiled surface of the first part of the corridor here gave place to a thick, grey carpet, never failed to impress the casual visitor or the new-comer, though regular customers, as also the managing director himself, had long ago ceased to be aware of it. The flowers were renewed by contract with a local florist and watered, except at week-ends, by the managing director’s principal secretary, who also looked after the smaller, scented flowers on his desk.
    A few days after Boris’s dinner-party with the free Poles he found himself engaged upon a particularly heavy trayful of letters for translation. Most of them were in German or French, one or two in Norwegian, which he laid on one side. It was not one of his five languages. Two were in Polish. These he also laid aside. When he eventually took them up he spent considerably more time over them than he had done over all the others.
    Margrethe Olsen, the secretary, came into his small room a few minutes before the lunch break. Boris was leaning back in his chair staring at a calendar on the wall.
    â€œAll ready for you,’’ he said, without turning.
    She saw that he was looking at her in the glass of a small mirror that hung above the calendar. She smiled and he smiled back.
    â€œI can never catch you out,’’ she said, in a low voice, “however quietly I open your door.’’
    â€œMy hearing is good,’’ he answered, quite seriously, “and I have had much