Motion Picture Classic (May 1921 - Dec 1927)

I MOTION PICTURE CLASSIC and George Wyndham came in, twisting his hat in his restless hands. Kent was about to greet him in the Hindu fashion but his visitor laughed derisively. “Dont try that hocus-pocus on me,” Wyndham scoffed, “you’re no more a native than I am. I’ve been watching you — you put the color on too thick! If you’ve ever looked closely, a Hindu isn’t one color, he’s a dozen different shades.” Kent bit his lip. “Very clever, my boy! You’ve probably formed some theory as to who I am then?” He laughed a trifle shortly, “a clear conscience is never suspicious. Perhaps you can give me some clue to the traitor who’s been selling the Mahajara English code messages?” With a snarl Wyndham thrust his face forward, and Kent read the expression that distorted it with a sense of shock. It was not guilt that lay behind that grey twitching skin, those distended eyeballs, those dry restless lips but fear, naked and unabashed. “Maybe I could — if I wanted to,” Wyndham choked, “but you’re on the wrong track. I haven’t sold those code messages, the man who did was ” With the name already taking shape on his lips, the boy stood still and then with horrible slowness pitched forward on his face at Kent’s feet ; at the same moment the shivered tenant George Wyndham, Wentworth’s aide, had a feeble mustache and a distrait manner that attracted Kent’s notice when — as they all rose to drink a toast to England — the wine glass fell from his nervous fingers and was smashed to fragments on the floor. After the dinner, while the others busied themselves about bridge tables and the visiting rajah had withdrawn with his host to smoke in the adjoining room, Kent asked Wentworth about his aide. “That toast business didn’t look to me like an accident,” he said under the cover of the laughter of the bridge players, “could he have secured those code messages?” Wentworth shook his head. “Impossible! What you noticed was simply nerves. I’m thinking of sending him home on sick leave. The climate gets the green ones sometimes — ” Kent listened absently. He was watching the bridge tables, especially the one where the Maharaja Jehan sat beside Norma Graves. The table cover was long, but in spite of that there was no doubt that the Hindu and the beautiful wife of the English officer were holding hands ! Moreover, Capt Graves was losing heavily, and instead of displaying a wifely solicitude over his ill luck Norma seemed quite reconciled. Indeed, Kent fancied that glances of amusement and understanding passed between her shallow blue eyes and the rajah’s dark heavy lidded ones. To be sure there was nothing particularly noteworthy in the fact that Graves’s wife was flirting with the Indian prince — Kent knew his India too well to think that. But he knew too that an attache’s pay was not royal enough to include bridge losses. If he had not been so inexperienced in woman-lore, he would have known also that the gown Norma wore was not the made-over, renovated, bravely contrived, defiantly dyed dinner dress usually worn by an officer’s wife. The party about the card tables broke up. The Maharaja departed, showering flowery compliments and honeyed words. The two women followed ; Doris turning in the doorway to look back at the new rajah and flushing as his gaze met hers. The pseudo-rajah salaamed gravely, but he stored the memory of that backward glance away in his heart to be brought out later and lingered over when he had this damned walnut juice off his face, and was a man again. Meanwhile there was his duty. Moving catfooted in his soft oriental slippers, Kent approached the door between the two rooms and stood in the shelter of the hangings watching Major Burnham and Captain Graves. “I’m telling you,” the Major was saying sulkily, “the game is getting too dangerous. It’s going to be found out sooner or later ” Kent drew noiselessly back as the Major cast a suspicious glance about him. Her father — but it couldn’t be. He simply would not believe it. In his own quarters he smoked two cigars to a stub over the problem. The words had been incriminating, and yet he had two reasons for not believing that they referred to the stolen code messages. The first was logical — a man who was clever enough to sell his country to a Hindu would be too clever to discuss the matter in a place where he might be overheard. The second reason was perhaps not' so logical, but to hismind more conclusive. A girl with such hair and eyes simply could not have a father who would do a thing like that. “But if it isn’t either the Major or Graves, then who the devil is it?” he muttered, aloud. As if in answer, a knock sounded on his door, Moving cat-footed in his soft oriental slippers, Kent approached the door between the two rooms and stood there watching Major Burnham and Captain Graves (Fifty-five)