“Free to go out?” she asked quickly.
“Of course.”
“With a policeman on either side of me, I suppose.”
“Not at all. You are as free in the hotel as though you were in your own house and you are free to go out and come in when you choose. I should like an assurance from you that you will not write any letters without my knowledge or attempt to leave Thonon without my permission.”
She gave Ashenden a long stare. She could not make it out at all. She looked as though she thought it a dream.
“I am in a position that forces me to give you any assurance you ask. I give you my word of honour that I will not write a letter without showing it to you or attempt to leave this place.”
“Thank you. Now I will leave you. I will do myself the pleasure of coming to see you tomorrow morning.”
Ashenden nodded and went out. He stopped for five minutes at the police-station to see that everything was in order and then took the cab up the hill to a little secluded house on the outskirts of the town at which on his periodical visits to this place he stayed. It was pleasant to have a bath and a shave and get into slippers. He felt lazy and spent the rest of the morning reading a novel.
Soon after dark—for even at Thonon, though it was in France, it was thought desirable to attract attention to Ashenden as little as possible—an agent from the police-station came to see him. His name was Félix. He was a little dark Frenchman with sharp eyes and an unshaven chin, dressed in a shabby grey suit and rather down at heel, so that he looked like a lawyer’s clerk out of work. Ashenden offered him a glass of wine and they sat down by the fire.
“Well, your lady lost no time,” he said. “Within a quarter of an hour of her arrival she was out of the hotel with a bundle of clothes and trinkets that she sold in a shop near the market. When the afternoon boat came in she went down to the quay and bought a ticket to Evian.”
Evian, it should be explained, was the next place along the lake in France and from there, crossing over, the boat went to Switzerland.
“Of course she hadn’t a passport, so permission to embark was denied her.”
“How did she explain that she had no passport?”
“She said she’d forgotten it. She said she had an appointment to see friends in Evian and tried to persuade the official in charge to let her go. She attempted to slip a hundred francs into his hand.”
“She must be a stupider woman than I thought,” said Ashenden.
But when next day he went about eleven in the morning to see her he made no reference to her attempt to escape. She had had time to arrange herself, and now, her hair elaborately done, her lips and cheeks painted, she looked less haggard than when he had first seen her.
“I’ve brought you some books,” said Ashenden. “I’m afraid the time hangs heavy on your hands.”
“What does that matter to you?”
“I have no wish that you should suffer anything that can be avoided. Anyhow, I will leave them and you can read them or not as you choose.”
“If you only knew how I hated you.”
“It would doubtless make me very uncomfortable. But I really don’t know why you should. I am only doing what I have been ordered to do.”
“What do you want of me now? I do not suppose you have come only to ask after my health.”
Ashenden smiled.
“I want you to write a letter to your lover telling him that owing to some irregularity in your passport the Swiss authorities would not let you cross the frontier, so you have come here, where it is very nice and quiet, so quiet that one can hardly realise there is a war, and you propose that Chandra should join you.”
“Do you think he is a fool? He will refuse.”
“Then you must do your best to persuade him.”
She looked at Ashenden a long time before she answered. He suspected that she was debating within herself whether by writing the letter and so seeming docile she could not gain time.
“Well, dictate and I will write what you say.”
“I should prefer you to put it in your own words.”
“Give me half an hour and the letter shall be ready.”
“I will wait here,” said Ashenden.
“Why?”
“Because I prefer to.”
Her eyes flashed angrily, but controlling herself she said nothing. On the chest of drawers were writing materials. She sat down at the dressing-table and began to write. When she handed Ashenden the letter he saw that even through her rouge she was very pale. It was the letter of a person not much used to expressing herself by means of pen and ink, but it was well enough, and when towards the end, starting to say how much she loved the man, she had been carried away and wrote with all her heart, it had really a certain passion.
“Now add: ‘The man who is bringing this is Swiss, you can trust him absolutely. I didn’t want the censor to see it.’ ”
She hesitated an instant, but then wrote as he directed.
“How do you spell ‘absolutely’?”
“As you like. Now address an envelope and I will relieve you of my unwelcome presence.”
He gave the letter to the agent who was waiting to take it across the lake. Ashenden brought her the reply the same evening. She snatched it from his hands and for a moment pressed it to her heart. When she read it she uttered a little cry of relief.
“He won’t come.”
The letter, in the Indian’s flowery, stilted English, expressed his bitter disappointment. He told her how intensely he had looked forward to seeing her and implored her to do everything in the world to smooth the difficulties that prevented her from crossing the frontier.
