He picked the telegram up from the floor and read it through again.
“Yes—Hanaud,” he repeated, his face clouding and growing bright and clouding again like a man catching at and just missing a very elusive recollection. He gave up the pursuit in the end. “Well, Jim, you had better take the two letters of Waberski, and Ann Upcott’s three-volume novel, and Betty’s telegram”—he gathered the papers together and enclosed them in a long envelope—“and I shall expect you back again with a smiling face in a very few days. I should like to see our little Boris when he is asked to explain those letters.”
Mr. Haslitt gave the envelope to Jim and rang his bell.
“There is someone waiting to see me, I think,” he said to the clerk who answered it.
The clerk named a great landowner, who had been kicking his heels during the last half-hour in an undusted waiting-room with a few mouldy old Law books in a battered glass case to keep him company.
“You can show him in now,” said Mr. Haslitt as Jim retired to his own office; and when the great landowner entered, he merely welcomed him with a reproach.
“You didn’t make an appointment, did you?” he said.
But all through that interview, though his advice was just the precise, clear advice for which the firm was quietly famous, Mr. Haslitt’s mind was still playing hide-and-seek with a memory, catching glimpses of the fringes of its skirt as it gleamed and vanished.
“Memory is a woman,” he said to himself. “If I don’t run after her she will come of her own accord.”
But he was in the common case of men with women: he could not but run after her. Towards the end of the interview, however, his shoulders and head moved with a little jerk, and he wrote a word down on a slip of paper. As soon as his client had gone, he wrote a note and sent it off by a messenger who had orders to wait for an answer. The messenger returned within the hour and Mr. Haslitt hurried to Jim Frobisher’s office.
Jim had just finished handing over his affairs to various clerks and was locking up the drawers of his desk.
“Jim, I have remembered where I have heard the name of this man Hanaud before. You have met Julius Ricardo? He’s one of our clients.”
“Yes,” said Frobisher. “I remember him—a rather finnicking person in Grosvenor Square.”
“That’s the man. He’s a friend of Hanaud and absurdly proud of the friendship. He and Hanaud were somehow mixed up in a rather scandalous crime some time ago—at Aix-les-Bains, I think. Well, Ricardo will give you a letter of introduction to him, and tell you something about him, if you will go round to Grosvenor Square at five this afternoon.”
“Capital!” said Jim Frobisher.
He kept the appointment, and was told how he must expect to be awed at one moment, leaped upon unpleasantly at the next, ridiculed at a third, and treated with great courtesy and friendship at the fourth. Jim discounted Mr. Ricardo’s enthusiasm, but he got the letter and crossed the Channel that night. On the journey it occurred to him that if Hanaud was a man of such high mark, he would not be free, even at an urgent call, to pack his bags and leave for the provinces in an instant. Jim broke his journey, therefore, at Paris, and in the course of the morning found his way to the Direction of the Sûrété on the Quai d’Horloge just behind the Palais de Justice.
“Monsieur Hanaud?” he asked eagerly, and the porter took his card and his letter of introduction. The great man was still in Paris, then, he thought with relief. He was taken to a long dark corridor, lit with electric globes even on that bright morning of early summer. There he rubbed elbows with malefactors and gendarmes for half an hour whilst his confidence in himself ebbed away. Then a bell rang and a policeman in plain clothes went up to him. One side of the corridor was lined with a row of doors.
“It is for you, sir,” said the policeman, and he led Frobisher to one of the doors and opened it, and stood aside. Frobisher straightened his shoulders and marched in.
III
Servants of Chance
Frobisher found himself at one end of an oblong room. Opposite to him a couple of windows looked across the shining river to the big Théâtre du Chatelet. On his left hand was a great table with a few neatly arranged piles of papers, at which a big, rather heavily-built man was sitting. Frobisher looked at that man as a novice in a duelling field might look at the master swordsman whom he was committed to fight; with a little shock of surprise that after all he appeared to be just like other men. Hanaud, on his side, could not have been said to have looked at Frobisher at all; yet when he spoke it was obvious that somehow he had looked and to very good purpose. He rose with a little bow and apologised.
“I have kept you waiting, Mr. Frobisher. My dear friend Mr. Ricardo did not mention your object in his letter. I had the idea that you came with the usual wish to see something of the underworld. Now that I see you, I recognise your wish is more serious.”
Hanaud was a man of middle age with a head of thick dark hair, and the round face and shaven chin of a comedian. A pair of remarkably light eyes under rather
