Mr. Ricardo sank down into his chair, exhausted by this second shock which trod so quickly upon the heels of the first.
“Really!” was all that he had the breath or the wit to say. “Really!”
Thus did Monsieur Hanaud, the big inspector of the Sûreté Générale, with the blue chin of a comedian, renew after a year’s interval his incongruous friendship with Mr. Ricardo. It had begun a lustrum ago in Aix-les-Bains, and since Hanaud took his holidays at a modest hotel of this pleasant spa, each August reaffirmed it. Mr. Ricardo was always aware that he must pay for this friendship. For now he was irritated to the limits of endurance by Hanaud’s reticence when anything serious was on foot; and now he was urged in all solemnity to expound his views, which were then rent to pieces, and ridiculed and jumped upon; and again he found himself as now the victim of a sort of schoolboy impishness which Hanaud seemed to mistake for humour, and was in any event totally out of place in a serious person. In return, Mr. Ricardo was allowed to know the inner terrible truth of a good many strange cases which remained uncomfortable mysteries to the general public. But there were limits to the price he was prepared to pay, and this morning Monsieur Hanaud had stepped beyond them.
“This is too much,” said Mr. Ricardo, as soon as he had recovered his speech. “You come into my room upon tiptoe and unannounced at a time when I am giving myself up to thought-concentration. You catch me—I admit it—in a ridiculous position, which is not half so ridiculous as your own. You are, after all, Monsieur Hanaud, a man of middle age—” and he broke off helplessly.
There was no use in making reproaches. Hanaud was not listening. He was utterly pleased with himself. He was absorbed in that pleasure. He kept lifting up his beard with that incredibly swift movement of his hand, saying to himself with startling violence: “Hanaudski, the Tcheka King,” and then flicking down the great valance of matted hair into its original position.
“Hanaudski, the King of the Tchekas! Hanaudski from Moscow! Hanaudski, the Terror of the Steppes!”
“And how long do you propose to go on with this grotesque behaviour?” Mr. Ricardo asked. “I should really be ashamed, even if I were able to excuse myself on the ground of Gallic levity.”
That phrase restored to Mr. Ricardo a good deal of his self-esteem. Even Hanaud recognised the shrewdness of the blow.
“Aha! You catch me one, my friend. A stinger. My Gallic levity. Yes, it is a phrase which punishes. But see my defence! How often have you said to me, and, oh, how much more often have you said to yourself: ‘That poor man Hanaud! He will never be a good detective, because he doesn’t wear false beards. He doesn’t know the rules and he won’t learn them.’ So all through the winter I grow sad. Then with the summer I shake myself together. I say: ‘I must have my dear friend proud of me. I will do something. I will show him the detective of his dreams.’ ”
“And instead, you showed me a cutthroat,” Mr. Ricardo replied coldly.
Hanaud disconsolately removed his trappings and folded them neatly in a pile. Then he cocked his head at his companion.
“You are angry with me?”
Mr. Ricardo did not demean himself to reply to so needless a question. He returned to his letter; and for a little while the temperature of the room even on that morning of sunlight was low. Hanaud, however, was unabashed. He smoked black cigarette after black cigarette, taking them from a bright blue paper packet, with now and then a whimsical smile at his ruffled friend. And in the end Mr. Ricardo’s curiosity got the better of his indignation.
“Here is a letter,” he said, and he took it across the room to Hanaud. “You shall tell me if you find anything odd about it.”
Hanaud read the address of an hotel in Biarritz, the signature and the letter itself. He turned it over and looked up at Mr. Ricardo.
“You draw my leg, eh?” he said; and proud, as he always was, of his mastery of English idioms, he repeated the phrase. “Yes, you draw my leg.”
“I don’t draw your leg,” Mr. Ricardo answered with a touch of his recent testiness. “A most unusual expression.”
Hanaud took the sheet of paper to the window and held it up to the light. He felt it between his fingers, and he saw his companion’s eyes brighten eagerly. There could be no doubt that Mr. Ricardo was very much in earnest about this simple invitation.
“No,” he said at length. “I read nothing but that you are bidden to the Château Suvlac for the vintage by a lady. I congratulate you, for the Bordeaux of the Château Suvlac is amongst the most delicate of the second growths.”
“That, of course, I knew,” said Mr. Ricardo.
“To be sure,” Hanaud agreed hastily and with all possible deference. “But I find nothing odd in this letter.”
“You were feeling it delicately with the tips of your fingers, as though some curious sensation passed from it into you.”
Hanaud shook his head.
“A mere question in my mind whether there was anything strange in the texture of the paper. But no! It is what a thousand hotels supply to their clients. What troubles you, my friend?”
With even more hesitation than Joyce Whipple had used, Mr. Ricardo repeated the account which she had given to him of her disquieting reactions to letters written in that hand. Joyce had confessed that even to herself, when she came to translate them into spoken words, they shredded away into nothing at all. How much more elusive they must sound related now at second hand to this hard-hearted trader in realities? But Hanaud did not scoff. Indeed a look of actual discomfort deepened the lines
