“It’s for me,” he cried with a little whoop of excitement. He snatched the envelope from her reluctant hand and tore it open. He read:
My dear friend,
I accuse the reception of your invitation...
and sat back, reflecting with toleration, “Yes, he would accuse something — it’s his nature to — and I have no doubt that he has signed his name like a peer of England.” He turned, to the back of the letter. There it was. “Hanaud” — just “Hanaud” — the name of terror.
“Really, really,” Mr. Ricardo said to himself and the smile of amusement passed from his lips.
After all, it was a year since he had invited Chief Inspector Hanaud of the Paris Sureté to spend a holiday in Grosvenor Square. Hanaud could have accused the reception of his letter a year ago. But he had not accused it. He had kept it on the chance that he might want to accuse it at a later time. And the time had come.
“But I don’t know,” said Mr. Ricardo indignantly, as he turned to the lady of the estaminet. “It is Madame Rollard, is it not?”
It certainly was Madame Rollard, as she assured him. But Mr. Ricardo was not thinking of Madame Rollard. He hit the offending letter with his knuckles.
“These are not manners.”
“No?”
“I do not keep a lodging house.”
“No?”
“Definitely no.” as though she had fathomed his troubles, and at each shake her body wobbled like a jelly.
“I must consider,” said Mr. Ricardo truculently.
“Yes, yes,” said Madame. “There must be thought, and no doubt Calvados to encourage it;” and she waddled back to her bar.
Over his second Calvados, Mr. Ricardo read the rest of Hanaud’s letter, and one sentence in it dispersed all his irritation: “Besides the holiday, there is a little thing I have to do, a little perplexity I have to make clear, in which I shall ask for your help.” The letter fluttered down upon Mr. Ricardo’s knees, and he drew in a breath and his face lost ten years of its age. Those little perplexities! Didn’t he know them? He would be insulted, ridiculed, outraged, baffled, humiliated, used. Yet there would be thrills, excitements, perils. Life would become once more a topaz instead of a turquoise. He would be helping to track great criminals to their doom. He and Hanaud, or, more probably, Hanaud and he.
Mr. Ricardo turned again to the letter; and in a few moments sprang to his feet. Hanaud would travel by the Channel steamer to Dover to-morrow. He would reach London by five, Grosvenor Square by five-thirty. But here was Ricardo, marooned in Lezardrieux. He rushed to the Post Office and sent off a telegram to his housekeeper. If only he were volatile enough to travel on that same beam! There was a midnight ship from Le Havre, but he couldn’t reach Le Havre. He came back into the square. Oh, he couldn’t sit in that iron chair by that iron table for two more days and, frankly, however much enthusiasm for Brittany might have hidden the truth from him at the beginning, he did not like Calvados. In despair he walked to the edge of the square and looked down into the pool. There were fishing boats drawn up on the beach, fishing boats afloat at anchor, and amongst them — yes, undoubtedly — a small ketch yacht. The water in the pool was so deep that the ketch was moored close enough under the hill to escape a careless eye. But to Mr. Ricardo’s envious gaze, the lustrous black paint of its sides, its white deck and burnished brass were as explicit as a dictionary.
“If I only owned it,” cried Mr. Ricardo, noting, to be sure, how calm was the air and the sky how cloudless.
And lo! there was a stir upon the deck. The ketch was slowly beginning to swing her bows towards the sea. Three men clambered from the fo’c’sle, removed the covers from the sails and the wheel and pulled the dinghy in to the starboard side.
Mr. Ricardo looked over his shoulder and saw Captain Mordaunt walking across the square to the path which slanted down the sand cliff to the beach.
“Captain Mordaunt,” he said, stepping to his side. Mr. Ricardo remembered him as a retired Captain of Grenadiers who passed from cocktail party to cocktail party but had no intimates; a man dissatisfied, jealous, with a grudge against the world. But there was no sign of discontent about him now. His face had smoothed out, there was a smile upon his lips, a friendliness in his manner.
“Yes, Mr. Ricardo.”
Ricardo looked down at the river. A hand was culling the dinghy towards the beach.
“That is your ketch.”
Mordaunt nodded his head.
“Agamemnon,” he said with a laugh. “There was a time when trawler-owners fancied high-sounding names. I didn’t change it when I bought her. But I added a bathroom.”
“Very convenient,” said Mr. Ricardo primly.
“Inevitable,” returned Captain Mordaunt. “Agamemnon without a bathroom? He would be alive now.”
Mr. Ricardo, whose acquaintance with the classics was limited, felt it prudent to titter. He added: “You are crossing to England?”
Captain Mordaunt became wary. He looked at the sky; he looked at Mr. Ricardo. “You would like a passage?”
“Yes.”
Captain Mordaunt nodded his head.
“Well,” he argued thoughtfully, “I have a spare cabin and the boat’s sound and the weather looks good. But it’s the fourth week in August and one can’t count on it, and if it should come on to blow, these little ketches bounce about a bit, and we’re very close to the water of course...”
Mr. Ricardo raised a deprecating hand.
“I am something of a yachtsman, too,” he said, with a smile; comrade to comrade, as it were.
“Indeed, several times Mr. Ricardo had sailed out of and back into Brightlingsea harbour on the Dutch barge of a friend, and once, on a smooth clear day of June, he had made the ocean voyage from Ryde to Weymouth, but when he said that he was a yachtsman, he was undoubtedly exaggerating. Mordaunt rather obviously doubted but accepted it.”
“Thank you,” and Mr. Ricardo hurried away to his lodging with a great show of pleasure.
But the pleasure was evaporating. Had he not, after all, been in a needless hurry? Who was Hanaud that he could not be left to investigate by himself for a day? There was no doubt he had been hasty. That was certainly a very small Agamemnon swinging round in the Pool, as Agamemnons go. Mr. Ricardo had a suspicion that Captain Mordaunt might have acquired greater merit if, instead of cramming a bathroom into this very small Agamemnon, he had bought a bigger Agamemnon with a bathroom in it already.
“Half an hour, Mr. Ricardo,” had said Captain Mordaunt.
“Half an hour,” Mr. Ricardo had repeated.
He gave instructions and money to his chauffeur, packed his suit-case, and was waiting on the beach when the nose of the dinghy grounded upon it.
CHAPTER 2
MEERSCHAUM
THE KETCH, WITH her propeller turning, slipped down the ten miles of the Lezardrieux river between the buoys and the lighthouses, turned eastwards at the mouth to avoid the sunken slabs, and wriggled out into the open sea. A steady wind was blowing on her beam. The engine was switched off, the sails hoisted, the log run out, and the course laid for the Start. The land sank out of sight.
Captain Mordaunt followed Mr. Ricardo down to the spare cabin in the stern of the ketch.
“We will dine early, if you don’t mind. There are only four of us all told, the skipper, the mate, the steward and myself, and at night we want two on deck when we are crossing the Channel, even if the night’s fine. I can, by the way, lend you a thick coat and a yachting cap.”
The first sign of any change came, indeed, when they were eating their dinner, side by side on the cushioned lounge in the little saloon. The ketch rose and dipped suddenly with a thud, as if it had met some unexpected swell of the sea and, a few moments later, the sheets of the mainsail rattled on the deck as the great wing of canvas was drawn in. Mordaunt looked up at the tell tale compass fixed above his head.
“The wind has shifted to the north,” he said.
The yachtsman o
f the quiet waters looked anxiously at his host. “Is that” — he searched for a word— “awkward?” he asked, hoping that the tremor was unnoticeable in his voice. After all, they were a very long way from the land.
Mordaunt shrugged his shoulders.
“Prolongs our passage. A cigar?” He reached for a box behind on the shelf. “Try those dates in brandy! We’ll have some coffee,” and he rang the hand-bell.
But whilst they drank their coffee, the movement of the ketch increased. To Mr. Ricardo she seemed now to hop forward and come down with a noisy crunch. Mordaunt smiled.
“There’s some wind somewhere ahead of us,” he said. “Let’s go up and see. You had better put that thick coat on.”
When they stepped from the tiny deck-house on to the deck, Mr. Ricardo was disturbed.
“Glary,” said Hamlin the skipper at the wheel; glary it certainly was. The sun was sinking in the west, a plate without effulgence, a plate as yellow as an old spade guinea. The kindness had all died out of the sky and, when the sun had gone, there were left a livid glare, a cold sea and this little ship alone in the midst of it.
Mordaunt looked up at the topsail.
“We might carry on until we get the weather news,” he said. For these were the days before the Second War, when Broadcasting House flung out her warnings and good tidings to all the ships on the near seas.
By nine o’clock night was closing in. Mr. Ricardo was seated in a corner of the deckhouse. Mordaunt leaned over a small receiver mounted on a revolving pedestal. Hamlin’s big figure blocked the doorway as he bent to listen; and suddenly, startlingly, a new voice spoke clearly out of the darkness at their elbows, giving them the weather report.
“A deep depression over Ireland is moving rapidly to the south-east. There will be a gale in the Channel to-night.”
“As a rule, that gives us half an hour,” said Hamlin. He and Mordaunt were out of the deck-cabin in an instant, leaving Ricardo almost sick with indignation against the radiant cheerful voice which had announced the direful news.
“Doesn’t he know we’re out here in a cockle-shell?” he exclaimed. “He’s going home to have supper — a nice hot supper in a nice hot room — on land! And we’re here, drowned men practically.”
But there was activity enough upon the deck. A storm jib was set, the topsail taken down and folded away with the big jib in the locker, the main and mizzen sails were reefed, and the sidelights burning brightly lifted on their shelves. The ship was snug and her crew clothed in oilskins and high boots.
Mr. Ricardo stood in the doorway of the cabin looking forward over its roof. The ketch still rose and dipped upon the unbroken swell, but ahead in the darkness lines of white ran out to right and left on the crests of waves with extraordinary speed.
“Here it comes,” said Mordaunt. He raised his hand to the mizzen rigging on the port side. Hamlin, the skipper, was at the wheel, lifting the boat gently up to the wind. Mordaunt grinned at Ricardo.
“I should go down and get into your bunk whilst you can,” he cried.
Mr. Ricardo shook his head. That was quite unthinkable.
“I’ll stay in the deckhouse for a little,” he said, and then more bravely, “This is a new experience for me.”
He crouched on the divan in the deckhouse with a foot against the rail-guard of the companion, and a few moments afterwards the gale broke upon them like an army. A wave smote the ketch so that it shuddered. Its crest leaped gaily over the port bow and ran in streams along the deck, whilst the bulk of it roared away to leeward from under the keel in an angry tumble of white fire.
“Disappointed, that’s what it was,” Mr. Ricardo began, but he could not go on.
For all about them was noise, noise unbelievable and yet combined into an awful harmony. The waves hammered and roared; the wind shrilled through the rigging like a Sabbath of lost souls; the planks groaned and clamoured that not for one moment longer could they cling together; and, above all other sounds, the topping-lift thrashed the belly of the mainsail with the crack of a hundred pistols.
Ricardo was terrified into a hopeless acquiescence.
“It can’t go on,” he said to himself as he clutched at anything which was clutchable in the deck-cabin. “That’s all. It can’t go on.”
But it did go on, hour after hour, until Mr. Ricardo actually dozed and then woke to an incident very pleasant but quite incredible. Mordaunt was at the helm, the skipper by the port rigging, when Mordaunt held the ship up to meet a more passionately venomous wave than any which had gone before. The two men bent their heads as the brine cut their faces like a whiplash.
“That was a nasty one,” cried the skipper.
“A beast!” answered Mordaunt; and then, to Ricardo’s stupefaction, they laughed, not with the wry laughter of the defeated, but heartily, enjoyably.
“Well, perhaps, after all” thought Ricardo. He was glad that he had not taken Mordaunt’s advice and retired to his bunk. He would have been ice-cold with terror. He couldn’t say that it was warm up here in the deckhouse, but it was friendly, and near to people who could laugh at the right moment. Again Mr. Ricardo dozed and woke; and now the mate was at the wheel whilst Mordaunt stood on one side unclenching his frozen fingers and Hamlin upon the other. Suddenly they all looked up and, as they looked, a ghostly twilight was diffused about the world. Mr. Ricardo was in the mood to believe that here at last was the Day of Judgement, so unillumined was the light, so pallid the faces lifted to it. But the mate broke the solemnity of the moment by asserting “’Tis the dawning,” and after both men had stared at him in admiration of his optimism, the laughter and the raillery were renewed. The mate was the incorrigible consoler. Somewhere, high up, beyond apprehension, and almost beyond faith, a full moon was riding in a blue sky and some sliver of its radiance slipped through. Mr. Ricardo clambered through the doorway and looked forward over its roof, clinging with both hands. As far as the eyes could reach, great black seas, like mountains, raced after each other in a riot of foam, whilst above his head the swaying topmast seemed on the point of scraping and snapping; a roof of grey cement, so solid and so low was the canopy of cloud. But whilst he watched the chink closed up again and once more there was no light but the white fire of the waves and the more friendly gleam of the binnacle lamp.
Mr. Ricardo scrambled back to his corner in the deck house. He pulled up the cushion behind him so that his head rested more comfortably upon it.
“After all, we’re still afloat,” he reflected. “I have not been seasick—” this he put down less to his panic than to his quality as a yachtsman— “and those three men, though they are unalarmed, are watchful.”
They were more than ever watchful now, it seemed. For more and more often he heard the man in the bows sing out: “Light ahead, sir.”
And more and more often the answer from the man at the wheel: “Right!”
For they were crossing now the crown of the great trunk road which flows from Ushant to the Port of London.
To the sound of those cries Mr. Ricardo fell asleep, and was only awakened by someone shaking him by the shoulder. Mordaunt was leaning over him.
“We can see the light at Start Point,” he said.
The motion of the ship had diminished, the noise had lost its terror, they were feeling the protection of the land, the gale was dying. Again Mr. Ricardo stood at the cabin door and looked forward. All was darkness, but in a few seconds he saw, as at the end of a long black iron tube, a faint glimmer which broadened out to the likeness of a beautiful incandescent moth and shrivelled again into nothing. Mordaunt, at his side, began to count: “One, two, three..”
He counted up to twenty, and the light shone again.
“Yes, Start Point,” said Mordaunt. “But, of course, we’re a long way from it yet.”
Mr. Ricardo stayed thereafter at the deckhouse door, and so was a witness of the incident which made that night more than ever memorable to him and perplexed the forgotten Hanaud for so long.
“Look out, sir!” cried Hamlin, the skipper, sharply to Mordaunt at the wheel. “She’s a dago with the cabin-boy in command and all the rest of ’em asleep.”
It was that spectral hour between night and dawn when all is magnified and yards are miles. Mordaunt held his ketch up until he had shaken what wind there was out of her sails; and it was lucky that he did, for his bowsprit hardly scraped clear of the iron monster’s side.
“There! I told you, didn’t I?” cried Hamlin, and he pointed to where a light shone on the name upon a buoy. “A dago!”
All could read the name. El Rey. But they had hardly time to read it. For a cry, like a wail, was borne to them urgently upon the breeze.
Men who sail in little boats are accustomed to see in the dark of the night and bad weather light on land, where there is no land, and to hear voices from the sea, where no men are drowning — so accustomed that they do not speak of them lest they should be thought to talk foolishly. So now Mordaunt and his crew looked each to the other, hesitating whether they should seem to have heard. But the cry reached them again, weaker, yet nearer, and just over the port bow.
The mate shouted “Hold on!” and cutting a life-buoy loose from the main rigging, hurled it out. The ketch was lying now, head in to the wind, with its sails flapping. Hamlin pulled up out of its slots the panel of bulwark which opened the port gangway and, flinging himself on his face, leaned over the side. The mate and the steward joined him, one upon his knees, the other with a boathook in his hands. From his, position at the wheel Mordaunt could see nothing of what was happening, but something or someone was being lifted on board.
It was someone, a slim young man with hair as black as ebony, and a face of a pallor so thick that it could hardly ever before have met the daylight. So Mordaunt thought, until the rescued man was stretched on deck. He was alive but snatching at the air in his exhaustion.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 150