“You were right, Raymond.” Leon Gonsalez stripped his thin coat and threw it on a chair. “The accuracy of your forecasts is almost depressing. I am waiting all the time for the inevitable mistake, and I am irritated when this doesn’t occur. You said the snake would reappear, and the snake has reappeared. Prophesy now for me, O seer!”
Poiccart’s heavy face was gloomy; his dark eyes almost hidden under the frown that brought his bushy eyebrows lower.
“One hasn’t to be a seer to know that our association with Barberton will send the snake wriggling towards Curzon Street,” he said. “Was it Gurther or Pfeiffer?”
Manfred considered.
“Pfeiffer, I think. He is the steadier of the two. Gurther has brain-storms; he is on the neurotic side. And that nine-thonged whip of yours, Leon, cannot have added to his mental stability. No, it was Pfeiffer, I’m sure.”
“I suppose the whip unbalanced him a little,” said Leon. He thought over this aspect as though it were one worth consideration. “Gurther is a sort of Jekyll and Hyde, except that there is no virtue to him at all. It is difficult to believe, seeing him dropping languidly into his seat at the opera, that this exquisite young man in his private moments would not change his linen more often than once a month, and would shudder at the sound of a running bath-tap! That almost sounds as though he were a morphia fiend. I remember a case in ’99 . . . but I am interrupting you?”
“What precautions shall you take, Leon?” asked George Manfred.
“Against the snake?” Leon shrugged his shoulders. “The old military precaution against Zeppelin raids; the precaution the farmer takes against a plague of wasps. You cannot kneel on the chest of the vespa vulgaris and extract his sting with an anæsthetic. You destroy his nest—you bomb his hangar. Personally, I have never feared dissolution in any form, but I have a childish objection to being bitten by a snake.”
Poiccart’s saturnine face creased for a moment in a smile.
“You’ve no objection to stealing my theories,” he said dryly, and the other doubled up in silent laughter.