“Certainly, monsieur,” she said without hesitation; “that is geranium.”
“Are you quite sure,” I asked, “that it is not verbena?”
“Monsieur shall decide for himself,” was the ready reply, and the girl at once fetched samples of both perfumes. A single test was enough to show that she was correct. And then, recognising the purpose of the card, though she could not speak English, she practically duplicated Doris’s remark. “Is it not unusual, monsieur, to scent a wedding card?”
That set me thinking furiously. It was quite possible that Doris might have made a mistake about a point of social etiquette. But here was a young Frenchwoman corroborating her in quite a dramatic fashion.
“It is unusual; I suppose they are peculiar people,” I replied as I left.
It is one of the penalties of contra-espionage work that one becomes almost morbidly interested in the seemingly trivial. One of the first lessons to be learnt is that nothing is so small that it can be safely neglected. There were, it was obvious, many ways by which the card might have become accidentally impregnated with the perfume. But my intuitive suspicions grew ever stronger, and at last I found myself convinced that there was “something in it.”
In one particular, at any rate, the card was of first-rate importance. Try as we would, we had failed entirely to connect Cauvin with anyone in England. We were morally certain that he must be receiving messages and money in some subterranean way, but it was certainly not through the post, and up to the present we had failed to find, among his big list of acquaintances and friends, anyone whom we could reasonably suspect of being in touch with the Hidden Hand across the Straits of Dover. But there were many possible channels of communication through neutral countries, and obviously we could not stop them all.
Now, with the aid of the wedding card, it seemed possible, always assuming the card to be genuine, that I might be able to locate one person at least in England who was upon extremely friendly terms with our wealthy suspect. That chance, at any rate, whether the perfume meant anything or not, I was resolved not to miss.
Treachery was rife everywhere. In Russia, in Italy, in Roumania, in Greece, and in other countries, men of apparently impeccable reputation were one after another being unmasked in their true characters of agents of the enemy, and were paying the penalty of their perfidy. In France several first-class scandals of this kind had recently absorbed the attention of the public. That England had hitherto been comparatively free from any of these causes célèbres was due, as I well knew, not to the absence of culprits, but to the lazy British good nature, which, coupled with the apathy of men in high places who had always laughed to scorn the very idea of the German spy in England, refused to look unpleasant facts in the face unless they became unduly obtrusive. And the picked men of the Hun spy bureau could be trusted not to make themselves conspicuous!
The great Hun octopus does not advertise its presence. It puts its faith in the powerful god Mammon, always sure of finding willing victims, and his chief disciple, Blackmail. Some day or other I may be able to tell the story in more detail; it will certainly be of absorbing interest. At present, however, it must give way to the exigencies of the war situation. The Germans would be only too glad to learn just how much we know; the British public would probably explode into a blaze of indignation if they once fully realised the supine attitude of their rulers to the ever-present and ever-growing menace of the German spy in their midst.