His memory, especially for faces, was prodigious. Indeed, it was to this that I owed the beginnings of our friendship. Years before Luigi had been a waiter at the great buffet at Liverpool where passengers from the incoming American boats were in the habit of snatching a hasty meal before joining the train for London. I had arrived in England from New York cold and hungry, and, owing to some delay about my baggage, was unable to get to the restaurant until just before the London express was due to start.
I had not realised how long I had been delayed, and had just taken my first mouthful of the soup which Luigi had brought me when the bell heralding the immediate departure of the train rang loudly. With a muttered ejaculation of annoyance I hastily threw down on the table the price of my abandoned meal and rushed out, jumped into the train, and a moment later was speeding Londonwards, still cold and hungry and in the very worst of tempers.
Of course I promptly forgot the incident, and it was not until a year later that I was forcibly reminded of it. I had again arrived in Liverpool from New York and hurried to the same restaurant for a meal. By some queer chance I made for a table at which Luigi was still the waiter. I should not have known him, but he recollected me and our previous meeting.
With a profound bow and a smiling flash of his exquisite teeth, Luigi said quizzically: “Good evening, monsieur. Has monsieur returned for his dinner?”
I looked at him in blank astonishment for a moment, then burst into a roar of laughter, as I remembered both him and the long-forgotten incident of a year before. The ice was effectually broken between us, and when I left for London I felt I had made a friend of the smiling Italian. But it was years before I discovered how deep and loyal a mutual regard had sprung out of a trifling incident. But the best friendships not infrequently owe their origin to some such triviality.
Time had slipped by since then, and Luigi had climbed the ladder until the humble waiter was a power in the great cosmopolitan world of the hotel. But to me, at any rate, he was the Luigi of old; to others he might be merely the official head of a perfectly appointed hotel, where arrangements seemed to go by clockwork and no one ever heard of such a thing as failure. Always in a frock-coat, whatever the season, whatever the hour of the day; always wearing the diamond pin given him by a travelling monarch; always alert though never obtrusive; known to all his guests, but familiar with hardly any—such was Luigi Battini. And he was one of Hecq’s “friends.”
I had gone to Lucerne on purpose to learn something from his lips which he would not risk in the post, and what he had told me half an hour earlier had set me thinking deeply. It entirely confirmed certain information I had been able to gain in London and Lisbon.
After a long and meditative walk, I seated myself on the terrasse of a café overlooking the lovely Lake of Lucerne, and, with a bock before me, wrote out a telegram as follows:
“Arthon, Paris.—Returning London fourteenth.—Casentino.”
Having finished my bock, I strolled along to the chief telegraph office near the station and dispatched the message. To the uninitiated it conveyed no other meaning than appeared on the surface, but its receipt at the address for which it was destined set various elements of machinery in motion.