Mystery at Geneva

Mystery at Geneva An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings
by Rose Macaulay
Author of "Dangerous Ages," "Potterism," etc.
LONDON: 48 PALL MALL
W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD,
GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND
Copyright 1922.
LONDON AND GLASGOW: W. COLLINS SONS AND CO. LTD.

NOTE
As I have observed among readers and critics a tendency to discern
satire where none is intended, I should like to say that this book is
simply a straightforward mystery story, devoid of irony, moral or
meaning. It has for its setting an imaginary session of the League of
Nations Assembly, but it is in no sense a study of, still less a skit on,
actual conditions at Geneva, of which indeed I know little, the only
connection I have ever had with the League being membership of its
Union.
1
HENRY, looking disgusted, as well he might, picked his way down the
dark and dirty corkscrew stairway of the dilapidated fifteenth century
house where he had rooms during the fourth (or possibly it was the fifth)
Assembly of the League of Nations. The stairway, smelling of fish and
worse, opened out on to a narrow cobbled alley that ran between lofty

mediaeval houses down from the Rue du Temple to the Quai du Seujet,
in the ancient wharfside quarter of Saint Gervais.
Henry, pale and melancholy, his soft hat slouched over his face, looked
what he was, a badly paid newspaper correspondent lodging in unclean
rooms. He looked hungry; he looked embittered; he looked like one of
the under dogs, whose time had not come yet, would, indeed, never
come. He looked, however, a gentleman, which, in the usual sense of
the word, he was not. He was of middle height, slim and not inelegant
of build; his trousers, though shiny, were creased in the right place; his
coat fitted him though it lacked two buttons, and he dangled a monocle,
which he screwed impartially now into one brown eye, now into the
other. If any one would know, as they very properly might, whether
Henry was a bad man or a good, I can only reply that we are all of us
mixed, and most of us not very well mixed.
Henry was, in fact, at the moment a journalist, and wrote for the British
Bolshevist^ a revolutionary paper with a startlingly small circulation;
and now the reader knows the very worst of Henry, which is to say a
great deal, but must, all the same, be said.
Such as he was, Henry, on this fine Sunday morning in September,
strolled down the Alle Petit Chat, which did not seem to him, as it
seems to most English visitors, in the least picturesque, for Henry was a
quarter Italian, and preferred new streets. and buildings to old. Having
arrived at the Quai du Mont Blanc, he walked along it, brooding on this
and that, gazing with a bitter kind of envy at the hotels which were
even now opening their portals to those more fortunate than he the
Bergues, the Paix, the Beau Rivage, the Angleterre, the Russie, the
Richemond. All these hostels were, on this Sunday morning before the
opening of the Assembly, receiving the delegates of the nations, their
staffs and secretaries, and even journalists. Crowds of little grave-faced
Japs processed into the Hotel de la Paix; the entrance hall of Les
Bergues was alive with the splendid, full-throated converse of Latin
Americans (" Ah, they live, those Spaniards!" Henry sighed); while at
the Beau Rivage the British Empire and the Dominions hastened, with
the morbid ardour of their race, to plunge into baths after their night

journey.
Baths, thought Henry bitterly. There were no baths in the Allee Petit
Chat. All his bathing must be done in the lake and cold comfort that
was. Henry was no lover of cold water: he preferred it warm.
These full-fed, well-housed, nobly cleaned delegates.... Henry quite
untruly reported to his newspaper, which resented the high living of
others, that some of them occupied as many as half a dozen rooms
apiece in the hotels, with their typists, their secretaries, and their
sycophantic suites.
Even the journalists, lodging less proudly in smaller hotels, or in
apartments, all lodged cleanly, all decently, excepting only Henry, the
accredited representative of the British Bolshevist.
Bitterly and proudly, with a faint sneer twisting his lips, Henry, leaning
against the lake-side parapet, watched the tumultuous arrival of the
organisers of peace on earth. The makers of the new world. What new
world? Where tarried it? How slow were its makers at their creative
task! Slow and unsure, thought Henry, whose newspaper was not of
those who approved the League.
With a sardonic smile Henry turned on his heel and pursued his way
along the Quai towards that immense hotel where the League