Wareham laughed.  He was thinking of ‘Captain Kettle,’ and said so.  But the would-be rescuer protested that all this was no romancing.  Oh! he was not a philanthropist, he should expect to be well paid for his services; but the Dreyfus family was rich, and M. Zola, too, was a man of means.  So surely they would not begrudge the necessary funds to release the unhappy prisoner from bondage.

But I replied that though the Dreyfus family and M. Zola also were anxious to see Dreyfus free, they were yet more anxious to prove his innocence.  Personally I knew nothing of the Dreyfus family, and could give no letter of introduction to any member of it, such as I was asked for.  And, as regards M. Zola, I was sufficiently acquainted with his character to say that he would never join in any such enterprise.  He intended to pursue his campaign by legal means alone, and it was useless to refer the matter to him.

Then the interview ended rather abruptly.  A French client of Wareham’s happened to call at that very moment, and was heard speaking in French in the hall.  This seemed to alarm the stranger, who ceased pressing his request that I should give him letters of introduction to prominent Dreyfusites.  He rose abruptly, saying that the time would come when we should probably regret having refused to entertain his proposals, and hurrying past the waiting French client he ran off down the Alexandra Road in much the same way as I myself subsequently ran off from the French ‘detectives’ who were simply harmless disciples of St. Cecilia.

To this day I do not know whether the man was a lunatic, an imposter seeking money, or an agent provocateur, that is, one who imagined that he might through me inveigle M. Zola into an illegal act which would lead to prosecution and imprisonment.  The last-mentioned status that I have ascribed to my interviewer is by no means an impossible one, considering the many dastardly attempts made to discredit and ruin M. Zola.  And yet, suspicious and abrupt as was the man’s leave-taking when he heard French being spoken outside Wareham’s private room (where the interview took place), I nowadays think it more charitable to assume that he was a trifle crazy.  One thing is certain, he had come to the wrong person in applying to me to aid and abet him in the foolhardy enterprise he spoke of.

This is the first time I have told this anecdote in any detail; but at the period when the incident occurred I spoke of it casually to a few friends, to which circumstance I am inclined to attribute the earlier paragraphs which appeared in the newspapers about American schemes for delivering Dreyfus.  The person whom I saw was, I believe, a German-American.

Well, this incident, preposterous as it may appear (but truth, remember, is quite as fantastic as fiction), had proved another link in the chain of suspicious occurrences in which I had been mixed up prior to M. Zola’s exile.  Other curious little incidents had followed, and thus for many months I had been living—­even as we lived long ago in besieged Paris—­in distrust of all strangers, and the climax had come with my foolish fears respecting a couple of French musicians.  The story I have told goes against me, but the man who cannot tell a story against himself when he thinks it a good one can have, I think, little grit in his composition.