“You got it?” I asked him.
He pointed to a large brown-paper parcel standing on the floor behind a pillar. “You want to test it first, sahib? You are very welcome because this is the absolute top class quality Beetle powder in the Sudan. One pinhead of this and you go jig-a-jig all night long and half the next day.”
I didn’t think he would have offered me a trial run if the stuff hadn’t been right, so I gave him the money and took the parcel.
An hour later, I was on the night train to Cairo. Within ten days, I was back in Paris and knocking on the door of Madame Boisvain’s house in the avenue Marceau. I had my precious parcel with me. There had been no trouble with the French customs as I disembarked at Marseilles. In those days, they searched for knives and guns but nothing else.
3
I ANNOUNCED to Madame B that I was going to stay for quite a while but that I had one request to make. I was a science student, I told her. She said she knew that. It was my wish, I went on, not only to learn French during my stay in France, but also to pursue my scientific studies. I would therefore be conducting certain experiments in my room which involved the use of apparatus and chemicals that could be dangerous or poisonous to the inexperienced. Because of this, I wished to have a key to my room, and nobody should enter it.
“You are going to blow us all up!” she cried, clutching her cheeks.
“Have no fear, madame,” I said. “I am merely taking the normal precautions. My professors have taught me always to do this.”
“And who will clean your room and make your bed?”
“I will,” I said. “This will save you much trouble.”
She muttered and grumbled a fair bit, but gave way to me in the end.
Supper with the Boisvains that evening was pigs’ trotters in white sauce, another repellent dish. Monsieur B tucked into it with all the usual sucking noises and exclamations of ecstasy, and the glutinous white sauce was smeared over his entire face by the time he had finished. I excused myself from the table just as he was preparing to transfer his false teeth from mouth to fingerbowl. I went upstairs to my room and locked the door.
For the first time, I opened my big brown-paper parcel. The powder had been packed, thank goodness, in two large biscuit tins. I opened one up. The stuff was pale grey and almost as fine as flour. Here before me, I told myself, lay what was probably the biggest crock of gold a man could ever find. I say “probably” because as yet I had no proof of anything. I had only the Major’s word that the stuff worked and the hall porter’s word that it was the genuine article.
I lay on my bed and read a book until midnight. I then undressed and got into my pyjamas. I took a pin and held it upright over the open tin of powder. I sprinkled a pinch of powder over the upright pinhead. A tiny cluster of grey powder grains remained clinging to the top of the pin. Very carefully, I raised this to my mouth and licked off the powder. It tasted of nothing. I noted the time by my watch, then I sat on the edge of the bed to await results.
They weren’t long coming. Precisely nine minutes later, my whole body went rigid. I began to gasp and gurgle. I froze where I was sitting, just as Major Grout had frozen on his veranda with the glass of whiskey in his hand. But because I’d had a much weaker dose than he had, this period of paralysis lasted only for a few seconds. Then I felt, as the good Major had so aptly put it, a burning sensation in the region of my groin. Within another minute, my member–and again the Major has said it better than I can–my member had become stiff and erect as the mainmast of a topsail schooner.
Now for the final test. I stood up and crossed to the door. I opened it quietly and slipped along the passage. I entered the bedroom of Mademoiselle Nicole, and surely enough, there she was tucked up in bed with the candle already lit, waiting for me. “Bon soir, monsieur,” she whispered, giving me another of those formal handshakes. “You have come along for your lesson number two, yes?”