Look at the mere facts.You have never seen the man before, you--""Oh, the mere facts," he cried out in a kind of despair."The mere facts! Do you really admit--are you still so sunk in superstitions, so clinging to dim and prehistoric altars, that you believe in facts? Do you not trust an immediate impression?""Well, an immediate impression may be," I said, "a little less practical than facts.""Bosh," he said."On what else is the whole world run but immediate impressions? What is more practical? My friend, the philosophy of this world may be founded on facts, its business is run on spiritual impressions and atmospheres.Why do you refuse or accept a clerk? Do you measure his skull? Do you read up his physiological state in a handbook? Do you go upon facts at all? Not a scrap.You accept a clerk who may save your business--you refuse a clerk that may rob your till, entirely upon those immediate mystical impressions under the pressure of which I pronounce, with a perfect sense of certainty and sincerity, that that man walking in that street beside us is a humbug and a villain of some kind.""You always put things well," I said, "but, of course, such things cannot immediately be put to the test."Basil sprang up straight and swayed with the swaying car.
"Let us get off and follow him," he said."I bet you five pounds it will turn out as I say."And with a scuttle, a jump, and a run, we were off the car.
The man with the curved silver hair and the curved Eastern face walked along for some time, his long splendid frock-coat flying behind him.Then he swung sharply out of the great glaring road and disappeared down an ill-lit alley.We swung silently after him.
"This is an odd turning for a man of that kind to take," I said.
"A man of what kind?" asked my friend.
"Well," I said, "a man with that kind of expression and those boots.I thought it rather odd, to tell the truth, that he should be in this part of the world at all.""Ah, yes," said Basil, and said no more.
We tramped on, looking steadily in front of us.The elegant figure, like the figure of a black swan, was silhouetted suddenly against the glare of intermittent gaslight and then swallowed again in night.The intervals between the lights were long, and a fog was thickening the whole city.Our pace, therefore, had become swift and mechanical between the lamp-posts; but Basil came to a standstill suddenly like a reined horse; I stopped also.We had almost run into the man.A great part of the solid darkness in front of us was the darkness of his body.
At first I thought he had turned to face us.But though we were hardly a yard off he did not realize that we were there.He tapped four times on a very low and dirty door in the dark, crabbed street.A gleam of gas cut the darkness as it opened slowly.We listened intently, but the interview was short and simple and inexplicable as an interview could be.Our exquisite friend handed in what looked like a paper or a card and said:
"At once.Take a cab."
A heavy, deep voice from inside said:
"Right you are."
And with a click we were in the blackness again, and striding after the striding stranger through a labyrinth of London lanes, the lights just helping us.It was only five o'clock, but winter and the fog had made it like midnight.
"This is really an extraordinary walk for the patent-leather boots," I repeated.
"I don't know," said Basil humbly."It leads to Berkeley Square."As I tramped on I strained my eyes through the dusky atmosphere and tried to make out the direction described.For some ten minutes I wondered and doubted; at the end of that I saw that my friend was right.We were coming to the great dreary spaces of fashionable London--more dreary, one must admit, even than the dreary plebeian spaces.
"This is very extraordinary!" said Basil Grant, as we turned into Berkeley Square.
"What is extraordinary?" I asked."I thought you said it was quite natural.""I do not wonder," answered Basil, "at his walking through nasty streets; I do not wonder at his going to Berkeley Square.But I do wonder at his going to the house of a very good man.""What very good man?" I asked with exasperation.
"The operation of time is a singular one," he said with his imperturbable irrelevancy."It is not a true statement of the case to say that I have forgotten my career when I was a judge and a public man.I remember it all vividly, but it is like remembering some novel.But fifteen years ago I knew this square as well as Lord Rosebery does, and a confounded long sight better than that man who is going up the steps of old Beaumont's house.""Who is old Beaumont?" I asked irritably.
