But at two o’clock sharp she was still in Norfolk Street, Strand, inside an A.B.C. shop, sipping cold coffee opposite a grotesque old man who was fiddling with a bit of string.
How could she be expected to remember Maud Allan or the Palace Theatre, or Dickie himself for a matter of that? The man in the corner had begun to talk of that mysterious death on the underground railway, and Polly had lost count of time, of place, and circumstance.
She had gone to lunch quite early, for she was looking forward to the matinée at the Palace.
The old scarecrow was sitting in his accustomed place when she came into the A.B.C. shop, but he had made no remark all the time that the young girl was munching her scone and butter. She was just busy thinking how rude he was not even to have said “Good morning,” when an abrupt remark from him caused her to look up.
“Will you be good enough,” he said suddenly, “to give me a description of the man who sat next to you just now, while you were having your cup of coffee and scone.”
Involuntarily Polly turned her head towards the distant door, through which a man in a light overcoat was even now quickly passing. That man had certainly sat at the next table to hers, when she first sat down to her coffee and scone: he had finished his luncheon—whatever it was—moment ago, had paid at the desk and gone out. The incident did not appear to Polly as being of the slightest consequence.
Therefore she did not reply to the rude old man, but shrugged her shoulders, and called to the waitress to bring her bill.
“Do you know if he was tall or short, dark or fair?” continued the man in the corner, seemingly not the least disconcerted by the young girl’s indifference. “Can you tell me at all what he was like?”
“Of course I can,” rejoined Polly impatiently, “but I don’t see that my description of one of the customers of an A.B.C. shop can have the slightest importance.”
He was silent for a minute, while his nervous fingers fumbled about in his capacious pockets in search of the inevitable piece of string. When he had found this necessary “adjunct to thought,” he viewed the young girl again through his half-closed lids, and added maliciously:
“But supposing it were of paramount importance that you should give an accurate description of a man who sat next to you for half an hour today, how would you proceed?”
“I should say that he was of medium height—”
“Five foot eight, nine, or ten?” he interrupted quietly.
“How can one tell to an inch or two?” rejoined Polly crossly. “He was between colours.”
“What’s that?” he inquired blandly.
“Neither fair nor dark—his nose—”
“Well, what was his nose like? Will you sketch it?”
“I am not an artist. His nose was fairly straight—his eyes—”
“Were neither dark nor light—his hair had the same striking peculiarity—he was neither short nor tall—his nose was neither aquiline nor snub—” he recapitulated sarcastically.
“No,” she retorted; “he was just ordinary looking.”
“Would you know him again—say tomorrow, and among a number of other men who were ‘neither tall nor short, dark nor fair, aquiline nor snub-nosed,’ etc.?”
“I don’t know—I might—he was certainly not striking enough to be specially remembered.”
“Exactly,” he said, while he leant forward excitedly, for all the world like a jack-in-the-box let loose. “Precisely; and you are a journalist—call yourself one, at least—and it should be part of your business to notice and describe people. I don’t mean only the wonderful personage with the clear Saxon features, the fine blue eyes, the noble brow and classic face, but the ordinary person—the person who represents ninety out of every hundred of his own kind—the average Englishman, say, of the middle classes, who is neither very tall nor very short, who wears a moustache which is neither fair nor dark, but which masks his mouth, and a top hat which hides the shape of his head and brow, a man, in fact, who dresses like hundreds of his fellow-creatures, moves like them, speaks like them, has no peculiarity.
“Try to describe him, to recognize him, say a week hence, among his other eighty-nine doubles; worse still, to swear his life away, if he happened to be implicated in some crime, wherein your recognition of him would place the halter round his neck.
“Try that, I say, and having utterly failed you will more readily understand how one of the greatest scoundrels unhung is still at large, and why the mystery on the Underground Railway was never cleared up.
“I think it was the only time in my life that I was seriously tempted to give the police the benefit of my own views upon the matter. You see, though I admire the brute for his cleverness, I did not see that his being unpunished could possibly benefit anyone.
“In these days of tubes and motor traction of all kinds, the old-fashioned ‘best, cheapest, and quickest route to City and West End’ is often deserted, and the good old Metropolitan Railway carriages cannot at any time be said to be overcrowded. Anyway, when that particular train steamed into Aldgate at about 4 p.m. on March 18th last, the first-class carriages were all but empty.
“The guard marched up and down the platform looking into all the carriages to see if anyone had left a halfpenny evening paper behind for him, and opening the door of one of the first-class compartments, he noticed a lady sitting in the further corner, with her head turned away towards the window, evidently oblivious of the fact that on this line Aldgate is the terminal station.
“ ‘Where are you for, lady?’ he said.
“The lady did not move, and the guard stepped into the carriage, thinking that perhaps the lady was asleep. He touched her arm lightly and looked into her face.
