“Don’t understand,” he said. “Where did you find it?”
“Zere,” said Antonio. “I go, wiz an order, to view an empty ’ouse, and zis have fall through the letter-box.”
The clerk whispered with another, nodded understandingly, and threw the letter on a shelf.
“All right” he said. “Should have been readdressed,” and prepared to go on with his work. That, one might say, was the post-office servant all over.
Antonio, patient and unoffended, essayed a hopeless question.
“Should be readdress?” he asked. “To where, zen?”
The clerk sniggered aloud to his next companion, a young lady, one of the newly emancipated sisterhood with a nose already above her station.
“That’s not your business,” said she. “We’ll see to it,” and the two ignored him ostentatiously.
Baffled again, and yet again!
Geoletti went back to the house. This time he made a thorough examination of it. It appeared just a repository for old dust and echoes. The only living things that inhabited there were mice and spiders; and what they thrived upon the Lord knew. The nozzles of the scullery taps were thick with brassy scum; the edges of the broken window-panes were yellow and blunted with the weather; there was an acrid deserted smell about everything. It was a large house, a property suggestive of handsome returns to its landlord; yet the atmosphere of it seemed costive with uninhabitableness. There are many such places in London, which, having every apparent advantage of position and accommodation, fail and fail to find a tenant. Certain ghosts, perhaps, are their bodiless caretakers; and these may resent the intrusion of their possible ousters. They do not want the scent of their hauntings crossed by lovelier and more desirable spirits.