It was a large, comfortable room, crowded with books on three walls, furnished with easy chairs and a couch in one corner. A brilliant blaze of light from several bulbs under a frosted hood poured upon a reading table in the middle of the room. Sitting at this table, in a Windsor chair, slumped down into the seat, was a short stout man whose head lolled sideways over his chest. He was wearing a tweed suit and a soft shirt, and looked as though he had fallen asleep at his work. In front of him were some books and a can of tobacco. I recognized him, of course, from the photographs I had often seen. It was Digby.
I looked at Dulcet, aghast. But, as always at such moments, what was uppermost in my mind was something trivial and irrelevant. I had an intense desire to open a window. The air in that room was thick and foggy, a sort of close, strangling frowst of venomously strong tobacco and furnace gas. After the clear elixir of the wintry night it was loathsome. It was the typical smell that hangs about the rooms of literary bachelors, who work all day long in a room without ever thinking of airing it.
“Yes,” he said. “He's dead. Pretty awful, isn't it? I found him like this when I got here. No sign of injury as far as I can see.”
There was something profoundly dreadful in this first sight, as mere sagging clay, of the brilliant and powerful writer whose books I had so long admired, and whom I had thought of as one of the strong and fortunate few who shape human perplexities to their own ends. I looked down at him with a miserable blackness in my spirit, and laid a hand on Dulcet's shoulder in sympathy.
“I've sent for a doctor,” he said. “Before he comes I want to get all the information I can from the landlady. I wanted to have you here as a witness. I haven't touched anything.”
The woman had followed me upstairs, and stood crying quietly in the doorway.
“Come in, Mrs. Barlow,” said Dulcet. “Now please tell us everything you can about where Mr. Digby went this evening, and anything that has happened.”
Mrs. Barlow, who seemed to be a good-hearted, simple-minded creature, snuffled wretchedly. “Oh, dear, oh dear,” she said. “He was such a nice gentleman, too. Let me see, he went out about seven, I suppose for his supper, but he was always irregular about his meals, you never could tell, sometimes he would eat in the middle of the afternoon, and sometimes not till late at night. I always would urge him that he would die of indigestion, but he was so kind-hearted.”
“You don't know where he went?” said Dulcet. “Perhaps he went round to the laundry,” she said, “for he had a parcel with him, which I took to be his laundry because he usually took it out on Monday evenings because by that time the clean shirt he put on on Sunday was ready to go to the wash. I hate to think that in all the years he lived in this house his laundry was the only thing we ever had a difference about, because I used to have it done in the house for him but he said my washwoman tore the buttons off his shirts or collars or something, so a little while ago he started taking his things out to be done, but I don't know where because he used to call for them himself.”
“You haven't any idea where he used to eat?” insisted Dulcet.