I was much pleased to get this corroborative evidence, though the mistake in initials must have been Colonel Bates' error, and apologised to Colonel Henry Arthur Chomley in the Unseen.
A few weeks later, however, you wrote again, and told me that you had been staying with a friend, who drove you over to call upon Colonel and Mrs Henry Arthur Chomley, that he was a brother of Sir Frederic Chomley, and was certainly alive, although not at home, at the time of your visit!
This information startled me, and my guide, at my request, went to look up the soi-disant Colonel to find out what it all meant.
The latter then confessed to having taken a friend's name, said a sudden impulse came over him when I first asked his name, and having told one lie, he felt bound to go on deceiving me, but that he had known both Colonel Bates and Colonel Henry Arthur Chomley in India, and that his own real name was Anstruther!"
This was Miss Smith's narrative.
Now out of this curious jumble of true and false, two points remain clear:
My brother had known a Chomley in India, and had succeeded him as Brigade Major at Meean Meer. This Chomley was a brother of Sir Frederic Chomley, the well-known diplomatist, but his name was Walter, not Henry Arthur. Yet Sir Frederic had a brother named Henry Arthur, and the impersonating Anstruther had borrowed the wrong brother's name when trying to pose as the friend of Colonel Charles Bates. To make confusion worse confounded, Walter Chomley was alive, as well as Henry Arthur, at the time of Miss Mabel Smith's experiences, for I have seen his death within the last eight months!
The second point is that, personally, my brother and I had reason to be grateful to the deceiving Anstruther. He was certainly the means of introducing a pleasant acquaintance to my brother and to me.
Miss Mabel Smith's experience at Grindelwald reminds me of one of my own in the same place during the following year.
I had gone there with a cousin, who was eager for skating and tobogganing, in January 1902, on my way to Rome. After a pleasant week at a charmingly quiet and comfortable hotel—the Alpenrühe I think was the name—my cousin wished, for purposes of policy, to change over to a more famous, but noisy and overcrowded one.