“I am disappointed,” he said, “that I didn’t think of the possibility of his buying a hat. It has disorganized all my inductions. You see I was so concentrated on what was going on inside his head that I never troubled about what might be going on outside it. But a man of his neat and proper habits—acquired through a lifetime of orderly living—would get himself a hat almost mechanically.... We may have passed quite close to him in that.”
“I should have known him,” said Christina Alberta.
“But, until that Pentonville man drew a red herring across the trail, I am convinced we were close on his footsteps. You see Christina Alberta insisted upon my asking every policeman we saw—even men, overworked, irritable, snappy, rude men controlling the traffic—but at any rate I chose the route—I inferred the route. You see, my dear Watson”—he smiled faintly in weary self-approval at Crumb—“the essential thing in a case like this is to put yourself in your man’s place, to think his thoughts instead of your own. That is what I tried—so far as being out of breath would allow it—to impress on Christina Alberta. It’s fairly straightforward. Here you have a man convinced, beautifully and enviably convinced, that he is the supreme lord of the world, unknown, unrecognized as yet, but on the eve of his proclamation. Will such a man go along any street just as easily as any other? Not at all! He will be elated, expansive, ascendant. Very well; he will go up hill and not down. He will choose wide highways and not narrow ones and tend towards the middle of the street——”
“He hasn’t been run over!” cried Christina Alberta sharply.
“No. No. He would avoid traffic because that would hustle him and impair his dignity. Open spaces would attract him. High buildings, bright lights, the intimations of any assembly would draw him powerfully. So he certainly crossed Trafalgar Square from the Admiralty Arch in a diagonal direction, towards the conspicuous invitation of the Coliseum.... You see my method?”
He did not wait for Crumb to answer. “But the more I think over our missing friend,” he went on, “the more I admire and envy him. What crawling things we are!—content to be subjects, units, items, pawns, drops of water and grains of sand, in the multitudinous, unmeaning muddle of human affairs. He soars above it. He soars above it now. He rejects his commonness and inferiority in one magnificent gesture. His world. The grandeur of it! Wherever he is to-night and whatever fate overtake him, he is a happy man. And we sit here, we sit here and drink—I am ordering another bottle of that wine, Harold, and I expect you and Mrs. Crumb to abandon that warm and sticky beer and join me—Waiter! Yes—another, please—we sit here in this crowded, smoky gathering (look at ’em!) while he plans the salvation of the world that we let slide, and lifts his kingly will to God. Glorious exaltation! Suppose that all of us could be touched——”
Christina Alberta interrupted. “I think we ought to telephone to the hospitals. I didn’t think before of the possibility of his being run over. Always he has been a little careless at crossings.”
Paul Lambone lifted a deprecating hand and searched in his mind for some excuse for rest.
“A little later,” he said after a slight pause, “the hospital staffs will be more at leisure. It is their rush hour now—ten to eleven. Yes, the Rush Hour....”