He knew that St. James’s Park Station was at his very door. He asked for and obtained a ticket with that promptitude which distinguishes the service of our premier Metropolitan line, left the change for sixpence by an oversight on the ledge of the ticket window, and then, as Fate would have it, turned to the left-hand stairs.
The official whose duty it was to examine and to cut designs upon the tickets presented to him by the public, was that evening (under the guidance of Fate) most negligent.
He should surely have seen that he was dealing with an Obvious Gentleman and should gently have directed him to the opposing platform. As it was he did no more than half puncture the cardboard without so much as glancing at it, and George Mulross Demaine (in whom now yet another pleasing thought had arisen—that there were such things as Cabinet pensions—) sauntered down on to the platform.
A train roared in; he stumbled into it just in time to save his coat from the shutting of the gate, and sat contentedly until he should hear the conductor shout “St. James’s Park!” But this cue word which would have aroused him to action, he was destined not to hear.
The Mansion House went by, and Cannon Street, but yet another pleasing thought having arisen in his mind he noted them not.
A shout of “Monument” startled him, for he had heard in a general way of the Monument, and it was nowhere near his home. When he came to Mark Lane he was seriously alarmed, and at the cry of Aldgate East, his mind was made up. He got out.
He asked with the utmost courtesy of the man who took the tickets what he should do to get to St. James’s Park, and the man who took the tickets replied with less courtesy but with great rapidity that he had better turn sharp to the right and that on his right again he would find Aldgate Station, whence there was still a service of trains, late as was the hour.
Alas, for the various locutions of various ranks in our society! he did turn sharp to the right; he went right round the corner into Middlesex Street, and to the right again into Wentworth Street, but not a station could be seen. The summer night was of a glimmering sort of darkness. It was hot, and many of the local families were still seated upon their steps, speaking to each other in a dialect of the Lithuanian Ghetto which George Mulross erroneously took for an accent native to the London poor.
He stepped up to one and asked whether he were yet near the station. The voluble reply “Shriska beth haumelshee! Chragso! Yeh!” illumined him not at all, and as he moved off uncertainly up the street, a roar of harsh laughter tended to upset his nerves.
He could not bear this raking fire: he turned, most imprudently, up a narrow court which was in total darkness; and, then at first to his surprise but almost immediately afterwards to his grave chagrin, he felt a voluminous and exceedingly foul cotton sheet drawn sharply round his throat, twisted, the slack of it thrown over his head, and one end crammed into his mouth for a gag; almost at the same moment his wrists were jerked behind him, a rope whose hardness must have been due to tar was hitched round them with surely excessive violence, putting him to grievous pain, his feet were lifted from under him, he felt several hands grasping his head and shoulders at random, a couple of them seizing his ankles; he was reversed, and in the attitude described at the Home Office as “The Frogs’ March” he felt himself carried for some few yards, and at last reversed again and placed face upwards upon a narrow and hard surface.