Slowly he produced the envelope with his eyes nervously diverted from the round face before him. There was no awkwardness. But there was on Mr. Petre’s side a pleased surprise at the simplicity of the passage. “Thank you a thousand times,” he said.... “You have already done me a world of good, believe me ... but the truth is, if I were to give you my name....”
A suppressed smile upon the lips of the expert barely betrayed his emotions. He had known that kind of thing before, and he never irritated that mood. He would have lost money by irritating that mood. But in the other cases he had always known in time, and before the event, who the Mysterious Stranger (though he might call himself the Grand Mogul) really was. In the other cases an agonized relative had informed him before the visit, had poured the true tale into his ear, warning him of a brother or a father’s sensitiveness and shame. To-day he was nonplussed.
Everything about this last patient betrayed precision; but who he was he could not for the life of him have told you. Even the very slight American accent had worn away.... Sir William did regret one thing. He would have asked to know who the funny fellow thought he was. He kept a book with screaming things of the sort. But it couldn’t be helped. Perhaps he’d find out later. As Mr. Petre walked off, filled with despair, down the street towards Oxford Street, Sir William at a little discreet distance from the light watched him from the bow-window; then he shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, rang the bell, and sent for the next case: the Dowager who was the head of the list in that great room without, where already two or three were attempting to beguile the time with Life and even Punch. She had come with her keeper, but he saw her alone. She was quite harmless.
Mr. Petre, bearing that inward burden of his, despairing, hopeless of rediscovering a knowledge without which life was not life, still paced southward, choosing the squares and the less occupied streets, until he found himself upon the top of St. James’s Hill. There he halted a moment at the corner of Piccadilly gazing down towards the Palace; the Clubs, the old brick towers, the Guardsmen on sentry-go at the door, the crowd of cars, even the London sky under a fresh autumnal breeze—all was as familiar to him as familiar could be. All was part of some home furniture in his mind; but of the home itself, nothing. A complete blank. The soul had lost its habitation.
Mr. Petre went out from this last of his ordeals profoundly depressed. By all our standards he was greatly to be envied. He was untroubled by any great responsibility. He had drunk the water of Lethe; he was in health, he was rich.
Yet that intimate thing within us which demands immortality, and which we call Ourselves, was incomplete, and he was a maimed man.
Not all the high respect with which he could now be surrounded at will was other than a nightmare to him. He was gnawed by the loss of that mysterious past; by the lack in him of that momentum of things lived under one mind, coördinating all that human, continuous, soul whereby indeed we suffer, but also are. He passionately desired—more than ever he now desired—now that he must face exile—to know himself.
His hands were clasped behind his back, his gold-headed cane within them; his eyes were bent upon the pavement in a reverie; he wondered and wondered, and he was tragically ill at ease. He had lost his bearings. He was more wretched in his loneliness than the poorest of the millions in the vast surge of life about him.
As he thus slowly paced St. James’s Street, down towards the Palace, under the long evening light, half forgetting the roar of the traffic around him, he suddenly heard, just as he passed White’s Club, a voice very familiar; and looking up with a start, he saw a face more familiar still. It was a hearty face, the face of a man of his own age, but bronzed and gay, the face of a man who had advanced up the hill at a vigorous stride, and had now suddenly halted with his arms extended and had cried: