The chronicle must now go back a few days and follow another up-express.
“I must either be a clergyman or a policeman,” Mr Bunker reflected, in the corner of his carriage; “they seem to me to be on the whole the two least molested professions. Each certainly has a livery which, if its occupier is ordinarily judicious, ought to serve as a certificate of sanity. To me all policemen are precisely alike, but I daresay they know them apart in the force, and as all the beats and crossings are presumably taken already, I might excite suspicion by my mere superfluity. Besides, a theatrical costumier’s uniform would possibly lack some ridiculous but essential detail.”
He lit another cigar and looked humorously out of the window.
“I shall take orders. An amateur theatrical clergyman’s costume will be more comfortable, and probably less erroneous. They allow them some latitude, I believe; and I don’t suppose there are any visible ordination scars whose absence would give me away. I shall certainly study the first reverend brother I meet to see.”
Thus wisely ruminating, he arrived in London at a very early hour on a chilly morning, and drove straight to a small hotel near King’s Cross, where the landlord was much gratified at receiving so respectable a guest as the [pg 188] Rev. Alexander Butler. (“I must begin with a B.” said Mr Bunker to himself; “I think it’s lucky.”)
It is true the reverend gentleman was in evening clothes, while his hat and coat had a singularly secular, not to say fashionable, appearance; but, as he mentioned casually in the course of some extremely affable remarks, he had been dining in a country house, and had not thought it worth while changing before he left. After breakfasting he dressed himself in an equally secular suit of tweeds and went out, he mentioned incidentally, to call at his tailor’s for his professional habit, which he seemed surprised to learn had not yet been forwarded to the hotel.
A visit to a certain well-known firm of theatrical costumiers was followed by his reappearance in a cab accompanied by a bulky brown paper parcel; and presently he emerged from his room attired more consistently with his office, much to his own satisfaction, for, as he observed, “I cannot say I approve of clergymen masquerading as laymen.”
His opinion on the converse circumstance was not expressed.
Much to his landlord’s disappointment, he informed him that he should probably leave again that afternoon, and then he went out for a walk.
About half an hour later he was once more in the street where, not so very long ago, a very exciting cab-race had finished. He strolled slowly past Dr Twiddel’s house. The blinds of the front room were down; at that hour there was no sign of life about it, and he saw nothing at all to arrest his attention. Then he looked down the [pg 189] other side of the street, and to his great satisfaction spied a card, with the legend “Apartments to let,” in one of the first-floor windows of a house immediately opposite.