"Oh, I can't tell you half the rubbish. I keep out of his way now—go somewhere else. I like to have my glass of whisky in peace, not with all this muttering and fist-shaking going on. Yes, he ought to get away for a bit."
"You say a doctor's attending him?"
"Well, he is and he isn't, in a manner of speaking. The doctor goes round—Doctor Dobbie of Carlyle Square he is—but Harry won't do what he tells him, so he might just as well be without one. He'll neither go to bed nor get about his business, as you might say. He's got a couch pulled up to the bedroom window, and he sits there by the hour together staring out. That's the bedroom where the bullet came in. And he writes scores of letters, but I don't think his missis posts all of them. They're to all sorts of people. He gets 'em out of directories."
"What are the letters about?"
"All about miscarriage of justice, and one law for the rich and another for the poor, and lots of them's to the newspapers. Oh, he's going downhill is Harry, I'm afraid. Downhill he's going. He was never any particular friend of mine, but it isn't a pleasant thing to see a man you've chatted with over your glass of whisky going downhill. Not much more than a boy by the side of me neither. I can give him getting on for forty years."
I mused for a moment; then: "You said something about his not being sympathetic to Mr. Rooke. What do you mean by that exactly?"
But at that moment the most astonishingly unexpected thing happened. A customer came into his shop. And so, as Dadley grabbed incredulously for his spectacle case, my question went unanswered.
III
One thing at any rate now seemed fairly certain, namely, that if what Dadley told me was true it was not likely that a man of Inspector Webster's penetration would pay much attention to the mutterings of an incipient megalomaniac. For, if I could guess at the signs at all, it was megalomania. I have not made a systematic analysis of those infinitely intricate mental states that we speak of conglomerately as "war nerves." I am not prepared to say that one man may bitterly grudge another something from the taking of which he himself has drawn back his hand, nor yet (to turn the case the other way round) that there is not on occasion just as heady and overweening an egotism on the part of the envied man. It is useless to generalize on these matters. It is also not quite decent. The least we can do is to mind our own business, the most to consider the given instance on its merits. It is simply as yet another curious by-product of our Case that I am speaking of Westbury.