But I hoped by my minute description to be able to stir the memory of one or other of the dozens of uniformed hall-porters whom I interviewed. The majority of such men have a remarkably retentive memory for a face, due to long cultivation, just as that possessed by one's club hall-porter, who can at once address any of the thousand or so members by name.
I confess, however, when at five o'clock, I sat in the huge, noisy Café Métropole over a glass of coffee and a liqueur of cognac, I began to realise the utter hopelessness of my search.
Digby Kemsley was ever an evasive person—a past master in avoiding observation, as I well knew. It had always been a hobby of his, he had told me, of watching persons without himself being seen.
Once he had remarked to me while we had been smoking together in that well-remembered room wherein the tragedy had taken place:
"I should make a really successful detective, Royle. I've had at certain periods of my life to efface myself and watch unseen. Now I've brought it to a fine art. If ever circumstances make it imperative for me to disappear—which I hope not," he laughed, "well—nobody will ever find me, I'm positive."
These words of his now came back to me as I sat there pensively smoking, and wondering if, after all, I had better not return again to London and remain patient for the additional police evidence which would no doubt be forthcoming at the adjourned inquest in a week's time.
I thought of the clever cunning exercised by the girl whom I so dearly loved and in whose innocence I had so confidently believed, of her blank refusal to satisfy me, and alas! of her avowed determination to shield the scoundrel who had posed as my friend, and whom the police had declared to be only a vulgar impostor.
My bitter reflection maddened me.
The jingle and chatter of that noisy café, full to overflowing at that hour, for rain had commenced to fall outside in the boulevard, irritated me. From where I sat in the window I could see the crowds of business people, hurrying through the rain to their trams and trains—the neat-waisted little modistes, the felt-hatted young clerks, the obese and over-dressed and whiskered men from their offices on the Bourse, the hawkers crying the "Soir," and the "Dernière Heure," with strident voices, the poor girls with rusty shawls and pinched faces, selling flowers, and the gaping, idling Cookites who seem to eternally pass and re-pass the Métropole at all hours of the day and the night.
Before my eyes was there presented the whole phantasmagoria of the life of the thrifty, hard-working Bruxellois, that active, energetic race which the French have so sarcastically designated "the brave Belgians."