iron post, I remember thinking, but it was St. Ives and Godall who between them made the whole thing plain. I forgot to tell you, in fact, that Godall was at the oyster bar, too—he and Hasbro, St. Ives’s gentleman’s gentleman.
But this is where art leans in and covers the page with her hand—she being leery of making things plain when the story would be better left obscure while the reader draws a breath. “All in good time” has ever been the way of art.
And anyway it wasn’t until the first of the ships went down in the Dover Strait that any of us was certain—absolutely certain; or at least Godall was, from the deductive end of things, and St. Ives from the scientific. I wasn’t certain of anything yet.
I was sitting on one of Godall’s sofas, I remember, waiting for the arrival of St. Ives and thinking that I ought to take up a pipe and thinking too that I had enough vices already—indolence being one of them—when a man came in with a parcel. Godall reacted as if the Queen had walked in, and introduced the man to me as Isaac Laquedem, but aside from the odd name and his great age and frailty, there seemed to be nothing notable about him. He was a peddler, actually, and I forgot about him almost at once, their business having nothing to do with me—or with this story except in a peripheral way.
My father-in-law, William Keeble, had been teaching me the trade of toy-making, and I sat there meddling with an India-rubber elephant with enormous ears that I had finished assembling that very morning. Its trunk would rotate when you pushed its belly, and the ears would flap, and out of its mouth would come the magnified noise of ratcheting gears, which sounded, if you had an imagination, like trumpeting—or at least like the trumpeting of a rubber elephant with mechanical nonsense inside. It was funny to look at, though.
I remember wondering what it would have been like if Keeble himself had built it, and thinking that I at least ought to have given it a hat, maybe with a bird in it, and I listened idly to Godall and the old fellow talk about numismatics and about a clockwork match that the man was peddling. Then he left, very cheerfully, entirely forgetting his parcel of matches and going away up Rupert Street toward Brewer.
A minute passed, neither of us noticing the parcel. Then Godall spotted it and shouted damnation, or something, and I was up and out the door with it under my arm and with my elephant in my other hand. I ran up the street, dodging past people until I reached the corner, where I found the old man in a tearoom trying to sell little cheesecloth bags of green tea that could be dropped into a cup of boiling water and then retrieved again—not for the purpose of being reused, mind you, but so that the leaves wouldn’t muck up the brew. The proprietor read tea leaves, though, as well as palms and scone crumbs, and wasn’t at all interested in the invention, although I thought it was fairly clever and said so when I returned his automatic matches. He said that he admired my elephant, too, and I believe he did. We chatted over a cup of tea for ten minutes and then I strolled back down, thinking correctly that St. Ives would have shown up by then.
There at the side of the street, half a block up from the cigar divan, was a hansom cab, rather broken-down and with a curtain of shabby velvet drawn across the window. As I was passing it, the curtain pushed aside and a face popped out. I thought at first it was a woman, but it wasn’t; it was a man with curled hair to his shoulders. His complexion was awful, and he had a sort of greasy look about him and a high effeminate collar cut out of a flowery chintz. It was his eyes, though, that did the trick. They were filled with a mad unfocused passion, as if everything around him—the cab, the buildings along Rupert Street, me—signified something to him. His glance shot back and forth in a cockeyed vigilance, and he said, almost whispering, “What is that?”
He was looking up the street at the time, so I looked up the street too, but saw nothing remarkable. “Beg your pardon,” I said.
“That there.”
He peered