Inspector Jacks studied the brass plate for a moment, and then rang
the patients’ bell. The former, he noticed was very much in want of
cleaning, and for a doctor’s residence there was a certain lack of
smartness about the house and its appointments which betokened a limited
practice. The railing in front was broken, and no pretence had been made
at keeping the garden in order. Inspector Jacks had time to notice these
things, for it was not until after his second summons that the door was
opened by Dr. Whiles himself.
“Good morning!” the latter said tentatively. Then, with a slight air of
disappointment, he recognized his visitor.
“Good morning, doctor!” Inspector Jacks replied. “You haven’t forgotten
me, I hope? I came down to see you a short time ago, respecting the
man who was knocked down by a motor car and treated by you on a certain
evening.”
The doctor nodded.
“Will you come in?” he asked.
He led the way into a somewhat dingy waiting room. A copy of _The
Field_, a month old, a dog-eared magazine, and a bound volume of _Good
Words_ were spread upon the table. The room itself, except for a few
chairs, was practically bare.
“I do not wish to take up too much of your time, Dr. Whiles,” the
Inspector began,--
The doctor laughed shortly.
“You needn’t bother about that,” he said. “I’m tired of making a bluff.
My time isn’t any too well occupied.”
The Inspector glanced at his watch,--it was a few minutes past twelve.
“If you are really not busy,” he said, “I was about to suggest to you
that you should come back to town with me and lunch. I do not expect,
of course, to take up your day for nothing,” he continued. “You will
understand, as a professional man, that when your services are required
by the authorities, they expect and are willing to pay for them.”
“But what use can I be to you?” the doctor asked. “You know all about
the man whom I fixed up on the night of the murder. There’s nothing more
to tell you about that. I’d as soon go up to town and lunch with you as
not, but if you think that I’ve anything more to tell you, you’ll only
be disappointed.”
The Inspector nodded.
“I’m quite content to run the risk of that,” he said. “Of course,” he
continued, “it does not follow in the least that this person was in any
way connected with the murder. In fact, so far as I can tell at present,
the chances are very much against it. But at the same time it would
interest my chief if you were able to identify him.”
The doctor nodded.
“I begin to understand,” he said.
“If you will consider a day spent up in town equivalent to the treatment
of twenty-five patients at your ordinary scale,” Inspector Jacks said,
“I shall be glad if you would accompany me there by the next train.
We will lunch together first, and look for our friend later in the
afternoon.”
The doctor did not attempt to conceal the fact that he found this
suggestion entirely satisfactory. In less than half an hour, the two men
were on their way to town.
Curiously enough, Penelope and Prince Maiyo met that morning for the
first time in several days. They were both guests of the Duchess of
Devenham at a large luncheon party at the Savoy Restaurant. Penelope
felt a little shiver when she saw him coming down the stairs. Somehow or
other, she had dreaded this meeting, yet when it came, she knew that it
was a relief. There was no change in his manner, no trace of anxiety
in his smooth, unruffled face. He seemed, if possible, to have grown
younger, to walk more buoyantly. His eyes met hers frankly, his smile
was wholly unembarrassed. It was not possible for a man to bear himself
thus who stood beneath the great shadow!
So far from avoiding her, he came over to her side directly he had
greeted his hostess.
“This morning,” he said, “I heard some good news. You are to be a fellow
guest at Devenham.”
“I am afraid,” she admitted, “that of my two aunts I impose most
frequently upon the one where my claims are the slightest. The Duchess
is so good-natured.”
“She is charming,” the Prince declared. “I am looking forward to my
visit immensely. I think I am a little weary of London. A visit to the
country seems to me most delightful. They tell me, too, that your spring
gardens are wonderful. What London suffers from, I think, at this time
of the year, is a lack of flowers. We want something to remind us that
the spring is coming, besides these occasional gleams of blue sky and
very occasional bursts of sunshine.”
“You are a sentimentalist, Prince,” she declared, smiling.
“No, I think not,” he answered seriously. “I love all beautiful things.
I think that there are many men as well as women who are like that.
Shall I be very rude and say that in the matter of climate and flowers
one grows, perhaps, to expect a little more in my own country.”
An uncontrollable impulse moved her. She leaned a little towards him.
“Climate and flowers only?” she murmured. “What about the third
essential?”
“Miss Penelope,” he said under his breath, “I have to admit that one
must travel further afield for Heaven’s greatest gift. Even then one can
only worship. The stars are denied to us.”
The Duchess came sailing over to them.
“Every one is here,” she said. “I hope that you are all hungry. After
lunch, Prince, I want you to speak to General Sherrif. He has been dying
to meet you, to talk over your campaign together in Manchuria. There’s
another man who is anxious to meet you, too,--Professor Spenlove. He
has been to Japan for a month, and thinks about writing a book on your
customs. I believe he looks to you to correct his impressions.”
“So long as he does not ask me to correct his proofs!” the Prince
murmured.
“That is positively the most unkind thing I have ever heard you say,”
the Duchess declared. “Come along, you good people. Jules has promised
me a new omelet, on condition that we sit down at precisely half-past
one. If we are five minutes late, he declines to send it up.”
They took their places at the round table which had been reserved for
the Duchess of Devenham,--not very far, Penelope remembered, from the
table at which they had sat for dinner a little more than a fortnight
ago. The recollection of that evening brought her a sudden realization
of the tragedy which seemed to have taken her life into its grip. Again
the Prince sat by her side. She watched him with eyes in which there was
a gleam sometimes almost of horror. Easy and natural as usual, with his
pleasant smile and simple speech, he was making himself agreeable to
one of the older ladies of the party, to whom, by chance, no one had
addressed more than a word or so. It was always the same--always like
this, she realized, with a sudden keen apprehension of this part of the
man’s nature. If there was a kindness to be done, a thoughtful action,
it was not only he who did it but it was he who first thought of it. The
papers during the last few days had been making public an incident which
he had done his best to keep secret. He had signalized his arrival in
London, some months ago, by going overboard from a police boat into the
Thames to rescue a half-drunken lighterman, and when the Humane Society
had voted him their medal, he had accepted it only on condition that the
presentation was private and kept out of the papers. It was not one but
fifty kindly deeds which stood to his credit. Always with the manners of
a Prince--gracious, courteous, and genial--never a word had passed his
lips of evil towards any human being. The barriers today between the
smoking room and the drawing room are shadowy things, and she knew very
well that he was held in a somewhat curious respect by men, as a person
to whom it was impossible to tell a story in which there was any shadow
of indelicacy. The ways of the so-called man of world seemed in his
presence as though they must be the ways of some creature of a different
and a lower stage of existence. A young man whom he had once corrected
had christened him, half jestingly, Sir Galahad, and certainly his
life in London, a life which had to bear all the while the test of the
limelight, had appeared to merit some such title. These thoughts chased
one another through her mind as she looked at him and marvelled. Surely
those other things must be part of a bad nightmare! It was not possible
that such a man could be associated with wrong-doing--such manner of
wrong-doing!
Even while these thoughts passed through her brain, he turned to talk to
her, and she felt at once that little glow of pleasure which the sound
of his voice nearly always evoked.
“I am looking forward so much,” he said, “to my stay at Devenham. You
know, it will not be very much longer that I shall have the opportunity
of accepting such invitations.”
“You mean that the time is really coming when we shall lose you?” she
asked suddenly.
“When my work is finished, I return home,” he answered. “I fancy that it
will not be very long now.”
“When you do leave England,” she asked after a moment’s pause, “do you
go straight to Japan?”
He bowed.
“With the Continent I have finished,” he said. “The cruiser which His
Majesty has sent to fetch me waits even now at Southampton.”
“You speak of your work,” she remarked, “as though you had been
collecting material for a book.”
He smiled.
“I have been busy collecting information in many ways,” he
said,--“trying to live your life and feel as you feel, trying to
understand those things in your country, and in other countries too,
which seem at first so strange to us who come from the other side of the
East.”
“And the end of it all?” she asked.
His eyes gleamed for a moment with a light which she did not understand.
His smile was tolerant, even genial, but his face remained like the face
of a sphinx.
“It is for the good of Japan I came,” he said, “for her good that I have
stayed here so long. At the same time it has been very pleasant. I have
met with great kindness.”
She leaned a little forward so as to look into his face. The impassivity
of his features was like a wall before her.
“After all,” she said, “I suppose it is a period of probation. You are
like a schoolboy already who is looking forward to his holidays. You
will be very happy when you return.”
“I shall be very happy indeed,” he admitted simply. “Why not? I am a
true son of Japan, and, for every true son of his country, absence from
her is as hard a thing to be borne as absence from one’s own family.”
Somerfield, who was sitting on her other side, insisted at last upon
diverting her attention.
“Penelope,” he declared, lowering his voice a little, “it isn’t fair.
You never have a word to say to me when the Prince is here.”
She smiled.
“You must remember that he is going away very soon, Charlie,” she
reminded him.
“Good job, too!” Somerfield muttered, sotto voce.
“And then,” Penelope continued, with the air of not having heard her
companion’s last remark, “he possesses also a very great attraction. He
is absolutely unlike any other human being I ever met or heard of.”
Somerfield glanced across at his rival with lowering brows.
“I’ve nothing to say against the fellow,” he remarked, “except that it
seems queer nowadays to run up against a man of his birth who is not a
sportsman,--in the sense of being fond of sport, I mean,” he corrected
himself quickly.
“Sometimes I wonder,” Penelope said thoughtfully, “whether such speeches
as the one which you have just made do not indicate something totally
wrong in our modern life. You, for instance, have no profession,
Charlie, and you devote your life to a systematic course of what is
nothing more or less than pleasure-seeking. You hunt or you shoot, you
play polo or golf, you come to town or you live in the country, entirely
according to the seasons. If any one asked you why you had not chosen a
profession, you would as good as tell them that it was because you were
a rich man and had no need to work for your living. That is practically
what it comes to. You Englishmen work only if you need money. If you do
not need money, you play. The Prince is wealthy, but his profession was
ordained for him from the moment when he left the cradle. The end and
aim of his life is to serve his country, and I believe that he would
consider it sacrilege if he allowed any slighter things to divert at any
time his mind from its main purpose. He would feel like a priest who has
broken his ordination vows.”
“That’s all very well,” Somerfield said coolly, “but there’s nothing in
life nowadays to make us quite so strenuous as that.”
“Isn’t there?” Penelope answered. “You are an Englishman, and you should
know. Are you convinced, then, that your country today is at the
height of her prosperity, safe and sound, bound to go on triumphant,
prosperous, without the constant care of her men?”
Somerfield looked up at her in growing amazement.
“What on earth’s got hold of you, Penelope?” he asked. “Have you been
reading the sensational papers, or stuffing yourself up with jingoism,
or what?”
She laughed.
“None of those things, I can assure you,” she said. “A man like the
Prince makes one think, because, you see, every standard of life we have
is a standard of comparison. When one sees the sort of man he is, one
wonders. When one sees how far apart he is from you Englishmen in his
ideals and the way he spends his life, one wonders again.”
Somerfield shrugged his shoulders.
“We do well enough,” he said. “Japan is the youngest of the nations. She
has a long way to go to catch us up.”
“We do well enough!” she repeated under her breath. “There was a great
city once which adopted that as her motto,--people dig up mementoes of
her sometimes from under the sands.”
Somerfield looked at her in an aggrieved fashion.
“Well,” he said, “I thought that this was to be an amusing luncheon
party.”
“You should have talked more to Lady Grace,” she answered. “I am sure
that she is quite ready to believe that you are perfection, and the
English army the one invincible institution in the world. You mustn’t
take me too seriously today, Charlie. I have a headache, and I think
that it has made me dull.”...
They trooped out into the foyer in irregular fashion to take their
coffee. The Prince and Penelope were side by side.
“What I like about your restaurant life,” the Prince said, “is the
strange mixture of classes which it everywhere reveals.”
“Those two, for instance,” Penelope said, and then stopped short.
The Prince followed her slight gesture. Inspector Jacks and Dr.
Spencer Whiles were certainly just a little out of accord with their
surroundings. The detective’s clothes were too new and his companion’s
too old. The doctor’s clothes indeed were as shabby as his waiting room,
and he sat where the sunlight was merciless.
“How singular,” the Prince remarked with a smile, “that you should have
pointed those two men out! One of them I know, and, if you will excuse
me for a moment, I should like to speak to him.”
Penelope was not capable of any immediate answer. The Prince, with a
kindly and yet gracious smile, walked over to Inspector Jacks, who rose
at once to his feet.
“I hope you have quite recovered, Mr. Inspector,” the Prince said,
holding out his hand in friendly fashion. “I have felt very guilty over
your indisposition. I am sure that I keep my rooms too close for English
people.”
“Thank you, Prince,” the Inspector answered, “I am perfectly well again.
In fact, I have not felt anything of my little attack since.”
The Prince smiled.
“I am glad,” he said. “Next time you are good enough to pay me a visit,
I will see that you do not suffer in the same way.”
He nodded kindly and rejoined his friends. The Inspector resumed his
seat and busied himself with relighting his cigar. He purposely did not
even glance at his companion.
“Who was that?” the doctor asked curiously. “Did you call him Prince?”
Inspector Jacks sighed. This was a disappointment to him!
“His name is Prince Maiyo,” he said slowly. “He is a Japanese.”
The doctor looked across the restaurant with puzzled face.
“It’s queer,” he said, “how all these Japanese seem to one to look so
much alike, and yet--”
He broke off in the middle of his sentence.
“You are thinking of your friend of the other night?” the Inspector
remarked.
“I was,” the doctor admitted. “For a moment it seemed to me like the
same man with a different manner.”
Inspector Jacks was silent. He puffed steadily at his cigar.
“You don’t suppose,” he asked quietly, “that it could have been the same
man?”
The doctor was still looking across the room.
“I could not tell,” he said. “I should like to see him again. I wasn’t
prepared, and there was something so altered in his tone and the way he
carried himself. And yet--”
The pause was expressive. Inspector Jacks’ eyes brightened. He hated to
feel that his day had been altogether wasted.