A solicitor of an active habit and athletic tastes who is compelled by
his hopes of business to remain within the four walls of his office from
ten till five must take what exercise he can in the evenings. Hence it
was that I was in the habit of indulging in very long nocturnal
excursions, in which I sought the heights of Hampstead and Highgate in
order to cleanse my system from the impure air of Abchurch Lane. It was
in the course of one of these aimless rambles that I first met Felix
Stanniford, and so led up to what has been the most extraordinary
adventure of my lifetime.
One evening—it was in April or early May of the year 1894—I made my way
to the extreme northern fringe of London, and was walking down one of
those fine avenues of high brick villas which the huge city is for ever
pushing farther and farther out into the country. It was a fine, clear
spring night, the moon was shining out of an unclouded sky, and I,
having already left many miles behind me, was inclined to walk slowly
and look about me. In this contemplative mood, my attention was arrested
by one of the houses which I was passing.
It was a very large building, standing in its own grounds, a little back
from the road. It was modern in appearance, and yet it was far less so
than its neighbours, all of which were crudely and painfully new. Their
symmetrical line was broken by the gap caused by the laurel-studded
lawn, with the great, dark, gloomy house looming at the back of it.
Evidently it had been the country retreat of some wealthy merchant,
built perhaps when the nearest street was a mile off, and now gradually
overtaken and surrounded by the red brick tentacles of the London
octopus. The next stage, I reflected, would be its digestion and
absorption, so that the cheap builder might rear a dozen
eighty-pound-a-year villas upon the garden frontage. And then, as all
this passed vaguely through my mind, an incident occurred which brought
my thoughts into quite another channel.
A four-wheeled cab, that opprobrium of London, was coming jolting and
creaking in one direction, while in the other there was a yellow glare
from the lamp of a cyclist. They were the only moving objects in the
whole long, moonlit road, and yet they crashed into each other with that
malignant accuracy which brings two ocean liners together in the broad
waste of the Atlantic. It was the cyclist’s fault. He tried to cross in
front of the cab, miscalculated his distance, and was knocked sprawling
by the horse’s shoulder. He rose, snarling; the cabman swore back at
him, and then, realizing that his number had not yet been taken, lashed
his horse and lumbered off. The cyclist caught at the handles of his
prostrate machine, and then suddenly sat down with a groan. “Oh, Lord!”
he said.