I was before one of those difficult positions unavoidable to a visitor
in a foreign country.
I had to meet the obligations of professional courtesy. Captain Walker
had asked me to go over the manuscript of his memoirs; and now he had
called at the house in which I was a guest, for my opinion. We had long
been friends; associated in innumerable cases, and I wished to suggest
the difficulty rather than to express it. It was the twilight of an
early Washington winter. The lights in the great library, softened with
delicate shades, had been turned on. Outside, Sheridan Circle was almost
a thing of beauty in its vague outlines; even the squat, ridiculous
bronze horse had a certain dignity in the blue shadow.
If one had been speculating on the man, from his physical aspect one
would have taken Walker for an engineer of some sort, rather than the
head of the United States Secret Service. His lean face and his angular
manner gaffe that impression. Even now, motionless in the big chair
beyond the table, he seemed--how shall I say it?--mechanical.
And that was the very defect in his memoir. He had cut the great cases
into a dry recital. There was no longer in them any pressure of a human
impulse. The glow of inspired detail had been dissected out. Everything
startling and wonderful had been devitalized.
The memoir was a report.
The bulky typewritten manuscript lay on the table beside the electric
lamp, and I stood about uncertain how to tell him.
“Walker,” I said, “did nothing wonderful ever happen to you in the
adventure of these cases?”
“What precisely do you mean, Sir Henry?” he replied.
The practical nature of the man tempted me to extravagance.
“Well,” I said, “for example, were you never kissed in a lonely street
by a mysterious woman and the flash of your dark lantern reveal a face
of startling beauty?”
“No,” he said, as though he were answering a sensible question, “that
never happened to me.”
“Then,” I continued, “perhaps you have found a prince of the church,
pale as alabaster, sitting in his red robe, who put together the
indicatory evidence of the crime that baffled you with such uncanny
acumen that you stood aghast at his perspicacity?”
“No,” he said; and then his face lighted. “But I'll tell you what I did
find. I found a drunken hobo at Atlantic City who was the best detective
I ever saw.”