The peculiar thing, then, was that a spokesman from the Royal Academy — the secretary, Mr. Parsons — denied it flat out and quick enough so that his denials were printed in the Standard by nightfall. There wasn’t any connection, he said. Couldn’t be. And he was extremely doubtful about any nonsense concerning flying door knockers. Science, Mr. Parsons seemed to say, didn’t hold with flying door knockers.
Tell that to the man laid out by the 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 down the street now, so I did too.
“There.”
Now it was up into the air, toward a bank of casements on the second floor. There was a man staring out of one, smoking a cigar.
“Him?” I asked.
He gave me such a look that I thought I’d landed upon it at last, but then I saw that I was wrong.
“That. In your hand.”
The elephant. He blinked rapidly, as if he had something in his eye. “I like that,” he said, and he squinted at me as if he knew me. There was something in his face, too, that I almost recognized. But he was clearly mad, and the madness, somehow, had given him a foreign cast, as if he were a citizen from nowhere on earth and had scrambled his features into an almost impenetrable disguise.
I felt sorry for him, to tell you the truth, and when he reached for the rubber elephant, I gave it to him, thinking, I’ll admit, that he’d give it back after having a look. Instead he disappeared back into the cab, taking the elephant with him. The curtain closed, and I heard from him no more. I knocked once on the door. “Go away,” he said.
So I did. He wanted the creature more than I wanted it. What did I want to build toys for, anyway, if not for the likes of him? And besides, it pretty clearly needed a hat. That’s the sort of thing I told myself. It was half cowardice, though, my just walking away. I didn’t want to make a scene by going into the cab after him and be found brawling with a madman over a rubber elephant. I argued it out in my head as I stepped into Godall’s shop, ready to relate the incident to my credit, and there, standing just inside the threshold, impossibly, was the lunatic himself.
I must have looked staggered, for Hasbro leaped up in alarm at the sight of my face, and the person in the doorway turned on her heel with a startled look. She wasn’t the fellow in the truck; she was a woman with an appallingly similar countenance and hair, equally greasy, and with a blouse of the same material. This one wore a shawl, though, and was older by a good many years, although her face belied her age. It was almost unlined due to some sort of unnatural puffiness — as if she were a goblin that had come up to Soho wearing a cleverly altered melon for a head. This was the mother, clearly, of the creature in the cab.
She smiled theatrically at me. Then, as if she had just that instant recognized me, her smile froze into a look of snooty reproach, and she ignored me utterly from then on. I had the distinct feeling that I’d been cut, although you’d suppose that being cut by a madwoman doesn’t count for much — any more than having one’s rubber elephant stolen by a madman counts for anything.
“A man like that ought to be brought to justice,” she said to St. Ives, who gestured toward the sofa and raised his eyebrows at me.
“This is Mr. Owlesby,” he said to the woman. “You can speak freely in front of him.”
She paid me no attention at all, as if to say that she would speak freely, or would not, before whomever she chose, and no one would stop her. I sat down.