“Throne Hotel, Harrogate,
“September 7th, 1911.
“DEAR BRUCE,—I do believe I’ve got it! If so it’s a great deal more (or less) than I deserve for one of the rottenest things I ever did in all my days.
“I was just saying I was absent-minded—I mean in the letter I only finished a few minutes ago, though now you’ll get this with it—but I’ve lowered my own record since then. I should say I had even beaten the man who went up to dress for dinner at a country house, never came down, and was found fast asleep in bed with the light out. Did I tell you about him in my last? I know I was beginning to, but I believe I went off about Ruth Vereker instead; it was she who told me the story for my consolation the other morning. But she shall never hear the one I’m going to tell you now.
“I dashed down to post your letter—the other one—and I rather thought I should run across Miss Vereker on the way. She was coming along the road when I left my room; but I was fool enough to stop to light a cigarette in the hall, thinking of course that she was on the way in. She cannot have been on her way in, because she never came in, and when I went out I could see nothing of her—anywhere. It was very annoying, because it was a chance of getting her apart from the old man and having a gossip about prehistoric times. However, I had come down to post your letter, and I could have sworn I did post it, in the pillar-box on the edge of the green, just opposite. It was not until I got up here again that I found your letter still in my hand, but no cigarette between my lips! I could not have been more shocked and ashamed if I had caught myself with the letter actually between my teeth!
“Of course, I had posted the infernal lighted cigarette, and no doubt it will burn a hole in an envelope or so. I must be thankful that nobody seems to have seen me do it, for who would believe that one could play such a trick unintentionally? No great harm is likely to be done; it isn’t as though I had put in lighted matches; but don’t you see the possibilities of the thing? These pillar-boxes must get pretty hot in the sun; that one was, now I think of it; and suppose the things inside got like tinder, suppose some thin envelope—I know it sounds ridiculous, but I think I’ll just have a look out and see. . . .
“Bruce! Bruce! How I wish to goodness I could get you here by writing down your name! I shall never be able to tell you in a letter what I’ve been through since I last laid down my pen. Yet for the sake of practice, and in case you care to submit the idea to the Vivid (without giving me away), I mean to try.
“I got up and looked out; the pillarbox is only just over the way, almost absolutely underneath my window; and—smoke was coming out of the slot! It was only just beginning, but in a minute it was quite thick, and in less than half a minute it had been seen by the people down below. An old gentleman saw it first—I was just in time to see the old gentleman. He had come out to post a letter, and he was greeted by a puff of smoke from the pillar-box! He started back as though the thing had sworn at him; and, indeed, it had a grotesquely human look about it that even I could appreciate in my horror. We all know mouths like letter-boxes, but here was a letter-box exactly like a mouth opened wide to blow a satisfactory cloud. Later in the proceedings, when the smoke came fast and furious, lit by leaping flames, it reminded me of a negro I once saw swallowing lighted fusees at the Law Courts end of old Holywell Street.
“Meanwhile the old gentleman had shouted for help, police, the fire-brigade. and everything else that he could lay his tongue to except a can of water. In a few seconds he had succeeded in collecting a crowd as excited and as helpless as himself. The Punch and Judy show, in the act of starting a fresh performance, lost its entire audience, who, however, were accompanied to the scene by Toby and the actor-manager with the squeaker in his mouth. A motor stopped in passing, and the occupants roared with laughter, without getting out or doing a thing. No policeman appeared; no policeman have I ever seen (or recognised as such) in happy Harrogate. And there was I looking down upon the grotesque jumble from my upper window—I, the incredibly unwitting author of it all!
“What was I to do? What would you have done? I started to go down, not to confess my fault, only to hear what they were saying; but on the stairs it struck me that somebody might have seen me after all, that I might conceivably be recognised as the culprit and denounced coram populo. I was not going to run the risk of that. I turned tail and came slinking up again, and here I still am with all the sensations of a hunted criminal. It may be that I shall treat that perennial type with some freshness, the next time I come to handle him.
“In the single minute of my absence the affair had entered on a new phase; our sturdy little Yorkshire porter had made his appearance with the can of water which had seemed the one thing needful. Yet it is not so easy to pour water into a pillar-box; the slot slopes the wrong way, and the porter could only dash cans of water at the gaping mouth, and more ran down outside than in. Relays of cans were requisitioned before that pillar-box ceased to belch forth smoke and steam; and by that time it seemed to me that the fire had practically burnt itself out. At all events, when a postman arrived (I hear they telephoned at last to the post-office from this hotel) the correspondence extracted was a charred litter, so far as I could see from my rather excellent coign of vantage; some of it fluttered away in black flakes, and I hear that practically everything in the box was destroyed. I have just been down to lunch, and discussed the matter with many to whom I fear I had never even nodded before. But there is nothing like a little excitement for bringing people together; only I shuddered to think what they would have said or done had they dreamt that the entire conflagration was my handiwork. There was the keenest possible indignation against the author of the outrage, whoever he might be; I was obliged to join in it to some extent myself, or run the risk of incurring suspicion by my apathy. My old friend Squire Vereker was particularly scandalised and incensed; he thumped the floor with the stick on which he leans, and said he would give something to see the ruffian flogged within an inch of his life.
“ ‘That’s what we want in these days,’ said he: ‘the cat, and plenty of it, instead of which there’s hardly any. This modern craze of coddling criminals is all confounded nonsense. It breeds ’em, sir; they thrive and multiply on it. If I wasn’t on my last legs I’d like to have the flogging of this hound myself.’
“ ‘They’ve got to catch him first,’ I suggested, with an unpleasant attack of goose-skin under my clothes.
“ ‘So they have, sir, and I don’t suppose they’ll do it. They never seem to me to catch anybody nowadays. I only hope the rascal won’t fall in with Ruth; she’s gone off on a long walk by herself—went without her lunch, if you please, and left me to get mine by myself. She might as well be married and done with me.’
“The rascal asked in which direction she had gone, but that the old curmudgeon could not say; nor has it anything to do with the case, my dear Bruce, though I feel more than ever that she must be having a precious thin time of it with the exacting old gentleman. The point is, however, that here I have a jolly good idea of the very kind I was wanting all along. It would make at least a very much better story than the one I destroyed. That’s one reason why I’ve written it at such length for your benefit; you might get whole chunks typewritten (again, of course, without giving me away) and try them on the Vivid. It’s not what they asked for, and they needn’t have it if they don’t like; but, if they do, let me have all this back and I can work it up in no time. It’s simply a question of treatment now.
“What would you say? The more or less innocent criminal is always a fascinating fellow, though I can’t profess to handle him like Anstey in ‘The Black Poodle,’ or Wells in some of his short stories. Still, that sort of thing at due distance. Suppose I had gone down into the street, and suppose somebody had spotted me as the dastardly offender playing a gratuitously double part? Should I have taken to my heels, and if so in what direction? Far afield in the heroine’s passing motor-car, or back into the hotel, up in the lift, and so out upon the roof? The essentially innocent soul, in the grotesquely desperate situation; that’s what we want, of course with the right sort of heroine to help him out in the end. Ruth Vereker would be the very one for the job. I would consult her about it, only I don’t want her to know I was such an abject idiot, or to think that I wouldn’t have owned up if there had seemed any point in it. On the whole I think I’ll go and try to find those wonderful rocks my doctor keeps preaching about. I feel like a walk for once, and they might be a very good place for my man to fly to. She would follow him there. But now I think I’ve given you as much as you can master to-morrow morning if you’re going to look after any other fellow’s work as well as mine. I shall still let my first letter go on its own, but I’ll mark it (1), and this one (2), so that you may get hold of the right end of the stick first. And then I hope the wrong end won’t seem as wrong as it might have been.
“But this time I go to the General Post Office. And I shall only light up on my way to those rocks.
“Yours,
“Philip.”
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