"I'll tell you what," he said, "I'll promise to keep the name of the firm out of _The Day_; I'll just refer to it as a firm of solicitors!"
"That's not a bad notion," said the younger man. He drew the elder man aside and they talked quietly for a few minutes. Then more drinks were ordered. Humphrey tackled his fourth Cannock. His head was just beginning to ache.
A tantalizing half-hour passed. The younger man seemed more friendly to Humphrey--he had some friends in Fleet Street; did Humphrey know them, and so on. The elder man was growing more drunk. He swayed a little now. Humphrey's ears buzzed, and his vision was not so acute. The outlines of people were blurred and indistinct. "Good lord," he murmured to himself, "I'm getting drunk too." He was pleasantly happy, and smiled into his sixth glass of beer. He confided to the elder man that he admired him for his constancy to the dead man, and they began to talk over the bad business as friends. The elder man even called him "Ol' chap." They really were very affectionate.
"But WHY did he do it?" said Humphrey; "that's what beats me."
"Oh, well, you see he was in love with this girl ..."
"Why, Miss Sycamore ... you know the little girl that sings, 'Come Round and See Me in the Evening,' in the _Pompadour Girl_."
"Was he not," said the elder man, with a hiccough. "Why, he used to be talking to me all day about her.... And the letters. My word, you should see the letters ... he used to show them to me before he sent them off. Full of high thinking and all that."
And gradually the whole story came out, in scattered pieces, that Humphrey saw he could put together into a real-life drama. Never once did he think of the dead man, or the dead man's wife in Surbiton (Willoughby was probably doing his best there). He only saw the secret drama unfolding itself like a novelist's plot. The meetings, the letters, the double life of Bellowes, a respectable churchwarden in Surbiton; a libertine in London--and then she threw him over; declined to see him when he called at the stage door; he had dressed himself as a woman, hoping to pass the stage-door keeper. Perhaps if he had got as far as the dressing-room, maddened by the breakage of his love, and the waste of his intrigue, there might have been a double tragedy. And so to the final grotesque death in the street.