I had seen nothing of Dawson during my intimate association with Madame Gilbert. He had written to me copiously--for a very busy man he was a curiously voluminous letter-writer. He always employed the backs of official forms and wrote in pencil. His handwriting, large and round, was that of a man who had received a good and careful Board School education, but was quite free from personal characteristics. Dawson's letters in no respect resembled the man. They were very long, very dull, and very crudely phrased. He had evidently tried to put them into what he conceived to be a literary shape, and the effect was deplorable. One may read such letters, the work of unskilled writers, in the newspapers which devote space to "Correspondence." The writers, like Dawson, can probably talk vividly and forcibly, using strong nervous vernacular English, but the moment they take the pen all thought and individual character become swamped in a flood of turgid, commonplace jargon. I was disappointed with Dawson's letters, and I am sure that he will be even more disappointed when he finds none of them made immortal in this book. His purpose in sending them to me will have been ruthlessly defeated.
A week after Madame had vanished down my lift for the last time, Dawson--in the make-up with which I was most familiar--called upon me at my office. He also came to say good-bye, for a turn of the official wheel had come, and he was ordered south to resume his duties at the Yard. He was, he told me, taking a last tour of inspection to make certain that the Secret Service net, which he had designed and laid, would be deftly worked by the hands of his subordinates. "I shall not be sorry," said he, "to get back to my deserted family and to be once more the plain man Dawson whom God made."
"You have so many different incarnations," I observed, "that I wonder the original has not escaped your memory."
He smiled. "If I had forgotten," said he, "my wife would soon remind me. She always insists that she married a certain man Dawson and declines to recognise any other."
"So if I come south to visit you, I shall see the original?"
"Thanks," said I; "I will come at the earliest opportunity."
"I don't say that if you call at the Yard you will see quite the same person whom you will meet at Acacia Villas, Primrose Road, Tooting."