Man With Two Left Feet | Page 3

teeth came together with a snap.
In the weeks that followed, as he dogged 'The Girl From Brighton'
company from town to town, it would be difficult to say whether Henry
was happy or unhappy. On the one hand, to realize that Alice was so
near and yet so inaccessible was a constant source of misery; yet, on
the other, he could not but admit that he was having the very dickens of
a time, loafing round the country like this.
He was made for this sort of life, he considered. Fate had placed him in
a London office, but what he really enjoyed was this unfettered travel.
Some gipsy strain in him rendered even the obvious discomforts of
theatrical touring agreeable. He liked catching trains; he liked invading

strange hotels; above all, he revelled in the artistic pleasure of watching
unsuspecting fellow-men as if they were so many ants.
That was really the best part of the whole thing. It was all very well for
Alice to talk about creeping and spying, but, if you considered it
without bias, there was nothing degrading about it at all. It was an art.
It took brains and a genius for disguise to make a man a successful
creeper and spyer. You couldn't simply say to yourself, 'I will creep.' If
you attempted to do it in your own person, you would be detected
instantly. You had to be an adept at masking your personality. You had
to be one man at Bristol and another quite different man at
Hull--especially if, like Henry, you were of a gregarious disposition,
and liked the society of actors.
The stage had always fascinated Henry. To meet even minor members
of the profession off the boards gave him a thrill. There was a resting
juvenile, of fit-up calibre, at his boarding-house who could always get a
shilling out of him simply by talking about how he had jumped in and
saved the show at the hamlets which he had visited in the course of his
wanderings. And on this 'Girl From Brighton' tour he was in constant
touch with men who really amounted to something. Walter Jelliffe had
been a celebrity when Henry was going to school; and Sidney Crane,
the baritone, and others of the lengthy cast, were all players not
unknown in London. Henry courted them assiduously.
It had not been hard to scrape acquaintance with them. The principals
of the company always put up at the best hotel, and--his expenses being
paid by his employer--so did Henry. It was the easiest thing possible to
bridge with a well-timed whisky-and-soda the gulf between
non-acquaintance and warm friendship. Walter Jelliffe, in particular,
was peculiarly accessible. Every time Henry accosted him--as a
different individual, of course--and renewed in a fresh disguise the
friendship which he had enjoyed at the last town, Walter Jelliffe met
him more than half-way.
It was in the sixth week of the tour that the comedian, promoting him
from mere casual acquaintanceship, invited him to come up to his room
and smoke a cigar.

Henry was pleased and flattered. Jelliffe was a personage, always
surrounded by admirers, and the compliment was consequently of a
high order.
He lit his cigar. Among his friends at the Green-Room Club it was
unanimously held that Walter Jelliffe's cigars brought him within the
scope of the law forbidding the carrying of concealed weapons; but
Henry would have smoked the gift of such a man if it had been a
cabbage-leaf. He puffed away contentedly. He was made up as an old
Indian colonel that week, and he complimented his host on the aroma
with a fine old-world courtesy.
Walter Jelliffe seemed gratified.
'Quite comfortable?' he asked.
'Quite, I thank you,' said Henry, fondling his silver moustache.
'That's right. And now tell me, old man, which of us is it you're
trailing?'
Henry nearly swallowed his cigar.
'What do you mean?'
'Oh, come,' protested Jelliffe; 'there's no need to keep it up with me. I
know you're a detective. The question is, Who's the man you're after?
That's what we've all been wondering all this time.'
All! They had all been wondering! It was worse than Henry could have
imagined. Till now he had pictured his position with regard to 'The Girl
From Brighton' company rather as that of some scientist who, seeing
but unseen, keeps a watchful eye on the denizens of a drop of water
under his microscope. And they had all detected him--every one of
them.
It was a stunning blow. If there was one thing on which Henry prided
himself it was the impenetrability of his disguises. He might be slow;

he might be on the stupid side; but he could disguise himself. He had a
variety of disguises, each designed to befog the public more