The Agony Column | Page 3

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The Agony Column
by Earl Derr Biggers


CHAPTER I
London that historic summer was almost unbearably hot. It seems,
looking back, as though the big baking city in those days was meant to
serve as an anteroom of torture--an inadequate bit of preparation for the
hell that was soon to break in the guise of the Great War. About the
soda-water bar in the drug store near the Hotel Cecil many American
tourists found solace in the sirups and creams of home. Through the
open windows of the Piccadilly tea shops you might catch glimpses of
the English consuming quarts of hot tea in order to become cool. It is a
paradox they swear by.
About nine o'clock on the morning of Friday, July twenty-fourth, in
that memorable year nineteen hundred and fourteen, Geoffrey West left
his apartments in Adelphi Terrace and set out for breakfast at the
Canton. He had found the breakfast room of that dignified hotel the
coolest in London, and through some miracle, for the season had
passed, strawberries might still be had there. As he took his way
through the crowded Strand, surrounded on all sides by honest British
faces wet with honest British perspiration he thought longingly of his
rooms in Washington Square, New York. For West, despite the English
sound of that Geoffrey, was as American as Kansas, his native state,
and only pressing business was at that moment holding him in England,
far from the country that glowed unusually rosy because of its

remoteness.
At the Carlton news stand West bought two morning papers--the Times
for study and the Mail for entertainment and then passed on into the
restaurant. His waiter--a tall soldierly Prussian, more blond than West
himself--saw him coming and, with a nod and a mechanical German
smile, set out for the plate of strawberries which he knew would be the
first thing desired by the American. West seated himself at his usual
table and, spreading out the Daily Mail, sought his favorite column.
The first item in that column brought a delighted smile to his face:
"The one who calls me Dearest is not genuine or they would write to
me."
Any one at all familiar with English journalism will recognize at once
what department it was that appealed most to West. During his three
weeks in London he had been following, with the keenest joy, the daily
grist of Personal Notices in the Mail. This string of intimate messages,
popularly known as the Agony Column, has long been an honored
institution in the English press. In the days of Sherlock Holmes it was
in the Times that it flourished, and many a criminal was tracked to
earth after he had inserted some alluring mysterious message in it.
Later the Telegraph gave