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Updated: May 12, 2025
Norman Gortsby sat on a bench in the Park, with his back to a strip of bush-planted sward, fenced by the park railings, and the Row fronting him across a wide stretch of carriage drive. Hyde Park Corner, with its rattle and hoot of traffic, lay immediately to his right.
He had nearly given up the search when he caught sight of the object of his pursuit standing irresolutely on the border of the carriage drive, evidently uncertain whether to strike across the Park or make for the bustling pavements of Knightsbridge. He turned round sharply with an air of defensive hostility when he found Gortsby hailing him.
It could be nothing else but a cake of soap, and it had evidently fallen out of the youth's overcoat pocket when he flung himself down on the seat. In another moment Gortsby was scudding along the dusk- shrouded path in anxious quest for a youthful figure in a light overcoat.
"Of course," said Gortsby slowly, "the weak point of your story is that you can't produce the soap." The young man sat forward hurriedly, felt rapidly in the pockets of his overcoat, and then jumped to his feet. "I must have lost it," he muttered angrily.
"The important witness to the genuineness of your story has turned up," said Gortsby, holding out the cake of soap; "it must have slid out of your overcoat pocket when you sat down on the seat. I saw it on the ground after you left.
There was a wide emptiness over road and sidewalk, and yet there were many unconsidered figures moving silently through the half- light, or dotted unobtrusively on bench and chair, scarcely to be distinguished from the shadowed gloom in which they sat. The scene pleased Gortsby and harmonised with his present mood. Dusk, to his mind, was the hour of the defeated.
"You don't seem in a very good temper," said Gortsby, judging that he was expected to take due notice of the demonstration. The young man turned to him with a look of disarming frankness which put him instantly on his guard. "You wouldn't be in a good temper if you were in the fix I'm in," he said; "I've done the silliest thing I've ever done in my life." "Yes?" said Gortsby dispassionately.
He belonged unmistakably to that forlorn orchestra to whose piping no one dances; he was one of the world's lamenters who induce no responsive weeping. As he rose to go Gortsby imagined him returning to a home circle where he was snubbed and of no account, or to some bleak lodging where his ability to pay a weekly bill was the beginning and end of the interest he inspired.
"It was a pity," mused Gortsby; "the going out to get one's own soap was the one convincing touch in the whole story, and yet it was just that little detail that brought him to grief. If he had had the brilliant forethought to provide himself with a cake of soap, wrapped and sealed with all the solicitude of the chemist's counter, he would have been a genius in his particular line.
Unless I can find some decent chap to swallow my story and lend me some money I seem likely to spend the night on the Embankment. I'm glad, anyhow, that you don't think the story outrageously improbable." He threw a good deal of warmth into the last remark, as though perhaps to indicate his hope that Gortsby did not fall far short of the requisite decency.
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