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Updated: June 3, 2025
M. Bontoux looked round. "The name he mentioned I know," said the night-porter, quickly. "This M. Gascoigne came here frequently. He is an Englishman." "So I gathered from the dead man's words. Do you know his domicile in Paris?" "Rue St. Honoré, Hôtel Versailles and St. Cloud. I have seen him enter it more than once, with his wife. He has lived there some months."
"Did you see anything of my cousin when he arrived last night?" he asked. "Not when he arrived no," replied the manager. "But later yes. I had some slight conversation with him after he had taken supper. It was nothing much he merely wished to know if there was always a night-porter on duty.
As it seldom happened that I came in at that Whitefriars gate after the Temple was closed, and as I was very muddy and weary, I did not take it ill that the night-porter examined me with much attention as he held the gate a little way open for me to pass in. To help his memory I mentioned my name. "I was not quite sure, sir, but I thought so. Here's a note, sir.
It was a quarter to nine, and the head hall-porter was abdicating his pagoda to the head night-porter, and telling him the necessary secrets of the day. These two lords, before whom the motley panorama of human existence was continually being enrolled, held a portentous confabulation night and morning. They had no illusions; they knew life.
Why should I wait in the room that is still haunted by my horrible doubts of the night? I take up my traveling-bag; I leave my letters on the sitting-room table; and I descend the stairs to the house door. The night-porter at the hotel is slumbering in his chair. "Going to leave us already, sir?" he says, looking at the bag in my hand. Mad or sane, I am ready with my reply.
He thought upon himself, and about himself he was very sturdily cheerful, because he had had a most satisfactory interview with Sir Isaac on the previous afternoon. A few minutes later he walked behind a portmanteau-bearing night-porter into the wide-corridored, sleeping hotel, whose dust glittered in the straight shafts of early sunlight.
It is the night-porter, who wakes you at five by appointment, that you may enjoy your early coffee, tumble into a hired volante, and reach, half dead with sleep, the station in time for the train that goes to San Antonio. Now, whether you are a partisan of early rising or not, you must allow that sunrise and the hour after is the golden time of the day in Cuba.
Two in the morning is the time all the year round when he likes to be most certain that he has got that clasp-knife safe about him. He does not mind being alone as long as he is awake, except on the night before his birthday, when he firmly believes himself to be in peril of his life. The birthday has only come round once since he has been here, and then he sat up along with the night-porter.
I see there are two advertised here, The Imperial everything's Imperial nowadays with a night-porter and a lift I detest lifts never use 'em and the Grand Central, family and commercial, electric light. I abominate commercials, but they know how to feed. Why the deuce can't these people advertise something worth knowing? Electric light who wants to eat overdone steaks by electricity?"
The manager summoned a clerk; the clerk indicated a sequence of entries, amongst which Allerdyke at once noticed the name of Dr. Lydenberg. The rest were, of course, unfamiliar to him. "There was a lady here last night, who, according to your night-porter, changed her mind about staying, and set off in a motor-car about midnight," observed Allerdyke. "Which is she, now, in this lot?"
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