Chapter 4

The Singular Speculation of the House-Agent

Lieutenant Drummond Keith was a man about whom conversation always
burst like a thunderstorm the moment he left the room. This arose
from many separate touches about him. He was a light, loose
person, who wore light, loose clothes, generally white, as if he
were in the tropics; he was lean and graceful, like a panther, and
he had restless black eyes.

He was very impecunious. He had one of the habits of the poor,
in a degree so exaggerated as immeasurably to eclipse the most
miserable of the unemployed; I mean the habit of continual change
of lodgings. There are inland tracts of London where, in the very
heart of artificial civilization, humanity has almost become
nomadic once more. But in that restless interior there was no
ragged tramp so restless as the elegant officer in the loose white
clothes. He had shot a great many things in his time, to judge
from his conversation, from partridges to elephants, but his
slangier acquaintances were of opinion that "the moon" had been
not unfrequently amid the victims of his victorious rifle. The
phrase is a fine one, and suggests a mystic, elvish, nocturnal
hunting.

He carried from house to house and from parish to parish a kit
which consisted practically of five articles. Two odd-looking,
large-bladed spears, tied together, the weapons, I suppose, of
some savage tribe, a green umbrella, a huge and tattered copy of
the Pickwick Papers, a big game rifle, and a large sealed jar of
some unholy Oriental wine. These always went into every new
lodging, even for one night; and they went in quite undisguised,
tied up in wisps of string or straw, to the delight of the poetic
gutter boys in the little grey streets.

I had forgotten to mention that he always carried also his old
regimental sword. But this raised another odd question about him.
Slim and active as he was, he was no longer very young. His hair,
indeed, was quite grey, though his rather wild almost Italian
moustache retained its blackness, and his face was careworn under
its almost Italian gaiety. To find a middle-aged man who has left
the Army at the primitive rank of lieutenant is unusual and not
necessarily encouraging. With the more cautious and solid this
fact, like his endless flitting, did the mysterious gentleman no
good.

Lastly, he was a man who told the kind of adventures which win a
man admiration, but not respect. They came out of queer places,
where a good man would scarcely find himself, out of opium dens and
gambling hells; they had the heat of the thieves' kitchens or
smelled of a strange smoke from cannibal incantations. These are
the kind of stories which discredit a person almost equally whether