The Seven ConundrumsOppenheim, E. Phillips (Edward Phillips)
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The Seven Conundrums
Oppenheim, E. Phillips (Edward Phillips)
Detective and mystery stories, English; English fiction -- 20th century
"You'll think this silly, but for the last three nights I've had a queer
sort of feeling that Mr. Thomson was somewhere in the audience. I can't
explain it. I looked everywhere for him. I even tried looking at the
people one by one, all down the rows. I never saw any one in the least
like him. All the same, I expected to hear his voice at any moment."
"Granted the old boy's Satanic connections," Leonard observed, "he may
appear to us in any form. Brimstone and horns are clean out of date.
He'll probably send his disembodied voice with instructions."
I strolled to the wings and had a look at the house. Although it still
wanted a quarter of an hour before the performance was due to commence,
the hall was almost packed with people. The audience, as was natural
considering the locality, was a pretty tough lot. It seemed to consist
chiefly of stewards and sailors from the great liners which lay in the
river near by, with a sprinkling of operatives and some of the smaller
shopkeepers. The study of faces has always interested me, and there were
two which I picked out from the crowd during that brief survey and
remembered. One was the face of a youngish man, dressed in the clothes
of a labourer and seated in a dark corner of the room. He was very pale,
almost consumptive-looking, with a black beard which looked as though it
had been recently grown, and coal black hair. His features were utterly
unlike the features of his presumed class, and there was a certain
furtiveness about his expression which puzzled me. A quietly dressed
girl sat by his side, whose face was even more in the shadow than his,
but it struck me that she had been crying, and that for some reason or
other there was a disagreement between her and the young man. The other
person whom I noticed was a stout, middle-aged man, with curly black
hair, a rather yellow complexion, of distinctly Semitic appearance. His
hands were folded upon his waistcoat, he was smoking with much obvious
enjoyment a large cigar, and his eyes were half-closed, as though he
were enjoying a brief rest. I put him down as a small shopkeeper, for
choice a seller of ready-made garments, who had had a long day's work
and was giving himself a treat on the strength of it.
At half-past seven the hall was crammed and the curtain rang up. We went
through the first part of our programme with a reasonable amount of
success, Leonard in particular getting two encores for one of his
humorous songs. At the beginning of the second part, I came out upon the
stage and made the little speech which our mysterious patron's wishes
rendered necessary.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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