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Page 3
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This Etext prepared by an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer.
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 Carlton. 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 it room; but,
with the advent of halfpenny journalism, the simple souls moved
en masse to the Mail.
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