Well, the crisis arrived with astonishing suddenness. About the second
or third of August I went down to stay with some friends at the little
fishing village of Rafiel in Glebeshire.
I saw him just before I left London, and he told me that he was going
to stay in London for the first half of August, that he liked London in
August, even though his club would be closed and Horton's delivered
over to the painters.
I heard nothing about him for a fortnight, and then I received a most
extraordinary letter from Box Hamilton, a fellow clubman of mine and
Wilbraham's. Had I heard, he said, that poor old Wilbraham had gone
right off his "knocker"? Nobody knew exactly what had happened, but
suddenly one day at lunch time Wilbraham had turned up at Grey's (the
club to which our own club was a visitor during its cleaning), had
harangued every one about religion in the most extraordinary way, had
burst out from there and started shouting in Piccadilly, had, after
collecting a crowd, disappeared and not been seen until the next
morning, when he had been found, nearly killed, after a hand-to-hand
fight with the market men in Covent Garden.
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