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Meanwhile Mme. Loewenstein had flown home in another airplane to Brussels, where she was reported by servants to have gone straight to bed.
A municipal memorial service for Captain Alfred Loewenstein was announced to take place at the Church of St. Michael and St. Gudale in Brussels, then cancelled "for the reason that the fact of Death has not been established," then reannounced.
London news organs distanced all others in advancing hypotheses:
Daily Chronicle: "Somnambulism."
Daily News: "Suicide. ... he had a malignant disease."
Daily Telegraph: "Exceptional strength and iron will power—in short, a man who, finding a door that seemed to stick, might be expected to wrench it open. . . . lurching plane. . . . accidental plunge."
Daily Mail: "Either never left Croyden in the airplane ... or disappeared in a motor car when the plane landed. . . prodigious hoax. . . ."
The London Evening Standard alone eschewed guesswork, chartered a plane exactly like Loewenstein's, sent up a "burly reporter" with a rope around his waist. After several times "hurling himself at the door" the reporter reported the impossibility of opening it against the pressure of the 300 mile gale.
Dutch officials of the Fokker Aircraft Corporation said indignantly that their doors were intentionally designed so that the blast of air would make it absolutely impossible for them to be opened in flight, except by the united efforts of two very strong men.
Seemingly no one reflected that there were at least four men in the Loewenstein Fokker or attached importance to the fact that the lock on the door was found broken.
Interest centred on the fortune that could have been made, last week, by selling Loewenstein shares short; and on the hope that Ogre Loewenstein had engineered a hoax, a coup, had sold himself short and vanished with a profit of millions.
International holding shares crashed from $215 to $100; and hydro-electrics from $51 to $25. When the boards of both corporations affirmed their financial soundness, announced the death of Captain Loewenstein and scouted suicide theories, the prices of the shares recovered respectively to $145 and $35. . . .
Count Van de Ponthose, close Brussels associate of M. le Captaine, cried: "When one is of the house of Loewenstein, one does not commit suicide!" A rival ogre of finance, M. Henry Drefus, chairman of British Celanese and a ruthless combatant with Ogre Loewenstein, commented at London in three words: "I am sorry."
*Hydro-Electric Securities Corp., and International Holding & Investment Co., Ltd.