“No, there isn’t. I must be getting back.”
“Oh no!”
“Yes. I must go home and pack.”
“Pack?”
“Just a suitcase.”
The universe reeled about George.
“Do you mean you’re going away?” he quavered.
“Yes. Tomorrow.”
“Oh, heavens! For long?”
“Forever. With you.”
“With … ?”
“Of course. Don’t you understand? I’m going home now to pack a suitcase. Then I’ll drive back to New York and stay the night at an hotel, and tomorrow we’ll be married early in the morning, and in the afternoon we’ll go off together, all alone, miles and miles from everybody.”
“Molly!”
“Look at that moon. About now it ought to have been shining into our drawing-room on the train.”
“Yes.”
“Well, there will be just as good a moon tomorrow night.”
George moistened his lips. Something seemed to be tickling his nose, and inside his chest a curious growth had begun to swell, rendering breathing difficult.
“And half an hour ago,” he said, “I thought I would never see you again.”
“Come down and put me in the car,” said Molly briskly. “I left it at the door.”
They descended the stairs. Owing to the eccentricity of the elevator, George had frequently had to go up and down these stairs before: but it was only now that he noticed for the first time a peculiarity about them that made them different from the stairs of every other apartment-house he had visited. They were, he observed, hedged about with roses and honeysuckle, and many more birds were singing on them than you would expect in an apartment-house. Odd. And yet, as he immediately realised, all perfectly in order.
Molly climbed into the two-seater: and George mentioned a point which had presented itself to him.
“I don’t see why you need hurry off like this.”
“I do. I’ve got to pack and get away before mother gets home.”
“Is that blas … is your stepmother in New York?”
“Yes. She came in to see the police.”
Until this moment George had been looking on New York as something rather out of the common run of cities—he particularly liked the way those violets were sprouting up through the flagstones: but on receipt of this information he found that it had lost a little of its charm.
“Oh, she’s in New York, is she?”
“Probably on her way home by now.”
“You don’t think there’s time for us to go and have a little dinner somewhere? Just a cosy little dinner at some quiet little restaurant?”
“Good gracious, no! I’m running it very fine as it is.” She looked at him closely. “But, Georgie darling, you’re starving. I can see it. You’re quite pale and worn-out. When did you last have anything to eat?”
“Eat? Eat? I don’t remember.”
“What did you do after that business this afternoon?”
“I—well, I walked around for awhile. And then I hung about in the bushes for awhile, hoping you would come out. And then—I believe I went to the station and took a train or something.”
“You poor darling! Go and eat something at once.”
“Why can’t I come back to Hempstead with you?”
“Because you can’t.”
“What hotel will you go to tonight?”
“I don’t know. But I’ll come and see you for a minute before I go there.”
“What, here? You’ll come here?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll come back here?”
“Yes.”
“You promise?”
“Yes, if you will go and have some dinner. You look perfectly ghastly.”
“Dinner? All right, I’ll have some.”
“Mind you do. If you haven’t by the time I get back, I’ll go straight home again and never marry you as long as I live. Goodbye, darling, I must be off.”
The two-seater moved away and turned into Washington Square. George stood looking after it long after there was nothing to look at but empty street. Then he started off, like some knight of old on a quest commanded by his lady, to get the dinner on which she had so strongly insisted. She had been wrong, of course, in telling him to go and dine: for what he wanted to do and what any good doctor would have recommended him to do was to return to the roof and gaze at the moon. But her lightest wish was law.
Where could he go most quickly and get the repulsive task done with the minimum waste of time?
The Purple Chicken. It was just round the corner, and a resolute man if he stuck to their prix fixe table-d’hôte at one-dollar-fifty, could shovel a meal into himself in about ten minutes—which was not long to ask the moon to wait.
Besides, at the Purple Chicken you could get “it” if they knew you. And George, though an abstemious young man, felt that “it” was just what at the moment he most required. On an occasion like this he ought, of course, to sip golden nectar from rare old crystal: but, failing that, synthetic whisky served in a coffeepot was perhaps the next best thing.
XVI
I
The Purple Chicken seemed to be having a big night. The room opening on to the street, when George reached it, was so crowded, that there was no chance of getting a table. He passed through, hoping to find a resting-place in the open-air section which lay beyond: and was struck, as he walked, by the extraordinarily fine physique of many of the diners.
As a rule, the Purple Chicken catered for the intelligentsia of the neighbourhood, and these did not run to thews and sinews. On most nights in the week you would find the tables occupied by wispy poets and slender futurist painters: but now, though these were present in great numbers, they were supplemented by quite a sprinkling of granite-faced men with knobby shoulders and protruding jaws. George came to the conclusion that a convention from one of the outlying States must be in town and that these men were members of it,
