George gave a feverish laugh.
“I was only kidding, of course,” he said.
“Kidding, Mr. Finch?”
“When I said that you could get it here. You can’t, of course. What Guiseppe is bringing me is ginger-ale.”
“Indeed?”
“And my name isn’t Finch,” babbled George. “It—it is—er—Briskett. And I don’t live in that apartment up there, I live in. …”
He was aware of Guiseppe at his side. And Guiseppe was being unspeakably furtive and conspiratorial with a long glass and a coffeepot. He looked like one of the executive staff of the Black Hand plotting against the public weal.
“Is that my ginger-ale?” twittered George. “My ginger-ale, is that what you’ve got there?”
“Yes, sare. Your ginger-ale. Your ginger-ale, Mr. Feench, ha, ha, ha! You are vairy fonny gentleman,” said Guiseppe approvingly.
George could have kicked the man. If this was what the modern Italian was like, no wonder the country had had to have a dictatorship.
“Take it away,” he said, quivering. “I don’t want it in a coffeepot.”
“We always sairve the whisky in the coffeepot, Mr. Feench. You know that.”
Across the table George was appalled by a sinister sight. The man opposite was rising. Yards and yards of him were beginning to uncoil, and on his face there was a strange look of determination and menace.
“You’re. …”
George knew what the next word would have been. It would have been the verb “pinched.” But it was never uttered. With a sudden frenzy, George Finch acted. He was not normally a man of violence, but there are occasions when violence and nothing but violence will meet the case. There flashed through his mind a vision of what would be, did he not act with promptitude and despatch. He would be arrested, haled to jail, immured in a dungeon-cell. And Molly would come back and find no one there to welcome her and—what was even worse—no one to marry her on the morrow.
George did not hesitate. Seizing the tablecloth, he swept it off in a hideous whirl of apple-pie, ice water, bread, potatoes, salad and poulet rôti. He raised it on high, like a retarius in the arena, and brought it down in an enveloping mass on the policeman’s head. Interested cries arose on all sides. The Purple Chicken was one of those jolly, informal restaurants in which a spirit of clean Bohemian fun is the prevailing note, but even in the Purple Chicken occurrences like this were unusual and calculated to excite remark. Four diners laughed happily, a fifth exclaimed “Hot pazazas!” and a sixth said “Well, would you look at that!”
The New York police are not quitters. They may be down, but they are never out. A clutching hand emerged from the tablecloth and gripped George’s shoulder. Another clutching hand was groping about not far from his collar. The fingers of the first hand fastened their hold.
George was not in the frame of mind to be tolerant of this sort of thing. He hit out and smote something solid.
“Casta dimura salve e pura! Attaboy! Soak him again,” said Guiseppe, the waiter, convinced now that the man in the tablecloth was one who had not the best interests of the Purple Chicken at heart.
George did so. The tablecloth became still more agitated. The hand fell from his shoulder.
At this moment there was a confused noise of shouting from the inner room, and all the lights went out.
George would not have had it otherwise. Darkness just suited him. He leaped for the fire-escape and climbed up it with as great a celerity as Mrs. Waddington, some little time before, had used in climbing down. He reached the roof and paused for an instant, listening to the tumult below. Then, hearing through the din the sound of somebody climbing, he ran to the sleeping-porch and dived beneath the bed. To seek refuge in his apartment was, he realised, useless. That would be the first place the pursuer would draw.
He lay there, breathless. Footsteps came to the door. The door opened, and the light was switched on.
II
In supposing that the person or persons whom he had heard climbing up the fire-escape were in pursuit of himself, George Finch had made a pardonable error. Various circumstances had combined to render his departure from the Purple Chicken unobserved.
In the first place, just as Officer Garroway was on the point of releasing his head from the folds of the tablecloth, Guiseppe, with a loyalty to his employers which it would be difficult to overpraise, hit him in the eye with the coffeepot. This had once more confused the policeman’s outlook, and by the time he was able to think clearly again the lights went out.
Simultaneously the moon, naturally on George’s side and anxious to do all that it could to help, went behind a thick cloud and stayed there. No human eye, therefore, had witnessed the young man’s climb for life.
The persons whom he had heard on the fire-escape were a couple who, like himself, had no object in mind other than a swift removal of themselves from the danger-zone. And so far were they from being hostile to George that each, had they seen him, would have urged him on and wished him luck. For one of them was Madame Eulalie and the other no less a man than J. Hamilton Beamish in person.
Hamilton Beamish, escorting his bride-to-be, had arrived at the Purple Chicken a few minutes after George, and, like George, had found the place crowded to its last table. But unlike George, he had not meekly accepted this situation as unalterable. Exerting the full force of his majestic personality, he had caused an extra table to appear, to be set, and to be placed in the fairway at the spot where the indoor restaurant joined the outdoor annex.
It was a position which at first had seemed to
