“Yes?” said a voice suddenly. And George’s head, jerking convulsively, seemed for an instant to have parted company with a loosely-attached neck.
The voice had spoken, he divined as soon as the power of thought returned to him, in response to a sharp and authoritative knock on the door, delivered by some hard instrument which sounded like a policeman’s nightstick: and there followed immediately upon this knock sharp and authoritative words.
“Open up there!”
The possessor of the ankles was plainly a girl of spirit.
“I won’t,” she said. “I’m dressing.”
“Who are you?”
“Who are you?”
“Never mind who I am.”
“Well, never mind who I am, then!”
There was a pause. It seemed to George, judging the matter dispassionately, that the ankles had had slightly the better of the exchanges to date.
“What are you doing in there?” asked the male duettist, approaching the thing from another angle.
“I’m dressing, I keep telling you.”
There was another pause. And then into this tense debate there entered a third party.
“What’s all this?” said the newcomer sharply.
George recognised the voice of his old friend Hamilton Beamish.
“Garroway,” said Hamilton Beamish, with an annoyed severity, “what the devil are you doing, hanging about outside this lady’s door? Upon my soul,” proceeded Mr. Beamish warmly, “I’m beginning to wonder what the duties of the New York constabulary are. Their life seems to consist of an endless leisure, which they employ in roaming about and annoying women. Are you aware that the lady inside there is my fiancée and that she is dressing in order to dine with me at a restaurant?”
Officer Garroway, as always, cringed before the superior intelligence.
“I am extremely sorry, Mr. Beamish.”
“So you ought to be. What are you doing here, anyway?”
“There has been some little trouble down below on the premises of the Purple Chicken, and I was violently assaulted by Mr. Finch. I followed him up here on the fire-escape. …”
“Mr. Finch? You are drivelling, Garroway. Mr. Finch is on his wedding-trip. He very kindly lent this lady his apartment during his absence.”
“But, Mr. Beamish, I was talking to him only just now. We sat at the same table.”
“Absurd!”
The dress had disappeared from George’s range of vision now, and he heard the door open.
“What does this man want, Jimmy?”
“A doctor, apparently,” said Hamilton Beamish. “He says he met George Finch just now.”
“But George is miles away.”
“Precisely. Are you ready, darling? Then we will go off and have some dinner. What you need, Garroway, is a bromo-seltzer. Come down to my apartment and I will mix you one. Having taken it, I would recommend you to lie down quietly on the sofa and rest awhile. I think you must have been over-exercising your brain, writing that poem of yours. Who blacked your eye?”
“I wish I knew,” said Officer Garroway wistfully. “I received the injury during the fracas at the Purple Chicken. There was a tablecloth over my head at the moment, and I was unable to ascertain the identity of my assailant. If, and when, I find him I shall soak him so hard it’ll jar his grandchildren.”
“A tablecloth?”
“Yes, Mr. Beamish. And while I was endeavouring to extricate myself from its folds, somebody hit me in the eye with a coffeepot.”
“How do you know it was a coffeepot?”
“I found it lying beside me when I emerged.”
“Ah! Well,” said Hamilton Beamish, summing up, “I hope that this will be a lesson to you not to go into places like the Purple Chicken. You are lucky to have escaped so lightly. You might have had to eat their cheese. Well, come along, Garroway, and we will see what we can do for you.”
IV
George stayed where he was. If he had known of a better ’ole, he would have gone to it: but he did not. He would have been the last person to pretend that it was comfortable lying underneath this bed with fluff tickling his nose and a draught playing about his left ear: but there seemed in the circumstances nothing else to do. To a man unable to fly there were only two modes of exit from this roof—he could climb down the fire-escape, probably into the very arms of the constabulary, or he could try to sneak down the stairs, and most likely run straight into the vengeful Garroway. True, Hamilton Beamish had recommended the policeman after drinking his bromo-seltzer to lie down on the sofa, but who knew if he would follow the advice? Possibly he was even now patrolling the staircase: and George, recalling the man’s physique and remembering the bitterness with which he had spoken of his late assailant, decided that the risk was too great to be taken. Numerous as were the defects of his little niche beneath the bed, considered as a spot to spend a happy evening, it was a good place to be for a man in his delicate position. So he dug himself in and tried to while away the time by thinking.
He thought of many things. He thought of his youth in East Gilead, of his manhood in New York. He thought of Molly and how much he loved her; of Mrs. Waddington and what a blot she was on the great scheme of things; of Hamilton Beamish and his offhand way of dealing with policemen. He thought of Officer Garroway and his nightstick; of Guiseppe and his coffeepot; of the Reverend Gideon Voules and his white socks. He even thought of Sigsbee H. Waddington.
Now, when a man is so hard put to it for mental occupation that he has to fall back on Sigsbee H. Waddington as a topic of thought, he is nearing the end of his resources: and it was possibly with a kindly appreciation of this fact that Fate now supplied something else to occupy George’s mind. Musing idly on Sigsbee H. and wondering how he got that way, George became suddenly aware of approaching footsteps.
He curled himself up into a ball, and his ears stood straight up like a
