§ 5
Lambone followed Christina Alberta into the studio and sat down at once on the simple couch that became Mr. Preemby’s bed at night. The couch squeaked and submitted. He stared at the floor and reflected. “I’ve got no engagements this evening,” he said. “None.”
“It won’t be much good waiting here for him,” said Christina Alberta.
“I feel in my bones he won’t head back here for hours and hours,” he said.
“And meanwhile he may be up to anything!” said Christina Alberta.
“Any old lark,” said Lambone.
“Anything,” said Christina Alberta.
“Three,” said Lambone and consulted his watch: “it’s now nearly five. Do you think there is any particular place, Christina Alberta, more than any other place, where we might go and look for him? Where, in fact, we ought to look for him?”
“But will you come and look for him?”
“I’m at your service.”
“It wasn’t in the bond.”
“I want to. If you won’t walk too fast. I feel I ought to.”
Christina Alberta stood before him with her arms akimbo. “I would bet five to one,” she said slowly, “that he heads for Buckingham Palace and demands an audience—No, that isn’t how he puts it—offers to give an audience to his Vassal, the King. He was full of that this morning. And then—Then I suppose they will lock him up and have an inquiry into his mental condition.”
“H’m,” said Lambone, and then, rising to the occasion: “Let’s go to Buckingham Palace.
“We’ll go there at once,” he said, and moved slowly doorward. “We’ll get a taxi.”
They found a taxi in the King’s Road. Christina Alberta did not belong to the taxi-ing class, and she was impressed by a sudden realization that Lambone had all these thousands of taxi-cabs upon the streets alert to do his bidding. The taxi dropped them according to instructions at the foot of the Victoria Memorial which gesticulates in front of Buckingham Palace, and they stood side by side surveying that building. “It looks much as usual,” said Lambone.
“You didn’t expect him to bend it?” said Christina Alberta.
“If he made a disturbance they’ve cleared him up very completely. That flag I suppose means G. R. is at home.... I wonder—what do we do next?”
He was rather at a loss. The emotional atmosphere of this wide-open place was quite different from the emotional atmosphere of his flat or the Lonsdale Mews. In the flat and in the Mews the appeal had been for him to act; the appeal here was not to make himself conspicuous. He was a man of decorous instincts. A car passed, a beautiful, big, shining Napier, and he thought the occupants looked at him as though they recognized him. Lots of people knew him nowadays and might recognize him. In his flat, in the studio at Lonsdale Mews, he could foregather with Christina Alberta without compunction; but now, in this very conspicuous place, this most conspicuous place, he had a momentary realization that he and she didn’t exactly match, he with his finished effect of being a man about town, a large, distinguished, mature man about town, and she with her air of excessive youthfulness, her very short skirts and her hat, like the calyptra of a black mushroom, pulled over her bobbed hair. People might think them an incongruous couple. People might wonder what had brought them together and what he was up to with her.
“I suppose we ought to ask some one,” she said.
“Who?”
“Oh!—one of those sentinels.”
“May one speak to the sentinels at the gate? Frankly, I’m afraid of those tremendous chaps in the busbies. I’d as soon speak to the Horse Guard in Whitehall. He’d probably look right over our heads and say nothing. And we should just dither away from beneath him. I couldn’t stand that....”
“But what are we to do?”
“Nothing rash.”
“We must ask some one.”
“Away there on the left towards Victoria there’s what looks like the real business way in. There’s two policemen. I’m not afraid of policemen. No. And of course that man at the corner is a plain-clothes man.”
“Then let’s ask him!”
Lambone made no move. “Suppose he hasn’t come here at all!”
“I know he meant to do so.”
“I suppose if he hasn’t come,” said Lambone, “we ought to wait about here on the chance of his coming.” He felt extremely like flight at that instant. “There ought to be seats here.
“Come along,” he said, with a sudden return to manly decision, “let’s ask one of those bobbies at the far gate.”