§ 8
Every one knows the Café Neptune near Piccadilly Circus and the various crowd that assembles there. There you see artists and painters that are scarcely artists, poets and mere writers, artists’ models and drug-fiends, undergraduates in arts and medicine who are no better than they should be, publishers and gay lawyers, Bolsheviks and White Refugees, American visitors who come to scoff and remain a prey, stray students from the Far East and Jews and Jews and Jews—and Jewesses. And hither at about half-past nine that night came a stout, large, and wearily-distinguished-looking man accompanied by an attractive young lady in short skirts and bobbed hair who carried a large and shapely nose high and sternly, and they threaded their way among the tables through the smoky atmosphere, seeking a congenial place. Out of the garrulous confusing mirk arose a young man with a mop of red hair and protruded a rampant face and asked in a large whisper: “Have you found him?”
“Not a trace,” said Paul Lambone.
Fay Crumb’s face looked up from the table through a haze of cigarette smoke.
“Nor we. We’ve been looking too.”
“As well here as anywhere,” said the stout man. “Where have you looked?”
“Here,” said Harold, “and hereabouts. It seemed a suitable rendezvous.”
“We’ve ranged far and wide,” said Lambone. “We’ve done miles—oh! endless miles. And Christina Alberta has refused all nourishment—for me as well as for herself. At last I said, either I sit down and eat or I drop down and die. May we take these chairs? You have that one, Christina Alberta. Waiter! It is a case of extreme fatigue. No—neither Munchner nor Pilsener. I must have champagne. Bollinger 1914 will do and it must be iced—rather over-iced, and with it, sandwiches—a very considerable number of sandwiches of smoked salmon. Yes—a dozen. Ah!”
He dropped his wrists on the table. “When I have had some drink I will talk,” he wheezed and became silent.
“When did you leave the Mews?” Christina Alberta asked Fay.
“Half-past eight.... Not a sign of him.”
“Have you been far?” Harold asked Lambone.
“Far!” said Lambone and for a time was incapable of more.
His voice seemed to recede in perspective. “Asking policemen for a small, hatless man. Over great areas of London. On and on—from one policeman to another.... She’s a most determined young woman. God help the man who wins her love! Not a soul had seen him. But I can’t talk yet....”
Harold clawed his chin softly with long artistic fingers. “It is just possible,” he said slowly, “that he went in somewhere and bought a hat.”
“Of course he must have got a hat,” said Fay.
“It never occurred to either of us that he would do anything so sane.”
“We never thought of asking in the hatters’ shops,” said Christina Alberta.
“Happily,” said Lambone, and turned to welcome his refreshment. “That would have been the last straw.”
“For a long time we were on the trail of another hatless man,” said Christina Alberta. “We ran him down in the Essex Road after tracking him all up Pentonville. But he was just a vegetarian in sandals and a beard. And there was a report of a hatless man near the Britannia, but that came to nothing. He seemed just to have come out of his house somewhere to buy fried fish off a barrow in the Camden Town High Street.”
“Extraordinary how a crowd collects when you ask the simplest questions,” said Lambone with his mouth full of sandwich. “And how urgently helpful it can be. They almost forced us up a staircase after that fried-fish man, who struck me as an extremely pugnacious, suspicious-looking fellow. The crowd would have it we wanted him, and he didn’t seem to want in the very least to be wanted. If I hadn’t had an inspiration something very disagreeable might have happened. I just said ‘No, it’s not this gentleman, it’s another of the same name.’”
“But what did he say?”
“‘You better,’ he said. But anyhow it satisfied the crowd, and afterwards we got away quite easily on an omnibus that took us down to Portland Road Station.”
The champagne arrived in its ice pail. “Hardly cold, sir, yet,” said the waiter, feeling the bottle.
“It’s not a time for fastidiousness,” said Lambone and took a third sandwich. “You’re not eating, Christina Alberta. And I insist upon your having at least one glass of this.”
Christina Alberta drank a little and ate mechanically.
“I wonder if we shall ever see him again,” said Harold. “London is so vast. So vast! But I always feel that, when I see anyone go out anywhere. There is a tremendous courage in going out. London must be full of lost people. I used to be afraid of London until I discovered the Tubes and the Underground. I felt I might be sucked up side-streets to God knows where. And keep on going round corners into longer and longer streets for ever. I used to dream of the last street of all—endless. But whenever I get nervous I just ask for the nearest tube station and there I am.”
“He may be back at the studio now,” said Fay.
Paul Lambone reached his fourth sandwich and his third glass of champagne with great rapidity. He became more leisurely in his refreshment.
“I am disappointed,” he said, “that I didn’t think of the possibility of his buying a hat. It has disorganized all my inductions. You see I was so concentrated on what was going on inside his head that I never troubled about what might be going on outside it. But a man of his neat and proper habits—acquired through a lifetime of orderly living—would get himself a hat almost mechanically.... We may have passed quite close to him in that.”
“I should have known him,” said Christina Alberta.
“But, until that Pentonville man drew a red herring across the trail, I am convinced we were close on his footsteps. You see Christina Alberta insisted upon my asking every policeman we saw—even men, overworked, irritable, snappy, rude men controlling the traffic—but at any rate I chose the route—I inferred the route. You see, my dear Watson”—he smiled faintly in weary self-approval at Crumb—“the essential thing in a case like this is to put yourself in your man’s place, to think his thoughts instead of your own. That is what I tried—so far as being out of breath would allow it—to impress on Christina Alberta. It’s fairly straightforward. Here you have a man convinced, beautifully and enviably convinced, that he is the supreme lord of the world, unknown, unrecognized as yet, but on the eve of his proclamation. Will such a man go along any street just as easily as any other? Not at all! He will be elated, expansive, ascendant. Very well; he will go up hill and not down. He will choose wide highways and not narrow ones and tend towards the middle of the street——”
“He hasn’t been run over!” cried Christina Alberta sharply.
“No. No. He would avoid traffic because that would hustle him and impair his dignity. Open spaces would attract him. High buildings, bright lights, the intimations of any assembly would draw him powerfully. So he certainly crossed Trafalgar Square from the Admiralty Arch in a diagonal direction, towards the conspicuous invitation of the Coliseum.... You see my method?”
He did not wait for Crumb to answer. “But the more I think over our missing friend,” he went on, “the more I admire and envy him. What crawling things we are!—content to be subjects, units, items, pawns, drops of water and grains of sand, in the multitudinous, unmeaning muddle of human affairs. He soars above it. He soars above it now. He rejects his commonness and inferiority in one magnificent gesture. His world. The grandeur of it! Wherever he is to-night and whatever fate overtake him, he is a happy man. And we sit here, we sit here and drink—I am ordering another bottle of that wine, Harold, and I expect you and Mrs. Crumb to abandon that warm and sticky beer and join me—Waiter! Yes—another, please—we sit here in this crowded, smoky gathering (look at ’em!) while he plans the salvation of the world that we let slide, and lifts his kingly will to God. Glorious exaltation! Suppose that all of us could be touched——”
Christina Alberta interrupted. “I think we ought to telephone to the hospitals. I didn’t think before of the possibility of his being run over. Always he has been a little careless at crossings.”
Paul Lambone lifted a deprecating hand and searched in his mind for some excuse for rest.
“A little later,” he said after a slight pause, “the hospital staffs will be more at leisure. It is their rush hour now—ten to eleven. Yes, the Rush Hour....”