III
The first thing that impressed itself on George Finch’s consciousness, after his eyes had grown accustomed to the light, was an ankle. It was clad in a stocking of diaphanous silk, and was joined almost immediately by another ankle, similarly clad. For an appreciable time these ankles, though slender, bulked so large in George’s world that they may be said to have filled his whole horizon. Then they disappeared.
A moment before this happened, George, shrinking modestly against the wall, would have said that nothing could have pleased him better than to have these ankles disappear. Nevertheless, when they did so, it was all he could do to keep himself from uttering a stricken cry. For the reason they disappeared was that at this moment a dress of some filmy material fell over them, hiding them from view.
It was a dress that had the appearance of having been cut by fairy scissors out of moonbeams and stardust: and in a shopwindow George would have admired it. But seeing it in a shopwindow and seeing it bunched like a prismatic foam on the floor of this bedroom were two separate and distinct things: and so warmly did George Finch blush that he felt as if his face must be singeing the carpet. He shut his eyes and clenched his teeth. Was this, he asked himself, the end or but a beginning?
“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.”