I
The Purple Chicken seemed to be having a big night. The room opening on to the street, when George reached it, was so crowded, that there was no chance of getting a table. He passed through, hoping to find a resting-place in the open-air section which lay beyond: and was struck, as he walked, by the extraordinarily fine physique of many of the diners.
As a rule, the Purple Chicken catered for the intelligentsia of the neighbourhood, and these did not run to thews and sinews. On most nights in the week you would find the tables occupied by wispy poets and slender futurist painters: but now, though these were present in great numbers, they were supplemented by quite a sprinkling of granite-faced men with knobby shoulders and protruding jaws. George came to the conclusion that a convention from one of the outlying States must be in town and that these men were members of it, bent upon seeing Bohemia.
He did not, however, waste a great deal of time in speculation on this matter, for, stirred by the actual presence of food, he had begun now to realise that Molly had been right, as women always are, and that, while his whole higher self cried out for the moon, his lower self was almost equally as insistent on taking in supplies. And at this particular restaurant it was happily possible to satisfy both selves simultaneously: for there, as he stepped into what the management called the garden—a flagged backyard dotted with tables—was the moon, all present and correct, and there, also, were waiters waiting to supply the prix fixe table-d’hôte at one-dollar-fifty.
It seemed to George the neatest possible combination: and his only anxiety now was with regard to the securing of a seat. At first glance it appeared that every table was occupied.
This conjecture was confirmed by a second glance. But, though all the other tables had their full quota, there was one, standing beside the Sheridan’s back wall and within a few feet of its fire-escape, that was in the possession of a single diner. This diner George approached, making his expression as winning as possible. He did not, as a rule, enjoy sharing a table with a stranger, but as an alternative to going away and trudging round in search of another restaurant it seemed a good plan now.
“Excuse me, sir,” said George, “would you mind if I came to this table?”
The other looked up from the poulet rôti aux pommes de terre and salade Bruxelloise which had been engaging his attention. He was plainly one of the convention from the outlying State, if physique could be taken as a guide. He spread upwards from the table like a circus giant and the hands which gripped the knife and fork had that same spaciousness which George had noted in the diners in the other room. Only as to the eyes did this man differ from his fellows. They had had eyes of a peculiarly steely and unfriendly type, the sort of eyes which a motorist instinctively associates with traffic-policemen and a professional thief with professional detectives. This man’s gaze was mild and friendly, and his eyes would have been attractive but for the redness of their rims and the generally inflamed look which they had.
“By no means, sir,” he replied to George’s polite query.
“Place very crowded tonight.”
“Extremely.”
“Then, if you won’t mind, I’ll sit here.”
“Delighted,” said the other.
George looked round for a waiter and found one at his elbow. However crowded the Purple Chicken might be, its staff never neglected the old habitué: and it had had the benefit of George’s regular custom for many months.
“Good evening, sare,” said the waiter, smiling the smile which had once broken hearts in Assisi.
“Good evening, Guiseppe,” said George. “I’ll take the dinner.”
“Yes, sare. Sick or glear zoop?”
“Sick. Crowded tonight, Guiseppe.”
“Yes, sare. Lots of guys here tonight. Big business.”
“The waiter appears to know you,” said George’s companion.
“Oh, yes,” said George, “I’m in here all the time.”
“Ah,” said the other, thoughtfully.
The soup arrived, and George set about it with a willing spoon. His companion became hideously involved with spaghetti.
“This your first visit to New York?” asked George, after an interval.
“No, indeed, sir. I live in New York.”
“Oh, I thought you were up from the country.”
“No, sir. I live right here in New York.”
A curious idea that he had seen this fellow before somewhere came over George. Yes, at some time and in some place he could have sworn that he had gazed upon that long body, that prominent Adam’s apple, and that gentle expanse of face. He searched his memory. Nothing stirred.
“I have an odd feeling that we have met before,” he said.
“I was thinking just the same myself,” replied the other.
“My name is Finch.”
“Mine is Cabot. Delancy Cabot.”
George shook his head.
“I don’t remember the name.”
“Yours is curiously familiar. I have heard it before, but cannot think when.”
“Do you live in Greenwich Village?”
“Somewhat further uptown. And you?”
“I live in the apartment on top of this building here at the back of us.”
A sudden light that seemed that of recognition came into the other’s face. George observed it.
“Have you remembered where we met?”
“No, sir. No, indeed,” said the other hastily. “It has entirely escaped me.” He took a sip of ice water. “I recall, however, that you are an artist.”
“That’s right. You are not one, by any chance?”
“I am a poet.”
“A poet?” George tried to conceal his somewhat natural surprise. “Where does your stuff appear mostly?”
“I have published nothing as yet, Mr. Finch,” replied the other sadly.
“Tough luck. I have never sold a picture.”
“Too bad.”
They gazed at one another with kindly eyes, two fellow-sufferers from the public’s lack of taste. Guiseppe appeared, bearing deep-dish apple-pie in one hand, poulet rôti in the other.
“Guiseppe,” said George.
“Sare?”
George bent his lips towards the waiter’s attentive ear.
“Bzz … Bzz … Bzz …” said George.
“Yes, sare. Very good, sare. In one moment, sare.”
George leaned back contentedly. Then it occurred to him that he had been a little remiss. He was not actually this red-eyed man’s host, but they had fraternised and they both knew what it was to toil at their respective arts without encouragement or appreciation.
“Perhaps you will join me?” he said.
“Join you, sir?”
“In a highball. Guiseppe has gone to get me one.”
“Indeed? Is it possible to obtain alcoholic refreshment in this restaurant?”
“You can always get it if they know you.”
“But surely it is against the law?”
“Ha, ha!” laughed George. He liked this pleasant, whimsical fellow. “Ha, ha! Deuced good!”
He looked at him with that genial bonhomie with which one looks at a stranger in whom one has discovered a sly sense of humour. And, looking, he suddenly congealed.
Stranger?
“Great Scott!” ejaculated George.
“Sir?”
“Nothing, nothing.”
Memory, though loitering by the way, had reached its goal at last. This man was no stranger. George recollected now where he had seen him before—on the roof of the Sheridan, when the other, clad in policeman’s uniform, had warned him of the deplorable past of Frederick Mullett. The man was a cop, and under his very eyes, red rims and all, he had just ordered a highball.
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.