"You certainly will," Mr. Beldeman replied. "If you should want me before—an advance payment or anything of that sort—I am at the Royal Hotel."
Maraton was alone in the room. For some moments he remained motionless.
He heard Aaron and Julia in the hall but he did not hasten to join them.
He moved instead to the window and stood watching Beldeman's retreating
form.
CHAPTER XX
Maraton led the way on to the roof of one of London's newer hotels.
"They won't give us dinner here," he explained. "London isn't civilised enough for that yet, or perhaps it's a matter of climate. But we can get all sorts of things to eat, and some wine, and sit and watch the lights come out. I was here the other night alone and I thought it the most restful spot in London."
He called a waiter and had a table drawn up to the palisaded edge of the roof. Then he slipped something into the man's hand, and there seemed to be no difficulty about serving them with anything they required.
"A salad, some sandwiches, a bottle of hock and plenty of strawberries. We shan't starve, at any rate," Maraton declared. "Lean back in your chairs, you children of the city, lean down and look at your mother. Look at her smoke-hung arms, stretched out as though to gather in the universe; and the lights upon her bosom—see how they come twinkling into existence."
Both of them followed his outstretched finger with their eyes, but Julia only shivered.
"I hate it," she muttered, "hate it all! London seems to me like a great, rapacious monster. Our bodies and souls are sacrificed over there. For what? I was in Piccadilly and the parks to-day. Is there any justice in the world, I wonder? It's just as though there were a kink in the great wheels and they weren't running true."
"Sometimes I think," Maraton declared, "that the matter would right itself automatically but for the interference of weak people. The laws of life are tampered with so often by people without understanding. They keep alive the unworthy. They try to make life easier for the unfit. They endow hospitals and build model dwellings. It's a sop to their consciences. It's like planting a flower on the grave of the man you have murdered."