‘I don’t know. We’ll go and look for him to-morrow. You know where he lives?’
‘Whereabouts, sir. Somewhere off Shaftesbury Avenue.’
‘All right. We’ll go and look him up to-morrow. That’ll be rippin’. Good-night.’
XXII
Neglecting his engagements and Huxtable’s remonstrances Dwala sought Hartopp for many days in vain. With Prosser at his side he visited the places where children play, open spaces, archipelagos of pavement, washed by the roaring traffic of St. Giles’s: for it was among the children that Prosser gave most hope of finding him.
‘It’s one of his curious ways, bein’ with children, sir; his dram-drinkin’ he calls it. He’s goin’ to raise a Revolution of the children one of these days, he says. He don’t set much store by the grown-ups: over-civilised he says they are, while the children are all young savages.’
Hartopp had risen to lofty heights in Prosser’s estimation, since he had realised Dwala’s plans about him; he was a Socrates now, whose every saying had a strange new value in remembrance.
At last they found him. They were standing one sunny summer day in Shaftesbury Avenue, when Prosser cried:
‘There he is!’
A throng of tiny Bacchanals came skipping and whooping out of Endell Street, and in their midst the old Silenus, clumping and swinging jovially along. It was a gay chatter of question and answer, gibe and repartee, flying to and from Silenus to the nymphs, while laughter flickered here and there at random.