“I come on one condition.... That you don’t walk too fast. We’ve never walked much together, Christina Alberta, but I’ve seen enough of you to know that you walk abominably fast.”
§ 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.