“For a long time we were on the trail of another hatless man,” said Christina Alberta. “We ran him down in the Essex Road after tracking him all up Pentonville. But he was just a vegetarian in sandals and a beard. And there was a report of a hatless man near the Britannia, but that came to nothing. He seemed just to have come out of his house somewhere to buy fried fish off a barrow in the Camden Town High Street.”
“Extraordinary how a crowd collects when you ask the simplest questions,” said Lambone with his mouth full of sandwich. “And how urgently helpful it can be. They almost forced us up a staircase after that fried-fish man, who struck me as an extremely pugnacious, suspicious-looking fellow. The crowd would have it we wanted him, and he didn’t seem to want in the very least to be wanted. If I hadn’t had an inspiration something very disagreeable might have happened. I just said ‘No, it’s not this gentleman, it’s another of the same name.’”
“But what did he say?”
“‘You better,’ he said. But anyhow it satisfied the crowd, and afterwards we got away quite easily on an omnibus that took us down to Portland Road Station.”
The champagne arrived in its ice pail. “Hardly cold, sir, yet,” said the waiter, feeling the bottle.
“It’s not a time for fastidiousness,” said Lambone and took a third sandwich. “You’re not eating, Christina Alberta. And I insist upon your having at least one glass of this.”
Christina Alberta drank a little and ate mechanically.
“I wonder if we shall ever see him again,” said Harold. “London is so vast. So vast! But I always feel that, when I see anyone go out anywhere. There is a tremendous courage in going out. London must be full of lost people. I used to be afraid of London until I discovered the Tubes and the Underground. I felt I might be sucked up side-streets to God knows where. And keep on going round corners into longer and longer streets for ever. I used to dream of the last street of all—endless. But whenever I get nervous I just ask for the nearest tube station and there I am.”
“He may be back at the studio now,” said Fay.
Paul Lambone reached his fourth sandwich and his third glass of champagne with great rapidity. He became more leisurely in his refreshment.