“Table, sir,” said the head-waiter. “For ’ow many, sir?”
“A great company.”
“Well, sir,” said the head-waiter with an appealing glance at the manager, “we’d like to ’ave an idea ’ow many.”
The manager came up to take control and the assistant manager deserted his piles of fruit and came up behind helpfully. Sargon perceived he was against opposition and gathered all the forces within him. “It is a great company,” he said. “It must sit at meat with me here and I must discourse to it. These people yonder may join. Set all the tables one to another. The day of separate tables and separate lives is at an end. Let even the tables manifest the Brotherhood of Man. Under Our Rule. Set them together.”
At the words “Brotherhood of Man” one of the three business men from the north was smitten with understanding. “It’s a blood-stained Bolshevik,” he said, or words to that effect. “Shovin’ in here! Of all places!”
“Oughtn’t to be allowed,” said his friend. “Aren’t we to have no peace from them?”
The first business man expressed a general antipathy for incarmined Bolsheviks and went on eating bread in a hurried, fussed, irritated manner. “When’s that Fricassee of Chicken coming?” he said. “They must have dropped it or something.”
But the manager’s intelligence had been even quicker than the business man’s. A swift signal had been given at the very beginning of Sargon’s speech. The waiter sent to summon the police had already sped past Billy and Bobby and the rest of the uncertain crowd in the entrance hall, draughty now and uneasy because of the broken glass in the rotating door that the man in mourning had broken.
But Sargon heeded nothing of this byplay. He held on to the only course that he could see before him, which was to overwhelm the opposition that gathered against him.
“We don’t have banquets in this room, sir,” said the manager, playing for time. “Banquets you can have in the Syrian Hall or in the Elysian Chamber or in the Great Masonic or Little Masonic Hall—given due notice and after proper arrangements, but this is the general public restaurant. You can’t suddenly give a banquet to an unknown company or society or something here. We don’t cater for that. It isn’t done.”