As I had no desire to get to the “Angel” really, I implored the taxi-man to take me back to Westminster, which he was willing to do, and on the way the Man from the Future was most entertaining. He spotted the public-houses as we passed, and asked me, as a piece of solid, practical information, whether wine, beer, and spirits were sold in them. I said, “Of course,” but he told me that there was a great controversy in his generation, some people maintaining that the number of them was, in fiction, drawn by enemies; others said that they were, as a fact, quite few and unimportant in London, and others again that they simply did not exist but were the creations of social satire. He asked me to point him out the houses of Brill and Ferguson, who, it seems, were in the eyes of the Twenty-second Century the principal authors of our time. When I answered that I had never heard of them he said, “That is interesting.” I was a little annoyed and asked him whether he had ever heard of Kipling, Miss Fowler, or Swinburne.
He said of course he had read Kipling and Swinburne, and though he had not read Miss Fowler’s works he had been advised to. But he said that Brill for wit and Ferguson for economic analysis were surely the glories of our England. Then he suddenly added, “Well, I’m not sure about 1909. The first Collected Brill is always thought to be 1911. But Ferguson! Why he knew a lot of people as early as 1907! He did the essay on Mediæval Economics which is the appendix to our school text of St. Thomas.”
At this moment we were going down Whitehall. He jumped up excitedly, pointed at the Duke of Cambridge’s statue and said, “That’s Charles I.” Then he pointed to the left and said, “That’s the Duke of Buccleuigh’s house.” And then as he saw the Victoria Tower he shouted, “Oh, that’s Big Ben, I know it. And oh, I say,” he went on, “just look at the Abbey!” “Now,” he said, with genuine bonhomie as the taxi drew up with a jerk, “are those statues symbolic?”
“No,” I said, “they are real people.”
At this he was immensely pleased, and said that he had always said so.
The taxi-man looked in again and asked with genuine pathos where we really wanted to go to.
But just as I was about to answer him two powerful men in billycock hats took my friend quietly but firmly out of the cab, linked their arms in his, and begged me to follow them. I paid the taxi and did so.
The strange man did not resist. He smiled rather foolishly. They hailed a four-wheeler, and we all got in together. We drove about half a mile to the south of Westminster Bridge, stopped at a large Georgian house, and there we all got out. I noticed that the two men treated the stranger with immense respect, but with considerable authority. He, poor fellow, waved his hand at me, and said with a faint smile as he went through the door, arm in arm with his captors:
“Sorry you had to pay. Came away without my salary ticket. Very silly.” And he disappeared.
The other man remaining behind said to me very seriously, “I hope his Lordship didn’t trouble you, sir?”