“Also,” Mr. Trevor said with restraint, “we will first of all call at Vine Street and borrow a few policemen.”
“Oh, yes!” the young lady said eagerly. “We will be sure to need some policemen. Please get some policemen. They will listen to you.”
“I do not find an audience so difficult to find as all that,” said Mr. Maturin coldly. “The London police, Miss Samsonoff, are delightful, but rather on the dull side. They are much given to standing in the middle of crowded roads and dreaming, and in even your short stay in London you must have observed what a serious, nay intolerable, obstruction they are to the traffic. No, no, my friend and I will get this murderer ourselves. Come, Miss Samsonoff.”
“But I dare not come with you!” cried the young lady. “I simply dare not approach that house again! May I not await your return here?”
“The attacks of ten murderers,” said Mr. Maturin indignantly, “cannot disfigure your person more violently than being left alone in a night-club will disfigure your reputation. Bulgarians may be violent, Miss Samsonoff. But lounge lizards are low dogs.”
Mr. Trevor says that he was so plunged in thought that he did not arise from the table with his usual agility; and the first notice he had that Mr. Maturin had risen and was nearly at the door was on hearing him waive aside a pursuing waiter with the damnable words: “My friend will pay.”
Without, the taxicab was still waiting. Its driver, says Mr. Trevor, was one of those stout men of little speech and impatient demeanour: on which at this moment was plainly written the fact that he had been disagreeably affected by waiting in the cold for nearly two hours; and on Mr. Maturin’s sternly giving him a Golders Green direction he just looked at our two gentlemen and appeared to struggle with an impediment in his throat.
Golgotha Road was, as the young lady had described it, a genteel street of tall gloomy houses. Mr. Trevor says that he cannot remember when he liked the look of a street less. The taxicab had not penetrated far therein when Miss Samsonoff timidly begged Mr. Maturin to stop its further progress, pointing out that she could not bear to wait immediately opposite the house and would indeed have preferred to await her brave cavaliers in an altogether different part of London. Mr. Maturin, however, soothed her fears; and, gay as a schoolboy, took the key of the house from her reluctant fingers and was jumping from the cab when Miss Samsonoff cried:
“But surely you have weapons!”
Mr. Trevor says that, while yielding to no one in deploring the use of weapons in daily life, in this particular instance the young lady’s words struck him as full of a practical grasp of the situation.