He left us.
“I didn’t know,” I murmured, “that Armenians were like that. I have been misled about Armenians. And he speaks English very well....”
“Hum,” said Tarlyon thoughtfully. “But no one would say he was Armenian if he wasn’t, would he?”
“Also,” said I, “he is the most aggressive young man I have ever met. Manet indeed!”
“So would you be aggressive, if you had been massacred and made an atrocity of ever since you were a slip of a boy, and had spent your holidays being chased round Lake Van by roaring Turks and hairy Kurds with scimitars dripping with the blood of Circassian children.”
“Oh, not Circassian!” I pleaded, for I have always been very sentimental about Circassian women; but Tarlyon insisted that they generally died young and that they were a fat race....
II
This is what actually happened, towards midnight of that very day, within a stone’s-throw of Claridge’s Hotel, in Brook Street, Mayfair. George Tarlyon and I had been of the same company for dinner and then bridge at a house in Brook Street. Towards midnight a gap in the bridge allowed us to slip away, which we did. Tarlyon had parked his car outside Claridge’s, and thither we walked.
Now Brook Street at that hour is undecided between a state of coma and one of glittering abandon; which means that the deathly silence is every now and then shattered by rich automobiles hurling themselves and lovely ladies all covered in pearls and chrysoprase into the bosom of Grosvenor Square. Claridge’s, of course, has music, so that youth may dance. But of pedestrians along Brook Street there are less than a few ... and of young men in gents’ evening wear running furiously after limousines there is a noticeable scarcity. He simply tore past us, that young man, in the middle of the road, a few yards behind a swiftly going car. The car stopped towards Grosvenor Square, and somehow the young man seemed to disappear. We were more than fifty yards away, and could not determine whether it was a man or a woman who emerged from the car and entered the house, but it looked like a fat little man. Then the car slid away. The pursuing young man had disappeared.
“He can’t have been doing it for fun,” said Tarlyon.