"A spare bed?" he echoed, when the Poet dragged his trunks into the middle of a tiny sitting room. "Really, I have no statement to make."
"At least you will not deny," said the Poet with truculent emphasis, "that you undertook to find me suitable accommodation and to supply me with a bed until it was found."
"I must refer you to the reply given to a similar question on the twenty-third ultimo," answered the Private Secretary loftily. for a rich reward he could not have said where he had been or what he had done on the twenty-third ultimo, but to the Poet the reply was new and disconcerting.
"Where's my flat anyway?" he pursued doggedly.
"I have no statement to make," reiterated the Private Secretary.
After an awkward silence, during which neither yielded an inch of ground, the Poet dragged his trunks destructively downstairs and drove to the flat of the Official Receiver. Glowing with the consciousness of victory, the Private Secretary dressed for dinner and started out to his club. His good-humor was impaired, when he observed in his hall a pendant triangle of wall-paper flapping in the draught of the open door through which the Poet had dragged his trunks. Further on, the paint was scarred on the stairs, and the carpet of the main hall was rucked and disordered; there was also a lingering suggestion of escaping gas, and the Secretary observed a bracket hanging at a bibulous angle.
"This," he murmured through grimly set teeth, "is sheer frightfulness."
Returning to his rooms, he drawled a friendly warning by telephone to the Millionaire, who instantly gave orders that no one of any sex or age was to be admitted. Next he called up the Iron King and repeated the warning; then the Lexicographer, the Official Receiver and the Military Attaché were similarly placed on their guard, and there was nothing to do but to proceed to his belated dinner.
The Great War, which had converted staff officers into popular preachers, novelists into strategical experts and everyone else into a Minister of the Crown, had left the Poet (in name, at least) a poet and in nothing else anything at all. He acted precisely as the Private Secretary had intended him to act, driving first to the Lexicographer's house, where he was greeted by a suspiciously new "TO LET" board, and thence to the Official Receiver's flat, where a typewritten card informed him that this bell was out of order. Embarrassed but purposeful, he directed his four-wheeler to Eaton Square, but the blinds were down, and a semblance of mourning draped the Iron King's house. In Park Lane a twenty-yard expanse of straw, nine inches thick, prayed silence for the Millionaire's quick recovery.
"I don't know where to go to next," murmured the Poet dejectedly.