From Apsley House to Marble Arch, he felt, was never a policeman. He could have embraced the hoariest of specials.
The service entrance was too far round. Before he could reach it all might be over.
So, forgetting the bell, he turned and beat, with fists none too hard, upon the door that was anything but soft. And cursed, as he had never cursed man before, the architect whose enlightened scheme had found no place for a knocker.
And with his first blow there burst out in the hall the wild, indecorous strains of "Kuk-kuk kuk-Katie," pealing out louder and ever louder as the musician found confidence.
With his left hand supporting half his tired weight on the frame of these bells, translated by some twentieth-century Tubal Cain to a music so strangely different from the first they had uttered, Dick was absorbed in his rendering of such bars of the vulgar melody as he could remember, when he heard, far behind him, a slow, unimpassioned voice.
"What's all this hell's delight?" it asked.
A confused chorus of protesting explanation, interwoven with the yapping cries and hysterical laughter of women, was all his answer.
In a fresh surge of enthusiasm "Katie" drowned it.
Then George Bruffin shouted—almost, the servants felt, as if he might some day lose his temper.
"How did this freak minstrel get in?" he roared.