“Very well,” said the police-constable, who was not only a man after all, but a bachelor. He put a large blue arm round the slim little figure of the war-goddess. “You’ve ’ad my whisker; I’ll ’ave a kiss.”
“Teawk it, laad,” said Sal o’ Peg’s.
Hitherto, in her short but vivid experience of life, policemen had occupied a different plane, moved in another sphere. They were beings to dodge, defy, jeer at, and punch when you could get them down. Flowerpots were kept on window-sills of upper floors expressly for dropping on their helmets. She had danced upon the upturned face of one, given another a swollen nose, distributed bites and shin-kicks impartially among others. This Lunnon one had kissed her for pulling out his whisker. She looked at him with melting eyes. The hitherto impregnable bastion of her heart was taken—and by a member of the Force.
“When tha dost sheave, laad, send tha whisker to Ah by peawst. Th’ address be Sal o’ Peg’s, Briven’s Buildin’s, Clog Ceawrt, East Side, Smutchester!”
“I won’t send it, you pretty little bit o’ frock,” said the enamored police-constable. “I’ll wait till my next leave an’——”
“Breng it then, laad,” sighed Sal o’ Peg’s.
A PITCHED BATTLE
The great Maestro sat at the piano, a small, square instrument. Upon it were piles of music, a bottle of Rhine wine, half emptied, a cup of black coffee, a plate of sliced garlic sausage, and a roll of black bread, peppered outside with aniseed. A bottle of ink was balanced on the music-desk, a blotted scroll of paper obscured the yellowed keyboard. As the great composer worked at the score of his new opera, he breakfasted, taking draughts from the bottle, bites of sausage and bread, and sips of coffee at discretion. He was a quaint, ungainly figure, with vivacious eyes, and his ill-fitting auburn wig had served him, like the right lapel of his plaid dressing-gown, for a pen-wiper for uncounted years.
The Maestro was not alone in the dusty studio to which so many people, both of the great and little worlds, sought entrance in vain. An olive-skinned youth, shabbily dressed in a gray paletot over a worn suit of black—a young fellow of sixteen, with a square, shaggy black head and a determined chin, the cleft in which was rapidly being hidden by an arriving beard—leaned against a music-stand crammed with portly volumes, his dark eyes anxiously fixed upon the old gentleman at the piano, who dipped in the ink and wrote, and wrote, and dipped in the ink, occasionally laying down the pen to strike a chord or two, in seeming forgetfulness of his visitor.
Suddenly the Maestro’s face beamed with a cheerful smile.