"Can anyone see a taxi?" he asked. "They've simply disappeared from the streets of London, like Sam Weller's dead donkeys and postboys. Well, you men help him up and give him a hoist on to my shoulders. I'm only a step from here."
At a guess the sprawling figure was some inches taller and at least as heavy as the new-comer, but my suggestion that we should wait for a taxi or send for a stretcher was disregarded.
"Perhaps I'm stronger than I look," he told me; to the injured man he said, "Clasp your hands round my neck; I'll try not to shake you, but it may come a bit painful. And one of you men look after the steering so that I don't tumble off the kerb or get run over. The house is just by the Tate Gallery—a big sort of barn with a lamp over the door—it's called 'The Sanctuary.'"
Grayle started violently and looked at me, but I had appointed myself steersman and was heading for Millbank in the wake of the sombre-eyed Saint Bernard. The young man's looks belied his strength, for he walked fast enough for Grayle to have difficulty in keeping pace, and, as he walked, he told us that the expected division was a false alarm and that the House was up. I hurried along by his side, feeling more and more that the whole evening had passed in a dream and that I should wake up to find myself back in my internment camp. The noise and excitement had tired me into somnolence; the darkened streets added to my feeling of unreality. The dog with a cane and hat in his jaws, one young man with another young man sprawling on his shoulders, Grayle panting on one side and myself guiding the unconvincing procession on the other made up a picture whose reality I myself doubted more than once.
And the house, when we reached it, was a large brick-and-timber warehouse, once the property of a wharfinger, before the Embankment was built, and quite unlike anything that I had expected,—though in keeping with everything that night. I stood waiting for instructions, for there was a modern annexe, with a second floor. I learned afterwards that Whaley, the Pre-Raphaelite, had used the place as a studio.
"It's only about half furnished at present," our young friend informed us, "and I expect you'll find it very untidy. We've not been married a month yet. The house was a wedding-present."
I had guessed him to be the husband of the young bride whom we had met at dinner and could understand why his wife was unprepared for visitors.
"We won't come in," I said, as we stopped under a wrought-iron lamp by a heavy oak door painted in white gothic characters with the name of the house.
"Oh, you must!" he cried. "I may want help. You just push the door—it isn't locked—and, if there's no light on, you'll find the switches to the right. Don't turn it on, though, till the door's shut, or someone will run me in for signalling to German aircraft."