The manager’s quick eye had seen Burling-Forster’s glance rest upon the solitary figure at the distant table, and he stared doubtfully now at Routledge. The latter rose and approached him. “Forgive me,” he said, quitting the place. “Not for fortunes would I impair the popularity of your excellent buffet.”
London had changed in an hour; it was pitiless, alien. Yet he could laugh at London. The thought that made him writhe had to do with the gorgeous woman who had cast herself into the débris of his fortunes—the woman who had meant so much to him in the silences of service.... He moved about in the fog; passed the Review office, glanced up at the fourth floor, the blazing lights just a pale glimmer now. Friends were there, putting their best of brain and hand into the maw of the morning paper. The cutting sentences of Dartmore returned, and he did not go upstairs. In the little press-club around the corner, the day men were in festival. Routledge winced—and passed by. There was time still to catch a night-train for Paris, but he couldn’t let the mystery beat him, not even for the glisten of Paris—not for New Jerusalem! He would wait and ask no questions. A broad, low building very lavish with its music, lights, and laughter appeared at length upon the right of way. Routledge inquired of a policeman what was going on within.
“It’s the cab-drivers’ annual ’op, sir,” the officer said.
“May one enter who is not a cab-driver at present?” Routledge asked.
“’Avin’ the price, sir.”
All things to all men, Routledge fell gladly into the gathering, buying seas of beer and continents of cake. Within a half-hour he had telephoned to Rupley’s for a ten-story confection, and presently many couples, shining-faced, were preening and pirouetting for the possession of it. Had he been the King’s groom, he could not have mounted higher in the estimate of the guests. His heart grew warm with the fun. It was after midnight when the new social stratum tumbled about his ears. The hard-headed little master of ceremonies approached, very white and sorrowful:
“I regrets hexceedingly to say, sir, that one as ’as been dismissed from the Harmy’s and the Noivy’s ’op, sir, cawn’t rightly be expected to find a boith ’ere.”
Routledge had a large view of the world, and a compressed notion of the personal equation, but his humor did not save him now from being stung hard and deep.
“You are quite right, of course,” he said. “I’m very sorry to have intruded, and very thankful for the good time up to now. Good-night.”
There was a murmur of sorrow from many feminine quarters when the great frieze coat was brought, but it was quickly silenced by the undertone of intelligence which spread like poison through the hall. The butler at the Army and Navy reception had told one of the drivers, who, turning up later at the celebration of his own guild, found the outcast there. Thus have empires fallen.