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Page 22
His fingers fell on Percy's shoulder again, but this time not in a
mere warning tap. They rested where they fell--in an iron clutch.
"It won't do, you know," he said. "This sort o' thing won't do!"
Madness came upon the stout young man. Common prudence and the
lessons of a carefully-taught youth fell from him like a garment.
With an incoherent howl he wriggled round and punched the policeman
smartly in the stomach.
"Ho!" quoth the outraged officer, suddenly becoming human. His
left hand removed itself from the belt, and he got a businesslike
grip on his adversary's collar. "Will you come along with me!"
It was amazing. The thing had happened in such an incredibly brief
space of time. One moment, it seemed to George, he was the centre
of a nasty row in one of the most public spots in London; the next,
the focus had shifted; he had ceased to matter; and the entire
attention of the metropolis was focused on his late assailant, as,
urged by the arm of the Law, he made that journey to Vine Street
Police Station which so many a better man than he had trod.
George watched the pair as they moved up the Haymarket, followed by
a growing and increasingly absorbed crowd; then he turned into the
hotel.
"This," he said to himself; "is the middle of a perfect day! And I
thought London dull!"
CHAPTER 5.
George awoke next morning with a misty sense that somehow the world
had changed. As the last remnants of sleep left him, he was aware
of a vague excitement. Then he sat up in bed with a jerk. He had
remembered that he was in love.
There was no doubt about it. A curious happiness pervaded his
entire being. He felt young and active. Everything was emphatically
for the best in this best of all possible worlds. The sun was
shining. Even the sound of someone in the street below whistling
one of his old compositions, of which he had heartily sickened
twelve months before, was pleasant to his ears, and this in spite
of the fact that the unseen whistler only touched the key in odd
spots and had a poor memory for tunes. George sprang lightly out of
bed, and turned on the cold tap in the bath-room. While he lathered
his face for its morning shave he beamed at himself in the mirror.
It had come at last. The Real Thing.
George had never been in love before. Not really in love. True,
from the age of fifteen, he had been in varying degrees of
intensity attracted sentimentally by the opposite sex. Indeed, at
that period of life of which Mr. Booth Tarkington has written so
searchingly--the age of seventeen--he had been in love with
practically every female he met and with dozens whom he had only
seen in the distance; but ripening years had mellowed his taste and
robbed him of that fine romantic catholicity. During the last five
years women had found him more or less cold. It was the nature of
his profession that had largely brought about this cooling of the
emotions. To a man who, like George, has worked year in and year
out at the composition of musical comedies, woman comes to lose
many of those attractive qualities which ensnare the ordinary male.
To George, of late years, it had begun to seem that the salient
feature of woman as a sex was her disposition to kick. For five
years he had been wandering in a world of women, many of them
beautiful, all of them superficially attractive, who had left no
other impress on his memory except the vigour and frequency with
which they had kicked. Some had kicked about their musical
numbers, some about their love-scenes; some had grumbled about
their exit lines, others about the lines of their second-act
frocks. They had kicked in a myriad differing ways--wrathfully,
sweetly, noisily, softly, smilingly, tearfully, pathetically and
patronizingly; but they had all kicked; with the result that woman
had now become to George not so much a flaming inspiration or a
tender goddess as something to be dodged--tactfully, if possible;
but, if not possible, by open flight. For years he had dreaded to
be left alone with a woman, and had developed a habit of gliding
swiftly away when he saw one bearing down on him.
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