Then a face looked in at the doorway, as if reconnoitring, and hesitated.
“By Jove!” said the violoncellist. “There’s the Mahatma back again! Oh! He’s seen us!”
The peering face preceded a sloping body into the _café_, and I was introduced to a man whose excellent poems I had read in a limited edition. He was wearing a heavily jewelled red waistcoat, and the largest ring I ever saw on a human hand. He sat down. The waiter took his order and intoned it in front of the service-bar, proving that another fellow-creature was hidden there awaiting our pleasure. When the Mahatma’s glass was brought, the Scotchman suddenly demanded from the waiter the total of our modest consumption, and paid it. The Mahatma said that he had arrived that evening direct from the Himalayas, and that he had been made or ordained a “khan” in the East. Without any preface he began to talk supernaturally. As he had known Aubrey Beardsley, I referred to the rumour that Beardsley had several times been seen abroad in London after his alleged death.
“That’s nothing,” he said quickly. “I know a man who saw and spoke to Oscar Wilde in the Pyrenees at the very time when Oscar was in prison in England.”
He paused. “Myself,” he said, in a low tone.
“Shall we go?” The Scotchman, faintly smiling, embraced his friend and me in the question.
We went, leaving the Mahatma bent in solitude over his glass. The waiter was obviously saying to himself: “It was inevitable that they should ultimately go, and they have gone.” We had sat for four hours.
Outside, cabs were still rolling to and fro. After cheerful casual good-nights, we got indolently into three separate cabs, and went our easy ways. I saw in my imagination the vista of the thousands of similar nights which my friends had spent, and the vista of the thousands of similar nights which they would yet spend. And the sight was majestic, tremendous.
You could smell money long before you arrived at the double portals of the flat on the second floor. The public staircase was heated; it mounted broadly upwards and upwards in a very easy slope, and at each spacious landing was the statue of some draped woman holding aloft a lamp which threw light on an endless carpet, and on marble mosaics. There was, indeed, a lift; but who could refuse the majestic invitation of the staircase, deserted, silent, and mysterious? The bell would give but one _ting_, and always the same _ting_; it was not an electric device by which the temperament and mood of the intruder on the mat are accurately and instantly signalled to the interior.