And still the old man didn't show up.
Cy Norton, smoking a cigarette near the information desk, kept swivelling round and round with his eyes on a comparatively small crowd.
Eighteen years ago, when he was first sent to London as correspondent for the Echo, he had not been impressed—as few sensible people are—by St Paul's Cathedral. He had written that St. Paul's looked exactly like Grand Central Station with an acre of folding seats.
Now, as he stood in the main hall on the upper level, amid a marbly shuffle-shuffle of feet, the old memory returned. So many memories, both ugly and pleasant! And always, of course, the face of a certain girl...
"Sir Henry Merrivale! Sir Henry Merrivale! Please come to the Station-master's office on the upper level near track thirty-six."
Again it echoed and died under the mutter of the crowd.
Standing there in an old grey flannel suit he had bought before the war, his dark blue tie hanging out over the double-breasted jacket, Cy Norton might have been a difficult man to plaice. He was very good-natured, and looked it. He had a lean sardonic face, with fair hair as thick as it had ever been. He was over forty, and showed it.
Yet, despite the battering of time and war, Cy retained an enormous and youthful zest He had not even sworn very much, a few weeks ago, when they politely booted him out of his job.
"We fear," they had cabled from New York, "that he is losing his American point of view."
And who the hell, reflected Cy Norton, wouldn't tend to lose his "American point of view" in all those years? Was it possible—Cy tried not to fool himself—that he could see things from too many sides, from too many countries? Or that he was at last writing real journalism, instead of his earlier antics? Or, most of all, that...
"Mister!" cried a hoarse voice, accompanied by the noise of running and dodging feet. "Mister!"
A grimy-faced boy of twelve or so, whose aid Cy had enlisted with money and with the flattering promise that he should play Dick Tracy, cannoned straight into him.
"He ain't there," the boy confided, breathless yet with a conspiratorial look round him. "They've paged him five times, and they won't do it no more. But he ain't there!"
Cy Norton's heart sank.
"That's bad," he said. "I thought he'd be certain to go there. I was counting on it'"
"Howdja mean?"
"He couldn't resist that loud-speaker! If he heard it, he'd want to go and use it himself and talk to the whole station."
"Cripes!" said the boy. His eyes opened to white disks at the majesty of this conception. "What madeja think of that?"
"Because," admitted Cy, "it's exactly what I've often wanted to do myself, only I haven't the nerve. I mean, they wouldn't really let him recite the limerick about the young girl from Madras. But he'd try."
"Mister, we gotta find him!"
Cy's feverish eyes sought the illuminated clock over the information desk. It was twenty-five minutes to four.
"If he didn't hear the loud-speaker," Cy decided, "either he's left the station or else he's in one of the shops in all these arcades. Probably a bookshop."
"There's lots of bookstores in this place," yelled the boy. "Come on!"
Beckoning, he raced off in the direction of the Vanderbilt Avenue side. Cy Norton, remembering with pleasure that he had not put on a pound of weight in fifteen years, plunged after him.
Lighted arcades loomed up and were explored, amid a rainbow profusion of goods which would have dazed a Londoner and still dazed Cy. Their footsteps clattered and echoed on marble until the boy, doing a graceful skid-turn at a last arcade, pointed ahead.
Well down on the left was another chaste Doubleday bookshop. They did not find H.M. there. But Cy, as he glanced at the line of glass doors to the subway which cut off the end of the corridor, and seeing who was beyond those doors, uttered a grunt of triumph.
"Here," he said, pressing another dollar bill into the boy's hand. "That's all, Dick. We've done it!"
And he hurried through one of the glass doors.
The warm, stale, oily breath of the subway blew round him. On his right, eight turnstiles—with new metal separations, painted dull green, since the fare had been increased to ten cents—faced an iron-shod staircase leading down to the shuttle service between Grand Central and Times Square.
On his left, against a white-tile wall, was a big money-changing booth with a grill over its aperture. In the open space between turnstiles and money-changing booth, but well back beyond both of them, stood a very large and very old Gladstone bag stained with ancient travel labels. On the travelling bag, with his arms folded like Napoleon departing for St Helena, sat Sir Henry Merrivale.
Facing him, fists on hips, stood a policeman. Now there are those who maintain that if Cy Norton had intervened then and there, before anything had happened, all yet would have been well. But to these Cy has a firm reply.
"The cop," he will point out, "wasn't on duty. He was a motorcycle cop, black leather leggings and all. Finally, he was in a good humour."
And so he was, when he first faced H.M.
"What’s the matter, Pop?" the policeman called jovially. "Haven't you got any money for your subway fare?"
H.M., bald head lowered and corporation outthrust, gave him a malignant look over the big spectacles.
"Sure I got money," he retorted, suddenly digging into his pocket and holding out a handful of change. On the tip of one finger was balanced a dime, on the tip of another a nickel.
"But for fifty years, burn me," added H.M., looking first at the dime and then at the nickel, "I've never understood why the little one is worth more than the big one."
"What's that?"
"Never you mind, son. I was just cogitatin'."
The policeman, who was young and a fine figure of a man in his uniform, strolled over and studied him.
"Say, Pop, who are you?"
"I'm the old man," said H.M., dropping the money back in his pocket and tapping himself impressively on the chest. "And I'm mad, too. I'm good and mad."
"No, but I mean: aren't you sort of English?"
"What d'ye mean, 'sort of English? I smackin' well am English!"
"But you talk like an American," objected the policeman, as though pursuing an elusive memory. "Wait a minute; I know! You talk like Winston Churchill. And he talks like an American. I've heard him on the radio. 'Course, in most ways," the policeman added carelessly, "he is an American."
H.M.'s face turned a rich, ripe purple.
"But look, Pop," the policeman continued in a persuasive tone, "why are you sitting here on your bags? And what are you so mad about, anyway?"
With a violent effort H.M. restrained himself. His voice, which at first seemed to come in a hoarse rumble from deep in the cellar, steadied itself. But he could not prevent himself from swelling up with a terrifying effect.
"I want to make a statement, son," he said.
"O.K.; make a statement!"
"I wish to state," said H.M., "that this subway, which you ought to call an Underground—that this subway, of all the subways in which I have ever travelled, is unquestionably the goddamnedest subway."
The policeman, though genuinely good-natured, was stung to the quick. Born in the Bronx and christened Aloysius John O'Casey, he felt his own temper rising.
"What’s the matter with this subway?" he demanded.
"Oh, my son!" groaned H.M., with a dismal wave of his hand. "I'm asking you, Pop: what's the matter with this subway?"
To Cy Norton, standing near the glass doors with his hat hiding his face to keep it straight, the policeman's question seemed justified. The rush hour had not yet come. Only a few persons hurried across, to a clank of turnstiles, and clattered downstairs. Near the money-changing booth lay a coil of rope left behind by workmen. Lights, red and white, winked in the cavern below; another train rumbled out