George hid her. He did it, too, without wasting precious time by
asking questions. In a situation which might well have thrown the
quickest-witted of men off his balance, he acted with promptitude,
intelligence and despatch. The fact is, George had for years been
an assiduous golfer; and there is no finer school for teaching
concentration and a strict attention to the matter in hand. Few
crises, however unexpected, have the power to disturb a man who has
so conquered the weakness of the flesh as to have trained himself
to bend his left knee, raise his left heel, swing his arms well out
from the body, twist himself into the shape of a corkscrew and use
the muscle of the wrist, at the same time keeping his head still
and his eye on the ball. It is estimated that there are
twenty-three important points to be borne in mind simultaneously
while making a drive at golf; and to the man who has mastered the
art of remembering them all the task of hiding girls in taxicabs is
mere child's play. To pull down the blinds on the side of the
vehicle nearest the kerb was with George the work of a moment. Then
he leaned out of the centre window in such a manner as completely
to screen the interior of the cab from public view.
"Thank you so much," murmured a voice behind him. It seemed to come
from the floor.
"Not at all," said George, trying a sort of vocal chip-shot out of
the corner of his mouth, designed to lift his voice backwards and
lay it dead inside the cab.
He gazed upon Piccadilly with eyes from which the scales had
fallen. Reason told him that he was still in Piccadilly. Otherwise
it would have seemed incredible to him that this could be the same
street which a moment before he had passed judgment upon and found
flat and uninteresting. True, in its salient features it had
altered little. The same number of stodgy-looking people moved up
and down. The buildings retained their air of not having had a bath
since the days of the Tudors. The east wind still blew. But,
though superficially the same, in reality Piccadilly had altered
completely. Before it had been just Piccadilly. Now it was a golden
street in the City of Romance, a main thoroughfare of Bagdad, one
of the principal arteries of the capital of Fairyland. A
rose-coloured mist swam before George's eyes. His spirits, so low
but a few moments back, soared like a good niblick shot out of the
bunker of Gloom. The years fell away from him till, in an instant,
from being a rather poorly preserved, liverish greybeard of
sixty-five or so, he became a sprightly lad of twenty-one in a
world of springtime and flowers and laughing brooks. In other
words, taking it by and large, George felt pretty good. The
impossible had happened; Heaven had sent him an adventure, and he
didn't care if it snowed.