IV
And then at luncheon, there was a little, pencilled feeble note for Peter from Norah Monogue. “Please, if you can spare half an hour come to me. In a day or two I am off to the country.”
Things had just been restored to peace and happiness—Clare had just proposed that they should go, that afternoon, to a Private View together—they might go and have tea with—
For an instant he was tempted to abandon Norah. Then his courage came:—
“Here's a note from Miss Monogue,” he said. “She's awfully ill I think, I ought—”
Clare's face hardened again. She got up from the table—
“Just as you please—” she said.
He climbed on to the omnibus that was to stumble with him down Piccadilly with a. hideous, numbing sense of being under the hand of Fate. Why, at this moment, in all time, should this letter of Norah Monogue's have made its unhappy appearance? With what difficulty and sorrow had he and Clare reached once more a reconciliation only, so wantonly, to be plucked away from it again! From the top of his omnibus he looked down upon a sinister London. It was a heavy, lowering day; thick clouds like damp cloths came down upon the towers and chimneys. The trees in the Green Park were black and chill and in and out of the Clubs figures slipped cautiously and it seemed furtively. Just beyond the Green Park they were building a vast hotel, climbing figures and twisting lines of scaffolding pierced the air, and behind the rolling and rattling of the traffic the sound of many hammers beat rhythmically, monotonously....
To Peter upon his omnibus, suddenly that sound that he had heard before—that sound of London stirring—came back to him, and now more clearly than he had ever known it. Tap-tap-tap-tap... Clamp-clamp-tap-tap-tap-tap—whir! whir!... Clamp-clamp....
It seemed to him that all the cabs and the buses and the little black figures were being hurried by some power straight, fast, along Piccadilly to be pitched, at the end of it, pell-mell, helter-skelter into some dark abysmal pit, there to perish miserably.
Yes, the beast was stirring! Ever so little the pavements, the houses were heaving. Perhaps if one could see already the soil was cracking beneath one's feet. “Look out! London will have you in a minute.” Tap-tap-tap-tap—clamp-clamp—tap-tap-tap-tap—whir-whir—clamp-clamp....
Anyhow it was a heavy, clammy day. The houses were ghosts and the people were ghosts, and grey shadows, soon perhaps to be a yellow fog, floated about the windows and the doors and muffled all human sounds.
He passed the great pile of scaffolding, saw iron girders shining, saw huge cranes swinging in mid-air, saw tiny, tiny black atoms perched above the noise and swallowed by the smoke... tap-tap-clamp-clamp....
Yes, the beast was moving... and, out and in, lost and then found again, crept that twisting chain of beggars to whose pallid army Peter himself had once so nearly belonged.
“I suppose I've got a headache after all that row with Clare,” Peter thought as he climbed off the omnibus.