1
Gurney, when he left his office on that Saturday, was influenced by the general depression. He went to lunch at the “White Vine,” in the Haymarket, quite determined to keep himself in hand, to argue himself out of his low spirits.
He made a beginning at once.
“Every one seems to have a fit of the blues. Ernst,” he remarked to the waiter with a factitious cheerfulness.
Ernst, less polite than usual, shrugged his shoulders. “There is enough cause already,” he said.
“Have you had bad news from Germany?” asked Gurney, feeling that he had probably been rather brutal.
“Ach Gott! ’s’ist bald Keiner mehr da,” blubbered Ernst, and he wept without restraint as he arranged the table, occasionally wiping his eyes with his napkin.
“I’m most awfully sorry,” murmured the embarrassed Gurney, and retreated behind the horror of his evening paper. He found small cause for rejoicing there, however, and discarded it as soon as his lunch had been brought by the red-eyed Ernst.
“I wonder what Mark Tapley would have done,” Gurney reflected moodily as he attacked his chop.
There were few other people in the restaurant, and they were all silent and engrossed. That dreadful cloud hung over England, the spirit of pestilence threatened to take substance, the air was full of horror that might at any moment become a visible shape of destruction.
Gurney did not finish his lunch, he lighted a cigarette, left four shillings on the table, and hurried out into the air.
He did not look up at the sky as he turned eastwards towards Fleet Street; no one looked up at the sky that afternoon. Heads and shoulders were burdened by an invisible weight which kept all eyes on the ground.
Fleet Street was full of people who crowded round the windows of newspaper offices, not with the eagerness of a general election crowd, but with a subdued surliness which ever and again broke out in spurts of violent temper.
Gurney, still struggling to maintain his composure, found himself unreasonably irritated when a motor-bus driver shouted at him to get out of the way. It seemed to Gurney that to be knocked down and run over was preferable to being shouted at. The noise of those infernal buses was unbearable, so, also, was that dreadful patter of feet upon the pavement and the dull murmur of mournful voices. Why, in the name of God, could not people keep quiet?
He bumped into some one on the pavement as he scrambled out of the way of the bus, and the man swore at him viciously. Gurney responded, and then discovered that the man was known to him.
“Hallo!” he said. “You?”
“Hallo,” responded the other.
For a moment they stood awkwardly, staring; then Gurney said, “Any more news?”
The man, who was a sub-editor of the Westminster Gazette, shook his head. “I’m just going back now,” he said. “There was nothing ten minutes ago.”
“Pretty awful, isn’t it?” remarked Gurney.
The sub-editor shrugged his shoulders and hurried away.
Presently Gurney found himself wedged among the crowd, watching the Daily Chronicle window.
A few minutes after three, a young man with a very white face, fastened a type-written message to the glass.
There was a rapid constriction of the crowd. Those behind, Gurney among them, could not read the message, and pressed forward. There were cries of “What is it?... I can’t see.... Read it out....” Then those in front gave way slightly, a wave of eagerness agitated the mass of watchers, and the news ran back from the front. “Two more cases of plague in Dundee; one in Edinburgh.”
And with that the pressure of dread was suddenly dissipated, giving place to something kinetic, dynamic. Now it was fear that took the people by the throat: active, compelling fear. Men looked at each other with terror and something of hate in their eyes, the crowd broke and melted. Every man was going to his own home, possessed by an instinct to fly before it was too late.
Gurney shouldered his way out, and stopped a taxi that was crawling past.
“Jermyn Street,” he said.
The driver leaned over and pointed to the Daily Chronicle window. “What’s the news?” he asked.
“The plague’s in Dundee and Edinburgh,” said Gurney, and climbed into the cab and slammed the door.
“Gawd!” muttered the driver, as he drove recklessly westwards.
Sitting in the cab, finding some comfort in the feeling of headlong speed, Gurney was debating whether he would not charter the man to take him right out of London. But he must go home first for money.
At the door of the house in Jermyn Street he met Jasper Thrale.