2
When I reached the light and warmth of the tube, I could analyse calmly my curious surrender to panic on my way up Great Cumberland Place. A London fog, as I had told Barbara, was no new phenomenon to me; apart from its dirt, I rather enjoyed one for its mystery and romance. If the order of interrogation had been reversed, I should have assured the policeman that I anticipated no trouble and that the hunger-marchers were too tired, too ill-acquainted with London to provoke a riot. I believed every word that I had said to my wife; I am not more nervous than most short-sighted and unadventurous men of forty; and yet for a moment I had entirely lost my head. Was this due to Barbara’s sudden collapse? Were my own nerves cracking?
In the familiar long car, staring up at the well-known advertisements, I was myself again. I could dismiss all thoughts of imminent death, hanging over the house like a bird of doom, as lightly as they would have been dismissed by my stolid neighbours in the train. Barbara, for some reason, was overexcited. In my uncle’s last illness she had felt—or said she felt—the presence of death; she added then, with something of the same terror, that, if she ever heard my life was in danger, she would be dragged out of her indifference. We had been talking, throughout luncheon, of possible riots; I had arrived unexpectedly because I was anxious for her safety; a cell in her unconscious mind might well have retained our conversation as I drove to my uncle’s death-bed. Was it necessary to probe deeper than that?
What mattered, what I could not yet begin to realize was that Barbara and I were at last one flesh and spirit. When I returned to her . . .
I wondered whether I had done wisely in leaving her. When I remembered the last poignant attitude in which I had seen her, kneeling upright with closed eyes and praying distractedly, I felt unforgivably callous.
“For a casual promise to a friend,” I told myself indignantly; “when I’ve assured her he’s in no danger . . .”
As the train ran in to Oxford Circus, I rose from my seat. Then I sat down again; rose again; sat down again . . . till the conductor called sharply:
“Now, make up your mind, sir.”
I made up my mind and went on to Chancery Lane. I must keep my word to O’Rane. Had I wished to break it, I could not; and, with this sense of impotence, something of my old anxiety returned. Raney would not have summoned me for a trifle; if he needed me, there was danger; yet I had told Barbara that I should be as safe with him as if I stayed in Seymour Street. . . .
From Chancery Lane I stumbled to my office at a pace that left no time for morbid fancies. O’Rane was in my room, sitting by the fire and slapping a stick lazily against his boot. I have never seen any one less like a figure of destiny, urging me to an unknown doom. At the vaguest hint, he would have insisted on my going back to Barbara.
“Is there any more news?,” I asked. “I came as soon as I could.”
“It’s very good of you. No, I’ve heard nothing since that first rumour,” he answered. “If I had, I wouldn’t have bothered you; but I’ve been trying for two hours to get through to my secretary, and the girl at the exchange tells me every time that there’s no answer. I expect the hunger-march has disorganized everything; and I can smell a pretty thick fog even if I can’t see it. . . . Shall we start, or is there anything you want to do here first?”
As we set out, I realized that in the darkness of night or the greater darkness of a fog the blind man has an advantage over those who are guided by their eyes. With a murmured “Chancery Lane Tube; and then change at Tottenham Court Road”, O’Rane piloted me more surely and far more quickly than I could have found my way unaided. The contents-bills outside the station proclaimed—rather superfluously—“Fog-Pall over London”; but, beyond one or two collisions and an accident with a runaway horse on the Embankment, I could find no news. “Griffiths’ Armies” were given a headline of no more than medium size; and their progress had been followed less far than Philip Hornbeck had carried it that morning. The peaceful encounter with the police in Regent’s Park was briefly described; but of the barricades which Sonia had seen at Westminster there was no mention.
“By the way, you know Griffiths has turned up again?,” I said. “Your wife was lunching with us; and I gathered that he’d called on you at The Sanctuary. That was just before lunch.”
“What’s happened to him?,” O’Rane asked.
“Sonia told him you weren’t at home.”
“Did she send him to the office?”
“I believe she did.”
O’Rane’s face grew grave; but he only muttered a hope that he would be in time to meet the deputation.
“This is a moment for desperate remedies,” he explained. “That’s why I came to see you in the first place. Most of these fellows will starve, and a fair number will go berserk if we don’t do something for them. I’ve had leave to turn Millbank Gardens into a canteen; so we can look after any one who comes to The Sanctuary. Only a few, though, will penetrate into the heart of London; the main armies are still in the suburbs; and if we can set up relief-camps at Wimbledon, Hounslow, Hampstead, Epping . . . I wanted you to help me with the plans . . . Are we nearly there yet?,” he enquired with sudden impatience.
“It’s the next station,” I answered.
On the high ground of Hampstead, the fog lay whiter, with a tantalizing promise that it would clear at any moment. As we came out of the lift, I could read without difficulty the shop-signs on the opposite side of the street, though the higher ground of the Heath alternated patches of afternoon light with pockets of mist as impenetrable as anything I had seen at the Marble Arch. Of hunger-marchers I could find no trace; but here, as everywhere in London, the police seemed to have been multiplied a hundredfold.
“Take my arm,” O’Rane ordered. “I can shew you a short cut.”
Leaving the main road, I followed him through devious alleys until a sense of open spaces hinted that we must be near the Heath. After the noise of the train, the silence of these empty lanes was unearthly; after the thronged street by the station, we seemed to be alone in the world.
“This reminds me of a raid-night in the war,” I said, as we plunged into a belt of fog. “Pitch-dark. Deserted. And all the time you feel there are thousands of people within touching-distance of you.”
Before he could answer, we had come again into a broad street and were within touching-distance of a crowd that seemed to number thousands, though I could only see the first three or four ranks.
“Is this one of the armies?,” O’Rane asked, as he turned, almost without checking, down a footway between two villas.
“Spectators, I think. It was more like a football crowd than a demonstration.”
“What the devil’s a crowd doing here?,” he asked with the first note of anxiety that I had heard in his voice. “There’s nothing to see, except my office. . . . Hold on a minute while I find the key. I’m going to take you in the back way.”
As we halted, I observed that the footway had brought us to a high brick wall with a wooden door in the middle. O’Rane was fitting the key into the lock when the door opened from the inside and a constable flashed his bull’s-eye into our faces.
“Now then, what are you up to?,” he demanded truculently.
“This is my office,” O’Rane answered.
“Sorry, sir. My orders are not to let any one in.”
“But you can’t keep me out of my own house. Where’s the inspector?”
The constable levelled the beam of his lamp on us again, this time with marked indecision. O’Rane’s voice had a ring of authority; and the key which he held was superficial evidence of good faith.
“Are you Mr. O’Rane, sir?,” asked the constable. “The inspector’s been trying to get hold of you. Maybe . . . you haven’t heard, sir?”
“Haven’t heard what?”
“The place has been smashed about, sir. Them hunger-marchers . . .”
“Any one hurt?”
“None of your people, sir; but we had to take our truncheons to the others. If you’ll see the inspector, sir . . .”
O’Rane bent his head and passed through the doorway, dragging me behind him by the wrist. Our path lay through an overgrown clump of evergreens; and, when we came into the open, on a strip of blighted lawn, it was my turn to catch O’Rane’s wrist while I surveyed the damage. So far as I could see in the uncertain light, there was not one whole pane of glass in the place; a door, torn from its hinges, lay athwart one of the trampled flower-beds; and under the boarding of the penthouse that did duty for a waiting-room there trickled a thin stream of black water. The lawn was carpeted with files and ledgers; the doorways were blocked with broken chairs; and the air was heavy with the smell of wet ashes.
“The place is wrecked?,” O’Rane broke in on my description. “That’s enough for the present. Find me the man in charge.”
In a corner of the main office we came upon a group of three constables, one inspector and two unexplained men in plain-clothes. They were talking in undertones round a table on which O’Rane’s secretary lay in a dead faint. Another clerk, white-faced and tremulous, sat in another corner with a telephone; a third wandered distractedly about the room, tidying books into place and sobbing gently to herself.
“This is Mr. O’Rane,” I told the inspector. “We understand no one’s been killed. That’s all we know.”
“It’s not the fault of those others that some one wasn’t killed. Excuse me, sir, she’s coming to,” he added in an undertone. “Don’t hurry her! Stand back there and give her room.”