CHAPTER II—Interviewed
The occupants of the balloon could see everything. They saw the debarcation from the steamers; they saw the unending crowd of doll-like persons thrown up out of the ground by the new Tube station at the south end of Hammersmith Bridge; they saw the heavy persistent stream of vehicles and pedestrians over the bridge; they saw the trains approaching Barnes on the South-Western Railway; they saw the struggles for admittance at all the gates of the City; they even saw flocks of people streaming Cityward along the Barnes High Street and the Lower Richmond Road. It was not for nothing that advertisements of the City of Pleasure had filled one solid page of every daily paper in London, and many in the provinces, for a week past. Visitors were now entering the city at the rate of seventy thousand an hour, at a shilling a head.
There was a gentle tug beneath the car. The thousand feet of rope had been paid out, and the balloon hung motionless.
Then a faint noise, something between the crackling of musketry and the surge of waves on a pebbly beach, ascended from the city.
“They’re cheering,” said Josephus Ilam. “What for?”
“Cheering us, of course,” answered Carpentaria excitedly. “Isn’t it immense?”
“Immense?” said Ilam heavily. “It’s hot. What did you want to show me up here?”
“That!” exclaimed Carpentaria, pointing below to the city with a superb gesture. “And that!” he added passionately, pointing with another gesture to the whole of London, which lay spread out with all its towers and steeples and its blanket of smoke, tremendous and interminable to the east. “That is our prey,” he said, “our food.”
And he began to sing the Toreador song from “Carmen,” exultantly launching the notes into the sky.