"My man," Lord Barcombe cried, "what has happened?"
The officer pulled himself together and touched his helmet.
"It's dreadful, sir," he sobbed. "There has been an accident in the tubes; and they have been blown all to pieces."
III.
The constable, for the moment, had utterly lost his nerve. He stood there in the great flaring roar of the gas mains with a dazed expression that was pitiful.
"Can you tell us anything about it?" Lord Barcombe asked.
"I was in Piccadilly," was the reply. "Everything was perfectly quiet, and so far as I could see not a soul was in sight. Then I heard a funny rushing sound, just like the tear of an express train through a big, empty station. Yes, it was for all the world like a ghostly express train that you could hear and not see. It came nearer and nearer; the whole earth trembled just as if the train had gone mad in Piccadilly. It rushed past me down St. James's Street, and after that there was an awful smash and a bang, and I was lying on my back in the middle of the road. All the lights that remained went out, and for a minute or two I was in that railway collision. Then, when I got my senses back, I blundered down here because of that big flaring light there; and I can't tell you, gentlemen, any more, except that the tube has blown up."
Of that fact there was no question. There were piles of débris thrown high in one part, and a long deep depression in another like a ruined dyke. A little further on the steel core of the tube lay bare with rugged holes ripped in it.
"Some ghastly electric catastrophe," Sir George Egerton murmured.
It was getting light by this time, and it was possible to form some idea of the magnitude of the disaster. Some of the clubs in St. James's Street still appeared to be intact, but others had suffered terribly. The heaps of tumbled masonry were powdered and glittering with broken glass and a few walls hung perilously over the pavement. And still the gas main roared on until the flame grew from purple to violet, and to straw colour before the coming dawn. If this same thing had happened all along the network of tubes, London would be more or less a hideous ruin.