Schnabel’s dry lips moved convulsively.... “Ach, bitte,” he babbled; then, with an effort: “Can—I—help—for—it?”...
Richard just caught the words. He recoiled; turned and stumbled up the ladder.... One must get away from that face.... Not so easy—some of the crowd had followed him after all, were swarming round the entrance to the bakehouse. “There’s no-one there,” muttered Richard; “no-one there” ... his voice was choked as though in a thick fog. “No-one there——” But the main thing was to get out, into the street, before they began to do things—no, that did not matter,—but before he could hear them doing things. They were pressing him back again, down again.... “There’s no one there, I tell you!” Blindly he buffeted right and left the heads which blocked his passage. Some of them, believing him, gave way ... melted out of reach from his hard fists and powerful driving shoulders. Others went shuffling and clattering past him, down the wooden rungs. “Schnabel! Schnabel!”—and a sharp scream. One must get away, quickly....
A great surge of bodies in the yard. Thrusting forward, with his head low down, through a rank smell of boots and corduroys and rusty skirts, Richard got clear at last. Round the corner—into the street—a number of people running in his direction—three or four policemen. “There’s no-one there!”—half-sobbing, he dodged through a mews into a wider street; again that loud trample of feet beating towards him—would they never let him escape? he wanted to be free of mobs. What did this mob want? Schnabel? ... No, it was only a helter-skelter of gnome-like urchins, shrieking hoarsely their late editions. He paused to draw breath; leant up against an adjacent wall; his cap had gone long ago, and the wind blew in hard, fresh gusts through his hair.
Presently he walked on again, slowly. Hysteria had evaporated, and was replaced by the usual shame. Now he came to think over the matter coolly, what had so upset him? The little rat of a baker had been in a funk, certainly; probably justified; probably the rabble had handled him fairly roughly. What of that? Ethel Ann, equally innocent, equally helpless, had met with an infinitely worse fate.
Oh, he was not going to take part in the baiting himself. No sport in it. The wisest course to pursue had been to depart from the scene, as he had done. Had he “departed from the scene” or made an exit—rather less dignified than that inferred? Well, he could hardly be expected to stay and look on. Nor could he have protected Schnabel—hang it! the man was a German. Not “the Germans”—but still a German. Richard, impatiently, classified the whole experience as “quite a decent scrum”; and as such, stuck it up on a shelf in his memory, like a book with several pages safely gummed together. He proved to be in a completely strange neighbourhood; and devoted all his present faculties in discovering the whereabouts of Montagu Hall.
II
“Richard, is that you?”
“Yes, Pater; I’ve just come in.”
“I want to speak to you, my boy.”
“Right-o!” Richard turned on the stairs, interrogatively.