Bob Power met us on the platform, which was horribly crowded, and immediately conducted Marion to a motor car which he had in waiting outside the station. Then he came back to me and we went together in search of Marion’s luggage. It was while we were pushing our way through the crowd that he told me the great news. I said that the failure of the demonstration would be a disappointment to the Dean and his riflemen who would have to walk all the way home again without hearing Babberly’s speech.
“I’m not so sure about that,” said Bob. “We may have the meeting in spite of their teeth.”
“You can’t possibly,” I said, “hold a meeting when—dear me! Who are those?”
There was a crowd round the luggage van where we were trying to discover Marion’s trunk. An unmannerly porter shoved me back, and I bumped into a man who had something hard and knobby in his hand. I looked round. He was a soldier in the regular khaki uniform with a rifle in his hand. The bayonet was fixed. I felt deeply thankful that it was pointing upwards and not in a horizontal direction when the porter charged me. It might quite easily have gone through my back. This man appeared to be a kind of outpost sentry. Behind him, all similarly armed, were twenty or thirty more men drawn up with their backs to the wall of the station. A youth, who looked bored and disgusted, was in command of them and stood at the end of the line. His sword struck me as being far too big for him.
“Who on earth are those?” I said.
“Those,” said Bob, “are the troops who are overawing us. Some of them. There are lots more. You’ll see them at every street corner as we go along. By jove! I believe that’s Nosey Henderson in command of this detachment. Excuse me one moment, Lord Kilmore. Henderson was with me at Harrow. I’ll just shake hands with him.”
He turned to the young officer as he spoke.
“Hullo Nosey,” he said, “I didn’t know you were in these parts.”
“Ordered up from the Curragh,” said Henderson. “Damned nuisance this sort of police duty. We oughtn’t to be asked to do it.”
“Your particular job,” said Bob, “is to overawe the railway porters, I suppose.”