These considerations led him a good distance on his way. Then the Mile End Road beguiled him, lying straight and foreign looking, and empty in the sunlight. The Barometer man’s weather apparatus must have been at fault, for in all the sky there was not a cloud, nor the symptom of the coming of a cloud.
Away down near the docks, a clock over a public house pointed to half past seven, and he judged it time to return.
He came back. The Mile End Road was still deserted, the city round the bank was destitute of life, Fleet Street empty.
Pompeii lay not more utterly dead than this weird city of vast business palaces, and the Strand shewed nothing of life or almost nothing, every shop was shuttered though now it was close upon nine o’clock.
Something had happened to London, some blight had fallen on the inhabitants, death seemed everywhere, not seen but hinted at. Stray recollections of weird stories by H. G. Wells passed through the mind of Jones. He recalled the city of London when the Martians had done with it, that city of death, and horror, and sunlight and silence.
Then of a sudden, as he neared the Law Courts, the appalling truth suddenly suggested itself to him.
He walked up to a policeman on point of duty at a corner, a policeman who seemed under the mesmerism of the general gloom and blight, a policeman who might have been the blue concrete core of negation.
“Say, officer,” said Jones, “what day’s to-day?”
“Sunday,” said the policeman.