‘What old woman?’
‘Lives next door to me,’ said Gibberne. ‘Has a lapdog that yaps. Gods! The temptation is strong!’
There is something very boyish and impulsive about Gibberne at times. Before I could expostulate with him he had dashed forward, snatched the unfortunate animal out of visible existence, and was running violently with it towards the cliff of the Leas. It was most extraordinary. The little brute, you know, didn’t bark or wriggle or make the slightest sign of vitality. It kept quite stiffly in an attitude of somnolent repose, and Gibberne held it by the neck. It was like running about with a dog of wood. ‘Gibberne,’ I cried, ‘put it down!’ Then I said something else. ‘If you run like that, Gibberne,’ I cried, ‘you’ll set your clothes on fire. Your linen trousers are going brown as it is!’
He clapped his hand on his thigh and stood hesitating on the verge. ‘Gibberne,’ I cried, coming up, ‘put it down. This heat is too much! It’s our running so! Two or three miles a second! Friction of the air!’
‘What?’ he said, glancing at the dog.
‘Friction of the air,’ I shouted. ‘Friction of the air. Going too fast. Like meteorites and things. Too hot. And, Gibberne! Gibberne! I’m all over pricking and a sort of perspiration. You can see people stirring slightly. I believe the stuff’s working off! Put that dog down.’
‘Eh?’ he said.
‘It’s working off,’ I repeated. ‘We’re too hot and the stuff’s working off! I’m wet through.’
He stared at me, then at the band, the wheezy rattle of whose performance was certainly going faster. Then with a tremendous sweep of the arm he hurled the dog away from him and it went spinning upward, still inanimate, and hung at last over the grouped parasols of a knot of chattering people. Gibberne was gripping my elbow. ‘By Jove!’ he cried, ‘I believe it is! A sort of hot pricking and—yes. That man’s moving his pocket-handkerchief! Perceptibly. We must get out of this sharp.’
But we could not get out of it sharply enough. Luckily, perhaps! For we might have run, and if we had run we should, I believe, have burst into flames! Almost certainly we should have burst into flames! You know we had neither of us thought of that.... But before we could even begin to run the action of the drug had ceased. It was the business of a minute fraction of a second. The effect of the New Accelerator passed like the drawing of a curtain, vanished in the movement of a hand. I heard Gibberne’s voice in infinite alarm. ‘Sit down,’ he said, and flop, down upon the turf at the edge of the Leas I sat—scorching as I sat. There is a patch of burnt grass there still where I sat down. The whole stagnation seemed to wake up as I did so, the disarticulated vibration of the band rushed together into a blast of music, the promenaders put their feet down and walked their ways, the papers and flags began flapping, smiles passed into words, the winker finished his wink and went on his way complacently, and all the seated people moved and spoke.