The suddenness of the catastrophe seemed to strike Mrs. Bindle dumb. To be sitting in the middle of a meadow at dead of night, clothed only in a nightdress and a mackintosh, with the rain drenching down, seemed to her to border upon the indecent.
"You there, Lizzie?" came the voice of Bindle, like the shout of one hailing a drowning person.
"Where's the tent?" demanded Mrs. Bindle inconsequently.
"Gawd knows!" he shouted back. "Probably it's at Yarmouth by now. 'Oly ointment," he yelled.
"What's the matter?"
"I trodden on the marjarine."
"It's all we've got," she cried, her housewifely fears triumphing over even the stress of wind and rain and her own intolerable situation.
From the surrounding darkness came shouts and enquiries as disaster followed disaster. Heaving masses of canvas laboured and, one by one, produced figures scanty of garment and full of protest; but mercifully unseen.
Women cried, children shrieked, and men swore volubly.