“Ach Gott! ’s’ist bald Keiner mehr da,” blubbered Ernst, and he wept without restraint as he arranged the table, occasionally wiping his eyes with his napkin.
“I’m most awfully sorry,” murmured the embarrassed Gurney, and retreated behind the horror of his evening paper. He found small cause for rejoicing there, however, and discarded it as soon as his lunch had been brought by the red-eyed Ernst.
“I wonder what Mark Tapley would have done,” Gurney reflected moodily as he attacked his chop.
There were few other people in the restaurant, and they were all silent and engrossed. That dreadful cloud hung over England, the spirit of pestilence threatened to take substance, the air was full of horror that might at any moment become a visible shape of destruction.
Gurney did not finish his lunch, he lighted a cigarette, left four shillings on the table, and hurried out into the air.
He did not look up at the sky as he turned eastwards towards Fleet Street; no one looked up at the sky that afternoon. Heads and shoulders were burdened by an invisible weight which kept all eyes on the ground.
Fleet Street was full of people who crowded round the windows of newspaper offices, not with the eagerness of a general election crowd, but with a subdued surliness which ever and again broke out in spurts of violent temper.
Gurney, still struggling to maintain his composure, found himself unreasonably irritated when a motor-bus driver shouted at him to get out of the way. It seemed to Gurney that to be knocked down and run over was preferable to being shouted at. The noise of those infernal buses was unbearable, so, also, was that dreadful patter of feet upon the pavement and the dull murmur of mournful voices. Why, in the name of God, could not people keep quiet?
He bumped into some one on the pavement as he scrambled out of the way of the bus, and the man swore at him viciously. Gurney responded, and then discovered that the man was known to him.
“Hallo!” he said. “You?”