"You two do look a couple of guys, wiv' yer blue faices. If some of them doctors round 'ere catches yer, they'll pop yer into 'ospital."
He ran off, shrieking his unintelligible jargon.
"We must get to the sea," I said firmly. "This clamour of London is unbearable."
I opened the paper. Enormous headlines stared me in the face.
"Blue Disease sweeping over London. Ten thousand cases reported to-day. Europe alarmed. Question of the isolation of Great Britain under discussion. Debate in the Commons to-night. The Duke of Thud and the Earl of Blunder victims. The Royal Family leave London."
We stood together on the pavement and gazed at these statements in silence. A sense of wonder filled my mind. What a confusion! What an emotional, feverish, heated confusion! Why could not they take the matter calmly? What, in the name of goodness, was the reason of this panic. They knew that the Blue Disease had caused no fatalities in Birmingham, and yet so totally absent was the power of thought and deduction, that they actually printed those glaring headlines.
"The fools," I said. "The amazing, fatuous fools. They simply want to sell the paper. They have no other idea."
A strong nausea came over me. I crumpled up the paper and stood staring up and down the street. The newspaper boy was in the far distance, still shrieking. I saw Sir Barnaby Burtle, the obstetrician, standing by his scarlet front door, eagerly devouring the news. His jaw was slack and his eyes protruded.
The solemn houses of Harley Street only increased my nausea. The folly of it—the selfish, savage folly of life!
"Come, Richard," said Alice. "The sooner we get to the house agent the better. We could never live here."