At an unattainable distance, a haze of dirty-lemon light smeared the darkness. I hurried forward six paces and bruised my knees against a lamp-post. Pausing to pick up my hat, I saw a knot of motionless bodies tangled on the doorstep at my feet. There was no word, no more laughter; perhaps I had imagined that earlier laugh. The fog insulated me again as though I had been thrust under an airless bell-glass with a pile of dead. I dared not move for fear of treading on one of them. The lemon light grew dim, as a thicker wave of fog floated silently from the unplumbed reservoir in the park. I felt my fingers tightening round my stick. Then one of the crumpled bodies moved in its sleep and broke the spell. I walked on—slowly, because I was out of breath—and steadied my nerves by speaking to the policeman on duty at the corner.
He too, I found, was insulated by the fog. Some one should have relieved him hours ago; but every man in the force was required to regulate the traffic and to shepherd the hunger-marchers. What had happened to them he could not tell me. Whenever the fog lifted, he saw groups of them drifting aimlessly about or camping wearily in the first resting-place that they could find. As armies, they had either ceased to exist or had transferred themselves to another part of London. I asked whether he had heard of any trouble.
“Haven’t heard nothing, sir,” he answered. “Wish I had. No, there won’t be no trouble. These chaps are too tired; and they’re all of them strange to London.”
2
When I reached the light and warmth of the tube, I could analyse calmly my curious surrender to panic on my way up Great Cumberland Place. A London fog, as I had told Barbara, was no new phenomenon to me; apart from its dirt, I rather enjoyed one for its mystery and romance. If the order of interrogation had been reversed, I should have assured the policeman that I anticipated no trouble and that the hunger-marchers were too tired, too ill-acquainted with London to provoke a riot. I believed every word that I had said to my wife; I am not more nervous than most short-sighted and unadventurous men of forty; and yet for a moment I had entirely lost my head. Was this due to Barbara’s sudden collapse? Were my own nerves cracking?
In the familiar long car, staring up at the well-known advertisements, I was myself again. I could dismiss all thoughts of imminent death, hanging over the house like a bird of doom, as lightly as they would have been dismissed by my stolid neighbours in the train. Barbara, for some reason, was overexcited. In my uncle’s last illness she had felt—or said she felt—the presence of death; she added then, with something of the same terror, that, if she ever heard my life was in danger, she would be dragged out of her indifference. We had been talking, throughout luncheon, of possible riots; I had arrived unexpectedly because I was anxious for her safety; a cell in her unconscious mind might well have retained our conversation as I drove to my uncle’s death-bed. Was it necessary to probe deeper than that?
What mattered, what I could not yet begin to realize was that Barbara and I were at last one flesh and spirit. When I returned to her . . .
I wondered whether I had done wisely in leaving her. When I remembered the last poignant attitude in which I had seen her, kneeling upright with closed eyes and praying distractedly, I felt unforgivably callous.
“For a casual promise to a friend,” I told myself indignantly; “when I’ve assured her he’s in no danger . . .”
As the train ran in to Oxford Circus, I rose from my seat. Then I sat down again; rose again; sat down again . . . till the conductor called sharply: