“Here we go dancing, under the Moon. …”
“What’s that?” I asked Glendyne.
“What? Oh, that? Some of the Dancers, I expect. We’ll come across them later on, no doubt. Nothing to be alarmed about. Come along!”
Just as we were moving on, however, at the turning into Montague Street there came a soft whirring behind us; a great limousine car drew up at the kerb; and from its interior descended a tall figure which approached us. As he drew near, I saw in the moonlight that it was a thin and white-haired man, showing no signs of the usual grime. He seemed a gentle old man, out of place in this city of nightmare; but as I looked more closely into his face I could see something abnormal in his eyes.
“You will excuse me for interrupting you, gentlemen; but I wish to put an important question to you. What is Truth?”
Glendyne gave an impatient snarl in reply. Probably he was completely blasé by this time; and took little interest in the vagaries of the human mind. As for myself, I was so taken aback by this latest comer that I could only stare without answering.
The old man looked at us eagerly for a moment; then disappointment clouded his face and he turned back to his car. We watched him without speaking as he stepped into it. The chauffeur drove on, leaving us as silently as he had come.
When we reached the great gates of the British Museum, I was somewhat surprised to find them standing wide. I suppose that even amid the abnormalities of this new London my memory was working upon its old lines, and it seemed strange to see this entrance open at that time of night. To my astonishment, Glendyne turned into the court.
“I just want to show you a curious survival in the Reading Room here.”
Inside the building, all was dark; but by the light of an electric torch we found our way to the back of the premises. The Reading Room was dotted here and there with tiny lights like stars in the gloom; and within each nimbus I saw a face bent in the study of a volume.
“Still reading, you see,” said Glendyne. “Even in the last crash some of them are eager for knowledge. How they find the books they want passes my comprehension; for, of course, there is no one left to give them out. But they seem able to pick out what they need from the shelves.”
He threw his flashlight here and there in the gloom, lighting up figure after figure. Some of them turned and gazed toward us with dazzled eyes; but others continued their reading without paying us any attention. It reminded me of a glimpse into the City of Dreadful Night; but it seemed better than the things we had met in our wanderings outside. After all, there was something almost heroic in this vain acquirement of learning at a moment when human things seemed doomed to destruction.
As we emerged from the Museum, it seemed to me that the glare of the flames in the sky was brighter; but this may have been due merely to the increased sensitiveness of my retina after the darkness within the building. We turned to the right and followed Great Russell Street westwards.
We crossed Oxford Street and turned down Charing Cross Road. At the lower end of the street, houses were burning furiously, and I could hear the sound of the fires and the crash of falling girders. Beyond Cambridge Circus the road was impassable. Sutton Street seemed to be the only way left to us. As we came into it, I noticed that the dead were much more numerous here and that many of them held clasped in their skeleton hands a crucifix or a rosary.
“Making their way to St. Patrick’s when they died,” Glendyne explained to me. As we came closer to the church, we found living mingled with the dead. Some of them were so feeble that they could crawl no further; but others were still making efforts to drag themselves nearer to the door. Organ music came from the porch, and I halted amid the dead and dying to listen to the voices of the choir:
“Dies irae, dies illa
Solvet saeclum in favilla. …”
It was weirdly apposite, there in the centre of that burning city. Then the choir continued:
“Tuba mirum spargens sonum
Per sepulchra regionum
Coget omnes ante thronum.”
Hardly had the thunder of the great vowels died away when from the crowd around us came a bitter cry, the sound of some soul in its agony. It startled me; and as I turned round, there ran a movement through that multitude of dead and dying, as though in very truth the trumpets had called the dead to life and judgment. The cry had been heard within the church; for a priest came to the porch and blessed them. It seemed to bring comfort to those alive.
“Let’s get out of this,” I said to Glendyne. “We can’t help; and it’s needless to stay here. I can’t stand it.”
“All right,” he said philosophically. “Personally, I don’t mind this so much as some of the other things one sees. These people, you know, by their way of it, have put themselves under the protection of the Church. Their path is clear. There’s only Death now for them, and, after all, each of us comes to that in his own time. They will go out with easy minds.”
As we came into Soho Square, I was reminded of the fact that even in this city of the dying, human passions still remained. From Greek Street came the sound of revolver shots: three in rapid succession, evidently a duel, and then a gasping cry, followed by a final shot. Then silence for a moment; and at last the noise of heavy footfalls dying away in the direction of Old Compton Street.
“What’s that?”
“How should I know?” Glendyne
