“There’s no gas,” he said and pointed to the clear red glow in the east. He tore off his mask, for he hated to have his face concealed. He sniffed the pervading anti-gas with satisfaction. He echoed in a tone of wonder, “STILL there is no gas.”
She too emerged from her disfiguring visor. “But are we safe?” she asked.
“Trust me,” he said.
The sky was full of the loud drone of engines, but no aircraft was visible. The evening was full of warm-tinted clouds, and the raiders and the fighting machines were no doubt dodging each other above that canopy. The distant air barrage made an undertone to the engine whir, as if an immense rubber ball were being bounced on an equally immense tin tray. The big Rolls–Royce had vanished. Its driver, perhaps, had taken it to some less conspicuous position and had not yet returned.
“I find something exhilarating in all this,” said the Lord Paramount. “I do not see why I should not share the dangers of my people.”
A few other intrepid spirits were walking along Whitehall, wearing gas masks of various patterns, and some merely with rags and handkerchiefs to their mouths. Many, like the Lord Paramount, had decided that the fear of gas was premature and either carried their masks in their hands or attempted no protection. Except for two old-fashioned water carts, there were no vehicles in sight. These water carts were busy spraying a heavy, slowly volatile liquid with a sweetish offensive odour that was understood to be an effective antidote to most forms of gas poisoning. It gave off a bluish low-lying mist that swirled and vanished as it diffused. A great deal of publicity had been given to the anti-gas supply after the East End panic. The supply of illuminating gas had been cut off now for some days, and the retorts and mains had been filled with an anti-gas of established efficacy which could be turned on when required from the normal burners. This had the same sweetish smell as the gas sprayed from the carts, and it had proved very reassuring to the public when raids occurred.
“Let us walk up Whitehall,” said the Lord Paramount. “I seem to remember an instruction that the car should shelter from observation under the Admiralty arch in case of a raid. We might go up there.”
She nodded.
“You are not nervous?” he asked.
“Beside you!” she glowed.
The car was not under the arch, and they went on into the Square. There seemed to be a lull in the unseen manoeuvres overhead. Either the invaders had gone altogether or they were too high to be heard or they had silencers for their engines. The only explosions audible were the deep and distant firing of the guns of the outer aircraft zone.
“It is passing over,” said the Lord Paramount. “They must have made off.”
Then he remarked how many people were abroad and how tranquil was their bearing. There were numbers visible now. A moment ago they had seemed alone. Men and women were coming out from the station of the tube railway very much as they might have emerged after a shower of rain. There were news-vendors who apparently had never left the curb. “There is something about our English folk,” he said, “magnificently calm. Something dogged. An obstinate resistance to excitement. They say little but they just carry on.”
BUT NOW THE AIR WAS SCREAMING!
A moment of blank expectation.
In an instant the whole area was alive with bursting bombs. Four — or was it five?— deafening explosions and blinding flashes about them and above them followed one another in close succession, and the ordered pavement before them became like a crater in eruption.
Mr. Parham had seen very little of the more violent side of warfare. During the first World War a certifiable weakness of the heart and his natural aptitudes had made him more serviceable on the home front. And now, peeping out of the eyes of the Lord Paramount, he was astounded at the grotesque variety of injury to human beings of which explosions are capable. Accustomed to study warfare through patr............