“It’s all right,” I told him. “Come on.”
I felt relieved to see him. He was, so to speak, normally blind. His dark glasses were much less disturbing than the staring but useless eyes of the others.
“Stand still, then,” he said. “I’ve already been bumped into by God knows how many fools today. What the devil’s happened? Why is it so quiet? I know it isn’t night-I can feel the sunlight. What’s gone wrong with everything?”
I told him as much as I knew of what had happened.
When I had finished he said nothing for almost a minute, then he gave a short, bitter laugh.
“There’s one thing,” he said. “They’ll be needing all their damned patronage for themselves now.”
With that he straightened up, a little defiantly.
“Thank you. Good luck,” he said to me, and set off westward wearing an exaggerated air of independence.
The sound of his briskly confident tapping gradually died away behind me as I made my way up Piccadilly.
There were more people to be seen now, and I walked among the scatter of stranded vehicles in the road. Out there I was much less disturbing to those who were feeling their way along the fronts of the buildings, for every time they heard a step close by they would stop and brace themselves against a possible collision. Such collisions were taking place every now and then all down the street, but there was one that I found significant. The subjects of it had been groping along a shop front from opposite directions until they met with a bump. One was a young man in a well-cut suit, but wearing a tie obviously selected by touch alone; the other, a woman who carried a small child. The child whined something inaudible.
The young man had started to edge his way past the woman. He stopped abruptly.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Can your child see?”
“Yes,” she said. “But I can’t.”
The young man turned. He put one finger on the plate glass window, pointing.
“Look, Sonny, what’s in there?” he asked.
“Not Sonny,” the child objected.
“Go on, Mary. Tell the gentleman,” her mother encouraged her.
“Pretty ladies,” said the child.
The man took the woman by the arm and felt his way to the next window.
“And what’s in here?” he asked again.
“Apples and fings,” the child told him.
“Fine!” said the young man.
He pulled off his shoe and hit the window a smart smack with the heel of it. He was inexperienced; the first blow did not do it, but the second did. The crash reverberated up and down the street. He restored his shoe, put an arm cautiously through the broken window, and felt about until he found a couple of oranges. One he gave to the woman and one to the child. He felt about again, found one for himself, and began to peel it. The woman fingered hers.
“But-” she began.
“What’s the matter? Don’t like oranges?” he asked.
“But it isn’t right,” she said. “We didn’t ought to take ‘em. Not like this.”
“How else are you going to get food?” he inquired.
“I suppose-well, I don’t know,” she admitted doubtfully.
“Very well. That’s the answer. Eat it up now, and we’ll go and find something more substantial.”
She still held the orange in her hand, head bent down as though she were looking at it.
“All the same, it don’t seem right,” she said again, but there was less conviction in her tone.
Presently she put the child down and began to peel the orange….
Piccadilly Circus was the most populous place I had found so far. It seemed crowded after the rest, though there were probably less than a hundred people there, all told. Mostly they were wearing queer, ill-assorted clothes and were prowling restlessly around as though still semi dazed. Occasionally a mishap would bring an outburst of profanity and futile rage-rather alarming to hear, because it was itself the product of fright, and childish in temper. But with one exception there was little talk and little noise. It seemed as though their blindness had shut people into themselves.
The exception had found himself a position out on one of the traffic islands. He was a tall, elderly, gaunt man with a bush of wiry gray hair, and he was holding forth emphatically about repentance, the wrath to come, and the uncomfortable prospects for sinners. Nobody was paying him any attention; for most of them the day of wrath had already arrived.
Then, from a distance, came a sound which caught everyones attention: a gradually swelling chorus:
And when I die,
Don’t bury me at all,
Just pickle my bones
in alcohol.
Dreary and untuneful, it slurred through the empty streets, echoing dismally back and forth. Every head in the Circus was turning now left, now right, trying to place its direction. The prophet of doom raised his voice against the competition. The song wailed discordantly closer:
Lay a bottle of booze
At my head and my feet,
And then I’m sure
My bones will keep.
and as an accompaniment to it there was the shuffle of feet more or less in step.
From where I stood I could see them come in single file out of a side street into Shaftesbury Avenue and turn toward the Circus. The second man had his hands on the shoulders of the leader, the third on his, and so on, to the number of twenty-five or thirty. At the conclusion of that song somebody started “Beer, Beer, Glorious Beer!” pitching it in such a high key that it petered out in confusion.
They trudged steadily on until they reached the center of the Circus, then the leader raised his voice, It was a considerable voice, with parade-ground quality:
“Companee-ee-ee-HALT!”
Everybody else in the Circus was now struck motionless, all with their faces turned toward him, nil trying to guess what was afoot. The leader raised his voice again, mimicking the manner of a professional guide:
“‘Ere we are, gents one an’ all. Piccabloodydilly Circus. The Center of the World. The ‘Ub of the Universe. Where all the nobs had their wine, women, and song.”
He was not blind, far from it. His eyes were ranging round, taking stock as he spoke, His sight must have been saved by some such accident as mine, but he was pretty drunk, and so were the men behind him.
“An’ we’ll ‘ave it too,” he added. “Next stop, the well-known Caffy Royal-an’ all drinks on the house,”
“Yus-but what abaht the women?” asked a voice, and there was a laugh.
“Oh, women. ‘S’ that what you want?” said the leader.
He stepped forward and caught a girl by the arm. She screamed as he dragged her toward the man who had spoken, but he took no notice of that.
“There y’are, chum. An’ don’t say I don’t treat you right. It’s a peach, a smasher-if that makes any difference to you.”
“Hey, what about mc?” said the next man.
“You, mate? Well, let’s see. Like ‘em blond or dark?”
Considered later, I suppose I behaved like a fool. My head was still full of standards and conventions that had ceased to apply. It did not occur to me that if there was to be any survival, anyone adopted by this gang would stand a far better chance than she would on her own. Fired with a mixture of schoolboy heroics and noble sentiments, I waded in. He didn’t see me coming until I was quite close, and then I slogged for his jaw. Unfortunately he was a little quicker.
When I next took an interest in things I found myself lying in the road. The sound of the gang was diminishing into the distance, and the prophet of doom, restored to eloquence, was sending threatful bolts of damnation, hell-fire, and a brimstone gehenna hurtling after them.
With a bit of sense knocked into me, I became thankful that the affair had not fallen out worse. Had the result been reversed, I could scarcely have escaped making myself responsible for the men he had been leading. After all, and whatever one might feel about his methods, he was the eyes of that party, and they’d be looking to him for food as well as for drink. And the women would go along too, on their own account as soon as they got hungry enough. And now I came to look around me, I felt doubtful whether any of the women hereabouts would seriously mind anyway. What with one thing and another, it looked as if I might have had a lucky escape from promotion to gang leadership.
Remembering that they had been headed for the Caf� Royal, I decided to revive myself and clear my head at the Regent Palace Hotel. Others appeared to have thought of that before me, but there were quite a lot of bottles they had not found.