“I’d not try any funny business, if I were you,” Coker advised me. “You do right by them, and they’ll do right by you.”
The three of us climbed awkwardly onto the tailboard, and the two trucks drove off.
We stopped somewhere near Swiss Cottage and piled out. There were perhaps twenty people in sight, prowling with apparent aimlessness along the gutters. At the sound of the engines every one of them had turned toward us with an incredulous expression on his face, and as if they were parts of a single mechanism they began to close hopefully toward us, calling out as they came. The drivers shouted to us to get clear. They backed, turned, and rumbled off by the way we had come. The converging people stopped. One or two of them shouted after the trucks; most turned hopelessly and silently back to their wandering. There was one woman about fifty yards away; she broke into hysterics and began to bang her head against a wall. I felt sick.
I turned toward my companions.
“Well, what do you want first?” I asked them.
“A billet,” said one. “We got to ‘ave a place to doss down.” II reckoned I’d have to find that at least for them. I couldn’t just dodge out and leave them stranded right where we were. Now we’d come this far, I couldn’t do less than find them a center, a kind of H.Q., and put them on their feet. What was wanted was a place where the receiving, storing, and feeding could be done, and the whole lot keep together. I counted them. There were fifty-two; fourteen of them women. The best course seemed to be to find a hotel. It would save the trouble of fitting out with beds and bedding.
The place we found was a kind of glorified boardinghouse made up of four Victorian terrace houses knocked together, giving more than the accommodation we needed. There were already half a dozen people in the place when we got there. Heaven knows what had happened to the rest. We found the remnant, huddled together and scared, in one of the lounges-an old man, and elderly woman (who turned out to have been the manageress), a middle-aged man, and three girls. The manageress had the spirit to pull herself together and hand out some quite high-sounding threats, but the ice, even of her most severe boardinghouse manner, was thin. The old man tried to back her up by blustering a bit. The rest did nothing but keep their faces turned nervously toward us.
I explained that we were moving in. If they did not like it, they could go: if, on the other hand, they preferred to stay and share equally what there was, they were free to do so. They were not pleased. The way they reacted suggested that somewhere in the place they had a cache of stores that they were not anxious to share. When they grasped that the intention was to build up bigger stores their attitude modified perceptibly, and they prepared to make the best of it.
I decided I’d have to stay on a day or two just to get the party set up. I guessed Josella would be feeling much the same about her lot. Ingenious man, Coker-the trick is called holding the baby. But after that I’d dodge out, and join her.
During the next couple of days we worked systematically, tackling the bigger stores near by-mostly chain stores, and not very big, at that. Nearly everywhere there had been others before us. The fronts of the shops were in a bad way. The windows were broken in, the floors were littered with half-opened cans and split packages which had disappointed the finders, and now lay in a sticky, stinking mass among the fragments of window glass. But as a rule the loss was small-and the damage superficial, and we’d find the larger cases in and behind the shop untouched.
It was far from easy for blind men to carry and maneuver heavy cases out of the place and load them on handcarts. Then there was the job of getting them back to the billet and stowing them. But practice began to give them a knack with it.
The most hampering factor was the necessity for my presence. Little or nothing could go on unless I was there to direct It was impossible to use more than one working party at a time, though we could have made up a dozen. Nor could much go on back at the hotel while I was out with the foraging squad. Moreover, such time as I had to spend investigating and prospecting the district was pretty much wasted for everyone else. Two sighted men could have got though a lot more than twice the work.
Once we had started, I was too busy during the day to spend much thought beyond the actual work in hand, and too tired at night to do anything but sleep the moment I lay down. Now and again I’d say to myself, “By tomorrow night I’ll have them pretty well fixed up-enough to keep them going for a bit, anyway. Then I’ll light out of this and find Josella.”
That sounded all right-but every day it was tomorrow that I’d be able to do it, and each day it became more difficult. Some of them had begun to learn a bit, but still practically nothing, from foraging to can-opening, could go on without my being around. It seemed, the way things were going, that I became less, instead of more, dispensable.
None of it was their fault. That was what made it difficult. Some of them were trying so damned hard. I just had to watch them making it more and more impossible for me to play the skunk and walk out on them. A dozen times a day I cursed the man Coker for contriving me into the situation-but that didn’t help to solve it: it just left me wondering how it could end.
I had my first inkling of that, though I scarcely recognized it as such, on the fourth morning-or maybe it was the fifth-just as we were setting out. A woman called down the stairs that there were two sick up there; pretty bad, she thought.
My two watchdogs did not like it.
“Listen,” I told them. “I’ve had about enough of this chain-gang stuff. We’d be doing a lot better than we are now without it , anyway.”
“An’ have you slinkin’ off to join your old mob?” said someone.
“Don’t fool yourself,” I said. “I could have slugged this pair of amateur gorillas any hour of the day or night. I’ve not done it because you’ve got nothing against them other than their being a pair of dim-witted nuisances
“‘Ere-” one of my attachments began to expostulate. “But,” I went on, “if they don’t let me see what’s wrong with these people, they can begin expecting to be slugged any minute from now.
The two saw reason, but when we reached the room they took good care to stand as far back as the chain allowed. The casualties turned out to be two men, one young, one middle-aged. Both had high temperatures and complained of agonizing pain in the bowels. I didn’t know much about such things then, but I did not need to know much to feel worried. I could think of nothing but to direct that they should be carried to an empty house near by, and to tell one of the women to look after them as best she could.
That was the beginning of a day of setbacks. The next of a very different kind, happened around noon.
We had cleared most of the food shops close to us, and I bad decided to extend our range a little. From my recollections of the neighborhood, I reckoned we ought to find another shopping street about a half mile to the north, so I led my party that way. We found the shops there, all right, but something else too.
As we turned the corner and came into view of them, L stopped. In front of a chain-store grocery a party of men was trundling out cases and loading them on to a truck. Save for the difference in the vehicle, I might have been watching my own party at work. I halted my group of twenty or so, wondering what line we should take. My inclination was to withdraw and avoid possible trouble by finding a clear field elsewhere; there was no sense in coming into conflict when there was plenty scattered in various stores for those who were organized enough to take it. But it did not fall to me to make the decision, Even while I hesitated a redheaded young man strode confidently out of the shop door. There was no doubt that he was able to see-or, a moment later, that he had seen us.