Sixty Days to Live (15 page)

Here they parked the car and set out along the track past the ponds, up Parliament Hill. Quite a crowd of people were moving in the same direction and several thousand more were already massed up there on the highest spot overlooking London.

Mingling with the crowd, they managed to find a place well up the slope from which they could gaze across the million rooftops of the mighty city. Right across the valley on another hilltop in the distant south-east, the two towers of the Crystal Palace were faintly discernible. More to the south the dome of St. Paul’s and the tower of Big Ben stood out clearly; while to the south-west rose the twin chimneys of Battersea Power Station.

But no one was now interested in picking out these famous landmarks. They were all gazing westward into the setting sun. Most of them had smoked glasses or pieces of coloured mica to prevent the glare hurting their eyes and, apparently oblivious of the fact that they possibly had only three days to live, hawkers were moving among the crowd doing a brisk business in such wares.

Derek bought three pairs of cheap smoked glasses for Lavina, Roy and himself, then they settled down on the grass to watch the heavenly phenomenon which threatened the doom of the world.

The comet was only three degrees in elevation above the sun and a little to its left; so, even through smoked glasses, it was difficult to get any clear impression of it while daylight lasted. But the menace in the heavens at least appeared to have brought a spell of exceptionally fine weather. The sky was cloudless and the opportunity for getting a good view of the comet remarkable for London.

The sun sank like a great yellow ball behind the horizon and,
normally, twilight would have followed, lasting about an hour, until darkness supervened and the stars came out. But now a dull yellow-orange light became slowly perceptible above the spot where the sun had gone down. The light grew in strength until it suffused the whole scene, changing it weirdly, and the multitude were able to gaze their fill upon the concentrated blotch in the heavens from which it came.

The comet was now far bigger than any star and had a diameter about one-fifth of that of the moon. But, unlike the moon, it had no clear-cut edge or cold brilliance.

Even seen through smoked glasses it had no regular outline but wobbled slightly, having the appearance of a large red nebula; a ball of fire that twinkled fiercely.

Daylight had gone, yet the Heath, the great crowd upon it, and the nearer portion of the city below were still clearly visible; but as an eerie landscape bathed in a strange, baleful, reddish light. The sight was most uncanny and the evil radiance seemed to affect the crowd on the hillside in an alarming manner.

A woman near Derek began to laugh hysterically. Another began to sob. The eyes of the men glinted strangely. A great wave of excitement suddenly seemed to surge right through the watching thousands. In a moment, from stillness the whole human mass began to pulse with a weird, unnatural life.

A great murmur went up. A mingling of shouts and wild laughter. Two men just in front of Lavina began to fight. Another suddenly thrust his way through the crush towards a pretty girl, seized her in his arms and, in spite of her struggles, began to kiss her avidly.

Derek felt an overpowering desire to do the same to Lavina. He was standing just behind her and his arms positively ached to reach out and draw her to him. He fought it down, but suddenly she swung right round and flung her arms about his neck.

For a good minute their mouths were locked together; then, with a little moan, she wrenched her head away and began to hammer on his shoulders with her fists.

Roy had pulled a large flask of whisky out of his hip-pocket and was gulping down its contents as though they were only water.

The baleful rays from the big splodge of reddish-yellow light near the western horizon seemed to have raised the basest
passions of the whole multitude. Parliament Hill was now a scene of indescribable confusion. People were fighting, kissing, struggling, rolling on the ground either in the grip of uncontrollable hate or passionate desire.

The comet set twelve minutes after the sun. With its disappearance the shouting died. The red glow faded, giving place to a pink-twinged twilight sky.

People were now coming to their senses as quickly as they had lost them ten minutes earlier. They were apologising to each other on every side and helping their late antagonists up from the ground. Almost at once the great crowd began to disperse, moving down the hill’s sides to the roads that led into London.

Derek took Lavina’s arm. ‘Come on,’ he said gruffly, ‘let’s get back to the car. What happened to us all, God knows! For a few minutes we must have been out of our senses.’

Lavina put a hand over her eyes. ‘Extraordinary, wasn’t it. The thing seemed to exercise a malign influence on everybody. But we aren’t responsible; we only behaved like all the rest.’

Roy followed them, lurching slightly. His breath was coming fast and his eyes were bulging a little from the amount of neat spirit he had consumed in gulp after gulp.

‘That’s all very well,’ he muttered. ‘But if it can do that sort of thing to us now, what effect is it going to have on us in a day or two’s time, when it gets a bit nearer?’

Distinctly sobered by this strange experience they regained the car and drove back towards London. Derek took the quieter streets and as they were passing through St. John’s Wood Lavina broke a long silence by saying:

‘Where are you heading for now?’

‘Back to St. James’s Square,’ Derek replied promptly. ‘Surely you’ve seen enough for one night, haven’t you?’

‘Yes. But I was thinking of dinner. Where are we going to feed?’

‘Oh, we’ll knock up something.’

‘Why should we, when the restaurants are still open? It’s getting on for ten o’clock and I feel extraordinarily hungry. Let’s stop on the way back and get something to eat somewhere.’

‘All right,’ he conceded, a trifle reluctantly. ‘Where would you like to go?’

‘Let’s try the Dorchester. We can get there without going through the most crowded parts of the West End.’

‘We’ll have to cross Oxford Street.’

‘We’d have to do that anyway, unless we go right round Hyde Park,
via
Notting Hill and Kensington.’

‘That’s true. And I can avoid Marble Arch by going down Park Street. The Dorchester let it be then.’

‘That’s O.K. by me,’ Roy muttered from the back, ‘as long as one of you has enough cash to pay for the feast. I’m stony.’

Derek smiled. ‘The meal, if we can get one, is on me. I drew fifty quid out of the bank last week in case of emergencies.’

At Baker Street they came into the crowds again so Derek turned right, into Gloucester Place, then back through Portman Square into Orchard Street. They were hung up for a quarter of an hour at the Oxford Street crossing and in the distance could see masses of people jamming the roadway right up to Marble Arch. But the crowd was good-tempered and eventually
they managed to get through; reaching Park Lane at last, and their destination, by way of Deanery Street.

To their surprise, they found the Dorchester packed to the doors. The lounge was as crowded as a railway terminus before a Bank Holiday week-end, and waiters were having difficulty in securing a passage through the crush to bring drinks to those people who had been fortunate enough to obtain tables.

Every table in the Grill Room was also taken but the head waiter, who was standing in the doorway, recognised Lavina.

‘You seem to be doing marvellous business,’ she smiled at him.

He gave her a worried look. ‘It is not good, madame. Many of our waiters have failed to report for duty and many of the kitchen staff are also gone; yet we have to cope with all these people. And we do not like this crowd. Very few of them are our usual patrons and they make unpleasantness for the guests who are still staying in the hotel.’

‘We were hoping to get some supper here,’ she said, ‘but it looks as though that’s impossible.’

‘In the Grill, yes, madame,’ he spread out his hands, ‘but I may be able to get you a table in the Restaurant.’

‘But we’re not changed.’

He shrugged. ‘Temporarily, that rule is no more. People made us withdraw it when they overflowed from the Grill, and old customers like yourself we could not refuse.’

Turning, he forced a way for them through the press and as there was not a single table vacant in the Restaurant he had one set up on the already diminished dance-floor.

They were lucky in getting a bottle of champagne almost at once, but it was a good half hour before the caviare rolled in smoked salmon, which they had ordered as a first course, appeared; and during their wait they had plenty of time to study the people about them.

It was quite clear that very few of them frequented the Dorchester in normal times. Only a handful were in evening dress. Many of the women were exotic-looking ladies, obviously from the streets round Piccadilly, and the bulk of the men were flashily-dressed foreigners of the type that usually haunt the Soho bars.

At nearly every table people were drinking champagne but, although appearances are often deceptive, something about the
types which formed many of the groups made Derek wonder vaguely if they meant to pay for it or would try and slip away before their bills were brought to them. He wished now that he had insisted on taking Lavina straight back to St. James’s Square, but she was in excellent form and Roy, his rather weak but attractive face wreathed in smiles, was entertaining her with a series of limericks in Pidgin-English which he had brought back from China.

The band, reduced to half its usual number, was doing its best but it was almost drowned in the babel of voices. The dance-floor was crowded with a solid mass of perspiring humanity. One look round the great room was enough to see that the people in it were the very antithesis of those who were praying in the churches. They typified the wilder elements of the Metropolis whom the possibility of being struck down in three days’ time had released from all normal restraint. Their set faces and harsh laughter suggested a fierce determination to get everything possible out of life while it was still in them.

Perhaps as a result of their recent experience on Hampstead Heath Lavina and her two escorts found themselves unusually thirsty. Between the three of them their bottle of champagne was finished before their
hors-d’æuvres
arrived, and Derek ordered another.

Twenty minutes went by but it did not appear, and Roy was grumbling about the delay when a big man with a bald head and bushy eyebrows, who was wearing a horse-shoe tie-pin in a striped cravat, leant across from the next table proffering a magnum.

‘Here have some of ours, old boy, till yours turns up,’ he leered. ‘It’s all on the house to-night so what’s the odds?’

Roy held out his glass at once and Derek, although he would have liked to refuse, followed suit because the big man looked as if he might resent a refusal and it would have been the height of folly to start a row at such a time on a point of ethics.

‘And some for the little lady,’ said their new acquaintance.

When Lavina’s glass was full the big man picked up his own. ‘Well, here’s to you all! Happy days and three nights of bliss before the old comet hits us!’ He gave a special smirk in Lavina’s direction.

As they were about to drink, a Spanish-looking woman at
his table irritably claimed his attention so for the moment they were relieved of his advances.

In spite of the crush Lavina wanted to dance, so Derek took her on to the floor; but when they returned to their table neither their second course nor the second bottle of wine had appeared and it seemed, on looking round the room, that the waiters had given up the unequal struggle.

‘It’s nearly half-past eleven,’ Derek remarked, ‘and it doesn’t look as though we’re going to get our omelette. I think we’d better go home.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Lavina shrugged. She was staring out under lowered lids, over the cigarette she was constantly puffing, at the jammed mass of dancers. ‘I’m enjoying myself watching all these queer people.’

‘Maybe, but things are going to get pretty tough here soon, unless I’m much mistaken.’

‘Well, I’m not going,’ she said, with sudden firmness. ‘It’s just like a gala night, only the most extraordinary one I’ve ever seen.’

At that moment a man in a check suit pushed his way past their table. He was carrying four bottles of champagne in his hands and others were wedged under his arm-pits.

‘By jove!’ exclaimed Roy. ‘That chap’s been raiding the cellars. I’m in on this. Hang on here, and I’ll get a few bottles.’

‘You can’t do that,’ Derek protested.

‘Why not?’ Roy got to his feet. ‘If the waiters won’t serve us, why shouldn’t we help ourselves?’ He left them abruptly.

That he was right in his surmise that looting had started was soon clear as other men in lounge suits, quite obviously not employed by the hotel, came thrusting their way through the crowded entrance of the Restaurant clutching bottles of champagne, brandy and whisky.

The new supplies of drink were soon in circulation and gave an added fillip to the already irresponsible assembly. Someone else had thought of raiding the hotel’s supply of carnival favours. Coloured streamers, balloons and puff-balls began to be thrown from table to table; paper hats appeared on the heads of the dancers; tin whistles and klaxon horns were thrown from hand to hand and added their noise to the already incredible din.

Roy returned flushed and laughing, with a couple of magnums
of Louis Roederer. He gave one to the big man with the horseshoe tie-pin at the next table and opened up the other for his own party.

‘You should just see the crowd in the cellar,’ he grinned. ‘This little beano’s going to cost the hotel a packet. Some of the chaps down there are too tight to move already and others are sitting on the floor lapping it up out of the bottles.’

Derek stood up. ‘Come on, Lavina, I’ve had enough of this. I’m going to take you home.’

‘Don’t be an idiot, darling!’ She smiled serenely. ‘I’ve already told you I’m thoroughly enjoying myself.’