THE CHILD'S ARM
"You see," he said to Christine, "it was not a Zeppelin.... We shall
be quite safe here."
But in that last phrase he had now confessed to her the existence
of an air-raid. He knew that he was not behaving with the maximum
of sagacity. There were, for example, hotels with subterranean
grill-rooms close by, and there were similar refuges where danger
would be less than in the street, though the street was narrow and
might be compared to a trench. And yet he had said, "We shall be quite
safe here." In others he would have condemned such an attitude.
Now, however, he realised that he was very like others. An inactive
fatalism had seized him. He was too proud, too idle, too negligent,
too curious, to do the wise thing. He and Christine were in the
air-raid, and in it they should remain. He had just the senseless,
monkeyish curiosity of the staring crowd so lyrically praised by
the London Press. He was afraid, but his curiosity and inertia were
stronger than his fear. Then came a most tremendous explosion--the
loudest sound, the most formidable physical phenomenon that G.J. had
ever experienced in his life. The earth under their feet trembled.
Christine gave a squeal and seemed to subside to the ground, but he
pulled her up again, not in calm self-possession, but by the sheer
automatism of instinct. A spasm of horrible fright shot through him.
He thought, in awe and stupefaction:
"A bomb!"
He thought about death and maiming and blood. The relations between
him and those everyday males aloft in the sky seemed to be appallingly
close. After the explosion perfect silence--no screams, no noise of
crumbling--perfect silence, and yet the explosion seemed still to
dominate the air! Ears ached and sang. Something must be done. All
theories of safety had been smashed to atoms in the explosion. G.J.
dragged Christine along the street, he knew not why. The street was
unharmed. Not the slightest trace in it, so far as G.J. could tell in
the gloom, of destruction! But where the explosion had been, whether
east, west, south or north, he could not guess. Except for the
disturbance in his ears the explosion might have been a hallucination.
Suddenly he saw at the end of the street a wide thoroughfare, and he
could not be sure what thoroughfare it was. Two motor-buses passed
the end of the street at mad speed; then two taxis; then a number of
people, men and women, running hard. Useless and silly to risk the
perils of that wide thoroughfare! He turned back with Christine. He
got her to run. In the thick gloom he looked for an open door or a
porch, but there was none. The houses were like the houses of the
dead. He made more than one right angle turn. Christine gave a sign
that she could go no farther. He ceased trying to drag her. He was
recovering himself. Once more he heard the guns--childishly feeble
after the explosion of the bomb. After all, one spot was as safe as
another.
The outline of a building seemed familiar. It was an abandoned chapel;
he knew he was in St. Martin's Street. He was about to pull Christine
into the shelter of the front of the chapel, when something happened
for which he could not find a name. True, it was an explosion. But the
previous event had been an explosion, and this one was a thousandfold
more intimidating. The earth swayed up and down. The sound alone of
the immeasurable cataclysm annihilated the universe. The sound and the
concussion transcended what had been conceivable. Both the sound
and the concussion seemed to last for a long time. Then, like an
afterthought, succeeded the awful noise of falling masses and the
innumerable crystal tinkling of shattered glass. This noise ceased and
began again....
G.J. was now in a strange condition of mild wonder. There was silence
in the dark solitude of St. Martin's Street. Then the sound of guns
supervened once more, but they were distant guns. G.J. discovered that
he was not holding Christine, and also that, instead of being in the
middle of the street, he was leaning against the door of a house.
He called faintly, "Christine!" No reply. "In a moment," he said to
himself, "I must go out and look for her. But I am not quite ready
yet." He had a slight pain in his side; it was naught; it was naught,
especially in comparison with the strange conviction of weakness and
confusion.
He thought:
"We've not won this war yet," and he had qualms.
One poor lamp burned in the street. He started to walk slowly and
uncertainly towards it. Near by he saw a hat on the ground. It was his
own. He put it on. Suddenly the street lamp went out. He walked on,
and stepped ankle-deep into broken glass. Then the road was clear
again. He halted. Not a sign of Christine! He decided that she must
have run away, and that she would run blindly and, finding herself
either in Leicester Square or Lower Regent Street, would by instinct
run home. At any rate, she could not be blown to atoms, for they were
together at the instant of the explosion. She must exist, and she must
have had the power of motion. He remembered that he had had a stick;
he had it no longer. He turned back and, taking from his pocket the
electric torch which had lately come into fashion, he examined the
road for his stick. The sole object of interest which the torch
revealed was a child's severed arm, with a fragment of brown frock on
it and a tinsel ring on one of the fingers of the dirty little hand.
The blood from the other end had stained the ground. G.J. abruptly
switched off the torch. Nausea overcame him, and then a feeling of
the most intense pity and anger overcame the nausea. (A month elapsed
before he could mention his discovery of the child's arm to anyone at
all.) The arm lay there as if it had been thrown there. Whence had it
come? No doubt it had come from over the housetops....
He smelt gas, and then he felt cold water in his boots. Water was
advancing in a flood along the street. "Broken mains, of course," he
said to himself, and was rather pleased with the promptness of his
explanation. At the elbow of St. Martin's Street, where a new dim
vista opened up, he saw policemen, then firemen; then he heard the
beat of a fire-engine, upon whose brass glinted the reflection of
flames that were flickering in a gap between two buildings. A huge
pile of debris encumbered the middle of the road. The vista was
closed by a barricade, beyond which was a pressing crowd. "Stand clear
there!" said a policeman to him roughly. "There's a wall going to
fall there any minute." He walked off, hurrying with relief from the
half-lit scene of busy, dim silhouettes. He could scarcely understand
it; and he was incapable of replying to the policeman. He wanted to be
alone and to ponder himself back into perfect composure. At the elbow
again he halted afresh. And as he stood figures in couples, bearing
stretchers, strode past him. The stretchers were covered with cloths
that hung down. Not the faintest sound came from beneath the cloths.
After a time he went on. The other exit of St. Martin's Street was
being barricaded as he reached it. A large crowd had assembled,
and there was a sound of talking like steady rain. He pushed grimly
through the crowd. He was set apart from the idle crowd. He would tell
the crowd nothing. In a minute he was going westwards on the left
side of Coventry Street again. The other side was as populous with
saunterers as ever. The violet glow-worms still burned in front of the
theatres and cinemas. Motor-buses swept by; taxis swept by; parcels
vans swept by, hooting. A newsman was selling papers at the corner.
Was he in a dream now? Or had he been in a dream in St. Martin's
Street? The vast capacity of the capital for digesting experience
seemed to endanger his reason. Save for the fragments of eager
conversation everywhere overheard, there was not a sign of disturbance
of the town's habitual life. And he was within four hundred yards
of the child's arm and of the spot where the procession of
stretcher-bearers had passed. One thought gradually gained ascendancy
in his mind: "I am saved!" It became exultant: "I might have been
blown to bits, but I am saved!" Despite the world's anguish and the
besetting imminence of danger, life and the city which he inhabited
had never seemed so enchanting, so lovely, as they did then. He
hurried towards Cork Street, hopeful.