1
SURELY the last place in the world where anyone would have expected to
meet a tragedy was in the High Street of Seabourne. There never was a
street so genteel and so lacking in emotion; it was almost an indecency
to associate emotion with it, and yet it was in the High Street that a
thing happened which was to make a lasting impression on Joan. She was
out with Elizabeth and Milly early one afternoon; they were feeling
dull, and conversation flagged; their minds were concentrated on
innumerable small commissions for Mrs. Ogden. It was a bright and rather
windy day, having in the keen air the first suggestion of coming winter.
The High Street was very empty at that hour, and stretched in front of
them ugly and shabby and painfully unimportant. Hidden from sight just
round the corner, a little bell went clanging and tinkling; it was the
little bell attached to the cart of the man who ground knives and
scissors every Thursday. A tradesman's boy clattered down the street on
a stout unclipped cob, a basket over his arm, and somewhere in a house
near by a phonograph was shouting loudly.
Then someone screamed, not once but many times. It was an ungainly
sound, crude with terror. The screams appeared to be coming from Mrs.
Jenkins's, the draper's shop, whither Elizabeth was bent; and then
before any of them realized what was happening, a woman had rushed out
into the street covered in flames. The spectacle she made, horrible in
itself, was still more horrible because this was the sort of thing that
one heard of or read of but never expected to see. Through the fire
which seemed to engulf her, her arms were waving and flapping in the
air. Joan noticed that her hair, which had come down, streamed out in
the wind, a mass of flame. The woman, still screaming, turned and ran
towards them, and as she ran the wind fanned the flames. Then Elizabeth
did a very brave thing. She tore off the long tweed coat she was
wearing, and running forward managed somehow to wrap it round the
terrified creature. It seemed to Joan as though she caught the woman and
pressed her against herself, but it was all too sudden and too terrible
for the girl to know with any certainty what happened; she was conscious
only of an overwhelming fear for Elizabeth, and found herself tearing at
her back, trying to pull her away; and then suddenly something, a mass
of something, was lying on the pavement with Elizabeth bending over it.
Elizabeth looked over her shoulder. "Are you there, Joan?" The voice
sounded very matter of fact.