By the next morning a certain tranquillity was restored.
It was only in this relative calm that the Clayhanger family and its
dependants began to realise the intensity of the experience through
which they had passed, and, in particular, the strain of waiting for
events after the printing office had been abandoned by its denizens. The
rumour of what had happened, and of what might have happened, had spread
about the premises in an instant, and in another instant all the women
had collected in the yard; even Miss Ingamells had betrayed the sacred
charge of the shop. Ten people were in the yard, staring at the window
aperture on the first-floor and listening for ruin. Some time had
elapsed before Darius would allow anybody even to mount the steps. Then
the baker, the tenant of the ground-floor, had had to be fetched. A
pleasant, bland man, he had consented in advance to every suggestion; he
had practically made Darius a present of the ground-floor, if Darius
possessed the courage to go into it, or to send others into it. The seat
of deliberation had then been transferred to the alley behind. And the
jobbing builder and carpenters had been fetched, and there was a palaver
of tremendous length and solemnity. For hours nothing definite seemed
to happen; no one ate or drank, and the current of life at the corner of
Trafalgar Road and Wedgwood Street ceased to flow. Boys and men who had
heard of the affair, and who had the divine gift of curiosity, gazed in
rapture at the `No Admittance' notice on the ramshackle double gates in
Woodisun Bank. It seemed that they might never be rewarded, but their
great faith was justified when a hand-cart, bearing several beams three
yards long, halted at the gates and was, after a pause, laboriously
pushed past them and round the corner into the alley and up the alley.
The alley had been crammed to witness the taking of the beams into the
baker's storeroom. If the floor above had decided to yield, the noble,
negligent carpenters would have been crushed beneath tons of machinery.
At length a forest of pillars stood planted on the ground-floor amid the
baker's lumber; every beam was duly supported, and the experts
pronounced that calamity was now inconceivable. Lastly, the tackle on
the Demy Columbian had been loosed, and the machine, slightly askew,
permitted gently to sink to full rest on the floor: and the result
justified the experts.
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