Читать книгу To-morrow and To-morrow - Stephen McKenna - Страница 6

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The emotions of the crowd were reacting on us. Behind me, I could hear murmurs like the soughing of wind, rising and falling with the murmurs of the crowd. When hands were excitedly shaken below us, I felt Barbara’s fingers gripping my wrist and saw Violet bending to kiss the silken curls of her child’s head.

Out there, over the water, the ‘cease-fire’ must be travelling down the unending shambles of the two opposing lines. The shadow that had darkened the world for more than four years had at last been driven away; and no one was going to be mutilated or killed any more. All—more than all—that we set out to do in 1914 had been accomplished; and the bound heads and empty sleeves of the survivors, the black dresses of those with no survivors to welcome, testified to the cost. Of the uniforms below us, some had first been donned in Tasmania, some in Natal, others on the Alaskan border. Belgium and Servia, Russia and France, Portugal and Japan, Italy and Rumania: all had joined hands with our English-speaking peoples to hem in the wild beast. Throughout the night, the news had crackled from Poldhu to the Azores, from Arlington to Seattle, that the wild beast was subdued. It had flashed to lonely patrols through the frost of the North Sea and the fire of the Persian Gulf; two hundred million men were now standing silent, with their eyes on their watches; and I fancied again the unearthly hush that must drop on the world when the last war ended.

In spite of Bertrand, in spite of Lucien de Grammont, in spite of Hornbeck I believed that it was the last war.

Burp! ... Burp! ... Burp! The maroons were like the rending of colossal drums. Burp! ... Burp! ... Burp! Sandy turned wide eyes of alarm upon us and buried his face in Violet’s bosom. Burp! Burp! Burp!

“Eleven o’clock,” muttered Roger Dainton in a quavering voice.

My secretary collapsed into a chair, murmuring “Air-raid”; and, though I knew that air-raids had now passed into history, I imagined for a moment that the last ‘scrap of paper’ had followed the first and that London and Paris were to be laid in ruins.

Burp! ... Burp! Burp!

There was no concerted cheering from the crowd below; but I had a curious feeling that the next man but one, down all that line from the Admiralty Arch to Buckingham Palace, had opened his lips and was waiting for a neighbour to cheer with him. Heads were turning in every direction; eyes were gazing upward, as though they expected to see “Peace” written across the sky in letters of flame; bodies, for a moment, were very still.

Then that vast sea of men and women gathered itself up and poured with a hoarse roar towards the Palace. There was a check, and I fancy the first-comers must have been pressed against the railings; I threw open my window in time to hear a mutter rolling from lip to lip: “The king! They’re calling for the king.” Later, though we could see and hear nothing of it, the word was passed: “The king! He’s speaking”; later still: “He’s finished! Give him a cheer! Hip, hip! Come on.”

The human sea must have eddied at the Palace. Five minutes later, as the crowd below my window surged forward, a returning stream poured down the Processional Avenue into Trafalgar Square; and a new current set in towards the Abbey. There was little cheering now, though every one made individual noises of greeting and laughter. A War Office car hooted its deliberate way across Horse Guards’ Parade and was promptly seized by three wounded soldiers and four girl-clerks, who ranged themselves along the running-boards and perched on the bonnet. As though all had been awaiting a signal, the crowd broke into little groups and swept like swarming bees upon every vehicle in sight. So long as all could move, it did not matter whither they hurried: something, all seemed to feel, must be happening somewhere else.

“The war’s over!,” some one cried; and mechanically, like hysterical children, a dozen others repeated uncomprehendingly: “The war’s over! The war’s over! The war’s over! The war’s over.” ...

“And the funny thing,” said Raymond Stornaway, blowing his nose vigorously, “is that they don’t know what to do next.”

“Do we?,” asked Bertrand; and, for once, he seemed less anxious to instruct than to be instructed.