The Day of the Triffids(15)

The place was withdrawn and peaceful. No one else came in, though occasionally a figure would shuffle past the railings at the entrance. I threw some crumbs to a few sparrows, the first birds I had seen that day, and felt all the better for watching their perky indifference to calamity.

When I had finished eating I lit a cigarette. While I sat there smoking it, wondering where I should go and what I should do, the quiet was broken by the sound of a piano played somewhere in a block of apartments that overlooked the garden. Presently a girl’s voice began to sing. The song was Byron’s ballad:

So we’ll go no more a-roving

So late into the night,

Though the heart be still as loving,

And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,

And the soul wears out the breast,

And the heart must pause to breathe,

And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,

And the day returns too soon,

Yet we’ll go no more a-roving

By the light of the moon.



I listened, looking up at the pattern that the tender young leaves and the branches made against the fresh blue sky. The song finished. The notes of the piano died away. Then there was a sound of sobbing. No passion: softly, helplessly, forlorn, heartbroken. Who she was, whether it was the singer or another weeping her hopes away, I do not know. But to listen longer was more than I could endure. I went quietly back into the street, unable to see anything more than mistily for a while.



* * *



—

Even Hyde Park Corner, when I reached it, was almost deserted. A few derelict cars and trucks stood about on the roads. Very little, it seemed, had gone out of control when it was in motion. One bus had run across the path and come to rest in the Green Park; a runaway horse with shafts still attached to it lay beside the artillery memorial against which it had cracked its skull. The only moving things were a few men and a lesser number of women feeling their way carefully with hands and feet where there were railings and shuffling forward with protectively outstretched arms where there were not. Also, and rather unexpectedly, there were one or two cats, apparently intact visually and treating the whole situation with that self-possession common to cats. They had poor prowling through the eerie quietness—the sparrows were few, and the pigeons had vanished.

Still magnetically drawn toward the old center of things, I crossed in the direction of Piccadilly. I was just about to start along it when I noticed a sharp new sound—a steady tapping not far away, and coming closer. Looking up Park Lane, I discovered its source. A man, more neatly dressed than any other I had seen that morning, was walking rapidly toward me, hitting the wall beside him with a white stick. As he caught the sound of my steps he stopped, listening alertly.

“It’s all right,” I told him. “Come on.”

I felt relieved to see him. He was, so to speak, normally blind. His dark glasses were much less disturbing than the staring but useless eyes of the others.

“Stand still, then,” he said. “I’ve already been bumped into by God knows how many fools today. What the devil’s happened? Why is it so quiet? I know it isn’t night—I can feel the sunlight. What’s gone wrong with everything?”

I told him as much as I knew of what had happened.

When I had finished he said nothing for almost a minute, then he gave a short, bitter laugh.

“There’s one thing,” he said. “They’ll be needing all their damned patronage for themselves now.”

With that he straightened up, a little defiantly.

“Thank you. Good luck,” he said to me, and set off westward wearing an exaggerated air of independence.

The sound of his briskly confident tapping gradually died away behind me as I made my way up Piccadilly.

There were more people to be seen now, and I walked among the scatter of stranded vehicles in the road. Out there I was much less disturbing to those who were feeling their way along the fronts of the buildings, for every time they heard a step close by they would stop and brace themselves against a possible collision. Such collisions were taking place every now and then all down the street, but there was one that I found significant. The subjects of it had been groping along a shop front from opposite directions until they met with a bump. One was a young man in a well-cut suit, but wearing a tie obviously selected by touch alone; the other, a woman who carried a small child. The child whined something inaudible. The young man had started to edge his way past the woman. He stopped abruptly.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Can your child see?”

“Yes,” she said. “But I can’t.”

The young man turned. He put one finger on the plateglass window, pointing.

“Look, Sonny, what’s in there?” he asked.

“Not Sonny,” the child objected.

“Go on, Mary. Tell the gentleman,” her mother encouraged her.

“Pretty ladies,” said the child.

The man took the woman by the arm and felt his way to the next window.

“And what’s in here?” he asked again.

“Apples and fings,” the child told him.

“Fine!” said the young man.

He pulled off his shoe and hit the window a smart smack with the heel of it. He was inexperienced; the first blow did not do it, but the second did. The crash reverberated up and down the street. He restored his shoe, put an arm cautiously through the broken window, and felt about until he found a couple of oranges. One he gave to the woman and one to the child. He felt about again, found one for himself, and began to peel it. The woman fingered hers.