The Day of the Triffids(23)
Clear of the crowd at last, we kept on foot for a while, looking out for a suitable car. After a mile or so we found it—a station wagon, likely to be more useful than an ordinary body for the plan that was beginning to form vaguely in my mind.
In Clerkenwell they had been accustomed for two or three centuries to make fine, precise instruments. The small factory I had dealt with professionally at times had adapted the old skill to new needs. I found it with little difficulty, nor was it hard to break in. When we set off again, there was a comforting sense of support to be derived from several excellent triffid guns, some thousands of little steel boomerangs for them, and some wire-mesh helmets that we had loaded into the back.
“And now—clothes?” suggested Josella as we started.
“Provisional plan, open to criticism and correction,” I told her. “First, what you might call a pied-à-terre: i.e., somewhere to pull ourselves together and discuss things.”
“Not another bar,” she protested. “I’ve had quite enough of bars for one day.”
“Improbably though my friends might think it—with everything free—so have I,” I agreed. “What I was thinking of was an empty apartment. That shouldn’t be difficult to find. We could ease up there awhile, and settle the rough plan of campaign. Also, it would be convenient for spending the night—or, if you find that the trammels of convention still defy the peculiar circumstances, well, maybe we could make it two apartments.”
“I think I’d be happier to know there was someone close at hand.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “Then Operation Number Two will be ladies’ and gents’ outfitting. For that perhaps we had better go our separate ways—both taking exceedingly good care not to forget which apartment it was that we decided on.”
“Y-es,” she said, but a little doubtfully.
“It’ll be all right,” I assured her. “Make a rule for yourself not to speak to anyone, and nobody’s going to guess you can see. It was only being quite unprepared that landed you in that mess before. ‘In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.’?”
“Oh yes—Wells said that, didn’t he? Only in the story it turned out not to be true.”
“The crux of the difference lies in what you mean by the word ‘country’—patria in the original,” I said. “Caecorum in patria luscus rex imperat omnis—a classical gentleman called Fullonius said that: it’s all anyone seems to remember about him. But there’s no organized patria, no state, here—only chaos. Wells imagined a people who had adapted themselves to blindness. I don’t think that is going to happen here—I don’t see how it can.”
“What do you think is going to happen?”
“My guess would be no better than yours. And soon we shall begin to know, anyway. Better get back to matters in hand. Where were we?”
“Choosing clothes.”
“Oh yes. Well, it’s simply a matter of slipping into a shop, adopting a few trifles, and slipping out again. You’ll not meet any triffids in central London—at least, not yet.”
“You talk so lightly about taking things,” she said.
“I don’t feel quite so lightly about it,” I admitted. “But I’m not sure that that’s virtue—it’s more likely merely habit. And an obstinate refusal to face facts isn’t going to bring anything back, or help us at all. I think we’ll have to try to see ourselves not as the robbers of all this but more as—well, the unwilling heirs to it.”
“Yes. I suppose it is—something like that,” she agreed in a qualified way.
She was silent for a time. When she spoke again she reverted to the earlier question.
“And after the clothes?” she asked.
“Operation Number Three,” I told her, “is, quite definitely, dinner.”
* * *
—
There was, as I had expected, no great difficulty about the apartment. We left the car locked up in the middle of the road in front of an opulent-looking block and climbed to the third story. Quite why we chose the third I can’t say, except that it seemed a bit more out of the way. The process of selection was simple. We knocked or we rang, and if anyone answered, we passed on. After we had passed on three times we found a door where there was no response. The socket of the rim lock tore off to one good heft of the shoulder, and we were in.
I myself had not been one of those addicted to living in an apartment with a rent of some two thousand pounds a year, but I found that there were decidedly things to be said in favor of it. The interior decorators had been, I guessed, elegant young men with just that ingenious gift for combining taste with advanced topicality which is so expensive. Consciousness of fashion was the mainspring of the place. Here and there were certain unmistakable derniers cris, some of them undoubtedly destined—had the world pursued its expected course—to become the rage of tomorrow; others, I would say, a dead loss from their very inception. The over-all effect was Trade Fair in its neglect of human foibles—a book left a few inches out of place or with the wrong color on its jacket would ruin the whole carefully considered balance and tone—so, too, would the person thoughtless enough to wear the wrong clothes when sitting upon the wrong luxurious chair or sofa. I turned to Josella, who was staring wide-eyed at it all.