The Day of the Triffids(49)

The right fork led us to a wide courtyard where several trucks stood already. Coach houses and stables extended around it, seemingly over several acres. Coker drew up alongside me, and we climbed down. There was no one in sight.

We made our way through the open rear door of the main building and down a long corridor. At the end of it was a kitchen of baronial capacity where the warmth and smell of cooking lingered. From beyond a door on the far side came a murmur of voices and a clatter of plates, but we had to negotiate a further dark passage and another door before we reached them.

The place we entered had, I imagine, been the servants’ hall in the days when staffs were large enough for the term to be no misnomer. It was spacious enough to hold a hundred or more at tables without crowding. The present occupants, seated on benches at two long trestles, I guessed to number between fifty and sixty, and it was clear at a glance that they were blind. While they sat patiently a few sighted persons were very busy. Over at a side table three girls were industriously carving chickens. I went up to one of them.

“We’ve just come,” I said. “What do we do?”

She paused, still clutching her fork, and pushed back a lock of hair with the crook of her wrist.

“It’ll help if one of you takes charge of the veg and the other helps with the plates,” she said.

I took command of two large tubs of potato and cabbage. In the intervals of doling them out I looked over the occupants of the halls. Josella was not among them—nor could I see any of the more notable characters among the group that had put forward its proposals at the University Building—though I fancied I had seen the faces of some of the women before.

The proportion of men was far higher than in the former group, and they were curiously assorted. A few of them might have been Londoners, or at least town dwellers, but the majority wore a countryman’s working clothes. An exception to either kind was a middle-aged clergyman, but what every one of the men had in common was blindness.

The women were more diversified. Some were in town clothes quite unsuited to their surroundings; others were probably local. Among the latter only one girl was sighted, but the former group comprised half a dozen or so who could see and a number who, though blind, were not clumsy.

Coker, too, had been taking stock of the place.

“Rum sort of setup, this,” he remarked sotto voce to me. “Have you seen her yet?”

I shook my head, desolately aware that I had pinned more on the expectation of finding Josella there than I had admitted to myself.

“Funny thing,” he went on, “there’s practically none of the lot I took along with you—except that girl that’s carrying, up at the end there.”

“Has she recognized you?” I asked.

“I think so. I got a sort of dirty look from her.”

When the carrying and serving had been completed we took our own plates and found places at the table. There was nothing to complain of in the cooking or the food, and living out of cold cans for a week sharpens the appreciation, anyway. At the end of the meal there was a knocking on the table. The clergyman rose; he waited for silence before he spoke:

“My friends, it is fitting that at the end of another day we should renew our thanks to God for His great mercy in preserving us in the midst of such disaster. I will ask you all to pray that He may look with compassion upon those who still wander alone in darkness, and that it may please Him to guide their feet hither that we may succor them. Let us all beseech Him that we may survive the trials and tribulations that lie ahead in order that in His time and with His aid we may succeed in playing our part in the rebuilding of a better world to His greater glory.”

He bowed his head.

“Almighty and most merciful God…”

After the “Amen” he led a hymn. When that was finished the gathering sorted itself out into parties, each keeping touch with his neighbor, and four of the sighted girls led them out.

I lit a cigarette. Coker took one from me absent-mindedly, without making any comment. A girl came across to us.

“Will you help to clear up?” she asked. “Miss Durrant will be back soon, I expect.”

“Miss Durrant?” I repeated.

“She does the organizing,” she explained. “You’ll be able to fix things up with her.”

It was an hour later and almost dark when we heard that Miss Durrant had returned. We found her in a small, studylike room lit only by the light of two candles on the desk. I recognized her at once as the dark, thin-lipped woman who had spoken for the opposition at the meeting. For the moment all her attention was concentrated on Coker. Her expression was no more amiable than upon the former occasion.

“I am told,” she said coldly, regarding Coker as though he were some kind of silt, “I am told that you are the man who organized the raid on the University Building?”

Coker agreed, and waited.

“Then I may as well tell you, once and for all, that in our community here we have no use for brutal methods, and no intention of tolerating them.”

Coker smiled slightly. He answered her in his best middle-class speech:

“It is a matter of viewpoint. Who is to judge who were the more brutal? Those who saw an immediate responsibility, and stayed—or those who saw a further responsibility, and cleared out?”

She continued to look hard at him. Her expression remained unchanged, but she was evidently forming a different judgment of the type of man she had to deal with. Neither his reply nor his manner had been quite what she had expected. She shelved that aspect for a time and turned to me.