第79章 CHAPTER XXXV(2)

In return I ask something. I have more serious charges still to bring against Sir Alfred's nephew. Will you leave the matter of dealing with this young man in my hands?""With pleasure," the Premier agreed. "I think, gentlemen," he added, looking around the table, "that we need not detain Major Thomson any longer? We others have still a little business to finish."It was all over in those few minutes and Thomson found himself in the street again. He guided his way by the railings into Whitehall. The blackness seemed to him to be now less impenetrable. Looking fixedly eastward he seemed to be conscious of some faint lightening in the sky. He heard the rumbling of carts in the road, the horses mostly being led by their drivers. Here and there, an odd taxicab which had escaped the police orders came along with one lamp lit, only to be stopped in a few yards and escorted to the edge of the pavement. All the way up Whitehall there was one long line of taxicabs, unable to ply for hire or find their way to the garages until daylight. The unusualness of it all was almost stimulating. At the top of the broad thoroughfare, Thomson turned to the left through the Pall Mall Arch and passed into St. James's Park. He strolled slowly along until he came to the thoroughfare to the left, leading down to the Admiralty. There he paused for a moment, and, turning around, listened intently. He was possessed of particularly keen hearing and it seemed to him as though from afar off he could hear the sound of a thousand muffled hammers beating upon an anvil; of a strange, methodical disturbance in the air. He grasped the railing with one hand and gazed upward with straining eyes. Just at that moment he saw distinctly what appeared to be a flash of lightning in the sky, followed by a report which sounded like a sharp clap of thunder. Then instinctively he covered his eyes with his hands. From a dozen places--one close at hand--a long, level stream of light seemed to shoot out towards the clouds. There was one of them which came from near the Carlton Hotel, which lit up the whole of the Pall Mall Arch with startling distinctness, gave him a sudden vision of the Admiralty roof, and, as he followed it up, brought a cry to his lips. Far away, beyond even the limits of the quivering line of light, there was something in the sky which seemed a little blacker than the cloud. Even while he looked at it, from the Admiralty roof came a lurid flash, the hiss and screech of a shell as it dashed upwards. And then the sleeping city seemed suddenly to awake and the night to become hideous. Not fifty yards away from him something fell in the Park, and all around him lumps of gravel and clods of earth fell in a shower. A great elm tree fell crashing into the railings close by his side. Then there was a deafening explosion, the thunder of falling masonry, and a house by the side of the arch broke suddenly into flames. A few moments later, a queer sight amongst all these untoward and unexpected happenings, a fire engine dashed under the arch, narrowly missing the broken fragments of brick and stone, swung around, and a dozen fire-hoses commenced to play upon the flaming building.

The darkness was over now, and the silence. There were houses on the other side of the river on fire, and scarcely a moment passed without the crash of a falling bomb. The air for a second or two was filled with piteous shrieks from somewhere towards Charing-Cross, shrieks drowned almost immediately by another tremendous explosion from further north. Every now and then, looking upwards in the line of the long searchlights, Thomson could distinctly see the shape of one of the circling airships. Once the light flashed downwards, and between him and Buckingham Palace he saw a great aeroplane coming head foremost down, heard it strike the ground with a tremendous crash, heard the long death cry, a cry which was more like a sob, of the men who perished with it. . . .