The People of the Ruins

Arising out of this discovery a stream of possibilities troubled the
still somewhat confused processes of his mind. Either Mrs. Watkins for
some unaccountable reason had failed to arrive, or else, contrary to
his emphatic and often repeated instructions, she had been perfunctory
in knocking at his door and had not stayed for an answer. In either
case it was annoying; but Mrs. Watkins' arrival at half-past seven was
so fixed a point in the day, she was so regular, so trustworthy, and,
moreover, life without her ministrations was so unthinkable that the
first possibility seemed much the less possible of the two. When
Jeremy had thus exhausted the field of speculation he rose and went
out of his room to speak sharply to Mrs. Watkins. His intention of
severity was a little belied by the genial grotesqueness of his short
and rather broad figure in dressing-gown and pyjamas; but he hoped
that he looked a disciplinarian.

Mrs. Watkins, however, was not there. The flat was silent and
completely empty. The blinds were drawn over the sitting-room windows,
and stirred faintly as he opened the door. He passed into the kitchen,
but not hopefully, for as a rule his ear told him without mistake when
the charwoman was to be found there. As he had expected, she was not
there, nor yet in the bathroom. There was a quite uncanny silence
everywhere, so strange and yet at the same time so reminiscent of
something that eluded his memory, that Jeremy paused a moment, head
lifted in air, trying to analyze its effect on him. He ascribed it at
last to the obvious cause of Mrs. Watkins' absence at this unusually
late hour; and he went further into the bathroom, whence he could see,
with a little craning of the neck, the clock on St. Andrew's Church in
Holborn. This last testimony confirmed that of his watch. He returned
to the sitting-room, struggling half-consciously in his mind with a
quite irrational feeling, for which he could not account, that it was
a Sunday. He knew very well that it was a Tuesday---Tuesday, the 18th
of April, in the year 1924.

When he came into the sitting-room he drew back the blinds and let in
the full morning light, and by its aid he surveyed unfavorably his
overcoat lying where he had thrown it the night before, coming in late
from a party. He looked also with some disgust at the glass from which
he had drunk a last unnecessary whisky and soda previous to going to
bed. Then he paddled back wearily with bare feet to the narrow kitchen
(a cupboard containing a gas-stove and a smaller cupboard), set a
kettle on to boil, and began the always laborious process of bathing,
shaving, and dressing. At the end he shirked making tea, or boiling an
egg, and he sat down discontentedly to another whisky, in the same
glass, and a piece of stale bread.

As he consumed this unsuitable meal he remembered his appointment for
one o'clock that day, and hoped with a sudden devoutness that the
'buses would be running after all. It was no joke to go from Holborn
to Whitechapel High Street on foot. But a young and rather aggressive
Socialist whom he had unwillingly met at that party had predicted with
confidence a strike of busmen some time during the evening. Certainly
Jeremy had had to walk all the way home from Chelsea, a thing he much
disliked, but then perhaps by that time the buses had stopped running
in the ordinary course...They did stop running, those Chelsea
'buses--a horrid place--at an ungodly early hour, he was not quite
sure what. But then he was not quite sure at what time he had started
home...he was not really sure of anything that had happened towards
the end of the party. He remembered long, devastating arguments in the
earlier part about Anarchism, Socialism, Syndicalism, Bolshevism, and
some other doctrines, the names of which were formed on the same
analogy, but which were too novel to him to be readily apprehended.

These discussions were mingled with more practical but equally windy
disputes on the questions whether the railwaymen would come out,
whether the miners were bluffing, what Bob Hart was going to do, and
much more besides on the same level of interest. There had been also a
youth with great superiority of manner, who seemed as tedious and
irritating to the politicians as they were to Jeremy--a sort of super-
bore who stated at intervals that the General Strike was a myth, but
praised all and sundry for talking about it and threatening it. It had
been--hadn't it?---a studio party. At least, Jeremy had gone to it on
that understanding; but the political push had rushed it somehow, and
had bored everybody else to tears.