raw hand. Only
at weddings or at the North Pole would Jaffery wear gloves.

"We know nothing about it as yet. The more we tear ourselves to pieces
now, the less able we'll be to deal with things."

Through the bottle-neck of Brentford, the most disgraceful main entrance
in the world into any great city, with bare room for a criminal double
line of tramways blocked by heavy, horse-drawn traffic, an officially
organised murder-trap for all save the shrinking pedestrian on the mean,
narrow, greasy side-walk, we crawled as fast as we were able. Then
through Chiswick, over Hammersmith Bridge, into the heart of London.
All London to cross. Never had it seemed longer. And the great city was
smitten by a blight. It was not a fog, for one could see clearly a
hundred yards ahead. But there was no sky and the air was a queer
yellow, almost olive green, in which the main buildings stood out in
startling meanness, and the distant ones were providentially obscured.
Though it was but little past noon, all the great shops blazed with
light, but they illuminated singularly little the yellow murk of the
roadway. The interiors were sharply clear. We could see swarms of black
things, seething with ant-like activity amid a phantasmagoria of
colours, draperies, curtains, flashes of white linen, streaks of red and
yellow meat gallant with rosettes and garlands, instantaneous,
glistening vistas of gold, silver and crystal, warm reflections of
mahogany and walnut; on the pavements an agglutinated yet moving mass by
the shop fronts, the inner stream a garish pink ribbon of faces, the
outer a herd of subfuse brown. And in the roadway, through the
translucent olive, the swirling traffic seemed like armies of ghosts
mightily and dashingly charioted.

The darkness had deepened when we, at last, drew up at the mansions in
St. John's Wood. No lights were lit in the vestibule, and the
hall-porter emerged as from a cavern of despair. He opened the car-door
and touched his peaked cap. I could see from the man's face that he had
been expecting us. He knew us, of course, as constant visitors of the
Bolderos.

"What's the matter?" I asked.

"Don't you know, sir?"

"No."

He glanced at Barbara, as if afraid to give her the shock of his news,
and bent forward and whispered to me:

"Mr. Boldero's dead, sir."

I don't remember clearly what happened then. I have a vague memory of
the man accompanying us in the lift and giving some unintelligible
ac