'In that case we'll still have to spend the rest of our lives like Eskimos, so it doesn't seem that we're much better off than we were before.'
'Oh, yes, we are,' Sam hastened to reassure her. 'All London is ours for the taking. Houses, food, furs, jewels. Why, you'll be able to sleep in the Queen's bed at Buckingham Palace for the rest of your life if you want to.'
'That would be rather fun,' she admitted. 'I hadn't thought of it quite that way. The whole idea of London being a city of the dead is so terrible, but I suppose we'll get used to that, and once we do there'll be all sorts of queer ways in which we can amuse ourselves.'
'I think I shall make my headquarters in the British Museum,' said Gervaise thoughtfully. 'Some of the manuscripts may have been damaged by the water, which is tragic, but being packed side by side on their shelves the volumes can't have suffered very much. It's a little awe-inspiring, though, for a bibliophile like myself suddenly to find that the greatest library in the world is his for the taking.'
Suddenly Hemmingway began to laugh, and on Sam's asking what had bitten him, he replied: 'All our lives long we've been striving to make money. You and I, Sam, have been pretty successful. Gervaise and Derek haven't striven so hard but a few months ago both of them would have found a few thousands apiece very useful. Now, all of us are billionaires—multi-billionaires. The jewels in the Tower of London, the gold in the Bank of England, the script and securities of the greatest city in the world are all ours if we like to go and collect them. But we shan't, because they're utterly useless to us.'
'Not quite,' said Lavina. 'The Koh-i-noor, or whatever the big diamond is in the top of the crown, would have a much more appropriate setting if I wore it in my hair.'
'That's all very well,' grunted Derek, 'but d'you realise that there's not a horse left alive; and there's not a partridge or a pheasant, nor even any eggs to restock the coverts.'
'You'll still be able to fish,' Hemmingway consoled him. 'Cut a nice hole in the ice of the Thames and put a light down it as the Eskimos do. That attracts the fish, then you can spear them.'
Derek gave him a supercilious smile. 'Evidently you're not a fisherman, or you'd know that that sort of thing isn't fishing.'
Margery brought them all down to earth by suddenly remarking : 'It's all very well for you to talk about fun and jewels and living in Buckingham Palace or the British Museum and things like that, but you're not being very practical. What we have to find are a few small houses which can be easily run so that there's not too far to carry the food from their kitchens.'
'That's right,' Sam nodded. 'And, after all, what more do we want as long as we've got food and fire and comfortable beds to sleep in? I'm afraid we've rather overlooked the fact, too, that we've still got the best part of twenty miles to walk to London.'
'Now we're on the main road we'll find plenty of houses to rest in,' said Gervaise. 'A great many of the jerry-built places outside London will have been demolished by the flood, like those cottages we came upon the other day, but I should think that most of the better built places will still be standing.'
He had hardly spoken when they came round a bend in the road and saw a good-sized house among some trees a quarter of a mile ahead. It was a two-storeyed building and a snowdrift, almost as high as the house, buried one wall. The roof was heavily covered and the only patches of mellow red brick which showed through the snow were under the front windows; but with a sense of fresh excitement they hurried forward, scrambled over the banked-up snow which hid a hedge, and approached the front door.
All the windows of the house had given under the pressure of the water and stared at them blank and foreboding like the eye-sockets in a skull. The door had swollen from the wet so they had some difficulty in getting it open and, as Derek and Hemmingway forced it with their united weight, a mass of snow slid down from the porch upon the others. Shaking it off, they went inside.
There was a thin coating of ice on the floor of the hallway which crunched under their feet as they advanced and, just as they entered the first room on the right, Derek slipped and fell. The whole floor of the room was covered with a three-inch-thick layer of glassy ice from the flood water which had failed to drain away and stuck fast in it, at all sorts of odd angles were its furnishings, which looked as though they had been hurled about by a typhoon. Actually, the flood water had only swept the ornaments from their places and floated the lighter pieces of furniture up to the ceiling until, on its receding, they had been left scattered about the floor. Long icicles hung from the ceiling and the walls had a satin-like sheen from the frost rime that covered them.
It was a sitting-room equipped with pieces typical of middle-class England during the last three generations. Lavina sat down on the sofa, which had remained upright, but she promptly stood up again, as its appearance was extraordinarily deceptive. With its rather worn cretonne cover it did not outwardly appear very different from any other sofa, but the whole thing had been water-logged during the flood and frozen afterwards so that it was now as solid as a piece of iron.
Margery had gone straight through to the back of the house and she called to them from the kitchen. When they joined her they found her in the larder. It contained the half of a cold chicken, some eggs, fruit and other oddments. The discolouration of the fruit showed that it had gone bad, although it was now frozen solid. The eggs were encased in a solid pack of ice as the flood water, which had filled the bowl in which they were, had had no means of draining away; while several broken plates and odd items of food lay half buried in the ice on the floor where they had been swept when the waters had gushed through the larder window.
They were all now ravenously hungry and Derek immediately suggested: 'How about a meal before we go any farther?'
'That's just what I was thinking,' Margery laughed, laying hold of the dish on which the chicken reposed to wrench it up from its bed of ice.
'Don't bother with that chicken,' said Gervaise quickly. 'It was submerged in the flood for forty-three days at least and it must have gone bad long before it became frozen. The eggs will be bad too. We must see if we can find any food in tins.'
In a kitchen cupboard they found some tins of sweet-corn and salmon; also some pots of jam, although there were no bread or biscuits with which to eat it. They were so cold that they badly needed a hot meal, so Margery said:
'There won't be any gas or electricity but I could heat up the sweet-corn and salmon if some of you will get a fire going in the sitting-room.'
Instead of going outside to see if there was a supply of coal or wood in a nearby shed, Derek, having found a chopper, returned to the front room and began to hack some of the lighter furniture to pieces: remarking as he did so that, as they would have the whole stock of Harrod's, Maple's and Hampton's from which to choose at their leisure, they could well afford to use the stuff in their temporary quarters for firewood. Hemmingway, who had joined him and was busily applying the poker to a hideous Victorian cabinet, replied:
'You can have all the furniture shops and Mr. Drage's plain vans as well. I intend to furnish my flat with some of the pieces from the South Kensington Museum. As for this hideous muck, I derive a peculiar joy from smashing it.' Lighting a fire was not as easy as they had imagined. The
wood lit all right but huge clouds of smoke bellowed out from the fireplace and it was soon apparent that the chimney was blocked, probably by ice or snow. After an equally fruitless attempt in the grate of the dining-room, which lay on the other side of the hall, they carried their remaining supplies of broken wood back to the kitchen on Gervaise's suggesting that their only course was now to light a fire on its stone floor.