It was three o'clock before they reached the easily distinguishable road junctions at Swiss Cottage, after which the way proved better for a little while as they were once more passing through an area where the houses stood back from the road, but soon the way was again choked by debris where several large blocks of flats had been swept away. By the time they had got to St. John's Wood Church, where they paused for another snack and a welcome go at the liqueurs, they were all very tired, and the two girls were thoroughly fagged out.
Their thickest clothes, in which they had left the Ark, were only English winter weight and much too light to protect them properly from the rigours of this frozen world. Each time they halted there seemed to creep up their limbs a deathly chill which they could check only by flailing their arms and stamping their feet. Their faces tingled and their eyes smarted from the snow-glare.
Sam suggested that they should shelter in Lord's cricket pavilion for the night, but as there was still an hour or more to go before sunset Gervaise insisted that they should not lose the balance of the day's good weather now when, by a last effort, they could cover the remaining two miles into Central London.
At four o'clock they started off once more. The sun had lost its power and all traces of the temporary thaw which had set in at midday had disappeared. The snow crust had frozen solid again but, owing to the partial thaw, it was now treacherously glassy, which made walking hazardous.
The half mile south from St. John's Wood Church was not so bad, as for a good part of the way they had Regent's Park on their left but when they entered the north end of Baker Street their real troubles began. The Abbey Road Building Society's block still reared its tower to the sky, but great numbers of the shops and flats had been demolished by the flood. Instead of a broad thoroughfare Baker Street was an uneven
mass of snow-covered debris from ten to thirty feet in height.
At half-past five they were still only half-way along it, plodding and scrambling wearily from mound to mound of concealed bricks, beams and girders. Then, from the top of a high mound near the Telephone Exchange they sighted Selfridge's in the distance and all agreed that, somehow, they must reach it, as there they would be certain of finding everything they could want, as well as shelter for the night.
Soon afterwards it began to snow again, blotting out both the sinking sun and also the Selfridge building, which caused them extreme anxiety as they might now lose their way among the unidentifiable piles of demolished houses and shops. The next hour was a nightmare. Darkness fell, which added further to their difficulties; their extremities ached with the cold, their legs were giving under them and they were no longer certain that they were moving in the right direction as they dragged themselves wearily through the falling snow from one heap of rubble to another.
A little before seven they stumbled into a level space that Sam and Hemmingway felt reasonably certain must be Port-man Square. The girls were now almost fainting with fatigue but the men half-pulled, half-carried them for a further ten minutes up and down a fresh chaos of slopes and valleys until, to their unutterable relief, the great Selfridge building loomed up before them.
As soon as Sam was able to get his bearings he led the stumbling group back a little along Orchard Street to the annexe in which the Provision Department was situated. Its windows were shattered and snow was piled up eight feet deep on the pavement, half-filling the empty frames. They scrambled over it and down into the store. It was dark in there but they lit some of the precious candle-ends they had brought from Barnet and staggered forward.
The floor was slippery with ice and jagged with broken glass. Some of the counters must have floated about in the flood waters as they were piled up at all sorts of odd angles and, as at first the weary party could see no food, they thought that the place had been completely looted; but soon they discovered that most of the remaining stocks had been swept by the water to one side of the gloomy cavern that they were exploring and
had been frozen into a solid mass against the wall.
A brief examination of this glassy bank revealed it to be composed entirely of fruit and vegetables, so they turned through an opening into the next department. The same scene of havoc was shown as far as the flickering light of the candles penetrated, but to their relief they found there a considerable quantity of groceries among which were many tins and bottles, lying in scattered heaps about the frozen floor.
'The first thing to do is to get a fire going and warm ourselves,' said Gervaise after an effort to stop his teeth from chattering.
Lavina was almost crying with the cold. The tips of her ears and of her nose were smarting and her fingers ached so much that she thought they were going to drop off. 'Yes, for goodness' sake, get one going quickly!' she stuttered. 'Even if you have to burn down the whole building.'
'No need for that,' Derek grunted. 'Everything here's so frozen up it'd take a week to melt it.'
As he spoke he produced the chopper which he had brought with him and started hacking pieces off one of the wooden show-cases. Shaking with cold they worked until they had their three braziers going in a clear space near the middle of the department, then stood about them trying to restore some warmth to their chapped hands and half-frozen limbs.
'We'll have to make do as well as we can here tonight,' said Gervaise. 'It would take us hours to thaw out mattresses.'
'The carpet section is only above the next entrance so we might get down some piles of rugs,' Lavina suggested.
Taking the spades and a couple of candle-ends Sam and Hemmingway made their way along and up the ice-covered stone stairs. They found some woolly lamb-skin rugs and bashed at them till they fell apart, each a stiff, solid slab. As the rugs would have taken too long to thaw and dry they beat them. The ice among the springy wool was like spun glass and, once broken into powder, could be shaken out.
By the time they got downstairs with these makeshift mattresses the others had dug into the frozen piles of provisions and set some tins of soup on the fires to warm. Having drunk the soup they spread the rugs on some of the counters, converted their overcoats into pillows and, wrapping their blankets round them, did their best to get to sleep. The counters made hard beds but they were so exhausted that, one by one, they dropped off with the firelight still glowing and flickering on the strange scene about them.
Although it was late when they woke, only a gloomy half-light filtered through the gutted ground floor windows of the store as these were now almost filled with snow and the snow was still falling. Having breakfasted off a tinned tongue and some cafe au lait, which they mixed with snow and heated over one of the braziers, they prepared for the day's activities.
It was clear that with the vast resources of the great store at their disposal they could not find a better place for their permanent headquarters and their first business was to select a more comfortable spot in which to settle themselves. Putting out the fires they cooled the braziers with snow so that they could use them to transport the oddments they had accumulated. Then they climbed over the snow bank in one of the wind-dows, made their way to the main block and entered it by a window that gave on to the Tobacco Department.
Deep snow which had drifted in covered the wrecked cases near the windows, but farther in cigar cabinets, tobacco jars, pouches and lighters littered the place in incredible confusion; yet Lavina gave a little sigh of relief as she saw the tumble piles of cigarettes. Many of them were in tins and the others might still be good for smoking after they had been dried out. Passing into the Book Department they saw that although thousands of volumes lay heaped on its floors most of the shelves were still full, as the weight of the books had kept them from shifting. Scrambling over the piles of books to a back staircase they made their way upstairs.