der. There was silence
in the dark solitude of St. Martin's Street. Then the sound of guns
supervened once more, but they were distant guns. G.J. discovered that
he was not holding Christine, and also that, instead of being in the
middle of the street, he was leaning against the door of a house.
He called faintly, "Christine!" No reply. "In a moment," he said to
himself, "I must go out and look for her. But I am not quite ready
yet." He had a slight pain in his side; it was naught; it was naught,
especially in comparison with the strange conviction of weakness and
confusion.

He thought:

"We've not won this war yet," and he had qualms.

One poor lamp burned in the street. He started to walk slowly and
uncertainly towards it. Near by he saw a hat on the ground. It was his
own. He put it on. Suddenly the street lamp went out. He walked on,
and stepped ankle-deep into broken glass. Then the road was clear
again. He halted. Not a sign of Christine! He decided that she must
have run away, and that she would run blindly and, finding herself
either in Leicester Square or Lower Regent Street, would by instinct
run home. At any rate, she could not be blown to atoms, for they were
together at the instant of the explosion. She must exist, and she must
have had the power of motion. He remembered that he had had a stick;
he had it no longer. He turned back and, taking from his pocket the
electric torch which had lately come into fashion, he examined the
road for his stick. The sole object of interest which the torch
revealed was a child's severed arm, with a fragment of brown frock on
it and a tinsel ring on one of the fingers of the dirty little hand.
The blood from the other end had stained the ground. G.J. abruptly
switched off the torch. Nausea overcame him, and then a feeling of
the most intense pity and anger overcame the nausea. (A month elapsed
before he could mention his discovery of the child's arm to anyone at
all.) The arm lay there as if it had been thrown there. Whence had it
come? No doubt it had come from over the housetops....

He smelt gas, and then he felt cold water in his boots. Water was
advancing in a flood along the street. "Broken mains, of course," he
said to himself, and was rather pleased with the promptness of his
explanation. At the elbow of St. Martin's Street, where a new dim
vista opened up, he saw policemen, then firemen; then he heard the
beat of a fire-engine, upon whose brass glinted the re