“Just coming,” she answered.
I wandered across to the window and looked out. Quite consciously I began saying good-by to it all. The sun was low. Towers, spires, and fa?ades of Portland stone were white or pink against the dimming sky. More fires had broken out here and there. The smoke climbed in big black smudges, sometimes with a lick of flame at the bottom of them. Quite likely, I told myself, I would never in my life again see any of these familiar buildings after tomorrow. There might be a time when one would be able to come back—but not to the same place. Fires and weather would have worked on it; it would be visibly dead and abandoned. But now, at a distance, it could still masquerade as a living city.
My father once told me that before Hitler’s war he used to go round London with his eyes more widely open than ever before, seeing the beauties of buildings that he had never noticed before—and saying good-by to them. And now I had a similar feeling. But this was something worse. Much more than anyone could have hoped for had survived that war—but this was an enemy they would not survive. It was not wanton smashing and willful burning that they waited for this time: it was simply the long, slow, inevitable course of decay and collapse.
Standing there, and at that time, my heart still resisted what my head was telling me. Still I had the feeling that it was all something too big, too unnatural really to happen. Yet I knew that it was by no means the first time that it had happened. The corpses of other great cities are lying buried in deserts and obliterated by the jungles of Asia. Some of them fell so long ago that even their names have gone with them. But to those who lived there their dissolution can have seemed no more probable or possible than the necrosis of a great modern city seemed to me…
It must be, I thought, one of the race’s most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that “it can’t happen here”—that one’s own little time and place is beyond cataclysms. And now it was happening here. Unless there should be some miracle, I was looking on the beginning of the end of London—and very likely, it seemed, there were other men, not unlike me, who were looking at the beginning of the end of New York, Paris, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Bombay, and all the rest of the cities that were destined to go the way of those others under the jungles.
I was still looking out when a sound of movement came from behind me. I turned, and saw that Josella had come into the room. She was wearing a long, pretty frock of palest blue georgette with a little jacket of white fur. In a pendant on a simple chain a few blue-white diamonds flashed; the stones that gleamed in her ear clips were smaller but as fine in color. Her hair and her face might have been fresh from a beauty parlor. She crossed the floor with a flicker of silver slippers and a glimpse of gossamer stockings. As I went on staring without speaking, her mouth lost its little smile.
“Don’t you like it?” she asked with childish half disappointment.
“It’s lovely—you’re beautiful,” I told her. “I—well, I just wasn’t expecting anything like this…”
Something more was needed. I knew that it was a display which had little or nothing to do with me. I added:
“You’re—saying good-by?”
A different look came into her eyes.
“So you do understand. I hoped you would.”
“I think I do. I’m glad you’ve done it. It’ll be a lovely thing to remember,” I said.
I stretched out my hand to her and led her to the window.
“I was saying good-by too—to all this.”
What went on in her mind as we stood there side by side is her secret. In mine there was a kind of kaleidoscope of the life and ways that were now finished—or perhaps it was more like flipping through a huge volume of photographs with one, all-comprehensive “do-you-remember?”
We looked for a long time, lost in our thoughts. Then she sighed. She glanced down at her dress, fingering the delicate silk.