July came in with temperate heat and occasional showers, ideal weather for the crops; for all the precious growths which must ripen before the famine could be stayed. The sudden stoppage of all imports, and the flight of the great urban population into the country, had demonstrated beyond all question the poverty of England’s resources of food supply, and the demonstration was to prove of value although there was no economist left to theorize. England was once again an independent unit, and no longer a member of a great world-body. Indeed England was being subdivided. The unit of organization was shrinking with amazing rapidity. The necessity for concentration grew with every week that passed, the fluidity of the superfluous labour was being resolved by death from starvation. The women who wandered from one farm to the next died by the way.

In the Putney house, Mrs Gosling and her daughters were faced by the failure of their food supply. The older woman had little initiative. She was a true Londoner. Her training and all the circumstances of her life had narrowed her imaginative grasp till she was only able to comprehend one issue. And as yet her daughters, and more particularly Millie, were so influenced by their mother’s thought that they, also, had shown little evidence of adaptability to the changed conditions.

“We shall ’ave to be careful,” was Mrs Gosling’s first expression of the necessity for looking to the future. She had arranged the bulk of her stores neatly in one room on the second floor, and although a goodly array of tins still faced her she experienced a miserly shrinking from any diminishment of their numbers. Moreover, she had long been without such necessities as flour. Barker and Prince had not dealt in flour.

Returning from her daily inspection one morning in the second week of July, Mrs Gosling decided that something must be done at once. Fear of the plague was almost dead, but fear of invasion by starving women had kept them all close prisoners. That house was a fortress.

“Look ’ere, gels,” said Mrs Gosling when she came downstairs. “Somethin’ ’ll ’ave to be done.”

Blanche looked thoughtful. Her own mind had already begun to work on that great problem of their future. Millie, lazy and indifferent, shrugged her shoulders and replied: “All very well, mother, but what can we do?”

“Well, I been thinking as it’s very likely as things ain’t so bad in some places as they are just about ’ere,” said Mrs Gosling. “We got plenty o’ money left, and it seems to me as two of us ’ad better go out and ’ave a look about, London way. One of us could look after the ’ouse easy enough, now. We ’aven’t ’ardly seen a soul about the past fortnight.”

The suggestion brought a gleam of hope to Blanche. She visualized the London she had known. It might be that in the heart of the town, business had begun again, that shops were open and people at work. It might be that she could find work there. She was longing for the sight and movement of life, after these two awful months of isolation.

“I’m on,” she said briskly. “Me and Millie had better go, mother, we can walk farther. You can lock up after us and you needn’t open the door to anyone. Are you on, Mill?”

“We must make ourselves look a bit more decent first,” said Millie, glancing at the mirror over the mantelpiece.

“Well, of course,” returned Blanche, “we brought one box of clothes with us.”

They spent some minutes in discussing the resources of their wardrobe.

“Come to the worst we could fetch some more things from Wisteria. I don’t suppose anyone has touched ’em,” suggested Blanche.

At the mention of the house in Wisteria Grove, Mrs Gosling sighed noticeably. She was by no means satisfied with the place at Putney, and she could not rid herself of the idea that there must be accessible gas and water in Kilburn, as there had always been.

“Well, you might go up there one day and ’ave a look at the place,” she put in. “It’s quite likely they’ve got things goin’ again up there.”

In less than an hour Blanche and Millie had made themselves presentable. Life had begun to stir again in humanity. The atmosphere of horror which the plague had brought was being lifted. It was as if the dead germs had filled the air with an invisible, impalpable dust, that had exercised a strange power of depression. The spirit of death had hung over the whole world and paralyzed all activity. Now the dust was dispersing. The spirit was withdrawing to the unknown deeps from which it had come.

“It is nice to feel decent again,” said Blanche. She lifted her head and threw back her shoulders.

Millie was preening herself before the glass.

“Well, I’m sure you ’ave made yourselves look smart,” said their mother with a touch of pride. “They were good girls,” she reflected, “if there had been more than a bit of temper shown lately. But, then, who could have helped themselves? It had been a terrible time.”

The July sun was shining brilliantly as the two young women, presentable enough to attend morning service at the Church of St John the Evangelist, Kilburn, set out to exhibit their charms and to buy food in the dead city.

They crossed Putney Bridge and made their way towards Hammersmith.

The air was miraculously clear. The detail of the streets was so sharp and bright that it was as if they saw with wonderfully renewed and sensitive eyes. The phenomenon produced a sense of exhilaration. They were conscious of quickened emotion, of a sensation of physical well-being.

“Isn’t it clean?” said Blanche.

“H’m! Funny!” returned Millie. “Like those photographs of foreign places.”

Under their feet was an accumulation of sharp, dry dust, detritus of stone, asphalt and steel. In corners where the fugitive rubbish had found refuge from the driving wind, the dust had accumulated in flat mounds, broken by scraps of paper or the torn flag of some rain-soaked poster that gave an untidy air of human refuse. Across the open way of certain roads the dust lay in a waved pattern of nearly parallel lines, like the ridged sand of the foreshore.

For some time they kept to the pavements from force of habit.

“I say, Mill, don’t you feel adventurous?” asked Blanche.

Millie looked dissatisfied. “It’s so lonely, B.,” was her expression of feeling.

“Never had London all to myself before,” said Blanche.

Near Hammersmith Broadway they saw a tram standing on the rails. Its thin tentacle still clung to the overhead wire that had once given it life, as if it waited there patiently hoping for a renewal of the exhilarating current.

Almost unconsciously Blanche and Millie quickened their pace. Perhaps this was the outermost dying ripple of life, the furthest outpost of the new activity that was springing up in central London.

But the tram was guarded by something that in the hot, still air seemed to surround it with an almost visible mist.

“Eugh!” ejaculated Millie and shrank back. “Don’t go, Blanche. It’s awful!”

Blanche’s hand also had leapt to her face, but she took a few steps forward and peered into the sunlit case of steel and glass. She saw a heap of clothes about the framework of a grotesquely jointed scarecrow, and the gleam of something round, smooth and white.

She screamed faintly, and a filthy dog crept, with a thin yelp, from under the seat and came to the door of the tram. For a moment it stood there with an air that was half placatory, wrinkling its nose and feebly raising a stump of propitiatory tail, then, with another protesting yelp, it crept back, furtive and ashamed, to its unlawful meat.

The two girls, handkerchief to nose, hurried by breathless, with bent heads. A little past Hammersmith Broadway they had their first sight of human life. Two gaunt faces looked out at them from an upper window. Blanche waved her hand, but the women in the house, half-wondering, half-fearful, at the strange sight of these two fancifully dressed girls, shook their heads and drew back. Doubtless there was some secret hoard of food in that house and the inmates feared the demands of charity.

“Well, we aren’t quite the last, anyway,” commented Blanche.

“What were they afraid of?” asked Millie.

“Thought we wanted to cadge, I expect,” suggested Blanche.

“Mean things,” was her sister’s comment.

“Well! we weren’t so over-anxious to have visitors,” Blanche reminded her.

“We didn’t want their beastly food,” complained the affronted Millie.

The shops in Hammersmith did not offer much inducement to exploration. Some were still closely shuttered, others presented goods that offered no temptation, such as hardware; but the majority had already been pillaged and devastated. Most of that work had been done in the early days of the plague when panic had reigned, and many men were left to lead the raids on the preserves of food.

Only one great line of shuttered fronts induced the two girls to pause.

“No need to go to Wisteria for clothes,” suggested Blanche.

“How could we get in?” asked Millie.

“Oh! get in some way easy enough.”

“It’s stealing,” said Millie, and thought of her raid on the Kilburn tobacconist’s.

“You can’t steal from dead people,” explained Blanche; “besides, who’ll have the things if we don’t?”

“I suppose it’d be all right,” hesitated Millie, obviously tempted.

“Well, of course,” returned Blanche and paused. “I say, Mill,” she burst out suddenly. “There’s all the West-end to choose from. Come on!”

For a time they walked more quickly.

In Kensington High Street they had an adventure. They saw a woman decked in gorgeous silks, strung and studded with jewels from head to foot. She walked with a slow and flaunting step, gesticulating, and talking. Every now and again she would pause and draw herself up with an affectation of immense dignity, finger the ropes of jewels at her breast, and make a slow gesture with her hands.

“She’s mad,” whispered Blanche, and the two girls, terrified and trembling, hastily took refuge in a great square cave full of litter and refuse that had once been a grocer’s shop.

The woman passed their hiding-place in her stately progress westward without giving any sign that she was conscious of their presence. When she was nearly opposite to them she made one of her stately pauses. “Queen of all the Earth,” they heard her say, “Queen and Empress. Queen of the Earth.” Her hand went up to her head and touched a strange collection of jewels pinned in her hair, of tiaras and brooches that flashed brighter than the high lights of the brilliant sun. One carelessly fastened brooch fell and she pushed it aside with her foot. “You understand,” she said in her high, wavering voice, “you understand, Queen and Empress, Queen of the Earth.”

They heard the refrain of her gratified ambition repeated as she moved slowly away.

A long submerged memory rose to the threshold of Millie’s mind. “Thieving slut,” she murmured.

As they came nearer to representative London the signs of deserted traffic were more numerous. By the Albert Memorial they saw an overturned motor-bus which had smashed into the park railings, and a little further on were two more buses, one standing decently at the curb, the other sprawling across the middle of the road. The wheels of both were axle deep in the dust which had blown against them, and out of the dust a few weak threads of grass were sprouting. There were other vehicles, too, cabs, lorries and carts: not a great number altogether, but even the fifty or so which the girls saw between Kensington and Knightsbridge offered sufficient testimony to the awful rapidity with which the plague had spread. For it seems probable that in the majority of cases the drivers of these deserted vehicles must have been attacked by the first agonizing pains at the base of the skull while they were actually employed in driving their machines. There were few skeletons to be seen. The lull which intervened between the first unmistakable symptoms of the plague and the oncoming of the paralysis had given men time to obey their instinct to die in seclusion, the old instinct so little altered by civilization. Those vestiges of humanity which remained had, for the most part, been cleansed by the processes of Nature, but twice the girls disturbed a horrible cloud of blue flies which rose with an angry buzzing so loud that the girls screamed and ran, leaving the scavengers to swoop eagerly back upon their carrion. Doubtless the thing in the Hammersmith tram had been the body of a woman, recently-dead from starvation. Even from the houses there was now little exhalation.

In Knightsbridge, a little past the top of Sloane Street, Blanche and Millie came to a shop which diverted them from their exploration for a time. Most of the huge rolling shutters had been pulled down and secured, but one had stopped half way, and, beyond, the great plate-glass windows were uncovered. One of ten million tragedies had descended swiftly to interrupt the closing of that immense place, and some combination of circumstances had followed to prevent the completion of the work. The imaginative might stop to speculate on the mystery of that half-closed shutter; the two Goslings stopped to admire the wonders behind the glass.

For a time the desolation and silence of London were forgotten. In imagination Blanche and Millie were once again units in the vast crowd of antagonists striving valiantly to win some prize in the great competition between the boast of wealth and the pathetic endeavour of make-believe.

They stayed to gaze at the “creations” behind the windows, at dummies draped in costly fabrics such as they had only dreamed of wearing. The silks, satins and velvets were whitened now with the thin snow of dust that had fallen upon them, but to Blanche and Millie they appeared still as wonders of beauty.

For a minute or two they criticized the models. They spoke at first in low voices, for the deep stillness of London held them in unconscious awe, but as they became lost in the fascination of their subject they forgot their fear. And then they looked at one another a little guiltily.

“No harm in seeing if the door’s locked, anyway,” said Blanche.

Millie looked over her shoulder and saw no movement in the frozen streets, save the sweep of one exploring swallow. Even the sparrows had deserted the streets. She did not reply in words, but signified her agreement of thought by a movement towards the entrance.

The swing doors were not fastened, and they entered stealthily.

They began with the touch of appraising fingers, wandering from room to room. But most of the rooms on the ground floor were darkened by the drawn shutters, and no glow of light came in response to the clicking of the electric switches that they experimented with with persistent futility. So they adventured into the clearly lit rooms upstairs and experienced a fallacious sense of security in the knowledge that they were on the floor above the street.

Fingering gave place to still closer inspection. They lifted the models from the stands and shook them out. They held up gorgeous robes in front of their own suburban dresses and admired each other and themselves in the numerous cheval glasses.

“Oh! bother!” exclaimed Blanche at last, “I’m going to try on.”

“Oh! B.” expostulated the more timid Millie.

“Well! why to goodness not?” asked her elder sister. “Who’s to be any the wiser?”

“Seems wrong, somehow,” replied Millie, unable to shake off the conventions which had so long served her as conscience.

“Well, I am,” said Blanche, and retired into a little side room to divest herself of her own dress. She had always shared a bedroom with her sister, and they observed few modesties before each other, but Blanche was mentally incapable of changing her dress in the broad avenues of that extensive show-room. It is true that the tall casement windows were wide open and the place was completely overlooked by the massive buildings opposite, but even if the windows had been screened she would not have changed her skirt in the publicity of that open place, though every human being in the world were dead.

When she emerged from her dressing-room she was transformed indeed. She went over to her still hesitating sister.

“Do me up, Mill,” she said.

Blanche had chosen well; the fine cloth walking dress admirably fitted her well-developed young figure. When she had discarded her hat and touched up her hair before the glass, only her boots and her hands remained to spoil the disguise. Well gloved and well shod, she might have passed down the Bond Street of the old London, and few women and no man would have known that she had not sprung from the ruling classes.

She posed. She stepped back from the mirror and half-unconsciously fell to imitating the manners of the revered aristocracy she had respectfully studied from a distance.

In a few minutes she was joined by Millie, also arrayed in peacock’s feathers and anxious to be “fastened.”

Their excitement increased. Walking dresses gave place to evening gowns. They lost their sense of fear and ran into other departments searching for long white gloves to hide the disfigurements of household work. They paraded and bowed to each other. The climax came when they discovered a Court dress, immensely trained, and embroidered with gold thread, laid by with evidences of tenderest care in endless wrappings of tissue paper. Surely the dress of some elegant young duchess!

For a moment they wrangled, but Blanche triumphed. “You shall have it afterwards,” she said, as she ran to her dressing-room.

Millie followed in an elaborate gown of Indian silk; a somewhat sulky Millie, inclined to resent her duty of lady’s maid. She dragged disrespectfully at the innumerable fastenings.

“My!” ejaculated Blanche when she could indulge herself in the glory of full examination before a cheval glass in the open show-room. She struggled with her train and when she had arranged it to her satisfaction, threw back her shoulders and lifted her chin haughtily.

“I ought to have some diamonds,” she reflected.

“It drags round the hips,” was Millie’s criticism.

“You should say ‘Your Majesty,’” corrected Blanche.

“Oh! a Queen, are you?” asked Millie.

“Rather——”

“Queen of all the Earth,” sneered Millie.

Blanche’s face suddenly fell. “I wonder if she began like this,” she said, and a note of fear had come into her voice.

Millie’s eyes reflected her sister’s alarm.

“Oh! let’s get out of this, B.,” she said, and began to tear at the neck of her Indian silk gown.

“I wanted diamonds, too,” persisted Blanche.

“Oh! B., it isn’t right,” said Millie. “I said it wasn’t right and you would come.”

Silence descended upon them for a moment, and then both sisters suddenly screamed and ducked, putting up their hands to their heads.

“Goodness! What was that?” cried Blanche.

A swallow had swept in through the open window, had curved round in one swift movement, and shot out again into the sunlight.

“Only a bird of some sort,” said Millie, but she was trembling and on the verge of hysterics. “Do let’s get out, B.”

After they had put on their own clothes once more they became aware that they were hungry.

“We have wasted a lot of time here,” said Blanche as they made their way out.

She did not pause to wonder how many women had spent the best part of their lives in a precisely similar manner.

“And we ought to have been looking for food,” she added.

“Come on,” replied Millie. “That place has given me the creeps.”

Growing rather tired and footsore they made their way to Piccadilly Circus, and so on to the Strand. Everywhere they found the same conditions: a few skeletons, a few deserted vehicles, young vegetation taking hold wherever a pinch of soil had found an abiding place, and over all a great silence. But food there was none that they were able to find, though it is probable that a careful investigation of cellars and underground places might have furnished some results. The more salient resources of London had been effectively pillaged so far as the West-end was concerned. They were too late.

In Trafalgar Square, Millie sat down and cried. Blanche made no attempt to comfort her, but sat wide eyed and wondering. Her mind was opening to new ideas. She was beginning to understand that London was incapable of supporting even the lives of three women; she was wrestling with the problem of existence. Every one had gone. Many had died; but many more, surely, must have fled into the country. She began to understand that she and her family must also fly into the country.

Millie still sobbed convulsively now and again.

“Oh! Chuck it, Mill,” said Blanche at last. “We’d better be getting home.”

Millie dabbed her eyes. “I’m starving,” she blubbered.

“Well, so am I,” returned Blanche. “That’s why I said we’d better get home. There’s nothing to eat here.”

“Is—is every one dead?”

“No, they’ve gone off into the country, and that’s what we’ve got to do.”

The younger girl sat up, put her hat straight, and blew her nose. “Isn’t it awful, B.?” she said.

Blanche pinched her lips together. “What are you putting your hat straight for?” she asked. “There’s no one to see you.”

“Well, you needn’t make it any worse,” retorted Millie on the verge of a fresh outburst of tears.

“Oh! come on!” said Blanche, getting to her feet.

“I don’t believe I can walk home,” complained Millie; “my feet ache so.”

“You’ll have to wait a long time if you’re going to find a bus,” returned Blanche.

Three empty taxicabs stood in the rank a few feet away from them, but it never occurred to either of the two young women to attempt any experiment with these mechanisms. If the thought had crossed their minds they would have deemed it absurd.

“Let’s go down by Victoria,” suggested Blanche. “I believe it’s nearer.”

In Parliament Square they disturbed a flock of rooks, birds which had partly changed their natural habits during the past few months and, owing to the superabundance of one kind of food, were preying on carrion.

“Crows,” commented Blanche. “Beastly things.”

“I wonder if we could get some water to drink,” was Millie’s reply.

“Well, there’s the river,” suggested Blanche, and they turned up towards Westminster Bridge.

In one of the tall buildings facing the river Blanche’s attention was caught by an open door.

“Look here, Mill,” she said, “we’ve only been looking for shops. Let’s try one of these houses. We might find something to eat in there.”

“I’m afraid,” said Millie.

“What of?” sneered Blanche. “At the worst it’s skeletons, and we can come out again.”

Millie shuddered. “You go,” she suggested.

“Not by myself, I won’t,” returned Blanche.

“There you are, you see,” said Millie.

“Well, it’s different by yourself.”

“I hate it,” returned Millie with emphasis.

“So do I, in a way, only I’m fair starving,” said Blanche. “Come on.”

The building was solidly furnished, and the ground floor, although somewhat disordered, still suggested a complacent luxury. On the floor lay a copy of the Evening Chronicle, dated May 10; possibly one of the last issues of a London journal. Two of the pages were quite blank, and almost the only advertisement was one hastily-set announcement of a patent medicine guaranteed as a sure protection against the plague. The remainder of the paper was filled with reports of the devastation that was being wrought, reports which were nevertheless marked by a faint spirit of simulated confidence. Between the lines could be read the story of desperate men clinging to hope with splendid courage. There were no signs of panic here. Groves had come out well at the last.

The two girls hovered over this piece of ancient history for a few minutes.

“You see,” said Blanche triumphantly, “even then, more’n two months ago, every one was making for the country. We shall have to go, too. I told you we should.”

“I never said we shouldn’t,” returned Millie. “Anyhow there’s nothing to eat here.”

“Not in this room, there isn’t,” said Blanche, “but there might be in the kitchens. Do you know what this place has been?”

Millie shook her head.

“It’s been a man’s club,” announced Blanche. “First time you’ve been in one, old dear.”

“Come on, let’s have a look downstairs, then,” returned Millie, careless of her achievement.

In the first kitchen they found havoc: broken china and glass, empty bottles, empty tins, cooking utensils on the floor, one table upset, everywhere devastation and the marks of struggle; but in none of the empty tins was there the least particle of food. Everything had been completely cleaned out. The rats had been there, and had gone.

Exploring deeper, however, they were at last rewarded. On a table stood a whole array of unopened tins and in one of them was plunged a tin-opener, a single stab had been given, and then, possibly, another of these common tragedies had begun. Had he been alone, that plunderer, or had his companions fled from him in terror?

Here the two girls made a sufficient meal, and discovered, moreover, a large store of unopened beer-bottles. They shared the contents of one between them, and then, feeling greatly reinvigorated, they sought for and found two baskets, which they filled with tinned foods. They only took away one bottle of beer—a special treat for their mother—on account of the weight. They remembered that they had a long walk before them; and they were not over-elated by their discovery; they were sick to death of tinned meats.

In looking for the baskets they came across a single potato that the rats had left. From it had sprung a long, thin, etiolated shoot which had crept under the door of the cupboard and was making its way across the floor to the light of the window. Already that shoot was several feet in length.

“Funny how they grow,” commented Millie.

“Making for the country, I expect,” replied Blanche, “same as we shall have to do.”

It was a relief to them to find their way into the sunlight once more. Those cold, forsaken houses held some suggestion of horror, of old activities so abruptly ended by tragedy. From these interiors Nature was still shut off. That ghostly tendril aching towards the light had no chance for life and reproduction....

The two Gosling girls had yet one more adventure before they toiled home with their load.

They were growing bolder, despite the gloom and oppression of those human habitations, and some freakish spirit prompted Blanche to suggest that they should visit the Houses of Parliament. After a brief demur, Millie acceded.

That great stronghold was open to them now. They might walk the floor of the House, sit in the Speaker’s chair, penetrate into the sacred places of the Upper Chamber.

Gone were all the rules and formulas, the intricacies and precedents of an unwritten constitution, the whole cumbrous machinery for the making of new laws. The air was no longer disturbed by the wranglings, evasions and cunning shifts of those who had found here a stage for their personal ambitions. The high talk of progress had died into silence along with the struggle of parties which had played the supreme game, side against side, for the prize of power. Progress had been defined in this place, in terms of human activity, human comfort. The end in sight had been some vague conception of general welfare through accumulated riches. And from the sky had fallen a pestilence to change the meaning of human terms. In three months the old conception of wealth was gone. Money, precious stones, a thousand accepted forms of value had become suddenly worthless, of no more account than the symbol of power which lay coated with dust on the table of the House of law-makers. Even law itself, that slow growth of the centuries, had become meaningless. Who cared if some mad woman plundered every jeweller’s shop in the whole City? Who was to forbid theft or avenge murder? The place of traffic was empty. Only one law was left and only one value; the law of self-preservation, the value of food.

The sunlight fell in broad coloured shafts upon two half-educated girls come on a plundering expedition, and they might sit in the high places if they would, and make new laws for themselves.

Blanche sat for a few moments in the Speaker’s chair.

“It’s a fine big place,” she remarked.

“Oh! come on, B., do,” replied Millie. “I want to get home.”

As they crossed the Square, Millie looked up at Big Ben. “Quarter-past nine,” she said. “It must have stopped.”

“Well, of course, silly,” replied Blanche. “All the clocks have stopped. Who’s to wind ’em?”