"I have no home in London; and in any case business calls me to Kensington," Mallory said.
"That's a distance. Dr. Mallory."
"Yes, it is," Mallory said, with a tug at his beard. "But it strikes me that there are any number of museums and savants' palaces in Kensington, which
have never been touched by advert-paper."
"Really," mused the King. "Do tell."
Mallory bade the King farewell a good mile from the Palace of Paleontology; he was unable to bear the fumes of glue any longer, and the van's lurching had made him badly seasick. He staggered off with the heavy scrolls of libelous and anarchic bills bundled awkwardly in his sweating grip. Behind him, Jemmy and Tom set to eager glue-slapping on the virgin bricks of the Palace of Political Economy.
Mallory propped the rolled bills against an ornate lamppost, and re-knotted his cloth mask over nose and mouth. His head spun evilly. Perhaps, he thought, that sticking-paste had had a bit of arsenic in it, or the ink some potent nauseous coal-derivative, for he felt poisoned, and weak in his very marrow. When he juggled up the bills again, their paper wrinkled in his sweating hands like the peeling skin of a drowned man.
He had, it seemed, frustrated a lashing bite of the tout's hydra-headed devilment. But this minor triumph seemed wretchedly small, when matched against the villain's seemingly endless reservoirs of wicked ingenuity. Mallory was stumbling in darknesswhile torn at will by invisible fangs
And yet Mallory had discovered a crucial piece of evidence: the tout was gone to earth in the West India Docks! To be so close to a chance to grapple with the scoundrel, and yet so farit was enough to madden a man.
Mallory stumbled badly on a slick lump of horse-dung, then swung the scrolls up onto his right shoulder, in an unstable heap. It was a useless fantasy to imagine confronting the toutalone, unaided, while the man was miles away, back across the chaos of London. Mallory had almost reached the Palace now, and it had taken well-nigh all he had to manage the trick of it.
He forced himself to concentrate on the matters at hand. He would haul the wretched bills to the Palace safety-box. They might prove useful as evidence someday, and they could take the place of Madeline's wedding-clock. He would take up the clock, he would find a way to flee this cursed London, and he would re-join his family, as he should have done. In green Sussex, in the bosom of the good auld clawney, there would be quiet, and sense, and safety. The gears of his life would begin to mesh once more in order.
Mallory lost his grip on the rolls of paper and they cascaded violently to the tarmac, one of them hitting him a smart blow across the shins as it bounded free. He gathered them up, groaning, and tried the other shoulder.
In the rancid mists down Knightsbridge a procession of some kind was moving steadily across the road. Ghost-like, blurred by distance and the Stink, they appeared to be military gurneys, the squat treaded monsters of the Crimean War. Fog muffled a heavy chugging and the faint repeated clank of jointed iron. One after another they passed, while Mallory peered forward, standing quite still and gripping his burden. Each gurney hauled a linked articulated caisson. These wains appeared to be canvas-shrouded cannon, with men, foot-soldiers in canvas-colored drab, clustered atop the cannons like barnacles, with a sea-urchin bristle of bayoneted rifles. At least a dozen war-gurneys, possible a score. Mallory rubbed his aching eyes in puzzled disbelief.
At Brompton Concourse he saw a trio of masked and batted figures scamper off with light-foot tread from a broken doorway; but no one offered trouble to him.
Some civil authority had erected saw-horses at the gate of the Palace of Paleontology. But the barricades were not manned; it was a simple matter to slip past them and up the fog-slick stone stairs to the main entrance. The Palace's great double-doors were thickly curtained in a protective shroud of wet canvas, hung from the brick archway down to the very flagstones. The thick damp fabric smelled sharply of chloride of lime. Behind the canvas, the Palace doors were slightly ajar. Mallory eased his way inside.
Servants were draping the furniture of lobby and drawing-room with thin white sheets of muslin. Others, a peculiar crowd of them, swept, and mopped, and dabbled earnestly at the cornices with long jointed feather-dusters. London women, and a large number of children of all ages, hustled about wearing borrowed Palace cleaning-aprons, looking anxious but vaguely exalted.
Mallory realized at length that these strangers must be the families of the Palace staff, come to seek shelter and security within the grandest public building known to them. And someoneKelly the major-domo, presumably, with help from whatever savants still remained on the premiseshad pluckily organized the refugees.
Mallory strode toward the lobby-desk, lugging his paper burden. These
were sturdy working-class folk, he realized. Their stations might be humble, but they were Britons through and through. They were not daunted; they had rallied in instinctive defense of their scientific institutions and the civil values of law and property. He realized, with a heart-lifting wash of patriotic relief, that the lurching madness of Chaos had reached its limit. Within the faltering maelstrom, a nucleation of spontaneous order had arisen! Now, like a cloudy muck resolving into crystals, everything would change.