might have been only the distant efforts of drunken men. . . .
He did not turn up his lights; he stood at his draughty broken window a distressful, slight black outline to the officer who looked ever and again into the room and exhorted him to rest.
All night Redwood remained at his window peering up at the ambiguous drift of the sky, and only with the coming of the dawn did he obey his fatigue and lie down upon the little bed they had prepared for him between his writing desk and the sinking fire in the fireplace under the great hog's skull.
III
For thirty-six long hours did Redwood remain imprisoned, closed in and shut off from the great drama of the Two Days, while the little people in the dawn of greatness fought against the Children of the Food. Then abruptly the iron curtain rose again and he found himself near the very centre of the struggle. That curtain rose as unexpectedly as it had fallen. In the late afternoon he was called to the window by the clatter of a cab, that stopped without. A young man descended and in another minute stood before him in the room, a slightly built young man of thirty perhaps, clean shaven, well dressed, well mannered.
"Mr. Redwood, Sir," he began, "would you be willing to come to Mr. Caterham? He needs your presence very urgently."
"Needs my presence!. . ." There leapt a
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