Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/153



But the Evening Argus '  hoot was a mere rustic bleat when the London press took up the cry; Sorrell became a student of "headlines":

By mid-day Sorrell was able to count some forty cars strung along the side of the road between the Lombard poplars and the Pelican. The number steadily increased, and so did the noise they made when the later arrivals had to find room somewhere and began to use the space beside the inn as a field of manœuvre. People crowded into the hotel,—and asked to be given lunch. Knots of them stood staring at the piece of grass where the accident had happened, and from which the crumpled car had been removed. The bark of one of the poplars had been torn, and from the gash curious people pulled fragments of splintered wood. Even the hotel garden was invaded. Roland found a lot of women staring up at the bedroom windows and talking in loud voices.

"That's it,—that's her window. I saw the nurse."

They walked over the flower beds.

Roland lost his temper. He went out to them.

"Haven't you ladies any sense of decency?"

He cleared them out, and had the garden doors locked and the gate chained,—but when the garden had achieved silence the lounge became like Babel. People were standing there as though it were the deck of a channel steamer, and the passage leading to the dining-room the gangway to the quay.

Roland stood on the stairs.

"Ladies and gentlemen"

No one paid the least attention, and he had to shout.

"Ladies and gentlemen—may I be permitted to remind you that a woman is—dying. A little silence, please. If you will go out by that door."

With Sorrell and Hulks to help him he got the lounge cleared, and he ordered the hotel doors to be locked.