ANGEL    PAVEMENT
Yet there was no real evidence for this. "How is
he?" he asked the nurse who had first shown him the
bed,
"Who? Seventy-five? Oh, getting along all right,"
she replied briskly. 'We're operating at the end of this
week or early next week. Hell be all right."
She sounded confident enough, but Mr. Smeeth did
not know whether to believe her or not. As he left the
hospital, a clammy air of dissolution and mortality clung
to him. Barbican and Golden Lane, through which he
passed on his way to Old Street and Brown and
Gorstein's, spoke to him only of decay. It was a curious
afternoon, belonging to one of those days that are in
the very dead heart of winter. The air was chilled and
leaden. The sky above the City was a low ceiling of
tarnished brass. All the usual noises were there, and
the trams and carts that went along Old Street made as
much din as ever, yet it seemed as if every sound was
besieged by a tremendous thick silence. Cold as it was,
it was not an afternoon that made a man want to move
sharply, to hurry about his business; there was some-
thing about it, something slowed down and muffled in
the heavy air, the brooding yellowish sky, the stone
buildings that seemed to be retreating into their native
rock again, that impelled a man to linger and stare and
lose himself in shadowy thought.
Mr. Smeeth found himself doing this, after he had left
Brown and Gorstein's, and had turned down Bunhill
Row on his way back to the office. He halted opposite
that large building boldly labelled The Star Works, and
wondered what was made there and whether it had any-
thing starry about it. Then he turned round, idly, and
stared through the iron railings at the old graves there.