The Peacemaker
Page 20
They went up the stairs and knocked on the door.
‘We want you, Pethwick,’ said the quiet leader, and at the sound of the strange voice Pethwick rose and opened the door.
They took him by the arms and dragged him out, not resisting very much, with on his face the half-hearted, good-natured smile he had worn as a boy when he had been ragged at school. The circumstances seemed just the same to him, and the memory of those times came flooding back to him.
They brought him downstairs, and as they led him into the street the quiet leader said to the hooligans:
‘There are all his infernal machines upstairs. See that nothing’s left of them.’
And on that invitation they poured up the stairs and they pounded his apparatus to pieces, and they took all his pages of closely written calculations and tore them into fragments and piled them on the floor and set fire to them, and, their appetite for destruction growing, they ranged through the house, breaking open drawers, and every scrap of paper they could find they piled upon the flames, with broken furniture, until they had set the whole house will alight, so that when the fire engine arrived the firemen had to complete the destruction of all Pethwick’s work in extinguishing the flames with their hoses and their chemicals.
Out in the street they led Pethwick towards the common. But now the news spread like wildfire that they had caught the Peacemaker. People came pouring out of their houses. From the slums on the other side of the High Street came more hooligans, running and shouting. Some of them remembered the happy war-time days when German bakers and linen-drapers had had their shops sacked. The streets filled with a yelling crowd of mischief-makers and of exasperated people, in the midst of which Pethwick was borne along, now and again lifted off his feet by the press. It is not known who it was that threw the first stone, but it is to be hoped that it was somebody without sin. It struck Pethwick on the cheek, and the blood poured down, and the crowd yelled.
That was when Dorothy saw him, head and shoulders above the crowd, the blood on his cheek. But on his face was still the same dazed, good-natured smile. She could comfort herself, afterwards, with the thought that he was unafraid. Then into the mob came charging the half-dozen rescuers with young Lenham at their head—Lenham had heard the news, and his dark face was set hard with his determination not to let Pethwick suffer. There were blows struck, and the mob surged and eddied this way and that, and Pethwick went down among the trampling feet, and rose again, bruised and dazed, until someone unknown, in the press of the battle, struck him down again with a coward’s blow, so that he fell once more beneath the feet of the mob pouring over him in their aimless riot for five wild minutes, until the police at last came fighting their way up Verulam Road. He was still breathing when they found him, but not for long.
A Note on the Author
Cecil Scott “C.S.” Forester, born in Cairo in August 1899, was the fifth and last child of George Foster Smith and Sarah Medhurst Troughton. After finishing school at Dulwich College he attended Guy’s Medical School but failed to finish the course, preferring to write than study. However, it was not until he was aged twenty-seven that he earned enough from his writing to live on.
During the Second World War, Forester moved to the United States where he met a young British intelligence officer named Roald Dahl, whom he encouraged to write about his experiences in the RAF.
Forester’s most notable works were the Horatio Hornblower series, which depicted a Royal Navy officer during the Napoleonic era, and The African Queen (filmed in 1951 by John Huston). His novels A Ship of the Line and Flying Colours were jointly awarded the 1938 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.
For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been
removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain
references to missing images.
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
First published in Great Britain 1981 by Chivers Press
Copyright © 1981 C. S. Forester
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eISBN: 9781448210428
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