The Door in the Wall And Other Stories


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collected outside the gates of the yard--a crowd, for no known  
reason, always hovers for a day or two near the scene of a sudden  
death in London; two or three reporters percolated somehow into the  
engine-shed, and one even got to Azuma-zi; but the scientific  
expert cleared them out again, being himself an amateur journalist.  
Presently the body was carried away, and public interest  
departed with it. Azuma-zi remained very quietly at his furnace,  
seeing over and over again in the coals a figure that wriggled  
violently and became still. An hour after the murder, to anyone  
coming into the shed it would have looked exactly as if nothing had  
ever happened there. Peeping presently from his engine-room the  
black saw the Lord Dynamo spin and whirl beside his little  
brothers, and the driving wheels were beating round, and the steam  
in the pistons went thud, thud, exactly as it had been earlier in  
the evening. After all, from the mechanical point of view, it had  
been a most insignificant incident--the mere temporary deflection  
of a current. But now the slender form and slender shadow of the  
scientific manager replaced the sturdy outline of Holroyd  
travelling up and down the lane of light upon the vibrating floor  
under the straps between the engines and the dynamos.  
"
Have I not served my Lord?" said Azuma-zi inaudibly, from his  
shadow, and the note of the great dynamo rang out full and clear.  
As he looked at the big whirling mechanism the strange fascination  
of it that had been a little in abeyance since Holroyd's death,  
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146 147 148 149 150

Quick Jump
1 49 97 146 194