For a time I stood there, too overwhelmed by this new development to think of the people.

At first I was too stunned to see the thing as any definite disaster—­I was just stunned, as a man is by some accidental violent blow.  It is only afterwards he begins to appreciate his specific injury.

“Good Lord!”

I felt as though somebody was pouring funk out of a can down the back of my neck.  My legs became feeble.  I had got the first intimation of what the disaster meant for me.  There was that confounded boy—­sky high!  I was utterly left.  There was the gold in the coffee-room—­my only possession on earth.  How would it all work out?  The general effect was of a gigantic unmanageable confusion.

“I say,” said the voice of the little man behind.  “I say, you know.”

I wheeled about, and there were twenty or thirty people, a sort of irregular investment of people, all bombarding me with dumb interrogation, with infinite doubt and suspicion.  I felt the compulsion of their eyes intolerably.  I groaned aloud.

“I can’t,” I shouted.  “I tell you I can’t!  I’m not equal to it!  You must puzzle and—­and be damned to you!”

I gesticulated convulsively.  He receded a step as though I had threatened him.  I made a bolt through them into the hotel.  I charged back into the coffee-room, rang the bell furiously.  I gripped the waiter as he entered.  “D’ye hear?” I shouted.  “Get help and carry these bars up to my room right away.”

He failed to understand me, and I shouted and raved at him.  A scared-looking little old man in a green apron appeared, and further two of the young men in flannels.  I made a dash at them and commandeered their services.  As soon as the gold was in my room I felt free to quarrel.  “Now get out,” I shouted; “all of you get out if you don’t want to see a man go mad before your eyes!” And I helped the waiter by the shoulder as he hesitated in the doorway.  And then, as soon as I had the door locked on them all, I tore off the little man’s clothes again, shied them right and left, and got into bed forthwith.  And there I lay swearing and panting and cooling for a very long time.

At last I was calm enough to get out of bed and ring up the round-eyed waiter for a flannel nightshirt, a soda and whisky, and some good cigars.  And these things being procured me, after an exasperating delay that drove me several times to the bell, I locked the door again and proceeded very deliberately to look entire situation in the face.

The net result of the great experiment presented itself as an absolute failure.  It was a rout, and I was the sole survivor.  It was an absolute collapse, and this was the final disaster.  There was nothing for it but to save myself, and as much as I could in the way of prospects from our debacle.  At one fatal crowning blow all my vague resolutions of return and recovery had vanished.  My intention of going back to the moon, of getting a sphereful of gold, and afterwards of having a fragment of Cavorite analysed and so recovering the great secret—­perhaps, finally, even of recovering Cavor’s body—­all these ideas vanished altogether.