The War in the Air

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Title: The War in the Air
Author: Herbert George Wells
Posting Date: August 10, 2008 [EBook #780]
Release Date: January, 1997
Last Updated: March 2, 2018
Language: English
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*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WAR IN THE AIR ***
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THE WAR IN THE AIR
By H. G. Wells
CONTENTS
I. OF PROGRESS AND THE SMALLWAYS FAMILY
II. HOW BERT SMALLWAYS GOT INTO DIFFICULTIES
III. THE BALLOON
IV. THE GERMAN AIR-FLEET
V. THE BATTLE OF THE NORTH ATLANTIC
VI. HOW WAR CAME TO NEW YORK
VII. THE “VATERLAND” IS DISABLED
VIII. A WORLD AT WAR
IX. ON GOAT ISLAND
X. THE WORLD UNDER THE WAR
XI. THE GREAT COLLAPSE
THE EPILOGUE
PREFACE TO REPRINT EDITION
The reader should grasp clearly the date at which this book was written.
It was done in 1907: it appeared in various magazines as a serial in
1908 and it was published in the Fall of that year. At that time the
aeroplane was, for most people, merely a rumour and the “Sausage” held
the air. The contemporary reader has all the advantage of ten years'
experience since this story was imagined. He can correct his author at a
dozen points and estimate the value of these warnings by the standard
of a decade of realities. The book is weak on anti-aircraft guns, for
example, and still more negligent of submarines. Much, no doubt, will
strike the reader as quaint and limited but upon much the writer may not
unreasonably plume himself. The interpretation of the German spirit
must have read as a caricature in 1908. Was it a caricature? Prince
Karl seemed a fantasy then. Reality has since copied Prince Carl with
an astonishing faithfulness. Is it too much to hope that some democratic
“Bert” may not ultimately get even with his Highness? Our author tells
us in this book, as he has told us in others, more especially in The
World Set Free, and as he has been telling us this year in his War
and the Future, that if mankind goes on with war, the smash-up of
civilization is inevitable. It is chaos or the United States of the
World for mankind. There is no other choice. Ten years have but added an
enormous conviction to the message of this book. It remains essentially
right, a pamphlet story--in support of the League to Enforce Peace. K.
THE WAR IN THE AIR
CHAPTER I. OF PROGRESS AND THE SMALLWAYS FAMILY
1
“This here Progress,” said Mr. Tom Smallways, “it keeps on.”
“You'd hardly think it could keep on,” said Mr. Tom Smallways.
It was along before the War in the Air began that Mr. Smallways made
this remark. He was sitting on the fence at the end of his garden and
surveying the great Bun Hill gas-works with an eye that neither praised
nor blamed. Above the clustering gasometers three unfamiliar shapes
appeared, thin, wallowing bladders that flapped and rolled about, and
grew bigger and bigger and rounder and rounder--balloons in course
of inflation for the South of England Aero Club's Saturday-afternoon
ascent.
“They goes up every Saturday,” said his neighbour, Mr. Stringer, the
milkman. “It's only yestiday, so to speak, when all London turned out to
see a balloon go over, and now every little place in the country has
its weekly-outings--uppings, rather. It's been the salvation of them gas
companies.”
“Larst Satiday I got three barrer-loads of gravel off my petaters,” said
Mr. Tom Smallways. “Three barrer-loads! What they dropped as ballase.
Some of the plants was broke, and some was buried.”
“Ladies, they say, goes up!”
“I suppose we got to call 'em ladies,” said Mr. Tom Smallways.
“Still, it ain't hardly my idea of a lady--flying about in the air, and
throwing gravel at people. It ain't what I been accustomed to consider
ladylike, whether or no.”
Mr. Stringer nodded his head approvingly, and for a time they continued
to regard the swelling bulks with expressions that had changed from
indifference to disapproval.
Mr. Tom Smallways was a green-grocer by trade and a gardener by
disposition; his little wife Jessica saw to the shop, and Heaven had
planned him for a peaceful world. Unfortunately Heaven had not planned
a peaceful world for him. He lived in a world of obstinate and incessant
change, and in parts where its operations were unsparingly conspicuous.
Vicissitude was in the very soil he tilled; even his garden was upon a
yearly tenancy, and overshadowed by a huge board that proclaimed it not
so much a garden as an eligible building site. He was horticulture under
notice to quit, the last patch of country in a district flooded by new
and (other) things. He did his best to console himself, to imagine
matters near the turn of the tide.
“You'd hardly think it could keep on,” he said.
Mr. Smallways' aged father, could remember Bun Hill as an idyllic
Kentish village. He had driven Sir Peter Bone until he was fifty and
then he took to drink a little, and driving the station bus, which
lasted him until he was seventy-eight. Then he retired. He sat by the
fireside, a shrivelled, very, very old coachman, full charged with
reminiscences, and ready for any careless stranger. He could tell you of
the vanished estate of Sir Peter Bone, long since cut up for building,
and how that magnate ruled the country-side when it was country-side, of
shooting and hunting, and of caches along the high road, of how “where
the gas-works is” was a cricket-field, and of the coming of the Crystal
Palace. The Crystal Palace was six miles away from Bun Hill, a great
facade that glittered in the morning, and was a clear blue outline
against the sky in the afternoon, and of a night, a source of gratuitous
fireworks for all the population of Bun Hill. And then had come the
railway, and then villas and villas, and then the gas-works and the
water-works, and a great, ugly sea of workmen's houses, and then
drainage, and the water vanished out of the Otterbourne and left it a
dreadful ditch, and then a second railway station, Bun Hill South, and
more houses and more, more shops, more competition, plate-glass shops,
a school-board, rates, omnibuses, tramcars--going right away into
London itself--bicycles, motor-cars and then more motor-cars, a Carnegie
library.
“You'd hardly think it could keep on,” said Mr. Tom Smallways, growing
up among these marvels.
But it kept on. Even from the first the green-grocer's shop which he had
set up in one of the smallest of the old surviving village houses in
the tail of the High Street had a submerged air, an air of hiding from
something that was looking for it. When they had made up the pavement of
the High Street, they levelled that up so that one had to go down three
steps into the shop. Tom did his best to sell only his own excellent
but limited range of produce; but Progress came shoving things into his
window, French artichokes and aubergines, foreign apples--apples from
the State of New York, apples from California, apples from Canada,
apples from New Zealand, “pretty lookin' fruit, but not what I should
call English apples,” said Tom--bananas, unfamiliar nuts, grape fruits,
mangoes.
The motor-cars that went by northward and southward grew more and more
powerful and efficient, whizzed faster and smelt worse, there appeared
great clangorous petrol trolleys delivering coal and parcels in
the place of vanishing horse-vans, motor-omnibuses ousted the
horse-omnibuses, even the Kentish strawberries going Londonward in the
night took to machinery and clattered instead of creaking, and became
affected in flavour by progress and petrol.
And then young Bert Smallways got a motor bicycle....
2
Bert, it is necessary to explain, was a progressive Smallways.
Nothing speaks more eloquently of the pitiless insistence of progress
and expansion in our time than that it should get into the Smallways
blood. But there was something advanced and enterprising about young
Smallways before he was out of short frocks. He was lost for a whole
day before he was five, and nearly drowned in the reservoir of the new
water-works before he was seven. He had a real pistol taken away from
him by a real policeman when he was ten. And he learnt to smoke, not
with pipes and brown paper and cane as Tom had done, but with a penny
packet of Boys of England American cigarettes. His language shocked
his father before he was twelve, and by that age, what with touting for
parcels at the station and selling the Bun Hill Weekly Express, he was
making three shillings a week, or more, and spending it on Chips, Comic
Cuts, Ally Sloper's Half-holiday, cigarettes, and all the concomitants
of a life of pleasure and enlightenment. All of this without hindrance
to his literary studies, which carried him up to the seventh standard at
an exceptionally early age. I mention these things so that you may have
no doubt at all concerning the sort of stuff Bert had in him.
He was six years younger than Tom, and for a time there was an attempt
to utilise him in the green-grocer's shop when Tom at twenty-one married
Jessica--who was thirty, and had saved a little money in service. But it
was not Bert's forte to be utilised. He hated digging, and when he
was given a basket of stuff to deliver, a nomadic instinct arose
irresistibly, it became his pack and he did not seem to care how heavy
it was nor where he took it, so long as he did not take it to its
destination. Glamour filled the world, and he strayed after it, basket
and all. So Tom took his goods out himself, and sought employers for
Bert who did not know of this strain of poetry in his nature. And Bert
touched the fringe of a number of trades in succession--draper's porter,
chemist's boy, doctor's page, junior assistant gas-fitter, envelope
addresser, milk-cart assistant, golf caddie, and at last helper in a
bicycle shop. Here, apparently, he found the progressive quality his
nature had craved. His employer was a pirate-souled young man named
Grubb, with a black-smeared face by day, and a music-hall side in the
evening, who dreamt of a patent lever chain; and it seemed to Bert that
he was the perfect model of a gentleman of spirit. He hired out quite
the dirtiest and unsafest bicycles in the whole south of England, and
conducted the subsequent discussions with astonishing verve. Bert and
he settled down very well together. Bert lived in, became almost a trick
rider--he could ride bicycles for miles that would have come to pieces
instantly under you or me--took to washing his face after business, and
spent his surplus money upon remarkable ties and collars, cigarettes,
and shorthand classes at the Bun Hill Institute.
He would go round to Tom at times, and look and talk so brilliantly
that Tom and Jessie, who both had a natural tendency to be respectful to
anybody or anything, looked up to him immensely.
“He's a go-ahead chap, is Bert,” said Tom. “He knows a thing or two.”
“Let's hope he don't know too much,” said Jessica, who had a fine sense
of limitations.
“It's go-ahead Times,” said Tom. “Noo petaters, and English at that;
we'll be having 'em in March if things go on as they do go. I never see
such Times. See his tie last night?”
“It wasn't suited to him, Tom. It was a gentleman's tie. He wasn't up to
it--not the rest of him, It wasn't becoming”...
Then presently Bert got a cyclist's suit, cap, badge, and all; and
to see him and Grubb going down to Brighton (and back)--heads
down, handle-bars down, backbones curved--was a revelation in the
possibilities of the Smallways blood.
Go-ahead Times!
Old Smallways would sit over the fire mumbling of the greatness of other
days, of old Sir Peter, who drove his coach to Brighton and back in
eight-and-twenty hours, of old Sir Peter's white top-hats, of Lady Bone,
who never set foot to ground except to walk in the garden, of the great,
prize-fights at Crawley. He talked of pink and pig-skin breeches, of
foxes at Ring's Bottom, where now the County Council pauper lunatics
were enclosed, of Lady Bone's chintzes and crinolines. Nobody heeded
him. The world had thrown up a new type of gentleman altogether--a
gentleman of most ungentlemanly energy, a gentleman in dusty oilskins
and motor goggles and a wonderful cap, a stink-making gentleman, a
swift, high-class badger, who fled perpetually along high roads from the
dust and stink he perpetually made. And his lady, as they were able
to see her at Bun Hill, was a weather-bitten goddess, as free from
refinement as a gipsy--not so much dressed as packed for transit at a
high velocity.
So Bert grew up, filled with ideals of speed and enterprise, and
became, so far as he became anything, a kind of bicycle engineer of the
let's-have-a-look-at-it and enamel chipping variety. Even a road-racer,
geared to a hundred and twenty, failed to satisfy him, and for a time he
pined in vain at twenty miles an hour along roads that were continually
more dusty and more crowded with mechanical traffic. But at last his
savings accumulated, and his chance came. The hire-purchase system
bridged a financial gap, and one bright and memorable Sunday morning he
wheeled his new possession through the shop into the road, got on to it
with the advice and assistance of Grubb, and teuf-teuffed off into
the haze of the traffic-tortured high road, to add himself as one more
voluntary public danger to the amenities of the south of England.
“Orf to Brighton!” said old Smallways, regarding his youngest son from
the sitting-room window over the green-grocer's shop with something
between pride and reprobation. “When I was 'is age, I'd never been to
London, never bin south of Crawley--never bin anywhere on my own where
I couldn't walk. And nobody didn't go. Not unless they was gentry. Now
every body's orf everywhere; the whole dratted country sims flying to
pieces. Wonder they all get back. Orf to Brighton indeed! Anybody want
to buy 'orses?”
“You can't say _I_ bin to Brighton, father,” said Tom.
“Nor don't want to go,” said Jessica sharply; “creering about and
spendin' your money.”
3
For a time the possibilities of the motor-bicycle so occupied Bert's
mind that he remained regardless of the new direction in which the
striving soul of man was finding exercise and refreshment. He failed
to observe that the type of motor-car, like the type of bicycle, was
settling-down and losing its adventurous quality. Indeed, it is as
true as it is remarkable that Tom was the first to observe the new
development. But his gardening made him attentive to the heavens, and
the proximity of the Bun Hill gas-works and the Crystal Palace, from
which ascents were continually being made, and presently the descent of
ballast upon his potatoes, conspired to bear in upon his unwilling mind
the fact that the Goddess of Change was turning her disturbing attention
to the sky. The first great boom in aeronautics was beginning.
Grubb and Bert heard of it in a music-hall, then it was driven home to
their minds by the cinematograph, then Bert's imagination was stimulated
by a sixpenny edition of that aeronautic classic, Mr. George Griffith's
“Clipper of the Clouds,” and so the thing really got hold of them.
At first the most obvious aspect was the multiplication of balloons.
The sky of Bun Hill began to be infested by balloons. On Wednesday and
Saturday afternoons particularly you could scarcely look skyward for a
quarter of an hour without discovering a balloon somewhere. And then one
bright day Bert, motoring toward Croydon, was arrested by the insurgence
of a huge, bolster-shaped monster from the Crystal Palace grounds, and
obliged to dismount and watch it. It was like a bolster with a broken
nose, and below it, and comparatively small, was a stiff framework
bearing a man and an engine with a screw that whizzed round in front and
a sort of canvas rudder behind. The framework had an air of dragging the
reluctant gas-cylinder after it like a brisk little terrier towing a
shy gas-distended elephant into society. The combined monster certainly
travelled and steered. It went overhead perhaps a thousand feet up
(Bert heard the engine), sailed away southward, vanished over the hills,
reappeared a little blue outline far off in the east, going now very
fast before a gentle south-west gale, returned above the Crystal Palace
towers, circled round them, chose a position for descent, and sank down
out of sight.
Bert sighed deeply, and turned to his motor-bicycle again.
And that was only the beginning of a succession of strange phenomena
in the heavens--cylinders, cones, pear-shaped monsters, even at last a
thing of aluminium that glittered wonderfully, and that Grubb, through
some confusion of ideas about armour plates, was inclined to consider a
war machine.
There followed actual flight.
This, however, was not an affair that was visible from Bun Hill; it was
something that occurred in private grounds or other enclosed places and,
under favourable conditions, and it was brought home to Grubb and
Bert Smallways only by means of the magazine page of the half-penny
newspapers or by cinematograph records. But it was brought home very
insistently, and in those days if, ever one heard a man saying in a
public place in a loud, reassuring, confident tone, “It's bound to
come,” the chances were ten to one he was talking of flying. And Bert
got a box lid and wrote out in correct window-ticket style, and Grubb
put in the window this inscription, “Aeroplanes made and repaired.” It
quite upset Tom--it seemed taking one's shop so lightly; but most of the
neighbours, and all the sporting ones, approved of it as being very good
indeed.
Everybody talked of flying, everybody repeated over and over again,
“Bound to come,” and then you know it didn't come. There was a hitch.
They flew--that was all right; they flew in machines heavier than air.
But they smashed. Sometimes they smashed the engine, sometimes they
smashed the aeronaut, usually they smashed both. Machines that made
flights of three or four miles and came down safely, went up the next
time to headlong disaster. There seemed no possible trusting to them.
The breeze upset them, the eddies near the ground upset them, a passing
thought in the mind of the aeronaut upset them. Also they upset--simply.
“It's this 'stability' does 'em,” said Grubb, repeating his newspaper.
“They pitch and they pitch, till they pitch themselves to pieces.”
Experiments fell away after two expectant years of this sort of success,
the public and then the newspapers tired of the expensive photographic
reproductions, the optimistic reports, the perpetual sequence of triumph
and disaster and silence. Flying slumped, even ballooning fell away to
some extent, though it remained a fairly popular sport, and continued
to lift gravel from the wharf of the Bun Hill gas-works and drop it upon
deserving people's lawns and gardens. There were half a dozen reassuring
years for Tom--at least so far as flying was concerned. But that was the
great time of mono-rail development, and his anxiety was only diverted
from the high heavens by the most urgent threats and symptoms of change
in the lower sky.
There had been talk of mono-rails for several years. But the real
mischief began when Brennan sprang his gyroscopic mono-rail car upon the
Royal Society. It was the leading sensation of the 1907 soirees; that
celebrated demonstration-room was all too small for its exhibition.
Brave soldiers, leading Zionists, deserving novelists, noble ladies,
congested the narrow passage and thrust distinguished elbows into ribs
the world would not willingly let break, deeming themselves fortunate
if they could see “just a little bit of the rail.” Inaudible, but
convincing, the great inventor expounded his discovery, and sent his
obedient little model of the trains of the future up gradients, round
curves, and across a sagging wire. It ran along its single rail, on its
single wheels, simple and sufficient; it stopped, reversed stood still,
balancing perfectly. It maintained its astounding equilibrium amidst a
thunder of applause. The audience dispersed at last, discussing how
far they would enjoy crossing an abyss on a wire cable. “Suppose the
gyroscope stopped!” Few of them anticipated a tithe of what the Brennan
mono-rail would do for their railway securities and the face of the
world.
In a few, years they realised better. In a little while no one
thought anything of crossing an abyss on a wire, and the mono-rail was
superseding the tram-lines, railways: and indeed every form of track
for mechanical locomotion. Where land was cheap the rail ran along
the ground, where it was dear the rail lifted up on iron standards and
passed overhead; its swift, convenient cars went everywhere and did
everything that had once been done along made tracks upon the ground.
When old Smallways died, Tom could think of nothing more striking to say
of him than that, “When he was a boy, there wasn't nothing higher than
your chimbleys--there wasn't a wire nor a cable in the sky!”
Old Smallways went to his grave under an intricate network of wires and
cables, for Bun Hill became not only a sort of minor centre of power
distribution--the Home Counties Power Distribution Company set
up transformers and a generating station close beside the old
gas-works--but, also a junction on the suburban mono-rail system.
Moreover, every tradesman in the place, and indeed nearly every house,
had its own telephone.
The mono-rail cable standard became a striking fact in urban landscape,
for the most part stout iron erections rather like tapering trestles,
and painted a bright bluish green. One, it happened, bestrode Tom's
house, which looked still more retiring and apologetic beneath its
immensity; and another giant stood just inside the corner of his garden,
which was still not built upon and unchanged, except for a couple of
advertisement boards, one recommending a two-and-sixpenny watch, and one
a nerve restorer. These, by the bye, were placed almost horizontally to
catch the eye of the passing mono-rail passengers above, and so served
admirably to roof over a tool-shed and a mushroom-shed for Tom. All day
and all night the fast cars from Brighton and Hastings went murmuring by
overhead long, broad, comfortable-looking cars, that were brightly lit
after dusk. As they flew by at night, transient flares of light and a
rumbling sound of passage, they kept up a perpetual summer lightning and
thunderstorm in the street below.
Presently the English Channel was bridged--a series of great iron Eiffel
Tower pillars carrying mono-rail cables at a height of a hundred and
fifty feet above the water, except near the middle, where they rose
higher to allow the passage of the London and Antwerp shipping and the
Hamburg-America liners.
Then heavy motor-cars began to run about on only a couple of wheels, one
behind the other, which for some reason upset Tom dreadfully, and made
him gloomy for days after the first one passed the shop...
All this gyroscopic and mono-rail development naturally absorbed a
vast amount of public attention, and there was also a huge excitement
consequent upon the amazing gold discoveries off the coast of Anglesea
made by a submarine prospector, Miss Patricia Giddy. She had taken her
degree in geology and mineralogy in the University of London, and while
working upon the auriferous rocks of North Wales, after a brief holiday
spent in agitating for women's suffrage, she had been struck by the
possibility of these reefs cropping up again under the water. She had
set herself to verify this supposition by the use of the submarine
crawler invented by Doctor Alberto Cassini. By a happy mingling of
reasoning and intuition peculiar to her sex she found gold at her
first descent, and emerged after three hours' submersion with about two
hundredweight of ore containing gold in the unparalleled quantity
of seventeen ounces to the ton. But the whole story of her submarine
mining, intensely interesting as it is, must be told at some other time;
suffice it now to remark simply that it was during the consequent great
rise of prices, confidence, and enterprise that the revival of interest
in flying occurred.
It is curious how that revival began. It was like the coming of a breeze
on a quiet day; nothing started it, it came. People began to talk of
flying with an air of never having for one moment dropped the subject.
Pictures of flying and flying machines returned to the newspapers;
articles and allusions increased and multiplied in the serious
magazines. People asked in mono-rail trains, “When are we going to fly?”
A new crop of inventors sprang up in a night or so like fungi. The Aero
Club announced the project of a great Flying Exhibition in a large
area of ground that the removal of slums in Whitechapel had rendered
available.
The advancing wave soon produced a sympathetic ripple in the Bun Hill
establishment. Grubb routed out his flying-machine model again, tried it
in the yard behind the shop, got a kind of flight out of it, and broke
seventeen panes of glass and nine flower-pots in the greenhouse that
occupied the next yard but one.
And then, springing from nowhere, sustained one knew not how, came a
persistent, disturbing rumour that the problem had been solved, that
the secret was known. Bert met it one early-closing afternoon as he
refreshed himself in an inn near Nutfield, whither his motor-bicycle had
brought him. There smoked and meditated a person in khaki, an engineer,
who presently took an interest in Bert's machine. It was a sturdy piece
of apparatus, and it had acquired a kind of documentary value in these
quick-changing times; it was now nearly eight years old. Its points
discussed, the soldier broke into a new topic with, “My next's going
to be an aeroplane, so far as I can see. I've had enough of roads and
ways.”
“They TORK,” said Bert.
“They talk--and they do,” said the soldier.
“The thing's coming--”
“It keeps ON coming,” said Bert; “I shall believe when I see it.”
“That won't be long,” said the soldier.
The conversation seemed degenerating into an amiable wrangle of
contradiction.
“I tell you they ARE flying,” the soldier insisted. “I see it myself.”
“We've all seen it,” said Bert.
“I don't mean flap up and smash up; I mean real, safe, steady,
controlled flying, against the wind, good and right.”
“You ain't seen that!”
“I 'AVE! Aldershot. They try to keep it a secret. They got it right
enough. You bet--our War Office isn't going to be caught napping this
time.”
Bert's incredulity was shaken. He asked questions--and the soldier
expanded.
“I tell you they got nearly a square mile fenced in--a sort of valley.
Fences of barbed wire ten feet high, and inside that they do things.
Chaps about the camp--now and then we get a peep. It isn't only
us neither. There's the Japanese; you bet they got it too--and the
Germans!”
The soldier stood with his legs very wide apart, and filled his pipe
thoughtfully. Bert sat on the low wall against which his motor-bicycle
was leaning.
“Funny thing fighting'll be,” he said.
“Flying's going to break out,” said the soldier. “When it DOES come,
when the curtain does go up, I tell you you'll find every one on the
stage--busy.... Such fighting, too!... I suppose you don't read the
papers about this sort of thing?”
“I read 'em a bit,” said Bert.
“Well, have you noticed what one might call the remarkable case of
the disappearing inventor--the inventor who turns up in a blaze of
publicity, fires off a few successful experiments, and vanishes?”
“Can't say I 'ave,” said Bert.
“Well, I 'ave, anyhow. You get anybody come along who does anything
striking in this line, and, you bet, he vanishes. Just goes off quietly
out of sight. After a bit, you don't hear anything more of 'em at all.
See? They disappear. Gone--no address. First--oh! it's an old story
now--there was those Wright Brothers out in America. They glided--they
glided miles and miles. Finally they glided off stage. Why, it must be
nineteen hundred and four, or five, THEY vanished! Then there was those
people in Ireland--no, I forget their names. Everybody said they could
fly. THEY went. They ain't dead that I've heard tell; but you can't say
they're alive. Not a feather of 'em can you see. Then that chap who flew
round Paris and upset in the Seine. De Booley, was it? I forget. That
was a grand fly, in spite of the accident; but where's he got to? The
accident didn't hurt him. Eh? _'E_'s gone to cover.”
The soldier prepared to light his pipe.
“Looks like a secret society got hold of them,” said Bert.
“Secret society! NAW!”
The soldier lit his match, and drew. “Secret society,” he repeated, with
his pipe between his teeth and the match flaring, in response to his
words. “War Departments; that's more like it.” He threw his match aside,
and walked to his machine. “I tell you, sir,” he said, “there isn't a
big Power in Europe, OR Asia, OR America, OR Africa, that hasn't got
at least one or two flying machines hidden up its sleeve at the present
time. Not one. Real, workable, flying machines. And the spying! The
spying and manoeuvring to find out what the others have got. I tell you,
sir, a foreigner, or, for the matter of that, an unaccredited native,
can't get within four miles of Lydd nowadays--not to mention our little
circus at Aldershot, and the experimental camp in Galway. No!”
“Well,” said Bert, “I'd like to see one of them, anyhow. Jest to help
believing. I'll believe when I see, that I'll promise you.”
“You'll see 'em, fast enough,” said the soldier, and led his machine out
into the road.
He left Bert on his wall, grave and pensive, with his cap on the back of
his head, and a cigarette smouldering in the corner of his mouth.
“If what he says is true,” said Bert, “me and Grubb, we been wasting our
blessed old time. Besides incurring expense with that green-'ouse.”
5
It was while this mysterious talk with the soldier still stirred in Bert
Smallways' imagination that the most astounding incident in the whole of
that dramatic chapter of human history, the coming of flying,
occurred. People talk glibly enough of epoch-making events; this was
an epoch-making event. It was the unanticipated and entirely successful
flight of Mr. Alfred Butteridge from the Crystal Palace to Glasgow
and back in a small businesslike-looking machine heavier than air--an
entirely manageable and controllable machine that could fly as well as a
pigeon.
It wasn't, one felt, a fresh step forward in the matter so much as a
giant stride, a leap. Mr. Butteridge remained in the air altogether
for about nine hours, and during that time he flew with the ease and
assurance of a bird. His machine was, however neither bird-like nor
butterfly-like, nor had it the wide, lateral expansion of the ordinary
aeroplane. The effect upon the observer was rather something in the
nature of a bee or wasp. Parts of the apparatus were spinning very
rapidly, and gave one a hazy effect of transparent wings; but parts,
including two peculiarly curved “wing-cases”--if one may borrow a figure
from the flying beetles--remained expanded stiffly. In the middle was
a long rounded body like the body of a moth, and on this Mr. Butteridge
could be seen sitting astride, much as a man bestrides a horse. The
wasp-like resemblance was increased by the fact that the apparatus
flew with a deep booming hum, exactly the sound made by a wasp at a
windowpane.
Mr. Butteridge took the world by surprise. He was one of those gentlemen
from nowhere Fate still succeeds in producing for the stimulation of
mankind. He came, it was variously said, from Australia and America and
the South of France. He was also described quite incorrectly as the son
of a man who had amassed a comfortable fortune in the manufacture of
gold nibs and the Butteridge fountain pens. But this was an entirely
different strain of Butteridges. For some years, in spite of a loud
voice, a large presence, an aggressive swagger, and an implacable
manner, he had been an undistinguished member of most of the existing
aeronautical associations. Then one day he wrote to all the London
papers to announce that he had made arrangements for an ascent from the
Crystal Palace of a machine that would demonstrate satisfactorily that
the outstanding difficulties in the way of flying were finally solved.
Few of the papers printed his letter, still fewer were the people who
believed in his claim. No one was excited even when a fracas on the
steps of a leading hotel in Piccadilly, in which he tried to horse-whip
a prominent German musician upon some personal account, delayed his
promised ascent. The quarrel was inadequately reported, and his name
spelt variously Betteridge and Betridge. Until his flight indeed, he
did not and could not contrive to exist in the public mind. There were
scarcely thirty people on the look-out for him, in spite of all his
clamour, when about six o'clock one summer morning the doors of the big
shed in which he had been putting together his apparatus opened--it was
near the big model of a megatherium in the Crystal Palace grounds--and
his giant insect came droning out into a negligent and incredulous
world.
But before he had made his second circuit of the Crystal Palace towers,
Fame was lifting her trumpet, she drew a deep breath as the startled
tramps who sleep on the seats of Trafalgar Square were roused by his
buzz and awoke to discover him circling the Nelson column, and by the
time he had got to Birmingham, which place he crossed about half-past
ten, her deafening blast was echoing throughout the country. The
despaired-of thing was done.
A man was flying securely and well.
Scotland was agape for his coming. Glasgow he reached by one o'clock,
and it is related that scarcely a ship-yard or factory in that busy hive
of industry resumed work before half-past two. The public mind was just
sufficiently educated in the impossibility of flying to appreciate Mr.
Butteridge at his proper value. He circled the University buildings, and
dropped to within shouting distance of the crowds in West End Park and
on the slope of Gilmorehill. The thing flew quite steadily at a pace
of about three miles an hour, in a wide circle, making a deep hum that,
would have drowned his full, rich voice completely had he not provided
himself with a megaphone. He avoided churches, buildings, and mono-rail
cables with consummate ease as he conversed.
“Me name's Butteridge,” he shouted; “B-U-T-T-E-R-I-D-G-E.--Got it? Me
mother was Scotch.”
And having assured himself that he had been understood, he rose amidst
cheers and shouting and patriotic cries, and then flew up very swiftly
and easily into the south-eastern sky, rising and falling with long,
easy undulations in an extraordinarily wasp-like manner.
His return to London--he visited and hovered over Manchester and
Liverpool and Oxford on his way, and spelt his name out to each
place--was an occasion of unparalleled excitement. Every one was staring
heavenward. More people were run over in the streets upon that one day,
than in the previous three months, and a County Council steamboat, the
Isaac Walton, collided with a pier of Westminster Bridge, and narrowly
escaped disaster by running ashore--it was low water--on the mud on
the south side. He returned to the Crystal Palace grounds, that classic
starting-point of aeronautical adventure, about sunset, re-entered his
shed without disaster, and had the doors locked immediately upon the
photographers and journalists who been waiting his return.
“Look here, you chaps,” he said, as his assistant did so, “I'm tired to
death, and saddle sore. I can't give you a word of talk. I'm too--done.
My name's Butteridge. B-U-T-T-E-R-I-D-G-E. Get that right. I'm an
Imperial Englishman. I'll talk to you all to-morrow.”
Foggy snapshots still survive to record that incident. His assistant
struggles in a sea of aggressive young men carrying note-books or
upholding cameras and wearing bowler hats and enterprising ties. He
himself towers up in the doorway, a big figure with a mouth--an eloquent
cavity beneath a vast black moustache--distorted by his shout to these
relentless agents of publicity. He towers there, the most famous man in
the country.
Almost symbolically he holds and gesticulates with a megaphone in his
left hand.
6
Tom and Bert Smallways both saw that return. They watched from the crest
of Bun Hill, from which they had so often surveyed the pyrotechnics of
the Crystal Palace. Bert was excited, Tom kept calm and lumpish, but
neither of them realised how their own lives were to be invaded by the
fruits of that beginning. “P'raps old Grubb'll mind the shop a bit now,”
he said, “and put his blessed model in the fire. Not that that can save
us, if we don't tide over with Steinhart's account.”
Bert knew enough of things and the problem of aeronautics to realise
that this gigantic imitation of a bee would, to use his own idiom, “give
the newspapers fits.” The next day it was clear the fits had been given
even as he said: their magazine pages were black with hasty photographs,
their prose was convulsive, they foamed at the headline. The next day
they were worse. Before the week was out they were not so much published
as carried screaming into the street.
The dominant fact in the uproar was the exceptional personality of Mr.
Butteridge, and the extraordinary terms he demanded for the secret of
his machine.
For it was a secret and he kept it secret in the most elaborate fashion.
He built his apparatus himself in the safe privacy of the great Crystal
Palace sheds, with the assistance of inattentive workmen, and the day
next following his flight he took it to pieces single handed, packed
certain portions, and then secured unintelligent assistance in packing
and dispersing the rest. Sealed packing-cases went north and east and
west to various pantechnicons, and the engines were boxed with peculiar
care. It became evident these precautions were not inadvisable in view
of the violent demand for any sort of photograph or impressions of
his machine. But Mr. Butteridge, having once made his demonstration,
intended to keep his secret safe from any further risk of leakage. He
faced the British public now with the question whether they wanted his
secret or not; he was, he said perpetually, an “Imperial Englishman,”
and his first wish and his last was to see his invention the privilege
and monopoly of the Empire. Only--
It was there the difficulty began.
Mr. Butteridge, it became evident, was a man singularly free from any
false modesty--indeed, from any modesty of any kind--singularly willing
to see interviewers, answer questions upon any topic except aeronautics,
volunteer opinions, criticisms, and autobiography, supply portraits and
photographs of himself, and generally spread his personality across
the terrestrial sky. The published portraits insisted primarily upon an
immense black moustache, and secondarily upon a fierceness behind the
moustache. The general impression upon the public was that Butteridge,
was a small man. No one big, it was felt, could have so virulently
aggressive an expression, though, as a matter of fact, Butteridge had a
height of six feet two inches, and a weight altogether proportionate to
that. Moreover, he had a love affair of large and unusual dimensions and
irregular circumstances and the still largely decorous British public
learnt with reluctance and alarm that a sympathetic treatment of this
affair was inseparable from the exclusive acquisition of the priceless
secret of aerial stability by the British Empire. The exact particulars
of the similarity never came to light, but apparently the lady had, in
a fit of high-minded inadvertence, had gone through the ceremony
of marriage with, one quotes the unpublished discourse of Mr.
Butteridge--“a white-livered skunk,” and this zoological aberration did
in some legal and vexatious manner mar her social happiness. He wanted
to talk about the business, to show the splendour of her nature in the
light of its complications. It was really most embarrassing to a press
that has always possessed a considerable turn for reticence, that wanted
things personal indeed in the modern fashion. Yet not too personal.
It was embarrassing, I say, to be inexorably confronted with
Mr. Butteridge's great heart, to see it laid open in relentlesss
self-vivisection, and its pulsating dissepiments adorned with emphatic
flag labels.
Confronted they were, and there was no getting away from it. He
would make this appalling viscus beat and throb before the shrinking
journalists--no uncle with a big watch and a little baby ever harped
upon it so relentlessly; whatever evasion they attempted he set aside.
He “gloried in his love,” he said, and compelled them to write it down.
“That's of course a private affair, Mr. Butteridge,” they would object.
“The injustice, sorr, is public. I do not care either I am up against
institutions or individuals. I do not care if I am up against the
universal All. I am pleading the cause of a woman, a woman I lurve,
sorr--a noble woman--misunderstood. I intend to vindicate her, sorr, to
the four winds of heaven!”
“I lurve England,” he used to say--“lurve England, but Puritanism, sorr,
I abhor. It fills me with loathing. It raises my gorge. Take my own
case.”
He insisted relentlessly upon his heart, and upon seeing proofs of the
interview. If they had not done justice to his erotic bellowings and
gesticulations, he stuck in, in a large inky scrawl, all and more than
they had omitted.
It was a strangely embarrassing thing for British journalism. Never was
there a more obvious or uninteresting affair; never had the world heard
the story of erratic affection with less appetite or sympathy. On the
other hand it was extremely curious about Mr. Butteridge's invention.
But when Mr. Butteridge could be deflected for a moment from the cause
of the lady he championed, then he talked chiefly, and usually
with tears of tenderness in his voice, about his mother and his
childhood--his mother who crowned a complete encyclopedia of maternal
virtue by being “largely Scotch.” She was not quite neat, but nearly so.
“I owe everything in me to me mother,” he asserted--“everything. Eh!”
and--“ask any man who's done anything. You'll hear the same story. All
we have we owe to women. They are the species, sorr. Man is but a dream.
He comes and goes. The woman's soul leadeth us upward and on!”
He was always going on like that.
What in particular he wanted from the Government for his secret did not
appear, nor what beyond a money payment could be expected from a modern
state in such an affair. The general effect upon judicious observers,
indeed, was not that he was treating for anything, but that he was using
an unexampled opportunity to bellow and show off to an attentive world.
Rumours of his real identity spread abroad. It was said that he had been
the landlord of an ambiguous hotel in Cape Town, and had there given
shelter to, and witnessed, the experiments and finally stolen the papers
and plans of, an extremely shy and friendless young inventor named
Palliser, who had come to South Africa from England in an advanced stage
of consumption, and died there. This, at any rate, was the allegation
of the more outspoken American press. But the proof or disproof of that
never reached the public.
Mr. Butteridge also involved himself passionately in a tangle of
disputes for the possession of a great number of valuable money prizes.
Some of these had been offered so long ago as 1906 for successful
mechanical flight. By the time of Mr. Butteridge's success a really
very considerable number of newspapers, tempted by the impunity of the
pioneers in this direction, had pledged themselves to pay in some cases,
quite overwhelming sums to the first person to fly from Manchester to
Glasgow, from London to Manchester, one hundred miles, two hundred
miles in England, and the like. Most had hedged a little with ambiguous
conditions, and now offered resistance; one or two paid at once, and
vehemently called attention to the fact; and Mr. Butteridge plunged into
litigation with the more recalcitrant, while at the same time sustaining
a vigorous agitation and canvass to induce the Government to purchase
his invention.
One fact, however, remained permanent throughout all the developments of
this affair behind Butteridge's preposterous love interest, his politics
and personality, and all his shouting and boasting, and that was that,
so far as the mass of people knew, he was in sole possession of the
secret of the practicable aeroplane in which, for all one could tell
to the contrary, the key of the future empire of the world resided. And
presently, to the great consternation of innumerable people, including
among others Mr. Bert Smallways, it became apparent that whatever
negotiations were in progress for the acquisition of this precious
secret by the British Government were in danger of falling through. The
London Daily Requiem first voiced the universal alarm, and published
an interview under the terrific caption of, “Mr. Butteridge Speaks his
Mind.”
Therein the inventor--if he was an inventor--poured out his heart.
“I came from the end of the earth,” he said, which rather seemed to
confirm the Cape Town story, “bringing me Motherland the secret that
would give her the empire of the world. And what do I get?” He paused.
“I am sniffed at by elderly mandarins!... And the woman I love is
treated like a leper!”
“I am an Imperial Englishman,” he went on in a splendid outburst,
subsequently written into the interview by his own hand; “but there
there are limits to the human heart! There are younger nations--living
nations! Nations that do not snore and gurgle helplessly in paroxysms
of plethora upon beds of formality and red tape! There are nations that
will not fling away the empire of earth in order to slight an unknown
man and insult a noble woman whose boots they are not fitted to unlatch.
There are nations not blinded to Science, not given over hand and foot
to effete snobocracies and Degenerate Decadents. In short, mark my
words--THERE ARE OTHER NATIONS!”
This speech it was that particularly impressed Bert Smallways. “If them
Germans or them Americans get hold of this,” he said impressively to
his brother, “the British Empire's done. It's U-P. The Union Jack, so to
speak, won't be worth the paper it's written on, Tom.”
“I suppose you couldn't lend us a hand this morning,” said Jessica,
in his impressive pause. “Everybody in Bun Hill seems wanting early
potatoes at once. Tom can't carry half of them.”
“We're living on a volcano,” said Bert, disregarding the suggestion. “At
any moment war may come--such a war!”
He shook his head portentously.
“You'd better take this lot first, Tom,” said Jessica. She turned
briskly on Bert. “Can you spare us a morning?” she asked.
“I dessay I can,” said Bert. “The shop's very quiet s'morning. Though
all this danger to the Empire worries me something frightful.”
“Work'll take it off your mind,” said Jessica.
And presently he too was going out into a world of change and wonder,
bowed beneath a load of potatoes and patriotic insecurity, that merged
at last into a very definite irritation at the weight and want of style
of the potatoes and a very clear conception of the entire detestableness
of Jessica.
CHAPTER II. HOW BERT SMALLWAYS GOT INTO DIFFICULTIES
It did not occur to either Tom or Bert Smallways that this remarkable
aerial performance of Mr. Butteridge was likely to affect either of
their lives in any special manner, that it would in any way single them
out from the millions about them; and when they had witnessed it from
the crest of Bun Hill and seen the fly-like mechanism, its rotating
planes a golden haze in the sunset, sink humming to the harbour of its
shed again, they turned back towards the sunken green-grocery beneath
the great iron standard of the London to Brighton mono-rail, and their
minds reverted to the discussion that had engaged them before Mr.
Butteridge's triumph had come in sight out of the London haze.
It was a difficult and unsuccessful discussions. They had to carry it
on in shouts because of the moaning and roaring of the gyroscopic
motor-cars that traversed the High Street, and in its nature it was
contentious and private. The Grubb business was in difficulties, and
Grubb in a moment of financial eloquence had given a half-share in it
to Bert, whose relations with his employer had been for some time
unsalaried and pallish and informal.
Bert was trying to impress Tom with the idea that the reconstructed
Grubb & Smallways offered unprecedented and unparalleled opportunities
to the judicious small investor. It was coming home to Bert, as though
it were an entirely new fact, that Tom was singularly impervious to
ideas. In the end he put the financial issues on one side, and, making
the thing entirely a matter of fraternal affection, succeeded in
borrowing a sovereign on the security of his word of honour.
The firm of Grubb & Smallways, formerly Grubb, had indeed been
singularly unlucky in the last year or so. For many years the business
had struggled along with a flavour of romantic insecurity in a small,
dissolute-looking shop in the High Street, adorned with brilliantly
coloured advertisements of cycles, a display of bells, trouser-clips,
oil-cans, pump-clips, frame-cases, wallets, and other accessories, and
the announcement of “Bicycles on Hire,” “Repairs,” “Free inflation,”
“Petrol,” and similar attractions. They were agents for several obscure
makes of bicycle,--two samples constituted the stock,--and occasionally
they effected a sale; they also repaired punctures and did their
best--though luck was not always on their side--with any other repairing
that was brought to them. They handled a line of cheap gramophones, and
did a little with musical boxes.
The staple of their business was, however, the letting of bicycles on
hire. It was a singular trade, obeying no known commercial or economic
principles--indeed, no principles. There was a stock of ladies' and
gentlemen's bicycles in a state of disrepair that passes description,
and these, the hiring stock, were let to unexacting and reckless people,
inexpert in the things of this world, at a nominal rate of one shilling
for the first hour and sixpence per hour afterwards. But really there
were no fixed prices, and insistent boys could get bicycles and the
thrill of danger for an hour for so low a sum as threepence, provided
they could convince Grubb that that was all they had. The saddle and
handle-bar were then sketchily adjusted by Grubb, a deposit exacted,
except in the case of familiar boys, the machine lubricated, and the
adventurer started upon his career. Usually he or she came back, but at
times, when the accident was serious, Bert or Grubb had to go out and
fetch the machine home. Hire was always charged up to the hour of return
to the shop and deducted from the deposit. It was rare that a bicycle
started out from their hands in a state of pedantic efficiency. Romantic
possibilities of accident lurked in the worn thread of the screw that
adjusted the saddle, in the precarious pedals, in the loose-knit chain,
in the handle-bars, above all in the brakes and tyres. Tappings and
clankings and strange rhythmic creakings awoke as the intrepid hirer
pedalled out into the country. Then perhaps the bell would jam or a
brake fail to act on a hill; or the seat-pillar would get loose, and the
saddle drop three or four inches with a disconcerting bump; or the loose
and rattling chain would jump the cogs of the chain-wheel as the machine
ran downhill, and so bring the mechanism to an abrupt and disastrous
stop without at the same time arresting the forward momentum of the
rider; or a tyre would bang, or sigh quietly, and give up the struggle
for efficiency.
When the hirer returned, a heated pedestrian, Grubb would ignore all
verbal complaints, and examine the machine gravely.
“This ain't 'ad fair usage,” he used to begin.
He became a mild embodiment of the spirit of reason. “You can't expect a
bicycle to take you up in its arms and carry you,” he used to say. “You
got to show intelligence. After all--it's machinery.”
Sometimes the process of liquidating the consequent claims bordered on
violence. It was always a very rhetorical and often a trying affair, but
in these progressive times you have to make a noise to get a living. It
was often hard work, but nevertheless this hiring was a fairly steady
source of profit, until one day all the panes in the window and door
were broken and the stock on sale in the window greatly damaged and
disordered by two over-critical hirers with no sense of rhetorical
irrelevance. They were big, coarse stokers from Gravesend. One was
annoyed because his left pedal had come off, and the other because his
tyre had become deflated, small and indeed negligible accidents by Bun
Hill standards, due entirely to the ungentle handling of the delicate
machines entrusted to them--and they failed to see clearly how they put
themselves in the wrong by this method of argument. It is a poor way of
convincing a man that he has let you a defective machine to throw his
foot-pump about his shop, and take his stock of gongs outside in order
to return them through the window-panes. It carried no real conviction
to the minds of either Grubb or Bert; it only irritated and vexed them.
One quarrel makes many, and this unpleasantness led to a violent dispute
between Grubb and the landlord upon the moral aspects of and legal
responsibility for the consequent re-glazing. In the end Grubb and
Smallways were put to the expense of a strategic nocturnal removal to
another position.
It was a position they had long considered. It was a small, shed-like
shop with a plate-glass window and one room behind, just at the sharp
bend in the road at the bottom of Bun Hill; and here they struggled
along bravely, in spite of persistent annoyance from their former
landlord, hoping for certain eventualities the peculiar situation of the
shop seemed to promise. Here, too, they were doomed to disappointment.
The High Road from London to Brighton that ran through Bun Hill was like
the British Empire or the British Constitution--a thing that had grown
to its present importance. Unlike any other roads in Europe the British
high roads have never been subjected to any organised attempts to
grade or straighten them out, and to that no doubt their peculiar
picturesqueness is to be ascribed. The old Bun Hill High Street drops at
its end for perhaps eighty or a hundred feet of descent at an angle
of one in five, turns at right angles to the left, runs in a curve for
about thirty yards to a brick bridge over the dry ditch that had once
been the Otterbourne, and then bends sharply to the right again round
a dense clump of trees and goes on, a simple, straightforward, peaceful
high road. There had been one or two horse-and-van and bicycle accidents
in the place before the shop Bert and Grubb took was built, and, to be
frank, it was the probability of others that attracted them to it.
Its possibilities had come to them first with a humorous flavour.
“Here's one of the places where a chap might get a living by keeping
hens,” said Grubb.
“You can't get a living by keeping hens,” said Bert.
“You'd keep the hen and have it spatch-cocked,” said Grubb. “The motor
chaps would pay for it.”
When they really came to take the place they remembered this
conversation. Hens, however, were out of the question; there was no
place for a run unless they had it in the shop. It would have been
obviously out of place there. The shop was much more modern than their
former one, and had a plate-glass front. “Sooner or later,” said Bert,
“we shall get a motor-car through this.”
“That's all right,” said Grubb. “Compensation. I don't mind when that
motor-car comes along. I don't mind even if it gives me a shock to the
system.”
“And meanwhile,” said Bert, with great artfulness, “I'm going to buy
myself a dog.”
He did. He bought three in succession. He surprised the people at the
Dogs' Home in Battersea by demanding a deaf retriever, and rejecting
every candidate that pricked up its ears. “I want a good, deaf,
slow-moving dog,” he said. “A dog that doesn't put himself out for
things.”
They displayed inconvenient curiosity; they declared a great scarcity of
deaf dogs.
“You see,” they said, “dogs aren't deaf.”
“Mine's got to be,” said Bert. “I've HAD dogs that aren't deaf. All I
want. It's like this, you see--I sell gramophones. Naturally I got to
make 'em talk and tootle a bit to show 'em orf. Well, a dog that isn't
deaf doesn't like it--gets excited, smells round, barks, growls. That
upsets the customer. See? Then a dog that has his hearing fancies
things. Makes burglars out of passing tramps. Wants to fight every motor
that makes a whizz. All very well if you want livening up, but our place
is lively enough. I don't want a dog of that sort. I want a quiet dog.”
In the end he got three in succession, but none of them turned out well.
The first strayed off into the infinite, heeding no appeals; the second
was killed in the night by a fruit motor-waggon which fled before Grubb
could get down; the third got itself entangled in the front wheel of a
passing cyclist, who came through the plate glass, and proved to be an
actor out of work and an undischarged bankrupt. He demanded compensation
for some fancied injury, would hear nothing of the valuable dog he had
killed or the window he had broken, obliged Grubb by sheer physical
obduracy to straighten his buckled front wheel, and pestered the
struggling firm with a series of inhumanly worded solicitor's letters.
Grubb answered them--stingingly, and put himself, Bert thought, in the
wrong.
Affairs got more and more exasperating and strained under these
pressures. The window was boarded up, and an unpleasant altercation
about their delay in repairing it with the new landlord, a Bun Hill
butcher--and a loud, bellowing, unreasonable person at that--served to
remind them of their unsettled troubles with the old. Things were at
this pitch when Bert bethought himself of creating a sort of debenture
capital in the business for the benefit of Tom. But, as I have said,
Tom had no enterprise in his composition. His idea of investment was the
stocking; he bribed his brother not to keep the offer open.
And then ill-luck made its last lunge at their crumbling business and
brought it to the ground.
2
It is a poor heart that never rejoices, and Whitsuntide had an air of
coming as an agreeable break in the business complications of Grubb &
Smallways. Encouraged by the practical outcome of Bert's negotiations
with his brother, and by the fact that half the hiring-stock was
out from Saturday to Monday, they decided to ignore the residuum of
hiring-trade on Sunday and devote that day to much-needed relaxation and
refreshment--to have, in fact, an unstinted good time, a beano on Whit
Sunday and return invigorated to grapple with their difficulties and
the Bank Holiday repairs on the Monday. No good thing was ever done
by exhausted and dispirited men. It happened that they had made the
acquaintance of two young ladies in employment in Clapham, Miss Flossie
Bright and Miss Edna Bunthorne, and it was resolved therefore to make
a cheerful little cyclist party of four into the heart of Kent, and to
picnic and spend an indolent afternoon and evening among the trees and
bracken between Ashford and Maidstone.
Miss Bright could ride a bicycle, and a machine was found for her, not
among the hiring stock, but specially, in the sample held for sale. Miss
Bunthorne, whom Bert particularly affected, could not ride, and so with
some difficulty he hired a basket-work trailer from the big business of
Wray's in the Clapham Road.
To see our young men, brightly dressed and cigarettes alight, wheeling
off to the rendezvous, Grubb guiding the lady's machine beside him with
one skilful hand and Bert teuf-teuffing steadily, was to realise how
pluck may triumph even over insolvency. Their landlord, the butcher,
said, “Gurr,” as they passed, and shouted, “Go it!” in a loud, savage
tone to their receding backs.
Much they cared!
The weather was fine, and though they were on their way southward before
nine o'clock, there was already a great multitude of holiday people
abroad upon the roads. There were quantities of young men and women on
bicycles and motor-bicycles, and a majority of gyroscopic motor-cars
running bicycle-fashion on two wheels, mingled with old-fashioned
four-wheeled traffic. Bank Holiday times always bring out old
stored-away vehicles and odd people; one saw tricars and electric
broughams and dilapidated old racing motors with huge pneumatic tyres.
Once our holiday-makers saw a horse and cart, and once a youth riding a
black horse amidst the badinage of the passersby. And there were several
navigable gas air-ships, not to mention balloons, in the air. It was
all immensely interesting and refreshing after the dark anxieties of
the shop. Edna wore a brown straw hat with poppies, that suited her
admirably, and sat in the trailer like a queen, and the eight-year-old
motor-bicycle ran like a thing of yesterday.
Little it seemed to matter to Mr. Bert Smallways that a newspaper
placard proclaimed:-- --------------------------------------- GERMANY
DENOUNCES THE MONROE DOCTRINE.
AMBIGUOUS ATTITUDE OF JAPAN.
WHAT WILL BRITAIN DO? IS IT WAR?---------------------------------------
This sort of thing was alvays going on, and on holidays one disregarded
it as a matter of course. Week-davs, in the slack time after the midday
meal, then perhaps one might worry about the Empire and international
politics; but not on a sunny Sunday, with a pretty girl trailing behind
one, and envious cyclists trying to race you. Nor did our young people
attach any great importance to the flitting suggestions of military
activity they glimpsed ever and again. Near Maidstone they came on
a string of eleven motor-guns of peculiar construction halted by the
roadside, with a number of businesslike engineers grouped about them
watching through field-glasses some sort of entrenchment that was going
on near the crest of the downs. It signified nothing to Bert.
“What's up?” said Edna.
“Oh!--manoeuvres,” said Bert.
“Oh! I thought they did them at Easter,” said Edna, and troubled no
more.
The last great British war, the Boer war, was over and forgotten, and
the public had lost the fashion of expert military criticism.
Our four young people picnicked cheerfully, and were happy in the manner
of a happiness that was an ancient mode in Nineveh. Eyes were bright,
Grubb was funny and almost witty, and Bert achieved epigrams; the
hedges were full of honeysuckle and dog-roses; in the woods the distant
toot-toot-toot of the traffic on the dust-hazy high road might have been
no more than the horns of elf-land. They laughed and gossiped and picked
flowers and made love and talked, and the girls smoked cigarettes. Also
they scuffled playfully. Among other things they talked aeronautics,
and how thev would come for a picnic together in Bert's flying-machine
before ten years were out. The world seemed full of amusing
possibilities that afternoon. They wondered what their
great-grandparents would have thought of aeronautics. In the evening,
about seven, the party turned homeward, expecting no disaster, and it
was only on the crest of the downs between Wrotham and Kingsdown that
disaster came.
They had come up the hill in the twilight; Bert was anxious to get as
far as possible before he lit--or attempted to light, for the issue
was a doubtful one--his lamps, and they had scorched past a number of
cyclists, and by a four-wheeled motor-car of the old style lamed by a
deflated tyre. Some dust had penetrated Bert's horn, and the result was
a curious, amusing, wheezing sound had got into his “honk, honk.” For
the sake of merriment and glory he was making this sound as much as
possible, and Edna was in fits of laughter in the trailer. They made a
sort of rushing cheerfulness along the road that affected their fellow
travellers variously, according to their temperaments. She did notice a
good lot of bluish, evil-smelling smoke coming from about the
bearings between his feet, but she thought this was one of the natural
concomitants of motor-traction, and troubled no more about it, until
abruptly it burst into a little yellow-tipped flame.
“Bert!” she screamed.
But Bert had put on the brakes with such suddenness that she found
herself involved with his leg as he dismounted. She got to the side of
the road and hastily readjusted her hat, which had suffered.
“Gaw!” said Bert.
He stood for some fatal seconds watching the petrol drip and catch, and
the flame, which was now beginning to smell of enamel as well as oil,
spread and grew. His chief idea was the sorrowful one that he had not
sold the machine second-hand a year ago, and that he ought to have done
so--a good idea in its way, but not immediately helpful. He turned upon
Edna sharply. “Get a lot of wet sand,” he said. Then he wheeled the
machine a little towards the side of the roadway, and laid it down and
looked about for a supply of wet sand. The flames received this as a
helpful attention, and made the most of it. They seemed to brighten and
the twilight to deepen about them. The road was a flinty road in the
chalk country, and ill-provided with sand.
Edna accosted a short, fat cyclist. “We want wet sand,” she said, and
added, “our motor's on fire.” The short, fat cyclist stared blankly for
a moment, then with a helpful cry began to scrabble in the road-grit.
Whereupon Bert and Edna also scrabbled in the road-grit. Other cyclists
arrived, dismounted and stood about, and their flame-lit faces expressed
satisfaction, interest, curiosity. “Wet sand,” said the short, fat man,
scrabbling terribly--“wet sand.” One joined him. They threw hard-earned
handfuls of road-grit upon the flames, which accepted them with
enthusiasm.
Grubb arrived, riding hard. He was shouting something. He sprang off
and threw his bicycle into the hedge. “Don't throw water on it!” he
said--“don't throw water on it!” He displayed commanding presence of
mind. He became captain of the occasion. Others were glad to repeat the
things he said and imitate his actions.
“Don't throw water on it!” they cried. Also there was no water.
“Beat it out, you fools!” he said.
He seized a rug from the trailer (it was an Austrian blanket, and
Bert's winter coverlet) and began to beat at the burning petrol. For a
wonderful minute he seemed to succeed. But he scattered burning pools
of petrol on the road, and others, fired by his enthusiasm, imitated his
action. Bert caught up a trailer-cushion and began to beat; there was
another cushion and a table-cloth, and these also were seized. A young
hero pulled off his jacket and joined the beating. For a moment there
was less talking than hard breathing, and a tremendous flapping.
Flossie, arriving on the outskirts of the crowd, cried, “Oh, my God!”
and burst loudly into tears. “Help!” she said, and “Fire!”
The lame motor-car arrived, and stopped in consternation. A tall,
goggled, grey-haired man who was driving inquired with an Oxford
intonation and a clear, careful enunciation, “Can WE help at all?”
It became manifest that the rug, the table-cloth, the cushions, the
jacket, were getting smeared with petrol and burning. The soul seemed
to go out of the cushion Bert was swaying, and the air was full of
feathers, like a snowstorm in the still twilight.
Bert had got very dusty and sweaty and strenuous. It seemed to him his
weapon had been wrested from him at the moment of victory. The fire lay
like a dying thing, close to the ground and wicked; it gave a leap of
anguish at every whack of the beaters. But now Grubb had gone off to
stamp out the burning blanket; the others were lacking just at the
moment of victory. One had dropped the cushion and was running to the
motor-car. “'ERE!” cried Bert; “keep on!”
He flung the deflated burning rags of cushion aside, whipped off his
jacket and sprang at the flames with a shout. He stamped into the ruin
until flames ran up his boots. Edna saw him, a red-lit hero, and thought
it was good to be a man.
A bystander was hit by a hot halfpenny flying out of the air. Then Bert
thought of the papers in his pockets, and staggered back, trying to
extinguish his burning jacket--checked, repulsed, dismayed.
Edna was struck by the benevolent appearance of an elderly spectator in
a silk hat and Sabbatical garments. “Oh!” she cried to him. “Help this
young man! How can you stand and see it?”
A cry of “The tarpaulin!” arose.
An earnest-looking man in a very light grey cycling-suit had suddenly
appeared at the side of the lame motor-car and addressed the owner.
“Have you a tarpaulin?” he said.
“Yes,” said the gentlemanly man. “Yes. We've got a tarpaulin.”
“That's it,” said the earnest-looking man, suddenly shouting. “Let's
have it, quick!”
The gentlemanly man, with feeble and deprecatory gestures, and in the
manner of a hypnotised person, produced an excellent large tarpaulin.
“Here!” cried the earnest-looking man to Grubb. “Ketch holt!”
Then everybody realised that a new method was to be tried. A number of
willing hands seized upon the Oxford gentleman's tarpaulin. The others
stood away with approving noises. The tarpaulin was held over the
burning bicycle like a canopy, and then smothered down upon it.
“We ought to have done this before,” panted Grubb.
There was a moment of triumph. The flames vanished. Every one who could
contrive to do so touched the edge of the tarpaulin. Bert held down
a corner with two hands and a foot. The tarpaulin, bulged up in the
centre, seemed to be suppressing triumphant exultation. Then its
self-approval became too much for it; it burst into a bright red smile
in the centre. It was exactly like the opening of a mouth. It laughed
with a gust of flames. They were reflected redly in the observant
goggles of the gentleman who owned the tarpaulin. Everybody recoiled.
“Save the trailer!” cried some one, and that was the last round in
the battle. But the trailer could not be detached; its wicker-work had
caught, and it was the last thing to burn. A sort of hush fell upon
the gathering. The petrol burnt low, the wicker-work trailer banged
and crackled. The crowd divided itself into an outer circle of critics,
advisers, and secondary characters, who had played undistinguished parts
or no parts at all in the affair, and a central group of heated
and distressed principals. A young man with an inquiring mind and a
considerable knowledge of motor-bicycles fixed on to Grubb and wanted
to argue that the thing could not have happened. Grubb wass short and
inattentive with him, and the young man withdrew to the back of the
crowd, and there told the benevolent old gentleman in the silk hat
that people who went out with machines they didn't understand had only
themselves to blame if things went wrong.
The old gentleman let him talk for some time, and then remarked, in a
tone of rapturous enjoyment: “Stone deaf,” and added, “Nasty things.”
A rosy-faced man in a straw hat claimed attention. “I DID save the front
wheel,” he said; “you'd have had that tyre catch, too, if I hadn't kept
turning it round.” It became manifest that this was so. The front wheel
had retained its tyre, was intact, was still rotating slowly among the
blackened and twisted ruins of the rest of the machine. It had something
of that air of conscious virtue, of unimpeachable respectability, that
distinguishes a rent collector in a low neighbourhood. “That wheel's
worth a pound,” said the rosy-faced man, making a song of it. “I kep'
turning it round.”
Newcomers kept arriving from the south with the question, “What's up?”
until it got on Grubb's nerves. Londonward the crowd was constantly
losing people; they would mount their various wheels with the satisfied
manner of spectators who have had the best. Their voices would recede
into the twilight; one would hear a laugh at the memory of this
particularly salient incident or that.
“I'm afraid,” said the gentleman of the motor-car, “my tarpaulin's a bit
done for.”
Grubb admitted that the owner was the best judge of that.
“Nothin, else I can do for you?” said the gentleman of the motor-car, it
may be with a suspicion of irony.
Bert was roused to action. “Look here,” he said. “There's my young lady.
If she ain't 'ome by ten they lock her out. See? Well, all my money was
in my jacket pocket, and it's all mixed up with the burnt stuff, and
that's too 'ot to touch. Is Clapham out of your way?”
“All in the day's work,” said the gentleman with the motor-car, and
turned to Edna. “Very pleased indeed,” he said, “if you'll come with us.
We're late for dinner as it is, so it won't make much difference for us
to go home by way of Clapham. We've got to get to Surbiton, anyhow. I'm
afraid you'll find us a little slow.”
“But what's Bert going to do?” said Edna.
“I don't know that we can accommodate Bert,” said the motor-car
gentleman, “though we're tremendously anxious to oblige.”
“You couldn't take the whole lot?” said Bert, waving his hand at the
deboshed and blackened ruins on the ground.
“I'm awfully afraid I can't,” said the Oxford man. “Awfully sorry, you
know.”
“Then I'll have to stick 'ere for a bit,” said Bert. “I got to see the
thing through. You go on, Edna.”
“Don't like leavin' you, Bert.”
“You can't 'elp it, Edna.”...
The last Edna saw of Bert was his figure, in charred and blackened
shirtsleeves, standing in the dusk. He was musing deeply by the mixed
ironwork and ashes of his vanished motor-bicycle, a melancholy figure.
His retinue of spectators had shrunk now to half a dozen figures.
Flossie and Grubb were preparing to follow her desertion.
“Cheer up, old Bert!” cried Edna, with artificial cheerfulness. “So
long.”
“So long, Edna,” said Bert.
“See you to-morrer.”
“See you to-morrer,” said Bert, though he was destined, as a matter of
fact, to see much of the habitable globe before he saw her again.
Bert began to light matches from a borrowed boxful, and search for a
half-crown that still eluded him among the charred remains.
His face was grave and melancholy.
“I WISH that 'adn't 'appened,” said Flossie, riding on with Grubb....
And at last Bert was left almost alone, a sad, blackened Promethean
figure, cursed by the gift of fire. He had entertained vague ideas of
hiring a cart, of achieving miraculous repairs, of still snatching some
residual value from his one chief possession. Now, in the darkening
night, he perceived the vanity of such intentions. Truth came to him
bleakly, and laid her chill conviction upon him. He took hold of the
handle-bar, stood the thing up, tried to push it forward. The tyreless
hind-wheel was jammed hopelessly, even as he feared. For a minute or so
he stood upholding his machine, a motionless despair. Then with a great
effort he thrust the ruins from him into the ditch, kicked at it once,
regarded it for a moment, and turned his face resolutely Londonward.
He did not once look back.
“That's the end of THAT game!” said Bert. “No more teuf-teuf-teuf for
Bert Smallways for a year or two. Good-bye 'olidays!... Oh! I ought to
'ave sold the blasted thing when I had a chance three years ago.”
3
The next morning found the firm of Grubb & Smallways in a state
of profound despondency. It seemed a small matter to them that the
newspaper and cigarette shop opposite displayed such placards as this:--
--------------------------------------- REPORTED AMERICAN ULTIMATUM.
BRITAIN MUST FIGHT.
OUR INFATUATED WAR OFFICE STILL
REFUSES TO LISTEN TO MR. BUTTERIDGE.
GREAT MONO-RAIL DISASTER AT
TIMBUCTOO.---------------------------------------
or this:-- --------------------------------------- WAR A QUESTION OF
HOURS.
NEW YORK CALM.
EXCITEMENT IN BERLIN.---------------------------------------
or again:-- --------------------------------------- WASHINGTON STILL
SILENT.
WHAT WILL PARIS DO?
THE PANIC ON THE BOURSE.
THE KING'S GARDEN PARTY TO THE MASKED TWAREGS.
MR. BUTTERIDGE TAKES AN OFFER.
LATEST BETTING FROM TEHERAN.---------------------------------------
or this:-- --------------------------------------- WILL AMERICA FIGHT?
ANTI-GERMAN RIOT IN BAGDAD.
THE MUNICIPAL SCANDALS AT DAMASCUS.
MR. BUTTERIDGE'S INVENTION FOR
AMERICA.---------------------------------------
Bert stared at these over the card of pump-clips in the pane in the
door with unseeing eyes. He wore a blackened flannel shirt, and the
jacketless ruins of the holiday suit of yesterday. The boarded-up shop
was dark and depressing beyond words, the few scandalous hiring machines
had never looked so hopelessly disreputable. He thought of their fellows
who were “out,” and of the approaching disputations of the afternoon. He
thought of their new landlord, and of their old landlord, and of bills
and claims. Life presented itself for the first time as a hopeless fight
against fate....
“Grubb, o' man,” he said, distilling the quintessence, “I'm fair sick of
this shop.”
“So'm I,” said Grubb.
“I'm out of conceit with it. I don't seem to care ever to speak to a
customer again.”
“There's that trailer,” said Grubb, after a pause.
“Blow the trailer!” said Bert. “Anyhow, I didn't leave a deposit on it.
I didn't do that. Still--”
He turned round on his friend. “Look 'ere,” he said, “we aren't gettin'
on here. We been losing money hand over fist. We got things tied up in
fifty knots.”
“What can we do?” said Grubb.
“Clear out. Sell what we can for what it will fetch, and quit. See?
It's no good 'anging on to a losing concern. No sort of good. Jest
foolishness.”
“That's all right,” said Grubb--“that's all right; but it ain't your
capital been sunk in it.”
“No need for us to sink after our capital,” said Bert, ignoring the
point.
“I'm not going to be held responsible for that trailer, anyhow. That
ain't my affair.”
“Nobody arst you to make it your affair. If you like to stick on here,
well and good. I'm quitting. I'll see Bank Holiday through, and then I'm
O-R-P-H. See?”
“Leavin' me?”
“Leavin' you. If you must be left.”
Grubb looked round the shop. It certainly had become distasteful. Once
upon a time it had been bright with hope and new beginnings and stock
and the prospect of credit. Now--now it was failure and dust. Very
likely the landlord would be round presently to go on with the row about
the window.... “Where d'you think of going, Bert?” Grubb asked.
Bert turned round and regarded him. “I thought it out as I was walking
'ome, and in bed. I couldn't sleep a wink.”
“What did you think out?”
“Plans.”
“What plans?”
“Oh! You're for stickin, here.”
“Not if anything better was to offer.”
“It's only an ideer,” said Bert.
“You made the girls laugh yestiday, that song you sang.”
“Seems a long time ago now,” said Grubb.
“And old Edna nearly cried--over that bit of mine.”
“She got a fly in her eye,” said Grubb; “I saw it. But what's this got
to do with your plan?”
“No end,” said Bert.
“'Ow?”
“Don't you see?”
“Not singing in the streets?”
“Streets! No fear! But 'ow about the Tour of the Waterin' Places of
England, Grubb? Singing! Young men of family doing it for a lark? You
ain't got a bad voice, you know, and mine's all right. I never see a
chap singing on the beach yet that I couldn't 'ave sung into a cocked
hat. And we both know how to put on the toff a bit. Eh? Well, that's my
ideer. Me and you, Grubb, with a refined song and a breakdown. Like we
was doing for foolery yestiday. That was what put it into my 'ead. Easy
make up a programme--easy. Six choice items, and one or two for encores
and patter. I'm all right for the patter anyhow.”
Grubb remained regarding his darkened and disheartening shop; he thought
of his former landlord and his present landlord, and of the general
disgustingness of business in an age which re-echoes to The Bitter Cry
of the Middle Class; and then it seemed to him that afar off he heard
the twankle, twankle of a banjo, and the voice of a stranded siren
singing. He had a sense of hot sunshine upon sand, of the children of at
least transiently opulent holiday makers in a circle round about him, of
the whisper, “They are really gentlemen,” and then dollop, dollop came
the coppers in the hat. Sometimes even silver. It was all income; no
outgoings, no bills. “I'm on, Bert,” he said.
“Right O!” said Bert, and, “Now we shan't be long.”
“We needn't start without capital neither,” said Grubb. “If we take the
best of these machines up to the Bicycle Mart in Finsbury we'd raise six
or seven pounds on 'em. We could easy do that to-morrow before anybody
much was about....”
“Nice to think of old Suet-and-Bones coming round to make his usual row
with us, and finding a card up 'Closed for Repairs.'”
“We'll do that,” said Grubb with zest--“we'll do that. And we'll put
up another notice, and jest arst all inquirers to go round to 'im and
inquire. See? Then they'll know all about us.”
Before the day was out the whole enterprise was planned. They decided at
first that they would call themselves the Naval Mr. O's, a plagiarism,
and not perhaps a very good one, from the title of the well-known troupe
of “Scarlet Mr. E's,” and Bert rather clung to the idea of a uniform of
bright blue serge, with a lot of gold lace and cord and ornamentation,
rather like a naval officer's, but more so. But that had to be abandoned
as impracticable, it would have taken too much time and money to
prepare. They perceived they must wear some cheaper and more readily
prepared costume, and Grubb fell back on white dominoes. They
entertained the notion for a time of selecting the two worst machines
from the hiring-stock, painting them over with crimson enamel paint,
replacing the bells by the loudest sort of motor-horn, and doing a ride
about to begin and end the entertainment. They doubted the advisability
of this step.
“There's people in the world,” said Bert, “who wouldn't recognise us,
who'd know them bicycles again like a shot, and we don't want to go on
with no old stories. We want a fresh start.”
“I do,” said Grubb, “badly.”
“We want to forget things--and cut all these rotten old worries. They
ain't doin' us good.”
Nevertheless, they decided to take the risk of these bicycles, and they
decided their costumes should be brown stockings and sandals, and cheap
unbleached sheets with a hole cut in the middle, and wigs and beards of
tow. The rest their normal selves! “The Desert Dervishes,” they would
call themselves, and their chief songs would be those popular ditties,
“In my Trailer,” and “What Price Hair-pins Now?”
They decided to begin with small seaside places, and gradually, as they
gained confidence, attack larger centres. To begin with they selected
Littlestone in Kent, chiefly because of its unassuming name.
So they planned, and it seemed a small and unimportant thing to them
that as they clattered the governments of half the world and more were
drifting into war. About midday they became aware of the first of
the evening-paper placards shouting to them across the street:--
-----------------------------------------------
THE WAR-CLOUD DARKENS-----------------------------------------------
Nothing else but that.
“Always rottin' about war now,” said Bert.
“They'll get it in the neck in real earnest one of these days, if they
ain't precious careful.”
4
So you will understand the sudden apparition that surprised rather than
delighted the quiet informality of Dymchurch sands. Dymchurch was one of
the last places on the coast of England to be reached by the mono-rail,
and so its spacious sands were still, at the time of this story, the
secret and delight of quite a limited number of people. They went there
to flee vulgarity and extravagances, and to bathe and sit and talk and
play with their children in peace, and the Desert Dervishes did not
please them at all.
The two white figures on scarlet wheels came upon them out of the
infinite along the sands from Littlestone, grew nearer and larger and
more audible, honk-honking and emitting weird cries, and generally
threatening liveliness of the most aggressive type. “Good heavens!” said
Dymchurch, “what's this?”
Then our young men, according to a preconcerted plan, wheeled round from
file to line, dismounted and stood it attention. “Ladies and gentlemen,”
they said, “we beg to present ourselves--the Desert Dervishes.” They
bowed profoundly.
The few scattered groups upon the beach regarded them with horror for
the most part, but some of the children and young people were interested
and drew nearer. “There ain't a bob on the beach,” said Grubb in an
undertone, and the Desert Dervishes plied their bicycles with comic
“business,” that got a laugh from one very unsophisticated little boy.
Then they took a deep breath and struck into the cheerful strain of
“What Price Hair-pins Now?” Grubb sang the song, Bert did his best to
make the chorus a rousing one, and it the end of each verse they danced
certain steps, skirts in hand, that they had carefully rehearsed.
“Ting-a-ling-a-ting-a-ling-a-ting-a-ling-a-tang...
What Price Hair-pins Now?”
So they chanted and danced their steps in the sunshine on Dymchurch
beach, and the children drew near these foolish young men, marvelling
that they should behave in this way, and the older people looked cold
and unfriendly.
All round the coasts of Europe that morning banjos were ringing,
voices were bawling and singing, children were playing in the sun,
pleasure-boats went to and fro; the common abundant life of the time,
unsuspicious of all dangers that gathered darkly against it, flowed
on its cheerful aimless way. In the cities men fussed about their
businesses and engagements. The newspaper placards that had cried
“wolf!” so often, cried “wolf!” now in vain.
5
Now as Bert and Grubb bawled their chorus for the third time, they
became aware of a very big, golden-brown balloon low in the sky to the
north-west, and coming rapidly towards them. “Jest as we're gettin' hold
of 'em,” muttered Grubb, “up comes a counter-attraction. Go it, Bert!”
“Ting-a-ling-a-ting-a-ling-a-ting-a-ling-a-tang
What Price Hair-pins Now?”
The balloon rose and fell, went out of sight--“landed, thank goodness,”
said Grubb--re-appeared with a leap. “'ENG!” said Grubb. “Step it, Bert,
or they'll see it!”
They finished their dance, and then stood frankly staring.
“There's something wrong with that balloon,” said Bert.
Everybody now was looking at the balloon, drawing rapidly nearer before
a brisk north-westerly breeze. The song and dance were a “dead frost.”
Nobody thought any more about it. Even Bert and Grubb forgot it, and
ignored the next item on the programme altogether. The balloon was
bumping as though its occupants were trying to land; it would approach,
sinking slowly, touch the ground, and instantly jump fifty feet or so in
the air and immediately begin to fall again. Its car touched a clump of
trees, and the black figure that had been struggling in the ropes fell
back, or jumped back, into the car. In another moment it was quite
close. It seemed a huge affair, as big as a house, and it floated down
swiftly towards the sands; a long rope trailed behind it, and enormous
shouts came from the man in the car. He seemed to be taking off his
clothes, then his head came over the side of the car. “Catch hold of the
rope!” they heard, quite plain.
“Salvage, Bert!” cried Grubb, and started to head off the rope.
Bert followed him, and collided, without upsetting, with a fisherman
bent upon a similar errand. A woman carrying a baby in her arms, two
small boys with toy spades, and a stout gentleman in flannels all got to
the trailing rope at about the same time, and began to dance over it
in their attempts to secure it. Bert came up to this wriggling, elusive
serpent and got his foot on it, went down on all fours and achieved a
grip. In half a dozen seconds the whole diffused population of the beach
had, as it were, crystallised on the rope, and was pulling against the
balloon under the vehement and stimulating directions of the man in the
car. “Pull, I tell you!” said the man in the car--“pull!”
For a second or so the balloon obeyed its momentum and the wind and
tugged its human anchor seaward. It dropped, touched the water, and made
a flat, silvery splash, and recoiled as one's finger recoils when one
touches anything hot. “Pull her in,” said the man in the car. “SHE'S
FAINTED!”
He occupied himself with some unseen object while the people on the
rope pulled him in. Bert was nearest the balloon, and much excited and
interested. He kept stumbling over the tail of the Dervish costume in
his zeal. He had never imagined before what a big, light, wallowing
thing a balloon was. The car was of brown coarse wicker-work,
and comparatively small. The rope he tugged at was fastened to a
stout-looking ring, four or five feet above the car. At each tug he drew
in a yard or so of rope, and the waggling wicker-work was drawn so much
nearer. Out of the car came wrathful bellowings: “Fainted, she has!” and
then: “It's her heart--broken with all she's had to go through.”
The balloon ceased to struggle, and sank downward. Bert dropped the
rope, and ran forward to catch it in a new place. In another moment he
had his hand on the car. “Lay hold of it,” said the man in the car, and
his face appeared close to Bert's--a strangely familiar face, fierce
eyebrows, a flattish nose, a huge black moustache. He had discarded coat
and waistcoat--perhaps with some idea of presently having to swim for
his life--and his black hair was extraordinarily disordered. “Will
all you people get hold round the car?” he said. “There's a lady here
fainted--or got failure of the heart. Heaven alone knows which! My name
is Butteridge. Butteridge, my name is--in a balloon. Now please, all
on to the edge. This is the last time I trust myself to one of these
paleolithic contrivances. The ripping-cord failed, and the valve
wouldn't act. If ever I meet the scoundrel who ought to have seen--”
He stuck his head out between the ropes abruptly, and said, in a note
of earnest expostulation: “Get some brandy!--some neat brandy!” Some one
went up the beach for it.
In the car, sprawling upon a sort of bed-bench, in an attitude of
elaborate self-abandonment, was a large, blond lady, wearing a fur
coat and a big floriferous hat. Her head lolled back against the padded
corner of the car, and her eyes were shut and her mouth open. “Me dear!”
said Mr. Butteridge, in a common, loud voice, “we're safe!”
She gave no sign.
“Me dear!” said Mr. Butteridge, in a greatly intensified loud voice,
“we're safe!”
She was still quite impassive.
Then Mr. Butteridge showed the fiery core of his soul. “If she is
dead,” he said, slowly lifting a fist towards the balloon above him,
and speaking in an immense tremulous bellow--“if she is dead, I will
r-r-rend the heavens like a garment! I must get her out,” he cried, his
nostrils dilated with emotion--“I must get her out. I cannot have her
die in a wicker-work basket nine feet square--she who was made for
kings' palaces! Keep holt of this car! Is there a strong man among ye to
take her if I hand her out?”
He swept the lady together by a powerful movement of his arms, and
lifted her. “Keep the car from jumping,” he said to those who clustered
about him. “Keep your weight on it. She is no light woman, and when she
is out of it--it will be relieved.”
Bert leapt lightly into a sitting position on the edge of the car. The
others took a firmer grip upon the ropes and ring.
“Are you ready?” said Mr. Butteridge.
He stood upon the bed-bench and lifted the lady carefully. Then he sat
down on the wicker edge opposite to Bert, and put one leg over to dangle
outside. A rope or so seemed to incommode him. “Will some one assist
me?” he said. “If they would take this lady?”
It was just at this moment, with Mr. Butteridge and the lady balanced
finely on the basket brim, that she came-to. She came-to suddenly and
violently with a loud, heart-rending cry of “Alfred! Save me!” And she
waved her arms searchingly, and then clasped Mr. Butteridge about.
It seemed to Bert that the car swayed for a moment and then buck-jumped
and kicked him. Also he saw the boots of the lady and the right leg of
the gentleman describing arcs through the air, preparatory to vanishing
over the side of the car. His impressions were complex, but they also
comprehended the fact that he had lost his balance, and was going to
stand on his head inside this creaking basket. He spread out clutching
arms. He did stand on his head, more or less, his tow-beard came off
and got in his mouth, and his cheek slid along against padding. His nose
buried itself in a bag of sand. The car gave a violent lurch, and became
still.
“Confound it!” he said.
He had an impression he must be stunned because of a surging in his
ears, and because all the voices of the people about him had become
small and remote. They were shouting like elves inside a hill.
He found it a little difficult to get on his feet. His limbs were mixed
up with the garments Mr. Butteridge had discarded when that gentleman
had thought he must needs plunge into the sea. Bert bawled out half
angry, half rueful, “You might have said you were going to tip
the basket.” Then he stood up and clutched the ropes of the car
convulsively.
Below him, far below him, shining blue, were the waters of the English
Channel. Far off, a little thing in the sunshine, and rushing down as if
some one was bending it hollow, was the beach and the irregular cluster
of houses that constitutes Dymchurch. He could see the little crowd of
people he had so abruptly left. Grubb, in the white wrapper of a Desert
Dervish, was running along the edge of the sea. Mr. Butteridge was
knee-deep in the water, bawling immensely. The lady was sitting up with
her floriferous hat in her lap, shockingly neglected. The beach, east
and west, was dotted with little people--they seemed all heads and
feet--looking up. And the balloon, released from the twenty-five stone
or so of Mr. Butteridge and his lady, was rushing up into the sky at the
pace of a racing motor-car. “My crikey!” said Bert; “here's a go!”
He looked down with a pinched face at the receding beach, and reflected
that he wasn't giddy; then he made a superficial survey of the cords and
ropes about him with a vague idea of “doing something.” “I'm not going
to mess about with the thing,” he said at last, and sat down upon the
mattress. “I'm not going to touch it.... I wonder what one ought to do?”
Soon he got up again and stared for a long time it the sinking world
below, at white cliffs to the east and flattening marsh to the left, at
a minute wide prospect of weald and downland, at dim towns and harbours
and rivers and ribbon-like roads, at ships and ships, decks and
foreshortened funnels upon the ever-widening sea, and at the great
mono-rail bridge that straddled the Channel from Folkestone to Boulogne,
until at last, first little wisps and then a veil of filmy cloud hid the
prospect from his eyes. He wasn't at all giddy nor very much frightened,
only in a state of enormous consternation.
CHAPTER III. THE BALLOON
I
Bert Smallways was a vulgar little creature, the sort of pert, limited
soul that the old civilisation of the early twentieth century produced
by the million in every country of the world. He had lived all his life
in narrow streets, and between mean houses he could not look over, and
in a narrow circle of ideas from which there was no escape. He thought
the whole duty of man was to be smarter than his fellows, get his hands,
as he put it, “on the dibs,” and have a good time. He was, in fact, the
sort of man who had made England and America what they were. The luck
had been against him so far, but that was by the way. He was a mere
aggressive and acquisitive individual with no sense of the State,
no habitual loyalty, no devotion, no code of honour, no code even of
courage. Now by a curious accident he found himself lifted out of his
marvellous modern world for a time, out of all the rush and confused
appeals of it, and floating like a thing dead and disembodied between
sea and sky. It was as if Heaven was experimenting with him, had picked
him out as a sample from the English millions, to look at him more
nearly, and to see what was happening to the soul of man. But what
Heaven made of him in that case I cannot profess to imagine, for I have
long since abandoned all theories about the ideals and satisfactions of
Heaven.
To be alone in a balloon at a height of fourteen or fifteen thousand
feet--and to that height Bert Smallways presently rose is like nothing
else in human experience. It is one of the supreme things possible to
man. No flying machine can ever better it. It is to pass extraordinarily
out of human things. It is to be still and alone to an unprecedented
degree. It is solitude without the suggestion of intervention; it is
calm without a single irrelevant murmur. It is to see the sky. No sound
reaches one of all the roar and jar of humanity, the air is clear and
sweet beyond the thought of defilement. No bird, no insect comes so
high. No wind blows ever in a balloon, no breeze rustles, for it moves
with the wind and is itself a part of the atmosphere. Once started, it
does not rock nor sway; you cannot feel whether it rises or falls. Bert
felt acutely cold, but he wasn't mountain-sick; he put on the coat and
overcoat and gloves Butteridge had discarded--put them over the “Desert
Dervish” sheet that covered his cheap best suit--and sat very still for
a long, time, overawed by the new-found quiet of the world. Above him
was the light, translucent, billowing globe of shining brown oiled silk
and the blazing sunlight and the great deep blue dome of the sky.
Below, far below, was a torn floor of sunlit cloud slashed by enormous
rents through which he saw the sea.
If you had been watching him from below, you would have seen his head, a
motionless little black knob, sticking out from the car first of all for
a long time on one side, and then vanishing to reappear after a time at
some other point.
He wasn't in the least degree uncomfortable nor afraid. He did think
that as this uncontrollable thing had thus rushed up the sky with him it
might presently rush down again, but this consideration did not trouble
him very much. Essentially his state was wonder. There is no fear nor
trouble in balloons--until they descend.
“Gollys!” he said at last, feeling a need for talking; “it's better than
a motor-bike.”
“It's all right!”
“I suppose they're telegraphing about, about me.”...
The second hour found him examining the equipment of the car with great
particularity. Above him was the throat of the balloon bunched and tied
together, but with an open lumen through which Bert could peer up into
a vast, empty, quiet interior, and out of which descended two fine cords
of unknown import, one white, one crimson, to pockets below the ring.
The netting about the balloon-ended in cords attached to the ring, a big
steel-bound hoop to which the car was slung by ropes. From it depended
the trail rope and grapnel, and over the sides of the car were a number
of canvas bags that Bert decided must be ballast to “chuck down” if the
balloon fell. (“Not much falling just yet,” said Bert.)
There were an aneroid and another box-shaped instrument hanging from the
ring. The latter had an ivory plate bearing “statoscope” and other words
in French, and a little indicator quivered and waggled, between Montee
and Descente. “That's all right,” said Bert. “That tells if you're
going up or down.” On the crimson padded seat of the balloon there lay a
couple of rugs and a Kodak, and in opposite corners of the bottom of
the car were an empty champagne bottle and a glass. “Refreshments,” said
Bert meditatively, tilting the empty bottle. Then he had a brilliant
idea. The two padded bed-like seats, each with blankets and mattress, he
perceived, were boxes, and within he found Mr. Butteridge's conception
of an adequate equipment for a balloon ascent: a hamper which included
a game pie, a Roman pie, a cold fowl, tomatoes, lettuce, ham sandwiches,
shrimp sandwiches, a large cake, knives and forks and paper plates,
self-heating tins of coffee and cocoa, bread, butter, and marmalade,
several carefully packed bottles of champagne, bottles of Perrier water,
and a big jar of water for washing, a portfolio, maps, and a compass,
a rucksack containing a number of conveniences, including curling-tongs
and hair-pins, a cap with ear-flaps, and so forth.
“A 'ome from 'ome,” said Bert, surveying this provision as he tied the
ear-flaps under his chin. He looked over the side of the car. Far below
were the shining clouds. They had thickened so that the whole world was
hidden. Southward they were piled in great snowy masses, so that he was
half disposed to think them mountains; northward and eastward they were
in wavelike levels, and blindingly sunlit.
“Wonder how long a balloon keeps up?” he said.
He imagined he was not moving, so insensibly did the monster drift with
the air about it. “No good coming down till we shift a bit,” he said.
He consulted the statoscope.
“Still Monty,” he said.
“Wonder what would happen if you pulled a cord?”
“No,” he decided. “I ain't going to mess it about.”
Afterwards he did pull both the ripping- and the valve-cords, but, as
Mr. Butteridge had already discovered, they had fouled a fold of silk in
the throat. Nothing happened. But for that little hitch the ripping-cord
would have torn the balloon open as though it had been slashed by a
sword, and hurled Mr. Smallways to eternity at the rate of some thousand
feet a second. “No go!” he said, giving it a final tug. Then he lunched.
He opened a bottle of champagne, which, as soon as he cut the wire, blew
its cork out with incredible violence, and for the most part followed
it into space. Bert, however, got about a tumblerful. “Atmospheric
pressure,” said Bert, finding a use at last for the elementary
physiography of his seventh-standard days. “I'll have to be more careful
next time. No good wastin' drink.”
Then he routed about for matches to utilise Mr. Butteridge's cigars; but
here again luck was on his side, and he couldn't find any wherewith
to set light to the gas above him. Or else he would have dropped in a
flare, a splendid but transitory pyrotechnic display. “'Eng old Grubb!”
said Bert, slapping unproductive pockets. “'E didn't ought to 'ave kep'
my box. 'E's always sneaking matches.”
He reposed for a time. Then he got up, paddled about, rearranged the
ballast bags on the floor, watched the clouds for a time, and turned
over the maps on the locker. Bert liked maps, and he spent some time in
trying to find one of France or the Channel; but they were all British
ordnance maps of English counties. That set him thinking about languages
and trying to recall his seventh-standard French. “Je suis Anglais.
C'est une meprise. Je suis arrive par accident ici,” he decided upon
as convenient phrases. Then it occurred to him that he would entertain
himself by reading Mr. Butteridge's letters and examining his
pocket-book, and in this manner he whiled away the afternoon.
2
He sat upon the padded locker, wrapped about very carefully, for the
air, though calm, was exhilaratingly cold and clear. He was wearing
first a modest suit of blue serge and all the unpretending underwear
of a suburban young man of fashion, with sandal-like cycling-shoes and
brown stockings drawn over his trouser ends; then the perforated
sheet proper to a Desert Dervish; then the coat and waistcoat and big
fur-trimmed overcoat of Mr. Butteridge; then a lady's large fur cloak,
and round his knees a blanket. Over his head was a tow wig, surmounted
by a large cap of Mr. Butteridge's with the flaps down over his ears.
And some fur sleeping-boots of Mr. Butteridge's warmed his feet. The car
of the balloon was small and neat, some bags of ballast the untidiest of
its contents, and he had found a light folding-table and put it at his
elbow, and on that was a glass with champagne. And about him, above and
below, was space--such a clear emptiness and silence of space as only
the aeronaut can experience.
He did not know where he might be drifting, or what might happen next.
He accepted this state of affairs with a serenity creditable to the
Smallways' courage, which one might reasonably have expected to be of a
more degenerate and contemptible quality altogether. His impression was
that he was bound to come down somewhere, and that then, if he wasn't
smashed, some one, some “society” perhaps, would probably pack him and
the balloon back to England. If not, he would ask very firmly for the
British Consul.
“Le consuelo Britannique,” he decided this would be. “Apportez moi a le
consuelo Britannique, s'il vous plait,” he would say, for he was by
no means ignorant of French. In the meanwhile, he found the intimate
aspects of Mr. Butteridge an interesting study.
There were letters of an entirely private character addressed to Mr.
Butteridge, and among others several love-letters of a devouring sort
in a large feminine hand. These are no business of ours, and one remarks
with regret that Bert read them.
When he had read them he remarked, “Gollys!” in an awestricken tone, and
then, after a long interval, “I wonder if that was her?
“Lord!”
He mused for a time.
He resumed his exploration of the Butteridge interior. It included
a number of press cuttings of interviews and also several letters
in German, then some in the same German handwriting, but in English.
“Hul-LO!” said Bert.
One of the latter, the first he took, began with an apology to
Butteridge for not writing to him in English before, and for the
inconvenience and delay that had been caused him by that, and went on
to matter that Bert found exciting in, the highest degree. “We can
understand entirely the difficulties of your position, and that you
shall possibly be watched at the present juncture.--But, sir, we do not
believe that any serious obstacles will be put in your way if you wished
to endeavour to leave the country and come to us with your plans by the
customary routes--either via Dover, Ostend, Boulogne, or Dieppe. We
find it difficult to think you are right in supposing yourself to be in
danger of murder for your invaluable invention.”
“Funny!” said Bert, and meditated.
Then he went through the other letters.
“They seem to want him to come,” said Bert, “but they don't seem hurting
themselves to get 'im. Or else they're shamming don't care to get his
prices down.
“They don't quite seem to be the gov'ment,” he reflected, after an
interval. “It's more like some firm's paper. All this printed stuff at
the top. Drachenflieger. Drachenballons. Ballonstoffe. Kugelballons.
Greek to me.
“But he was trying to sell his blessed secret abroad. That's all right.
No Greek about that! Gollys! Here IS the secret!”
He tumbled off the seat, opened the locker, and had the portfolio open
before him on the folding-table. It was full of drawings done in the
peculiar flat style and conventional colours engineers adopt. And, in,
addition there were some rather under-exposed photographs, obviously
done by an amateur, at close quarters, of the actual machine's
mutterings had made, in its shed near the Crystal Palace. Bert found he
was trembling. “Lord” he said, “here am I and the whole blessed secret
of flying--lost up here on the roof of everywhere.
“Let's see!” He fell to studying the drawings and comparing them with
the photographs. They puzzled him. Half of them seemed to be missing.
He tried to imagine how they fitted together, and found the effort too
great for his mind.
“It's tryin',” said Bert. “I wish I'd been brought up to the
engineering. If I could only make it out!”
He went to the side of the car and remained for a time staring with
unseeing eyes at a huge cluster of great clouds--a cluster of slowly
dissolving Monte Rosas, sunlit below. His attention was arrested by a
strange black spot that moved over them. It alarmed him. It was a
black spot moving slowly with him far below, following him down there,
indefatigably, over the cloud mountains. Why should such a thing follow
him? What could it be?...
He had an inspiration. “Uv course!” he said. It was the shadow of the
balloon. But he still watched it dubiously for a time.
He returned to the plans on the table.
He spent a long afternoon between his struggles to understand them and
fits of meditation. He evolved a remarkable new sentence in French.
“Voici, Mossoo!--Je suis un inventeur Anglais. Mon nom est Butteridge.
Beh. oo. teh. teh. eh. arr. I. deh. geh. eh. J'avais ici pour vendre le
secret de le flying-machine. Comprenez? Vendre pour l'argent tout
suite, l'argent en main. Comprenez? C'est le machine a jouer dans l'air.
Comprenez? C'est le machine a faire l'oiseau. Comprenez? Balancer? Oui,
exactement! Battir l'oiseau en fait, a son propre jeu. Je desire de
vendre ceci a votre government national. Voulez vous me directer la?
“Bit rummy, I expect, from the point of view of grammar,” said Bert,
“but they ought to get the hang of it all right.
“But then, if they arst me to explain the blessed thing?”
He returned in a worried way to the plans. “I don't believe it's all
here!” he said....
He got more and more perplexed up there among the clouds as to what he
should do with this wonderful find of his. At any moment, so far as he
knew he might descend among he knew not what foreign people.
“It's the chance of my life!” he said.
It became more and more manifest to him that it wasn't. “Directly I come
down they'll telegraph--put it in the papers. Butteridge'll know of it
and come along--on my track.”
Butteridge would be a terrible person to be on any one's track.
Bert thought of the great black moustaches, the triangular nose, the
searching bellow and the glare. His afternoon's dream of a marvellous
seizure and sale of the great Butteridge secret crumpled up in his mind,
dissolved, and vanished. He awoke to sanity again.
“Wouldn't do. What's the good of thinking of it?” He proceeded slowly
and reluctantly to replace the Butteridge papers in pockets and
portfolio as he had found them. He became aware of a splendid golden
light upon the balloon above him, and of a new warmth in the blue dome
of the sky. He stood up and beheld the sun, a great ball of blinding
gold, setting upon a tumbled sea of gold-edged crimson and purple
clouds, strange and wonderful beyond imagining. Eastward cloud-land
stretched for ever, darkling blue, and it seemed to Bert the whole round
hemisphere of the world was under his eyes.
Then far, away over the blue he caught sight of three long, dark shapes
like hurrying fish that drove one after the other, as porpoises follow
one another in the water. They were very fish-like indeed--with tails.
It was an unconvincing impression in that light. He blinked his eyes,
stared again, and they had vanished. For a long time he scrutinised
those remote blue levels and saw no more....
“Wonder if I ever saw anything,” he said, and then: “There ain't such
things....”
Down went the sun and down, not diving steeply, but passing northward as
it sank, and then suddenly daylight and the expansive warmth of daylight
had gone altogether, and the index of the statoscope quivered over to
Descente.
3
“NOW what's going to 'appen?” said Bert.
He found the cold, grey cloud wilderness rising towards him with a wide,
slow steadiness. As he sank down among them the clouds ceased to seem
the snowclad mountain-slopes they had resembled heretofore, became
unsubstantial, confessed an immense silent drift and eddy in their
substance. For a moment, when he was nearly among their twilight masses,
his descent was checked. Then abruptly the sky was hidden, the last
vestiges of daylight gone, and he was falling rapidly in an evening
twilight through a whirl of fine snowflakes that streamed past him
towards the zenith, that drifted in upon the things about him and
melted, that touched his face with ghostly fingers. He shivered. His
breath came smoking from his lips, and everything was instantly bedewed
and wet.
He had an impression of a snowstorm pouring with unexampled and
increasing fury UPWARD; then he realised that he was falling faster and
faster.
Imperceptibly a sound grew upon his ears. The great silence of the world
was at an end. What was this confused sound?
He craned his head over the side, concerned, perplexed.
First he seemed to see, and then not to see. Then he saw clearly little
edges of foam pursuing each other, and a wide waste of weltering waters
below him. Far away was a pilot boat with a big sail bearing dim black
letters, and a little pinkish-yellow light, and it was rolling and
pitching, rolling and pitching in a gale, while he could feel no wind
at, all. Soon the sound of waters was loud and near. He was dropping,
dropping--into the sea!
He became convulsively active.
“Ballast!” he cried, and seized a little sack from the floor, and heaved
it overboard. He did not wait for the effect of that, but sent another
after it. He looked over in time to see a minute white splash in the dim
waters below him, and then he was back in the snow and clouds again.
He sent out quite needlessly a third sack of ballast and a fourth, and
presently had the immense satisfaction of soaring up out of the damp and
chill into the clear, cold, upper air in which the day still lingered.
“Thang-God!” he said, with all his heart.
A few stars now had pierced the blue, and in the east there shone
brightly a prolate moon.
4
That first downward plunge filled Bert with a haunting sense of
boundless waters below. It was a summer's night, but it seemed to him,
nevertheless, extraordinarily long. He had a feeling of insecurity that
he fancied quite irrationally the sunrise would dispel. Also he was
hungry. He felt, in the dark, in the locker, put his fingers in
the Roman pie, and got some sandwiches, and he also opened rather
successfully a half-bottle of champagne. That warmed and restored him,
he grumbled at Grubb about the matches, wrapped himself up warmly on the
locker, and dozed for a time. He got up once or twice to make sure that
he was still securely high above the sea. The first time the moonlit
clouds were white and dense, and the shadow of the balloon ran athwart
them like a dog that followed; afterwards they seemed thinner. As he lay
still, staring up at the huge dark balloon above, he made a discovery.
His--or rather Mr. Butteridge's--waistcoat rustled as he breathed. It
was lined with papers. But Bert could not see to get them out or examine
them, much as he wished to do so....
He was awakened by the crowing of cocks, the barking of dogs, and a
clamour of birds. He was driving slowly at a low level over a broad land
lit golden by sunrise under a clear sky. He stared out upon hedgeless,
well-cultivated fields intersected by roads, each lined with
cable-bearing red poles. He had just passed over a compact, whitewashed,
village with a straight church tower and steep red-tiled roofs. A number
of peasants, men and women, in shiny blouses and lumpish footwear, stood
regarding him, arrested on their way to work. He was so low that the end
of his rope was trailing.
He stared out at these people. “I wonder how you land,” he thought.
“S'pose I OUGHT to land?”
He found himself drifting down towards a mono-rail line, and hastily
flung out two or three handfuls of ballast to clear it.
“Lemme see! One might say just 'Pre'nez'! Wish I knew the French for
take hold of the rope!... I suppose they are French?”
He surveyed the country again. “Might be Holland. Or Luxembourg. Or
Lorraine 's far as _I_ know. Wonder what those big affairs over there
are? Some sort of kiln. Prosperous-looking country...”
The respectability of the country's appearance awakened answering chords
in his nature.
“Make myself a bit ship-shape first,” he said.
He resolved to rise a little and get rid of his wig (which now felt
hot on his head), and so forth. He threw out a bag of ballast, and was
astonished to find himself careering up through the air very rapidly.
“Blow!” said Mr. Smallways. “I've over-done the ballast trick.... Wonder
when I shall get down again?... brekfus' on board, anyhow.”
He removed his cap and wig, for the air was warm, and an improvident
impulse made him cast the latter object overboard. The statoscope
responded with a vigorous swing to Monte.
“The blessed thing goes up if you only LOOK overboard,” he remarked, and
assailed the locker. He found among other items several tins of liquid
cocoa containing explicit directions for opening that he followed with
minute care. He pierced the bottom with the key provided in the holes
indicated, and forthwith the can grew from cold to hotter and hotter,
until at last he could scarcely touch it, and then he opened the can at
the other end, and there was his cocoa smoking, without the use of match
or flame of any sort. It was an old invention, but new to Bert. There
was also ham and marmalade and bread, so that he had a really very
tolerable breakfast indeed.
Then he took off his overcoat, for the sunshine was now inclined to be
hot, and that reminded him of the rustling he had heard in the night.
He took off the waistcoat and examined it. “Old Butteridge won't like
me unpicking this.” He hesitated, and finally proceeded to unpick it. He
found the missing drawings of the lateral rotating planes, on which the
whole stability of the flying machine depended.
An observant angel would have seen Bert sitting for a long time after
this discovery in a state of intense meditation. Then at last he rose
with an air of inspiration, took Mr. Butteridge's ripped, demolished,
and ransacked waistcoat, and hurled it from the balloon whence it
fluttered down slowly and eddyingly until at last it came to rest with
a contented flop upon the face of German tourist sleeping peacefully
beside the Hohenweg near Wildbad. Also this sent the balloon higher,
and so into a position still more convenient for observation by our
imaginary angel who would next have seen Mr. Smallways tear open his own
jacket and waistcoat, remove his collar, open his shirt, thrust his hand
into his bosom, and tear his heart out--or at least, if not his heart,
some large bright scarlet object. If the observer, overcoming a thrill
of celestial horror, had scrutinised this scarlet object more narrowly,
one of Bert's most cherished secrets, one of his essential weaknesses,
would have been laid bare. It was a red-flannel chest-protector, one of
those large quasi-hygienic objects that with pills and medicines take
the place of beneficial relics and images among the Protestant peoples
of Christendom. Always Bert wore this thing; it was his cherished
delusion, based on the advice of a shilling fortune-teller at Margate,
that he was weak in the lungs.
He now proceeded to unbutton his fetish, to attack it with a penknife,
and to thrust the new-found plans between the two layers of imitation
Saxony flannel of which it was made. Then with the help of Mr.
Butteridge's small shaving mirror and his folding canvas basin he
readjusted his costume with the gravity of a man who has taken an
irrevocable step in life, buttoned up his jacket, cast the white sheet
of the Desert Dervish on one side, washed temperately, shaved,
resumed the big cap and the fur overcoat, and, much refreshed by these
exercises, surveyed the country below him.
It was indeed a spectacle of incredible magnificence. If perhaps it was
not so strange and magnificent as the sunlit cloudland of the previous
day, it was at any rate infinitely more interesting.
The air was at its utmost clearness and except to the south and
south-west there was not a cloud in the sky. The country was hilly,
with occasional fir plantations and bleak upland spaces, but also with
numerous farms, and the hills were deeply intersected by the gorges of
several winding rivers interrupted at intervals by the banked-up
ponds and weirs of electric generating wheels. It was dotted with
bright-looking, steep-roofed, villages, and each showed a distinctive
and interesting church beside its wireless telegraph steeple; here and
there were large chateaux and parks and white roads, and paths lined
with red and white cable posts were extremely conspicuous in the
landscape. There were walled enclosures like gardens and rickyards and
great roofs of barns and many electric dairy centres. The uplands were
mottled with cattle. At places he would see the track of one of the
old railroads (converted now to mono-rails) dodging through tunnels
and crossing embankments, and a rushing hum would mark the passing of a
train. Everything was extraordinarily clear as well as minute. Once or
twice he saw guns and soldiers, and was reminded of the stir of military
preparations he had witnessed on the Bank Holiday in England; but there
was nothing to tell him that these military preparations were abnormal
or to explain an occasional faint irregular firing Of guns that drifted
up to him....
“Wish I knew how to get down,” said Bert, ten thousand feet or so above
it all, and gave himself to much futile tugging at the red and white
cords. Afterwards he made a sort of inventory of the provisions. Life in
the high air was giving him an appalling appetite, and it seemed to him
discreet at this stage to portion out his supply into rations. So far as
he could see he might pass a week in the air.
At first all the vast panorama below had been as silent as a painted
picture. But as the day wore on and the gas diffused slowly from the
balloon, it sank earthward again, details increased, men became more
visible, and he began to hear the whistle and moan of trains and cars,
sounds of cattle, bugles and kettle drums, and presently even men's
voices. And at last his guide-rope was trailing again, and he found it
possible to attempt a landing. Once or twice as the rope dragged over
cables he found his hair erect with electricity, and once he had a
slight shock, and sparks snapped about the car. He took these things
among the chances of the voyage. He had one idea now very clear in his
mind, and that was to drop the iron grapnel that hung from the ring.
From the first this attempt was unfortunate, perhaps because the place
for descent was ill-chosen. A balloon should come down in an empty open
space, and he chose a crowd. He made his decision suddenly, and without
proper reflection. As he trailed, Bert saw ahead of him one of the
most attractive little towns in the world--a cluster of steep gables
surmounted by a high church tower and diversified with trees, walled,
and with a fine, large gateway opening out upon a tree-lined high road.
All the wires and cables of the countryside converged upon it like
guests to entertainment. It had a most home-like and comfortable
quality, and it was made gayer by abundant flags. Along the road a
quantity of peasant folk, in big pair-wheeled carts and afoot, were
coming and going, besides an occasional mono-rail car; and at the
car-junction, under the trees outside the town, was a busy little
fair of booths. It seemed a warm, human, well-rooted, and altogether
delightful place to Bert. He came low over the tree-tops, with his
grapnel ready to throw and so anchor him--a curious, interested, and
interesting guest, so his imagination figured it, in the very middle of
it all.
He thought of himself performing feats with the sign language and chance
linguistics amidst a circle of admiring rustics....
And then the chapter of adverse accidents began.
The rope made itself unpopular long before the crowd had fully realised
his advent over the trees. An elderly and apparently intoxicated peasant
in a shiny black hat, and carrying a large crimson umbrella, caught
sight of it first as it trailed past him, and was seized with a
discreditable ambition to kill it. He pursued it, briskly with
unpleasant cries. It crossed the road obliquely, splashed into a pail of
milk upon a stall, and slapped its milky tail athwart a motor-car load
of factory girls halted outside the town gates. They screamed loudly.
People looked up and saw Bert making what he meant to be genial
salutations, but what they considered, in view of the feminine outcry,
to be insulting gestures. Then the car hit the roof of the gatehouse
smartly, snapped a flag staff, played a tune upon some telegraph wires,
and sent a broken wire like a whip-lash to do its share in accumulating
unpopularity. Bert, by clutching convulsively, just escaped being
pitched headlong. Two young soldiers and several peasants shouted things
up to him and shook fists at him and began to run in pursuit as he
disappeared over the wall into the town.
Admiring rustics, indeed!
The balloon leapt at once, in the manner of balloons when part of their
weight is released by touching down, with a sort of flippancy, and
in another moment Bert was over a street crowded with peasants
and soldiers, that opened into a busy market-square. The wave of
unfriendliness pursued him.
“Grapnel,” said Bert, and then with an afterthought shouted, “TETES
there, you! I say! I say! TETES. 'Eng it!”
The grapnel smashed down a steeply sloping roof, followed by an
avalanche of broken tiles, jumped the street amidst shrieks and cries,
and smashed into a plate-glass window with an immense and sickening
impact. The balloon rolled nauseatingly, and the car pitched. But the
grapnel had not held. It emerged at once bearing on one fluke, with
a ridiculous air of fastidious selection, a small child's chair, and
pursued by a maddened shopman. It lifted its catch, swung about with an
appearance of painful indecision amidst a roar of wrath, and dropped
it at last neatly, and as if by inspiration, over the head of a peasant
woman in charge of an assortment of cabbages in the market-place.
Everybody now was aware of the balloon. Everybody was either trying to
dodge the grapnel or catch the trail rope. With a pendulum-like swoop
through the crowd, that sent people flying right and left the grapnel
came to earth again, tried for and missed a stout gentleman in a blue
suit and a straw hat, smacked away a trestle from under a stall of
haberdashery, made a cyclist soldier in knickerbockers leap like
a chamois, and secured itself uncertainly among the hind-legs of a
sheep--which made convulsive, ungenerous efforts to free itself, and was
dragged into a position of rest against a stone cross in the middle of
the place. The balloon pulled up with a jerk. In another moment a score
of willing hands were tugging it earthward. At the same instant Bert
became aware for the first time of a fresh breeze blowing about him.
For some seconds he stood staggering in the car, which now swayed
sickeningly, surveying the exasperated crowd below him and trying to
collect his mind. He was extraordinarily astonished at this run of
mishaps. Were the people really so annoyed? Everybody seemed angry
with him. No one seemed interested or amused by his arrival.
A disproportionate amount of the outcry had the flavour of
imprecation--had, indeed a strong flavour of riot. Several greatly
uniformed officials in cocked hats struggled in vain to control the
crowd. Fists and sticks were shaken. And when Bert saw a man on the
outskirts of the crowd run to a haycart and get a brightly pronged
pitch-fork, and a blue-clad soldier unbuckle his belt, his rising doubt
whether this little town was after all such a good place for a landing
became a certainty.
He had clung to the fancy that they would make something of a hero of
him. Now he knew that he was mistaken.
He was perhaps ten feet above the people when he made his decision.
His paralysis ceased. He leapt up on the seat, and, at imminent risk of
falling headlong, released the grapnel-rope from the toggle that held
it, sprang on to the trail rope and disengaged that also. A hoarse shout
of disgust greeted the descent of the grapnel-rope and the swift leap
of the balloon, and something--he fancied afterwards it was a
turnip--whizzed by his head. The trail-rope followed its fellow. The
crowd seemed to jump away from him. With an immense and horrifying
rustle the balloon brushed against a telephone pole, and for a tense
instant he anticipated either an electric explosion or a bursting of the
oiled silk, or both. But fortune was with him.
In another second he was cowering in the bottom of the car, and released
from the weight of the grapnel and the two ropes, rushing up once more
through the air. For a time he remained crouching, and when at last he
looked out again the little town was very small and travelling, with the
rest of lower Germany, in a circular orbit round and round the car--or
at least it appeared to be doing that. When he got used to it, he found
this rotation of the balloon rather convenient; it saved moving about in
the car.
5
Late in the afternoon of a pleasant summer day in the year 191-, if one
may borrow a mode of phrasing that once found favour with the readers of
the late G. P. R. James, a solitary balloonist--replacing the solitary
horseman of the classic romances--might have been observed wending his
way across Franconia in a north-easterly direction, and at a height of
about eleven thousand feet above the sea and still spindling slowly. His
head was craned over the side of the car, and he surveyed the country
below with an expression of profound perplexity; ever and again his lips
shaped inaudible words. “Shootin' at a chap,” for example, and “I'll
come down right enough soon as I find out 'ow.” Over the side of
the basket the robe of the Desert Dervish was hanging, an appeal for
consideration, an ineffectual white flag.
He was now very distinctly aware that the world below him, so far from
being the naive countryside of his earlier imaginings that day, sleepily
unconscious of him and capable of being amazed and nearly reverential
at his descent, was acutely irritated by his career, and extremely
impatient with the course he was taking.--But indeed it was not he
who took that course, but his masters, the winds of heaven. Mysterious
voices spoke to him in his ear, jerking the words up to him by means
of megaphones, in a weird and startling manner, in a great variety of
languages. Official-looking persons had signalled to him by means of
flag flapping and arm waving. On the whole a guttural variant of English
prevailed in the sentences that alighted upon the balloon; chiefly he
was told to “gome down or you will be shot.”
“All very well,” said Bert, “but 'ow?”
Then they shot a little wide of the car. Latterly he had been shot at
six or seven times, and once the bullet had gone by with a sound so
persuasively like the tearing of silk that he had resigned himself to
the prospect of a headlong fall. But either they were aiming near him or
they had missed, and as yet nothing was torn but the air about him--and
his anxious soul.
He was now enjoying a respite from these attentions, but he felt it was
at best an interlude, and he was doing what he could to appreciate
his position. Incidentally he was having some hot coffee and pie in an
untidy inadvertent manner, with an eye fluttering nervously over the
side of the car. At first he had ascribed the growing interest in his
career to his ill-conceived attempt to land in the bright little upland
town, but now he was beginning to realise that the military rather than
the civil arm was concerned about him.
He was quite involuntarily playing that weird mysterious part--the part
of an International Spy. He was seeing secret things. He had, in fact,
crossed the designs of no less a power than the German Empire, he had
blundered into the hot focus of Welt-Politik, he was drifting helplessly
towards the great Imperial secret, the immense aeronautic park that had
been established at a headlong pace in Franconia to develop silently,
swiftly, and on an immense scale the great discoveries of Hunstedt and
Stossel, and so to give Germany before all other nations a fleet of
airships, the air power and the Empire of the world.
Later, just before they shot him down altogether, Bert saw that great
area of passionate work, warm lit in the evening light, a great area
of upland on which the airships lay like a herd of grazing monsters at
their feed. It was a vast busy space stretching away northward as far as
he could see, methodically cut up into numbered sheds, gasometers, squad
encampments, storage areas, interlaced with the omnipresent mono-rail
lines, and altogether free from overhead wires or cables. Everywhere was
the white, black and yellow of Imperial Germany, everywhere the black
eagles spread their wings. Even without these indications, the large
vigorous neatness of everything would have marked it German. Vast
multitudes of men went to and fro, many in white and drab fatigue
uniforms busy about the balloons, others drilling in sensible drab. Here
and there a full uniform glittered. The airships chiefly engaged his
attention, and he knew at once it was three of these he had seen on
the previous night, taking advantage of the cloud welkin to manoeuvre
unobserved. They were altogether fish-like. For the great airships with
which Germany attacked New York in her last gigantic effort for
world supremacy--before humanity realized that world supremacy was a
dream--were the lineal descendants of the Zeppelin airship that flew
over Lake Constance in 1906, and of the Lebaudy navigables that made
their memorable excursions over Paris in 1907 and 1908.
These German airships were held together by rib-like skeletons of steel
and aluminium and a stout inelastic canvas outer-skin, within which was
an impervious rubber gas-bag, cut up by transverse dissepiments into
from fifty to a hundred compartments. These were all absolutely gas
tight and filled with hydrogen, and the entire aerostat was kept at any
level by means of a long internal balloonette of oiled and toughened
silk canvas, into which air could be forced and from which it could be
pumped. So the airship could be made either heavier or lighter than air,
and losses of weight through the consumption of fuel, the casting
of bombs and so forth, could also be compensated by admitting air to
sections of the general gas-bag. Ultimately that made a highly explosive
mixture; but in all these matters risks must be taken and guarded
against. There was a steel axis to the whole affair, a central backbone
which terminated in the engine and propeller, and the men and magazines
were forward in a series of cabins under the expanded headlike forepart.
The engine, which was of the extraordinarily powerful Pforzheim type,
that supreme triumph of German invention, was worked by wires from this
forepart, which was indeed the only really habitable part of the ship.
If anything went wrong, the engineers went aft along a rope ladder
beneath the frame. The tendency of the whole affair to roll was partly
corrected by a horizontal lateral fin on either side, and steering was
chiefly effected by two vertical fins, which normally lay back like
gill-flaps on either side of the head. It was indeed a most complete
adaptation of the fish form to aerial conditions, the position of
swimming bladder, eyes, and brain being, however, below instead of
above. A striking, and unfish-like feature was the apparatus for
wireless telegraphy that dangled from the forward cabin--that is to say,
under the chin of the fish.
These monsters were capable of ninety miles an hour in a calm, so that
they could face and make headway against nearly everything except
the fiercest tornado. They varied in length from eight hundred to two
thousand feet, and they had a carrying power of from seventy to two
hundred tons. How many Germany possessed history does not record, but
Bert counted nearly eighty great bulks receding in perspective during
his brief inspection. Such were the instruments on which she chiefly
relied to sustain her in her repudiation of the Monroe Doctrine and her
bold bid for a share in the empire of the New World. But not
altogether did she rely on these; she had also a one-man bomb-throwing
Drachenflieger of unknown value among the resources.
But the Drachenflieger were away in the second great aeronautic
park east of Hamburg, and Bert Smallways saw nothing of them in the
bird's-eye view he took of the Franconian establishment before they shot
him down very neatly. The bullet tore past him and made a sort of pop as
it pierced his balloon--a pop that was followed by a rustling sigh and
a steady downward movement. And when in the confusion of the moment he
dropped a bag of ballast, the Germans, very politely but firmly overcame
his scruples by shooting his balloon again twice.
CHAPTER IV. THE GERMAN AIR-FLEET
1
Of all the productions of the human imagination that make the world in
which Mr. Bert Smallways lived confusingly wonderful, there was none
quite so strange, so headlong and disturbing, so noisy and persuasive
and dangerous, as the modernisations of patriotism produced by imperial
and international politics. In the soul of all men is a liking for kind,
a pride in one's own atmosphere, a tenderness for one's Mother speech
and one's familiar land. Before the coming of the Scientific Age
this group of gentle and noble emotions had been a fine factor in the
equipment of every worthy human being, a fine factor that had its less
amiable aspect in a usually harmless hostility to strange people, and a
usually harmless detraction of strange lands. But with the wild rush of
change in the pace, scope, materials, scale, and possibilities of human
life that then occurred, the old boundaries, the old seclusions and
separations were violently broken down. All the old settled mental
habits and traditions of men found themselves not simply confronted by
new conditions, but by constantly renewed and changing new conditions.
They had no chance of adapting themselves. They were annihilated or
perverted or inflamed beyond recognition.
Bert Smallways' grandfather, in the days when Bun Hill was a village
under the sway of Sir Peter Bone's parent, had “known his place” to
the uttermost farthing, touched his hat to his betters, despised and
condescended to his inferiors, and hadn't changed an idea from the
cradle to the grave. He was Kentish and English, and that meant hops,
beer, dog-rose's, and the sort of sunshine that was best in the world.
Newspapers and politics and visits to “Lunnon” weren't for the likes of
him. Then came the change. These earlier chapters have given an idea of
what happened to Bun Hill, and how the flood of novel things had poured
over its devoted rusticity. Bert Smallways was only one of countless
millions in Europe and America and Asia who, instead of being born
rooted in the soil, were born struggling in a torrent they never clearly
understood. All the faiths of their fathers had been taken by surprise,
and startled into the strangest forms and reactions. Particularly did
the fine old tradition of patriotism get perverted and distorted in the
rush of the new times. Instead of the sturdy establishment in prejudice
of Bert's grandfather, to whom the word “Frenchified” was the ultimate
term of contempt, there flowed through Bert's brain a squittering
succession of thinly violent ideas about German competition, about
the Yellow Danger, about the Black Peril, about the White Man's
Burthen--that is to say, Bert's preposterous right to muddle further the
naturally very muddled politics of the entirely similar little cads to
himself (except for a smear of brown) who smoked cigarettes and rode
bicycles in Buluwayo, Kingston (Jamaica), or Bombay. These were Bert's
“Subject Races,” and he was ready to die--by proxy in the person of any
one who cared to enlist--to maintain his hold upon that right. It kept
him awake at nights to think that he might lose it.
The essential fact of the politics of the age in which Bert Smallways
lived--the age that blundered at last into the catastrophe of the War in
the Air--was a very simple one, if only people had had the intelligence
to be simple about it. The development of Science had altered the scale
of human affairs. By means of rapid mechanical traction, it had brought
men nearer together, so much nearer socially, economically, physically,
that the old separations into nations and kingdoms were no longer
possible, a newer, wider synthesis was not only needed, but imperatively
demanded. Just as the once independent dukedoms of France had to fuse
into a nation, so now the nations had to adapt themselves to a wider
coalescence, they had to keep what was precious and possible, and
concede what was obsolete and dangerous. A saner world would have
perceived this patent need for a reasonable synthesis, would have
discussed it temperately, achieved and gone on to organise the great
civilisation that was manifestly possible to mankind. The world of
Bert Smallways did nothing of the sort. Its national governments, its
national interests, would not hear of anything so obvious; they were
too suspicious of each other, too wanting in generous imaginations. They
began to behave like ill-bred people in a crowded public car, to squeeze
against one another, elbow, thrust, dispute and quarrel. Vain to
point out to them that they had only to rearrange themselves to be
comfortable. Everywhere, all over the world, the historian of the early
twentieth century finds the same thing, the flow and rearrangement
of human affairs inextricably entangled by the old areas, the old
prejudices and a sort of heated irascible stupidity, and everywhere
congested nations in inconvenient areas, slopping population and produce
into each other, annoying each other with tariffs, and every possible
commercial vexation, and threatening each other with navies and armies
that grew every year more portentous.
It is impossible now to estimate how much of the intellectual and
physical energy of the world was wasted in military preparation and
equipment, but it was an enormous proportion. Great Britain spent upon
army and navy money and capacity, that directed into the channels
of physical culture and education would have made the British the
aristocracy of the world. Her rulers could have kept the whole
population learning and exercising up to the age of eighteen and made
a broad-chested and intelligent man of every Bert Smallways in the
islands, had they given the resources they spent in war material to the
making of men. Instead of which they waggled flags at him until he was
fourteen, incited him to cheer, and then turned him out of school to
begin that career of private enterprise we have compactly recorded.
France achieved similar imbecilities; Germany was, if possible worse;
Russia under the waste and stresses of militarism festered towards
bankruptcy and decay. All Europe was producing big guns and countless
swarms of little Smallways. The Asiatic peoples had been forced in
self-defence into a like diversion of the new powers science had brought
them. On the eve of the outbreak of the war there were six great powers
in the world and a cluster of smaller ones, each armed to the teeth
and straining every nerve to get ahead of the others in deadliness
of equipment and military efficiency. The great powers were first the
United States, a nation addicted to commerce, but roused to military
necessities by the efforts of Germany to expand into South America, and
by the natural consequences of her own unwary annexations of land in the
very teeth of Japan. She maintained two immense fleets east and west,
and internally she was in violent conflict between Federal and State
governments upon the question of universal service in a defensive
militia. Next came the great alliance of Eastern Asia, a close-knit
coalescence of China and Japan, advancing with rapid strides year by
year to predominance in the world's affairs. Then the German alliance
still struggled to achieve its dream of imperial expansion, and its
imposition of the German language upon a forcibly united Europe. These
were the three most spirited and aggressive powers in the world. Far
more pacific was the British Empire, perilously scattered over the
globe, and distracted now by insurrectionary movements in Ireland
and among all its Subject Races. It had given these subject races
cigarettes, boots, bowler hats, cricket, race meetings, cheap revolvers,
petroleum, the factory system of industry, halfpenny newspapers in
both English and the vernacular, inexpensive university degrees,
motor-bicycles and electric trams; it had produced a considerable
literature expressing contempt for the Subject Races, and rendered
it freely accessible to them, and it had been content to believe that
nothing would result from these stimulants because somebody once wrote
“the immemorial east”; and also, in the inspired words of Kipling--
East is east and west is west,
And never the twain shall meet.
Instead of which, Egypt, India, and the subject countries generally had
produced new generations in a state of passionate indignation and the
utmost energy, activity and modernity. The governing class in Great
Britain was slowly adapting itself to a new conception, of the Subject
Races as waking peoples, and finding its efforts to keep the Empire
together under these, strains and changing ideas greatly impeded by
the entirely sporting spirit with which Bert Smallways at home (by the
million) cast his vote, and by the tendency of his more highly
coloured equivalents to be disrespectful to irascible officials. Their
impertinence was excessive; it was no mere stone-throwing and shouting.
They would quote Burns at them and Mill and Darwin and confute them in
arguments.
Even more pacific than the British Empire were France and its allies,
the Latin powers, heavily armed states indeed, but reluctant warriors,
and in many ways socially and politically leading western civilisation.
Russia was a pacific power perforce, divided within itself, torn between
revolutionaries and reactionaries who were equally incapable of social
reconstruction, and so sinking towards a tragic disorder of chronic
political vendetta. Wedged in among these portentous larger bulks,
swayed and threatened by them, the smaller states of the world
maintained a precarious independence, each keeping itself armed as
dangerously as its utmost ability could contrive.
So it came about that in every country a great and growing body of
energetic and inventive men was busied either for offensive or defensive
ends, in elaborating the apparatus of war, until the accumulating
tensions should reach the breaking-point. Each power sought to keep its
preparations secret, to hold new weapons in reserve, to anticipate and
learn the preparations of its rivals. The feeling of danger from fresh
discoveries affected the patriotic imagination of every people in the
world. Now it was rumoured the British had an overwhelming gun, now the
French an invincible rifle, now the Japanese a new explosive, now the
Americans a submarine that would drive every ironclad from the seas.
Each time there would be a war panic.
The strength and heart of the nations was given to the thought of war,
and yet the mass of their citizens was a teeming democracy as heedless
of and unfitted for fighting, mentally, morally, physically, as any
population has ever been--or, one ventures to add, could ever be. That
was the paradox of the time. It was a period altogether unique in
the world's history. The apparatus of warfare, the art and method of
fighting, changed absolutely every dozen years in a stupendous progress
towards perfection, and people grew less and less warlike, and there was
no war.
And then at last it came. It came as a surprise to all the world because
its real causes were hidden. Relations were strained between Germany
and the United States because of the intense exasperation of a tariff
conflict and the ambiguous attitude of the former power towards the
Monroe Doctrine, and they were strained between the United States and
Japan because of the perennial citizenship question. But in both cases
these were standing causes of offence. The real deciding cause, it is
now known, was the perfecting of the Pforzheim engine by Germany and the
consequent possibility of a rapid and entirely practicable airship.
At that time Germany was by far the most efficient power in the world,
better organised for swift and secret action, better equipped with the
resources of modern science, and with her official and administrative
classes at a higher level of education and training. These things she
knew, and she exaggerated that knowledge to the pitch of contempt for
the secret counsels of her neighbours. It may be that with the habit of
self-confidence her spying upon them had grown less thorough. Moreover,
she had a tradition of unsentimental and unscrupulous action that
vitiated her international outlook profoundly. With the coming of these
new weapons her collective intelligence thrilled with the sense that now
her moment had come. Once again in the history of progress it seemed she
held the decisive weapon. Now she might strike and conquer--before the
others had anything but experiments in the air.
Particularly she must strike America, swiftly, because there, if
anywhere, lay the chance of an aerial rival. It was known that America
possessed a flying-machine of considerable practical value, developed
out of the Wright model; but it was not supposed that the Washington War
Office had made any wholesale attempts to create an aerial navy. It was
necessary to strike before they could do so. France had a fleet of
slow navigables, several dating from 1908, that could make no
possible headway against the new type. They had been built solely for
reconnoitring purposes on the eastern frontier, they were mostly
too small to carry more than a couple of dozen men without arms or
provisions, and not one could do forty miles an hour. Great Britain,
it seemed, in an access of meanness, temporised and wrangled with the
imperial spirited Butteridge and his extraordinary invention. That also
was not in play--and could not be for some months at the earliest.
From Asia there came no sign. The Germans explained this by saying the
yellow peoples were without invention. No other competitor was worth
considering. “Now or never,” said the Germans--“now or never we may
seize the air--as once the British seized the seas! While all the other
powers are still experimenting.”
Swift and systematic and secret were their preparations, and their plan
most excellent. So far as their knowledge went, America was the only
dangerous possibility; America, which was also now the leading
trade rival of Germany and one of the chief barriers to her Imperial
expansion. So at once they would strike at America. They would fling a
great force across the Atlantic heavens and bear America down unwarned
and unprepared.
Altogether it was a well-imagined and most hopeful and spirited
enterprise, having regard to the information in the possession of the
German government. The chances of it being a successful surprise were
very great. The airship and the flying-machine were very different
things from ironclads, which take a couple of years to build. Given
hands, given plant, they could be made innumerably in a few weeks.
Once the needful parks and foundries were organised, air-ships and
Drachenflieger could be poured into the sky. Indeed, when the time
came, they did pour into the sky like, as a bitter French writer put it,
flies roused from filth.
The attack upon America was to be the first move in this tremendous
game. But no sooner had it started than instantly the aeronautic parks
were to proceed to put together and inflate the second fleet which was
to dominate Europe and manoeuvre significantly over London, Paris, Rome,
St. Petersburg, or wherever else its moral effect was required. A World
Surprise it was to be--no less a World Conquest; and it is wonderful how
near the calmly adventurous minds that planned it came to succeeding in
their colossal design.
Von Sternberg was the Moltke of this War in the Air, but it was the
curious hard romanticism of Prince Karl Albert that won over the
hesitating Emperor to the scheme. Prince Karl Albert was indeed the
central figure of the world drama. He was the darling of the Imperialist
spirit in German, and the ideal of the new aristocratic feeling--the
new Chivalry, as it was called--that followed the overthrow of
Socialism through its internal divisions and lack of discipline, and
the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few great families. He was
compared by obsequious flatterers to the Black Prince, to Alcibiades, to
the young Caesar. To many he seemed Nietzsche's Overman revealed. He was
big and blond and virile, and splendidly non-moral. The first great feat
that startled Europe, and almost brought about a new Trojan war, was
his abduction of the Princess Helena of Norway and his blank refusal to
marry her. Then followed his marriage with Gretchen Krass, a Swiss girl
of peerless beauty. Then came the gallant rescue, which almost cost him
his life, of three drowning sailors whose boat had upset in the sea near
Heligoland. For that and his victory over the American yacht Defender,
C.C.I., the Emperor forgave him and placed him in control of the new
aeronautic arm of the German forces. This he developed with marvellous
energy and ability, being resolved, as he said, to give to Germany land
and sea and sky. The national passion for aggression found in him its
supreme exponent, and achieved through him its realisation in this
astounding war. But his fascination was more than national; all over the
world his ruthless strength dominated minds as the Napoleonic legend had
dominated minds. Englishmen turned in disgust from the slow, complex,
civilised methods of their national politics to this uncompromising,
forceful figure. Frenchmen believed in him. Poems were written to him in
American.
He made the war.
Quite equally with the rest of the world, the general German population
was taken by surprise by the swift vigour of the Imperial government.
A considerable literature of military forecasts, beginning as early as
1906 with Rudolf Martin, the author not merely of a brilliant book of
anticipations, but of a proverb, “The future of Germany lies in the
air,” had, however, partially prepared the German imagination for some
such enterprise.
2
Of all these world-forces and gigantic designs Bert Smallways knew
nothing until he found himself in the very focus of it all and gaped
down amazed on the spectacle of that giant herd of air-ships. Each one
seemed as long as the Strand, and as big about as Trafalgar Square. Some
must have been a third of a mile in length. He had never before seen
anything so vast and disciplined as this tremendous park. For the first
time in his life he really had an intimation of the extraordinary and
quite important things of which a contemporary may go in ignorance. He
had always clung to the illusion that Germans were fat, absurd men, who
smoked china pipes, and were addicted to knowledge and horseflesh and
sauerkraut and indigestible things generally.
His bird's-eye view was quite transitory. He ducked at the first shot;
and directly his balloon began to drop, his mind ran confusedly upon how
he might explain himself, and whether he should pretend to be Butteridge
or not. “O Lord!” he groaned, in an agony of indecision. Then his eye
caught his sandals, and he felt a spasm of self-disgust. “They'll think
I'm a bloomin' idiot,” he said, and then it was he rose up desperately
and threw over the sand-bag and provoked the second and third shots.
It flashed into his head, as he cowered in the bottom of the car, that
he might avoid all sorts of disagreeable and complicated explanations by
pretending to be mad.
That was his last idea before the airships seemed to rush up about him
as if to look at him, and his car hit the ground and bounded and pitched
him out on his head....
He awoke to find himself famous, and to hear a voice crying,
“Booteraidge! Ja! Ja! Herr Booteraidge! Selbst!”
He was lying on a little patch of grass beside one of the main avenues
of the aeronautic park. The airships receded down a great vista, an
immense perspective, and the blunt prow of each was adorned with a black
eagle of a hundred feet or so spread. Down the other side of the avenue
ran a series of gas generators, and big hose-pipes trailed everywhere
across the intervening space. Close at hand was his now nearly deflated
balloon and the car on its side looking minutely small, a mere broken
toy, a shrivelled bubble, in contrast with the gigantic bulk of the
nearer airship. This he saw almost end-on, rising like a cliff and
sloping forward towards its fellow on the other side so as to overshadow
the alley between them. There was a crowd of excited people about him,
big men mostly in tight uniforms. Everybody was talking, and several
were shouting, in German; he knew that because they splashed and
aspirated sounds like startled kittens.
Only one phrase, repeated again and again could he recognize--the name
of “Herr Booteraidge.”
“Gollys!” said Bert. “They've spotted it.”
“Besser,” said some one, and some rapid German followed.
He perceived that close at hand was a field telephone, and that a tall
officer in blue was talking thereat about him. Another stood close
beside him with the portfolio of drawings and photographs in his hand.
They looked round at him.
“Do you spik Cherman, Herr Booteraidge?”
Bert decided that he had better be dazed. He did his best to seem
thoroughly dazed. “Where AM I?” he asked.
Volubility prevailed. “Der Prinz,” was mentioned. A bugle sounded far
away, and its call was taken up by one nearer, and then by one close at
hand. This seemed to increase the excitement greatly. A mono-rail car
bumbled past. The telephone bell rang passionately, and the tall officer
seemed to engage in a heated altercation. Then he approached the group
about Bert, calling out something about “mitbringen.”
An earnest-faced, emaciated man with a white moustache appealed to Bert.
“Herr Booteraidge, sir, we are chust to start!”
“Where am I?” Bert repeated.
Some one shook him by the other shoulder. “Are you Herr Booteraidge?” he
asked.
“Herr Booteraidge, we are chust to start!” repeated the white moustache,
and then helplessly, “What is de goot? What can we do?”
The officer from the telephone repeated his sentence about “Der Prinz”
and “mitbringen.” The man with the moustache stared for a moment,
grasped an idea and became violently energetic, stood up and bawled
directions at unseen people. Questions were asked, and the doctor at
Bert's side answered, “Ja! Ja!” several times, also something about
“Kopf.” With a certain urgency he got Bert rather unwillingly to his
feet. Two huge soldiers in grey advanced upon Bert and seized hold of
him. “'Ullo!” said Bert, startled. “What's up?”
“It is all right,” the doctor explained; “they are to carry you.”
“Where?” asked Bert, unanswered.
“Put your arms roundt their--hals--round them!”
“Yes! but where?”
“Hold tight!”
Before Bert could decide to say anything more he was whisked up by the
two soldiers. They joined hands to seat him, and his arms were put about
their necks. “Vorwarts!” Some one ran before him with the portfolio, and
he was borne rapidly along the broad avenue between the gas generators
and the airships, rapidly and on the whole smoothly except that once or
twice his bearers stumbled over hose-pipes and nearly let him down.
He was wearing Mr. Butteridge's Alpine cap, and his little shoulders
were in Mr. Butteridge's fur-lined overcoat, and he had responded to Mr.
Butteridge's name. The sandals dangled helplessly. Gaw! Everybody seemed
in a devil of a hurry. Why? He was carried joggling and gaping through
the twilight, marvelling beyond measure.
The systematic arrangement of wide convenient spaces, the quantities
of business-like soldiers everywhere, the occasional neat piles of
material, the ubiquitous mono-rail lines, and the towering ship-like
hulls about him, reminded him a little of impressions he had got as
a boy on a visit to Woolwich Dockyard. The whole camp reflected the
colossal power of modern science that had created it. A peculiar
strangeness was produced by the lowness of the electric light, which
lay upon the ground, casting all shadows upwards and making a grotesque
shadow figure of himself and his bearers on the airship sides, fusing
all three of them into a monstrous animal with attenuated legs and an
immense fan-like humped body. The lights were on the ground because
as far as possible all poles and standards had been dispensed with to
prevent complications when the airships rose.
It was deep twilight now, a tranquil blue-skyed evening; everything rose
out from the splashes of light upon the ground into dim translucent
tall masses; within the cavities of the airships small inspecting
lamps glowed like cloud-veiled stars, and made them seem marvellously
unsubstantial. Each airship had its name in black letters on white on
either flank, and forward the Imperial eagle sprawled, an overwhelming
bird in the dimness.
Bugles sounded, mono-rail cars of quiet soldiers slithered burbling
by. The cabins under the heads of the airships were being lit up; doors
opened in them, and revealed padded passages.
Now and then a voice gave directions to workers indistinctly seen.
There was a matter of sentinels, gangways and a long narrow passage, a
scramble over a disorder of baggage, and then Bert found himself lowered
to the ground and standing in the doorway of a spacious cabin--it was
perhaps ten feet square and eight high, furnished with crimson padding
and aluminium. A tall, bird-like young man with a small head, a
long nose, and very pale hair, with his hands full of things like
shaving-strops, boot-trees, hair-brushes, and toilet tidies, was saying
things about Gott and thunder and Dummer Booteraidge as Bert entered. He
was apparently an evicted occupant. Then he vanished, and Bert was lying
back on a couch in the corner with a pillow under his head and the door
of the cabin shut upon him. He was alone. Everybody had hurried out
again astonishingly.
“Gollys!” said Bert. “What next?”
He stared about him at the room.
“Butteridge! Shall I try to keep it up, or shan't I?”
The room he was in puzzled him. “'Tisn't a prison and 'tisn't a norfis?”
Then the old trouble came uppermost. “I wish to 'eaven I 'adn't these
silly sandals on,” he cried querulously to the universe. “They give the
whole blessed show away.”
3
His door was flung open, and a compact young man in uniform appeared,
carrying Mr. Butteridge's portfolio, rucksac, and shaving-glass.
“I say!” he said in faultless English as he entered. He had a beaming
face, and a sort of pinkish blond hair. “Fancy you being Butteridge.” He
slapped Bert's meagre luggage down.
“We'd have started,” he said, “in another half-hour! You didn't give
yourself much time!”
He surveyed Bert curiously. His gaze rested for a fraction of a moment
on the sandals. “You ought to have come on your flying-machine, Mr.
Butteridge.”
He didn't wait for an answer. “The Prince says I've got to look after
you. Naturally he can't see you now, but he thinks your coming's
providential. Last grace of Heaven. Like a sign. Hullo!”
He stood still and listened.
Outside there was a going to and fro of feet, a sound of distant bugles
suddenly taken up and echoed close at hand, men called out in loud tones
short, sharp, seemingly vital things, and were answered distantly. A
bell jangled, and feet went down the corridor. Then came a stillness
more distracting than sound, and then a great gurgling and rushing and
splashing of water. The young man's eyebrows lifted. He hesitated, and
dashed out of the room. Presently came a stupendous bang to vary the
noises without, then a distant cheering. The young man re-appeared.
“They're running the water out of the ballonette already.”
“What water?” asked Bert.
“The water that anchored us. Artful dodge. Eh?”
Bert tried to take it in.
“Of course!” said the compact young man. “You don't understand.”
A gentle quivering crept upon Bert's senses. “That's the engine,” said
the compact young man approvingly. “Now we shan't be long.”
Another long listening interval.
The cabin swayed. “By Jove! we're starting already;” he cried. “We're
starting!”
“Starting!” cried Bert, sitting up. “Where?”
But the young man was out of the room again. There were noises of German
in the passage, and other nerve-shaking sounds.
The swaying increased. The young man reappeared. “We're off, right
enough!”
“I say!” said Bert, “where are we starting? I wish you'd explain. What's
this place? I don't understand.”
“What!” cried the young man, “you don't understand?”
“No. I'm all dazed-like from that crack on the nob I got. Where ARE we?
WHERE are we starting?”
“Don't you know where you are--what this is?”
“Not a bit of it! What's all the swaying and the row?”
“What a lark!” cried the young man. “I say! What a thundering lark!
Don't you know? We're off to America, and you haven't realised. You've
just caught us by a neck. You're on the blessed old flagship with the
Prince. You won't miss anything. Whatever's on, you bet the Vaterland
will be there.”
“Us!--off to America?”
“Ra--ther!”
“In an airship?”
“What do YOU think?”
“Me! going to America on an airship! After that balloon! 'Ere! I say--I
don't want to go! I want to walk about on my legs. Let me get out! I
didn't understand.”
He made a dive for the door.
The young man arrested Bert with a gesture, took hold of a strap, lifted
up a panel in the padded wall, and a window appeared. “Look!” he said.
Side by side they looked out.
“Gaw!” said Bert. “We're going up!”
“We are!” said the young man, cheerfully; “fast!”
They were rising in the air smoothly and quietly, and moving slowly
to the throb of the engine athwart the aeronautic park. Down below it
stretched, dimly geometrical in the darkness, picked out at regular
intervals by glow-worm spangles of light. One black gap in the long
line of grey, round-backed airships marked the position from which the
Vaterland had come. Beside it a second monster now rose softly, released
from its bonds and cables into the air. Then, taking a beautifully exact
distance, a third ascended, and then a fourth.
“Too late, Mr. Butteridge!” the young man remarked. “We're off! I
daresay it is a bit of a shock to you, but there you are! The Prince
said you'd have to come.”
“Look 'ere,” said Bert. “I really am dazed. What's this thing? Where are
we going?”
“This, Mr. Butteridge,” said the young man, taking pains to be explicit,
“is an airship. It's the flagship of Prince Karl Albert. This is the
German air-fleet, and it is going over to America, to give that spirited
people 'what for.' The only thing we were at all uneasy about was your
invention. And here you are!”
“But!--you a German?” asked Bert.
“Lieutenant Kurt. Luft-lieutenant Kurt, at your service.”
“But you speak English!”
“Mother was English--went to school in England. Afterwards, Rhodes
scholar. German none the less for that. Detailed for the present, Mr.
Butteridge, to look after you. You're shaken by your fall. It's all
right, really. They're going to buy your machine and everything. You
sit down, and take it quite calmly. You'll soon get the hang of the
position.”
4
Bert sat down on the locker, collecting his mind, and the young man
talked to him about the airship.
He was really a very tactful young man indeed, in a natural sort of way.
“Daresay all this is new to you,” he said; “not your sort of machine.
These cabins aren't half bad.”
He got up and walked round the little apartment, showing its points.
“Here is the bed,” he said, whipping down a couch from the wall and
throwing it back again with a click. “Here are toilet things,” and he
opened a neatly arranged cupboard. “Not much washing. No water we've
got; no water at all except for drinking. No baths or anything until
we get to America and land. Rub over with loofah. One pint of hot for
shaving. That's all. In the locker below you are rugs and blankets; you
will need them presently. They say it gets cold. I don't know. Never
been up before. Except a little work with gliders--which is mostly
going down. Three-quarters of the chaps in the fleet haven't. Here's a
folding-chair and table behind the door. Compact, eh?”
He took the chair and balanced it on his little finger. “Pretty light,
eh? Aluminium and magnesium alloy and a vacuum inside. All these
cushions stuffed with hydrogen. Foxy! The whole ship's like that. And
not a man in the fleet, except the Prince and one or two others, over
eleven stone. Couldn't sweat the Prince, you know. We'll go all over the
thing to-morrow. I'm frightfully keen on it.”
He beamed at Bert. “You DO look young,” he remarked. “I always thought
you'd be an old man with a beard--a sort of philosopher. I don't know
why one should expect clever people always to be old. I do.”
Bert parried that compliment a little awkwardly, and then the lieutenant
was struck with the riddle why Herr Butteridge had not come in his own
flying machine.
“It's a long story,” said Bert. “Look here!” he said abruptly, “I wish
you'd lend me a pair of slippers, or something. I'm regular sick of
these sandals. They're rotten things. I've been trying them for a
friend.”
“Right O!”
The ex-Rhodes scholar whisked out of the room and reappeared with a
considerable choice of footwear--pumps, cloth bath-slippers, and a
purple pair adorned with golden sun-flowers.
But these he repented of at the last moment.
“I don't even wear them myself,” he said. “Only brought 'em in the zeal
of the moment.” He laughed confidentially. “Had 'em worked for me--in
Oxford. By a friend. Take 'em everywhere.”
So Bert chose the pumps.
The lieutenant broke into a cheerful snigger. “Here we are trying on
slippers,” he said, “and the world going by like a panorama below.
Rather a lark, eh? Look!”
Bert peeped with him out of the window, looking from the bright
pettiness of the red-and-silver cabin into a dark immensity. The land
below, except for a lake, was black and featureless, and the other
airships were hidden. “See more outside,” said the lieutenant. “Let's
go! There's a sort of little gallery.”
He led the way into the long passage, which was lit by one small
electric light, past some notices in German, to an open balcony and a
light ladder and gallery of metal lattice overhanging, empty space. Bert
followed his leader down to the gallery slowly and cautiously. From
it he was able to watch the wonderful spectacle of the first air-fleet
flying through the night. They flew in a wedge-shaped formation, the
Vaterland highest and leading, the tail receding into the corners of
the sky. They flew in long, regular undulations, great dark fish-like
shapes, showing hardly any light at all, the engines making a
throb-throb-throbbing sound that was very audible out on the gallery.
They were going at a level of five or six thousand feet, and rising
steadily. Below, the country lay silent, a clear darkness dotted and
lined out with clusters of furnaces, and the lit streets of a group of
big towns. The world seemed to lie in a bowl; the overhanging bulk of
the airship above hid all but the lowest levels of the sky.
They watched the landscape for a space.
“Jolly it must be to invent things,” said the lieutenant suddenly. “How
did you come to think of your machine first?”
“Worked it out,” said Bert, after a pause. “Jest ground away at it.”
“Our people are frightfully keen on you. They thought the British had
got you. Weren't the British keen?”
“In a way,” said Bert. “Still--it's a long story.”
“I think it's an immense thing--to invent. I couldn't invent a thing to
save my life.”
They both fell silent, watching the darkened world and following their
thoughts until a bugle summoned them to a belated dinner. Bert was
suddenly alarmed. “Don't you 'ave to dress and things?” he said. “I've
always been too hard at Science and things to go into Society and all
that.”
“No fear,” said Kurt. “Nobody's got more than the clothes they wear.
We're travelling light. You might perhaps take your overcoat off.
They've an electric radiator each end of the room.”
And so presently Bert found himself sitting to eat in the presence of
the “German Alexander”--that great and puissant Prince, Prince Karl
Albert, the War Lord, the hero of two hemispheres. He was a handsome,
blond man, with deep-set eyes, a snub nose, upturned moustache, and long
white hands, a strange-looking man. He sat higher than the others, under
a black eagle with widespread wings and the German Imperial flags; he
was, as it were, enthroned, and it struck Bert greatly that as he ate he
did not look at people, but over their heads like one who sees visions.
Twenty officers of various ranks stood about the table--and Bert. They
all seemed extremely curious to see the famous Butteridge, and their
astonishment at his appearance was ill-controlled. The Prince gave him
a dignified salutation, to which, by an inspiration, he bowed. Standing
next the Prince was a brown-faced, wrinkled man with silver spectacles
and fluffy, dingy-grey side-whiskers, who regarded Bert with a peculiar
and disconcerting attention. The company sat after ceremonies Bert could
not understand. At the other end of the table was the bird-faced officer
Bert had dispossessed, still looking hostile and whispering about Bert
to his neighbour. Two soldiers waited. The dinner was a plain one--a
soup, some fresh mutton, and cheese--and there was very little talk.
A curious solemnity indeed brooded over every one. Partly this was
reaction after the intense toil and restrained excitement of starting;
partly it was the overwhelming sense of strange new experiences, of
portentous adventure. The Prince was lost in thought. He roused himself
to drink to the Emperor in champagne, and the company cried “Hoch!” like
men repeating responses in church.
No smoking was permitted, but some of the officers went down to the
little open gallery to chew tobacco. No lights whatever were safe
amidst that bundle of inflammable things. Bert suddenly fell yawning
and shivering. He was overwhelmed by a sense of his own insignificance
amidst these great rushing monsters of the air. He felt life was too big
for him--too much for him altogether.
He said something to Kurt about his head, went up the steep ladder from
the swaying little gallery into the airship again, and so, as if it were
a refuge, to bed.
5
Bert slept for a time, and then his sleep was broken by dreams. Mostly
he was fleeing from formless terrors down an interminable passage in
an airship--a passage paved at first with ravenous trap-doors, and then
with openwork canvas of the most careless description.
“Gaw!” said Bert, turning over after his seventh fall through infinite
space that night.
He sat up in the darkness and nursed his knees. The progress of the
airship was not nearly so smooth as a balloon; he could feel a regular
swaying up, up, up and then down, down, down, and the throbbing and
tremulous quiver of the engines.
His mind began to teem with memories--more memories and more.
Through them, like a struggling swimmer in broken water, came the
perplexing question, what am I to do to-morrow? To-morrow, Kurt had told
him, the Prince's secretary, the Graf Von Winterfeld, would come to him
and discuss his flying-machine, and then he would see the Prince. He
would have to stick it out now that he was Butteridge, and sell
his invention. And then, if they found him out! He had a vision of
infuriated Butteridges.... Suppose after all he owned up? Pretended it
was their misunderstanding? He began to scheme devices for selling the
secret and circumventing Butteridge.
What should he ask for the thing? Somehow twenty thousand pounds struck
him as about the sum indicated.
He fell into that despondency that lies in wait in the small hours. He
had got too big a job on--too big a job....
Memories swamped his scheming.
“Where was I this time last night?”
He recapitulated his evenings tediously and lengthily. Last night he
had been up above the clouds in Butteridge's balloon. He thought of the
moment when he dropped through them and saw the cold twilight sea close
below. He still remembered that disagreeable incident with a nightmare
vividness. And the night before he and Grubb had been looking for cheap
lodgings at Littlestone in Kent. How remote that seemed now. It might be
years ago. For the first time he thought of his fellow Desert Dervish,
left with the two red-painted bicycles on Dymchurch sands. “'E won't
make much of a show of it, not without me. Any'ow 'e did 'ave the
treasury--such as it was--in his pocket!”... The night before that
was Bank Holiday night and they had sat discussing their minstrel
enterprise, drawing up a programme and rehearsing steps. And the
night before was Whit Sunday. “Lord!” cried Bert, “what a doing
that motor-bicycle give me!” He recalled the empty flapping of the
eviscerated cushion, the feeling of impotence as the flames rose again.
From among the confused memories of that tragic flare one little figure
emerged very bright and poignantly sweet, Edna, crying back reluctantly
from the departing motor-car, “See you to-morrer, Bert?”
Other memories of Edna clustered round that impression. They led Bert's
mind step by step to an agreeable state that found expression in “I'll
marry 'ER if she don't look out.” And then in a flash it followed in his
mind that if he sold the Butteridge secret he could! Suppose after all
he did get twenty thousand pounds; such sums have been paid! With that
he could buy house and garden, buy new clothes beyond dreaming, buy a
motor, travel, have every delight of the civilised life as he knew it,
for himself and Edna. Of course, risks were involved. “I'll 'ave old
Butteridge on my track, I expect!”
He meditated upon that. He declined again to despondency. As yet he
was only in the beginning of the adventure. He had still to deliver the
goods and draw the cash. And before that--Just now he was by no means
on his way home. He was flying off to America to fight there. “Not
much fighting,” he considered; “all our own way.” Still, if a shell did
happen to hit the Vaterland on the underside!...
“S'pose I ought to make my will.”
He lay back for some time composing wills--chiefly in favour of Edna. He
had settled now it was to be twenty thousand pounds. He left a number
of minor legacies. The wills became more and more meandering and
extravagant....
He woke from the eighth repetition of his nightmare fall through space.
“This flying gets on one's nerves,” he said.
He could feel the airship diving down, down, down, then slowly swinging
to up, up, up. Throb, throb, throb, throb, quivered the engine.
He got up presently and wrapped himself about with Mr. Butteridge's
overcoat and all the blankets, for the air was very keen. Then he peeped
out of the window to see a grey dawn breaking over clouds, then turned
up his light and bolted his door, sat down to the table, and produced
his chest-protector.
He smoothed the crumpled plans with his hand, and contemplated them.
Then he referred to the other drawings in the portfolio. Twenty thousand
pounds. If he worked it right! It was worth trying, anyhow.
Presently he opened the drawer in which Kurt had put paper and
writing-materials.
Bert Smallways was by no means a stupid person, and up to a certain
limit he had not been badly educated. His board school had taught him
to draw up to certain limits, taught him to calculate and understand a
specification. If at that point his country had tired of its efforts,
and handed him over unfinished to scramble for a living in an atmosphere
of advertisments and individual enterprise, that was really not his
fault. He was as his State had made him, and the reader must not imagine
because he was a little Cockney cad, that he was absolutely incapable
of grasping the idea of the Butteridge flying-machine. But he found it
stiff and perplexing. His motor-bicycle and Grubb's experiments and the
“mechanical drawing” he had done in standard seven all helped him out;
and, moreover, the maker of these drawings, whoever he was, had been
anxious to make his intentions plain. Bert copied sketches, he made
notes, he made a quite tolerable and intelligent copy of the essential
drawings and sketches of the others. Then he fell into a meditation upon
them.
At last he rose with a sigh, folded up the originals that had formerly
been in his chest-protector and put them into the breast-pocket of his
jacket, and then very carefully deposited the copies he had made in the
place of the originals. He had no very clear plan in his mind in doing
this, except that he hated the idea of altogether parting with the
secret. For a long time he meditated profoundly--nodding. Then he turned
out his light and went to bed again and schemed himself to sleep.
6
The hochgeboren Graf von Winterfeld was also a light sleeper that night,
but then he was one of these people who sleep little and play chess
problems in their heads to while away the time--and that night he had a
particularly difficult problem to solve.
He came in upon Bert while he was still in bed in the glow of the
sunlight reflected from the North Sea below, consuming the rolls and
coffee a soldier had brought him. He had a portfolio under his arm,
and in the clear, early morning light his dingy grey hair and heavy,
silver-rimmed spectacles made him look almost benevolent. He spoke
English fluently, but with a strong German flavour. He was particularly
bad with his “b's,” and his “th's” softened towards weak “z'ds.” He
called Bert explosively, “Pooterage.” He began with some indistinct
civilities, bowed, took a folding-table and chair from behind the door,
put the former between himself and Bert, sat down on the latter, coughed
drily, and opened his portfolio. Then he put his elbows on the table,
pinched his lower lip with his two fore-fingers, and regarded Bert
disconcertingly with magnified eyes. “You came to us, Herr Pooterage,
against your will,” he said at last.
“'Ow d'you make that out?” asked Bert, after a pause of astonishment.
“I chuge by ze maps in your car. They were all English. And your
provisions. They were all picnic. Also your cords were entangled. You
haf' been tugging--but no good. You could not manage ze balloon, and
anuzzer power than yours prought you to us. Is it not so?”
Bert thought.
“Also--where is ze laty?”
“'Ere!--what lady?”
“You started with a laty. That is evident. You shtarted for an afternoon
excursion--a picnic. A man of your temperament--he would take a laty.
She was not wiz you in your balloon when you came down at Dornhof. No!
Only her chacket! It is your affair. Still, I am curious.”
Bert reflected. “'Ow d'you know that?”
“I chuge by ze nature of your farious provisions. I cannot account, Mr.
Pooterage, for ze laty, what you haf done with her. Nor can I tell why
you should wear nature-sandals, nor why you should wear such cheap plue
clothes. These are outside my instructions. Trifles, perhaps. Officially
they are to be ignored. Laties come and go--I am a man of ze worldt. I
haf known wise men wear sandals and efen practice vegetarian habits.
I haf known men--or at any rate, I haf known chemists--who did not
schmoke. You haf, no doubt, put ze laty down somewhere. Well. Let us get
to--business. A higher power”--his voice changed its emotional quality,
his magnified eyes seemed to dilate--“has prought you and your secret
straight to us. So!”--he bowed his head--“so pe it. It is ze Destiny of
Chermany and my Prince. I can undershtandt you always carry zat secret.
You are afraidt of roppers and spies. So it comes wiz you--to us. Mr.
Pooterage, Chermany will puy it.”
“Will she?”
“She will,” said the secretary, looking hard at Bert's abandoned sandals
in the corner of the locker. He roused himself, consulted a paper of
notes for a moment, and Bert eyed his brown and wrinkled face with
expectation and terror. “Chermany, I am instructed to say,” said the
secretary, with his eyes on the table and his notes spread out, “has
always been willing to puy your secret. We haf indeed peen eager to
acquire it fery eager; and it was only ze fear that you might be, on
patriotic groundts, acting in collusion with your Pritish War Office zat
has made us discreet in offering for your marvellous invention through
intermediaries. We haf no hesitation whatefer now, I am instructed, in
agreeing to your proposal of a hundert tousand poundts.”
“Crikey!” said Bert, overwhelmed.
“I peg your pardon?”
“Jest a twinge,” said Bert, raising his hand to his bandaged head.
“Ah! Also I am instructed to say that as for that noble, unrightly
accused laty you haf championed so brafely against Pritish hypocrisy and
coldness, all ze chivalry of Chermany is on her site.”
“Lady?” said Bert faintly, and then recalled the great Butteridge love
story. Had the old chap also read the letters? He must think him a
scorcher if he had. “Oh! that's aw-right,” he said, “about 'er. I 'adn't
any doubts about that. I--”
He stopped. The secretary certainly had a most appalling stare. It
seemed ages before he looked down again. “Well, ze laty as you please.
She is your affair. I haf performt my instructions. And ze title of
Paron, zat also can pe done. It can all pe done, Herr Pooterage.”
He drummed on the table for a second or so, and resumed. “I haf to tell
you, sir, zat you come to us at a crisis in--Welt-Politik. There can be
no harm now for me to put our plans before you. Pefore you leafe this
ship again they will be manifest to all ze worldt. War is perhaps
already declared. We go--to America. Our fleet will descend out of ze
air upon ze United States--it is a country quite unprepared for war
eferywhere--eferywhere. Zey have always relied on ze Atlantic. And their
navy. We have selected a certain point--it is at present ze secret
of our commanders--which we shall seize, and zen we shall establish
a depot--a sort of inland Gibraltar. It will be--what will it be?--an
eagle's nest. Zere our airships will gazzer and repair, and thence
they will fly to and fro ofer ze United States, terrorising cities,
dominating Washington, levying what is necessary, until ze terms we
dictate are accepted. You follow me?”
“Go on!” said Bert.
“We could haf done all zis wiz such Luftschiffe and Drachenflieger as we
possess, but ze accession of your machine renders our project complete.
It not only gifs us a better Drachenflieger, but it remofes our last
uneasiness as to Great Pritain. Wizout you, sir, Great Pritain, ze land
you lofed so well and zat has requited you so ill, zat land of Pharisees
and reptiles, can do nozzing!--nozzing! You see, I am perfectly frank
wiz you. Well, I am instructed that Chermany recognises all this. We
want you to place yourself at our disposal. We want you to become our
Chief Head Flight Engineer. We want you to manufacture, we want to equip
a swarm of hornets under your direction. We want you to direct this
force. And it is at our depot in America we want you. So we offer you
simply, and without haggling, ze full terms you demanded weeks ago--one
hundert tousand poundts in cash, a salary of three tousand poundts a
year, a pension of one tousand poundts a year, and ze title of Paron as
you desired. These are my instructions.”
He resumed his scrutiny of Bert's face.
“That's all right, of course,” said Bert, a little short of breath, but
otherwise resolute and calm; and it seemed to him that now was the time
to bring his nocturnal scheming to the issue.
The secretary contemplated Bert's collar with sustained attention. Only
for one moment did his gaze move to the sandals and back.
“Jes' lemme think a bit,” said Bert, finding the stare debilitating.
“Look 'ere!” he said at last, with an air of great explicitness, “I GOT
the secret.”
“Yes.”
“But I don't want the name of Butteridge to appear--see? I been thinking
that over.”
“A little delicacy?”
“Exactly. You buy the secret--leastways, I give it you--from
Bearer--see?”
His voice failed him a little, and the stare continued. “I want to do
the thing Enonymously. See?”
Still staring. Bert drifted on like a swimmer caught by a current. “Fact
is, I'm going to edop' the name of Smallways. I don't want no title of
Baron; I've altered my mind. And I want the money quiet-like. I want the
hundred thousand pounds paid into benks--thirty thousand into the London
and County Benk Branch at Bun Hill in Kent directly I 'and over the
plans; twenty thousand into the Benk of England; 'arf the rest into a
good French bank, the other 'arf the German National Bank, see? I want
it put there, right away. I don't want it put in the name of Butteridge.
I want it put in the name of Albert Peter Smallways; that's the name I'm
going to edop'. That's condition one.”
“Go on!” said the secretary.
“The nex condition,” said Bert, “is that you don't make any inquiries
as to title. I mean what English gentlemen do when they sell or let you
land. You don't arst 'ow I got it. See? 'Ere I am--I deliver you the
goods--that's all right. Some people 'ave the cheek to say this isn't my
invention, see? It is, you know--THAT'S all right; but I don't want that
gone into. I want a fair and square agreement saying that's all right.
See?”
His “See?” faded into a profound silence.
The secretary sighed at last, leant back in his chair and produced a
tooth-pick, and used it, to assist his meditation on Bert's case. “What
was that name?” he asked at last, putting away the tooth-pick; “I must
write it down.”
“Albert Peter Smallways,” said Bert, in a mild tone.
The secretary wrote it down, after a little difficulty about the
spelling because of the different names of the letters of the alphabet
in the two languages.
“And now, Mr. Schmallvays,” he said at last, leaning back and resuming
the stare, “tell me: how did you ket hold of Mister Pooterage's
balloon?”
7
When at last the Graf von Winterfold left Bert Smallways, he left him in
an extremely deflated condition, with all his little story told.
He had, as people say, made a clean breast of it. He had been pursued
into details. He had had to explain the blue suit, the sandals, the
Desert Dervishes--everything. For a time scientific zeal consumed the
secretary, and the question of the plans remained in suspense. He even
went into speculation about the previous occupants of the balloon. “I
suppose,” he said, “the laty WAS the laty. Bot that is not our affair.
“It is fery curious and amusing, yes: but I am afraid the Prince may be
annoyt. He acted wiz his usual decision--always he acts wiz wonterful
decision. Like Napoleon. Directly he was tolt of your descent into the
camp at Dornhof, he said, 'Pring him!--pring him! It is my schtar!' His
schtar of Destiny! You see? He will be dthwarted. He directed you to
come as Herr Pooterage, and you haf not done so. You haf triet, of
course; but it has peen a poor try. His chugments of men are fery just
and right, and it is better for men to act up to them--gompletely.
Especially now. Particularly now.”
He resumed that attitude of his, with his underlip pinched between his
forefingers. He spoke almost confidentially. “It will be awkward. I
triet to suggest some doubt, but I was over-ruled. The Prince does
not listen. He is impatient in the high air. Perhaps he will think his
schtar has been making a fool of him. Perhaps he will think _I_ haf been
making a fool of him.”
He wrinkled his forehead, and drew in the corners of his mouth.
“I got the plans,” said Bert.
“Yes. There is that! Yes. But you see the Prince was interested in
Herr Pooterage because of his romantic seit. Herr Pooterage was so much
more--ah!--in the picture. I am afraid you are not equal to controlling
the flying machine department of our aerial park as he wished you to do.
He hadt promised himself that....
“And der was also the prestige--the worldt prestige of Pooterage with
us.... Well, we must see what we can do.” He held out his hand. “Gif me
the plans.”
A terrible chill ran through the being of Mr. Smallways. To this day he
is not clear in his mind whether he wept or no, but certainly there
was weeping in his voice. “'Ere, I say!” he protested. “Ain't I to
'ave--nothin' for 'em?”
The secretary regarded him with benevolent eyes. “You do not deserve
anyzing!” he said.
“I might 'ave tore 'em up.”
“Zey are not yours!”
“They weren't Butteridge's!”
“No need to pay anyzing.”
Bert's being seemed to tighten towards desperate deeds. “Gaw!” he said,
clutching his coat, “AIN'T there?”
“Pe galm,” said the secretary. “Listen! You shall haf five hundert
poundts. You shall haf it on my promise. I will do that for you, and
that is all I can do. Take it from me. Gif me the name of that bank.
Write it down. So! I tell you the Prince--is no choke. I do not think he
approffed of your appearance last night. No! I can't answer for him. He
wanted Pooterage, and you haf spoilt it. The Prince--I do not understand
quite, he is in a strange state. It is the excitement of the starting
and this great soaring in the air. I cannot account for what he does.
But if all goes well I will see to it--you shall haf five hundert
poundts. Will that do? Then gif me the plans.”
“Old beggar!” said Bert, as the door clicked. “Gaw!--what an ole
beggar!--SHARP!”
He sat down in the folding-chair, and whistled noiselessly for a time.
“Nice 'old swindle for 'im if I tore 'em up! I could 'ave.”
He rubbed the bridge of his nose thoughtfully. “I gave the whole blessed
show away. If I'd j'es' kep quiet about being Enonymous.... Gaw!... Too
soon, Bert, my boy--too soon and too rushy. I'd like to kick my silly
self.
“I couldn't 'ave kep' it up.
“After all, it ain't so very bad,” he said.
“After all, five 'undred pounds.... It isn't MY secret, anyhow. It's
jes' a pickup on the road. Five 'undred.
“Wonder what the fare is from America back home?”
8
And later in the day an extremely shattered and disorganised Bert
Smallways stood in the presence of the Prince Karl Albert.
The proceedings were in German. The Prince was in his own cabin, the end
room of the airship, a charming apartment furnished in wicker-work with
a long window across its entire breadth, looking forward. He was sitting
at a folding-table of green baize, with Von Winterfeld and two officers
sitting beside him, and littered before them was a number of American
maps and Mr. Butteridge's letters and his portfolio and a number of
loose papers. Bert was not asked to sit down, and remained standing
throughout the interview. Von Winterfeld told his story, and every
now and then the words Ballon and Pooterage struck on Bert's ears. The
Prince's face remained stern and ominous and the two officers watched it
cautiously or glanced at Bert. There was something a little strange
in their scrutiny of the Prince--a curiosity, an apprehension. Then
presently he was struck by an idea, and they fell discussing the plans.
The Prince asked Bert abruptly in English. “Did you ever see this thing
go op?”
Bert jumped. “Saw it from Bun 'Ill, your Royal Highness.”
Von Winterfeld made some explanation.
“How fast did it go?”
“Couldn't say, your Royal Highness. The papers, leastways the Daily
Courier, said eighty miles an hour.”
They talked German over that for a time.
“Couldt it standt still? Op in the air? That is what I want to know.”
“It could 'ovver, your Royal Highness, like a wasp,” said Bert.
“Viel besser, nicht wahr?” said the Prince to Von Winterfeld, and then
went on in German for a time.
Presently they came to an end, and the two officers looked at Bert. One
rang a bell, and the portfolio was handed to an attendant, who took it
away.
Then they reverted to the case of Bert, and it was evident the Prince
was inclined to be hard with him. Von Winterfeld protested. Apparently
theological considerations came in, for there were several mentions
of “Gott!” Some conclusions emerged, and it was apparent that Von
Winterfeld was instructed to convey them to Bert.
“Mr. Schmallvays, you haf obtained a footing in this airship,” he said,
“by disgraceful and systematic lying.”
“'Ardly systematic,” said Bert. “I--”
The Prince silenced him by a gesture.
“And it is within the power of his Highness to dispose of you as a spy.”
“'Ere!--I came to sell--”
“Ssh!” said one of the officers.
“However, in consideration of the happy chance that mate you the
instrument unter Gott of this Pooterage flying-machine reaching his
Highness's hand, you haf been spared. Yes,--you were the pearer of
goot tidings. You will be allowed to remain on this ship until it is
convenient to dispose of you. Do you understandt?”
“We will bring him,” said the Prince, and added terribly with a terrible
glare, “als Ballast.”
“You are to come with us,” said Winterfeld, “as pallast. Do you
understandt?”
Bert opened his mouth to ask about the five hundred pounds, and then a
saving gleam of wisdom silenced him. He met Von Winterfeld's eye, and it
seemed to him the secretary nodded slightly.
“Go!” said the Prince, with a sweep of the great arm and hand towards
the door. Bert went out like a leaf before a gale.
9
But in between the time when the Graf von Winterfeld had talked to him
and this alarming conference with the Prince, Bert had explored the
Vaterland from end to end. He had found it interesting in spite of grave
preoccupations. Kurt, like the greater number of the men upon the
German air-fleet, had known hardly anything of aeronautics before his
appointment to the new flagship. But he was extremely keen upon this
wonderful new weapon Germany had assumed so suddenly and dramatically.
He showed things to Bert with a boyish eagerness and appreciation. It
was as if he showed them over again to himself, like a child showing a
new toy. “Let's go all over the ship,” he said with zest. He pointed out
particularly the lightness of everything, the use of exhausted aluminium
tubing, of springy cushions inflated with compressed hydrogen; the
partitions were hydrogen bags covered with light imitation leather, the
very crockery was a light biscuit glazed in a vacuum, and weighed next
to nothing. Where strength was needed there was the new Charlottenburg
alloy, German steel as it was called, the toughest and most resistant
metal in the world.
There was no lack of space. Space did not matter, so long as load did
not grow. The habitable part of the ship was two hundred and fifty
feet long, and the rooms in two tiers; above these one could go up into
remarkable little white-metal turrets with big windows and airtight
double doors that enabled one to inspect the vast cavity of the
gas-chambers. This inside view impressed Bert very much. He had never
realised before that an airship was not one simple continuous gas-bag
containing nothing but gas. Now he saw far above him the backbone of the
apparatus and its big ribs, “like the neural and haemal canals,” said
Kurt, who had dabbled in biology.
“Rather!” said Bert appreciatively, though he had not the ghost of an
idea what these phrases meant.
Little electric lights could be switched on up there if anything went
wrong in the night. There were even ladders across the space. “But you
can't go into the gas,” protested Bert. “You can't breve it.”
The lieutenant opened a cupboard door and displayed a diver's suit, only
that it was made of oiled silk, and both its compressed-air knapsack and
its helmet were of an alloy of aluminium and some light metal. “We can
go all over the inside netting and stick up bullet holes or leaks,” he
explained. “There's netting inside and out. The whole outer-case is rope
ladder, so to speak.”
Aft of the habitable part of the airship was the magazine of explosives,
coming near the middle of its length. They were all bombs of various
types mostly in glass--none of the German airships carried any guns at
all except one small pom-pom (to use the old English nickname dating
from the Boer war), which was forward in the gallery upon the shield at
the heart of the eagle.
From the magazine amidships a covered canvas gallery with aluminium
treads on its floor and a hand-rope, ran back underneath the gas-chamber
to the engine-room at the tail; but along this Bert did not go, and from
first to last he never saw the engines. But he went up a ladder against
a gale of ventilation--a ladder that was encased in a kind of gas-tight
fire escape--and ran right athwart the great forward air-chamber to the
little look-out gallery with a telephone, that gallery that bore the
light pom-pom of German steel and its locker of shells. This gallery
was all of aluminium magnesium alloy, the tight front of the air-ship
swelled cliff-like above and below, and the black eagle sprawled
overwhelmingly gigantic, its extremities all hidden by the bulge of
the gas-bag. And far down, under the soaring eagles, was England, four
thousand feet below perhaps, and looking very small and defenceless
indeed in the morning sunlight.
The realisation that there was England gave Bert sudden and unexpected
qualms of patriotic compunction. He was struck by a quite novel idea.
After all, he might have torn up those plans and thrown them away. These
people could not have done so very much to him. And even if they did,
ought not an Englishman to die for his country? It was an idea that
had hitherto been rather smothered up by the cares of a competitive
civilisation. He became violently depressed. He ought, he perceived, to
have seen it in that light before. Why hadn't he seen it in that light
before?
Indeed, wasn't he a sort of traitor?... He wondered how the aerial fleet
must look from down there. Tremendous, no doubt, and dwarfing all the
buildings.
He was passing between Manchester and Liverpool, Kurt told him; a
gleaming band across the prospect was the Ship Canal, and a weltering
ditch of shipping far away ahead, the Mersey estuary. Bert was a
Southerner; he had never been north of the Midland counties, and the
multitude of factories and chimneys--the latter for the most part
obsolete and smokeless now, superseded by huge electric generating
stations that consumed their own reek--old railway viaducts, mono-rail
net-works and goods yards, and the vast areas of dingy homes and narrow
streets, spreading aimlessly, struck him as though Camberwell and
Rotherhithe had run to seed. Here and there, as if caught in a net, were
fields and agricultural fragments. It was a sprawl of undistinguished
population. There were, no doubt, museums and town halls and even
cathedrals of a sort to mark theoretical centres of municipal and
religious organisation in this confusion; but Bert could not see
them, they did not stand out at all in that wide disorderly vision
of congested workers' houses and places to work, and shops and meanly
conceived chapels and churches. And across this landscape of an
industrial civilisation swept the shadows of the German airships like a
hurrying shoal of fishes....
Kurt and he fell talking of aerial tactics, and presently went down to
the undergallery in order that Bert might see the Drachenflieger that
the airships of the right wing had picked up overnight and were towing
behind them; each airship towing three or four. They looked, like big
box-kites of an exaggerated form, soaring at the ends of invisible
cords. They had long, square heads and flattened tails, with lateral
propellers.
“Much skill is required for those!--much skill!”
“Rather!”
Pause.
“Your machine is different from that, Mr. Butteridge?”
“Quite different,” said Bert. “More like an insect, and less like a
bird. And it buzzes, and don't drive about so. What can those things
do?”
Kurt was not very clear upon that himself, and was still explaining when
Bert was called to the conference we have recorded with the Prince.
And after that was over, the last traces of Butteridge fell from Bert
like a garment, and he became Smallways to all on board. The soldiers
ceased to salute him, and the officers ceased to seem aware of his
existence, except Lieutenant Kurt. He was turned out of his nice cabin,
and packed in with his belongings to share that of Lieutenant Kurt,
whose luck it was to be junior, and the bird-headed officer, still
swearing slightly, and carrying strops and aluminium boot-trees and
weightless hair-brushes and hand-mirrors and pomade in his hands,
resumed possession. Bert was put in with Kurt because there was nowhere
else for him to lay his bandaged head in that close-packed vessel. He
was to mess, he was told, with the men.
Kurt came and stood with his legs wide apart and surveyed, him for a
moment as he sat despondent in his new quarters.
“What's your real name, then?” said Kurt, who was only imperfectly
informed of the new state of affairs.
“Smallways.”
“I thought you were a bit of a fraud--even when I thought you were
Butteridge. You're jolly lucky the Prince took it calmly. He's a pretty
tidy blazer when he's roused. He wouldn't stick a moment at pitching a
chap of your sort overboard if he thought fit. No!... They've shoved you
on to me, but it's my cabin, you know.”
“I won't forget,” said Bert.
Kurt left him, and when he came to look about him the first thing he saw
pasted on the padded wall was a reproduction, of the great picture by
Siegfried Schmalz of the War God, that terrible, trampling figure with
the viking helmet and the scarlet cloak, wading through destruction,
sword in hand, which had so strong a resemblance to Karl Albert, the
prince it was painted to please.
CHAPTER V. THE BATTLE OF THE NORTH ATLANTIC
1
The Prince Karl Albert had made a profound impression upon Bert. He was
quite the most terrifying person Bert had ever encountered. He filled
the Smallways soul with passionate dread and antipathy. For a long time
Bert sat alone in Kurt's cabin, doing nothing and not venturing even
to open the door lest he should be by that much nearer that appalling
presence.
So it came about that he was probably the last person on board to hear
the news that wireless telegraphy was bringing to the airship in throbs
and fragments of a great naval battle in progress in mid-Atlantic.
He learnt it at last from Kurt.
Kurt came in with a general air of ignoring Bert, but muttering to
himself in English nevertheless. “Stupendous!” Bert heard him say.
“Here!” he said, “get off this locker.” And he proceeded to rout out two
books and a case of maps. He spread them on the folding-table, and stood
regarding them. For a time his Germanic discipline struggled with his
English informality and his natural kindliness and talkativeness, and at
last lost.
“They're at it, Smallways,” he said.
“At what, sir?” said Bert, broken and respectful.
“Fighting! The American North Atlantic squadron and pretty nearly
the whole of our fleet. Our Eiserne Kreuz has had a gruelling and is
sinking, and their Miles Standish--she's one of their biggest--has sunk
with all hands. Torpedoes, I suppose. She was a bigger ship than the
Karl der Grosse, but five or six years older. Gods! I wish we could see
it, Smallways; a square fight in blue water, guns or nothing, and all of
'em steaming ahead!”
He spread his maps, he had to talk, and so he delivered a lecture on the
naval situation to Bert.
“Here it is,” he said, “latitude 30 degrees 50 minutes N. longitude 30
degrees 50 minutes W. It's a good day off us, anyhow, and they're all
going south-west by south at full pelt as hard as they can go. We shan't
see a bit of it, worse luck! Not a sniff we shan't get!”
2
The naval situation in the North Atlantic at that time was a peculiar
one. The United States was by far the stronger of the two powers upon
the sea, but the bulk of the American fleet was still in the Pacific.
It was in the direction of Asia that war had been most feared, for the
situation between Asiatic and white had become unusually violent
and dangerous, and the Japanese government had shown itself quite
unprecedentedly difficult. The German attack therefore found half the
American strength at Manila, and what was called the Second Fleet strung
out across the Pacific in wireless contact between the Asiatic station
and San Francisco. The North Atlantic squadron was the sole American
force on her eastern shore, it was returning from a friendly visit
to France and Spain, and was pumping oil-fuel from tenders in
mid-Atlantic--for most of its ships were steamships--when the
international situation became acute. It was made up of four battleships
and five armoured cruisers ranking almost with battleships, not one of
which was of a later date than 1913. The Americans had indeed grown so
accustomed to the idea that Great Britain could be trusted to keep the
peace of the Atlantic that a naval attack on the eastern seaboard
found them unprepared even in their imaginations. But long before the
declaration of war--indeed, on Whit Monday--the whole German fleet of
eighteen battleships, with a flotilla of fuel tenders and converted
liners containing stores to be used in support of the air-fleet, had
passed through the straits of Dover and headed boldly for New York. Not
only did these German battleships outnumber the Americans two to one,
but they were more heavily armed and more modern in construction--seven
of them having high explosive engines built of Charlottenburg steel, and
all carrying Charlottenburg steel guns.
The fleets came into contact on Wednesday before any actual declaration
of war. The Americans had strung out in the modern fashion at distances
of thirty miles or so, and were steaming to keep themselves between the
Germans and either the eastern states or Panama; because, vital as it
was to defend the seaboard cities and particularly New York, it was
still more vital to save the canal from any attack that might prevent
the return of the main fleet from the Pacific. No doubt, said Kurt, this
was now making records across that ocean, “unless the Japanese have had
the same idea as the Germans.” It was obviously beyond human possibility
that the American North Atlantic fleet could hope to meet and defeat
the German; but, on the other hand, with luck it might fight a delaying
action and inflict such damage as to greatly weaken the attack upon
the coast defences. Its duty, indeed, was not victory but devotion,
the severest task in the world. Meanwhile the submarine defences of New
York, Panama, and the other more vital points could be put in some sort
of order.
This was the naval situation, and until Wednesday in Whit week it was
the only situation the American people had realised. It was then they
heard for the first time of the real scale of the Dornhof aeronautic
park and the possibility of an attack coming upon them not only by
sea, but by the air. But it is curious that so discredited were the
newspapers of that period that a large majority of New Yorkers, for
example, did not believe the most copious and circumstantial accounts of
the German air-fleet until it was actually in sight of New York.
Kurt's talk was half soliloquy. He stood with a map on Mercator's
projection before him, swaying to the swinging of the ship and talking
of guns and tonnage, of ships and their build and powers and speed, of
strategic points, and bases of operation. A certain shyness that
reduced him to the status of a listener at the officers' table no longer
silenced him.
Bert stood by, saying very little, but watching Kurt's finger on the
map. “They've been saying things like this in the papers for a long
time,” he remarked. “Fancy it coming real!”
Kurt had a detailed knowledge of the Miles Standish. “She used to be
a crack ship for gunnery--held the record. I wonder if we beat her
shooting, or how? I wish I was in it. I wonder which of our ships beat
her. Maybe she got a shell in her engines. It's a running fight! I
wonder what the Barbarossa is doing,” he went on, “She's my old ship.
Not a first-rater, but good stuff. I bet she's got a shot or two home
by now if old Schneider's up to form. Just think of it! There they
are whacking away at each other, great guns going, shells exploding,
magazines bursting, ironwork flying about like straw in a gale, all
we've been dreaming of for years! I suppose we shall fly right away to
New York--just as though it wasn't anything at all. I suppose we shall
reckon we aren't wanted down there. It's no more than a covering fight
on our side. All those tenders and store-ships of ours are going on
southwest by west to New York to make a floating depot for us. See?” He
dabbed his forefinger on the map. “Here we are. Our train of stores goes
there, our battleships elbow the Americans out of our way there.”
When Bert went down to the men's mess-room to get his evening ration,
hardly any one took notice of him except just to point him out for
an instant. Every one was talking of the battle, suggesting,
contradicting--at times, until the petty officers hushed them, it rose
to a great uproar. There was a new bulletin, but what it said he did not
gather except that it concerned the Barbarossa. Some of the men stared
at him, and he heard the name of “Booteraidge” several times; but no one
molested him, and there was no difficulty about his soup and bread when
his turn at the end of the queue came. He had feared there might be no
ration for him, and if so he did not know what he would have done.
Afterwards he ventured out upon the little hanging gallery with the
solitary sentinel. The weather was still fine, but the wind was rising
and the rolling swing of the airship increasing. He clutched the rail
tightly and felt rather giddy. They were now out of sight of land,
and over blue water rising and falling in great masses. A dingy old
brigantine under the British flag rose and plunged amid the broad blue
waves--the only ship in sight.
3
In the evening it began to blow and the air-ship to roll like a porpoise
as it swung through the air. Kurt said that several of the men were
sea-sick, but the motion did not inconvenience Bert, whose luck it was
to be of that mysterious gastric disposition which constitutes a good
sailor. He slept well, but in the small hours the light awoke him, and
he found Kurt staggering about in search of something. He found it at
last in the locker, and held it in his hand unsteadily--a compass. Then
he compared his map.
“We've changed our direction,” he said, “and come into the wind. I can't
make it out. We've turned away from New York to the south. Almost as if
we were going to take a hand--”
He continued talking to himself for some time.
Day came, wet and windy. The window was bedewed externally, and they
could see nothing through it. It was also very cold, and Bert decided
to keep rolled up in his blankets on the locker until the bugle summoned
him to his morning ration. That consumed, he went out on the little
gallery; but he could see nothing but eddying clouds driving headlong
by, and the dim outlines of the nearer airships. Only at rare intervals
could he get a glimpse of grey sea through the pouring cloud-drift.
Later in the morning the Vaterland changed altitude, and soared up
suddenly in a high, clear sky, going, Kurt said, to a height of nearly
thirteen thousand feet.
Bert was in his cabin, and chanced to see the dew vanish from the window
and caught the gleam of sunlight outside. He looked out, and saw once
more that sunlit cloud floor he had seen first from the balloon, and the
ships of the German air-fleet rising one by one from the white, as fish
might rise and become visible from deep water. He stared for a moment
and then ran out to the little gallery to see this wonder better. Below
was cloudland and storm, a great drift of tumbled weather going hard
away to the north-east, and the air about him was clear and cold
and serene save for the faintest chill breeze and a rare, drifting
snow-flake. Throb, throb, throb, throb, went the engines in the
stillness. That huge herd of airships rising one after another had
an effect of strange, portentous monsters breaking into an altogether
unfamiliar world.
Either there was no news of the naval battle that morning, or the Prince
kept to himself whatever came until past midday. Then the bulletins came
with a rush, bulletins that made the lieutenant wild with excitement.
“Barbarossa disabled and sinking,” he cried. “Gott im Himmel! Der alte
Barbarossa! Aber welch ein braver krieger!”
He walked about the swinging cabin, and for a time he was wholly German.
Then he became English again. “Think of it, Smallways! The old ship we
kept so clean and tidy! All smashed about, and the iron flying about
in fragments, and the chaps one knew--Gott!--flying about too! Scalding
water squirting, fire, and the smash, smash of the guns! They smash
when you're near! Like everything bursting to pieces! Wool won't stop
it--nothing! And me up here--so near and so far! Der alte Barbarossa!”
“Any other ships?” asked Smallways, presently.
“Gott! Yes! We've lost the Karl der Grosse, our best and biggest. Run
down in the night by a British liner that blundered into the fighting
in trying to blunder out. They're fighting in a gale. The liner's
afloat with her nose broken, sagging about! There never was such a
battle!--never before! Good ships and good men on both sides,--and a
storm and the night and the dawn and all in the open ocean full steam
ahead! No stabbing! No submarines! Guns and shooting! Half our ships we
don't hear of any more, because their masts are shot away. Latitude,
30 degrees 40 minutes N.--longitude, 40 degrees 30 minutes W.--where's
that?”
He routed out his map again, and stared at it with eyes that did not
see.
“Der alte Barbarossa! I can't get it out of my head--with shells in her
engine-room, and the fires flying out of her furnaces, and the stokers
and engineers scalded and dead. Men I've messed with, Smallways--men
I've talked to close! And they've had their day at last! And it wasn't
all luck for them!
“Disabled and sinking! I suppose everybody can't have all the luck in a
battle. Poor old Schneider! I bet he gave 'em something back!”
So it was the news of the battle came filtering through to them all that
morning. The Americans had lost a second ship, name unknown; the Hermann
had been damaged in covering the Barbarossa.... Kurt fretted like an
imprisoned animal about the airship, now going up to the forward gallery
under the eagle, now down into the swinging gallery, now poring over his
maps. He infected Smallways with a sense of the immediacy of this battle
that was going on just over the curve of the earth. But when Bert went
down to the gallery the world was empty and still, a clear inky-blue
sky above and a rippled veil of still, thin sunlit cirrus below, through
which one saw a racing drift of rain-cloud, and never a glimpse of sea.
Throb, throb, throb, throb, went the engines, and the long, undulating
wedge of airships hurried after the flagship like a flight of swans
after their leader. Save for the quiver of the engines it was as
noiseless as a dream. And down there, somewhere in the wind and rain,
guns roared, shells crashed home, and, after the old manner of warfare,
men toiled and died.
4
As the afternoon wore on the lower weather abated, and the sea became
intermittently visible again. The air-fleet dropped slowly to the middle
air, and towards sunset they had a glimpse of the disabled Barbarossa
far away to the east. Smallways heard men hurrying along the passage,
and was drawn out to the gallery, where he found nearly a dozen officers
collected and scrutinising the helpless ruins of the battleship through
field-glasses. Two other vessels stood by her, one an exhausted petrol
tank, very high out of the water, and the other a converted liner. Kurt
was at the end of the gallery, a little apart from the others.
“Gott!” he said at last, lowering his binocular, “it is like seeing
an old friend with his nose cut off--waiting to be finished. Der
Barbarossa!”
With a sudden impulse he handed his glass to Bert, who had peered
beneath his hands, ignored by every one, seeing the three ships merely
as three brown-black lines upon the sea.
Never had Bert seen the like of that magnified slightly hazy image
before. It was not simply a battered ironclad that wallowed helpless,
it was a mangled ironclad. It seemed wonderful she still floated. Her
powerful engines had been her ruin. In the long chase of the night
she had got out of line with her consorts, and nipped in between the
Susquehanna and the Kansas City. They discovered her proximity, dropped
back until she was nearly broadside on to the former battleship, and
signalled up the Theodore Roosevelt and the little Monitor. As dawn
broke she had found herself hostess of a circle. The fight had not
lasted five minutes before the appearance of the Hermann to the east,
and immediately after of the Furst Bismarck in the west, forced the
Americans to leave her, but in that time they had smashed her iron
to rags. They had vented the accumulated tensions of their hard day's
retreat upon her. As Bert saw her, she seemed a mere metal-worker's
fantasy of frozen metal writhings. He could not tell part from part of
her, except by its position.
“Gott!” murmured Kurt, taking the glasses Bert restored to him--“Gott!
Da waren Albrecht--der gute Albrecht und der alte Zimmermann--und von
Rosen!”
Long after the Barbarosa had been swallowed up in the twilight and
distance he remained on the gallery peering through his glasses, and
when he came back to his cabin he was unusually silent and thoughtful.
“This is a rough game, Smallways,” he said at last--“this war is a rough
game. Somehow one sees it different after a thing like that. Many men
there were worked to make that Barbarossa, and there were men in it--one
does not meet the like of them every day. Albrecht--there was a man
named Albrecht--played the zither and improvised; I keep on wondering
what has happened to him. He and I--we were very close friends, after
the German fashion.”
Smallways woke the next night to discover the cabin in darkness, a
draught blowing through it, and Kurt talking to himself in German. He
could see him dimly by the window, which he had unscrewed and opened,
peering down. That cold, clear, attenuated light which is not so much
light as a going of darkness, which casts inky shadows and so often
heralds the dawn in the high air, was on his face.
“What's the row?” said Bert.
“Shut up!” said the lieutenant. “Can't you hear?”
Into the stillness came the repeated heavy thud of guns, one, two, a
pause, then three in quick succession.
“Gaw!” said Bert--“guns!” and was instantly at the lieutenant's side.
The airship was still very high and the sea below was masked by a thin
veil of clouds. The wind had fallen, and Bert, following Kurt's pointing
finger, saw dimly through the colourless veil first a red glow, then
a quick red flash, and then at a little distance from it another. They
were, it seemed for a while, silent flashes, and seconds after, when
one had ceased to expect them, came the belated thuds--thud, thud. Kurt
spoke in German, very quickly.
A bugle call rang through the airship.
Kurt sprang to his feet, saying something in an excited tone, still
using German, and went to the door.
“I say! What's up?” cried Bert. “What's that?”
The lieutenant stopped for an instant in the doorway, dark against the
light passage. “You stay where you are, Smallways. You keep there and do
nothing. We're going into action,” he explained, and vanished.
Bert's heart began to beat rapidly. He felt himself poised over the
fighting vessels far below. In a moment, were they to drop like a hawk
striking a bird? “Gaw!” he whispered at last, in awestricken tones.
Thud!... thud! He discovered far away a second ruddy flare flashing guns
back at the first. He perceived some difference on the Vaterland for
which he could not account, and then he realised that the engines
had slowed to an almost inaudible beat. He stuck his head out of the
window--it was a tight fit--and saw in the bleak air the other airships
slowed down to a scarcely perceptible motion.
A second bugle sounded, was taken up faintly from ship to ship. Out went
the lights; the fleet became dim, dark bulks against an intense blue sky
that still retained an occasional star. For a long time they hung, for
an interminable time it seemed to him, and then began the sound of air
being pumped into the balloonette, and slowly, slowly the Vaterland sank
down towards the clouds.
He craned his neck, but he could not see if the rest of the fleet was
following them; the overhang of the gas-chambers intervened. There
was something that stirred his imagination deeply in that stealthy,
noiseless descent. The obscurity deepened for a time, the last fading
star on the horizon vanished, and he felt the cold presence of cloud.
Then suddenly the glow beneath assumed distinct outlines, became flames,
and the Vaterland ceased to descend and hung observant, and it would
seem unobserved, just beneath a drifting stratum of cloud, a thousand
feet, perhaps, over the battle below.
In the night the struggling naval battle and retreat had entered upon a
new phase. The Americans had drawn together the ends of the flying line
skilfully and dexterously, until at last it was a column and well to the
south of the lax sweeping pursuit of the Germans. Then in the darkness
before the dawn they had come about and steamed northward in close order
with the idea of passing through the German battle-line and falling
upon the flotilla that was making for New York in support of the German
air-fleet. Much had altered since the first contact of the fleets. By
this time the American admiral, O'Connor, was fully informed of the
existence of the airships, and he was no longer vitally concerned for
Panama, since the submarine flotilla was reported arrived there from Key
West, and the Delaware and Abraham Lincoln, two powerful and entirely
modern ships, were already at Rio Grande, on the Pacific side of the
canal. His manoeuvre was, however, delayed by a boiler explosion on
board the Susquehanna, and dawn found this ship in sight of and indeed
so close to the Bremen and Weimar that they instantly engaged. There was
no alternative to her abandonment but a fleet engagement. O'Connor chose
the latter course. It was by no means a hopeless fight. The Germans,
though much more numerous and powerful than the Americans, were in a
dispersed line measuring nearly forty-five miles from end to end, and
there were many chances that before they could gather in for the fight
the column of seven Americans would have ripped them from end to end.
The day broke dim and overcast, and neither the Bremen nor the Weimar
realised they had to deal with more than the Susquehanna until the whole
column drew out from behind her at a distance of a mile or less and
bore down on them. This was the position of affairs when the Vaterland
appeared in the sky. The red glow Bert had seen through the column of
clouds came from the luckless Susquehanna; she lay almost immediately
below, burning fore and aft, but still fighting two of her guns and
steaming slowly southward. The Bremen and the Weimar, both hit in
several places, were going west by south and away from her. The American
fleet, headed by the Theodore Roosevelt, was crossing behind them,
pounding them in succession, steaming in between them and the big modern
Furst Bismarck, which was coming up from the west. To Bert, however,
the names of all these ships were unknown, and for a considerable time
indeed, misled by the direction in which the combatants were moving, he
imagined the Germans to be Americans and the Americans Germans. He saw
what appeared to him to be a column of six battleships pursuing three
others who were supported by a newcomer, until the fact that the Bremen
and Weimar were firing into the Susquehanna upset his calculations.
Then for a time he was hopelessly at a loss. The noise of the guns, too,
confused him, they no longer seemed to boom; they went whack, whack,
whack, whack, and each faint flash made his heart jump in anticipation
of the instant impact. He saw these ironclads, too, not in profile,
as he was accustomed to see ironclads in pictures, but in plan and
curiously foreshortened. For the most part they presented empty decks,
but here and there little knots of men sheltered behind steel bulwarks.
The long, agitated noses of their big guns, jetting thin transparent
flashes and the broadside activity of the quick-firers, were the chief
facts in this bird's-eye view. The Americans being steam-turbine ships,
had from two to four blast funnels each; the Germans lay lower in the
water, having explosive engines, which now for some reason made an
unwonted muttering roar. Because of their steam propulsion, the American
ships were larger and with a more graceful outline. He saw all these
foreshortened ships rolling considerably and fighting their guns over
a sea of huge low waves and under the cold, explicit light of dawn. The
whole spectacle waved slowly with the long rhythmic rising and beat of
the airship.
At first only the Vaterland of all the flying fleet appeared upon the
scene below. She hovered high, over the Theodore Roosevelt, keeping
pace with the full speed of that ship. From that ship she must have
been intermittently visible through the drifting clouds. The rest of the
German fleet remained above the cloud canopy at a height of six or seven
thousand feet, communicating with the flagship by wireless telegraphy,
but risking no exposure to the artillery below.
It is doubtful at what particular time the unlucky Americans realised
the presence of this new factor in the fight. No account now survives of
their experience. We have to imagine as well as we can what it must have
been to a battled-strained sailor suddenly glancing upward to discover
that huge long silent shape overhead, vaster than any battleship, and
trailing now from its hinder quarter a big German flag. Presently, as
the sky cleared, more of such ships appeared in the blue through the
dissolving clouds, and more, all disdainfully free of guns or armour,
all flying fast to keep pace with the running fight below.
From first to last no gun whatever was fired at the Vaterland, and only
a few rifle shots. It was a mere adverse stroke of chance that she had
a man killed aboard her. Nor did she take any direct share in the fight
until the end. She flew above the doomed American fleet while the Prince
by wireless telegraphy directed the movements of her consorts. Meanwhile
the Vogel-stern and Preussen, each with half a dozen drachenflieger in
tow, went full speed ahead and then dropped through the clouds, perhaps
five miles ahead of the Americans. The Theodore Roosevelt let fly at
once with the big guns in her forward barbette, but the shells burst far
below the Vogel-stern, and forthwith a dozen single-man drachenflieger
were swooping down to make their attack.
Bert, craning his neck through the cabin port-hole, saw the whole of
that incident, that first encounter of aeroplane and ironclad. He saw
the queer German drachenflieger, with their wide flat wings and square
box-shaped heads, their wheeled bodies, and their single-man riders,
soar down the air like a flight of birds. “Gaw!” he said. One to the
right pitched extravagantly, shot steeply up into the air, burst with a
loud report, and flamed down into the sea; another plunged nose forward
into the water and seemed to fly to pieces as it hit the waves. He
saw little men on the deck of the Theodore Roosevelt below, men
foreshortened in plan into mere heads and feet, running out preparing
to shoot at the others. Then the foremost flying-machine was rushing
between Bert and the American's deck, and then bang! came the thunder
of its bomb flung neatly at the forward barbette, and a thin little
crackling of rifle shots in reply. Whack, whack, whack, went the
quick-firing guns of the Americans' battery, and smash came an answering
shell from the Furst Bismarck. Then a second and third flying-machine
passed between Bert and the American ironclad, dropping bombs also, and
a fourth, its rider hit by a bullet, reeled down and dashed itself to
pieces and exploded between the shot-torn funnels, blowing them apart.
Bert had a momentary glimpse of a little black creature jumping from the
crumpling frame of the flying-machine, hitting the funnel, and falling
limply, to be instantly caught and driven to nothingness by the blaze
and rush of the explosion.
Smash! came a vast explosion in the forward part of the flagship, and a
huge piece of metalwork seemed to lift out of her and dump itself
into the sea, dropping men and leaving a gap into which a prompt
drachenflieger planted a flaring bomb. And then for an instant Bert
perceived only too clearly in the growing, pitiless light a number of
minute, convulsively active animalcula scorched and struggling in the
Theodore Roosevelt's foaming wake. What were they? Not men--surely not
men? Those drowning, mangled little creatures tore with their clutching
fingers at Bert's soul. “Oh, Gord!” he cried, “Oh, Gord!” almost
whimpering. He looked again and they had gone, and the black stem of the
Andrew Jackson, a little disfigured by the sinking Bremen's last
shot, was parting the water that had swallowed them into two neatly
symmetrical waves. For some moments sheer blank horror blinded Bert to
the destruction below.
Then, with an immense rushing sound, bearing as it were a straggling
volley of crashing minor explosions on its back, the Susquehanna, three
miles and more now to the east, blew up and vanished abruptly in a
boiling, steaming welter. For a moment nothing was to be seen but
tumbled water, and--then there came belching up from below, with immense
gulping noises, eructations of steam and air and petrol and fragments of
canvas and woodwork and men.
That made a distinct pause in the fight. It seemed a long pause to Bert.
He found himself looking for the drachenflieger. The flattened ruin of
one was floating abeam of the Monitor, the rest had passed, dropping
bombs down the American column; several were in the water and apparently
uninjured, and three or four were still in the air and coming round
now in a wide circle to return to their mother airships. The American
ironclads were no longer in column formation; the Theodore Roosevelt,
badly damaged, had turned to the southeast, and the Andrew Jackson,
greatly battered but uninjured in any fighting part was passing between
her and the still fresh and vigorous Furst Bismarck to intercept and
meet the latter's fire. Away to the west the Hermann and the Germanicus
had appeared and were coming into action.
In the pause, after the Susquehanna's disaster Bert became aware of a
trivial sound like the noise of an ill-greased, ill-hung door that falls
ajar--the sound of the men in the Furst Bismarck cheering.
And in that pause in the uproar too, the sun rose, the dark waters
became luminously blue, and a torrent of golden light irradiated the
world. It came like a sudden smile in a scene of hate and terror. The
cloud veil had vanished as if by magic, and the whole immensity of the
German air-fleet was revealed in the sky; the air-fleet stooping now
upon its prey.
“Whack-bang, whack-bang,” the guns resumed, but ironclads were not built
to fight the zenith, and the only hits the Americans scored were a few
lucky chances in a generally ineffectual rifle fire. Their column was
now badly broken, the Susquehanna had gone, the Theodore Roosevelt had
fallen astern out of the line, with her forward guns disabled, in a heap
of wreckage, and the Monitor was in some grave trouble. These two had
ceased fire altogether, and so had the Bremen and Weimar, all four ships
lying within shot of each other in an involuntary truce and with their
respective flags still displayed. Only four American ships now, with the
Andrew Jackson leading, kept to the south-easterly course. And the Furst
Bismarck, the Hermann, and the Germanicus steamed parallel to them and
drew ahead of them, fighting heavily. The Vaterland rose slowly in the
air in preparation for the concluding act of the drama.
Then, falling into place one behind the other, a string of a dozen
airships dropped with unhurrying swiftness down the air in pursuit of
the American fleet. They kept at a height of two thousand feet or more
until they were over and a little in advance of the rearmost ironclad,
and then stooped swiftly down into a fountain of bullets, and going just
a little faster than the ship below, pelted her thinly protected decks
with bombs until they became sheets of detonating flame. So the airships
passed one after the other along the American column as it sought
to keep up its fight with the Furst Bismarck, the Hermann, and the
Germanicus, and each airship added to the destruction and confusion
its predecessor had made. The American gunfire ceased, except for a few
heroic shots, but they still steamed on, obstinately unsubdued, bloody,
battered, and wrathfully resistant, spitting bullets at the airships
and unmercifully pounded by the German ironclads. But now Bert had but
intermittent glimpses of them between the nearer bulks of the airships
that assailed them....
It struck Bert suddenly that the whole battle was receding and growing
small and less thunderously noisy. The Vaterland was rising in the air,
steadily and silently, until the impact of the guns no longer smote
upon the heart but came to the ear dulled by distance, until the four
silenced ships to the eastward were little distant things: but were
there four? Bert now could see only three of those floating, blackened,
and smoking rafts of ruin against the sun. But the Bremen had two boats
out; the Theodore Roosevelt was also dropping boats to where the drift
of minute objects struggled, rising and falling on the big, broad
Atlantic waves.... The Vaterland was no longer following the fight. The
whole of that hurrying tumult drove away to the south-eastward, growing
smaller and less audible as it passed. One of the airships lay on
the water burning, a remote monstrous fount of flames, and far in the
south-west appeared first one and then three other German ironclads
hurrying in support of their consorts....
5
Steadily the Vaterland soared, and the air-fleet soared with her and
came round to head for New York, and the battle became a little thing
far away, an incident before the breakfast. It dwindled to a string of
dark shapes and one smoking yellow flare that presently became a mere
indistinct smear upon the vast horizon and the bright new day, that was
at last altogether lost to sight...
So it was that Bert Smallways saw the first fight of the airship and the
last fight of those strangest things in the whole history of war:
the ironclad battleships, which began their career with the floating
batteries of the Emperor Napoleon III in the Crimean war and lasted,
with an enormous expenditure of human energy and resources, for seventy
years. In that space of time the world produced over twelve thousand
five hundred of these strange monsters, in schools, in types, in series,
each larger and heavier and more deadly than its predecessors. Each in
its turn was hailed as the last birth of time, most in their turn were
sold for old iron. Only about five per cent of them ever fought in a
battle. Some foundered, some went ashore, and broke up, several rammed
one another by accident and sank. The lives of countless men were spent
in their service, the splendid genius, and patience of thousands of
engineers and inventors, wealth and material beyond estimating; to their
account we must put, stunted and starved lives on land, millions of
children sent to toil unduly, innumerable opportunities of fine living
undeveloped and lost. Money had to be found for them at any cost--that
was the law of a nation's existence during that strange time. Surely
they were the weirdest, most destructive and wasteful megatheria in the
whole history of mechanical invention.
And then cheap things of gas and basket-work made an end of them
altogether, smiting out of the sky!...
Never before had Bert Smallways seen pure destruction, never had he
realised the mischief and waste of war. His startled mind rose to the
conception; this also is in life. Out of all this fierce torrent of
sensation one impression rose and became cardinal--the impression of the
men of the Theodore Roosevelt who had struggled in the water after the
explosion of the first bomb. “Gaw!” he said at the memory; “it might
'ave been me and Grubb!... I suppose you kick about and get the water in
your mouf. I don't suppose it lasts long.”
He became anxious to see how Kurt was affected by these things. Also he
perceived he was hungry. He hesitated towards the door of the cabin and
peeped out into the passage. Down forward, near the gangway to the men's
mess, stood a little group of air sailors looking at something that
was hidden from him in a recess. One of them was in the light diver's
costume Bert had already seen in the gas chamber turret, and he was
moved to walk along and look at this person more closely and examine the
helmet he carried under his arm. But he forgot about the helmet when he
got to the recess, because there he found lying on the floor the dead
body of the boy who had been killed by a bullet from the Theodore
Roosevelt.
Bert had not observed that any bullets at all had reached the Vaterland
or, indeed, imagined himself under fire. He could not understand for a
time what had killed the lad, and no one explained to him.
The boy lay just as he had fallen and died, with his jacket torn and
scorched, his shoulder-blade smashed and burst away from his body and
all the left side of his body ripped and rent. There was much blood.
The sailors stood listening to the man with the helmet, who made
explanations and pointed to the round bullet hole in the floor and the
smash in the panel of the passage upon which the still vicious missile
had spent the residue of its energy. All the faces were grave and
earnest: they were the faces of sober, blond, blue-eyed men accustomed
to obedience and an orderly life, to whom this waste, wet, painful thing
that had been a comrade came almost as strangely as it did to Bert.
A peal of wild laughter sounded down the passage in the direction of the
little gallery and something spoke--almost shouted--in German, in tones
of exultation.
Other voices at a lower, more respectful pitch replied.
“Der Prinz,” said a voice, and all the men became stiffer and less
natural. Down the passage appeared a group of figures, Lieutenant Kurt
walking in front carrying a packet of papers.
He stopped point blank when he saw the thing in the recess, and his
ruddy face went white.
“So!” said he in surprise.
The Prince was following him, talking over his shoulder to Von
Winterfeld and the Kapitan.
“Eh?” he said to Kurt, stopping in mid-sentence, and followed the
gesture of Kurt's hand. He glared at the crumpled object in the recess
and seemed to think for a moment.
He made a slight, careless gesture towards the boy's body and turned to
the Kapitan.
“Dispose of that,” he said in German, and passed on, finishing his
sentence to Von Winterfeld in the same cheerful tone in which it had
begun.
6
The deep impression of helplessly drowning men that Bert had brought
from the actual fight in the Atlantic mixed itself up inextricably with
that of the lordly figure of Prince Karl Albert gesturing aside the dead
body of the Vaterland sailor. Hitherto he had rather liked the idea of
war as being a jolly, smashing, exciting affair, something like a
Bank Holiday rag on a large scale, and on the whole agreeable and
exhilarating. Now he knew it a little better.
The next day there was added to his growing disillusionment a third
ugly impression, trivial indeed to describe, a mere necessary everyday
incident of a state of war, but very distressing to his urbanised
imagination. One writes “urbanised” to express the distinctive
gentleness of the period. It was quite peculiar to the crowded townsmen
of that time, and different altogether from the normal experience of any
preceding age, that they never saw anything killed, never encountered,
save through the mitigating media of book or picture, the fact of lethal
violence that underlies all life. Three times in his existence, and
three times only, had Bert seen a dead human being, and he had never
assisted at the killing of anything bigger than a new-born kitten.
The incident that gave him his third shock was the execution of one
of the men on the Adler for carrying a box of matches. The case was
a flagrant one. The man had forgotten he had it upon him when coming
aboard. Ample notice had been given to every one of the gravity of this
offence, and notices appeared at numerous points all over the airships.
The man's defence was that he had grown so used to the notices and
had been so preoccupied with his work that he hadn't applied them to
himself; he pleaded, in his defence, what is indeed in military affairs
another serious crime, inadvertency. He was tried by his captain, and
the sentence confirmed by wireless telegraphy by the Prince, and it was
decided to make his death an example to the whole fleet. “The Germans,”
the Prince declared, “hadn't crossed the Atlantic to go wool gathering.”
And in order that this lesson in discipline and obedience might be
visible to every one, it was determined not to electrocute or drown but
hang the offender.
Accordingly the air-fleet came clustering round the flagship like carp
in a pond at feeding time. The Adler hung at the zenith immediately
alongside the flagship. The whole crew of the Vaterland assembled
upon the hanging gallery; the crews of the other airships manned the
air-chambers, that is to say, clambered up the outer netting to the
upper sides. The officers appeared upon the machine-gun platforms. Bert
thought it an altogether stupendous sight, looking down, as he was, upon
the entire fleet. Far off below two steamers on the rippled blue water,
one British and the other flying the American flag, seemed the minutest
objects, and marked the scale. They were immensely distant. Bert stood
on the gallery, curious to see the execution, but uncomfortable, because
that terrible blond Prince was within a dozen feet of him, glaring
terribly, with his arms folded, and his heels together in military
fashion.
They hung the man from the Adler. They gave him sixty feet of rope, so,
that he should hang and dangle in the sight of all evil-doers who might
be hiding matches or contemplating any kindred disobedience. Bert
saw the man standing, a living, reluctant man, no doubt scared and
rebellious enough in his heart, but outwardly erect and obedient, on
the lower gallery of the Adler about a hundred yards away. Then they had
thrust him overboard.
Down he fell, hands and feet extending, until with a jerk he was at the
end of the rope. Then he ought to have died and swung edifyingly, but
instead a more terrible thing happened; his head came right off, and
down the body went spinning to the sea, feeble, grotesque, fantastic,
with the head racing it in its fall.
“Ugh!” said Bert, clutching the rail before him, and a sympathetic grunt
came from several of the men beside him.
“So!” said the Prince, stiffer and sterner, glared for some seconds,
then turned to the gang way up into the airship.
For a long time Bert remained clinging to the railing of the gallery. He
was almost physically sick with the horror of this trifling incident.
He found it far more dreadful than the battle. He was indeed a very
degenerate, latter-day, civilised person.
Late that afternoon Kurt came into the cabin and found him curled up
on his locker, and looking very white and miserable. Kurt had also lost
something of his pristine freshness.
“Sea-sick?” he asked.
“No!”
“We ought to reach New York this evening. There's a good breeze coming
up under our tails. Then we shall see things.”
Bert did not answer.
Kurt opened out folding chair and table, and rustled for a time with
his maps. Then he fell thinking darkly. He roused himself presently, and
looked at his companion. “What's the matter?” he said.
“Nothing!”
Kurt stared threateningly. “What's the matter?”
“I saw them kill that chap. I saw that flying-machine man hit the
funnels of the big ironclad. I saw that dead chap in the passage. I seen
too much smashing and killing lately. That's the matter. I don't like
it. I didn't know war was this sort of thing. I'm a civilian. I don't
like it.”
“_I_ don't like it,” said Kurt. “By Jove, no!”
“I've read about war, and all that, but when you see it it's different.
And I'm gettin' giddy. I'm gettin' giddy. I didn't mind a bit being up
in that balloon at first, but all this looking down and floating over
things and smashing up people, it's getting on my nerves. See?”
“It'll have to get off again....”
Kurt thought. “You're not the only one. The men are all getting strung
up. The flying--that's just flying. Naturally it makes one a little
swimmy in the head at first. As for the killing, we've got to be
blooded; that's all. We're tame, civilised men. And we've got to get
blooded. I suppose there's not a dozen men on the ship who've really
seen bloodshed. Nice, quiet, law-abiding Germans they've been so far....
Here they are--in for it. They're a bit squeamy now, but you wait till
they've got their hands in.”
He reflected. “Everybody's getting a bit strung up,” he said.
He turned again to his maps. Bert sat crumpled up in the corner,
apparently heedless of him. For some time both kept silence.
“What did the Prince want to go and 'ang that chap for?” asked Bert,
suddenly.
“That was all right,” said Kurt, “that was all right. QUITE right. Here
were the orders, plain as the nose on your face, and here was that fool
going about with matches--”
“Gaw! I shan't forget that bit in a 'urry,” said Bert irrelevantly.
Kurt did not answer him. He was measuring their distance from New York
and speculating. “Wonder what the American aeroplanes are like?” he
said. “Something like our drachenflieger.... We shall know by this time
to-morrow.... I wonder what we shall know? I wonder. Suppose, after all,
they put up a fight.... Rum sort of fight!”
He whistled softly and mused. Presently he fretted out of the cabin, and
later Bert found him in the twilight upon the swinging platform, staring
ahead, and speculating about the things that might happen on the morrow.
Clouds veiled the sea again, and the long straggling wedge of air-ships
rising and falling as they flew seemed like a flock of strange new
births in a Chaos that had neither earth nor water but only mist and
sky.
CHAPTER VI. HOW WAR CAME TO NEW YORK
1
The City of New York was in the year of the German attack the largest,
richest, in many respects the most splendid, and in some, the wickedest
city the world had ever seen. She was the supreme type of the City of
the Scientific Commercial Age; she displayed its greatness, its power,
its ruthless anarchic enterprise, and its social disorganisation most
strikingly and completely. She had long ousted London from her pride of
place as the modern Babylon, she was the centre of the world's finance,
the world's trade, and the world's pleasure; and men likened her to
the apocalyptic cities of the ancient prophets. She sat drinking up the
wealth of a continent as Rome once drank the wealth of the Mediterranean
and Babylon the wealth of the east. In her streets one found the
extremes of magnificence and misery, of civilisation and disorder. In
one quarter, palaces of marble, laced and, crowned with light and flame
and flowers, towered up into her marvellous twilights beautiful, beyond
description; in another, a black and sinister polyglot population
sweltered in indescribable congestion in warrens, and excavations beyond
the power and knowledge of government. Her vice, her crime, her law
alike were inspired by a fierce and terrible energy, and like the great
cities of mediaeval Italy, her ways were dark and adventurous with
private war.
It was the peculiar shape of Manhattan Island, pressed in by arms of the
sea on either side, and incapable of comfortable expansion, except along
a narrow northward belt, that first gave the New York architects their
bias for extreme vertical dimensions. Every need was lavishly supplied
them--money, material, labour; only space was restricted. To begin,
therefore, they built high perforce. But to do so was to discover a
whole new world of architectural beauty, of exquisite ascendant lines,
and long after the central congestion had been relieved by tunnels
under the sea, four colossal bridges over the east river, and a dozen
mono-rail cables east and west, the upward growth went on. In many ways
New York and her gorgeous plutocracy repeated Venice in the magnificence
of her architecture, painting, metal-work and sculpture, for example,
in the grim intensity of her political method, in her maritime and
commercial ascendancy. But she repeated no previous state at all in the
lax disorder of her internal administration, a laxity that made vast
sections of her area lawless beyond precedent, so that it was possible
for whole districts to be impassable, while civil war raged between
street and street, and for Alsatias to exist in her midst in which the
official police never set foot. She was an ethnic whirlpool. The flags
of all nations flew in her harbour, and at the climax, the yearly
coming and going overseas numbered together upwards of two million human
beings. To Europe she was America, to America she was the gateway of
the world. But to tell the story of New York would be to write a social
history of the world; saints and martyrs, dreamers and scoundrels, the
traditions of a thousand races and a thousand religions, went to her
making and throbbed and jostled in her streets. And over all that
torrential confusion of men and purposes fluttered that strange flag,
the stars and stripes, that meant at once the noblest thing in life,
and the least noble, that is to say, Liberty on the one hand, and on
the other the base jealousy the individual self-seeker feels towards the
common purpose of the State.
For many generations New York had taken no heed of war, save as a thing
that happened far away, that affected prices and supplied the newspapers
with exciting headlines and pictures. The New Yorkers felt perhaps even
more certainly than the English had done that war in their own land
was an impossible thing. In that they shared the delusion of all North
America. They felt as secure as spectators at a bullfight; they risked
their money perhaps on the result, but that was all. And such ideas of
war as the common Americans possessed were derived from the limited,
picturesque, adventurous war of the past. They saw war as they saw
history, through an iridescent mist, deodorised, scented indeed, with
all its essential cruelties tactfully hidden away. They were inclined to
regret it as something ennobling, to sigh that it could no longer come
into their own private experience. They read with interest, if not with
avidity, of their new guns, of their immense and still more immense
ironclads, of their incredible and still more incredible explosives, but
just what these tremendous engines of destruction might mean for their
personal lives never entered their heads. They did not, so far as one
can judge from their contemporary literature, think that they meant
anything to their personal lives at all. They thought America was safe
amidst all this piling up of explosives. They cheered the flag by habit
and tradition, they despised other nations, and whenever there was an
international difficulty they were intensely patriotic, that is to
say, they were ardently against any native politician who did not say,
threaten, and do harsh and uncompromising things to the antagonist
people. They were spirited to Asia, spirited to Germany, so spirited to
Great Britain that the international attitude of the mother country to
her great daughter was constantly compared in contemporary caricature to
that between a hen-pecked husband and a vicious young wife. And for the
rest, they all went about their business and pleasure as if war had died
out with the megatherium....
And then suddenly, into a world peacefully busied for the most part upon
armaments and the perfection of explosives, war came; came the shock of
realising that the guns were going off, that the masses of inflammable
material all over the world were at last ablaze.
2
The immediate effect upon New York of the sudden onset of war was merely
to intensify her normal vehemence.
The newspapers and magazines that fed the American mind--for books upon
this impatient continent had become simply material for the energy
of collectors--were instantly a coruscation of war pictures and of
headlines that rose like rockets and burst like shells. To the normal
high-strung energy of New York streets was added a touch of war-fever.
Great crowds assembled, more especially in the dinner hour, in Madison
Square about the Farragut monument, to listen to and cheer patriotic
speeches, and a veritable epidemic of little flags and buttons swept
through these great torrents of swiftly moving young people, who poured
into New York of a morning by car and mono-rail and subway and train,
to toil, and ebb home again between the hours of five and seven. It was
dangerous not to wear a war button. The splendid music-halls of the time
sank every topic in patriotism and evolved scenes of wild enthusiasm,
strong men wept at the sight of the national banner sustained by the
whole strength of the ballet, and special searchlights and illuminations
amazed the watching angels. The churches re-echoed the national
enthusiasm in graver key and slower measure, and the aerial and naval
preparations on the East River were greatly incommoded by the multitude
of excursion steamers which thronged, helpfully cheering, about them.
The trade in small-arms was enormously stimulated, and many overwrought
citizens found an immediate relief for their emotions in letting off
fireworks of a more or less heroic, dangerous, and national character
in the public streets. Small children's air-balloons of the latest model
attached to string became a serious check to the pedestrian in Central
Park. And amidst scenes of indescribable emotion the Albany legislature
in permanent session, and with a generous suspension of rules and
precedents, passed through both Houses the long-disputed Bill for
universal military service in New York State.
Critics of the American character are disposed to consider--that up
to the actual impact of the German attack the people of New York dealt
altogether too much with the war as if it was a political demonstration.
Little or no damage, they urge, was done to either the German or
Japanese forces by the wearing of buttons, the waving of small flags,
the fireworks, or the songs. They forgot that, under the conditions of
warfare a century of science had brought about, the non-military section
of the population could do no serious damage in any form to their
enemies, and that there was no reason, therefore, why they should not do
as they did. The balance of military efficiency was shifting back from
the many to the few, from the common to the specialised.
The days when the emotional infantryman decided battles had passed by
for ever. War had become a matter of apparatus of special training
and skill of the most intricate kind. It had become undemocratic. And
whatever the value of the popular excitement, there can be no denying
that the small regular establishment of the United States Government,
confronted by this totally unexpected emergency of an armed invasion
from Europe, acted with vigour, science, and imagination. They were
taken by surprise so far as the diplomatic situation was concerned,
and their equipment for building either navigables or aeroplanes was
contemptible in comparison with the huge German parks. Still they set to
work at once to prove to the world that the spirit that had created the
Monitor and the Southern submarines of 1864 was not dead. The chief of
the aeronautic establishment near West Point was Cabot Sinclair, and
he allowed himself but one single moment of the posturing that was so
universal in that democratic time. “We have chosen our epitaphs,”
he said to a reporter, “and we are going to have, 'They did all they
could.' Now run away!”
The curious thing is that they did all do all they could; there is no
exception known. Their only defect indeed was a defect of style. One of
the most striking facts historically about this war, and the one that
makes the complete separation that had arisen between the methods
of warfare and the necessity of democratic support, is the effectual
secrecy of the Washington authorities about their airships. They did
not bother to confide a single fact of their preparations to the public.
They did not even condescend to talk to Congress. They burked and
suppressed every inquiry. The war was fought by the President and the
Secretaries of State in an entirely autocratic manner. Such publicity as
they sought was merely to anticipate and prevent inconvenient agitation
to defend particular points. They realised that the chief danger in
aerial warfare from an excitable and intelligent public would be a
clamour for local airships and aeroplanes to defend local interests.
This, with such resources as they possessed, might lead to a fatal
division and distribution of the national forces. Particularly they
feared that they might be forced into a premature action to defend
New York. They realised with prophetic insight that this would be the
particular advantage the Germans would seek. So they took great pains
to direct the popular mind towards defensive artillery, and to divert it
from any thought of aerial battle. Their real preparations they masked
beneath ostensible ones. There was at Washington a large reserve of
naval guns, and these were distributed rapidly, conspicuously, and with
much press attention, among the Eastern cities. They were mounted for
the most part upon hills and prominent crests around the threatened
centres of population. They were mounted upon rough adaptations of the
Doan swivel, which at that time gave the maximum vertical range to a
heavy gun. Much of this artillery was still unmounted, and nearly all of
it was unprotected when the German air-fleet reached New York. And down
in the crowded streets, when that occurred, the readers of the New
York papers were regaling themselves with wonderful and wonderfully
illustrated accounts of such matters as:--
THE SECRET OF THE THUNDERBOLT
AGED SCIENTIST PERFECTS ELECTRIC GUN
TO ELECTROCUTE AIRSHIP CREWS BY UPWARD LIGHTNING
WASHINGTON ORDERS FIVE HUNDRED
WAR SECRETARY LODGE DELIGHTED
SAYS THEY WILL SUIT THE GERMANS DOWN TO THE GROUND
PRESIDENT PUBLICLY APPLAUDS THIS MERRY QUIP
3
The German fleet reached New York in advance of the news of the American
naval disaster. It reached New York in the late afternoon and was first
seen by watchers at Ocean Grove and Long Branch coming swiftly out of
the southward sea and going away to the northwest. The flagship passed
almost vertically over the Sandy Hook observation station, rising
rapidly as it did so, and in a few minutes all New York was vibrating to
the Staten Island guns.
Several of these guns, and especially that at Giffords and the one on
Beacon Hill above Matawan, were remarkably well handled. The former, at
a distance of five miles, and with an elevation of six thousand feet,
sent a shell to burst so close to the Vaterland that a pane of the
Prince's forward window was smashed by a fragment. This sudden explosion
made Bert tuck in his head with the celerity of a startled tortoise. The
whole air-fleet immediately went up steeply to a height of about twelve
thousand feet and at that level passed unscathed over the ineffectual
guns. The airships lined out as they moved forward into the form of a
flattened V, with its apex towards the city, and with the flagship going
highest at the apex. The two ends of the V passed over Plumfield and
Jamaica Bay, respectively, and the Prince directed his course a little
to the east of the Narrows, soared over Upper Bay, and came to rest
over Jersey City in a position that dominated lower New York. There
the monsters hung, large and wonderful in the evening light, serenely
regardless of the occasional rocket explosions and flashing shell-bursts
in the lower air.
It was a pause of mutual inspection. For a time naive humanity swamped
the conventions of warfare altogether; the interest of the millions
below and of the thousands above alike was spectacular. The evening was
unexpectedly fine--only a few thin level bands of clouds at seven or
eight thousand feet broke its luminous clarity. The wind had dropped; it
was an evening infinitely peaceful and still. The heavy concussions of
the distant guns and those incidental harmless pyrotechnics at the level
of the clouds seemed to have as little to do with killing and force,
terror and submission, as a salute at a naval review. Below, every
point of vantage bristled with spectators, the roofs of the towering
buildings, the public squares, the active ferry boats, and every
favourable street intersection had its crowds: all the river piers
were dense with people, the Battery Park was solid black with east-side
population, and every position of advantage in Central Park and along
Riverside Drive had its peculiar and characteristic assembly from the
adjacent streets. The footways of the great bridges over the East River
were also closely packed and blocked. Everywhere shopkeepers had left
their shops, men their work, and women and children their homes, to come
out and see the marvel.
“It beat,” they declared, “the newspapers.”
And from above, many of the occupants of the airships stared with an
equal curiosity. No city in the world was ever so finely placed as New
York, so magnificently cut up by sea and bluff and river, so admirably
disposed to display the tall effects of buildings, the complex
immensities of bridges and mono-railways and feats of engineering.
London, Paris, Berlin, were shapeless, low agglomerations beside it. Its
port reached to its heart like Venice, and, like Venice, it was obvious,
dramatic, and proud. Seen from above it was alive with crawling
trains and cars, and at a thousand points it was already breaking into
quivering light. New York was altogether at its best that evening, its
splendid best.
“Gaw! What a place!” said Bert.
It was so great, and in its collective effect so pacifically
magnificent, that to make war upon it seemed incongruous beyond measure,
like laying siege to the National Gallery or attacking respectable
people in an hotel dining-room with battle-axe and mail. It was in its
entirety so large, so complex, so delicately immense, that to bring it
to the issue of warfare was like driving a crowbar into the mechanism
of a clock. And the fish-like shoal of great airships hovering light
and sunlit above, filling the sky, seemed equally remote from the ugly
forcefulness of war. To Kurt, to Smallways, to I know not how many more
of the people in the air-fleet came the distinctest apprehension of
these incompatibilities. But in the head of the Prince Karl Albert were
the vapours of romance: he was a conqueror, and this was the enemy's
city. The greater the city, the greater the triumph. No doubt he had a
time of tremendous exultation and sensed beyond all precedent the sense
of power that night.
There came an end at last to that pause. Some wireless communications
had failed of a satisfactory ending, and fleet and city remembered they
were hostile powers. “Look!” cried the multitude; “look!”
“What are they doing?”
“What?”... Down through the twilight sank five attacking airships, one
to the Navy Yard on East River, one to City Hall, two over the great
business buildings of Wall Street and Lower Broadway, one to the
Brooklyn Bridge, dropping from among their fellows through the danger
zone from the distant guns smoothly and rapidly to a safe proximity to
the city masses. At that descent all the cars in the streets stopped
with dramatic suddenness, and all the lights that had been coming on in
the streets and houses went out again. For the City Hall had awakened
and was conferring by telephone with the Federal command and taking
measures for defence. The City Hall was asking for airships, refusing to
surrender as Washington advised, and developing into a centre of intense
emotion, of hectic activity. Everywhere and hastily the police began to
clear the assembled crowds. “Go to your homes,” they said; and the word
was passed from mouth to mouth, “There's going to be trouble.” A chill
of apprehension ran through the city, and men hurrying in the unwonted
darkness across City Hall Park and Union Square came upon the dim forms
of soldiers and guns, and were challenged and sent back. In half an
hour New York had passed from serene sunset and gaping admiration to a
troubled and threatening twilight.
The first loss of life occurred in the panic rush from Brooklyn Bridge
as the airship approached it. With the cessation of the traffic an
unusual stillness came upon New York, and the disturbing concussions of
the futile defending guns on the hills about grew more and more audible.
At last these ceased also. A pause of further negotiation followed.
People sat in darkness, sought counsel from telephones that were dumb.
Then into the expectant hush came a great crash and uproar, the breaking
down of the Brooklyn Bridge, the rifle fire from the Navy Yard, and the
bursting of bombs in Wall Street and the City Hall. New York as a whole
could do nothing, could understand nothing. New York in the darkness
peered and listened to these distant sounds until presently they died
away as suddenly as they had begun. “What could be happening?” They
asked it in vain.
A long, vague period intervened, and people looking out of the windows
of upper rooms discovered the dark hulls of German airships, gliding
slowly and noiselessly, quite close at hand. Then quietly the electric
lights came on again, and an uproar of nocturnal newsvendors began in
the streets.
The units of that vast and varied population bought and learnt what
had happened; there had been a fight and New York had hoisted the white
flag.
4
The lamentable incidents that followed the surrender of New York seem
now in the retrospect to be but the necessary and inevitable consequence
of the clash of modern appliances and social conditions produced by
the scientific century on the one hand, and the tradition of a crude,
romantic patriotism on the other. At first people received the fact
with an irresponsible detachment, much as they would have received the
slowing down of the train in which they were travelling or the erection
of a public monument by the city to which they belonged.
“We have surrendered. Dear me! HAVE we?” was rather the manner in which
the first news was met. They took it in the same spectacular spirit they
had displayed at the first apparition of the air-fleet. Only slowly was
this realisation of a capitulation suffused with the flush of passion,
only with reflection did they make any personal application. “WE have
surrendered!” came later; “in us America is defeated.” Then they began
to burn and tingle.
The newspapers, which were issued about one in the morning contained no
particulars of the terms upon which New York had yielded--nor did
they give any intimation of the quality of the brief conflict that had
preceded the capitulation. The later issues remedied these deficiencies.
There came the explicit statement of the agreement to victual the
German airships, to supply the complement of explosives to replace
those employed in the fight and in the destruction of the North Atlantic
fleet, to pay the enormous ransom of forty million dollars, and to
surrender the flotilla in the East River. There came, too, longer and longer
descriptions of the smashing up of the City Hall and the Navy Yard, and
people began to realise faintly what those brief minutes of uproar had
meant. They read the tale of men blown to bits, of futile soldiers
in that localised battle fighting against hope amidst an indescribable
wreckage, of flags hauled down by weeping men. And these strange
nocturnal editions contained also the first brief cables from Europe
of the fleet disaster, the North Atlantic fleet for which New York had
always felt an especial pride and solicitude. Slowly, hour by hour, the
collective consciousness woke up, the tide of patriotic astonishment and
humiliation came floating in. America had come upon disaster; suddenly
New York discovered herself with amazement giving place to wrath
unspeakable, a conquered city under the hand of her conqueror.
As that fact shaped itself in the public mind, there sprang up, as
flames spring up, an angry repudiation. “No!” cried New York, waking in
the dawn. “No! I am not defeated. This is a dream.” Before day broke
the swift American anger was running through all the city, through every
soul in those contagious millions. Before it took action, before it took
shape, the men in the airships could feel the gigantic insurgence of
emotion, as cattle and natural creatures feel, it is said, the coming
of an earthquake. The newspapers of the Knype group first gave the thing
words and a formula. “We do not agree,” they said simply. “We have been
betrayed!” Men took that up everywhere, it passed from mouth to mouth,
at every street corner under the paling lights of dawn orators stood
unchecked, calling upon the spirit of America to arise, making the
shame a personal reality to every one who heard. To Bert, listening five
hundred feet above, it seemed that the city, which had at first produced
only confused noises, was now humming like a hive of bees--of very angry
bees.
After the smashing of the City Hall and Post-Office, the white flag had
been hoisted from a tower of the old Park Row building, and thither had
gone Mayor O'Hagen, urged thither indeed by the terror-stricken property
owners of lower New York, to negotiate the capitulation with Von
Winterfeld. The Vaterland, having dropped the secretary by a rope
ladder, remained hovering, circling very slowly above the great
buildings, old and new, that clustered round City Hall Park, while the
Helmholz, which had done the fighting there, rose overhead to a height
of perhaps two thousand feet. So Bert had a near view of all that
occurred in that central place. The City Hall and Court House, the
Post-Office and a mass of buildings on the west side of Broadway, had
been badly damaged, and the three former were a heap of blackened ruins.
In the case of the first two the loss of life had not been considerable,
but a great multitude of workers, including many girls and women, had
been caught in the destruction of the Post-Office, and a little army of
volunteers with white badges entered behind the firemen, bringing out
the often still living bodies, for the most part frightfully charred,
and carrying them into the big Monson building close at hand. Everywhere
the busy firemen were directing their bright streams of water upon the
smouldering masses: their hose lay about the square, and long cordons of
police held back the gathering black masses of people, chiefly from the
east side, from these central activities.
In violent and extraordinary contrast with this scene of destruction,
close at hand were the huge newspaper establishments of Park Row. They
were all alight and working; they had not been abandoned even while
the actual bomb throwing was going on, and now staff and presses were
vehemently active, getting out the story, the immense and dreadful story
of the night, developing comment and, in most cases, spreading the idea
of resistance under the very noses of the airships. For a long time Bert
could not imagine what these callously active offices could be, then he
detected the noise of the presses and emitted his “Gaw!”
Beyond these newspaper buildings again, and partially hidden by the
arches of the old Elevated Railway of New York (long since converted
into a mono-rail), there was another cordon of police and a sort of
encampment of ambulances and doctors, busy with the dead and wounded who
had been killed early in the night by the panic upon Brooklyn Bridge.
All this he saw in the perspectives of a bird's-eye view, as things
happening in a big, irregular-shaped pit below him, between cliffs of
high building. Northward he looked along the steep canon of Broadway,
down whose length at intervals crowds were assembling about excited
speakers; and when he lifted his eyes he saw the chimneys and
cable-stacks and roof spaces of New York, and everywhere now over these
the watching, debating people clustered, except where the fires raged
and the jets of water flew. Everywhere, too, were flagstaffs devoid of
flags; one white sheet drooped and flapped and drooped again over the
Park Row buildings. And upon the lurid lights, the festering movement
and intense shadows of this strange scene, there was breaking now the
cold, impartial dawn.
For Bert Smallways all this was framed in the frame of the open
porthole. It was a pale, dim world outside that dark and tangible
rim. All night he had clutched at that rim, jumped and quivered at
explosions, and watched phantom events. Now he had been high and now
low; now almost beyond hearing, now flying close to crashings and shouts
and outcries. He had seen airships flying low and swift over darkened
and groaning streets; watched great buildings, suddenly red-lit amidst
the shadows, crumple at the smashing impact of bombs; witnessed for
the first time in his life the grotesque, swift onset of insatiable
conflagrations. From it all he felt detached, disembodied. The Vaterland
did not even fling a bomb; she watched and ruled. Then down they had
come at last to hover over City Hall Park, and it had crept in upon his
mind, chillingly, terrifyingly, that these illuminated black masses
were great offices afire, and that the going to and fro of minute, dim
spectres of lantern-lit grey and white was a harvesting of the wounded
and the dead. As the light grew clearer he began to understand more and
more what these crumpled black things signified....
He had watched hour after hour since first New York had risen out of the
blue indistinctness of the landfall. With the daylight he experienced an
intolerable fatigue.
He lifted weary eyes to the pink flush in the sky, yawned immensely, and
crawled back whispering to himself across the cabin to the locker. He
did not so much lie down upon that as fall upon it and instantly become
asleep.
There, hours after, sprawling undignified and sleeping profoundly,
Kurt found him, a very image of the democratic mind confronted with the
problems of a time too complex for its apprehension. His face was
pale and indifferent, his mouth wide open, and he snored. He snored
disagreeably.
Kurt regarded him for a moment with a mild distaste. Then he kicked his
ankle.
“Wake up,” he said to Smallways' stare, “and lie down decent.”
Bert sat up and rubbed his eyes.
“Any more fightin' yet?” he asked.
“No,” said Kurt, and sat down, a tired man.
“Gott!” he cried presently, rubbing his hands over his face, “but
I'd like a cold bath! I've been looking for stray bullet holes in the
air-chambers all night until now.” He yawned. “I must sleep. You'd
better clear out, Smallways. I can't stand you here this morning. You're
so infernally ugly and useless. Have you had your rations? No! Well, go
in and get 'em, and don't come back. Stick in the gallery....”
5
So Bert, slightly refreshed by coffee and sleep, resumed his helpless
co-operation in the War in the Air. He went down into the little gallery
as the lieutenant had directed, and clung to the rail at the extreme end
beyond the look-out man, trying to seem as inconspicuous and harmless a
fragment of life as possible.
A wind was rising rather strongly from the south-east. It obliged the
Vaterland to come about in that direction, and made her roll a
great deal as she went to and fro over Manhattan Island. Away in the
north-west clouds gathered. The throb-throb of her slow screw working
against the breeze was much more perceptible than when she was going
full speed ahead; and the friction of the wind against the underside of
the gas-chamber drove a series of shallow ripples along it and made
a faint flapping sound like, but fainter than, the beating of ripples
under the stem of a boat. She was stationed over the temporary City Hall
in the Park Row building, and every now and then she would descend
to resume communication with the mayor and with Washington. But the
restlessness of the Prince would not suffer him to remain for long in
any one place. Now he would circle over the Hudson and East River; now
he would go up high, as if to peer away into the blue distances; once he
ascended so swiftly and so far that mountain sickness overtook him and
the crew and forced him down again; and Bert shared the dizziness and
nausea.
The swaying view varied with these changes of altitude. Now they would
be low and close, and he would distinguish in that steep, unusual
perspective, windows, doors, street and sky signs, people and the
minutest details, and watch the enigmatical behaviour of crowds and
clusters upon the roofs and in the streets; then as they soared the
details would shrink, the sides of streets draw together, the view
widen, the people cease to be significant. At the highest the effect
was that of a concave relief map; Bert saw the dark and crowded land
everywhere intersected by shining waters, saw the Hudson River like a
spear of silver, and Lower Island Sound like a shield. Even to Bert's
unphilosophical mind the contrast of city below and fleet above pointed
an opposition, the opposition of the adventurous American's tradition
and character with German order and discipline. Below, the immense
buildings, tremendous and fine as they were, seemed like the giant trees
of a jungle fighting for life; their picturesque magnificence was as
planless as the chances of crag and gorge, their casualty enhanced by
the smoke and confusion of still unsubdued and spreading conflagrations.
In the sky soared the German airships like beings in a different,
entirely more orderly world, all oriented to the same angle of the
horizon, uniform in build and appearance, moving accurately with one
purpose as a pack of wolves will move, distributed with the most precise
and effectual co-operation.
It dawned upon Bert that hardly a third of the fleet was visible. The
others had gone upon errands he could not imagine, beyond the compass of
that great circle of earth and sky. He wondered, but there was no one to
ask. As the day wore on, about a dozen reappeared in the east with
their stores replenished from the flotilla and towing a number of
drachenflieger. Towards afternoon the weather thickened, driving clouds
appeared in the south-west and ran together and seemed to engender more
clouds, and the wind came round into that quarter and blew stronger.
Towards the evening the wind became a gale into which the now tossing
airships had to beat.
All that day the Prince was negotiating with Washington, while his
detached scouts sought far and wide over the Eastern States looking for
anything resembling an aeronautic park. A squadron of twenty airships
detached overnight had dropped out of the air upon Niagara and was
holding the town and power works.
Meanwhile the insurrectionary movement in the giant city grew
uncontrollable. In spite of five great fires already involving many
acres, and spreading steadily, New York was still not satisfied that she
was beaten.
At first the rebellious spirit below found vent only in isolated shouts,
street-crowd speeches, and newspaper suggestions; then it found much
more definite expression in the appearance in the morning sunlight of
American flags at point after point above the architectural cliffs of
the city. It is quite possible that in many cases this spirited display
of bunting by a city already surrendered was the outcome of the innocent
informality of the American mind, but it is also undeniable that in many
it was a deliberate indication that the people “felt wicked.”
The German sense of correctitude was deeply shocked by this outbreak.
The Graf von Winterfeld immediately communicated with the mayor, and
pointed out the irregularity, and the fire look-out stations were
instructed in the matter. The New York police was speedily hard at
work, and a foolish contest in full swing between impassioned citizens
resolved to keep the flag flying, and irritated and worried officers
instructed to pull it down.
The trouble became acute at last in the streets above Columbia
University. The captain of the airship watching this quarter seems to
have stooped to lasso and drag from its staff a flag hoisted upon Morgan
Hall. As he did so a volley of rifle and revolver shots was fired from
the upper windows of the huge apartment building that stands between the
University and Riverside Drive.
Most of these were ineffectual, but two or three perforated
gas-chambers, and one smashed the hand and arm of a man upon the forward
platform; The sentinel on the lower gallery immediately replied, and the
machine gun on the shield of the eagle let fly and promptly stopped
any further shots. The airship rose and signalled the flagship and City
Hall, police and militiamen were directed at once to the spot, and this
particular incident closed.
But hard upon that came the desperate attempt of a party of young
clubmen from New York, who, inspired by patriotic and adventurous
imaginations, slipped off in half a dozen motor-cars to Beacon Hill, and
set to work with remarkable vigour to improvise a fort about the Doan
swivel gun that had been placed there. They found it still in the hands
of the disgusted gunners, who had been ordered to cease fire at the
capitulation, and it was easy to infect these men with their own spirit.
They declared their gun hadn't had half a chance, and were burning to
show what it could do. Directed by the newcomers, they made a trench
and bank about the mounting of the piece, and constructed flimsy
shelter-pits of corrugated iron.
They were actually loading the gun when they were observed by the
airship Preussen and the shell they succeeded in firing before the bombs
of the latter smashed them and their crude defences to fragments, burst
over the middle gas-chambers of the Bingen, and brought her to earth,
disabled, upon Staten Island. She was badly deflated, and dropped among
trees, over which her empty central gas-bags spread in canopies and
festoons. Nothing, however, had caught fire, and her men were speedily
at work upon her repair. They behaved with a confidence that verged upon
indiscretion. While most of them commenced patching the tears of the
membrane, half a dozen of them started off for the nearest road in
search of a gas main, and presently found themselves prisoners in
the hands of a hostile crowd. Close at hand was a number of villa
residences, whose occupants speedily developed from an unfriendly
curiosity to aggression. At that time the police control of the large
polyglot population of Staten Island had become very lax, and scarcely
a household but had its rifle or pistols and ammunition. These were
presently produced, and after two or three misses, one of the men at
work was hit in the foot. Thereupon the Germans left their sewing and
mending, took cover among the trees, and replied.
The crackling of shots speedily brought the Preussen and Kiel on the
scene, and with a few hand grenades they made short work of every
villa within a mile. A number of non-combatant American men, women, and
children were killed and the actual assailants driven off. For a time
the repairs went on in peace under the immediate protection of these
two airships. Then when they returned to their quarters, an intermittent
sniping and fighting round the stranded Bingen was resumed, and went
on all the afternoon, and merged at last in the general combat of the
evening....
About eight the Bingen was rushed by an armed mob, and all its defenders
killed after a fierce, disorderly struggle.
The difficulty of the Germans in both these cases came from the
impossibility of landing any efficient force or, indeed, any force at
all from the air-fleet. The airships were quite unequal to the transport
of any adequate landing parties; their complement of men was just
sufficient to manoeuvre and fight them in the air. From above they could
inflict immense damage; they could reduce any organised Government to a
capitulation in the briefest space, but they could not disarm, much less
could they occupy, the surrendered areas below. They had to trust to
the pressure upon the authorities below of a threat to renew the
bombardment. It was their sole resource. No doubt, with a
highly organised and undamaged Government and a homogeneous and
well-disciplined people that would have sufficed to keep the peace. But
this was not the American case. Not only was the New York Government a
weak one and insufficiently provided with police, but the destruction of
the City Hall and Post-Office and other central ganglia had hopelessly
disorganised the co-operation of part with part. The street cars and
railways had ceased; the telephone service was out of gear and only
worked intermittently. The Germans had struck at the head, and the head
was conquered and stunned--only to release the body from its rule. New
York had become a headless monster, no longer capable of collective
submission. Everywhere it lifted itself rebelliously; everywhere
authorities and officials left to their own imitative were joining in
the arming and flag-hoisting and excitement of that afternoon.
6
The disintegrating truce gave place to a definite general breach with
the assassination of the Wetterhorn--for that is the only possible word
for the act--above Union Square, and not a mile away from the exemplary
ruins of City Hall. This occurred late in the afternoon, between five
and six. By that time the weather had changed very much for the worse,
and the operations of the airships were embarrassed by the necessity
they were under of keeping head on to the gusts. A series of squalls,
with hail and thunder, followed one another from the south by
south-east, and in order to avoid these as much as possible, the
air-fleet came low over the houses, diminishing its range of observation
and exposing itself to a rifle attack.
Overnight there had been a gun placed in Union Square. It had never been
mounted, much less fired, and in the darkness after the surrender it was
taken with its supplies and put out of the way under the arches of the
great Dexter building. Here late in the morning it was remarked by a
number of patriotic spirits. They set to work to hoist and mount it
inside the upper floors of the place. They made, in fact, a masked
battery behind the decorous office blinds, and there lay in wait as
simply excited as children until at last the stem of the luckless
Wetterhorn appeared, beating and rolling at quarter speed over the
recently reconstructed pinnacles of Tiffany's. Promptly that one-gun
battery unmasked. The airship's look-out man must have seen the whole
of the tenth story of the Dexter building crumble out and smash in the
street below to discover the black muzzle looking out from the shadows
behind. Then perhaps the shell hit him.
The gun fired two shells before the frame of the Dexter building
collapsed, and each shell raked the Wetterhorn from stem to stern.
They smashed her exhaustively. She crumpled up like a can that has been
kicked by a heavy boot, her forepart came down in the square, and the
rest of her length, with a great snapping and twisting of shafts and
stays, descended, collapsing athwart Tammany Hall and the streets
towards Second Avenue. Her gas escaped to mix with air, and the air of
her rent balloonette poured into her deflating gas-chambers. Then with
an immense impact she exploded....
The Vaterland at that time was beating up to the south of City Hall
from over the ruins of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the reports of the gun,
followed by the first crashes of the collapsing Dexter building, brought
Kurt and, Smallways to the cabin porthole. They were in time to see the
flash of the exploding gun, and then they were first flattened against
the window and then rolled head over heels across the floor of the cabin
by the air wave of the explosion. The Vaterland bounded like a football
some one has kicked and when they looked out again, Union Square was
small and remote and shattered, as though some cosmically vast giant had
rolled over it. The buildings to the east of it were ablaze at a dozen
points, under the flaming tatters and warping skeleton of the airship,
and all the roofs and walls were ridiculously askew and crumbling as one
looked. “Gaw!” said Bert. “What's happened? Look at the people!”
But before Kurt could produce an explanation, the shrill bells of the
airship were ringing to quarters, and he had to go. Bert hesitated and
stepped thoughtfully into the passage, looking back at the window as
he did so. He was knocked off his feet at once by the Prince, who was
rushing headlong from his cabin to the central magazine.
Bert had a momentary impression of the great figure of the Prince, white
with rage, bristling with gigantic anger, his huge fist swinging. “Blut
und Eisen!” cried the Prince, as one who swears. “Oh! Blut und Eisen!”
Some one fell over Bert--something in the manner of falling suggested
Von Winterfeld--and some one else paused and kicked him spitefully and
hard. Then he was sitting up in the passage, rubbing a freshly bruised
cheek and readjusting the bandage he still wore on his head. “Dem that
Prince,” said Bert, indignant beyond measure. “'E 'asn't the menners of
a 'og!”
He stood up, collected his wits for a minute, and then went slowly
towards the gangway of the little gallery. As he did so he heard noises
suggestive of the return of the Prince. The lot of them were coming back
again. He shot into his cabin like a rabbit into its burrow, just in
time to escape that shouting terror.
He shut the door, waited until the passage was still, then went across
to the window and looked out. A drift of cloud made the prospect of
the streets and squares hazy, and the rolling of the airship swung the
picture up and down. A few people were running to and fro, but for the
most part the aspect of the district was desertion. The streets seemed
to broaden out, they became clearer, and the little dots that were
people larger as the Vaterland came down again. Presently she was
swaying along above the lower end of Broadway. The dots below, Bert saw,
were not running now, but standing and looking up. Then suddenly they
were all running again.
Something had dropped from the aeroplane, something that looked small
and flimsy. It hit the pavement near a big archway just underneath Bert.
A little man was sprinting along the sidewalk within half a dozen yards,
and two or three others and one woman were bolting across the roadway.
They were odd little figures, so very small were they about the heads,
so very active about the elbows and legs. It was really funny to see
their legs going. Foreshortened, humanity has no dignity. The little man
on the pavement jumped comically--no doubt with terror, as the bomb fell
beside him.
Then blinding flames squirted out in all directions from the point of
impact, and the little man who had jumped became, for an instant, a
flash of fire and vanished--vanished absolutely. The people running out
into the road took preposterous clumsy leaps, then flopped down and lay
still, with their torn clothes smouldering into flame. Then pieces of
the archway began to drop, and the lower masonry of the building to fall
in with the rumbling sound of coals being shot into a cellar. A faint
screaming reached Bert, and then a crowd of people ran out into the
street, one man limping and gesticulating awkwardly. He halted, and went
back towards the building. A falling mass of brick-work hit him and sent
him sprawling to lie still and crumpled where he fell. Dust and black
smoke came pouring into the street, and were presently shot with red
flame....
In this manner the massacre of New York began. She was the first of the
great cities of the Scientific Age to suffer by the enormous powers
and grotesque limitations of aerial warfare. She was wrecked as in the
previous century endless barbaric cities had been bombarded, because she
was at once too strong to be occupied and too undisciplined and proud to
surrender in order to escape destruction. Given the circumstances, the
thing had to be done. It was impossible for the Prince to desist, and
own himself defeated, and it was impossible to subdue the city except
by largely destroying it. The catastrophe was the logical outcome of
the situation, created by the application of science to warfare. It
was unavoidable that great cities should be destroyed. In spite of his
intense exasperation with his dilemma, the Prince sought to be moderate
even in massacre. He tried to give a memorable lesson with the minimum
waste of life and the minimum expenditure of explosives. For that night
he proposed only the wrecking of Broadway. He directed the air-fleet to
move in column over the route of this thoroughfare, dropping bombs, the
Vaterland leading. And so our Bert Smallways became a participant in one
of the most cold-blooded slaughters in the world's history, in which
men who were neither excited nor, except for the remotest chance of
a bullet, in any danger, poured death and destruction upon homes and
crowds below.
He clung to the frame of the porthole as the airship tossed and swayed,
and stared down through the light rain that now drove before the wind,
into the twilight streets, watching people running out of the houses,
watching buildings collapse and fires begin. As the airships sailed
along they smashed up the city as a child will shatter its cities of
brick and card. Below, they left ruins and blazing conflagrations and
heaped and scattered dead; men, women, and children mixed together as
though they had been no more than Moors, or Zulus, or Chinese. Lower
New York was soon a furnace of crimson flames, from which there was no
escape. Cars, railways, ferries, all had ceased, and never a light lit
the way of the distracted fugitives in that dusky confusion but the
light of burning. He had glimpses of what it must mean to be down
there--glimpses. And it came to him suddenly as an incredible discovery,
that such disasters were not only possible now in this strange,
gigantic, foreign New York, but also in London--in Bun Hill! that the
little island in the silver seas was at the end of its immunity, that
nowhere in the world any more was there a place left where a Smallways
might lift his head proudly and vote for war and a spirited foreign
policy, and go secure from such horrible things.
CHAPTER VII. THE “VATERLAND” IS DISABLED
1
And then above the flames of Manhattan Island came a battle, the first
battle in the air. The Americans had realised the price their waiting
game must cost, and struck with all the strength they had, if haply they
might still save New York from this mad Prince of Blood and Iron, and
from fire and death.
They came down upon the Germans on the wings of a great gale in
the twilight, amidst thunder and rain. They came from the yards of
Washington and Philadelphia, full tilt in two squadrons, and but for one
sentinel airship hard by Trenton, the surprise would have been complete.
The Germans, sick and weary with destruction, and half empty of
ammunition, were facing up into the weather when the news of this onset
reached them. New York they had left behind to the south-eastward, a
darkened city with one hideous red scar of flames. All the airships
rolled and staggered, bursts of hailstorm bore them down and forced
them to fight their way up again; the air had become bitterly cold. The
Prince was on the point of issuing orders to drop earthward and trail
copper lightning chains when the news of the aeroplane attack came to
him. He faced his fleet in line abreast south, had the drachenflieger
manned and held ready to cast loose, and ordered a general ascent into
the freezing clearness above the wet and darkness.
The news of what was imminent came slowly to Bert's perceptions. He was
standing in the messroom at the time and the evening rations were being
served out. He had resumed Butteridge's coat and gloves, and in addition
he had wrapped his blanket about him. He was dipping his bread into his
soup and was biting off big mouthfuls. His legs were wide apart, and
he leant against the partition in order to steady himself amidst the
pitching and oscillation of the airship. The men about him looked tired
and depressed; a few talked, but most were sullen and thoughtful,
and one or two were air-sick. They all seemed to share the peculiarly
outcast feeling that had followed the murders of the evening, a sense
of a land beneath them, and an outraged humanity grown more hostile than
the Sea.
Then the news hit them. A red-faced sturdy man, a man with light
eyelashes and a scar, appeared in the doorway and shouted something in
German that manifestly startled every one. Bert felt the shock of the
altered tone, though he could not understand a word that was said.
The announcement was followed by a pause, and then a great outcry of
questions and suggestions. Even the air-sick men flushed and spoke.
For some minutes the mess-room was Bedlam, and then, as if it were a
confirmation of the news, came the shrill ringing of the bells that
called the men to their posts.
Bert with pantomime suddenness found himself alone.
“What's up?” he said, though he partly guessed.
He stayed only to gulp down the remainder of his soup, and then ran
along the swaying passage and, clutching tightly, down the ladder to
the little gallery. The weather hit him like cold water squirted from a
hose. The airship engaged in some new feat of atmospheric Jiu-Jitsu. He
drew his blanket closer about him, clutching with one straining hand.
He found himself tossing in a wet twilight, with nothing to be seen but
mist pouring past him. Above him the airship was warm with lights and
busy with the movements of men going to their quarters. Then abruptly
the lights went out, and the Vaterland with bounds and twists and
strange writhings was fighting her way up the air.
He had a glimpse, as the Vaterland rolled over, of some large buildings
burning close below them, a quivering acanthus of flames, and then he
saw indistinctly through the driving weather another airship wallowing
along like a porpoise, and also working up. Presently the clouds
swallowed her again for a time, and then she came back to sight as a
dark and whale-like monster, amidst streaming weather. The air was full
of flappings and pipings, of void, gusty shouts and noises; it buffeted
him and confused him; ever and again his attention became rigid--a blind
and deaf balancing and clutching.
“Wow!”
Something fell past him out of the vast darknesses above and vanished
into the tumults below, going obliquely downward. It was a German
drachenflieger. The thing was going so fast he had but an instant
apprehension of the dark figure of the aeronaut crouched together
clutching at his wheel. It might be a manoeuvre, but it looked like a
catastrophe.
“Gaw!” said Bert.
“Pup-pup-pup” went a gun somewhere in the mirk ahead and suddenly and
quite horribly the Vaterland lurched, and Bert and the sentinel were
clinging to the rail for dear life. “Bang!” came a vast impact out of
the zenith, followed by another huge roll, and all about him the tumbled
clouds flashed red and lurid in response to flashes unseen, revealing
immense gulfs. The rail went right overhead, and he was hanging loose in
the air holding on to it.
For a time Bert's whole mind and being was given to clutching. “I'm
going into the cabin,” he said, as the airship righted again and brought
back the gallery floor to his feet. He began to make his way cautiously
towards the ladder. “Whee-wow!” he cried as the whole gallery reared
itself up forward, and then plunged down like a desperate horse.
Crack! Bang! Bang! Bang! And then hard upon this little rattle of shots
and bombs came, all about him, enveloping him, engulfing him,
immense and overwhelming, a quivering white blaze of lightning and a
thunder-clap that was like the bursting of a world.
Just for the instant before that explosion the universe seemed to be
standing still in a shadowless glare.
It was then he saw the American aeroplane. He saw it in the light of the
flash as a thing altogether motionless. Even its screw appeared still,
and its men were rigid dolls. (For it was so near he could see the men
upon it quite distinctly.) Its stern was tilting down, and the whole
machine was heeling over. It was of the Colt-Coburn-Langley pattern,
with double up-tilted wings and the screw ahead, and the men were in
a boat-like body netted over. From this very light long body, magazine
guns projected on either side. One thing that was strikingly odd and
wonderful in that moment of revelation was that the left upper wing was
burning downward with a reddish, smoky flame. But this was not the most
wonderful thing about this apparition. The most wonderful thing was that
it and a German airship five hundred yards below were threaded as it
were on the lightning flash, which turned out of its path as if to take
them, and, that out from the corners and projecting points of its
huge wings everywhere, little branching thorn-trees of lightning were
streaming.
Like a picture Bert saw these things, a picture a little blurred by a
thin veil of wind-torn mist.
The crash of the thunder-clap followed the flash and seemed a part of
it, so that it is hard to say whether Bert was the rather deafened or
blinded in that instant.
And then darkness, utter darkness, and a heavy report and a thin small
sound of voices that went wailing downward into the abyss below.
2
There followed upon these things a long, deep swaying of the airship,
and then Bert began a struggle to get back to his cabin. He was drenched
and cold and terrified beyond measure, and now more than a little
air-sick. It seemed to him that the strength had gone out of his knees
and hands, and that his feet had become icily slippery over the metal
they trod upon. But that was because a thin film of ice had frozen upon
the gallery.
He never knew how long his ascent of the ladder back into the airship
took him, but in his dreams afterwards, when he recalled it, that
experience seemed to last for hours. Below, above, around him were
gulfs, monstrous gulfs of howling wind and eddies of dark, whirling
snowflakes, and he was protected from it all by a little metal grating
and a rail, a grating and rail that seemed madly infuriated with him,
passionately eager to wrench him off and throw him into the tumult of
space.
Once he had a fancy that a bullet tore by his ear, and that the clouds
and snowflakes were lit by a flash, but he never even turned his head to
see what new assailant whirled past them in the void. He wanted to get
into the passage! He wanted to get into the passage! He wanted to get
into the passage! Would the arm by which he was clinging hold out, or
would it give way and snap? A handful of hail smacked him in the face,
so that for a time he was breathless and nearly insensible. Hold tight,
Bert! He renewed his efforts.
He found himself, with an enormous sense of relief and warmth, in the
passage. The passage was behaving like a dice-box, its disposition was
evidently to rattle him about and then throw him out again. He hung on
with the convulsive clutch of instinct until the passage lurched down
ahead. Then he would make a short run cabin-ward, and clutch again as
the fore-end rose.
Behold! He was in the cabin!
He snapped-to the door, and for a time he was not a human being, he was
a case of air-sickness. He wanted to get somewhere that would fix him,
that he needn't clutch. He opened the locker and got inside among the
loose articles, and sprawled there helplessly, with his head sometimes
bumping one side and sometimes the other. The lid shut upon him with a
click. He did not care then what was happening any more. He did not care
who fought who, or what bullets were fired or explosions occurred. He
did not care if presently he was shot or smashed to pieces. He was full
of feeble, inarticulate rage and despair. “Foolery!” he said, his one
exhaustive comment on human enterprise, adventure, war, and the chapter
of accidents that had entangled him. “Foolery! Ugh!” He included the
order of the universe in that comprehensive condemnation. He wished he
was dead.
He saw nothing of the stars, as presently the Vaterland cleared the rush
and confusion of the lower weather, nor of the duel she fought with two
circling aeroplanes, how they shot her rear-most chambers through, and
how she fought them off with explosive bullets and turned to run as she
did so.
The rush and swoop of these wonderful night birds was all lost upon him;
their heroic dash and self-sacrifice. The Vaterland was rammed, and for
some moments she hung on the verge of destruction, and sinking swiftly,
with the American aeroplane entangled with her smashed propeller, and
the Americans trying to scramble aboard. It signified nothing to Bert.
To him it conveyed itself simply as vehement swaying. Foolery! When
the American airship dropped off at last, with most of its crew shot or
fallen, Bert in his locker appreciated nothing but that the Vaterland
had taken a hideous upward leap.
But then came infinite relief, incredibly blissful relief. The rolling,
the pitching, the struggle ceased, ceased instantly and absolutely.
The Vaterland was no longer fighting the gale; her smashed and exploded
engines throbbed no more; she was disabled and driving before the wind
as smoothly as a balloon, a huge, windspread, tattered cloud of aerial
wreckage.
To Bert it was no more than the end of a series of disagreeable
sensations. He was not curious to know what had happened to the airship,
nor what had happened to the battle. For a long time he lay waiting
apprehensively for the pitching and tossing and his qualms to return,
and so, lying, boxed up in the locker, he presently fell asleep.
3
He awoke tranquil but very stuffy, and at the same time very cold, and
quite unable to recollect where he could be. His head ached, and his
breath was suffocated. He had been dreaming confusedly of Edna, and
Desert Dervishes, and of riding bicycles in an extremely perilous manner
through the upper air amidst a pyrotechnic display of crackers and
Bengal lights--to the great annoyance of a sort of composite person made
up of the Prince and Mr. Butteridge. Then for some reason Edna and
he had begun to cry pitifully for each other, and he woke up with wet
eye-lashes into this ill-ventilated darkness of the locker. He would
never see Edna any more, never see Edna any more.
He thought he must be back in the bedroom behind the cycle shop at
the bottom of Bun Hill, and he was sure the vision he had had of the
destruction of a magnificent city, a city quite incredibly great and
splendid, by means of bombs, was no more than a particularly vivid
dream.
“Grubb!” he called, anxious to tell him.
The answering silence, and the dull resonance of the locker to his
voice, supplementing the stifling quality of the air, set going a new
train of ideas. He lifted up his hands and feet, and met an inflexible
resistance. He was in a coffin, he thought! He had been buried alive! He
gave way at once to wild panic. “'Elp!” he screamed. “'Elp!” and drummed
with his feet, and kicked and struggled. “Let me out! Let me out!”
For some seconds he struggled with this intolerable horror, and then
the side of his imagined coffin gave way, and he was flying out into
daylight. Then he was rolling about on what seemed to be a padded floor
with Kurt, and being punched and sworn at lustily.
He sat up. His head bandage had become loose and got over one eye, and
he whipped the whole thing off. Kurt was also sitting up, a yard away
from him, pink as ever, wrapped in blankets, and with an aluminium
diver's helmet over his knee, staring at him with a severe expression,
and rubbing his downy unshaven chin. They were both on a slanting floor
of crimson padding, and above them was an opening like a long, low
cellar flap that Bert by an effort perceived to be the cabin door in a
half-inverted condition. The whole cabin had in fact turned on its side.
“What the deuce do you mean by it, Smallways?” said Kurt, “jumping out
of that locker when I was certain you had gone overboard with the rest
of them? Where have you been?”
“What's up?” asked Bert.
“This end of the airship is up. Most other things are down.”
“Was there a battle?”
“There was.”
“Who won?”
“I haven't seen the papers, Smallways. We left before the finish. We got
disabled and unmanageable, and our colleagues--consorts I mean--were
too busy most of them to trouble about us, and the wind blew us--Heaven
knows where the wind IS blowing us. It blew us right out of action at
the rate of eighty miles an hour or so. Gott! what a wind that was! What
a fight! And here we are!”
“Where?”
“In the air, Smallways--in the air! When we get down on the earth again
we shan't know what to do with our legs.”
“But what's below us?”
“Canada, to the best of my knowledge--and a jolly bleak, empty,
inhospitable country it looks.”
“But why ain't we right ways up?”
Kurt made no answer for a space.
“Last I remember was seeing a sort of flying-machine in a lightning
flash,” said Bert. “Gaw! that was 'orrible. Guns going off! Things
explodin'! Clouds and 'ail. Pitching and tossing. I got so scared and
desperate--and sick. You don't know how the fight came off?”
“Not a bit of it. I was up with my squad in those divers' dresses,
inside the gas-chambers, with sheets of silk for caulking. We couldn't
see a thing outside except the lightning flashes. I never saw one
of those American aeroplanes. Just saw the shots flicker through the
chambers and sent off men for the tears. We caught fire a bit--not much,
you know. We were too wet, so the fires spluttered out before we banged.
And then one of their infernal things dropped out of the air on us and
rammed. Didn't you feel it?”
“I felt everything,” said Bert. “I didn't notice any particular smash--”
“They must have been pretty desperate if they meant it. They slashed
down on us like a knife; simply ripped the after gas-chambers like
gutting herrings, crumpled up the engines and screw. Most of the engines
dropped off as they fell off us--or we'd have grounded--but the rest is
sort of dangling. We just turned up our nose to the heavens and stayed
there. Eleven men rolled off us from various points, and poor old
Winterfeld fell through the door of the Prince's cabin into the
chart-room and broke his ankle. Also we got our electric gear shot or
carried away--no one knows how. That's the position, Smallways. We're
driving through the air like a common aerostat, at the mercy of the
elements, almost due north--probably to the North Pole. We don't know
what aeroplanes the Americans have, or anything at all about it.
Very likely we have finished 'em up. One fouled us, one was struck by
lightning, some of the men saw a third upset, apparently just for
fun. They were going cheap anyhow. Also we've lost most of our
drachenflieger. They just skated off into the night. No stability in
'em. That's all. We don't know if we've won or lost. We don't know if
we're at war with the British Empire yet or at peace. Consequently, we
daren't get down. We don't know what we are up to or what we are going
to do. Our Napoleon is alone, forward, and I suppose he's rearranging
his plans. Whether New York was our Moscow or not remains to be seen.
We've had a high old time and murdered no end of people! War! Noble war!
I'm sick of it this morning. I like sitting in rooms rightway up and
not on slippery partitions. I'm a civilised man. I keep thinking of old
Albrecht and the Barbarossa.... I feel I want a wash and kind words
and a quiet home. When I look at you, I KNOW I want a wash. Gott!”--he
stifled a vehement yawn--“What a Cockney tadpole of a ruffian you look!”
“Can we get any grub?” asked Bert.
“Heaven knows!” said Kurt.
He meditated upon Bert for a time. “So far as I can judge, Smallways,”
he said, “the Prince will probably want to throw you overboard--next
time he thinks of you. He certainly will if he sees you.... After all,
you know, you came als Ballast.... And we shall have to lighten ship
extensively pretty soon. Unless I'm mistaken, the Prince will wake up
presently and start doing things with tremendous vigour.... I've taken a
fancy to you. It's the English strain in me. You're a rum little chap. I
shan't like seeing you whizz down the air.... You'd better make yourself
useful, Smallways. I think I shall requisition you for my squad. You'll
have to work, you know, and be infernally intelligent and all that. And
you'll have to hang about upside down a bit. Still, it's the best chance
you have. We shan't carry passengers much farther this trip, I fancy.
Ballast goes over-board--if we don't want to ground precious soon and be
taken prisoners of war. The Prince won't do that anyhow. He'll be game
to the last.”
4
By means of a folding chair, which was still in its place behind the
door, they got to the window and looked out in turn and contemplated
a sparsely wooded country below, with no railways nor roads, and
only occasional signs of habitation. Then a bugle sounded, and Kurt
interpreted it as a summons to food. They got through the door and
clambered with some difficulty up the nearly vertical passage,
holding on desperately with toes and finger-tips, to the ventilating
perforations in its floor. The mess stewards had found their fireless
heating arrangements intact, and there was hot cocoa for the officers
and hot soup for the men.
Bert's sense of the queerness of this experience was so keen that
it blotted out any fear he might have felt. Indeed, he was far more
interested now than afraid. He seemed to have touched down to the bottom
of fear and abandonment overnight. He was growing accustomed to the idea
that he would probably be killed presently, that this strange voyage
in the air was in all probability his death journey. No human being can
keep permanently afraid: fear goes at last to the back of one's mind,
accepted, and shelved, and done with. He squatted over his soup, sopping
it up with his bread, and contemplated his comrades. They were all
rather yellow and dirty, with four-day beards, and they grouped
themselves in the tired, unpremeditated manner of men on a wreck. They
talked little. The situation perplexed them beyond any suggestion of
ideas. Three had been hurt in the pitching up of the ship during the
fight, and one had a bandaged bullet wound. It was incredible that this
little band of men had committed murder and massacre on a scale
beyond precedent. None of them who squatted on the sloping gas-padded
partition, soup mug in hand, seemed really guilty of anything of the
sort, seemed really capable of hurting a dog wantonly. They were all
so manifestly built for homely chalets on the solid earth and carefully
tilled fields and blond wives and cheery merrymaking. The red-faced,
sturdy man with light eyelashes who had brought the first news of
the air battle to the men's mess had finished his soup, and with an
expression of maternal solicitude was readjusting the bandages of a
youngster whose arm had been sprained.
Bert was crumbling the last of his bread into the last of his soup,
eking it out as long as possible, when suddenly he became aware that
every one was looking at a pair of feet that were dangling across the
downturned open doorway. Kurt appeared and squatted across the hinge. In
some mysterious way he had shaved his face and smoothed down his light
golden hair. He looked extraordinarily cherubic. “Der Prinz,” he said.
A second pair of boots followed, making wide and magnificent gestures in
their attempts to feel the door frame. Kurt guided them to a foothold,
and the Prince, shaved and brushed and beeswaxed and clean and big and
terrible, slid down into position astride of the door. All the men and
Bert also stood up and saluted.
The Prince surveyed them with the gesture of a man who site a steed. The
head of the Kapitan appeared beside him.
Then Bert had a terrible moment. The blue blaze of the Prince's eye
fell upon him, the great finger pointed, a question was asked. Kurt
intervened with explanations.
“So,” said the Prince, and Bert was disposed of.
Then the Prince addressed the men in short, heroic sentences, steadying
himself on the hinge with one hand and waving the other in a fine
variety of gesture. What he said Bert could not tell, but he perceived
that their demeanor changed, their backs stiffened. They began to
punctuate the Prince's discourse with cries of approval. At the end
their leader burst into song and all the men with him. “Ein feste Burg
ist unser Gott,” they chanted in deep, strong tones, with an immense
moral uplifting. It was glaringly inappropriate in a damaged,
half-overturned, and sinking airship, which had been disabled and blown
out of action after inflicting the cruellest bombardment in the world's
history; but it was immensely stirring nevertheless. Bert was deeply
moved. He could not sing any of the words of Luther's great hymn, but
he opened his mouth and emitted loud, deep, and partially harmonious
notes....
Far below, this deep chanting struck on the ears of a little camp of
Christianised half-breeds who were lumbering. They were breakfasting,
but they rushed out cheerfully, quite prepared for the Second Advent.
They stared at the shattered and twisted Vaterland driving before the
gale, amazed beyond words. In so many respects it was like their idea
of the Second Advent, and then again in so many respects it wasn't. They
stared at its passage, awe-stricken and perplexed beyond their power of
words. The hymn ceased. Then after a long interval a voice came out of
heaven. “Vat id diss blace here galled itself; vat?”
They made no answer. Indeed they did not understand, though the question
repeated itself.
And at last the monster drove away northward over a crest of pine woods
and was no more seen. They fell into a hot and long disputation....
The hymn ended. The Prince's legs dangled up the passage again, and
every one was briskly prepared for heroic exertion and triumphant acts.
“Smallways!” cried Kurt, “come here!”
5
Then Bert, under Kurt's direction, had his first experience of the work
of an air-sailor.
The immediate task before the captain of the Vaterland was a very simple
one. He had to keep afloat. The wind, though it had fallen from its
earlier violence, was still blowing strongly enough to render the
grounding of so clumsy a mass extremely dangerous, even if it had been
desirable for the Prince to land in inhabited country, and so risk
capture. It was necessary to keep the airship up until the wind fell and
then, if possible, to descend in some lonely district of the Territory
where there would be a chance of repair or rescue by some searching
consort. In order to do this weight had to be dropped, and Kurt was
detailed with a dozen men to climb down among the wreckage of the
deflated air-chambers and cut the stuff clear, portion by portion, as
the airship sank. So Bert, armed with a sharp cutlass, found himself
clambering about upon netting four thousand feet up in the air, trying
to understand Kurt when he spoke in English and to divine him when he
used German.
It was giddy work, but not nearly so giddy as a rather overnourished
reader sitting in a warm room might imagine. Bert found it quite
possible to look down and contemplate the wild sub-arctic landscape
below, now devoid of any sign of habitation, a land of rocky cliffs and
cascades and broad swirling desolate rivers, and of trees and thickets
that grew more stunted and scrubby as the day wore on. Here and there on
the hills were patches and pockets of snow. And over all this he worked,
hacking away at the tough and slippery oiled silk and clinging stoutly
to the netting. Presently they cleared and dropped a tangle of bent
steel rods and wires from the frame, and a big chunk of silk bladder.
That was trying. The airship flew up at once as this loose hamper
parted. It seemed almost as though they were dropping all Canada. The
stuff spread out in the air and floated down and hit and twisted up in a
nasty fashion on the lip of a gorge. Bert clung like a frozen monkey to
his ropes and did not move a muscle for five minutes.
But there was something very exhilarating, he found, in this dangerous
work, and above every thing else, there was the sense of fellowship. He
was no longer an isolated and distrustful stranger among these others,
he had now a common object with them, he worked with a friendly rivalry
to get through with his share before them. And he developed a great
respect and affection for Kurt, which had hitherto been only latent
in him. Kurt with a job to direct was altogether admirable; he was
resourceful, helpful, considerate, swift. He seemed to be everywhere.
One forgot his pinkness, his light cheerfulness of manner. Directly one
had trouble he was at hand with sound and confident advice. He was like
an elder brother to his men.
All together they cleared three considerable chunks of wreckage, and
then Bert was glad to clamber up into the cabins again and give place to
a second squad. He and his companions were given hot coffee, and indeed,
even gloved as they were, the job had been a cold one. They sat drinking
it and regarding each other with satisfaction. One man spoke to Bert
amiably in German, and Bert nodded and smiled. Through Kurt, Bert, whose
ankles were almost frozen, succeeded in getting a pair of top-boots from
one of the disabled men.
In the afternoon the wind abated greatly, and small, infrequent
snowflakes came drifting by. Snow also spread more abundantly below, and
the only trees were clumps of pine and spruce in the lower valleys.
Kurt went with three men into the still intact gas-chambers, let out
a certain quantity of gas from them, and prepared a series of ripping
panels for the descent. Also the residue of the bombs and explosives in
the magazine were thrown overboard and fell, detonating loudly, in the
wilderness below. And about four o'clock in the afternoon upon a wide
and rocky plain within sight of snow-crested cliffs, the Vaterland
ripped and grounded.
It was necessarily a difficult and violent affair, for the Vaterland had
not been planned for the necessities of a balloon. The captain got
one panel ripped too soon and the others not soon enough. She dropped
heavily, bounced clumsily, and smashed the hanging gallery into the
fore-part, mortally injuring Von Winterfeld, and then came down in a
collapsing heap after dragging for some moments. The forward shield
and its machine gun tumbled in upon the things below. Two men were hurt
badly--one got a broken leg and one was internally injured--by flying
rods and wires, and Bert was pinned for a time under the side. When
at last he got clear and could take a view of the situation, the great
black eagle that had started so splendidly from Franconia six
evenings ago, sprawled deflated over the cabins of the airship and the
frost-bitten rocks of this desolate place and looked a most unfortunate
bird--as though some one had caught it and wrung its neck and cast
it aside. Several of the crew of the airship were standing about in
silence, contemplating the wreckage and the empty wilderness into which
they had fallen. Others were busy under the imromptu tent made by
the empty gas-chambers. The Prince had gone a little way off and was
scrutinising the distant heights through his field-glass. They had
the appearance of old sea cliffs; here and there were small clumps of
conifers, and in two places tall cascades. The nearer ground was strewn
with glaciated boulders and supported nothing but a stunted Alpine
vegetation of compact clustering stems and stalkless flowers. No river
was visible, but the air was full of the rush and babble of a torrent
close at hand. A bleak and biting wind was blowing. Ever and again a
snowflake drifted past. The springless frozen earth under Bert's feet
felt strangely dead and heavy after the buoyant airship.
6
So it came about that that great and powerful Prince Karl Albert was
for a time thrust out of the stupendous conflict he chiefly had been
instrumental in provoking. The chances of battle and the weather
conspired to maroon him in Labrador, and there he raged for six long
days, while war and wonder swept the world. Nation rose against
nation and air-fleet grappled air-fleet, cities blazed and men died in
multitudes; but in Labrador one might have dreamt that, except for a
little noise of hammering, the world was at peace.
There the encampment lay; from a distance the cabins, covered over with
the silk of the balloon part, looked like a gipsy's tent on a rather
exceptional scale, and all the available hands were busy in building
out of the steel of the framework a mast from which the Vaterland's
electricians might hang the long conductors of the apparatus for
wireless telegraphy that was to link the Prince to the world again.
There were times when it seemed they would never rig that mast. From
the outset the party suffered hardship. They were not too abundantly
provisioned, and they were put on short rations, and for all the thick
garments they had, they were but ill-equipped against the piercing wind
and inhospitable violence of this wilderness. The first night was spent
in darkness and without fires. The engines that had supplied power were
smashed and dropped far away to the south, and there was never a
match among the company. It had been death to carry matches. All the
explosives had been thrown out of the magazine, and it was only towards
morning that the bird-faced man whose cabin Bert had taken in the
beginning confessed to a brace of duelling pistols and cartridges, with
which a fire could be started. Afterwards the lockers of the machine gun
were found to contain a supply of unused ammunition.
The night was a distressing one and seemed almost interminable. Hardly
any one slept. There were seven wounded men aboard, and Von Winterfeld's
head had been injured, and he was shivering and in delirium, struggling
with his attendant and shouting strange things about the burning of New
York. The men crept together in the mess-room in the darkling, wrapped
in what they could find and drank cocoa from the fireless heaters and
listened to his cries. In the morning the Prince made them a speech
about Destiny, and the God of his Fathers and the pleasure and glory
of giving one's life for his dynasty, and a number of similar
considerations that might otherwise have been neglected in that bleak
wilderness. The men cheered without enthusiasm, and far away a wolf
howled.
Then they set to work, and for a week they toiled to put up a mast of
steel, and hang from it a gridiron of copper wires two hundred feet by
twelve. The theme of all that time was work, work continually, straining
and toilsome work, and all the rest was grim hardship and evil chances,
save for a certain wild splendour in the sunset and sunrise in the
torrents and drifting weather, in the wilderness about them. They built
and tended a ring of perpetual fires, gangs roamed for brushwood and met
with wolves, and the wounded men and their beds were brought out from
the airship cabins, and put in shelters about the fires. There old Von
Winterfeld raved and became quiet and presently died, and three of
the other wounded sickened for want of good food, while their fellows
mended. These things happened, as it were, in the wings; the central
facts before Bert's consciousness were always firstly the perpetual
toil, the holding and lifting, and lugging at heavy and clumsy masses,
the tedious filing and winding of wires, and secondly, the Prince,
urgent and threatening whenever a man relaxed. He would stand over them,
and point over their heads, southward into the empty sky. “The world
there,” he said in German, “is waiting for us! Fifty Centuries come to
their Consummation.” Bert did not understand the words, but he read the
gesture. Several times the Prince grew angry; once with a man who was
working slowly, once with a man who stole a comrade's ration. The first
he scolded and set to a more tedious task; the second he struck in the
face and ill-used. He did no work himself. There was a clear space near
the fires in which he would walk up and down, sometimes for two hours
together, with arms folded, muttering to himself of Patience and his
destiny. At times these mutterings broke out into rhetoric, into shouts
and gestures that would arrest the workers; they would stare at him
until they perceived that his blue eyes glared and his waving hand
addressed itself always to the southward hills. On Sunday the work
ceased for half an hour, and the Prince preached on faith and God's
friendship for David, and afterwards they all sang: “Ein feste Burg ist
unser Gott.”
In an improvised hovel lay Von Winterfeld, and all one morning he raved
of the greatness of Germany. “Blut und Eisen!” he shouted, and then,
as if in derision, “Welt-Politik--ha, ha!” Then he would explain
complicated questions of polity to imaginary hearers, in low, wily
tones. The other sick men kept still, listening to him. Bert's
distracted attention would be recalled by Kurt. “Smallways, take that
end. So!”
Slowly, tediously, the great mast was rigged and hoisted foot by foot
into place. The electricians had contrived a catchment pool and a wheel
in the torrent close at hand--for the little Mulhausen dynamo with its
turbinal volute used by the telegraphists was quite adaptable to water
driving, and on the sixth day in the evening the apparatus was
in working order and the Prince was calling--weakly, indeed, but
calling--to his air-fleet across the empty spaces of the world. For a
time he called unheeded.
The effect of that evening was to linger long in Bert's memory. A red
fire spluttered and blazed close by the electricians at their work, and
red gleams ran up the vertical steel mast and threads of copper wire
towards the zenith. The Prince sat on a rock close by, with his chin
on his hand, waiting. Beyond and to the northward was the cairn that
covered Von Winterfeld, surmounted by a cross of steel, and from among
the tumbled rocks in the distance the eyes of a wolf gleamed redly.
On the other hand was the wreckage of the great airship and the men
bivouacked about a second ruddy flare. They were all keeping very still,
as if waiting to hear what news might presently be given them. Far away,
across many hundreds of miles of desolation, other wireless masts would
be clicking, and snapping, and waking into responsive vibration. Perhaps
they were not. Perhaps those throbs upon the ethers wasted themselves
upon a regardless world. When the men spoke, they spoke in low tones.
Now and then a bird shrieked remotely, and once a wolf howled. All these
things were set in the immense cold spaciousness of the wild.
7
Bert got the news last, and chiefly in broken English, from a linguist
among his mates. It was only far on in the night that the weary
telegraphist got an answer to his calls, but then the messages came
clear and strong. And such news it was!
“I say,” said Bert at his breakfast, amidst a great clamour, “tell us a
bit.”
“All de vorlt is at vor!” said the linguist, waving his cocoa in an
illustrative manner, “all de vorlt is at vor!”
Bert stared southward into the dawn. It did not seem so.
“All de vorlt is at vor! They haf burn' Berlin; they haf burn' London;
they haf burn' Hamburg and Paris. Chapan hass burn San Francisco. We haf
mate a camp at Niagara. Dat is whad they are telling us. China has cot
drachenflieger and luftschiffe beyont counting. All de vorlt is at vor!”
“Gaw!” said Bert.
“Yess,” said the linguist, drinking his cocoa.
“Burnt up London, 'ave they? Like we did New York?”
“It wass a bombardment.”
“They don't say anything about a place called Clapham, or Bun Hill, do
they?”
“I haf heard noding,” said the linguist.
That was all Bert could get for a time. But the excitement of all the
men about him was contagious, and presently he saw Kurt standing alone,
hands behind him, and looking at one of the distant waterfalls very
steadfastly. He went up and saluted, soldier-fashion. “Beg pardon,
lieutenant,” he said.
Kurt turned his face. It was unusually grave that morning. “I was
just thinking I would like to see that waterfall closer,” he said. “It
reminds me--what do you want?”
“I can't make 'ead or tail of what they're saying, sir. Would you mind
telling me the news?”
“Damn the news,” said Kurt. “You'll get news enough before the day's
out. It's the end of the world. They're sending the Graf Zeppelin for
us. She'll be here by the morning, and we ought to be at Niagara--or
eternal smash--within eight and forty hours.... I want to look at that
waterfall. You'd better come with me. Have you had your rations?”
“Yessir.”
“Very well. Come.”
And musing profoundly, Kurt led the way across the rocks towards the
distant waterfall.
For a time Bert walked behind him in the character of an escort; then as
they passed out of the atmosphere of the encampment, Kurt lagged for him
to come alongside.
“We shall be back in it all in two days' time,” he said. “And it's a
devil of a war to go back to. That's the news. The world's gone mad.
Our fleet beat the Americans the night we got disabled, that's clear.
We lost eleven--eleven airships certain, and all their aeroplanes got
smashed. God knows how much we smashed or how many we killed. But that
was only the beginning. Our start's been like firing a magazine. Every
country was hiding flying-machines. They're fighting in the air all over
Europe--all over the world. The Japanese and Chinese have joined in.
That's the great fact. That's the supreme fact. They've pounced into our
little quarrels.... The Yellow Peril was a peril after all! They've got
thousands of airships. They're all over the world. We bombarded London
and Paris, and now the French and English have smashed up Berlin. And
now Asia is at us all, and on the top of us all.... It's mania. China
on the top. And they don't know where to stop. It's limitless. It's the
last confusion. They're bombarding capitals, smashing up dockyards and
factories, mines and fleets.”
“Did they do much to London, sir?” asked Bert.
“Heaven knows....”
He said no more for a time.
“This Labrador seems a quiet place,” he resumed at last. “I'm half a
mind to stay here. Can't do that. No! I've got to see it through. I've
got to see it through. You've got to, too. Every one.... But why?... I
tell you--our world's gone to pieces. There's no way out of it, no way
back. Here we are! We're like mice caught in a house on fire, we're like
cattle overtaken by a flood. Presently we shall be picked up, and back
we shall go into the fighting. We shall kill and smash again--perhaps.
It's a Chino-Japanese air-fleet this time, and the odds are against
us. Our turns will come. What will happen to you I don't know, but for
myself, I know quite well; I shall be killed.”
“You'll be all right,” said Bert, after a queer pause.
“No!” said Kurt, “I'm going to be killed. I didn't know it before, but
this morning, at dawn, I knew it--as though I'd been told.”
“'Ow?”
“I tell you I know.”
“But 'ow COULD you know?”
“I know.”
“Like being told?”
“Like being certain.
“I know,” he repeated, and for a time they walked in silence towards the
waterfall.
Kurt, wrapped in his thoughts, walked heedlessly, and at last broke out
again. “I've always felt young before, Smallways, but this morning
I feel old--old. So old! Nearer to death than old men feel. And I've
always thought life was a lark. It isn't.... This sort of thing has
always been happening, I suppose--these things, wars and earthquakes,
that sweep across all the decency of life. It's just as though I had
woke up to it all for the first time. Every night since we were at New
York I've dreamt of it.... And it's always been so--it's the way of
life. People are torn away from the people they care for; homes are
smashed, creatures full of life, and memories, and little peculiar gifts
are scalded and smashed, and torn to pieces, and starved, and spoilt.
London! Berlin! San Francisco! Think of all the human histories we ended
in New York!... And the others go on again as though such things weren't
possible. As I went on! Like animals! Just like animals.”
He said nothing for a long time, and then he dropped out, “The Prince is
a lunatic!”
They came to a place where they had to climb, and then to a long peat
level beside a rivulet. There a quantity of delicate little pink flowers
caught Bert's eye. “Gaw!” he said, and stooped to pick one. “In a place
like this.”
Kurt stopped and half turned. His face winced.
“I never see such a flower,” said Bert. “It's so delicate.”
“Pick some more if you want to,” said Kurt.
Bert did so, while Kurt stood and watched him.
“Funny 'ow one always wants to pick flowers,” said Bert.
Kurt had nothing to add to that.
They went on again, without talking, for a long time.
At last they came to a rocky hummock, from which the view of the
waterfall opened out. There Kurt stopped and seated himself on a rock.
“That's as much as I wanted to see,” he explained. “It isn't very like,
but it's like enough.”
“Like what?”
“Another waterfall I knew.”
He asked a question abruptly. “Got a girl, Smallways?”
“Funny thing,” said Bert, “those flowers, I suppose.--I was jes'
thinking of 'er.”
“So was I.”
“WHAT! Edna?”
“No. I was thinking of MY Edna. We've all got Ednas, I suppose, for our
imaginations to play about. This was a girl. But all that's past for
ever. It's hard to think I can't see her just for a minute--just let her
know I'm thinking of her.”
“Very likely,” said Bert, “you'll see 'er all right.”
“No,” said Kurt with decision, “I KNOW.”
“I met her,” he went on, “in a place like this--in the Alps--Engstlen
Alp. There's a waterfall rather like this one--a broad waterfall down
towards Innertkirchen. That's why I came here this morning. We slipped
away and had half a day together beside it. And we picked flowers. Just
such flowers as you picked. The same for all I know. And gentian.”
“I know” said Bert, “me and Edna--we done things like that. Flowers. And
all that. Seems years off now.”
“She was beautiful and daring and shy, Mein Gott! I can hardly hold
myself for the desire to see her and hear her voice again before I
die. Where is she?... Look here, Smallways, I shall write a sort of
letter--And there's her portrait.” He touched his breast pocket.
“You'll see 'er again all right,” said Bert.
“No! I shall never see her again.... I don't understand why people
should meet just to be torn apart. But I know she and I will never meet
again. That I know as surely as that the sun will rise, and that cascade
come shining over the rocks after I am dead and done.... Oh! It's
all foolishness and haste and violence and cruel folly, stupidity and
blundering hate and selfish ambition--all the things that men have
done--all the things they will ever do. Gott! Smallways, what a muddle
and confusion life has always been--the battles and massacres and
disasters, the hates and harsh acts, the murders and sweatings, the
lynchings and cheatings. This morning I am tired of it all, as though
I'd just found it out for the first time. I HAVE found it out. When a
man is tired of life, I suppose it is time for him to die. I've lost
heart, and death is over me. Death is close to me, and I know I have
got to end. But think of all the hopes I had only a little time ago,
the sense of fine beginnings!... It was all a sham. There were no
beginnings.... We're just ants in ant-hill cities, in a world that
doesn't matter; that goes on and rambles into nothingness. New York--New
York doesn't even strike me as horrible. New York was nothing but an
ant-hill kicked to pieces by a fool!
“Think of it, Smallways: there's war everywhere! They're smashing up
their civilisation before they have made it. The sort of thing the
English did at Alexandria, the Japanese at Port Arthur, the French at
Casablanca, is going on everywhere. Everywhere! Down in South America
even they are fighting among themselves! No place is safe--no place is
at peace. There is no place where a woman and her daughter can hide and
be at peace. The war comes through the air, bombs drop in the night.
Quiet people go out in the morning, and see air-fleets passing
overhead--dripping death--dripping death!”
CHAPTER VIII. A WORLD AT WAR
1
It was only very slowly that Bert got hold of this idea that the
whole world was at war, that he formed any image at all of the crowded
countries south of these Arctic solitudes stricken with terror and
dismay as these new-born aerial navies swept across their skies. He
was not used to thinking of the world as a whole, but as a limitless
hinterland of happenings beyond the range of his immediate vision. War
in his imagination was something, a source of news and emotion, that
happened in a restricted area, called the Seat of War. But now the whole
atmosphere was the Seat of War, and every land a cockpit. So closely had
the nations raced along the path of research and invention, so secret
and yet so parallel had been their plans and acquisitions, that it was
within a few hours of the launching of the first fleet in Franconia
that an Asiatic Armada beat its west-ward way across, high above the
marvelling millions in the plain of the Ganges. But the preparations
of the Confederation of Eastern Asia had been on an altogether more
colossal scale than the German. “With this step,” said Tan Ting-siang,
“we overtake and pass the West. We recover the peace of the world that
these barbarians have destroyed.”
Their secrecy and swiftness and inventions had far surpassed those of
the Germans, and where the Germans had had a hundred men at work the
Asiatics had ten thousand. There came to their great aeronautic parks
at Chinsi-fu and Tsingyen by the mono-rails that now laced the whole
surface of China a limitless supply of skilled and able workmen, workmen
far above the average European in industrial efficiency. The news of the
German World Surprise simply quickened their efforts. At the time of the
bombardment of New York it is doubtful if the Germans had three hundred
airships all together in the world; the score of Asiatic fleets flying
east and west and south must have numbered several thousand. Moreover
the Asiatics had a real fighting flying-machine, the Niais as they were
called, a light but quite efficient weapon, infinitely superior to the
German drachenflieger. Like that, it was a one-man machine, but it
was built very lightly of steel and cane and chemical silk, with a
transverse engine, and a flapping sidewing. The aeronaut carried a gun
firing explosive bullets loaded with oxygen, and in addition, and true
to the best tradition of Japan, a sword. Mostly they were Japanese, and
it is characteristic that from the first it was contemplated that the
aeronaut should be a swordsman. The wings of these flyers had bat-like
hooks forward, by which they were to cling to their antagonist's
gas-chambers while boarding him. These light flying-machines were
carried with the fleets, and also sent overland or by sea to the front
with the men. They were capable of flights of from two to five hundred
miles according to the wind.
So, hard upon the uprush of the first German air-fleet, these Asiatic
swarms took to the atmosphere. Instantly every organised Government in
the world was frantically and vehemently building airships and whatever
approach to a flying machine its inventors' had discovered. There was no
time for diplomacy. Warnings and ultimatums were telegraphed to and fro,
and in a few hours all the panic-fierce world was openly at war, and at
war in the most complicated way. For Britain and France and Italy had
declared war upon Germany and outraged Swiss neutrality; India, at the
sight of Asiatic airships, had broken into a Hindoo insurrection
in Bengal and a Mohametan revolt hostile to this in the North-west
Provinces--the latter spreading like wildfire from Gobi to the Gold
Coast--and the Confederation of Eastern Asia had seized the oil wells of
Burmha and was impartially attacking America and Germany. In a week they
were building airships in Damascus and Cairo and Johannesburg; Australia
and New Zealand were frantically equipping themselves. One unique and
terrifying aspect of this development was the swiftness with which these
monsters could be produced. To build an ironclad took from two to four
years; an airship could be put together in as many weeks. Moreover,
compared with even a torpedo boat, the airship was remarkably simple to
construct, given the air-chamber material, the engines, the gas plant,
and the design, it was really not more complicated and far easier than
an ordinary wooden boat had been a hundred years before. And now from
Cape Horn to Nova Zembla, and from Canton round to Canton again, there
were factories and workshops and industrial resources.
And the German airships were barely in sight of the Atlantic waters, the
first Asiatic fleet was scarcely reported from Upper Burmah, before the
fantastic fabric of credit and finance that had held the world together
economically for a hundred years strained and snapped. A tornado of
realisation swept through every stock exchange in the world; banks
stopped payment, business shrank and ceased, factories ran on for a
day or so by a sort of inertia, completing the orders of bankrupt and
extinguished customers, then stopped. The New York Bert Smallways saw,
for all its glare of light and traffic, was in the pit of an economic
and financial collapse unparalleled in history. The flow of the food
supply was already a little checked. And before the world-war had lasted
two weeks--by the time, that is, that mast was rigged in Labrador--there
was not a city or town in the world outside China, however far from
the actual centres of destruction, where police and government were not
adopting special emergency methods to deal with a want of food and a
glut of unemployed people.
The special peculiarities of aerial warfare were of such a nature as
to trend, once it had begun, almost inevitably towards social
disorganisation. The first of these peculiarities was brought home
to the Germans in their attack upon New York; the immense power of
destruction an airship has over the thing below, and its relative
inability to occupy or police or guard or garrison a surrendered
position. Necessarily, in the face of urban populations in a state
of economic disorganisation and infuriated and starving, this led to
violent and destructive collisions, and even where the air-fleet floated
inactive above, there would be civil conflict and passionate disorder
below. Nothing comparable to this state of affairs had been known in
the previous history of warfare, unless we take such a case as that of
a nineteenth century warship attacking some large savage or barbaric
settlement, or one of those naval bombardments that disfigure the
history of Great Britain in the late eighteenth century. Then, indeed,
there had been cruelties and destruction that faintly foreshadowed the
horrors of the aerial war. Moreover, before the twentieth century the
world had had but one experience, and that a comparatively light one,
in the Communist insurrection of Paris, 1871, of the possibilities of a
modern urban population under warlike stresses.
A second peculiarity of airship war as it first came to the world that
also made for social collapse, was the ineffectiveness of the early
air-ships against each other. Upon anything below they could rain
explosives in the most deadly fashion, forts and ships and cities lay at
their mercy, but unless they were prepared for a suicidal grapple they
could do remarkably little mischief to each other. The armament of the
huge German airships, big as the biggest mammoth liners afloat, was one
machine gun that could easily have been packed up on a couple of mules.
In addition, when it became evident that the air must be fought for, the
air-sailors were provided with rifles with explosive bullets of oxygen
or inflammable substance, but no airship at any time ever carried as
much in the way of guns and armour as the smallest gunboat on the navy
list had been accustomed to do. Consequently, when these monsters met in
battle, they manoeuvred for the upper place, or grappled and fought like
junks, throwing grenades fighting hand to hand in an entirely medieval
fashion. The risks of a collapse and fall on either side came near to
balancing in every case the chances of victory. As a consequence, and
after their first experiences of battle, one finds a growing tendency on
the part of the air-fleet admirals to evade joining battle, and to seek
rather the moral advantage of a destructive counter attack.
And if the airships were too ineffective, the early drachenflieger were
either too unstable, like the German, or too light, like the Japanese,
to produce immediately decisive results. Later, it is true, the
Brazilians launched a flying-machine of a type and scale that was
capable of dealing with an airship, but they built only three or four,
they operated only in South America, and they vanished from history
untraceably in the time when world-bankruptcy put a stop to all further
engineering production on any considerable scale.
The third peculiarity of aerial warfare was that it was at once
enormously destructive and entirely indecisive. It had this unique
feature, that both sides lay open to punitive attack. In all previous
forms of war, both by land and sea, the losing side was speedily unable
to raid its antagonist's territory and the communications. One fought
on a “front,” and behind that front the winner's supplies and resources,
his towns and factories and capital, the peace of his country, were
secure. If the war was a naval one, you destroyed your enemy's battle
fleet and then blockaded his ports, secured his coaling stations, and
hunted down any stray cruisers that threatened your ports of commerce.
But to blockade and watch a coastline is one thing, to blockade and
watch the whole surface of a country is another, and cruisers and
privateers are things that take long to make, that cannot be packed up
and hidden and carried unostentatiously from point to point. In aerial
war the stronger side, even supposing it destroyed the main battle fleet
of the weaker, had then either to patrol and watch or destroy every
possible point at which he might produce another and perhaps a novel and
more deadly form of flyer. It meant darkening his air with airships. It
meant building them by the thousand and making aeronauts by the hundred
thousand. A small uninitated airship could be hidden in a railway
shed, in a village street, in a wood; a flying machine is even less
conspicuous.
And in the air are no streets, no channels, no point where one can
say of an antagonist, “If he wants to reach my capital he must come by
here.” In the air all directions lead everywhere.
Consequently it was impossible to end a war by any of the established
methods. A, having outnumbered and overwhelmed B, hovers, a thousand
airships strong, over his capital, threatening to bombard it unless B
submits. B replies by wireless telegraphy that he is now in the act of
bombarding the chief manufacturing city of A by means of three raider
airships. A denounces B's raiders as pirates and so forth, bombards B's
capital, and sets off to hunt down B's airships, while B, in a state of
passionate emotion and heroic unconquerableness, sets to work amidst his
ruins, making fresh airships and explosives for the benefit of A.
The war became perforce a universal guerilla war, a war inextricably
involving civilians and homes and all the apparatus of social life.
These aspects of aerial fighting took the world by surprise. There had
been no foresight to deduce these consequences. If there had been, the
world would have arranged for a Universal Peace Conference in 1900.
But mechanical invention had gone faster than intellectual and social
organisation, and the world, with its silly old flags, its silly
unmeaning tradition of nationality, its cheap newspapers and cheaper
passions and imperialisms, its base commercial motives and habitual
insincerities and vulgarities, its race lies and conflicts, was taken by
surprise. Once the war began there was no stopping it. The flimsy fabric
of credit that had grown with no man foreseeing, and that had held those
hundreds of millions in an economic interdependence that no man clearly
understood, dissolved in panic. Everywhere went the airships dropping
bombs, destroying any hope of a rally, and everywhere below were
economic catastrophe, starving workless people, rioting, and social
disorder. Whatever constructive guiding intelligence there had been
among the nations vanished in the passionate stresses of the time. Such
newspapers and documents and histories as survive from this period
all tell one universal story of towns and cities with the food supply
interrupted and their streets congested with starving unemployed; of
crises in administration and states of siege, of provisional Governments
and Councils of Defence, and, in the cases of India and Egypt,
insurrectionary committees taking charge of the re-arming of the
population, of the making of batteries and gun-pits, of the vehement
manufacture of airships and flying-machines.
One sees these things in glimpses, in illuminated moments, as if through
a driving reek of clouds, going on all over the world. It was the
dissolution of an age; it was the collapse of the civilisation that
had trusted to machinery, and the instruments of its destruction were
machines. But while the collapse of the previous great civilisation,
that of Rome, had been a matter of centuries, had been a thing of phase
and phase, like the ageing and dying of a man, this, like his killing by
railway or motor car, was one swift, conclusive smashing and an end.
2
The early battles of the aerial war were no doubt determined by attempts
to realise the old naval maxim, to ascertain the position of the enemy's
fleet and to destroy it. There was first the battle of the Bernese
Oberland, in which the Italian and French navigables in their flank
raid upon the Franconian Park were assailed by the Swiss experimental
squadron, supported as the day wore on by German airships, and then
the encounter of the British Winterhouse-Dunn aeroplanes with three
unfortunate Germans.
Then came the Battle of North India, in which the entire Anglo-Indian
aeronautic settlement establishment fought for three days against
overwhelming odds, and was dispersed and destroyed in detail.
And simultaneously with the beginning of that, commenced the momentous
struggle of the Germans and Asiatics that is usually known as the Battle
of Niagara because of the objective of the Asiatic attack. But it passed
gradually into a sporadic conflict over half a continent. Such German
airships as escaped destruction in battle descended and surrendered to
the Americans, and were re-manned, and in the end it became a series of
pitiless and heroic encounters between the Americans, savagely resolved
to exterminate their enemies, and a continually reinforced army of
invasion from Asia quartered upon the Pacific slope and supported by
an immense fleet. From the first the war in America was fought with
implacable bitterness; no quarter was asked, no prisoners were taken.
With ferocious and magnificent energy the Americans constructed and
launched ship after ship to battle and perish against the Asiatic
multitudes. All other affairs were subordinate to this war, the whole
population was presently living or dying for it. Presently, as I shall
tell, the white men found in the Butteridge machine a weapon that could
meet and fight the flying-machines of the Asiatic swordsman.
The Asiatic invasion of America completely effaced the German-American
conflict. It vanishes from history. At first it had seemed to promise
quite sufficient tragedy in itself--beginning as it did in unforgettable
massacre. After the destruction of central New York all America had
risen like one man, resolved to die a thousand deaths rather than submit
to Germany. The Germans grimly resolved upon beating the Americans into
submission and, following out the plans developed by the Prince, had
seized Niagara--in order to avail themselves of its enormous powerworks;
expelled all its inhabitants and made a desert of its environs as far as
Buffalo. They had also, directly Great Britain and France declare war,
wrecked the country upon the Canadian side for nearly ten miles inland.
They began to bring up men and material from the fleet off the east
coast, stringing out to and fro like bees getting honey. It was then
that the Asiatic forces appeared, and it was in their attack upon this
German base at Niagara that the air-fleets of East and West first met
and the greater issue became clear.
One conspicuous peculiarity of the early aerial fighting arose from the
profound secrecy with which the airships had been prepared. Each power
had had but the dimmest inkling of the schemes of its rivals, and even
experiments with its own devices were limited by the needs of secrecy.
None of the designers of airships and aeroplanes had known clearly what
their inventions might have to fight; many had not imagined they would
have to fight anything whatever in the air; and had planned them only
for the dropping of explosives. Such had been the German idea. The only
weapon for fighting another airship with which the Franconian fleet had
been provided was the machine gun forward. Only after the fight over
New York were the men given short rifles with detonating bullets.
Theoretically, the drachenflieger were to have been the fighting weapon.
They were declared to be aerial torpedo-boats, and the aeronaut was
supposed to swoop close to his antagonist and cast his bombs as he
whirled past. But indeed these contrivances were hopelessly unstable;
not one-third in any engagement succeeded in getting back to the mother
airship. The rest were either smashed up or grounded.
The allied Chino-Japanese fleet made the same distinction as the Germans
between airships and fighting machines heavier than air, but the type in
both cases was entirely different from the occidental models, and--it
is eloquent of the vigour with which these great peoples took up and
bettered the European methods of scientific research in almost every
particular the invention of Asiatic engineers. Chief among these, it
is worth remarking, was Mohini K. Chatterjee, a political exile who had
formerly served in the British-Indian aeronautic park at Lahore.
The German airship was fish-shaped, with a blunted head; the Asiatic
airship was also fish-shaped, but not so much on the lines of a cod or
goby as of a ray or sole. It had a wide, flat underside, unbroken by
windows or any opening except along the middle line. Its cabins occupied
its axis, with a sort of bridge deck above, and the gas-chambers gave
the whole affair the shape of a gipsy's hooped tent, except that it was
much flatter. The German airship was essentially a navigable balloon
very much lighter than air; the Asiatic airship was very little lighter
than air and skimmed through it with much greater velocity if with
considerably less stability. They carried fore and aft guns, the latter
much the larger, throwing inflammatory shells, and in addition they had
nests for riflemen on both the upper and the under side. Light as this
armament was in comparison with the smallest gunboat that ever sailed,
it was sufficient for them to outfight as well as outfly the German
monster airships. In action they flew to get behind or over the Germans:
they even dashed underneath, avoiding only passing immediately beneath
the magazine, and then as soon as they had crossed let fly with their
rear gun, and sent flares or oxygen shells into the antagonist's
gas-chambers.
It was not in their airships, but, as I have said, in their
flying-machines proper, that the strength of the Asiatics lay. Next
only to the Butteridge machine, these were certainly the most efficient
heavier-than-air fliers that had ever appeared. They were the invention
of a Japanese artist, and they differed in type extremely from the
box-kite quality of the German drachenflieger. They had curiously
curved, flexible side wings, more like _bent_ butterfly's wings than
anything else, and made of a substance like celluloid and of brightly
painted silk, and they had a long humming-bird tail. At the forward
corner of the wings were hooks, rather like the claws of a bat, by which
the machine could catch and hang and tear at the walls of an airship's
gas-chamber. The solitary rider sat between the wings above a transverse
explosive engine, an explosive engine that differed in no essential
particular from those in use in the light motor bicycles of the period.
Below was a single large wheel. The rider sat astride of a saddle, as in
the Butteridge machine, and he carried a large double-edged two-handed
sword, in addition to his explosive-bullet firing rifle.
3
One sets down these particulars and compares the points of the American
and German pattern of aeroplane and navigable, but none of these facts
were clearly known to any of those who fought in this monstrously
confused battle above the American great lakes.
Each side went into action against it knew not what, under novel
conditions and with apparatus that even without hostile attacks was
capable of producing the most disconcerting surprises. Schemes of
action, attempts at collective manoeuvring necessarily went to pieces
directly the fight began, just as they did in almost all the early
ironclad battles of the previous century. Each captain then had to fall
back upon individual action and his own devices; one would see triumph
in what another read as a cue for flight and despair. It is as true of
the Battle of Niagara as of the Battle of Lissa that it was not a battle
but a bundle of “battlettes”!
To such a spectator as Bert it presented itself as a series of
incidents, some immense, some trivial, but collectively incoherent. He
never had a sense of any plain issue joined, of any point struggled
for and won or lost. He saw tremendous things happen and in the end his
world darkened to disaster and ruin.
He saw the battle from the ground, from Prospect Park and from Goat
Island, whither he fled.
But the manner in which he came to be on the ground needs explaining.
The Prince had resumed command of his fleet through wireless telegraphy
long before the Zeppelin had located his encampment in Labrador. By his
direction the German air-fleet, whose advance scouts had been in contact
with the Japanese over the Rocky Mountains, had concentrated upon
Niagara and awaited his arrival. He had rejoined his command early in
the morning of the twelfth, and Bert had his first prospect of the Gorge
of Niagara while he was doing net drill outside the middle gas-chamber
at sunrise. The Zeppelin was flying very high at the time, and far below
he saw the water in the gorge marbled with froth and then away to the
west the great crescent of the Canadian Fall shining, flickering and
foaming in the level sunlight and sending up a deep, incessant thudding
rumble to the sky. The air-fleet was keeping station in an enormous
crescent, with its horns pointing south-westward, a long array of
shining monsters with tails rotating slowly and German ensigns now
trailing from their bellies aft of their Marconi pendants.
Niagara city was still largely standing then, albeit its streets were
empty of all life. Its bridges were intact; its hotels and restaurants
still flying flags and inviting sky signs; its power-stations running.
But about it the country on both sides of the gorge might have been
swept by a colossal broom. Everything that could possibly give cover
to an attack upon the German position at Niagara had been levelled as
ruthlessly as machinery and explosives could contrive; houses blown up
and burnt, woods burnt, fences and crops destroyed. The mono-rails had
been torn up, and the roads in particular cleared of all possibility of
concealment or shelter. Seen from above, the effect of this wreckage was
grotesque. Young woods had been destroyed whole-sale by dragging wires,
and the spoilt saplings, smashed or uprooted, lay in swathes like corn
after the sickle. Houses had an appearance of being flattened down by
the pressure of a gigantic finger. Much burning was still going on, and
large areas had been reduced to patches of smouldering and sometimes
still glowing blackness.
Here and there lay the debris of belated fugitives, carts, and dead
bodies of horses and men; and where houses had had water-supplies there
were pools of water and running springs from the ruptured pipes. In
unscorched fields horses and cattle still fed peacefully. Beyond this
desolated area the countryside was still standing, but almost all the
people had fled. Buffalo was on fire to an enormous extent, and there
were no signs of any efforts to grapple with the flames. Niagara city
itself was being rapidly converted to the needs of a military depot.
A large number of skilled engineers had already been brought from the
fleet and were busily at work adapting the exterior industrial apparatus
of the place to the purposes of an aeronautic park. They had made a
gas recharging station at the corner of the American Fall above the
funicular railway, and they were, opening up a much larger area to
the south for the same purpose. Over the power-houses and hotels and
suchlike prominent or important points the German flag was flying.
The Zeppelin circled slowly over this scene twice while the Prince
surveyed it from the swinging gallery; it then rose towards the centre
of the crescent and transferred the Prince and his suite, Kurt included,
to the Hohenzollern, which had been chosen as the flagship during the
impending battle. They were swung up on a small cable from the forward
gallery, and the men of the Zeppelin manned the outer netting as the
Prince and his staff left them. The Zeppelin then came about, circled
down and grounded in Prospect Park, in order to land the wounded and
take aboard explosives; for she had come to Labrador with her magazines
empty, it being uncertain what weight she might need to carry. She
also replenished the hydrogen in one of her forward chambers which had
leaked.
Bert was detailed as a bearer and helped carry the wounded one by one
into the nearest of the large hotels that faced the Canadian shore. The
hotel was quite empty except that there were two trained American nurses
and a negro porter, and three or four Germans awaiting them. Bert went
with the Zeppelin's doctor into the main street of the place, and they
broke into a drug shop and obtained various things of which they stood
in need. As they returned they found an officer and two men making a
rough inventory of the available material in the various stores. Except
for them the wide, main street of the town was quite deserted, the
people had been given three hours to clear out, and everybody,
it seemed, had done so. At one corner a dead man lay against the
wall--shot. Two or three dogs were visible up the empty vista, but
towards its river end the passage of a string of mono-rail cars broke
the stillness and the silence. They were loaded with hose, and were
passing to the trainful of workers who were converting Prospect Park
into an airship dock.
Bert pushed a case of medicine balanced on a bicycle taken from an
adjacent shop, to the hotel, and then he was sent to load bombs into the
Zeppelin magazine, a duty that called for elaborate care. From this job
he was presently called off by the captain of the Zeppelin, who sent
him with a note to the officer in charge of the Anglo-American Power
Company, for the field telephone had still to be adjusted. Bert received
his instructions in German, whose meaning he guessed, and saluted and
took the note, not caring to betray his ignorance of the language. He
started off with a bright air of knowing his way and turned a corner or
so, and was only beginning to suspect that he did not know where he was
going when his attention was recalled to the sky by the report of a gun
from the Hohenzollern and celestial cheering.
He looked up and found the view obstructed by the houses on either side
of the street. He hesitated, and then curiosity took him back towards
the bank of the river. Here his view was inconvenienced by trees, and
it was with a start that he discovered the Zeppelin, which he knew had
still a quarter of her magazines to fill, was rising over Goat Island.
She had not waited for her complement of ammunition. It occurred to him
that he was left behind. He ducked back among the trees and bushes until
he felt secure from any after-thought on the part of the Zeppelin's
captain. Then his curiosity to see what the German air-fleet faced
overcame him, and drew him at last halfway across the bridge to Goat
Island.
From that point he had nearly a hemisphere of sky and got his first
glimpse of the Asiatic airships low in the sky above the glittering
tumults of the Upper Rapids.
They were far less impressive than the German ships. He could not
judge the distance, and they flew edgeways to him, so as to conceal the
broader aspect of their bulk.
Bert stood there in the middle of the bridge, in a place that most
people who knew it remembered as a place populous with sightseers and
excursionists, and he was the only human being in sight there. Above
him, very high in the heavens, the contending air-fleets manoeuvred;
below him the river seethed like a sluice towards the American Fall. He
was curiously dressed. His cheap blue serge trousers were thrust into
German airship rubber boots, and on his head he wore an aeronaut's white
cap that was a trifle too large for him. He thrust that back to reveal
his staring little Cockney face, still scarred upon the brow. “Gaw!” he
whispered.
He stared. He gesticulated. Once or twice he shouted and applauded.
Then at a certain point terror seized him and he took to his heels in
the direction of Goat Island.
4
For a time after they were in sight of each other, neither fleet
attempted to engage. The Germans numbered sixty-seven great airships
and they maintained the crescent formation at a height of nearly four
thousand feet. They kept a distance of about one and a half lengths, so
that the horns of the crescent were nearly thirty miles apart. Closely
in tow of the airships of the extreme squadrons on either wing were
about thirty drachenflieger ready manned, but these were too small and
distant for Bert to distinguish.
At first, only what was called the Southern fleet of the Asiatics was
visible to him. It consisted of forty airships, carrying all together
nearly four hundred one-man flying-machines upon their flanks, and for
some time it flew slowly and at a minimum distance of perhaps a dozen
miles from the Germans, eastward across their front. At first Bert
could distinguish only the greater bulks, then he perceived the one-man
machines as a multitude of very small objects drifting like motes in the
sunshine about and beneath the larger shapes.
Bert saw nothing then of the second fleet of the Asiatics, though
probably that was coming into sight of the Germans at the time, in the
north-west.
The air was very still, the sky almost without a cloud, and the German
fleet had risen to an immense height, so that the airships seemed no
longer of any considerable size. Both ends of their crescent showed
plainly. As they beat southward they passed slowly between Bert and the
sunlight, and became black outlines of themselves. The drachenflieger
appeared as little flecks of black on either wing of this aerial Armada.
The two fleets seemed in no hurry to engage. The Asiatics went far away
into the east, quickening their pace and rising as they did so, and then
tailed out into a long column and came flying back, rising towards the
German left. The squadrons of the latter came about, facing this oblique
advance, and suddenly little flickerings and a faint crepitating sound
told that they had opened fire. For a time no effect was visible to
the watcher on the bridge. Then, like a handful of snowflakes, the
drachenflieger swooped to the attack, and a multitude of red specks
whirled up to meet them. It was to Bert's sense not only enormously
remote but singularly inhuman. Not four hours since he had been on one
of those very airships, and yet they seemed to him now not gas-bags
carrying men, but strange sentient creatures that moved about and did
things with a purpose of their own. The flight of the Asiatic and German
flying-machines joined and dropped earthward, became like a handful
of white and red rose petals flung from a distant window, grew larger,
until Bert could see the overturned ones spinning through the air,
and were hidden by great volumes of dark smoke that were rising in the
direction of Buffalo. For a time they all were hidden, then two or three
white and a number of red ones rose again into the sky, like a swarm of
big butterflies, and circled fighting and drove away out of sight again
towards the east.
A heavy report recalled Bert's eyes to the zenith, and behold, the great
crescent had lost its dressing and burst into a disorderly long cloud of
airships! One had dropped halfway down the sky. It was flaming fore and
aft, and even as Bert looked it turned over and fell, spinning over and
over itself and vanished into the smoke of Buffalo.
Bert's mouth opened and shut, and he clutched tighter on the rail of
the bridge. For some moments--they seemed long moments--the two fleets
remained without any further change flying obliquely towards each other,
and making what came to Bert's ears as a midget uproar. Then suddenly
from either side airships began dropping out of alignment, smitten by
missiles he could neither see nor trace. The string of Asiatic ships
swung round and either charged into or over (it was difficult to say
from below) the shattered line of the Germans, who seemed to open out
to give way to them. Some sort of manoeuvring began, but Bert could
not grasp its import. The left of the battle became a confused dance
of airships. For some minutes up there the two crossing lines of ships
looked so close it seemed like a hand-to-hand scuffle in the sky. Then
they broke up into groups and duels. The descent of German air-ships
towards the lower sky increased. One of them flared down and vanished
far away in the north; two dropped with something twisted and crippled
in their movements; then a group of antagonists came down from the
zenith in an eddying conflict, two Asiatics against one German, and were
presently joined by another, and drove away eastward all together with
others dropping out of the German line to join them.
One Asiatic either rammed or collided with a still more gigantic German,
and the two went spinning to destruction together. The northern squadron
of Asiatics came into the battle unnoted by Bert, except that the
multitude of ships above seemed presently increased. In a little while
the fight was utter confusion, drifting on the whole to the southwest
against the wind. It became more and more a series of group encounters.
Here a huge German airship flamed earthward with a dozen flat Asiatic
craft about her, crushing her every attempt to recover. Here another
hung with its screw fighting off the swordsman from a swarm of
flying-machines. Here, again, an Asiatic aflame at either end swooped
out of the battle. His attention went from incident to incident in the
vast clearness overhead; these conspicuous cases of destruction caught
and held his mind; it was only very slowly that any sort of scheme
manifested itself between those nearer, more striking episodes.
The mass of the airships that eddied remotely above was, however,
neither destroying nor destroyed. The majority of them seemed to
be going at full speed and circling upward for position, exchanging
ineffectual shots as they did so. Very little ramming was essayed after
the first tragic downfall of rammer and rammed, and what ever attempts
at boarding were made were invisible to Bert. There seemed, however,
a steady attempt to isolate antagonists, to cut them off from their
fellows and bear them down, causing a perpetual sailing back and
interlacing of these shoaling bulks. The greater numbers of the Asiatics
and their swifter heeling movements gave them the effect of persistently
attacking the Germans. Overhead, and evidently endeavouring to keep
itself in touch with the works of Niagara, a body of German airships
drew itself together into a compact phalanx, and the Asiatics became
more and more intent upon breaking this up. He was grotesquely reminded
of fish in a fish-pond struggling for crumbs. He could see puny puffs of
smoke and the flash of bombs, but never a sound came down to him....
A flapping shadow passed for a moment between Bert and the sun and was
followed by another. A whirring of engines, click, clock, clitter clock,
smote upon his ears. Instantly he forgot the zenith.
Perhaps a hundred yards above the water, out of the south, riding like
Valkyries swiftly through the air on the strange steeds the engineering
of Europe had begotten upon the artistic inspiration of Japan, came
a long string of Asiatic swordsman. The wings flapped jerkily, click,
block, clitter clock, and the machines drove up; they spread and ceased,
and the apparatus came soaring through the air. So they rose and fell
and rose again. They passed so closely overhead that Bert could hear
their voices calling to one another. They swooped towards Niagara city
and landed one after another in a long line in a clear space before
the hotel. But he did not stay to watch them land. One yellow face had
craned over and looked at him, and for one enigmatical instant met his
eyes....
It was then the idea came to Bert that he was altogether too conspicuous
in the middle of the bridge, and that he took to his heels towards Goat
Island. Thence, dodging about among the trees, with perhaps an excessive
self-consciousness, he watched the rest of the struggle.
5
When Bert's sense of security was sufficiently restored for him to watch
the battle again, he perceived that a brisk little fight was in
progress between the Asiatic aeronauts and the German engineers for the
possession of Niagara city. It was the first time in the whole course of
the war that he had seen anything resembling fighting as he had studied
it in the illustrated papers of his youth. It seemed to him almost as
though things were coming right. He saw men carrying rifles and taking
cover and running briskly from point to point in a loose attacking
formation. The first batch of aeronauts had probably been under the
impression that the city was deserted. They had grounded in the open
near Prospect Park and approached the houses towards the power-works
before they were disillusioned by a sudden fire. They had scattered back
to the cover of a bank near the water--it was too far for them to reach
their machines again; they were lying and firing at the men in the
hotels and frame-houses about the power-works.
Then to their support came a second string of red flying-machines
driving up from the east. They rose up out of the haze above the houses
and came round in a long curve as if surveying the position below. The
fire of the Germans rose to a roar, and one of those soaring shapes gave
an abrupt jerk backward and fell among the houses. The others swooped
down exactly like great birds upon the roof of the power-house. They
caught upon it, and from each sprang a nimble little figure and ran
towards the parapet.
Other flapping bird-shapes came into this affair, but Bert had not seen
their coming. A staccato of shots came over to him, reminding him of
army manoeuvres, of newspaper descriptions of fights, of all that was
entirely correct in his conception of warfare. He saw quite a number of
Germans running from the outlying houses towards the power-house. Two
fell. One lay still, but the other wriggled and made efforts for a time.
The hotel that was used as a hospital, and to which he had helped carry
the wounded men from the Zeppelin earlier in the day, suddenly ran up
the Geneva flag. The town that had seemed so quiet had evidently
been concealing a considerable number of Germans, and they were
now concentrating to hold the central power-house. He wondered what
ammunition they might have. More and more of the Asiatic flying-machines
came into the conflict. They had disposed of the unfortunate German
drachenflieger and were now aiming at the incipient aeronautic
park,--the electric gas generators and repair stations which formed
the German base. Some landed, and their aeronauts took cover and became
energetic infantry soldiers. Others hovered above the fight, their men
ever and again firing shots down at some chance exposure below. The
firing came in paroxysms; now there would be a watchful lull and now a
rapid tattoo of shots, rising to a roar. Once or twice flying machines,
as they circled warily, came right overhead, and for a time Bert gave
himself body and soul to cowering.
Ever and again a larger thunder mingled with the rattle and reminded
him of the grapple of airships far above, but the nearer fight held his
attention.
Abruptly something dropped from the zenith; something like a barrel or a
huge football.
CRASH! It smashed with an immense report. It had fallen among the
grounded Asiatic aeroplanes that lay among the turf and flower-beds near
the river. They flew in scraps and fragments, turf, trees, and gravel
leapt and fell; the aeronauts still lying along the canal bank were
thrown about like sacks, catspaws flew across the foaming water. All the
windows of the hotel hospital that had been shiningly reflecting blue
sky and airships the moment before became vast black stars. Bang!--a
second followed. Bert looked up and was filled with a sense of a number
of monstrous bodies swooping down, coming down on the whole affair like
a flight of bellying blankets, like a string of vast dish-covers. The
central tangle of the battle above was circling down as if to come
into touch with the power-house fight. He got a new effect of airships
altogether, as vast things coming down upon him, growing swiftly larger
and larger and more overwhelming, until the houses over the way seemed
small, the American rapids narrow, the bridge flimsy, the combatants
infinitesimal. As they came down they became audible as a complex of
shootings and vast creakings and groanings and beatings and throbbings
and shouts and shots. The fore-shortened black eagles at the fore-ends
of the Germans had an effect of actual combat of flying feathers.
Some of these fighting airships came within five hundred feet of the
ground. Bert could see men on the lower galleries of the Germans,
firing rifles; could see Asiatics clinging to the ropes; saw one man
in aluminium diver's gear fall flashing headlong into the waters above
Goat Island. For the first time he saw the Asiatic airships closely.
From this aspect they reminded him more than anything else of colossal
snowshoes; they had a curious patterning in black and white, in forms
that reminded him of the engine-turned cover of a watch. They had no
hanging galleries, but from little openings on the middle line peeped
out men and the muzzles of guns. So, driving in long, descending and
ascending curves, these monsters wrestled and fought. It was like clouds
fighting, like puddings trying to assassinate each other. They whirled
and circled about each other, and for a time threw Goat Island and
Niagara into a smoky twilight, through which the sunlight smote in
shafts and beams. They spread and closed and spread and grappled and
drove round over the rapids, and two miles away or more into Canada,
and back over the Falls again. A German caught fire, and the whole crowd
broke away from her flare and rose about her dispersing, leaving her to
drop towards Canada and blow up as she dropped. Then with renewed uproar
the others closed again. Once from the men in Niagara city came a sound
like an ant-hill cheering. Another German burnt, and one badly deflated
by the prow of an antagonist, flopped out of action southward.
It became more and more evident that the Germans were getting the
worst of the unequal fight. More and more obviously were they being
persecuted. Less and less did they seem to fight with any object other
than escape. The Asiatics swept by them and above them, ripped their
bladders, set them alight, picked off their dimly seen men in diving
clothes, who struggled against fire and tear with fire extinguishers and
silk ribbons in the inner netting. They answered only with ineffectual
shots. Thence the battle circled back over Niagara, and then suddenly
the Germans, as if at a preconcerted signal, broke and dispersed, going
east, west, north, and south, in open and confused flight. The Asiatics,
as they realised this, rose to fly above them and after them. Only
one little knot of four Germans and perhaps a dozen Asiatics remained
fighting about the Hohenzollern and the Prince as he circled in a last
attempt to save Niagara.
Round they swooped once again over the Canadian Fall, over the waste of
waters eastward, until they were distant and small, and then round and
back, hurrying, bounding, swooping towards the one gaping spectator.
The whole struggling mass approached very swiftly, growing rapidly
larger, and coming out black and featureless against the afternoon sun
and above the blinding welter of the Upper Rapids. It grew like a storm
cloud until once more it darkened the sky. The flat Asiatic airships
kept high above the Germans and behind them, and fired unanswered
bullets into their gas-chambers and upon their flanks--the one-man
flying-machines hovered and alighted like a swarm of attacking bees.
Nearer they came, and nearer, filling the lower heaven. Two of the
Germans swooped and rose again, but the Hohenzollern had suffered too
much for that. She lifted weakly, turned sharply as if to get out of
the battle, burst into flames fore and aft, swept down to the water,
splashed into it obliquely, and rolled over and over and came down
stream rolling and smashing and writhing like a thing alive, halting and
then coming on again, with her torn and bent propeller still beating the
air. The bursting flames spluttered out again in clouds of steam. It was
a disaster gigantic in its dimensions. She lay across the rapids like
an island, like tall cliffs, tall cliffs that came rolling, smoking, and
crumpling, and collapsing, advancing with a sort of fluctuating rapidity
upon Bert. One Asiatic airship--it looked to Bert from below like three
hundred yards of pavement--whirled back and circled two or three times
over that great overthrow, and half a dozen crimson flying-machines
danced for a moment like great midges in the sunlight before they swept
on after their fellows. The rest of the fight had already gone over the
island, a wild crescendo of shots and yells and smashing uproar. It was
hidden from Bert now by the trees of the island, and forgotten by him in
the nearer spectacle of the huge advance of the defeated German airship.
Something fell with a mighty smashing and splintering of boughs unheeded
behind him.
It seemed for a time that the Hohenzollern must needs break her back
upon the Parting of the Waters, and then for a time her propeller
flopped and frothed in the river and thrust the mass of buckling,
crumpled wreckage towards the American shore. Then the sweep of the
torrent that foamed down to the American Fall caught her, and in another
minute the immense mass of deflating wreckage, with flames spurting out
in three new places, had crashed against the bridge that joined Goat
Island and Niagara city, and forced a long arm, as it were, in a heaving
tangle under the central span. Then the middle chambers blew up with a
loud report, and in another moment the bridge had given way and the main
bulk of the airship, like some grotesque cripple in rags, staggered,
flapping and waving flambeaux to the crest of the Fall and hesitated
there and vanished in a desperate suicidal leap.
Its detached fore-end remained jammed against that little island, Green
Island it used to be called, which forms the stepping-stone between the
mainland and Goat Island's patch of trees.
Bert followed this disaster from the Parting of the Waters to the bridge
head. Then, regardless of cover, regardless of the Asiatic airship
hovering like a huge house roof without walls above the Suspension
Bridge, he sprinted along towards the north and came out for the first
time upon that rocky point by Luna Island that looks sheer down upon
the American Fall. There he stood breathless amidst that eternal rush of
sound, breathless and staring.
Far below, and travelling rapidly down the gorge, whirled something like
a huge empty sack. For him it meant--what did it not mean?--the German
air-fleet, Kurt, the Prince, Europe, all things stable and familiar,
the forces that had brought him, the forces that had seemed indisputably
victorious. And it went down the rapids like an empty sack and left the
visible world to Asia, to yellow people beyond Christendom, to all that
was terrible and strange!
Remote over Canada receded the rest of that conflict and vanished beyond
the range of his vision....
CHAPTER IX. ON GOAT ISLAND
1
The whack of a bullet on the rocks beside him reminded him that he was
a visible object and wearing at least portions of a German uniform. It
drove him into the trees again, and for a time he dodged and dropped and
sought cover like a chick hiding among reeds from imaginary hawks.
“Beaten,” he whispered. “Beaten and done for... Chinese! Yellow chaps
chasing 'em!”
At last he came to rest in a clump of bushes near a locked-up and
deserted refreshment shed within view of the American side. They made
a sort of hole and harbour for him; they met completely overhead. He
looked across the rapids, but the firing had ceased now altogether and
everything seemed quiet. The Asiatic aeroplane had moved from its former
position above the Suspension Bridge, was motionless now above Niagara
city, shadowing all that district about the power-house which had been
the scene of the land fight. The monster had an air of quiet and assured
predominance, and from its stern it trailed, serene and ornamental, a
long streaming flag, the red, black, and yellow of the great alliance,
the Sunrise and the Dragon. Beyond, to the east, at a much higher level,
hung a second consort, and Bert, presently gathering courage, wriggled
out and craned his neck to find another still airship against the sunset
in the south.
“Gaw!” he said. “Beaten and chased! My Gawd!”
The fighting, it seemed at first, was quite over in Niagara city, though
a German flag was still flying from one shattered house. A white sheet
was hoisted above the power-house, and this remained flying all through
the events that followed. But presently came a sound of shots and then
German soldiers running. They disappeared among the houses, and then
came two engineers in blue shirts and trousers hotly pursued by three
Japanese swordsman. The foremost of the two fugitives was a shapely man,
and ran lightly and well; the second was a sturdy little man, and rather
fat. He ran comically in leaps and bounds, with his plump arms bent up
by his side and his head thrown back. The pursuers ran with uniforms and
dark thin metal and leather head-dresses. The little man stumbled, and
Bert gasped, realising a new horror in war.
The foremost swordsman won three strides on him and was near enough to
slash at him and miss as he spurted.
A dozen yards they ran, and then the swordsman slashed again, and Bert
could hear across the waters a little sound like the moo of an elfin cow
as the fat little man fell forward. Slash went the swordsman and slash
at something on the ground that tried to save itself with ineffectual
hands. “Oh, I carn't!” cried Bert, near blubbering, and staring with
starting eyes.
The swordsman slashed a fourth time and went on as his fellows came up
after the better runner. The hindmost swordsman stopped and turned back.
He had perceived some movement perhaps; but at any rate he stood, and
ever and again slashed at the fallen body.
“Oo-oo!” groaned Bert at every slash, and shrank closer into the bushes
and became very still. Presently came a sound of shots from the town,
and then everything was quiet, everything, even the hospital.
He saw presently little figures sheathing swords come out from the
houses and walk to the debris of the flying-machines the bomb had
destroyed. Others appeared wheeling undamaged aeroplanes upon their
wheels as men might wheel bicycles, and sprang into the saddles and
flapped into the air. A string of three airships appeared far away
in the east and flew towards the zenith. The one that hung low above
Niagara city came still lower and dropped a rope ladder to pick up men
from the power-house.
For a long time he watched the further happenings in Niagara city as a
rabbit might watch a meet. He saw men going from building to building,
to set fire to them, as he presently realised, and he heard a series
of dull detonations from the wheel pit of the power-house. Some similar
business went on among the works on the Canadian side. Meanwhile more
and more airships appeared, and many more flying-machines, until at last
it seemed to him nearly a third of the Asiatic fleet had re-assembled.
He watched them from his bush, cramped but immovable, watched them
gather and range themselves and signal and pick up men, until at last
they sailed away towards the glowing sunset, going to the great Asiatic
rendez-vous, above the oil wells of Cleveland. They dwindled and passed
away, leaving him alone, so far as he could tell, the only living man
in a world of ruin and strange loneliness almost beyond describing. He
watched them recede and vanish. He stood gaping after them.
“Gaw!” he said at last, like one who rouses himself from a trance.
It was far more than any personal desolation extremity that flooded his
soul. It seemed to him indeed that this must be the sunset of his race.
2
He did not at first envisage his own plight in definite and
comprehensible terms. Things happened to him so much of late, his
own efforts had counted for so little, that he had become passive and
planless. His last scheme had been to go round the coast of England as
a Desert Dervish giving refined entertainment to his fellow-creatures.
Fate had quashed that. Fate had seen fit to direct him to other
destinies, had hurried him from point to point, and dropped him at
last upon this little wedge of rock between the cataracts. It did
not instantly occur to him that now it was his turn to play. He had
a singular feeling that all must end as a dream ends, that presently
surely he would be back in the world of Grubb and Edna and Bun Hill,
that this roar, this glittering presence of incessant water, would be
drawn aside as a curtain is drawn aside after a holiday lantern show,
and old familiar, customary things re-assume their sway. It would be
interesting to tell people how he had seen Niagara. And then Kurt's
words came into his head: “People torn away from the people they care
for; homes smashed, creatures full of life and memories and peculiar
little gifts--torn to pieces, starved, and spoilt.”...
He wondered, half incredulous, if that was in deed true. It was so hard
to realise it. Out beyond there was it possible that Tom and Jessica
were also in some dire extremity? that the little green-grocer's shop
was no longer standing open, with Jessica serving respectfully, warming
Tom's ear in sharp asides, or punctually sending out the goods?
He tried to think what day of the week it was, and found he had lost his
reckoning. Perhaps it was Sunday. If so, were they going to church or,
were they hiding, perhaps in bushes? What had happened to the landlord,
the butcher, and to Butteridge and all those people on Dymchurch beach?
Something, he knew, had happened to London--a bombardment. But who had
bombarded? Were Tom and Jessica too being chased by strange brown men
with long bare swords and evil eyes? He thought of various possible
aspects of affliction, but presently one phase ousted all the others.
Were they getting much to eat? The question haunted him, obsessed him.
If one was very hungry would one eat rats?
It dawned upon him that a peculiar misery that oppressed him was not so
much anxiety and patriotic sorrow as hunger. Of course he was hungry!
He reflected and turned his steps towards the little refreshment shed
that stood near the end of the ruined bridge. “Ought to be somethin'--”
He strolled round it once or twice, and then attacked the shutters
with his pocket-knife, reinforced presently by a wooden stake he found
conveniently near. At last he got a shutter to give, and tore it back
and stuck in his head.
“Grub,” he remarked, “anyhow. Leastways--”
He got at the inside fastening of the shutter and had presently this
establishment open for his exploration. He found several sealed bottles
of sterilized milk, much mineral water, two tins of biscuits and a crock
of very stale cakes, cigarettes in great quantity but very dry, some
rather dry oranges, nuts, some tins of canned meat and fruit, and plates
and knives and forks and glasses sufficient for several score of people.
There was also a zinc locker, but he was unable to negotiate the padlock
of this.
“Shan't starve,” said Bert, “for a bit, anyhow.” He sat on the vendor's
seat and regaled himself with biscuits and milk, and felt for a moment
quite contented.
“Quite restful,” he muttered, munching and glancing about him
restlessly, “after what I been through.
“Crikey! WOT a day! Oh! WOT a day!”
Wonder took possession of him. “Gaw!” he cried: “Wot a fight it's been!
Smashing up the poor fellers! 'Eadlong! The airships--the fliers and
all. I wonder what happened to the Zeppelin?... And that chap Kurt--I
wonder what happened to 'im? 'E was a good sort of chap, was Kurt.”
Some phantom of imperial solicitude floated through his mind. “Injia,”
he said....
A more practical interest arose.
“I wonder if there's anything to open one of these tins of corned beef?”
3
After he had feasted, Bert lit a cigarette and sat meditative for a
time. “Wonder where Grubb is?” he said; “I do wonder that! Wonder if any
of 'em wonder about me?”
He reverted to his own circumstances. “Dessay I shall 'ave to stop on
this island for some time.”
He tried to feel at his ease and secure, but presently the indefinable
restlessness of the social animal in solitude distressed him. He began
to want to look over his shoulder, and, as a corrective, roused himself
to explore the rest of the island.
It was only very slowly that he began to realise the peculiarities of
his position, to perceive that the breaking down of the arch between
Green Island and the mainland had cut him off completely from the
world. Indeed it was only when he came back to where the fore-end of
the Hohenzollern lay like a stranded ship, and was contemplating the
shattered bridge, that this dawned upon him. Even then it came with no
sort of shock to his mind, a fact among a number of other extraordinary
and unmanageable facts. He stared at the shattered cabins of the
Hohenzollern and its widow's garment of dishevelled silk for a time,
but without any idea of its containing any living thing; it was all so
twisted and smashed and entirely upside down. Then for a while he gazed
at the evening sky. A cloud haze was now appearing and not an airship
was in sight. A swallow flew by and snapped some invisible victim. “Like
a dream,” he repeated.
Then for a time the rapids held his mind. “Roaring. It keeps on roaring
and splashin' always and always. Keeps on....”
At last his interests became personal. “Wonder what I ought to do now?”
He reflected. “Not an idee,” he said.
He was chiefly conscious that a fortnight ago he had been in Bun Hill
with no idea of travel in his mind, and that now he was between the
Falls of Niagara amidst the devastation and ruins of the greatest air
fight in the world, and that in the interval he had been across France,
Belgium, Germany, England, Ireland, and a number of other countries.
It was an interesting thought and suitable for conversation, but of
no great practical utility. “Wonder 'ow I can get orf this?” he said.
“Wonder if there is a way out? If not... rummy!”
Further reflection decided, “I believe I got myself in a bit of a 'ole
coming over that bridge....
“Any'ow--got me out of the way of them Japanesy chaps. Wouldn't 'ave
taken 'em long to cut MY froat. No. Still--”
He resolved to return to the point of Luna Island. For a long time he
stood without stirring, scrutinising the Canadian shore and the wreckage
of hotels and houses and the fallen trees of the Victoria Park, pink now
in the light of sundown. Not a human being was perceptible in that scene
of headlong destruction. Then he came back to the American side of
the island, crossed close to the crumpled aluminium wreckage of the
Hohenzollern to Green Islet, and scrutinised the hopeless breach in the
further bridge and the water that boiled beneath it. Towards Buffalo
there was still much smoke, and near the position of the Niagara railway
station the houses were burning vigorously. Everything was deserted now,
everything was still. One little abandoned thing lay on a transverse
path between town and road, a crumpled heap of clothes with sprawling
limbs....
“'Ave a look round,” said Bert, and taking a path that ran through the
middle of the island he presently discovered the wreckage of the two
Asiatic aeroplanes that had fallen out of the struggle that ended the
Hohenzollern.
With the first he found the wreckage of an aeronaut too.
The machine had evidently dropped vertically and was badly knocked
about amidst a lot of smashed branches in a clump of trees. Its bent and
broken wings and shattered stays sprawled amidst new splintered wood,
and its forepeak stuck into the ground. The aeronaut dangled weirdly
head downward among the leaves and branches some yards away, and Bert
only discovered him as he turned from the aeroplane. In the dusky
evening light and stillness--for the sun had gone now and the wind
had altogether fallen-this inverted yellow face was anything but a
tranquilising object to discover suddenly a couple of yards away. A
broken branch had run clean through the man's thorax, and he hung, so
stabbed, looking limp and absurd. In his hand he still clutched, with
the grip of death, a short light rifle.
For some time Bert stood very still, inspecting this thing.
Then he began to walk away from it, looking constantly back at it.
Presently in an open glade he came to a stop.
“Gaw!” he whispered, “I don' like dead bodies some'ow! I'd almost rather
that chap was alive.”
He would not go along the path athwart which the Chinaman hung. He felt
he would rather not have trees round him any more, and that it would be
more comfortable to be quite close to the sociable splash and uproar of
the rapids.
He came upon the second aeroplane in a clear grassy space by the side of
the streaming water, and it seemed scarcely damaged at all. It looked as
though it had floated down into a position of rest. It lay on its side
with one wing in the air. There was no aeronaut near it, dead or alive.
There it lay abandoned, with the water lapping about its long tail.
Bert remained a little aloof from it for a long time, looking into
the gathering shadows among the trees, in the expectation of another
Chinaman alive or dead. Then very cautiously he approached the machine
and stood regarding its widespread vans, its big steering wheel and
empty saddle. He did not venture to touch it.
“I wish that other chap wasn't there,” he said. “I do wish 'e wasn't
there!”
He saw a few yards away, something bobbing about in an eddy that spun
within a projecting head of rock. As it went round it seemed to draw him
unwillingly towards it....
What could it be?
“Blow!” said Bert. “It's another of 'em.”
It held him. He told himself that it was the other aeronaut that had
been shot in the fight and fallen out of the saddle as he strove to
land. He tried to go away, and then it occurred to him that he might get
a branch or something and push this rotating object out into the stream.
That would leave him with only one dead body to worry about. Perhaps he
might get along with one. He hesitated and then with a certain emotion
forced himself to do this. He went towards the bushes and cut himself a
wand and returned to the rocks and clambered out to a corner between the
eddy and the stream, By that time the sunset was over and the bats were
abroad--and he was wet with perspiration.
He prodded the floating blue-clad thing with his wand, failed, tried
again successfully as it came round, and as it went out into the stream
it turned over, the light gleamed on golden hair and--it was Kurt!
It was Kurt, white and dead and very calm. There was no mistaking him.
There was still plenty of light for that. The stream took him and he
seemed to compose himself in its swift grip as one who stretches himself
to rest. White-faced he was now, and all the colour gone out of him.
A feeling of infinite distress swept over Bert as the body swept out of
sight towards the fall. “Kurt!” he cried, “Kurt! I didn't mean to! Kurt!
don' leave me 'ere! Don' leave me!”
Loneliness and desolation overwhelmed him. He gave way. He stood on
the rock in the evening light, weeping and wailing passionately like a
child. It was as though some link that had held him to all these things
had broken and gone. He was afraid like a child in a lonely room,
shamelessly afraid.
The twilight was closing about him. The trees were full now of strange
shadows. All the things about him became strange and unfamiliar with
that subtle queerness one feels oftenest in dreams. “O God! I carn'
stand this,” he said, and crept back from the rocks to the grass and
crouched down, and suddenly wild sorrow for the death of Kurt, Kurt the
brave, Kurt the kindly, came to his help and he broke from whimpering to
weeping. He ceased to crouch; he sprawled upon the grass and clenched an
impotent fist.
“This war,” he cried, “this blarsted foolery of a war.
“O Kurt! Lieutenant Kurt!
“I done,” he said, “I done. I've 'ad all I want, and more than I
want. The world's all rot, and there ain't no sense in it. The night's
coming.... If 'E comes after me--'E can't come after me--'E can't!...
“If 'E comes after me, I'll fro' myself into the water.”...
Presently he was talking again in a low undertone.
“There ain't nothing to be afraid of reely. It's jest imagination. Poor
old Kurt--he thought it would happen. Prevision like. 'E never gave me
that letter or tole me who the lady was. It's like what 'e said--people
tore away from everything they belonged to--everywhere. Exactly like
what 'e said.... 'Ere I am cast away--thousands of miles from Edna or
Grubb or any of my lot--like a plant tore up by the roots.... And every
war's been like this, only I 'adn't the sense to understand it. Always.
All sorts of 'oles and corners chaps 'ave died in. And people 'adn't the
sense to understand, 'adn't the sense to feel it and stop it. Thought
war was fine. My Gawd!...
“Dear old Edna. She was a fair bit of all right--she was. That time we
'ad a boat at Kingston....
“I bet--I'll see 'er again yet. Won't be my fault if I don't.”...
4
Suddenly, on the very verge of this heroic resolution, Bert became
rigid with terror. Something was creeping towards him through the
grass. Something was creeping and halting and creeping again towards him
through the dim dark grass. The night was electrical with horror. For a
time everything was still. Bert ceased to breathe. It could not be. No,
it was too small!
It advanced suddenly upon him with a rush, with a little meawling cry
and tail erect. It rubbed its head against him and purred. It was a
tiny, skinny little kitten.
“Gaw, Pussy! 'ow you frightened me!” said Bert, with drops of
perspiration on his brow.
5
He sat with his back to a tree stump all that night, holding the kitten
in his arms. His mind was tired, and he talked or thought coherently no
longer. Towards dawn he dozed.
When he awoke, he was stiff but in better heart, and the kitten slept
warmly and reassuringly inside his jacket. And fear, he found, had gone
from amidst the trees.
He stroked the kitten, and the little creature woke up to excessive
fondness and purring. “You want some milk,” said Bert. “That's what you
want. And I could do with a bit of brekker too.”
He yawned and stood up, with the kitten on his shoulder, and stared
about him, recalling the circumstances of the previous day, the grey,
immense happenings.
“Mus' do something,” he said.
He turned towards the trees, and was presently contemplating the dead
aeronaut again. The kitten he held companionably against his neck.
The body was horrible, but not nearly so horrible as it had been at
twilight, and now the limbs were limper and the gun had slipped to the
ground and lay half hidden in the grass.
“I suppose we ought to bury 'im, Kitty,” said Bert, and looked
helplessly at the rocky soil about him. “We got to stay on the island
with 'im.”
It was some time before he could turn away and go on towards that
provision shed. “Brekker first,” he said, “anyhow,” stroking the kitten
on his shoulder. She rubbed his cheek affectionately with her furry
little face and presently nibbled at his ear. “Wan' some milk, eh?” he
said, and turned his back on the dead man as though he mattered nothing.
He was puzzled to find the door of the shed open, though he had closed
and latched it very carefully overnight, and he found also some dirty
plates he had not noticed before on the bench. He discovered that the
hinges of the tin locker were unscrewed and that it could be opened. He
had not observed this overnight.
“Silly of me!” said Bert. “'Ere I was puzzlin' and whackin' away at the
padlock, never noticing.” It had been used apparently as an ice-chest,
but it contained nothing now but the remains of half-dozen boiled
chickens, some ambiguous substance that might once have been butter, and
a singularly unappetising smell. He closed the lid again carefully.
He gave the kitten some milk in a dirty plate and sat watching its busy
little tongue for a time. Then he was moved to make an inventory of
the provisions. There were six bottles of milk unopened and one opened,
sixty bottles of mineral water and a large stock of syrups, about two
thousand cigarettes and upwards of a hundred cigars, nine oranges,
two unopened tins of corned beef and one opened, and five large tins
California peaches. He jotted it down on a piece of paper. “'Ain't much
solid food,” he said. “Still--A fortnight, say!
“Anything might happen in a fortnight.”
He gave the kitten a small second helping and a scrap of beef and then
went down with the little creature running after him, tail erect and in
high spirits, to look at the remains of the Hohenzollern.
It had shifted in the night and seemed on the whole more firmly grounded
on Green Island than before. From it his eye went to the shattered
bridge and then across to the still desolation of Niagara city. Nothing
moved over there but a number of crows. They were busy with the engineer
he had seen cut down on the previous day. He saw no dogs, but he heard
one howling.
“We got to get out of this some'ow, Kitty,” he said. “That milk won't
last forever--not at the rate you lap it.”
He regarded the sluice-like flood before him.
“Plenty of water,” he said. “Won't be drink we shall want.”
He decided to make a careful exploration of the island. Presently he
came to a locked gate labelled “Biddle Stairs,” and clambered over to
discover a steep old wooden staircase leading down the face of the cliff
amidst a vast and increasing uproar of waters. He left the kitten above
and descended these, and discovered with a thrill of hope a path leading
among the rocks at the foot of the roaring downrush of the Centre Fall.
Perhaps this was a sort of way!
It led him only to the choking and deafening experience of the Cave of
the Winds, and after he had spent a quarter of an hour in a partially
stupefied condition flattened between solid rock and nearly as solid
waterfall, he decided that this was after all no practicable route to
Canada and retraced his steps. As he reascended the Biddle Stairs, he
heard what he decided at last must be a sort of echo, a sound of some
one walking about on the gravel paths above. When he got to the top, the
place was as solitary as before.
Thence he made his way, with the kitten skirmishing along beside him
in the grass, to a staircase that led to a lump of projecting rock that
enfiladed the huge green majesty of the Horseshoe Fall. He stood there
for some time in silence.
“You wouldn't think,” he said at last, “there was so much water.... This
roarin' and splashin', it gets on one's nerves at last.... Sounds
like people talking.... Sounds like people going about.... Sounds like
anything you fancy.”
He retired up the staircase again. “I s'pose I shall keep on goin' round
this blessed island,” he said drearily. “Round and round and round.”
He found himself presently beside the less damaged Asiatic aeroplane
again. He stared at it and the kitten smelt it. “Broke!” he said.
He looked up with a convulsive start.
Advancing slowly towards him out from among the trees were two tall
gaunt figures. They were blackened and tattered and bandaged; the
hind-most one limped and had his head swathed in white, but the foremost
one still carried himself as a Prince should do, for all that his left
arm was in a sling and one side of his face scalded a livid crimson. He
was the Prince Karl Albert, the War Lord, the “German Alexander,” and
the man behind him was the bird-faced man whose cabin had once been
taken from him and given to Bert.
6
With that apparition began a new phase of Goat Island in Bert's
experience. He ceased to be a solitary representative of humanity in a
vast and violent and incomprehensible universe, and became once more a
social creature, a man in a world of other men. For an instant these two
were terrible, then they seemed sweet and desirable as brothers. They
too were in this scrape with him, marooned and puzzled. He wanted
extremely to hear exactly what had happened to them. What mattered it if
one was a Prince and both were foreign soldiers, if neither perhaps had
adequate English? His native Cockney freedom flowed too generously for
him to think of that, and surely the Asiatic fleets had purged all such
trivial differences. “Ul-LO!” he said; “'ow did you get 'ere?”
“It is the Englishman who brought us the Butteridge machine,” said the
bird-faced officer in German, and then in a tone of horror, as Bert
advanced, “Salute!” and again louder, “SALUTE!”
“Gaw!” said Bert, and stopped with a second comment under his breath. He
stared and saluted awkwardly and became at once a masked defensive thing
with whom co-operation was impossible.
For a time these two perfected modern aristocrats stood regarding the
difficult problem of the Anglo-Saxon citizen, that ambiguous citizen
who, obeying some mysterious law in his blood, would neither drill nor
be a democrat. Bert was by no means a beautiful object, but in some
inexplicable way he looked resistant. He wore his cheap suit of serge,
now showing many signs of wear, and its loose fit made him seem sturdier
than he was; above his disengaging face was a white German cap that was
altogether too big for him, and his trousers were crumpled up his legs
and their ends tucked into the rubber highlows of a deceased German
aeronaut. He looked an inferior, though by no means an easy inferior,
and instinctively they hated him.
The Prince pointed to the flying-machine and said something in broken
English that Bert took for German and failed to understand. He intimated
as much.
“Dummer Kerl!” said the bird-faced officer from among his bandages.
The Prince pointed again with his undamaged hand. “You verstehen dis
drachenflieger?”
Bert began to comprehend the situation. He regarded the Asiatic machine.
The habits of Bun Hill returned to him. “It's a foreign make,” he said
ambiguously.
The two Germans consulted. “You are an expert?” said the Prince.
“We reckon to repair,” said Bert, in the exact manner of Grubb.
The Prince sought in his vocabulary. “Is dat,” he said, “goot to fly?”
Bert reflected and scratched his cheek slowly. “I got to look at it,” he
replied.... “It's 'ad rough usage!”
He made a sound with his teeth he had also acquired from Grubb, put
his hands in his trouser pockets, and strolled back to the
machine. Typically Grubb chewed something, but Bert could chew only
imaginatively. “Three days' work in this,” he said, teething. For
the first time it dawned on him that there were possibilities in this
machine. It was evident that the wing that lay on the ground was badly
damaged. The three stays that held it rigid had snapped across a ridge
of rock and there was also a strong possibility of the engine being
badly damaged. The wing hook on that side was also askew, but probably
that would not affect the flight. Beyond that there probably wasn't much
the matter. Bert scratched his cheek again and contemplated the broad
sunlit waste of the Upper Rapids. “We might make a job of this.... You
leave it to me.”
He surveyed it intently again, and the Prince and his officer watched
him. In Bun Hill Bert and Grubb had developed to a very high pitch among
the hiring stock a method of repair by substituting; they substituted
bits of other machines. A machine that was too utterly and obviously
done for even to proffer for hire, had nevertheless still capital value.
It became a sort of quarry for nuts and screws and wheels, bars and
spokes, chain-links and the like; a mine of ill-fitting “parts” to
replace the defects of machines still current. And back among the trees
was a second Asiatic aeroplane....
The kitten caressed Bert's airship boots unheeded.
“Mend dat drachenflieger,” said the Prince.
“If I do mend it,” said Bert, struck by a new thought, “none of us ain't
to be trusted to fly it.”
“_I_ vill fly it,” said the Prince.
“Very likely break your neck,” said Bert, after a pause.
The Prince did not understand him and disregarded what he said. He
pointed his gloved finger to the machine and turned to the bird-faced
officer with some remark in German. The officer answered and the Prince
responded with a sweeping gesture towards the sky. Then he spoke--it
seemed eloquently. Bert watched him and guessed his meaning. “Much more
likely to break your neck,” he said. “'Owever. 'Ere goes.”
He began to pry about the saddle and engine of the drachenflieger in
search for tools. Also he wanted some black oily stuff for his hands and
face. For the first rule in the art of repairing, as it was known to the
firm of Grubb and Smallways, was to get your hands and face thoroughly
and conclusively blackened. Also he took off his jacket and waistcoat
and put his cap carefully to the back of his head in order to facilitate
scratching.
The Prince and the officer seemed disposed to watch him, but he
succeeded in making it clear to them that this would inconvenience him
and that he had to “puzzle out a bit” before he could get to work. They
thought him over, but his shop experience had given him something of the
authoritative way of the expert with common men. And at last they
went away. Thereupon he went straight to the second aeroplane, got the
aeronaut's gun and ammunition and hid them in a clump of nettles close
at hand. “That's all right,” said Bert, and then proceeded to a careful
inspection of the debris of the wings in the trees. Then he went back
to the first aeroplane to compare the two. The Bun Hill method was quite
possibly practicable if there was nothing hopeless or incomprehensible
in the engine.
The Germans returned presently to find him already generously smutty and
touching and testing knobs and screws and levers with an expression of
profound sagacity. When the bird-faced officer addressed a remark to
him, he waved him aside with, “Nong comprong. Shut it! It's no good.”
Then he had an idea. “Dead chap back there wants burying,” he said,
jerking a thumb over his shoulder.
7
With the appearance of these two men Bert's whole universe had changed
again. A curtain fell before the immense and terrible desolation that
had overwhelmed him. He was in a world of three people, a minute human
world that nevertheless filled his brain with eager speculations and
schemes and cunning ideas. What were they thinking of? What did
they think of him? What did they mean to do? A hundred busy threads
interlaced in his mind as he pottered studiously over the Asiatic
aeroplane. New ideas came up like bubbles in soda water.
“Gaw!” he said suddenly. He had just appreciated as a special aspect of
this irrational injustice of fate that these two men were alive and that
Kurt was dead. All the crew of the Hohenzollern were shot or burnt or
smashed or drowned, and these two lurking in the padded forward cabin
had escaped.
“I suppose 'e thinks it's 'is bloomin' Star,” he muttered, and found
himself uncontrollably exasperated.
He stood up, facing round to the two men. They were standing side by
side regarding him.
“'It's no good,” he said, “starin' at me. You only put me out.” And
then seeing they did not understand, he advanced towards them, wrench in
hand. It occurred to him as he did so that the Prince was really a very
big and powerful and serene-looking person. But he said, nevertheless,
pointing through the trees, “dead man!”
The bird-faced man intervened with a reply in German.
“Dead man!” said Bert to him. “There.”
He had great difficulty in inducing them to inspect the dead Chinaman,
and at last led them to him. Then they made it evident that they
proposed that he, as a common person below the rank of officer should
have the sole and undivided privilege of disposing of the body by
dragging it to the water's edge. There was some heated gesticulation,
and at last the bird-faced officer abased himself to help. Together they
dragged the limp and now swollen Asiatic through the trees, and after
a rest or so--for he trailed very heavily--dumped him into the westward
rapid. Bert returned to his expert investigation of the flying-machine
at last with aching arms and in a state of gloomy rebellion. “Brasted
cheek!” he said. “One'd think I was one of 'is beastly German slaves!
“Prancing beggar!”
And then he fell speculating what would happen when the flying-machine,
was repaired--if it could be repaired.
The two Germans went away again, and after some reflection Bert removed
several nuts, resumed his jacket and vest, pocketed those nuts and his
tools and hid the set of tools from the second aeroplane in the fork of
a tree. “Right O,” he said, as he jumped down after the last of these
precautions. The Prince and his companion reappeared as he returned to
the machine by the water's edge. The Prince surveyed his progress for
a time, and then went towards the Parting of the Waters and stood with
folded arms gazing upstream in profound thought. The bird-faced officer
came up to Bert, heavy with a sentence in English.
“Go,” he said with a helping gesture, “und eat.”
When Bert got to the refreshment shed, he found all the food had
vanished except one measured ration of corned beef and three biscuits.
He regarded this with open eyes and mouth.
The kitten appeared from under the vendor's seat with an ingratiating
purr. “Of course!” said Bert. “Why! where's your milk?”
He accumulated wrath for a moment or so, then seized the plate in one
hand, and the biscuits in another, and went in search of the Prince,
breathing vile words anent “grub” and his intimate interior. He
approached without saluting.
“'Ere!” he said fiercely. “Whad the devil's this?”
An entirely unsatisfactory altercation followed. Bert expounded the
Bun Hill theory of the relations of grub to efficiency in English,
the bird-faced man replied with points about nations and discipline
in German. The Prince, having made an estimate of Bert's quality and
physique, suddenly hectored. He gripped Bert by the shoulder and shook
him, making his pockets rattle, shouted something to him, and flung him
struggling back. He hit him as though he was a German private. Bert went
back, white and scared, but resolved by all his Cockney standards upon
one thing. He was bound in honour to “go for” the Prince. “Gaw!” he
gasped, buttoning his jacket.
“Now,” cried the Prince, “Vil you go?” and then catching the heroic
gleam in Bert's eye, drew his sword.
The bird-faced officer intervened, saying something in German and
pointing skyward.
Far away in the southwest appeared a Japanese airship coming fast toward
them. Their conflict ended at that. The Prince was first to grasp the
situation and lead the retreat. All three scuttled like rabbits for the
trees, and ran to and for cover until they found a hollow in which
the grass grew rank. There they all squatted within six yards of one
another. They sat in this place for a long time, up to their necks in
the grass and watching through the branches for the airship. Bert had
dropped some of his corned beef, but he found the biscuits in his hand
and ate them quietly. The monster came nearly overhead and then went
away to Niagara and dropped beyond the power-works. When it was near,
they all kept silence, and then presently they fell into an argument
that was robbed perhaps of immediate explosive effect only by their
failure to understand one another.
It was Bert began the talking and he talked on regardless of what they
understood or failed to understand. But his voice must have conveyed his
cantankerous intentions.
“You want that machine done,” he said first, “you better keep your 'ands
off me!”
They disregarded that and he repeated it.
Then he expanded his idea and the spirit of speech took hold of him.
“You think you got 'old of a chap you can kick and 'it like you do your
private soldiers--you're jolly well mistaken. See? I've 'ad about enough
of you and your antics. I been thinking you over, you and your war and
your Empire and all the rot of it. Rot it is! It's you Germans made all
the trouble in Europe first and last. And all for nothin'. Jest silly
prancing! Jest because you've got the uniforms and flags! 'Ere I was--I
didn't want to 'ave anything to do with you. I jest didn't care a 'eng
at all about you. Then you get 'old of me--steal me practically--and
'ere I am, thousands of miles away from 'ome and everything, and all
your silly fleet smashed up to rags. And you want to go on prancin' NOW!
Not if 'I know it!
“Look at the mischief you done! Look at the way you smashed up New
York--the people you killed, the stuff you wasted. Can't you learn?”
“Dummer Kerl!” said the bird-faced man suddenly in a tone of
concentrated malignancy, glaring under his bandages. “Esel!”
“That's German for silly ass!--I know. But who's the silly ass--'im
or me? When I was a kid, I used to read penny dreadfuls about 'avin
adventures and bein' a great c'mander and all that rot. I stowed it. But
what's 'e got in 'is head? Rot about Napoleon, rot about Alexander, rot
about 'is blessed family and 'im and Gord and David and all that. Any
one who wasn't a dressed-up silly fool of a Prince could 'ave told all
this was goin' to 'appen. There was us in Europe all at sixes and sevens
with our silly flags and our silly newspapers raggin' us up against each
other and keepin' us apart, and there was China, solid as a cheese, with
millions and millions of men only wantin' a bit of science and a bit of
enterprise to be as good as all of us. You thought they couldn't get at
you. And then they got flying-machines. And bif!--'ere we are. Why, when
they didn't go on making guns and armies in China, we went and poked 'em
up until they did. They '_ad_ to give us this lickin' they've give us. We
wouldn't be happy until they did, and as I say, 'ere we are!”
The bird-faced officer shouted to him to be quiet, and then began a
conversation with the Prince.
“British citizen,” said Bert. “You ain't obliged to listen, but I ain't
obliged to shut up.”
And for some time he continued his dissertation upon Imperialism,
militarism, and international politics. But their talking put him
out, and for a time he was certainly merely repeating abusive terms,
“prancin' nincompoops” and the like, old terms and new. Then suddenly
he remembered his essential grievance. “'Owever, look 'ere--'ere!--the
thing I started this talk about is where's that food there was in that
shed? That's what I want to know. Where you put it?”
He paused. They went on talking in German. He repeated his question.
They disregarded him. He asked a third time in a manner insupportably
aggressive.
There fell a tense silence. For some seconds the three regarded one
another. The Prince eyed Bert steadfastly, and Bert quailed under his
eye. Slowly the Prince rose to his feet and the bird-faced officer
jerked up beside him. Bert remained squatting.
“Be quaiat,” said the Prince.
Bert perceived this was no moment for eloquence.
The two Germans regarded him as he crouched there. Death for a moment
seemed near.
Then the Prince turned away and the two of them went towards the
flying-machine.
“Gaw!” whispered Bert, and then uttered under his breath one single word
of abuse. He sat crouched together for perhaps three minutes, then
he sprang to his feet and went off towards the Chinese aeronaut's gun
hidden among the weeds.
8
There was no pretence after that moment that Bert was under the
orders of the Prince or that he was going on with the repairing of the
flying-machine. The two Germans took possession of that and set to work
upon it. Bert, with his new weapon went off to the neighbourhood of
Terrapin Rock, and there sat down to examine it. It was a short rifle
with a big cartridge, and a nearly full magazine. He took out the
cartridges carefully and then tried the trigger and fittings until
he felt sure he had the use of it. He reloaded carefully. Then he
remembered he was hungry and went off, gun under his arm, to hunt in and
about the refreshment shed. He had the sense to perceive that he must
not show himself with the gun to the Prince and his companion. So long
as they thought him unarmed they would leave him alone, but there was
no knowing what the Napoleonic person might do if he saw Bert's weapon.
Also he did not go near them because he knew that within himself boiled
a reservoir of rage and fear that he wanted to shoot these two men. He
wanted to shoot them, and he thought that to shoot them would be a quite
horrible thing to do. The two sides of his inconsistent civilisation
warred within him.
Near the shed the kitten turned up again, obviously keen for milk. This
greatly enhanced his own angry sense of hunger. He began to talk as he
hunted about, and presently stood still, shouting insults. He talked of
war and pride and Imperialism. “Any other Prince but you would have died
with his men and his ship!” he cried.
The two Germans at the machine heard his voice going ever and again
amidst the clamour of the waters. Their eyes met and they smiled
slightly.
He was disposed for a time to sit in the refreshment shed waiting for
them, but then it occurred to him that so he might get them both at
close quarters. He strolled off presently to the point of Luna Island to
think the situation out.
It had seemed a comparatively simple one at first, but as he turned it
over in his mind its possibilities increased and multiplied. Both these
men had swords,--had either a revolver?
Also, if he shot them both, he might never find the food!
So far he had been going about with this gun under his arm, and a sense
of lordly security in his mind, but what if they saw the gun and decided
to ambush him? Goat Island is nearly all cover, trees, rocks, thickets,
and irregularities.
Why not go and murder them both now?
“I carn't,” said Bert, dismissing that. “I got to be worked up.”
But it was a mistake to get right away from them. That suddenly became
clear. He ought to keep them under observation, ought to “scout” them.
Then he would be able to see what they were doing, whether either of
them had a revolver, where they had hidden the food. He would be better
able to determine what they meant to do to him. If he didn't “scout”
them, presently they would begin to “scout” him. This seemed so
eminently reasonable that he acted upon it forthwith. He thought over
his costume and threw his collar and the tell-tale aeronaut's white cap
into the water far below. He turned his coat collar up to hide any gleam
of his dirty shirt. The tools and nuts in his pockets were disposed
to clank, but he rearranged them and wrapped some letters and his
pocket-handkerchief about them. He started off circumspectly and
noiselessly, listening and peering at every step. As he drew near
his antagonists, much grunting and creaking served to locate them. He
discovered them engaged in what looked like a wrestling match with the
Asiatic flying-machine. Their coats were off, their swords laid aside,
they were working magnificently. Apparently they were turning it round
and were having a good deal of difficulty with the long tail among the
trees. He dropped flat at the sight of them and wriggled into a little
hollow, and so lay watching their exertions. Ever and again, to pass the
time, he would cover one or other of them with his gun.
He found them quite interesting to watch, so interesting that at times
he came near shouting to advise them. He perceived that when they had
the machine turned round, they would then be in immediate want of the
nuts and tools he carried. Then they would come after him. They would
certainly conclude he had them or had hidden them. Should he hide his
gun and do a deal for food with these tools? He felt he would not be
able to part with the gun again now he had once felt its reassuring
company. The kitten turned up again and made a great fuss with him and
licked and bit his ear.
The sun clambered to midday, and once that morning he saw, though the
Germans did not, an Asiatic airship very far to the south, going swiftly
eastward.
At last the flying-machine was turned and stood poised on its wheel,
with its hooks pointing up the Rapids. The two officers wiped their
faces, resumed jackets and swords, spoke and bore themselves like men
who congratulated themselves on a good laborious morning. Then they
went off briskly towards the refreshment shed, the Prince leading.
Bert became active in pursuit; but he found it impossible to stalk them
quickly enough and silently enough to discover the hiding-place of the
food. He found them, when he came into sight of them again, seated with
their backs against the shed, plates on knee, and a tin of corned beef
and a plateful of biscuits between them. They seemed in fairly good
spirits, and once the Prince laughed. At this vision of eating Bert's
plans gave way. Fierce hunger carried him. He appeared before them
suddenly at a distance of perhaps twenty yards, gun in hand.
“'Ands up!” he said in a hard, ferocious voice.
The Prince hesitated, and then up went two pairs of hands. The gun had
surprised them both completely.
“Stand up,” said Bert.... “Drop that fork!”
They obeyed again.
“What nex'?” said Bert to himself. “'Orf stage, I suppose. That way,” he
said. “Go!”
The Prince obeyed with remarkable alacrity. When he reached the head of
the clearing, he said something quickly to the bird-faced man and they
both, with an entire lack of dignity, RAN!
Bert was struck with an exasperating afterthought.
“Gord!” he cried with infinite vexation. “Why! I ought to 'ave took
their swords! 'Ere!”
But the Germans were already out of sight, and no doubt taking cover
among the trees. Bert fell back upon imprecations, then he went up to
the shed, cursorily examined the possibility of a flank attack, put his
gun handy, and set to work, with a convulsive listening pause before
each mouthful on the Prince's plate of corned beef. He had finished that
up and handed its gleanings to the kitten and he was falling-to on the
second plateful, when the plate broke in his hand! He stared, with the
fact slowly creeping upon him that an instant before he had heard a
crack among the thickets. Then he sprang to his feet, snatched up his
gun in one hand and the tin of corned beef in the other, and fled round
the shed to the other side of the clearing. As he did so came a second
crack from the thickets, and something went phwit! by his ear.
He didn't stop running until he was in what seemed to him a strongly
defensible position near Luna Island. Then he took cover, panting, and
crouched expectant.
“They got a revolver after all!” he panted....
“Wonder if they got two? If they 'ave--Gord! I'm done!
“Where's the kitten? Finishin' up that corned beef, I suppose. Little
beggar!”
9
So it was that war began upon Goat Island. It lasted a day and a night,
the longest day and the longest night in Bert's life. He had to lie
close and listen and watch. Also he had to scheme what he should do. It
was clear now that he had to kill these two men if he could, and that if
they could, they would kill him. The prize was first food and then the
flying-machine and the doubtful privilege of trying' to ride it. If one
failed, one would certainly be killed; if one succeeded, one would get
away somewhere over there. For a time Bert tried to imagine what it
was like over there. His mind ran over possibilities, deserts, angry
Americans, Japanese, Chinese--perhaps Red Indians! (Were there still Red
Indians?)
“Got to take what comes,” said Bert. “No way out of it that I can see!”
Was that voices? He realised that his attention was wandering. For a
time all his senses were very alert. The uproar of the Falls was very
confusing, and it mixed in all sorts of sounds, like feet walking, like
voices talking, like shouts and cries.
“Silly great catarac',” said Bert. “There ain't no sense in it, fallin'
and fallin'.”
Never mind that, now! What were the Germans doing?
Would they go back to the flying-machine? They couldn't do anything with
it, because he had those nuts and screws and the wrench and other tools.
But suppose they found the second set of tools he had hidden in a tree!
He had hidden the things well, of course, but they MIGHT find them.
One wasn't sure, of course--one wasn't sure. He tried to remember just
exactly how he had hidden those tools. He tried to persuade himself they
were certainly and surely hidden, but his memory began to play antics.
Had he really left the handle of the wrench sticking out, shining out at
the fork of the branch?
Ssh! What was that? Some one stirring in those bushes? Up went an
expectant muzzle. No! Where was the kitten? No! It was just imagination,
not even the kitten.
The Germans would certainly miss and hunt about for the tools and nuts
and screws he carried in his pockets; that was clear. Then they would
decide he had them and come for him. He had only to remain still under
cover, therefore, and he would get them. Was there any flaw in that?
Would they take off more removable parts of the flying-machine and then
lie up for him? No, they wouldn't do that, because they were two to
one; they would have no apprehension of his getting off in the
flying-machine, and no sound reason for supposing he would approach it,
and so they would do nothing to damage or disable it. That he decided
was clear. But suppose they lay up for him by the food. Well, that they
wouldn't do, because they would know he had this corned beef; there was
enough in this can to last, with moderation, several days. Of course
they might try to tire him out instead of attacking him--
He roused himself with a start. He had just grasped the real weakness of
his position. He might go to sleep!
It needed but ten minutes under the suggestion of that idea, before he
realised that he was going to sleep!
He rubbed his eyes and handled his gun. He had never before realised the
intensely soporific effect of the American sun, of the American air, the
drowsy, sleep-compelling uproar of Niagara. Hitherto these things had on
the whole seemed stimulating....
If he had not eaten so much and eaten it so fast, he would not be so
heavy. Are vegetarians always bright?...
He roused himself with a jerk again.
If he didn't do something, he would fall asleep, and if he fell asleep,
it was ten to one they would find him snoring, and finish him forthwith.
If he sat motionless and noiseless, he would inevitably sleep. It was
better, he told himself, to take even the risks of attacking than that.
This sleep trouble, he felt, was going to beat him, must beat him in
the end. They were all right; one could sleep and the other could watch.
That, come to think of it, was what they would always do; one would do
anything they wanted done, the other would lie under cover near at hand,
ready to shoot. They might even trap him like that. One might act as a
decoy.
That set him thinking of decoys. What a fool he had been to throw his
cap away. It would have been invaluable on a stick--especially at night.
He found himself wishing for a drink. He settled that for a time by
putting a pebble in his mouth. And then the sleep craving returned.
It became clear to him he must attack. Like many great generals before
him, he found his baggage, that is to say his tin of corned beef, a
serious impediment to mobility. At last he decided to put the beef
loose in his pocket and abandon the tin. It was not perhaps an ideal
arrangement, but one must make sacrifices when one is campaigning. He
crawled perhaps ten yards, and then for a time the possibilities of the
situation paralysed him.
The afternoon was still. The roar of the cataract simply threw up that
immense stillness in relief. He was doing his best to contrive the
death of two better men than himself. Also they were doing their best to
contrive his. What, behind this silence, were they doing.
Suppose he came upon them suddenly and fired, and missed?
10
He crawled, and halted listening, and crawled again until nightfall, and
no doubt the German Alexander and his lieutenant did the same. A large
scale map of Goat Island marked with red and blue lines to show these
strategic movements would no doubt have displayed much interlacing, but
as a matter of fact neither side saw anything of the other throughout
that age-long day of tedious alertness. Bert never knew how near he got
to them nor how far he kept from them. Night found him no longer sleepy,
but athirst, and near the American Fall. He was inspired by the idea
that his antagonists might be in the wreckage of the Hohenzollern cabins
that was jammed against Green Island. He became enterprising, broke from
any attempt to conceal himself, and went across the little bridge at the
double. He found nobody. It was his first visit to these huge fragments
of airships, and for a time he explored them curiously in the dim
light. He discovered the forward cabin was nearly intact, with its door
slanting downward and a corner under water. He crept in, drank, and then
was struck by the brilliant idea of shutting the door and sleeping on
it.
But now he could not sleep at all.
He nodded towards morning and woke up to find it fully day. He
breakfasted on corned beef and water, and sat for a long time
appreciative of the security of his position. At last he became
enterprising and bold. He would, he decided, settle this business
forthwith, one way or the other. He was tired of all this crawling. He
set out in the morning sunshine, gun in hand, scarcely troubling to walk
softly. He went round the refreshment shed without finding any one,
and then through the trees towards the flying-machine. He came upon the
bird-faced man sitting on the ground with his back against a tree, bent
up over his folded arms, sleeping, his bandage very much over one eye.
Bert stopped abruptly and stood perhaps fifteen yards away, gun in hand
ready. Where was the Prince? Then, sticking out at the side of the tree
beyond, he saw a shoulder. Bert took five deliberate paces to the left.
The great man became visible, leaning up against the trunk, pistol in
one hand and sword in the other, and yawning--yawning. You can't shoot
a yawning man Bert found. He advanced upon his antagonist with his
gun levelled, some foolish fancy of “hands up” in his mind. The Prince
became aware of him, the yawning mouth shut like a trap and he stood
stiffly up. Bert stopped, silent. For a moment the two regarded one
another.
Had the Prince been a wise man he would, I suppose, have dodged behind
the tree. Instead, he gave vent to a shout, and raised pistol and sword.
At that, like an automaton, Bert pulled his trigger.
It was his first experience of an oxygen-containing bullet. A great
flame spurted from the middle of the Prince, a blinding flare, and
there came a thud like the firing of a gun. Something hot and wet struck
Bert's face. Then through a whirl of blinding smoke and steam he saw
limbs and a collapsing, burst body fling themselves to earth.
Bert was so astonished that he stood agape, and the bird-faced officer
might have cut him to the earth without a struggle. But instead the
bird-faced officer was running away through the undergrowth, dodging as
he went. Bert roused himself to a brief ineffectual pursuit, but he had
no stomach for further killing. He returned to the mangled, scattered
thing that had so recently been the great Prince Karl Albert. He
surveyed the scorched and splashed vegetation about it. He made some
speculative identifications. He advanced gingerly and picked up the hot
revolver, to find all its chambers strained and burst. He became aware
of a cheerful and friendly presence. He was greatly shocked that one so
young should see so frightful a scene.
“'Ere, Kitty,” he said, “this ain't no place for you.”
He made three strides across the devastated area, captured the kitten
neatly, and went his way towards the shed, with her purring loudly on
his shoulder.
“YOU don't seem to mind,” he said.
For a time he fussed about the shed, and at last discovered the rest
of the provisions hidden in the roof. “Seems 'ard,” he said, as he
administered a saucerful of milk, “when you get three men in a 'ole like
this, they can't work together. But 'im and 'is princing was jest a bit
too thick!”
“Gaw!” he reflected, sitting on the counter and eating, “what a thing
life is! 'Ere am I; I seen 'is picture, 'eard 'is name since I was a kid
in frocks. Prince Karl Albert! And if any one 'ad tole me I was going to
blow 'im to smithereens--there! I shouldn't 'ave believed it, Kitty.
“That chap at Margit ought to 'ave tole me about it. All 'e tole me was
that I got a weak chess.
“That other chap, 'e ain't going to do much. Wonder what I ought to do
about 'im?”
He surveyed the trees with a keen blue eye and fingered the gun on his
knee. “I don't like this killing, Kitty,” he said. “It's like Kurt said
about being blooded. Seems to me you got to be blooded young.... If
that Prince 'ad come up to me and said, 'Shake 'ands!' I'd 'ave shook
'ands.... Now 'ere's that other chap, dodging about! 'E's got 'is 'ead
'urt already, and there's something wrong with his leg. And burns.
Golly! it isn't three weeks ago I first set eyes on 'im, and then 'e was
smart and set up--'ands full of 'air-brushes and things, and swearin' at
me. A regular gentleman! Now 'e's 'arfway to a wild man. What am I to do
with 'im? What the 'ell am I to do with 'im? I can't leave 'im 'ave that
flying-machine; that's a bit too good, and if I don't kill 'im, 'e'll
jest 'ang about this island and starve....
“'E's got a sword, of course”....
He resumed his philosophising after he had lit a cigarette.
“War's a silly gaim, Kitty. It's a silly gaim! We common people--we were
fools. We thought those big people knew what they were up to--and they
didn't. Look at that chap! 'E 'ad all Germany be'ind 'im, and what 'as
'e made of it? Smeshin' and blunderin' and destroyin', and there 'e 'is!
Jest a mess of blood and boots and things! Jest an 'orrid splash! Prince
Karl Albert! And all the men 'e led and the ships 'e 'ad, the airships,
and the dragon-fliers--all scattered like a paper-chase between this
'ole and Germany. And fightin' going on and burnin' and killin' that 'e
started, war without end all over the world!
“I suppose I shall 'ave to kill that other chap. I suppose I must. But
it ain't at all the sort of job I fancy, Kitty!”
For a time he hunted about the island amidst the uproar of the
waterfall, looking for the wounded officer, and at last he started him
out of some bushes near the head of Biddle Stairs. But as he saw the
bent and bandaged figure in limping flight before him, he found his
Cockney softness too much for him again; he could neither shoot nor
pursue. “I carn't,” he said, “that's flat. I 'aven't the guts for it!
'E'll 'ave to go.”
He turned his steps towards the flying-machine....
He never saw the bird-faced officer again, nor any further evidence of
his presence. Towards evening he grew fearful of ambushes and hunted
vigorously for an hour or so, but in vain. He slept in a good defensible
position at the extremity of the rocky point that runs out to the
Canadian Fall, and in the night he woke in panic terror and fired his
gun. But it was nothing. He slept no more that night. In the morning he
became curiously concerned for the vanished man, and hunted for him as
one might for an erring brother.
“If I knew some German,” he said, “I'd 'oller. It's jest not knowing
German does it. You can't explain'”
He discovered, later, traces of an attempt to cross the gap in the
broken bridge. A rope with a bolt attached had been flung across and had
caught in a fenestration of a projecting fragment of railing. The end of
the rope trailed in the seething water towards the fall.
But the bird-faced officer was already rubbing shoulders with certain
inert matter that had once been Lieutenant Kurt and the Chinese aeronaut
and a dead cow, and much other uncongenial company, in the huge circle
of the Whirlpool two and a quarter miles away. Never had that great
gathering place, that incessant, aimless, unprogressive hurry of
waste and battered things, been so crowded with strange and melancholy
derelicts. Round they went and round, and every day brought its
new contributions, luckless brutes, shattered fragments of boat and
flying-machine, endless citizens from the cities upon the shores of the
great lakes above. Much came from Cleveland. It all gathered here, and
whirled about indefinitely, and over it all gathered daily a greater
abundance of birds.
CHAPTER X. THE WORLD UNDER THE WAR
1
Bert spent two more days upon Goat Island, and finished all his
provisions except the cigarettes and mineral water, before he brought
himself to try the Asiatic flying-machine.
Even at last he did not so much go off upon it as get carried off. It
had taken only an hour or so to substitute wing stays from the second
flying-machine and to replace the nuts he had himself removed. The
engine was in working order, and differed only very simply and obviously
from that of a contemporary motor-bicycle. The rest of the time was
taken up by a vast musing and delaying and hesitation. Chiefly he saw
himself splashing into the rapids and whirling down them to the Fall,
clutching and drowning, but also he had a vision of being hopelessly in
the air, going fast and unable to ground. His mind was too concentrated
upon the business of flying for him to think very much of what might
happen to an indefinite-spirited Cockney without credential who arrived
on an Asiatic flying-machine amidst the war-infuriated population
beyond.
He still had a lingering solicitude for the bird-faced officer. He had
a haunting fancy he might be lying disabled or badly smashed in some
way in some nook or cranny of the Island; and it was only after a most
exhaustive search that he abandoned that distressing idea. “If I found
'im,” he reasoned the while, “what could I do wiv 'im? You can't blow
a chap's brains out when 'e's down. And I don' see 'ow else I can 'elp
'im.”
Then the kitten bothered his highly developed sense of social
responsibility. “If I leave 'er, she'll starve.... Ought to catch mice
for 'erself.... ARE there mice?... Birds?... She's too young.... She's
like me; she's a bit too civilised.”
Finally he stuck her in his side pocket and she became greatly
interested in the memories of corned beef she found there. With her in
his pocket, he seated himself in the saddle of the flying-machine. Big,
clumsy thing it was--and not a bit like a bicycle. Still the working of
it was fairly plain. You set the engine going--SO; kicked yourself
up until the wheel was vertical, SO; engaged the gyroscope, SO, and
then--then--you just pulled up this lever.
Rather stiff it was, but suddenly it came over--
The big curved wings on either side flapped disconcertingly, flapped
again' click, clock, click, clock, clitter-clock!
Stop! The thing was heading for the water; its wheel was in the water.
Bert groaned from his heart and struggled to restore the lever to its
first position. Click, clock, clitter-clock, he was rising! The machine
was lifting its dripping wheel out of the eddies, and he was going up!
There was no stopping now, no good in stopping now. In another moment
Bert, clutching and convulsive and rigid, with staring eyes and a face
pale as death, was flapping up above the Rapids, jerking to every jerk
of the wings, and rising, rising.
There was no comparison in dignity and comfort between a flying-machine
and a balloon. Except in its moments of descent, the balloon was a
vehicle of faultless urbanity; this was a buck-jumping mule, a mule that
jumped up and never came down again. Click, clock, click, clock; with
each beat of the strangely shaped wings it jumped Bert upward and
caught him neatly again half a second later on the saddle. And while in
ballooning there is no wind, since the balloon is a part of the wind,
flying is a wild perpetual creation of and plunging into wind. It was
a wind that above all things sought to blind him, to force him to close
his eyes. It occurred to him presently to twist his knees and legs
inward and grip with them, or surely he would have been bumped into two
clumsy halves. And he was going up, a hundred yards high, two hundred,
three hundred, over the streaming, frothing wilderness of water
below--up, up, up. That was all right, but how presently would one go
horizontally? He tried to think if these things did go horizontally. No!
They flapped up and then they soared down. For a time he would keep
on flapping up. Tears streamed from his eyes. He wiped them with one
temerariously disengaged hand.
Was it better to risk a fall over land or over water--such water?
He was flapping up above the Upper Rapids towards Buffalo. It was at any
rate a comfort that the Falls and the wild swirl of waters below them
were behind him. He was flying up straight. That he could see. How did
one turn?
He was presently almost cool, and his eyes got more used to the rush
of air, but he was getting very high, very high. He tilted his head
forwards and surveyed the country, blinking. He could see all over
Buffalo, a place with three great blackened scars of ruin, and hills and
stretches beyond. He wondered if he was half a mile high, or more.
There were some people among some houses near a railway station between
Niagara and Buffalo, and then more people. They went like ants busily
in and out of the houses. He saw two motor cars gliding along the road
towards Niagara city. Then far away in the south he saw a great Asiatic
airship going eastward. “Oh, Gord!” he said, and became earnest in his
ineffectual attempts to alter his direction. But that airship took no
notice of him, and he continued to ascend convulsively. The world got
more and more extensive and maplike. Click, clock, clitter-clock. Above
him and very near to him now was a hazy stratum of cloud.
He determined to disengage the wing clutch. He did so. The lever
resisted his strength for a time, then over it came, and instantly
the tail of the machine cocked up and the wings became rigidly spread.
Instantly everything was swift and smooth and silent. He was
gliding rapidly down the air against a wild gale of wind, his eyes
three-quarters shut.
A little lever that had hitherto been obdurate now confessed itself
mobile. He turned it over gently to the right, and whiroo!--the left
wing had in some mysterious way given at its edge and he was sweeping
round and downward in an immense right-handed spiral. For some moments
he experienced all the helpless sensations of catastrophe. He restored
the lever to its middle position with some difficulty, and the wings
were equalised again.
He turned it to the left and had a sensation of being spun round
backwards. “Too much!” he gasped.
He discovered that he was rushing down at a headlong pace towards a
railway line and some factory buildings. They appeared to be tearing up
to him to devour him. He must have dropped all that height. For a moment
he had the ineffectual sensations of one whose bicycle bolts downhill.
The ground had almost taken him by surprise. “'Ere!” he cried; and then
with a violent effort of all his being he got the beating engine at work
again and set the wings flapping. He swooped down and up and resumed his
quivering and pulsating ascent of the air.
He went high again, until he had a wide view of the pleasant upland
country of western New York State, and then made a long coast down, and
so up again, and then a coast. Then as he came swooping a quarter of
a mile above a village he saw people running about, running
away--evidently in relation to his hawk-like passage. He got an idea
that he had been shot at.
“Up!” he said, and attacked that lever again. It came over with
remarkable docility, and suddenly the wings seemed to give way in the
middle. But the engine was still! It had stopped. He flung the lever
back rather by instinct than design. What to do?
Much happened in a few seconds, but also his mind was quick, he thought
very quickly. He couldn't get up again, he was gliding down the air; he
would have to hit something.
He was travelling at the rate of perhaps thirty miles an hour down,
down.
That plantation of larches looked the softest thing--mossy almost!
Could he get it? He gave himself to the steering. Round to the
right--left!
Swirroo! Crackle! He was gliding over the tops of the trees, ploughing
through them, tumbling into a cloud of green sharp leaves and black
twigs. There was a sudden snapping, and he fell off the saddle forward,
a thud and a crashing of branches. Some twigs hit him smartly in the
face....
He was between a tree-stem and the saddle, with his leg over the
steering lever and, so far as he could realise, not hurt. He tried to
alter his position and free his leg, and found himself slipping and
dropping through branches with everything giving way beneath him. He
clutched and found himself in the lower branches of a tree beneath the
flying-machine. The air was full of a pleasant resinous smell. He stared
for a moment motionless, and then very carefully clambered down branch
by branch to the soft needle-covered ground below.
“Good business,” he said, looking up at the bent and tilted kite-wings
above.
“I dropped soft!”
He rubbed his chin with his hand and meditated. “Blowed if I don't
think I'm a rather lucky fellow!” he said, surveying the pleasant
sun-bespattered ground under the trees. Then he became aware of
a violent tumult at his side. “Lord!” he said, “You must be 'arf
smothered,” and extracted the kitten from his pocket-handkerchief and
pocket. She was twisted and crumpled and extremely glad to see the light
again. Her little tongue peeped between her teeth. He put her down, and
she ran a dozen paces and shook herself and stretched and sat up and
began to wash.
“Nex'?” he said, looking about him, and then with a gesture of vexation,
“Desh it! I ought to 'ave brought that gun!”
He had rested it against a tree when he had seated himself in the
flying-machine saddle.
He was puzzled for a time by the immense peacefulness in the quality of
the world, and then he perceived that the roar of the cataract was no
longer in his ears.
2
He had no very clear idea of what sort of people he might come upon
in this country. It was, he knew, America. Americans he had always
understood were the citizens of a great and powerful nation, dry and
humorous in their manner, addicted to the use of the bowie-knife
and revolver, and in the habit of talking through the nose like
Norfolkshire, and saying “allow” and “reckon” and “calculate,” after the
manner of the people who live on the New Forest side of Hampshire. Also
they were very rich, had rocking-chairs, and put their feet at unusual
altitudes, and they chewed tobacco, gum, and other substances, with
untiring industry. Commingled with them were cowboys, Red Indians, and
comic, respectful niggers. This he had learnt from the fiction in
his public library. Beyond that he had learnt very little. He was not
surprised therefore when he met armed men.
He decided to abandon the shattered flying-machine. He wandered through
the trees for some time, and then struck a road that seemed to his urban
English eyes to be remarkably wide but not properly “made.” Neither
hedge nor ditch nor curbed distinctive footpath separated it from the
woods, and it went in that long easy curve which distinguishes the
tracks of an open continent. Ahead he saw a man carrying a gun under his
arm, a man in a soft black hat, a blue blouse, and black trousers,
and with a broad round-fat face quite innocent of goatee. This person
regarded him askance and heard him speak with a start.
“Can you tell me whereabouts I am at all?” asked Bert.
The man regarded him, and more particularly his rubber boots, with
sinister suspicion. Then he replied in a strange outlandish tongue
that was, as a matter of fact, Czech. He ended suddenly at the sight of
Bert's blank face with “Don't spik English.”
“Oh!” said Bert. He reflected gravely for a moment, and then went his
way.
“Thenks,” he, said as an afterthought. The man regarded his back for a
moment, was struck with an idea, began an abortive gesture, sighed, gave
it up, and went on also with a depressed countenance.
Presently Bert came to a big wooden house standing casually among the
trees. It looked a bleak, bare box of a house to him, no creeper grew on
it, no hedge nor wall nor fence parted it off from the woods about it.
He stopped before the steps that led up to the door, perhaps thirty
yards away. The place seemed deserted. He would have gone up to the
door and rapped, but suddenly a big black dog appeared at the side and
regarded him. It was a huge heavy-jawed dog of some unfamiliar breed,
and it, wore a spike-studded collar. It did not bark nor approach him,
it just bristled quietly and emitted a single sound like a short, deep
cough.
Bert hesitated and went on.
He stopped thirty paces away and stood peering about him among the
trees. “If I 'aven't been and lef' that kitten,” he said.
Acute sorrow wrenched him for a time. The black dog came through the
trees to get a better look at him and coughed that well-bred cough
again. Bert resumed the road.
“She'll do all right,” he said.... “She'll catch things.
“She'll do all right,” he said presently, without conviction. But if it
had not been for the black dog, he would have gone back.
When he was out of sight of the house and the black dog, he went into
the woods on the other side of the way and emerged after an interval
trimming a very tolerable cudgel with his pocket-knife. Presently he saw
an attractive-looking rock by the track and picked it up and put it in
his pocket. Then he came to three or four houses, wooden like the last,
each with an ill-painted white verandah (that was his name for it) and
all standing in the same casual way upon the ground. Behind, through
the woods, he saw pig-stys and a rooting black sow leading a brisk,
adventurous family. A wild-looking woman with sloe-black eyes and
dishevelled black hair sat upon the steps of one of the houses nursing a
baby, but at the sight of Bert she got up and went inside, and he heard
her bolting the door. Then a boy appeared among the pig-stys, but he
would not understand Bert's hail.
“I suppose it is America!” said Bert.
The houses became more frequent down the road, and he passed two other
extremely wild and dirty-looking men without addressing them. One
carried a gun and the other a hatchet, and they scrutinised him and his
cudgel scornfully. Then he struck a cross-road with a mono-rail at its
side, and there was a notice board at the corner with “Wait here for the
cars.” “That's all right, any'ow,” said Bert. “Wonder 'ow long I should
'ave to wait?” It occurred to him that in the present disturbed state of
the country the service might be interrupted, and as there seemed more
houses to the right than the left he turned to the right. He passed an
old negro. “'Ullo!” said Bert. “Goo' morning!”
“Good day, sah!” said the old negro, in a voice of almost incredible
richness.
“What's the name of this place?” asked Bert.
“Tanooda, sah!” said the negro.
“Thenks!” said Bert.
“Thank YOU, sah!” said the negro, overwhelmingly.
Bert came to houses of the same detached, unwalled, wooden type, but
adorned now with enamelled advertisements partly in English and partly
in Esperanto. Then he came to what he concluded was a grocer's shop. It
was the first house that professed the hospitality of an open door, and
from within came a strangely familiar sound. “Gaw!” he said searching
in his pockets. “Why! I 'aven't wanted money for free weeks! I wonder
if I--Grubb 'ad most of it. Ah!” He produced a handful of coins and
regarded it; three pennies, sixpence, and a shilling. “That's all
right,” he said, forgetting a very obvious consideration.
He approached the door, and as he did so a compactly built, grey-faced
man in shirt sleeves appeared in it and scrutinised him and his cudgel.
“Mornin',” said Bert. “Can I get anything to eat 'r drink in this shop?”
The man in the door replied, thank Heaven, in clear, good American.
“This, sir, is not A shop, it is A store.”
“Oh!” said Bert, and then, “Well, can I get anything to eat?”
“You can,” said the American in a tone of confident encouragement, and
led the way inside.
The shop seemed to him by his Bun Hill standards extremely roomy, well
lit, and unencumbered. There was a long counter to the left of him,
with drawers and miscellaneous commodities ranged behind it, a number of
chairs, several tables, and two spittoons to the right, various barrels,
cheeses, and bacon up the vista, and beyond, a large archway leading to
more space. A little group of men was assembled round one of the tables,
and a woman of perhaps five-and-thirty leant with her elbows on the
counter. All the men were armed with rifles, and the barrel of a gun
peeped above the counter. They were all listening idly, inattentively,
to a cheap, metallic-toned gramophone that occupied a table near at
hand. From its brazen throat came words that gave Bert a qualm of
homesickness, that brought back in his memory a sunlit beach, a group of
children, red-painted bicycles, Grubb, and an approaching balloon:--
“Ting-a-ling-a-ting-a-ling-a-ting-a ling-a-tang... What Price Hair-pins
Now?”
A heavy-necked man in a straw hat, who was chewing something, stopped
the machine with a touch, and they all turned their eyes on Bert. And
all their eyes were tired eyes.
“Can we give this gentleman anything to eat, mother, or can we not?”
said the proprietor.
“He kin have what he likes?” said the woman at the counter, without
moving, “right up from a cracker to a square meal.” She struggled with a
yawn, after the manner of one who has been up all night.
“I want a meal,” said Bert, “but I 'aven't very much money. I don' want
to give mor'n a shillin'.”
“Mor'n a WHAT?” said the proprietor, sharply.
“Mor'n a shillin',” said Bert, with a sudden disagreeable realisation
coming into his mind.
“Yes,” said the proprietor, startled for a moment from his courtly
bearing. “But what in hell is a shilling?”
“He means a quarter,” said a wise-looking, lank young man in riding
gaiters.
Bert, trying to conceal his consternation, produced a coin. “That's a
shilling,” he said.
“He calls A store A shop,” said the proprietor, “and he wants A meal for
A shilling. May I ask you, sir, what part of America you hail from?”
Bert replaced the shilling in his pocket as he spoke, “Niagara,” he
said.
“And when did you leave Niagara?”
“'Bout an hour ago.”
“Well,” said the proprietor, and turned with a puzzled smile to the
others. “Well!”
They asked various questions simultaneously.
Bert selected one or two for reply. “You see,” he said, “I been with
the German air-fleet. I got caught up by them, sort of by accident, and
brought over here.”
“From England?”
“Yes--from England. Way of Germany. I was in a great battle with them
Asiatics, and I got lef' on a little island between the Falls.”
“Goat Island?”
“I don' know what it was called. But any'ow I found a flying-machine and
made a sort of fly with it and got here.”
Two men stood up with incredulous eyes on him. “Where's the
flying-machine?” they asked; “outside?”
“It's back in the woods here--'bout arf a mile away.”
“Is it good?” said a thick-lipped man with a scar.
“I come down rather a smash--.”
Everybody got up and stood about him and talked confusingly. They wanted
him to take them to the flying-machine at once.
“Look 'ere,” said Bert, “I'll show you--only I 'aven't 'ad anything to
eat since yestiday--except mineral water.”
A gaunt soldierly-looking young man with long lean legs in riding
gaiters and a bandolier, who had hitherto not spoken, intervened now on
his behalf in a note of confident authority. “That's aw right,” he said.
“Give him a feed, Mr. Logan--from me. I want to hear more of that story
of his. We'll see his machine afterwards. If you ask me, I should say
it's a remarkably interesting accident had dropped this gentleman here.
I guess we requisition that flying-machine--if we find it--for local
defence.”
3
So Bert fell on his feet again, and sat eating cold meat and good bread
and mustard and drinking very good beer, and telling in the roughest
outline and with the omissions and inaccuracies of statement natural to
his type of mind, the simple story of his adventures. He told how he and
a “gentleman friend” had been visiting the seaside for their health, how
a “chep” came along in a balloon and fell out as he fell in, how he had
drifted to Franconia, how the Germans had seemed to mistake him for some
one and had “took him prisoner” and brought him to New York, how he
had been to Labrador and back, how he had got to Goat Island and
found himself there alone. He omitted the matter of the Prince and the
Butteridge aspect of the affair, not out of any deep deceitfulness,
but because he felt the inadequacy of his narrative powers. He wanted
everything to seem easy and natural and correct, to present himself as a
trustworthy and understandable Englishman in a sound mediocre position,
to whom refreshment and accommodation might be given with freedom and
confidence. When his fragmentary story came to New York and the battle
of Niagara, they suddenly produced newspapers which had been lying about
on the table, and began to check him and question him by these vehement
accounts. It became evident to him that his descent had revived and
roused to flames again a discussion, a topic, that had been burning
continuously, that had smouldered only through sheer exhaustion of
material during the temporary diversion of the gramophone, a discussion
that had drawn these men together, rifle in hand, the one supreme topic
of the whole world, the War and the methods of the War. He found any
question of his personality and his personal adventures falling into the
background, found himself taken for granted, and no more than a source
of information. The ordinary affairs of life, the buying and selling
of everyday necessities, the cultivation of the ground, the tending
of beasts, was going on as it were by force of routine, as the common
duties of life go on in a house whose master lies under the knife of
some supreme operation. The overruling interest was furnished by those
great Asiatic airships that went upon incalculable missions across the
sky, the crimson-clad swordsmen who might come fluttering down demanding
petrol, or food, or news. These men were asking, all the continent was
asking, “What are we to do? What can we try? How can we get at them?”
Bert fell into his place as an item, ceased even in his own thoughts to
be a central and independent thing.
After he had eaten and drunken his fill and sighed and stretched and
told them how good the food seemed to him, he lit a cigarette they gave
him and led the way, with some doubts and trouble, to the flying-machine
amidst the larches. It became manifest that the gaunt young man, whose
name, it seemed, was Laurier, was a leader both by position and natural
aptitude. He knew the names and characters and capabilities of all the
men who were with him, and he set them to work at once with vigour and
effect to secure this precious instrument of war. They got the thing
down to the ground deliberately and carefully, felling a couple of trees
in the process, and they built a wide flat roof of timbers and tree
boughs to guard their precious find against its chance discovery by any
passing Asiatics. Long before evening they had an engineer from the next
township at work upon it, and they were casting lots among the seventeen
picked men who wanted to take it for its first flight. And Bert found
his kitten and carried it back to Logan's store and handed it with
earnest admonition to Mrs. Logan. And it was reassuringly clear to him
that in Mrs. Logan both he and the kitten had found a congenial soul.
Laurier was not only a masterful person and a wealthy property owner and
employer--he was president, Bert learnt with awe, of the Tanooda Canning
Corporation--but he was popular and skilful in the arts of popularity.
In the evening quite a crowd of men gathered in the store and talked of
the flying-machine and of the war that was tearing the world to pieces.
And presently came a man on a bicycle with an ill-printed newspaper of a
single sheet which acted like fuel in a blazing furnace of talk. It
was nearly all American news; the old-fashioned cables had fallen into
disuse for some years, and the Marconi stations across the ocean and
along the Atlantic coastline seemed to have furnished particularly
tempting points of attack.
But such news it was.
Bert sat in the background--for by this time they had gauged his
personal quality pretty completely--listening. Before his staggering
mind passed strange vast images as they talked, of great issues at a
crisis, of nations in tumultuous march, of continents overthrown, of
famine and destruction beyond measure. Ever and again, in spite of his
efforts to suppress them, certain personal impressions would scamper
across the weltering confusion, the horrible mess of the exploded
Prince, the Chinese aeronaut upside down, the limping and bandaged
bird-faced officer blundering along in miserable and hopeless flight....
They spoke of fire and massacre, of cruelties and counter cruelties, of
things that had been done to harmless Asiatics by race-mad men, of the
wholesale burning and smashing up of towns, railway junctions, bridges,
of whole populations in hiding and exodus. “Every ship they've got is in
the Pacific,” he heard one man exclaim. “Since the fighting began they
can't have landed on the Pacific slope less than a million men. They've
come to stay in these States, and they will--living or dead.”
Slowly, broadly, invincibly, there grew upon Bert's mind realisation
of the immense tragedy of humanity into which his life was flowing;
the appalling and universal nature of the epoch that had arrived; the
conception of an end to security and order and habit. The whole world
was at war and it could not get back to peace, it might never recover
peace.
He had thought the things he had seen had been exceptional, conclusive
things, that the besieging of New York and the battle of the Atlantic
were epoch-making events between long years of security. And they had
been but the first warning impacts of universal cataclysm. Each day
destruction and hate and disaster grew, the fissures widened between
man and man, new regions of the fabric of civilisation crumbled and gave
way. Below, the armies grew and the people perished; above, the airships
and aeroplanes fought and fled, raining destruction.
It is difficult perhaps for the broad-minded and long-perspectived
reader to understand how incredible the breaking down of the scientific
civilisation seemed to those who actually lived at this time, who in
their own persons went down in that debacle. Progress had marched as it
seemed invincible about the earth, never now to rest again. For three
hundred years and more the long steadily accelerated diastole of
Europeanised civilisation had been in progress: towns had been
multiplying, populations increasing, values rising, new countries
developing; thought, literature, knowledge unfolding and spreading. It
seemed but a part of the process that every year the instruments of war
were vaster and more powerful, and that armies and explosives outgrew
all other growing things....
Three hundred years of diastole, and then came the swift and unexpected
systole, like the closing of a fist. They could not understand it was
systole.
They could not think of it as anything but a jolt, a hitch, a mere
oscillatory indication of the swiftness of their progress. Collapse,
though it happened all about them, remained incredible. Presently some
falling mass smote them down, or the ground opened beneath their feet.
They died incredulous....
These men in the store made a minute, remote group under this immense
canopy of disaster. They turned from one little aspect to another. What
chiefly concerned them was defence against Asiatic raiders swooping for
petrol or to destroy weapons or communications. Everywhere levies were
being formed at that time to defend the plant of the railroads day and
night in the hope that communication would speedily be restored. The
land war was still far away. A man with a flat voice distinguished
himself by a display of knowledge and cunning. He told them all with
confidence just what had been wrong with the German drachenflieger
and the American aeroplanes, just what advantage the Japanese flyers
possessed. He launched out into a romantic description of the Butteridge
machine and riveted Bert's attention. “I SEE that,” said Bert, and was
smitten silent by a thought. The man with the flat voice talked on,
without heeding him, of the strange irony of Butteridge's death. At
that Bert had a little twinge of relief--he would never meet Butteridge
again. It appeared Butteridge had died suddenly, very suddenly.
“And his secret, sir, perished with him! When they came to look for the
parts--none could find them. He had hidden them all too well.”
“But couldn't he tell?” asked the man in the straw hat. “Did he die so
suddenly as that?”
“Struck down, sir. Rage and apoplexy. At a place called Dymchurch in
England.”
“That's right,” said Laurier. “I remember a page about it in the Sunday
American. At the time they said it was a German spy had stolen his
balloon.”
“Well, sir,” said the flat-voiced man, “that fit of apoplexy at
Dyrnchurch was the worst thing--absolutely the worst thing that ever
happened to the world. For if it had not been for the death of Mr.
Butteridge--”
“No one knows his secret?”
“Not a soul. It's gone. His balloon, it appears, was lost at sea, with
all the plans. Down it went, and they went with it.”
Pause.
“With machines such as he made we could fight these Asiatic fliers
on more than equal terms. We could outfly and beat down those scarlet
humming-birds wherever they appeared. But it's gone, it's gone, and
there's no time to reinvent it now. We got to fight with what we
got--and the odds are against us. THAT won't stop us fightin'. No! but
just think of it!”
Bert was trembling violently. He cleared his throat hoarsely.
“I say,” he said, “look here, I--”
Nobody regarded him. The man with the flat voice was opening a new
branch of the subject.
“I allow--” he began.
Bert became violently excited. He stood up.
He made clawing motions with his hands. “I say!” he exclaimed, “Mr.
Laurier. Look 'ere--I want--about that Butteridge machine--.”
Mr. Laurier, sitting on an adjacent table, with a magnificent gesture,
arrested the discourse of the flat-voiced man. “What's HE saying?” said
he.
Then the whole company realised that something was happening to Bert;
either he was suffocating or going mad. He was spluttering.
“Look 'ere! I say! 'Old on a bit!” and trembling and eagerly unbuttoning
himself.
He tore open his collar and opened vest and shirt. He plunged into his
interior and for an instant it seemed he was plucking forth his liver.
Then as he struggled with buttons on his shoulder they perceived this
flattened horror was in fact a terribly dirty flannel chest-protector.
In an other moment Bert, in a state of irregular decolletage, was
standing over the table displaying a sheaf of papers.
“These!” he gasped. “These are the plans!... You know! Mr.
Butteridge--his machine! What died! I was the chap that went off in that
balloon!”
For some seconds every one was silent. They stared from these papers to
Bert's white face and blazing eyes, and back to the papers on the table.
Nobody moved. Then the man with the flat voice spoke.
“Irony!” he said, with a note of satisfaction. “Real rightdown Irony!
When it's too late to think of making 'em any more!”
4
They would all no doubt have been eager to hear Bert's story over again,
but it was it this point that Laurier showed his quality. “No, SIR,” he
said, and slid from off his table.
He impounded the dispersing Butteridge plans with one comprehensive
sweep of his arm, rescuing them even from the expository finger-marks of
the man with the flat voice, and handed them to Bert. “Put those back,”
he said, “where you had 'em. We have a journey before us.”
Bert took them.
“Whar?” said the man in the straw hat.
“Why, sir, we are going to find the President of these States and give
these plans over to him. I decline to believe, sir, we are too late.”
“Where is the President?” asked Bert weakly in that pause that followed.
“Logan,” said Laurier, disregarding that feeble inquiry, “you must help
us in this.”
It seemed only a matter of a few minutes before Bert and Laurier and the
storekeeper were examining a number of bicycles that were stowed in the
hinder room of the store. Bert didn't like any of them very much. They
had wood rims and an experience of wood rims in the English climate had
taught him to hate them. That, however, and one or two other objections
to an immediate start were overruled by Laurier. “But where IS the
President?” Bert repeated as they stood behind Logan while he pumped up
a deflated tyre.
Laurier looked down on him. “He is reported in the neighbourhood of
Albany--out towards the Berkshire Hills. He is moving from place to
place and, as far as he can, organising the defence by telegraph and
telephones The Asiatic air-fleet is trying to locate him. When they
think they have located the seat of government, they throw bombs. This
inconveniences him, but so far they have not come within ten miles of
him. The Asiatic air-fleet is at present scattered all over the
Eastern States, seeking out and destroying gas-works and whatever seems
conducive to the building of airships or the transport of troops.
Our retaliatory measures are slight in the extreme. But with these
machines--Sir, this ride of ours will count among the historical rides
of the world!”
He came near to striking an attitude. “We shan't get to him to-night?”
asked Bert.
“No, sir!” said Laurier. “We shall have to ride some days, sure!”
“And suppose we can't get a lift on a train--or anything?”
“No, sir! There's been no transit by Tanooda for three days. It is no
good waiting. We shall have to get on as well as we can.”
“Startin' now?”
“Starting now!”
“But 'ow about--We shan't be able to do much to-night.”
“May as well ride till we're fagged and sleep then. So much clear gain.
Our road is eastward.”
“Of course,” began Bert, with memories of the dawn upon Goat Island, and
left his sentence unfinished.
He gave his attention to the more scientific packing of the
chest-protector, for several of the plans flapped beyond his vest.
5
For a week Bert led a life of mixed sensations. Amidst these fatigue
in the legs predominated. Mostly he rode, rode with Laurier's back
inexorably ahead, through a land like a larger England, with bigger
hills and wider valleys, larger fields, wider roads, fewer hedges, and
wooden houses with commodious piazzas. He rode. Laurier made inquiries,
Laurier chose the turnings, Laurier doubted, Laurier decided. Now it
seemed they were in telephonic touch with the President; now something
had happened and he was lost again. But always they had to go on, and
always Bert rode. A tyre was deflated. Still he rode. He grew saddle
sore. Laurier declared that unimportant. Asiatic flying ships passed
overhead, the two cyclists made a dash for cover until the sky was
clear. Once a red Asiatic flying-machine came fluttering after them, so
low they could distinguish the aeronaut's head. He followed them for a
mile. Now they came to regions of panic, now to regions of destruction;
here people were fighting for food, here they seemed hardly stirred
from the countryside routine. They spent a day in a deserted and
damaged Albany. The Asiatics had descended and cut every wire and made a
cinder-heap of the Junction, and our travellers pushed on eastward.
They passed a hundred half-heeded incidents, and always Bert was toiling
after Laurier's indefatigable back....
Things struck upon Bert's attention and perplexed him, and then he
passed on with unanswered questionings fading from his mind.
He saw a large house on fire on a hillside to the right, and no man
heeding it....
They came to a narrow railroad bridge and presently to a mono-rail train
standing in the track on its safety feet. It was a remarkably sumptuous
train, the Last Word Trans-Continental Express, and the passengers were
all playing cards or sleeping or preparing a picnic meal on a grassy
slope near at hand. They had been there six days....
At one point ten dark-complexioned men were hanging in a string from the
trees along the roadside. Bert wondered why....
At one peaceful-looking village where they stopped off to get Bert's
tyre mended and found beer and biscuits, they were approached by an
extremely dirty little boy without boots, who spoke as follows:--
“Deyse been hanging a Chink in dose woods!”
“Hanging a Chinaman?” said Laurier.
“Sure. Der sleuths got him rubberin' der rail-road sheds!”
“Oh!”
“Dose guys done wase cartridges. Deyse hung him and dey pulled his legs.
Deyse doin' all der Chinks dey can fine dat weh! Dey ain't takin' no
risks. All der Chinks dey can fine.”
Neither Bert nor Laurier made any reply, and presently, after a
little skilful expectoration, the young gentleman was attracted by
the appearance of two of his friends down the road and shuffled off,
whooping weirdly....
That afternoon they almost ran over a man shot through the body and
partly decomposed, lying near the middle of the road, just outside
Albany. He must have been lying there for some days....
Beyond Albany they came upon a motor car with a tyre burst and a young
woman sitting absolutely passive beside the driver's seat. An old man
was under the car trying to effect some impossible repairs. Beyond,
sitting with a rifle across his knees, with his back to the car, and
staring into the woods, was a young man.
The old man crawled out at their approach and still on all-fours
accosted Bert and Laurier. The car had broken down overnight. The old
man, said he could not understand what was wrong, but he was trying
to puzzle it out. Neither he nor his son-in-law had any mechanical
aptitude. They had been assured this was a fool-proof car. It was
dangerous to have to stop in this place. The party had been attacked
by tramps and had had to fight. It was known they had provisions. He
mentioned a great name in the world of finance. Would Laurier and Bert
stop and help him? He proposed it first hopefully, then urgently, at
last in tears and terror.
“No!” said Laurier inexorable. “We must go on! We have something more
than a woman to save. We have to save America!”
The girl never stirred.
And once they passed a madman singing.
And at last they found the President hiding in a small saloon upon the
outskirts of a place called Pinkerville on the Hudson, and gave the
plans of the Butteridge machine into his hands.
CHAPTER XI. THE GREAT COLLAPSE
1
And now the whole fabric of civilisation was bending and giving, and
dropping to pieces and melting in the furnace of the war.
The stages of the swift and universal collapse of the financial and
scientific civilisation with which the twentieth century opened followed
each other very swiftly, so swiftly that upon the foreshortened page of
history--they seem altogether to overlap. To begin with, one sees the
world nearly at a maximum wealth and prosperity. To its inhabitants
indeed it seemed also at a maximum of security. When now in retrospect
the thoughtful observer surveys the intellectual history of this time,
when one reads its surviving fragments of literature, its scraps of
political oratory, the few small voices that chance has selected out of
a thousand million utterances to speak to later days, the most striking
thing of all this web of wisdom and error is surely that hallucination
of security. To men living in our present world state, orderly,
scientific and secured, nothing seems so precarious, so giddily
dangerous, as the fabric of the social order with which the men of the
opening of the twentieth century were content. To us it seems that every
institution and relationship was the fruit of haphazard and tradition
and the manifest sport of chance, their laws each made for some separate
occasion and having no relation to any future needs, their customs
illogical, their education aimless and wasteful. Their method of
economic exploitation indeed impresses a trained and informed mind as
the most frantic and destructive scramble it is possible to conceive;
their credit and monetary system resting on an unsubstantial tradition
of the worthiness of gold, seems a thing almost fantastically unstable.
And they lived in planless cities, for the most part dangerously
congested; their rails and roads and population were distributed over
the earth in the wanton confusion ten thousand irrevelant considerations
had made.
Yet they thought confidently that this was a secure and permanent
progressive system, and on the strength of some three hundred years
of change and irregular improvement answered the doubter with, “Things
always have gone well. We'll worry through!”
But when we contrast the state of man in the opening of the twentieth
century with the condition of any previous period in his history, then
perhaps we may begin to understand something of that blind confidence.
It was not so much a reasoned confidence as the inevitable consequence
of sustained good fortune. By such standards as they possessed, things
HAD gone amazingly well for them. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say
that for the first time in history whole populations found themselves
regularly supplied with more than enough to eat, and the vital
statistics of the time witness to an amelioration of hygienic conditions
rapid beyond all precedent, and to a vast development of intelligence
and ability in all the arts that make life wholesome. The level and
quality of the average education had risen tremendously; and at the dawn
of the twentieth century comparatively few people in Western Europe or
America were unable to read or write. Never before had there been such
reading masses. There was wide social security. A common man might
travel safely over three-quarters of the habitable globe, could go
round the earth at a cost of less than the annual earnings of a skilled
artisan. Compared with the liberality and comfort of the ordinary life
of the time, the order of the Roman Empire under the Antonines was local
and limited. And every year, every month, came some new increment to
human achievement, a new country opened up, new mines, new scientific
discoveries, a new machine!
For those three hundred years, indeed, the movement of the world seemed
wholly beneficial to mankind. Men said, indeed, that moral organisation
was not keeping pace with physical progress, but few attached any
meaning to these phrases, the understanding of which lies at the basis
of our present safety. Sustaining and constructive forces did indeed
for a time more than balance the malign drift of chance and the natural
ignorance, prejudice, blind passion, and wasteful self-seeking of
mankind.
The accidental balance on the side of Progress was far slighter and
infinitely more complex and delicate in its adjustments than the people
of that time suspected; but that did not alter the fact that it was an
effective balance. They did not realise that this age of relative good
fortune was an age of immense but temporary opportunity for their kind.
They complacently assumed a necessary progress towards which they had
no moral responsibility. They did not realise that this security of
progress was a thing still to be won--or lost, and that the time to win
it was a time that passed. They went about their affairs energetically
enough and yet with a curious idleness towards those threatening things.
No one troubled over the real dangers of mankind. They, saw their armies
and navies grow larger and more portentous; some of their ironclads
at the last cost as much as the whole annual expenditure upon advanced
education; they accumulated explosives and the machinery of destruction;
they allowed their national traditions and jealousies to accumulate;
they contemplated a steady enhancement of race hostility as the races
drew closer without concern or understanding, and they permitted
the growth in their midst of an evil-spirited press, mercenary and
unscrupulous, incapable of good, and powerful for evil. The State had
practically no control over the press at all. Quite heedlessly they
allowed this torch-paper to lie at the door of their war magazine for
any spark to fire. The precedents of history were all one tale of the
collapse of civilisations, the dangers of the time were manifest. One is
incredulous now to believe they could not see.
Could mankind have prevented this disaster of the War in the Air?
An idle question that, as idle as to ask could mankind have prevented
the decay that turned Assyria and Babylon to empty deserts or the slow
decline and fall, the gradual social disorganisation, phase by phase,
that closed the chapter of the Empire of the West! They could not,
because they did not, they had not the will to arrest it. What mankind
could achieve with a different will is a speculation as idle as it
is magnificent. And this was no slow decadence that came to the
Europeanised world; those other civilisations rotted and crumbled down,
the Europeanised civilisation was, as it were, blown up. Within the
space of five years it was altogether disintegrated and destroyed. Up
to the very eve of the War in the Air one sees a spacious spectacle of
incessant advance, a world-wide security, enormous areas with highly
organised industry and settled populations, gigantic cities spreading
gigantically, the seas and oceans dotted with shipping, the land netted
with rails, and open ways. Then suddenly the German air-fleets sweep
across the scene, and we are in the beginning of the end.
2
This story has already told of the swift rush upon New York of the
first German air-fleet and of the wild, inevitable orgy of inconclusive
destruction that ensued. Behind it a second air-fleet was already
swelling at its gasometers when England and France and Spain and Italy
showed their hands. None of these countries had prepared for aeronautic
warfare on the magnificent scale of the Germans, but each guarded
secrets, each in a measure was making ready, and a common dread of
German vigour and that aggressive spirit Prince Karl Albert embodied,
had long been drawing these powers together in secret anticipation of
some such attack. This rendered their prompt co-operation possible, and
they certainly co-operated promptly. The second aerial power in Europe
at this time was France; the British, nervous for their Asiatic
empire, and sensible of the immense moral effect of the airship upon
half-educated populations, had placed their aeronautic parks in North
India, and were able to play but a subordinate part in the European
conflict. Still, even in England they had nine or ten big navigables,
twenty or thirty smaller ones, and a variety of experimental aeroplanes.
Before the fleet of Prince Karl Albert had crossed England, while
Bert was still surveying Manchester in bird's-eye view, the diplomatic
exchanges were going on that led to an attack upon Germany. A
heterogeneous collection of navigable balloons of all sizes and types
gathered over the Bernese Oberland, crushed and burnt the twenty-five
Swiss air-ships that unexpectedly resisted this concentration in the
battle of the Alps, and then, leaving the Alpine glaciers and valleys
strewn with strange wreckage, divided into two fleets and set itself
to terrorise Berlin and destroy the Franconian Park, seeking to do this
before the second air-fleet could be inflated.
Both over Berlin and Franconia the assailants with their modern
explosives effected great damage before they were driven off. In
Franconia twelve fully distended and five partially filled and manned
giants were able to make head against and at last, with the help of a
squadron of drachenflieger from Hamburg, defeat and pursue the attack
and to relieve Berlin, and the Germans were straining every nerve to get
an overwhelming fleet in the air, and were already raiding London and
Paris when the advance fleets from the Asiatic air-parks, the first
intimation of a new factor in the conflict, were reported from Burmah
and Armenia.
Already the whole financial fabric of the world was staggering when
that occurred. With the destruction of the American fleet in the North
Atlantic, and the smashing conflict that ended the naval existence of
Germany in the North Sea, with the burning and wrecking of billions of
pounds' worth of property in the four cardinal cities of the world, the
fact of the hopeless costliness of war came home for the first time,
came, like a blow in the face, to the consciousness of mankind. Credit
went down in a wild whirl of selling. Everywhere appeared a phenomenon
that had already in a mild degree manifested itself in preceding periods
of panic; a desire to SECURE AND HOARD GOLD before prices reached
bottom. But now it spread like wild-fire, it became universal. Above was
visible conflict and destruction; below something was happening far more
deadly and incurable to the flimsy fabric of finance and commercialism
in which men had so blindly put their trust. As the airships fought
above, the visible gold supply of the world vanished below. An epidemic
of private cornering and universal distrust swept the world. In a few
weeks, money, except for depreciated paper, vanished into vaults, into
holes, into the walls of houses, into ten million hiding-places. Money
vanished, and at its disappearance trade and industry came to an end.
The economic world staggered and fell dead. It was like the stroke
of some disease it was like the water vanishing out of the blood of
a living creature; it was a sudden, universal coagulation of
intercourse....
And as the credit system, that had been the living fortress of the
scientific civilisation, reeled and fell upon the millions it had
held together in economic relationship, as these people, perplexed and
helpless, faced this marvel of credit utterly destroyed, the airships
of Asia, countless and relentless, poured across the heavens, swooped
eastward to America and westward to Europe. The page of history
becomes a long crescendo of battle. The main body of the British-Indian
air-fleet perished upon a pyre of blazing antagonists in Burmah; the
Germans were scattered in the great battle of the Carpathians; the vast
peninsula of India burst into insurrection and civil war from end to
end, and from Gobi to Morocco rose the standards of the “Jehad.”
For some weeks of warfare and destruction it seemed as though the
Confederation of Eastern Asia must needs conquer the world, and then
the jerry-built “modern” civilisation of China too gave way under
the strain. The teeming and peaceful population of China had been
“westernised” during the opening years of the twentieth century with
the deepest resentment and reluctance; they had been dragooned and
disciplined under Japanese and European--influence into an acquiescence
with sanitary methods, police controls, military service, and wholesale
process of exploitation against which their whole tradition rebelled.
Under the stresses of the war their endurance reached the breaking
point, the whole of China rose in incoherent revolt, and the practical
destruction of the central government at Pekin by a handful of British
and German airships that had escaped from the main battles rendered that
revolt invincible. In Yokohama appeared barricades, the black flag and
the social revolution. With that the whole world became a welter of
conflict.
So that a universal social collapse followed, as it were a logical
consequence, upon world-wide war. Wherever there were great populations,
great masses of people found themselves without work, without money,
and unable to get food. Famine was in every working-class quarter in
the world within three weeks of the beginning of the war. Within a
month there was not a city anywhere in which the ordinary law and social
procedure had not been replaced by some form of emergency control, in
which firearms and military executions were not being used to keep
order and prevent violence. And still in the poorer quarters, and in the
populous districts, and even here and there already among those who had
been wealthy, famine spread.
3
So what historians have come to call the Phase of the Emergency
Committees sprang from the opening phase and from the phase of social
collapse. Then followed a period of vehement and passionate conflict
against disintegration; everywhere the struggle to keep order and to
keep fighting went on. And at the same time the character of the war
altered through the replacement of the huge gas-filled airships by
flying-machines as the instruments of war. So soon as the big fleet
engagements were over, the Asiatics endeavoured to establish in close
proximity to the more vulnerable points of the countries against which
they were acting, fortified centres from which flying-machine raids
could be made. For a time they had everything their own way in this, and
then, as this story has told, the lost secret of the Butteridge machine
came to light, and the conflict became equalized and less conclusive
than ever. For these small flying-machines, ineffectual for any large
expedition or conclusive attack, were horribly convenient for guerilla
warfare, rapidly and cheaply made, easily used, easily hidden. The
design of them was hastily copied and printed in Pinkerville and
scattered broadcast over the United States and copies were sent to
Europe, and there reproduced. Every man, every town, every parish that
could, was exhorted to make and use them. In a little while they were
being constructed not only by governments and local authorities, but by
robber bands, by insurgent committees, by every type of private person.
The peculiar social destructiveness of the Butteridge machine lay in
its complete simplicity. It was nearly as simple as a motor-bicycle. The
broad outlines of the earlier stages of the war disappeared under its
influence, the spacious antagonism of nations and empires and races
vanished in a seething mass of detailed conflict. The world passed at a
stride from a unity and simplicity broader than that of the Roman Empire
at its best, to as social fragmentation as complete as the robber-baron
period of the Middle Ages. But this time, for a long descent down
gradual slopes of disintegration, comes a fall like a fall over a cliff.
Everywhere were men and women perceiving this and struggling desperately
to keep as it were a hold upon the edge of the cliff.
A fourth phase follows. Through the struggle against Chaos, in the wake
of the Famine, came now another old enemy of humanity--the Pestilence,
the Purple Death. But the war does not pause. The flags still fly.
Fresh air-fleets rise, new forms of airship, and beneath their swooping
struggles the world darkens--scarcely heeded by history.
It is not within the design of this book to tell what further story, to
tell how the War in the Air kept on through the sheer inability of
any authorities to meet and agree and end it, until every organised
government in the world was as shattered and broken as a heap of china
beaten with a stick. With every week of those terrible years history
becomes more detailed and confused, more crowded and uncertain. Not
without great and heroic resistance was civilisation borne down. Out
of the bitter social conflict below rose patriotic associations,
brotherhoods of order, city mayors, princes, provisional committees,
trying to establish an order below and to keep the sky above. The double
effort destroyed them. And as the exhaustion of the mechanical resources
of civilisation clears the heavens of airships at last altogether,
Anarchy, Famine and Pestilence are discovered triumphant below. The
great nations and empires have become but names in the mouths of men.
Everywhere there are ruins and unburied dead, and shrunken, yellow-faced
survivors in a mortal apathy. Here there are robbers, here vigilance
committees, and here guerilla bands ruling patches of exhausted
territory, strange federations and brotherhoods form and dissolve, and
religious fanaticisms begotten of despair gleam in famine-bright eyes.
It is a universal dissolution. The fine order and welfare of the earth
have crumpled like an exploded bladder. In five short years the world
and the scope of human life have undergone a retrogressive change as
great as that between the age of the Antonines and the Europe of the
ninth century....
4
Across this sombre spectacle of disaster goes a minute and insignificant
person for whom perhaps the readers of this story have now some
slight solicitude. Of him there remains to be told just one single
and miraculous thing. Through a world darkened and lost, through a
civilisation in its death agony, our little Cockney errant went and
found his Edna! He found his Edna!
He got back across the Atlantic partly by means of an order from the
President and partly through his own good luck. He contrived to get
himself aboard a British brig in the timber trade that put out from
Boston without cargo, chiefly, it would seem, because its captain had
a vague idea of “getting home” to South Shields. Bert was able to ship
himself upon her mainly because of the seamanlike appearance of his
rubber boots. They had a long, eventful voyage; they were chased, or
imagined themselves to be chased, for some hours by an Asiatic ironclad,
which was presently engaged by a British cruiser. The two ships fought
for three hours, circling and driving southward as they fought, until
the twilight and the cloud-drift of a rising gale swallowed them up. A
few days later Bert's ship lost her rudder and mainmast in a gale. The
crew ran out of food and subsisted on fish. They saw strange air-ships
going eastward near the Azores and landed to get provisions and repair
the rudder at Teneriffe. There they found the town destroyed and two big
liners, with dead still aboard, sunken in the harbour. From there they
got canned food and material for repairs, but their operations were
greatly impeded by the hostility of a band of men amidst the ruins of
the town, who sniped them and tried to drive them away.
At Mogador, they stayed and sent a boat ashore for water, and were
nearly captured by an Arab ruse. Here too they got the Purple Death
aboard, and sailed with it incubating in their blood. The cook sickened
first, and then the mate, and presently every one was down and three
in the forecastle were dead. It chanced to be calm weather, and they
drifted helplessly and indeed careless of their fate backwards towards
the Equator. The captain doctored them all with rum. Nine died all
together, and of the four survivors none understood navigation; when at
last they took heart again and could handle a sail, they made a course
by the stars roughly northward and were already short of food once
more when they fell in with a petrol-driven ship from Rio to Cardiff,
shorthanded by reason of the Purple Death and glad to take them aboard.
So at last, after a year of wandering Bert reached England. He landed in
bright June weather, and found the Purple Death was there just beginning
its ravages.
The people were in a state of panic in Cardiff and many had fled to the
hills, and directly the steamer came to the harbour she was boarded
and her residue of food impounded by some unauthenticated Provisional
Committee. Bert tramped through a country disorganised by pestilence,
foodless, and shaken to the very base of its immemorial order. He came
near death and starvation many times, and once he was drawn into scenes
of violence that might have ended his career. But the Bert Smallways
who tramped from Cardiff to London vaguely “going home,” vaguely seeking
something of his own that had no tangible form but Edna, was a very
different person from the Desert Dervish who was swept out of England
in Mr. Butteridge's balloon a year before. He was brown and lean and
enduring, steady-eyed and pestilence-salted, and his mouth, which had
once hung open, shut now like a steel trap. Across his brow ran a white
scar that he had got in a fight on the brig. In Cardiff he had felt
the need of new clothes and a weapon, and had, by means that would have
shocked him a year ago, secured a flannel shirt, a corduroy suit, and
a revolver and fifty cartridges from an abandoned pawnbroker's. He
also got some soap and had his first real wash for thirteen months in
a stream outside the town. The Vigilance bands that had at first shot
plunderers very freely were now either entirely dispersed by the plague,
or busy between town and cemetery in a vain attempt to keep pace with
it. He prowled on the outskirts of the town for three or four days,
starving, and then went back to join the Hospital Corps for a week, and
so fortified himself with a few square meals before he started eastward.
The Welsh and English countryside at that time presented the strangest
mingling of the assurance and wealth of the opening twentieth century
with a sort of Dureresque mediaevalism. All the gear, the houses and
mono-rails, the farm hedges and power cables, the roads and pavements,
the sign-posts and advertisements of the former order were still for the
most part intact. Bankruptcy, social collapse, famine, and pestilence
had done nothing to damage these, and it was only to the great capitals
and ganglionic centres, as it were, of this State, that positive
destruction had come. Any one dropped suddenly into the country would
have noticed very little difference. He would have remarked first,
perhaps, that all the hedges needed clipping, that the roadside grass
grew rank, that the road-tracks were unusually rainworn, and that the
cottages by the wayside seemed in many cases shut up, that a telephone
wire had dropped here, and that a cart stood abandoned by the wayside.
But he would still find his hunger whetted by the bright assurance that
Wilder's Canned Peaches were excellent, or that there was nothing so
good for the breakfast table as Gobble's Sausages. And then suddenly
would come the Düreresque element; the skeleton of a horse, or some
crumpled mass of rags in the ditch, with gaunt extended feet and a
yellow, purple-blotched skin and face, or what had been a face, gaunt
and glaring and devastated. Then here would be a field that had been
ploughed and not sown, and here a field of corn carelessly trampled by
beasts, and here a hoarding torn down across the road to make a fire.
Then presently he would meet a man or a woman, yellow-faced and probably
negligently dressed and armed--prowling for food. These people would
have the complexions and eyes and expressions of tramps or criminals,
and often the clothing of prosperous middle-class or upper-class people.
Many of these would be eager for news, and willing to give help and even
scraps of queer meat, or crusts of grey and doughy bread, in return for
it. They would listen to Bert's story with avidity, and attempt to
keep him with them for a day or so. The virtual cessation of postal
distribution and the collapse of all newspaper enterprise had left an
immense and aching gap in the mental life of this time. Men had suddenly
lost sight of the ends of the earth and had still to recover the
rumour-spreading habits of the Middle Ages. In their eyes, in their
bearing, in their talk, was the quality of lost and deoriented souls.
As Bert travelled from parish to parish, and from district to district,
avoiding as far as possible those festering centres of violence and
despair, the larger towns, he found the condition of affairs varying
widely. In one parish he would find the large house burnt, the vicarage
wrecked, evidently in violent conflict for some suspected and perhaps
imaginary store of food, unburied dead everywhere, and the whole
mechanism of the community at a standstill. In another he would find
organising forces stoutly at work, newly-painted notice boards warning
off vagrants, the roads and still cultivated fields policed by armed
men, the pestilence under control, even nursing going on, a store of
food husbanded, the cattle and sheep well guarded, and a group of two
or three justices, the village doctor or a farmer, dominating the
whole place; a reversion, in fact, to the autonomous community of the
fifteenth century. But at any time such a village would be liable to a
raid of Asiatics or Africans or such-like air-pirates, demanding
petrol and alcohol or provisions. The price of its order was an almost
intolerable watchfulness and tension.
Then the approach to the confused problems of some larger centre of
population and the presence of a more intricate conflict would be marked
by roughly smeared notices of “Quarantine” or “Strangers Shot,” or by a
string of decaying plunderers dangling from the telephone poles at the
roadside. About Oxford big boards were put on the roofs warning all air
wanderers off with the single word, “Guns.”
Taking their risks amidst these things, cyclists still kept abroad, and
once or twice during Bert's long tramp powerful motor cars containing
masked and goggled figures went tearing past him. There were few
police in evidence, but ever and again squads of gaunt and tattered
soldier-cyclists would come drifting along, and such encounters became
more frequent as he got out of Wales into England. Amidst all this
wreckage they were still campaigning. He had had some idea of resorting
to the workhouses for the night if hunger pressed him too closely, but
some of these were closed and others converted into temporary hospitals,
and one he came up to at twilight near a village in Gloucestershire
stood with all its doors and windows open, silent as the grave, and, as
he found to his horror by stumbling along evil-smelling corridors, full
of unburied dead.
From Gloucestershire Bert went northward to the British aeronautic park
outside Birmingham, in the hope that he might be taken on and given
food, for there the Government, or at any rate the War Office, still
existed as an energetic fact, concentrated amidst collapse and social
disaster upon the effort to keep the British flag still flying in
the air, and trying to brisk up mayor and mayor and magistrate and
magistrate in a new effort of organisation. They had brought together
all the best of the surviving artisans from that region, they had
provisioned the park for a siege, and they were urgently building a
larger type of Butteridge machine. Bert could get no footing at this
work: he was not sufficiently skilled, and he had drifted to Oxford when
the great fight occurred in which these works were finally wrecked. He
saw something, but not very much, of the battle from a place called
Boar Hill. He saw the Asiatic squadron coming up across the hills to the
south-west, and he saw one of their airships circling southward again
chased by two aeroplanes, the one that was ultimately overtaken, wrecked
and burnt at Edge Hill. But he never learnt the issue of the combat as a
whole.
He crossed the Thames from Eton to Windsor and made his way round the
south of London to Bun Hill, and there he found his brother Tom, looking
like some dark, defensive animal in the old shop, just recovering from
the Purple Death, and Jessica upstairs delirious, and, as it seemed to
him, dying grimly. She raved of sending out orders to customers, and
scolded Tom perpetually lest he should be late with Mrs. Thompson's
potatoes and Mrs. Hopkins' cauliflower, though all business had long
since ceased and Tom had developed a quite uncanny skill in the snaring
of rats and sparrows and the concealment of certain stores of cereals
and biscuits from plundered grocers' shops. Tom received his brother
with a sort of guarded warmth.
“Lor!” he said, “it's Bert. I thought you'd be coming back some day, and
I'm glad to see you. But I carn't arst you to eat anything, because I
'aven't got anything to eat.... Where you been, Bert, all this time?”
Bert reassured his brother by a glimpse of a partly eaten swede, and was
still telling his story in fragments and parentheses, when he discovered
behind the counter a yellow and forgotten note addressed to himself.
“What's this?” he said, and found it was a year-old note from Edna. “She
came 'ere,” said Tom, like one who recalls a trivial thing, “arstin' for
you and arstin' us to take 'er in. That was after the battle and settin'
Clapham Rise afire. I was for takin' 'er in, but Jessica wouldn't 'ave
it--and so she borrowed five shillings of me quiet like and went on. I
dessay she's tole you--”
She had, Bert found. She had gone on, she said in her note, to an aunt
and uncle who had a brickfield near Horsham. And there at last, after
another fortnight of adventurous journeying, Bert found her.
5
When Bert and Edna set eyes on one another, they stared and laughed
foolishly, so changed they were, and so ragged and surprised. And then
they both fell weeping.
“Oh! Bertie, boy!” she cried. “You've come--you've come!” and put out
her arms and staggered. “I told 'im. He said he'd kill me if I didn't
marry him.”
But Edna was not married, and when presently Bert could get talk from
her, she explained the task before him. That little patch of lonely
agricultural country had fallen under the power of a band of bullies
led by a chief called Bill Gore who had begun life as a butcher boy and
developed into a prize-fighter and a professional sport. They had been
organised by a local nobleman of former eminence upon the turf, but
after a time he had disappeared, no one quite knew how and Bill had
succeeded to the leadership of the countryside, and had developed his
teacher's methods with considerable vigour. There had been a strain
of advanced philosophy about the local nobleman, and his mind ran to
“improving the race” and producing the Over-Man, which in practice
took the form of himself especially and his little band in moderation
marrying with some frequency. Bill followed up the idea with an
enthusiasm that even trenched upon his popularity with his followers.
One day he had happened upon Edna tending her pigs, and had at once
fallen a-wooing with great urgency among the troughs of slush. Edna
had made a gallant resistance, but he was still vigorously about and
extraordinarily impatient. He might, she said, come at any time, and she
looked Bert in the eyes. They were back already in the barbaric stage
when a man must fight for his love.
And here one deplores the conflicts of truth with the chivalrous
tradition. One would like to tell of Bert sallying forth to challenge
his rival, of a ring formed and a spirited encounter, and Bert by some
miracle of pluck and love and good fortune winning. But indeed nothing
of the sort occurred. Instead, he reloaded his revolver very carefully,
and then sat in the best room of the cottage by the derelict brickfield,
looking anxious and perplexed, and listening to talk about Bill and his
ways, and thinking, thinking. Then suddenly Edna's aunt, with a thrill
in her voice, announced the appearance of that individual. He was coming
with two others of his gang through the garden gate. Bert got up, put
the woman aside, and looked out. They presented remarkable figures.
They wore a sort of uniform of red golfing jackets and white sweaters,
football singlet, and stockings and boots and each had let his fancy
play about his head-dress. Bill had a woman's hat full of cock's
feathers, and all had wild, slouching cowboy brims.
Bert sighed and stood up, deeply thoughtful, and Edna watched him,
marvelling. The women stood quite still. He left the window, and went
out into the passage rather slowly, and with the careworn expression of
a man who gives his mind to a complex and uncertain business. “Edna!” he
called, and when she came he opened the front door.
He asked very simply, and pointing to the foremost of the three, “That
'im?... Sure?”... and being told that it was, shot his rival instantly
and very accurately through the chest. He then shot Bill's best man much
less tidily in the head, and then shot at and winged the third man as he
fled. The third gentleman yelped, and continued running with a comical
end-on twist.
Then Bert stood still meditating, with the pistol in his hand, and quite
regardless of the women behind him.
So far things had gone well.
It became evident to him that if he did not go into politics at once,
he would be hanged as an assassin and accordingly, and without a word
to the women, he went down to the village public-house he had passed an
hour before on his way to Edna, entered it from the rear, and confronted
the little band of ambiguous roughs, who were drinking in the tap-room
and discussing matrimony and Bill's affection in a facetious but envious
manner, with a casually held but carefully reloaded revolver, and
an invitation to join what he called, I regret to say, a “Vigilance
Committee” under his direction. “It's wanted about 'ere, and some of us
are gettin' it up.” He presented himself as one having friends outside,
though indeed, he had no friends at all in the world but Edna and her
aunt and two female cousins.
There was a quick but entirely respectful discussion of the situation.
They thought him a lunatic who had tramped into, this neighbourhood
ignorant of Bill. They desired to temporise until their leader came.
Bill would settle him. Some one spoke of Bill.
“Bill's dead, I jest shot '_im_,” said Bert. “We don't need reckon with
'IM. '_e's_ shot, and a red-'aired chap with a squint, 'E'S shot. We've
settled up all that. There ain't going to be no more Bill, ever. 'E'd
got wrong ideas about marriage and things. It's 'is sort of chap we're
after.”
That carried the meeting.
Bill was perfunctorily buried, and Bert's Vigilance Committee (for so it
continued to be called) reigned in his stead.
That is the end of this story so far as Bert Smallways is concerned.
We leave him with his Edna to become squatters among the clay and oak
thickets of the Weald, far away from the stream of events. From that
time forth life became a succession of peasant encounters, an affair of
pigs and hens and small needs and little economies and children, until
Clapham and Bun Hill and all the life of the Scientific Age became to
Bert no more than the fading memory of a dream. He never knew how the
War in the Air went on, nor whether it still went on. There were rumours
of airships going and coming, and of happenings Londonward. Once or
twice their shadows fell on him as he worked, but whence they came or
whither they went he could not tell. Even his desire to tell died out
for want of food. At times came robbers and thieves, at times came
diseases among the beasts and shortness of food, once the country was
worried by a pack of boar-hounds he helped to kill; he went through many
inconsecutive, irrelevant adventures. He survived them all.
Accident and death came near them both ever and again and passed them
by, and they loved and suffered and were happy, and she bore him many
children--eleven children--one after the other, of whom only four
succumbed to the necessary hardships of their simple life. They lived
and did well, as well was understood in those days. They went the way of
all flesh, year by year.
THE EPILOGUE
It happened that one bright summer's morning exactly thirty years after
the launching of the first German air-fleet, an old man took a small boy
to look for a missing hen through the ruins of Bun Hill and out towards
the splintered pinnacles of the Crystal Palace. He was not a very
old man; he was, as a matter of fact, still within a few weeks of
sixty-three, but constant stooping over spades and forks and the
carrying of roots and manure, and exposure to the damps of life in the
open-air without a change of clothing, had bent him into the form of a
sickle. Moreover, he had lost most of his teeth and that had affected
his digestion and through that his skin and temper. In face and
expression he was curiously like that old Thomas Smallways who had once
been coachman to Sir Peter Bone, and this was just as it should be,
for he was Tom Smallways the son, who formerly kept the little
green-grocer's shop under the straddle of the mono-rail viaduct in the
High Street of Bun Hill. But now there were no green-grocer's shops,
and Tom was living in one of the derelict villas hard by that unoccupied
building site that had been and was still the scene of his daily
horticulture. He and his wife lived upstairs, and in the drawing and
dining rooms, which had each French windows opening on the lawn, and all
about the ground floor generally, Jessica, who was now a lean and lined
and baldish but still very efficient and energetic old woman, kept
her three cows and a multitude of gawky hens. These two were part of a
little community of stragglers and returned fugitives, perhaps a hundred
and fifty souls of them all together, that had settled down to the new
conditions of things after the Panic and Famine and Pestilence that
followed in the wake of the War. They had come back from strange refuges
and hiding-places and had squatted down among the familiar houses and
begun that hard struggle against nature for food which was now the chief
interest of their lives. They were by sheer preoccupation with that a
peaceful people, more particularly after Wilkes, the house agent, driven
by some obsolete dream of acquisition, had been drowned in the pool by
the ruined gas-works for making inquiries into title and displaying a
litigious turn of mind. (He had not been murdered, you understand, but
the people had carried an exemplary ducking ten minutes or so beyond its
healthy limits.)
This little community had returned from its original habits of suburban
parasitism to what no doubt had been the normal life of humanity for
nearly immemorial years, a life of homely economies in the most intimate
contact with cows and hens and patches of ground, a life that breathes
and exhales the scent of cows and finds the need for stimulants
satisfied by the activity of the bacteria and vermin it engenders. Such
had been the life of the European peasant from the dawn of history to
the beginning of the Scientific Era, so it was the large majority of the
people of Asia and Africa had always been wont to live. For a time it
had seemed that, by virtue of machines, and scientific civilisation,
Europe was to be lifted out of this perpetual round of animal drudgery,
and that America was to evade it very largely from the outset. And with
the smash of the high and dangerous and splendid edifice of mechanical
civilisation that had arisen so marvellously, back to the land came the
common man, back to the manure.
The little communities, still haunted by ten thousand memories of a
greater state, gathered and developed almost tacitly a customary law
and fell under the guidance of a medicine man or a priest. The world
rediscovered religion and the need of something to hold its communities
together. At Bun Hill this function was entrusted to an old Baptist
minister. He taught a simple but adequate faith. In his teaching a good
principle called the Word fought perpetually against a diabolical female
influence called the Scarlet Woman and an evil being called Alcohol.
This Alcohol had long since become a purely spiritualised conception
deprived of any element of material application; it had no relation to
the occasional finds of whiskey and wine in Londoners' cellars that gave
Bun Hill its only holidays. He taught this doctrine on Sundays, and
on weekdays he was an amiable and kindly old man, distinguished by his
quaint disposition to wash his hands, and if possible his face, daily,
and with a wonderful genius for cutting up pigs. He held his Sunday
services in the old church in the Beckenham Road, and then the
countryside came out in a curious reminiscence of the urban dress of
Edwardian times. All the men without exception wore frock coats, top
hats, and white shirts, though many had no boots. Tom was particularly
distinguished on these occasions because he wore a top hat with gold
lace about it and a green coat and trousers that he had found upon a
skeleton in the basement of the Urban and District Bank. The women, even
Jessica, came in jackets and immense hats extravagantly trimmed with
artificial flowers and exotic birds' feather's--of which there were
abundant supplies in the shops to the north--and the children (there
were not many children, because a large proportion of the babies born in
Bun Hill died in a few days' time of inexplicable maladies) had similar
clothes cut down to accommodate them; even Stringer's little grandson of
four wore a large top hat.
That was the Sunday costume of the Bun Hill district, a curious and
interesting survival of the genteel traditions of the Scientific Age. On
a weekday the folk were dingily and curiously hung about with dirty rags
of housecloth and scarlet flannel, sacking, curtain serge, and patches
of old carpet, and went either bare-footed or on rude wooden sandals.
These people, the reader must understand, were an urban population
sunken back to the state of a barbaric peasantry, and so without any of
the simple arts a barbaric peasantry would possess. In many ways they
were curiously degenerate and incompetent. They had lost any idea
of making textiles, they could hardly make up clothes when they had
material, and they were forced to plunder the continually dwindling
supplies of the ruins about them for cover.
All the simple arts they had ever known they had lost, and with the
breakdown of modern drainage, modern water supply, shopping, and the
like, their civilised methods were useless. Their cooking was worse than
primitive. It was a feeble muddling with food over wood fires in rusty
drawing-room fireplaces; for the kitcheners burnt too much. Among them
all no sense of baking or brewing or metal-working was to be found.
Their employment of sacking and such-like coarse material for work-a-day
clothing, and their habit of tying it on with string and of thrusting
wadding and straw inside it for warmth, gave these people an odd,
“packed” appearance, and as it was a week-day when Tom took his little
nephew for the hen-seeking excursion, so it was they were attired.
“So you've really got to Bun Hill at last, Teddy,” said old Tom,
beginning to talk and slackening his pace so soon as they were out of
range of old Jessica. “You're the last of Bert's boys for me to see.
Wat I've seen, young Bert I've seen, Sissie and Matt, Tom what's called
after me, and Peter. The traveller people brought you along all right,
eh?”
“I managed,” said Teddy, who was a dry little boy.
“Didn't want to eat you on the way?”
“They was all right,” said Teddy, “and on the way near Leatherhead we
saw a man riding on a bicycle.”
“My word!” said Tom, “there ain't many of those about nowadays. Where
was he going?”
“Said 'e was going to Dorking if the High Road was good enough. But I
doubt if he got there. All about Burford it was flooded. We came over
the hill, uncle--what they call the Roman Road. That's high and safe.”
“Don't know it,” said old Tom. “But a bicycle! You're sure it was a
bicycle? Had two wheels?”
“It was a bicycle right enough.”
“Why! I remember a time, Teddy, where there was bicycles no end, when
you could stand just here--the road was as smooth as a board then--and
see twenty or thirty coming and going at the same time, bicycles and
moty-bicycles; moty cars, all sorts of whirly things.”
“No!” said Teddy.
“I do. They'd keep on going by all day,--'undreds and 'undreds.”
“But where was they all going?” asked Teddy.
“Tearin' off to Brighton--you never seen Brighton, I expect--it's down
by the sea, used to be a moce 'mazing place--and coming and going from
London.”
“Why?”
“They did.”
“But why?”
“Lord knows why, Teddy. They did. Then you see that great thing there
like a great big rusty nail sticking up higher than all the houses, and
that one yonder, and that, and how something's fell in between 'em among
the houses. They was parts of the mono-rail. They went down to Brighton
too and all day and night there was people going, great cars as big as
'ouses full of people.”
The little boy regarded the rusty evidences acrosss the narrow muddy
ditch of cow-droppings that had once been a High Street. He was clearly
disposed to be sceptical, and yet there the ruins were! He grappled with
ideas beyond the strength of his imagination.
“What did they go for?” he asked, “all of 'em?”
“They 'AD to. Everything was on the go those days--everything.”
“Yes, but where did they come from?”
“All round 'ere, Teddy, there was people living in those 'ouses, and up
the road more 'ouses and more people. You'd 'ardly believe me, Teddy,
but it's Bible truth. You can go on that way for ever and ever, and keep
on coming on 'ouses, more 'ouses, and more. There's no end to 'em. No
end. They get bigger and bigger.” His voice dropped as though he named
strange names.
“It's ,” _London_ he said.
“And it's all empty now and left alone. All day it's left alone. You
don't find 'ardly a man, you won't find nothing but dogs and cats after
the rats until you get round by Bromley and Beckenham, and there you
find the Kentish men herding swine. (Nice rough lot they are too!) I
tell you that so long as the sun is up it's as still as the grave. I
been about by day--orfen and orfen.” He paused.
“And all those 'ouses and streets and ways used to be full of people
before the War in the Air and the Famine and the Purple Death. They used
to be full of people, Teddy, and then came a time when they was full of
corpses, when you couldn't go a mile that way before the stink of 'em
drove you back. It was the Purple Death 'ad killed 'em every one. The
cats and dogs and 'ens and vermin caught it. Everything and every one
'ad it. Jest a few of us 'appened to live. I pulled through, and your
aunt, though it made 'er lose 'er 'air. Why, you find the skeletons in
the 'ouses now. This way we been into all the 'ouses and took what we
wanted and buried moce of the people, but up that way, Norwood way,
there's 'ouses with the glass in the windows still, and the furniture
not touched--all dusty and falling to pieces--and the bones of the
people lying, some in bed, some about the 'ouse, jest as the Purple
Death left 'em five-and-twenty years ago. I went into one--me and old
Higgins las' year--and there was a room with books, Teddy--you know what
I mean by books, Teddy?”
“I seen 'em. I seen 'em with pictures.”
“Well, books all round, Teddy, 'undreds of books, beyond-rhyme or
reason, as the saying goes, green-mouldy and dry. I was for leaven' 'em
alone--I was never much for reading--but ole Higgins he must touch em.
'I believe I could read one of 'em _NOW_,' 'e says.
“'Not it,' I says.
“'I could,' 'e says, laughing and takes one out and opens it.
“I looked, and there, Teddy, was a cullud picture, oh, so lovely! It was
a picture of women and serpents in a garden. I never see anything like
it.
“'This suits me,' said old Higgins, 'to rights.'
“And then kind of friendly he gave the book a pat--
Old Tom Smallways paused impressively.
“And then?” said Teddy.
“It all fell to dus'. White dus'!” He became still more impressive. “We
didn't touch no more of them books that day. Not after that.”
For a long time both were silent. Then Tom, playing with a subject that
attracted him with a fatal fascination, repeated, “All day long they
lie--still as the grave.”
Teddy took the point at last. “Don't they lie o' nights?” he asked.
Old Tom shook his head. “Nobody knows, boy, nobody knows.”
“But what could they do?”
“Nobody knows. Nobody ain't seen to tell not nobody.”
“Nobody?”
“They tell tales,” said old Tom. “They tell tales, but there ain't no
believing 'em. I gets 'ome about sundown, and keeps indoors, so I can't
say nothing, can I? But there's them that thinks some things and them as
thinks others. I've 'eard it's unlucky to take clo'es off of 'em unless
they got white bones. There's stories--”
The boy watched his uncle sharply. “_WOT_ stories?” he said.
“Stories of moonlight nights and things walking about. But I take no
stock in 'em. I keeps in bed. If you listen to stories--Lord! You'll get
afraid of yourself in a field at midday.”
The little boy looked round and ceased his questions for a space.
“They say there's a 'og man in Beck'n'am what was lost in London three
days and three nights. 'E went up after whiskey to Cheapside, and lorst
'is way among the ruins and wandered. Three days and three nights 'e
wandered about and the streets kep' changing so's he couldn't get 'ome.
If 'e 'adn't remembered some words out of the Bible 'e might 'ave been
there now. All day 'e went and all night--and all day long it was still.
It was as still as death all day long, until the sunset came and the
twilight thickened, and then it began to rustle and whisper and go
pit-a-pat with a sound like 'urrying feet.”
He paused.
“Yes,” said the little boy breathlessly. “Go on. What then?”
“A sound of carts and 'orses there was, and a sound of cabs and
omnibuses, and then a lot of whistling, shrill whistles, whistles that
froze 'is marrer. And directly the whistles began things begun to show,
people in the streets 'urrying, people in the 'ouses and shops busying
themselves, moty cars in the streets, a sort of moonlight in all the
lamps and winders. People, I say, Teddy, but they wasn't people. They
was the ghosts of them that was overtook, the ghosts of them that used
to crowd those streets. And they went past 'im and through 'im and never
'eeded 'im, went by like fogs and vapours, Teddy. And sometimes they
was cheerful and sometimes they was 'orrible, 'orrible beyond words. And
once 'e come to a place called Piccadilly, Teddy, and there was lights
blazing like daylight and ladies and gentlemen in splendid clo'es
crowding the pavement, and taxicabs follering along the road. And as 'e
looked, they all went evil--evil in the face, Teddy. And it seemed to
'im suddenly _they saw 'im_, and the women began to look at 'im and say
things to 'im--'orrible--wicked things. One come very near 'im, Teddy,
right up to 'im, and looked into 'is face--close. And she 'adn't got a
face to look with, only a painted skull, and then 'e see; they was
all painted skulls. And one after another they crowded on 'im saying
'orrible things, and catchin' at 'im and threatenin' and coaxing 'im, so
that 'is 'eart near left 'is body for fear.”
“Yes,” gasped Teddy in an unendurable pause.
“Then it was he remembered the words of Scripture and saved himself
alive. 'The Lord is my 'Elper, 'e says, 'therefore I will fear nothing,'
and straightaway there came a cock-crowing and the street was empty
from end to end. And after that the Lord was good to 'im and guided 'im
'ome.”
Teddy stared and caught at another question. “But who was the people,”
he asked, “who lived in all these 'ouses? What was they?”
“Gent'men in business, people with money--leastways we thought it
was money till everything smashed up, and then seemingly it was jes'
paper--all sorts. Why, there was 'undreds of thousands of them. There
was millions. I've seen that 'I Street there regular so's you couldn't
walk along the pavements, shoppin' time, with women and people
shoppin'.”
“But where'd they get their food and things?”
“Bort 'em in shops like I used to 'ave. I'll show you the place, Teddy,
if we go back. People nowadays 'aven't no idee of a shop--no idee.
Plate-glass winders--it's all Greek to them. Why, I've 'ad as much as
a ton and a 'arf of petaties to 'andle all at one time. You'd open your
eyes till they dropped out to see jes' what I used to 'ave in my shop.
Baskets of pears 'eaped up, marrers, apples and pears, d'licious great
nuts.” His voice became luscious--“Benanas, oranges.”
“What's benanas?” asked the boy, “and oranges?”
“Fruits they was. Sweet, juicy, d'licious fruits. Foreign fruits. They
brought 'em from Spain and N' York and places. In ships and things. They
brought 'em to me from all over the world, and I sold 'em in my shop.
_I_ sold 'em, Teddy! me what goes about now with you, dressed up in old
sacks and looking for lost 'ens. People used to come into my shop,
great beautiful ladies like you'd 'ardly dream of now, dressed up to the
nines, and say, 'Well, Mr. Smallways, what you got 'smorning?' and
I'd say, 'Well, I got some very nice C'nadian apples, 'or p'raps I got
custed marrers. See? And they'd buy 'em. Right off they'd say, 'Send me
some up.' Lord! what a life that was. The business of it, the bussel,
the smart things you saw, moty cars going by, kerridges, people,
organ-grinders, German bands. Always something going past--always. If it
wasn't for those empty 'ouses, I'd think it all a dream.”
“But what killed all the people, uncle?” asked Teddy.
“It was a smash-up,” said old Tom. “Everything was going right until
they started that War. Everything was going like clock-work. Everybody
was busy and everybody was 'appy and everybody got a good square meal
every day.”
He met incredulous eyes. “Everybody,” he said firmly. “If you couldn't
get it anywhere else, you could get it in the workhuss, a nice 'ot bowl
of soup called skilly, and bread better'n any one knows 'ow to make now,
reg'lar _white_ bread, gov'ment bread.”
Teddy marvelled, but said nothing. It made him feel deep longings that
he found it wisest to fight down.
For a time the old man resigned himself to the pleasures of gustatory
reminiscence. His lips moved. “Pickled Sammin!” he whispered, “an'
vinegar.... Dutch cheese, _beer_! A pipe of terbakker.”
“But 'OW did the people get killed?” asked Teddy presently.
“There was the War. The War was the beginning of it. The War banged and
flummocked about, but it didn't really KILL many people. But it upset
things. They came and set fire to London and burnt and sank all the
ships there used to be in the Thames--we could see the smoke and steam
for weeks--and they threw a bomb into the Crystal Palace and made a
bust-up, and broke down the rail lines and things like that. But as for
killin' people, it was just accidental if they did. They killed each
other more. There was a great fight all hereabout one day, Teddy--up in
the air. Great things bigger than fifty 'ouses, bigger than the Crystal
Palace--bigger, bigger than anything, flying about up in the air and
whacking at each other and dead men fallin' off 'em. T'riffic! But,
it wasn't so much the people they killed as the business they stopped.
There wasn't any business doin', Teddy, there wasn't any money about,
and nothin' to buy if you 'ad it.”
“But '_ow_ did the people get killse?” said the little boy in the pause.
“I'm tellin' you, Teddy,” said the old man. “It was the stoppin' of
business come next. Suddenly there didn't seem to be any money. There
was cheques--they was a bit of paper written on, and they was jes' as
good as money--jes' as good if they come from customers you knew. Then
all of a sudden they wasn't. I was left with three of 'em and two I'd
given' change. Then it got about that five-pun' notes were no good,
and then the silver sort of went off. Gold you 'couldn't get for love
or--anything. The banks in London 'ad got it, and the banks was all
smashed up. Everybody went bankrup'. Everybody was thrown out of work.
Everybody!”
He paused, and scrutinised his hearer. The small boy's intelligent face
expressed hopeless perplexity.
“That's 'ow it 'appened,” said old Tom. He sought for some means of
expression. “It was like stoppin' a clock,” he said. “Things were quiet
for a bit, deadly quiet, except for the air-ships fighting about in the
sky, and then people begun to get excited. I remember my lars' customer,
the very lars' customer that ever I 'ad. He was a Mr. Moses Gluckstein,
a city gent and very pleasant and fond of sparrowgrass and chokes, and
'e cut in--there 'adn't been no customers for days--and began to
talk very fast, offerin' me for anything I 'ad, anything, petaties or
anything, its weight in gold. 'E said it was a little speculation 'e
wanted to try. 'E said it was a sort of bet reely, and very likely
'e'd lose; but never mind that, 'e wanted to try. 'E always 'ad been a
gambler, 'e said. 'E said I'd only got to weigh it out and 'e'd give me
'is cheque right away. Well, that led to a bit of a argument, perfect
respectful it was, but a argument about whether a cheque was still good,
and while 'e was explaining there come by a lot of these here unemployed
with a great banner they 'ad for every one to read--every one could
read those days--'We want Food.' Three or four of 'em suddenly turns and
comes into my shop.
“'Got any food?' says one.
“'No,' I says, 'not to sell. I wish I 'ad. But if I 'ad, I'm afraid I
couldn't let you have it. This gent, 'e's been offerin' me--'
“Mr. Gluckstein 'e tried to stop me, but it was too late.
“'What's 'e been offerin' you?' says a great big chap with a 'atchet;
'what's 'e been offerin you?' I 'ad to tell.
“'Boys,' 'e said, ''ere's another feenancier!' and they took 'im out
there and then, and 'ung 'im on a lam'pose down the street. 'E never
lifted a finger to resist. After I tole on 'im 'e never said a word....”
Tom meditated for a space. “First chap I ever sin 'ung!” he said.
“Ow old was you?” asked Teddy.
“'Bout thirty,” said old Tom.
“Why! I saw free pig-stealers 'ung before I was six,” said Teddy.
“Father took me because of my birfday being near. Said I ought to be
blooded....”
“Well, you never saw no-one killed by a moty car, any'ow,” said old Tom
after a moment of chagrin. “And you never saw no dead men carried into a
chemis' shop.”
Teddy's momentary triumph faded. “No,” he said, “I 'aven't.”
“Nor won't. Nor won't. You'll never see the things I've seen, never.
Not if you live to be a 'undred... Well, as I was saying, that's how the
Famine and Riotin' began. Then there was strikes and Socialism, things
I never did 'old with, worse and worse. There was fightin' and shootin'
down, and burnin' and plundering. They broke up the banks up in London
and got the gold, but they couldn't make food out of gold. 'Ow did _we_
get on? Well, we kep' quiet. We didn't interfere with no-one and no-one
didn't interfere with us. We 'ad some old 'tatoes about, but mocely we
lived on rats. Ours was a old 'ouse, full of rats, and the famine never
seemed to bother 'em. Orfen we got a rat. Orfen. But moce of the people
who lived hereabouts was too tender stummicked for rats. Didn't seem
to fancy 'em. They'd been used to all sorts of fallals, and they didn't
take to 'onest feeding, not till it was too late. Died rather.
“It was the famine began to kill people. Even before the Purple Death
came along they was dying like flies at the end of the summer. 'Ow I
remember it all! I was one of the first to 'ave it. I was out, seein' if
I mightn't get 'old of a cat or somethin', and then I went round to my
bit of ground to see whether I couldn't get up some young turnips
I'd forgot, and I was took something awful. You've no idee the pain,
Teddy--it doubled me up pretty near. I jes' lay down by 'at there
corner, and your aunt come along to look for me and dragged me 'ome like
a sack.
“I'd never 'ave got better if it 'adn't been for your aunt. 'Tom,' she
says to me, 'you got to get well,' and I '_ad_ to. Then _she_ sickened. She
sickened but there ain't much dyin' about your aunt. 'Lor!' she says,
'as if I'd leave you to go muddlin' along alone!' That's what she says.
She's got a tongue, 'as your aunt. But it took 'er 'air off--and arst
though I might, she's never cared for the wig I got 'er--orf the old
lady what was in the vicarage garden.
“Well, this 'ere Purple Death,--it jes' wiped people out, Teddy. You
couldn't bury 'em. And it took the dogs and the cats too, and the rats
and 'orses. At last every house and garden was full of dead bodies.
London way, you couldn't go for the smell of there, and we 'ad to move
out of the 'I street into that villa we got. And all the water run short
that way. The drains and underground tunnels took it. Gor' knows where
the Purple Death come from; some say one thing and some another. Some
said it come from eatin' rats and some from eatin' nothin'. Some say the
Asiatics brought it from some 'I place, Thibet, I think, where it never
did nobody much 'arm. All I know is it come after the Famine. And the
Famine come after the Penic and the Penic come after the War.”
Teddy thought. “What made the Purple Death?” he asked.
“'Aven't I tole you!”
“But why did they 'ave a Penic?”
“They 'ad it.”
“But why did they start the War?”
“They couldn't stop theirselves. 'Aving them airships made 'em.”
“And 'ow did the War end?”
“Lord knows if it's ended, boy,” said old Tom. “Lord knows if it's
ended. There's been travellers through 'ere--there was a chap only two
summers ago--say it's goin' on still. They say there's bands of people
up north who keep on with it and people in Germany and China and 'Merica
and places. 'E said they still got flying-machines and gas and things.
But we 'aven't seen nothin' in the air now for seven years, and nobody
'asn't come nigh of us. Last we saw was a crumpled sort of airship going
away--over there. It was a littleish-sized thing and lopsided, as though
it 'ad something the matter with it.”
He pointed, and came to a stop at a gap in the fence, the vestiges of
the old fence from which, in the company of his neighbour Mr. Stringer
the milkman, he had once watched the South of England Aero Club's
Saturday afternoon ascents. Dim memories, it may be, of that particular
afternoon returned to him.
“There, down there, where all that rus' looks so red and bright, that's
the gas-works.”
“What's gas?” asked the little boy.
“Oh, a hairy sort of nothin' what you put in balloons to make 'em go up.
And you used to burn it till the 'lectricity come.”
The little boy tried vainly to imagine gas on the basis of these
particulars. Then his thoughts reverted to a previous topic.
“But why didn't they end the War?”
“Obstinacy. Everybody was getting 'urt, but everybody was 'urtin' and
everybody was 'igh-spirited and patriotic, and so they smeshed up
things instead. They jes' went on smeshin'. And afterwards they jes' got
desp'rite and savige.”
“It ought to 'ave ended,” said the little boy.
“It didn't ought to 'ave begun,” said old Tom, “But people was proud.
People was la-dy-da-ish and uppish and proud. Too much meat and drink
they 'ad. Give in--not them! And after a bit nobody arst 'em to give in.
Nobody arst 'em....”
He sucked his old gums thoughtfully, and his gaze strayed away across
the valley to where the shattered glass of the Crystal Palace
glittered in the sun. A dim large sense of waste and irrevocable lost
opportunities pervaded his mind. He repeated his ultimate judgment
upon all these things, obstinately, slowly, and conclusively, his final
saying upon the matter.
“You can say what you like,” he said. “It didn't ought ever to 'ave
begun.”
He said it simply--somebody somewhere ought to have stopped something,
but who or how or why were all beyond his ken.
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