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The War in the Air

by H. G. Wells · English · Gutenberg #780 · 579,264 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The War in the Air

Author: H. G. Wells


        
Release date: January 1, 1997 [eBook #780]
                Most recently updated: February 25, 2026

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/780

Credits: Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer, Janet Blenkinship, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WAR IN THE AIR ***




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 long 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.

4

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-days, 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 they 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-roses, 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 im

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