THE MILLION TO ONE CHANCE
So wings came--to stay, every one admitted, although most people
complained that after all flying was not so wonderful when one could do
it as they thought it would have been. For at the first glance the
popular fancy had inclined towards pinning on a pair of gauzy appendages
and soaring at once into empyrean heights with the spontaneity of a
lark, or of lightly fluttering from point to point with the ease and
grace of a butterfly. They found that a pair of wings cost rather more
than a high-grade bicycle, and that the novice who could struggle from
the stage into a net placed twenty yards away, after a month's course of
daily practices, was held to be very promising. There was no more talk
of England lying at the mercy of any and every invader; for one man, and
one only, had so far succeeded in crossing even the Channel, and that at
its narrowest limit. For at least three years after the conversion of
Phipps the generality of people gleaned their knowledge of the progress
of flying from the pages of the comic papers. To the comic papers wings
had been sent as an undiluted blessing.
But if alatics, in their infancy, did not come up to the wider
expectation, there were many who found in it a novel and exhilarating
sport. There were also those who, discovering something congenial in the
new force, set quietly and resolutely to work to develop its
possibilities and to raise it above the level of a mere fashionable
novelty. There have always been some, a few, not infrequently
Englishmen, who have unostentatiously become pre-eminent in every
development of science with a fixity of purpose. Their names rarely
appear in the pages of history, but they largely write it.
Hastings permitted mixed flying. It was a question that had embittered
many a town council. To one section it seemed intolerable that a father,
a husband, or a brother should be torn for twenty minutes from the side
of his female relatives; to the opposing section it seemed horrible that
coatless men should be allowed to spread their wings within a hundred
and fifty yards of shoeless women.
"I have no particular convictions," one prominent citizen remarked, "but
in view of the existing railway facilities it is worth while considering
whether we shall have any visitors at all this season if we stand in the
way of families flying down together." The humour of the age was flowing
mordaciously, even as the wit of France had done little more than a
century before. The readiest jests carried a tang, whether turning upon
personal poverty, municipal extravagance, or national incapacity.
Opinion being evenly divided, the local rate of seventeen shillings in
the pound influenced the casting vote in favour of mixed flying. There
were necessary preparations, including a captive balloon in which an
ancient mariner, decked out with a pair of wings like a superannuated
Cupid, was posted to render assistance to the faltering. The rates at
once rose to seventeen shillings and sixpence, but the principle of the
enterprise was admitted to be sound.
So on this pleasant summer afternoon--an ideal day for a fly, said every
one--the heights above the old town were echoing to the ceaseless gaiety
of the watching crowd, for alatics had not yet ceased to be a novelty,
while the air above was cleft by a hundred pairs of beating wings.
"A remarkable sight," said an old man who had opened conversation with
the sociable craving of the aged; "ten years ago we little expected
this."
"Why, no," replied his chance acquaintance on the seat; "if I remember
rightly, the tendency was all towards a combination either of a balloon
and a motor-car or of a submarine and a band-box."
"You don't fly yourself?"
The young man--and he was a stalwart enough youth--looked at himself
critically as if mentally picturing the effect of a pair of wings upon
his person. "Well, no," he replied; "one doesn't get the time for
practice. Then consider the price of the things. And the annual
licence--oh, they won't let you forget _that_, I assure you. Well, is it
worth it?"
The old man shook his head in harmonious agreement; decidedly for him it
was not worth it. "Perhaps you are in Somerset House?" he remarked
tentatively. It is not the young who are curious; they have the
fascinating study of themselves.
"Not exactly," replied the other, veiling by this diplomatic ambiguity
an eminent firm of West End drapers; "but I happen to have rather
exceptional chances of knowing what is going on behind the scenes in
London. I can assure you, sir, that in spite of the last sixpence on the
income-tax and the hen-roost tax, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has
sent out stringent orders to whip up every penny in the hope of
lessening a serious deficit."
"There may possibly be a deficit," admitted the old man with bland
assurance; "but what do a few millions, either one way or the other,
matter to a country with our inexhaustible resources? We are certainly
passing through a period of financial depression, but the unfailing
lesson of the past has been that a cycle of bad years is inevitably
followed by a cycle of good years, and in the competition with foreign
countries our advantage of free trade ensures our pre-eminence." For it
is a mistake now to ascribe optimism to youth. Those youths have by this
time grown up into old men. Age is the optimist because it has seen so
many things "come right," so many difficulties "muddled through." Also
because they who would have been pessimistic old men have worried
themselves into early graves. Your unquenchable optimist needs no pill
to aid digestion. "Then," he concluded, "why trouble yourself
unnecessarily on a beautiful day like this!"
"Oh, it doesn't trouble me," laughed the other man; "at least the
deficit doesn't; nor the income-tax, I regret to say. But I rather kick
at ten per cent. on my season ticket and a few other trifles when I
consider that there used to be better national value without them. And I
rather think that most others have had about enough of it."
"Patience, patience; you are a young man yet. Look round. I don't think
I ever saw the grass greener for the time of the year, and in my front
garden I noticed only to-day that the syringa is out a full week earlier
than I can remember.... Eh! What is it? Which way? Where?"
The clerk was on his feet suddenly, and standing on the seat. Every one
was standing up, and all in a common impulse were pointing to the sky.
Some--women--screamed as they stood and watched, but after a gasp of
horrified surprise, like a cry of warning cut short because too late,
the mingling noises of the crowd seemed to shrink away in a breath.
Every one had read of the sickening tragedies of broken cross-rods or of
sudden loss of wing-power--aerolanguisis it was called--and one was
taking place before their eyes. High up, very high at first, and a
little to the east, a female figure was cleaving headlong through the
air, and beyond all human power to save.
So one would have said; so every one indeed assumed; and when a second
later another figure crossed their range it only heralded a double
tragedy. It drew a gasp ... a gasp that lingered, spun out long and
turned to one loud, tumultuous shout. The next minute men were shouting
incoherently, dancing wildly, shaking hands with all and any, and
expressing frantic relief in a hundred frantic ways.
Thus makes his timely entry into this chronicle Gatacre Stobalt, and
reviewing the progress of flying as it then immaturely stood, it is not
too much to say that no other man could have turned that tragedy. With
an instinctive judgment of time, distance, angle, and his own powers,
Stobalt, from a hundred feet above, had leapt as a diver often leaps as
he leaves the plank, and with rigid outstretched wings was dropping
earthward on all but a plummet line. It was the famous "razor-edge"
stroke at its narrowest angle, the delight of strong and daring fliers,
the terror of those who watched beneath. It may be realised by ascending
to the highest point of St Paul's and contemplating a dive into the
flooded churchyard.
The moment was a classic one in the history of the wing. The air had
claimed its victims as the waters have; and there was a legitimate
pride, since the enterprise was no longer foolhardy, that they had never
been withheld. But never before had a rescue been effected beyond the
limits of the nets; it was not then deemed practicable and the axiom of
the sport "A broken wing is a broken neck," so far held good. Yet here
was a man, no novice in the art, deliberately pointing sheer to earth on
a line that must bring him, if unswervingly maintained, into contact
with the falling girl beneath. Up to that point the attempt would have
been easy if daring, beyond it nothing but the readiest self-possession
and the most consummate skill could avert an irretrievable disaster to
himself.
* * * * *
"You have not even had the curiosity to ask if I am hurt yet." Her voice
certainly was.
"X = - 4 {C^2} {x^3}," murmured Stobalt abstractedly. "I assure you," he
explained, leaving the higher mathematics at her reproach, "that I had
quite satisfied myself that you were not.... It all turns on the extra
tension thrown on the crank by the additional three feathers. I am
convinced that English makers have gone as far as they safely can in
that direction." He glanced at her wings as he mused. They were of the
familiar detached feather--or "venetian blind," as it was commonly
called--pattern, and wonderfully graceful in their long sweep and
elegant poise. Made of the purest white celluloid, just tinted with a
delicate and deepening pink at the base, they harmonised with her
sea-green costume as faultlessly as the lily with the leaves it springs
from. Stobalt himself used the more difficult but much more powerful
"bat" shape, built up of gold-beaters' skin; he had already folded them
in rest, but in those early days the prudish conventions of the air
debarred the girl from seeking a like repose.
"I should certainly discard the three outside feathers," he summed up.
"I shall certainly discard the whole thing," she replied. "I do not know
which felt the worse--being killed or being saved."
He made a gesture that would seem to say that the personal details of
the adventure were better dismissed. He was plainly a man of few words,
but the mechanical defect still held his interest.
"One understands that a brave man always dislikes being thanked," she
continued a little nervously; "and, indeed, what can I say to thank you?
You have saved my life, and I know that it must have been at a
tremendous risk to yourself."
"I think," he said, "that the sooner you forget the incident.... That
and the removal of those three feathers." His gestures were deliberate
and the reverse of vivacious, but when he glanced up and moved a hand,
it at once conveyed to the girl that in his opinion nothing else need
stand in the way of her recovered powers and confidence.
"And there is," she said timidly, "nothing?" Precisely what there might
be had not occurred to her satisfactorily.
"Nothing," he said, without the air of being heroic in his generosity.
"Unless," he added, "you care to promise that you will not let----" He
stopped with easy self-possession and turned enquiringly to a man in
some official dress who had suddenly appeared in the glade.
"Have you a licence?" demanded the official, ignoring Stobalt and
addressing himself in a style that at one time would have been deemed
objectionably abrupt, to the lady. He was in point of fact a policeman,
and from a thong on his wrist swung a truncheon, while the butt of a
revolver showed at his belt. He wore no number or identifying mark, for
it had long since been agreed that it must be objectionable to their
finer feelings to treat policemen as though they were--one cannot say
convicts, for a sympathetic Home Secretary had already discontinued the
numbering of convicts on the ground that it created a state of things
"undistinguishable from slavery," though not really slavery--but as
though they were railway bridges or district council lamp-posts. "Treat
a man as a dog, and he becomes a dog," had been the invincible argument
of the band of humanitarians who had introduced what was known as the
"Get-up-when-you-like-and-have-what-you-want" system of prison
discipline, and "Treat a man as a lamp-post, and he becomes a
lamp-post," had been the logical standpoint of the Amalgamated Union of
Policemen and Plain Clothes Detectives.
"Yes," replied the girl, and her voice had not quite that agreeable
intonation that members of the force usually hear from the lips of fair
young ladies nowadays. "Do you wish to see it?"
"What else should I ask you if you had one for?" he demanded with the
innate boorishness of the heavy-witted man. "Of course I want to see
it."
She opened the little bag that hung from her girdle and handed him a
paper without a word.
"Muriel Ursula Percy Sleigh Hampden?" It would be idle to pretend that
the names pleased him, or that he tried to veil his contempt.
"Yes," she replied.
He indicated his private disbelief--or possibly merely took a ready
means of exercising his authority in a way that he knew to be
offensive--by producing a small tin box from one of his pockets and
passing it to her without any explanation. The requirement was so
universal in practice, however, that no explanation was necessary, for
the signature, as the chief mark of identification, had long been
superseded by the simpler and more effective thumb-sign. Miss Hampden
made a slight grimace when she saw the condition of the soft wax which
the box contained, but she obediently pressed it with her thumb and
passed it back again. As her licence bore another thumb-sign, stamped in
pigment, it was only necessary for the constable to compare the two (a
process simplified by the superimposing glass, a contrivance not unlike
a small opera-glass with converging tubes) in order to satisfy himself
at once whether the marks were the impress of the same thumb. Apparently
they were, for with a careless "Right-O," he proceeded on his way,
swinging his truncheon with an easy grace, and occasionally striking off
the end of an overhanging branch.
"I wonder," said Stobalt, when at length the zealous officer had quite
disappeared in search of other fields for tactful activity, "I wonder if
you are a daughter of Sir John Hampden?"
"Yes," she replied, looking at him with renewed interest. "His only
daughter. Do you know my father?"
He shook his head. "I have been away, but we see the papers sometimes,"
he said. "The Sir John I mean," he explained, as though the point were a
matter of some moment, "was a few years ago regarded as the one man who
might unite our parties and save the position."
"There is only one Sir John Hampden," she replied. "But it was too
late."
"Oh yes," he admitted vaguely, dismissing the subject.
Both were silent for a few minutes; it might be noticed that people
often became thoughtful when they spoke of the past in those years.
Indeed, an optimist might almost have had some ground for believing that
a thinking era had begun.
When he spoke again it was with something of an air of constraint. "You
asked me just now if there was--anything. Well, I have since
thought----"
"Yes?" she said encouragingly.
"I have thought that I should like to meet your father. I hear
everywhere that he is the most inaccessible man in London; but perhaps
if you could favour me with a line of introduction----"
"Oh yes," she exclaimed gladly. "I am sure that he would wish to thank
you. I will write to-morrow."
"I have paper and a pencil here," he suggested. "I have been a sailor,"
he added, as though that simple statement explained an omnipercipient
resourcefulness; as perhaps it did.
"If you prefer it," she said, accepting the proffered stationery. It did
not make the least difference, she told herself, but this business-like
expedition chilled her generous instincts.
"I leave for town to-night," was all he vouchsafed.
For a few minutes she wrote in silence, while he looked fixedly out to
sea. "What name am I to write, please?" she asked presently.
"Oh, Salt--George Salt," he replied in a matter-of-fact voice, and
without turning his head.
"Is it 'Mr Salt,' or 'Captain,' or----?"
"Just 'Mr,' please. And"--his voice fell a little flat in spite of
himself, but he did not meet her eyes--"and would it be too much if I
asked you to mention the circumstances under which we met?"
She bent a little lower over the paper in a shame she could not then
define. "I will not fail to let my father know how heroic you have been,
and to what an extent we are indebted to you," she replied
dispassionately.
"Thank you." Suddenly he turned with an arresting gesture, and impulsive
speech trembled on his tongue. But the sophistries of explanation,
apology, self-extenuation, were foreign to the nature of this strong
keen-featured man, whose grey and not unkindly eyes had gained their
tranquil depth from long intercourse with sea and sky--those two masters
who teach the larger things of life. The words were never spoken, his
arm fell down again, and the moment passed.
"I have never," he was known to say with quiet emphasis in later years,
"regretted silence. I have never given way to an impulse and spoken
hastily without regretting speech."
The London evening papers were being cried in the streets of the old
Cinque Port as "George Salt" walked to the station a few hours later. A
general election was drawing to its desultory close, but the results
seemed to excite curiously little interest among the well-dressed,
leisured class that filled the promenades. It was a longer sweep of the
pendulum than had ever been anticipated in the days when politics were
more or less the pastime of the rich, and the working classes neither
understood nor cared to understand them--only understood that whatever
else happened nothing ever came their way.
The man who had been a sailor bought two papers of very different views,
the _Pall Mall Gazette_ and the orthodox labour organ called _The
Masses_. Neither rejoiced, but to despair _The Masses_ added a note of
ingenuous surprise as it summarised the contest as a whole. This was how
the matter stood:
POSITION OF PARTIES AT THE DISSOLUTION
Labour Members 300
Socialists 140
Liberals 112
Unionists 40
PARTY GAINS
Socialist Gains 204
Moderate Labour Gains 5
Imperial Party Gains 0
POSITION OF PARTIES IN THE NEW PARLIAMENT
Socialists 344
Moderate Labour Party (all groups) 179
Combined Imperial Party (Liberals and
Unionists) 68
(The above returns do not include the Orkney and Shetland Islands.)
Socialist majority over all possible combinations 97
There is no need to trace the development of political events leading up
to this position. It lends itself to summary. The Labour party had come
into power by pointing out to voters of the working classes that its
members were their brothers, and promising them a great deal of property
belonging to other people and a good many privileges which they
vehemently denounced in every other class. When in power they had thrown
open the doors of election to one and all. The Socialist party had come
into power by pointing out to voters of the working classes that its
members were even more their brothers, and promising them a still larger
share of other people's property (some, indeed, belonging to the more
prosperous of the Labour representatives then in office) and still
greater privileges. Yet the editor of _The Masses_ was both pained and
surprised at the result.