One saw Monson’s flying-machine from the windows of the trains passing
either along the South-Western main line or along the line between
Wimbledon and Worcester Park,—to be more exact, one saw the huge
scaffoldings which limited the flight of the apparatus. They rose over
the tree-tops, a massive alley of interlacing iron and timber, and an
enormous web of ropes and tackle, extending the best part of two miles.
From the Leatherhead branch this alley was foreshortened and in part
hidden by a hill with villas; but from the main line one had it in
profile, a complex tangle of girders and curving bars, very impressive
to the excursionists from Portsmouth and Southampton and the West.
Monson had taken up the work where Maxim had left it, had gone on at
first with an utter contempt for the journalistic wit and ignorance that
had irritated and hampered his predecessor, and had spent (it was said)
rather more than half his immense fortune upon his experiments. The
results, to an impatient generation, seemed inconsiderable. When some
five years had passed after the growth of the colossal iron groves at
Worcester Park, and Monson still failed to put in a fluttering
appearance over Trafalgar Square, even the Isle of Wight trippers felt
their liberty to smile. And such intelligent people as did not consider
Monson a fool stricken with the mania for invention, denounced him as
being (for no particular reason) a self-advertising quack.
Yet now and again a morning trainload of season-ticket holders would see
a white monster rush headlong through the airy tracery of guides and
bars, and hear the further stays, nettings, and buffers snap, creak, and
groan with the impact of the blow. Then there would be an efflorescence
of black-set white-rimmed faces along the sides of the train, and the
morning papers would be neglected for a vigorous discussion of the
possibility of flying (in which nothing new was ever said by any
chance), until the train reached Waterloo, and its cargo of
season-ticket holders dispersed themselves over London. Or the fathers
and mothers in some multitudinous train of weary excursionists returning
exhausted from a day of rest by the sea, would find the dark fabric,
standing out against the evening sky, useful in diverting some bilious
child from its introspection, and be suddenly startled by the swift
transit of a huge black flapping shape that strained upward against the
guides. It was a great and forcible thing beyond dispute, and excellent
for conversation; yet, all the same, it was but flying in
leading-strings, and most of those who witnessed it scarcely counted its
flight as flying. More of a switchback it seemed to the run of the folk.
Monson, I say, did not trouble himself very keenly about the opinions of
the press at first. But possibly he, even, had formed but a poor idea of
the time it would take before the tactics of flying were mastered, the
swift assured adjustment of the big soaring shape to every gust and
chance movement of the air; nor had he clearly reckoned the money this
prolonged struggle against gravitation would cost him. And he was not so
pachydermatous as he seemed. Secretly he had his periodical bundles of
cuttings sent him by Romeike, he had his periodical reminders from his
banker; and if he did not mind the initial ridicule and scepticism, he
felt the growing neglect as the months went by and the money dribbled
away. Time was when Monson had sent the enterprising journalist, keen
after readable matter, empty from his gates. But when the enterprising
journalist ceased from troubling, Monson was anything but satisfied in
his heart of hearts. Still day by day the work went on, and the
multitudinous subtle difficulties of the steering diminished in number.
Day by day, too, the money trickled away, until his balance was no
longer a matter of hundreds of thousands, but of tens. And at last came
an anniversary.
Monson, sitting in the little drawing-shed, suddenly noticed the date on
Woodhouse’s calendar.
“It was five years ago to-day that we began,” he said to Woodhouse
suddenly.
“Is it?” said Woodhouse.
“It’s the alterations play the devil with us,” said Monson, biting a
paper-fastener.
The drawings for the new vans to the hinder screw lay on the table
before him as he spoke. He pitched the mutilated brass paper-fastener
into the waste-paper basket and drummed with his fingers. “These
alterations! Will the mathematicians ever be clever enough to save us
all this patching and experimenting. Five years—learning by rule of
thumb, when one might think that it was possible to calculate the whole
thing out beforehand. The cost of it! I might have hired three senior
wranglers for life. But they’d only have developed some beautifully
useless theorems in pneumatics. What a time it has been, Woodhouse!”
“These mouldings will take three weeks,” said Woodhouse. “At special
prices.”
“Three weeks!” said Monson, and sat drumming.
“Three weeks certain,” said Woodhouse, an excellent engineer, but no
good as a comforter. He drew the sheets towards him and began shading a
bar.
Monson stopped drumming and began to bite his finger-nails, staring the
while at Woodhouse’s head.
“How long have they been calling this Monson’s Folly?” he said suddenly.
“_Oh!_ Year or so,” said Woodhouse, carelessly, without looking up.
Monson sucked the air in between his teeth, and went to the window. The
stout iron columns carrying the elevated rails upon which the start of
the machine was made rose up close by, and the machine was hidden by the
upper edge of the window. Through the grove of iron pillars, red painted
and ornate with rows of bolts, one had a glimpse of the pretty scenery
towards Esher. A train went gliding noiselessly across the middle
distance, its rattle drowned by the hammering of the workmen overhead.
Monson could imagine the grinning faces at the windows of the carriages.
He swore savagely under his breath, and dabbed viciously at a blowfly
that suddenly became noisy on the window-pane.
“What’s up?” said Woodhouse, staring in surprise at his employer.
“I’m about sick of this.”
Woodhouse scratched his cheek. “Oh!” he said, after an assimilating
pause. He pushed the drawing away from him.
“Here these fools—I’m trying to conquer a new element—trying to do a
thing that will revolutionise life. And instead of taking an intelligent
interest, they grin and make their stupid jokes, and call me and my
appliances names.”
“Asses!” said Woodhouse, letting his eye fall again on the drawing.
The epithet, curiously enough, made Monson wince. “I’m about sick of it,
Woodhouse, anyhow,” he said, after a pause.
Woodhouse shrugged his shoulders.
“There’s nothing for it but patience, I suppose,” said Monson, sticking
his hands in his pockets. “I’ve started. I’ve made my bed, and I’ve got
to lie on it. I can’t go back. I’ll see it through, and spend every
penny I have and every penny I can borrow. But I tell you, Woodhouse,
I’m infernally sick of it, all the same. If I’d paid a tenth part of the
money towards some political greaser’s expenses—I’d have been a baronet
before this.”
Monson paused. Woodhouse stared in front of him with a blank expression
he always employed to indicate sympathy, and tapped his pencil-case on
the table. Monson stared at him for a minute.
“Oh, _damn_!” said Monson, suddenly, and abruptly rushed out of the
room.
Woodhouse continued his sympathetic rigour for perhaps half a minute.
Then he sighed and resumed the shading of the drawings. Something had
evidently upset Monson. Nice chap, and generous, but difficult to get on
with. It was the way with every amateur who had anything to do with
engineering—wanted everything finished at once. But Monson had usually
the patience of the expert. Odd he was so irritable. Nice and round that
aluminium rod did look now! Woodhouse threw back his head, and put it,
first this side and then that, to appreciate his bit of shading better.
“Mr. Woodhouse,” said Hooper, the foreman of the labourers, putting his
head in at the door.
“Hullo!” said Woodhouse, without turning round.
“Nothing happened, sir?” said Hooper.
“Happened?” said Woodhouse.
“The governor just been up the rails swearing like a tornader.”
“_Oh!_” said Woodhouse.
“It ain’t like him, sir.”
“No?”
“And I was thinking perhaps—”
“Don’t think,” said Woodhouse, still admiring the drawings.
Hooper knew Woodhouse, and he shut the door suddenly with a vicious
slam. Woodhouse stared stonily before him for some further minutes, and
then made an ineffectual effort to pick his teeth with his pencil.
Abruptly he desisted, pitched that old, tried, and stumpy servitor
across the room, got up, stretched himself, and followed Hooper.
He looked ruffled—it was visible to every workman he met. When a
millionaire who has been spending thousands on experiments that employ
quite a little army of people suddenly indicates that he is sick of the
undertaking, there is almost invariably a certain amount of mental
friction in the ranks of the little army he employs. And even before he
indicates his intentions there are speculations and murmurs, a watching
of faces and a study of straws. Hundreds of people knew before the day
was out that Monson was ruffled, Woodhouse ruffled, Hooper ruffled. A
workman’s wife, for instance (whom Monson had never seen), decided to
keep her money in the savings-bank instead of buying a velveteen dress.
So far-reaching are even the casual curses of a millionaire.
Monson found a certain satisfaction in going on the works and behaving
disagreeably to as many people as possible. After a time even that
palled upon him, and he rode off the grounds, to every one’s relief
there, and through the lanes south-eastward, to the infinite tribulation
of his house steward at Cheam.
And the immediate cause of it all, the little grain of annoyance
that had suddenly precipitated all this discontent with his
life-work was—these trivial things that direct all our great
decisions!—half a dozen ill-considered remarks made by a pretty
girl, prettily dressed, with a beautiful voice and something more
than prettiness in her soft grey eyes. And of these half-dozen
remarks, two words especially—“Monson’s Folly.” She had felt she was
behaving charmingly to Monson; she reflected the next day how
exceptionally effective she had been, and no one would have been
more amazed than she, had she learned the effect she had left on
Monson’s mind. I hope, considering everything, that she never knew.
“How are you getting on with your flying-machine?” she asked. (“I wonder
if I shall ever meet any one with the sense not to ask that,” thought
Monson.) “It will be very dangerous at first, will it not?” (“Thinks I’m
afraid.”) “Jorgon is going to play presently; have you heard him
before?” (“My mania being attended to, we turn to rational
conversation.”) Gush about Jorgon; gradual decline of conversation,
ending with—“You must let me know when your flying-machine is finished,
Mr. Monson, and then I will consider the advisability of taking a
ticket.” (“One would think I was still playing inventions in the
nursery.”) But the bitterest thing she said was not meant for Monson’s
ears. To Phlox, the novelist, she was always conscientiously brilliant.
“I have been talking to Mr. Monson, and he can think of nothing,
positively nothing, but that flying-machine of his. Do you know, all his
workmen call that place of his ‘Monson’s Folly’? He is quite impossible.
It is really very, very sad. I always regard him myself in the light of
sunken treasure—the Lost Millionaire, you know.”
She was pretty and well educated,—indeed, she had written an
epigrammatic novelette; but the bitterness was that she was typical. She
summarised what the world thought of the man who was working sanely,
steadily, and surely towards a more tremendous revolution in the
appliances of civilisation, a more far-reaching alteration in the ways
of humanity than has ever been effected since history began. They did
not even take him seriously. In a little while he would be proverbial.
“I must fly now,” he said on his way home, smarting with a sense of
absolute social failure. “I _must_ fly soon. If it doesn’t come off
soon, by God! I shall run amuck.”
He said that before he had gone through his pass-book and his litter of
papers. Inadequate as the cause seems, it was that girl’s voice and the
expression of her eyes that precipitated his discontent. But certainly
the discovery that he had no longer even one hundred thousand pounds’
worth of realisable property behind him was the poison that made the
wound deadly.
It was the next day after this that he exploded upon Woodhouse and his
workmen, and thereafter his bearing was consistently grim for three
weeks, and anxiety dwelt in Cheam and Ewell, Malden, Morden, and
Worcester Park, places that had thriven mightily on his experiments.
Four weeks after that first swearing of his, he stood with Woodhouse by
the reconstructed machine as it lay across the elevated railway, by
means of which it gained its initial impetus. The new propeller
glittered a brighter white than the rest of the machine, and a gilder,
obedient to a whim of Monson’s, was picking out the aluminium bars with
gold. And looking down the long avenue between the ropes (gilded now
with the sunset), one saw red signals, and two miles away an anthill of
workmen busy altering the last falls of the run into a rising slope.
“I’ll _come_,” said Woodhouse. “I’ll come right enough. But I tell you
it’s infernally foolhardy. If only you would give another year—”
“I tell you I won’t. I tell you the thing works. I’ve given years
enough—”
“It’s not that,” said Woodhouse. “We’re all right with the machine. But
it’s the steering—”
“Haven’t I been rushing, night and morning, backwards and forwards,
through this squirrel’s cage? If the thing steers true here, it will
steer true all across England. It’s just funk, I tell you, Woodhouse. We
could have gone a year ago. And besides—”
“Well?” said Woodhouse.
“The money!” snapped Monson, over his shoulder.
“Hang it! I never thought of the money,” said Woodhouse, and then,
speaking now in a very different tone to that with which he had said the
words before, he repeated, “I’ll come. Trust me.”
Monson turned suddenly, and saw all that Woodhouse had not the dexterity
to say, shining on his sunset-lit face. He looked for a moment, then
impulsively extended his hand. “Thanks,” he said.
“All right,” said Woodhouse, gripping the hand, and with a queer
softening of his features. “Trust me.”
Then both men turned to the big apparatus that lay with its flat wings
extended upon the carrier, and stared at it meditatively. Monson, guided
perhaps by a photographic study of the flight of birds, and by
Lilienthal’s methods, had gradually drifted from Maxim’s shapes towards
the bird form again. The thing, however, was driven by a huge screw
behind in the place of the tail; and so hovering, which needs an almost
vertical adjustment of a flat tail, was rendered impossible. The body of
the machine was small, almost cylindrical, and pointed. Forward and aft
on the pointed ends were two small petroleum engines for the screw, and
the navigators sat deep in a canoe-like recess, the foremost one
steering, and being protected by a low screen, with two plate-glass
windows, from the blinding rush of air. On either side a monstrous flat
framework with a curved front border could be adjusted so as either to
lie horizontally, or to be tilted upward or down. These wings worked
rigidly together, or, by releasing a pin, one could be tilted through a
small angle independently of its fellow. The front edge of either wing
could also be shifted back so as to diminish the wing-area about
one-sixth. The machine was not only not designed to hover, but it was
also incapable of fluttering. Monson’s idea was to get into the air with
the initial rush of the apparatus, and then to skim, much as a
playingcard may be skimmed, keeping up the rush by means of the screw at
the stern. Rooks and gulls fly enormous distances in that way with
scarcely a perceptible movement of the wings. The bird really drives
along on an aërial switchback. It glides slanting downward for a space,
until it has gained considerable momentum, and then altering the
inclination of its wings, glides up again almost to its original
altitude. Even a Londoner who has watched the birds in the aviary in
Regent’s Park knows that.
But the bird is practising this art from the moment it leaves its nest.
It has not only the perfect apparatus, but the perfect instinct to use
it. A man off his feet has the poorest skill in balancing. Even the
simple trick of the bicycle costs him some hours of labour. The
instantaneous adjustments of the wings, the quick response to a passing
breeze, the swift recovery of equilibrium, the giddy, eddying movements
that require such absolute precision—all that he must learn, learn with
infinite labour and infinite danger, if ever he is to conquer flying.
The flying-machine that will start off some fine day, driven by neat
“little levers,” with a nice open deck like a liner, and all loaded up
with bomb-shells and guns, is the easy dreaming of a literary man. In
lives and in treasure the cost of the conquest of the empire of the air
may even exceed all that has been spent in man’s great conquest of the
sea. Certainly it will be costlier than the greatest war that has ever
devastated the world.
No one knew these things better than these two practical men. And they
knew they were in the front rank of the coming army. Yet there is hope
even in a forlorn hope. Men are killed outright in the reserves
sometimes, while others who have been left for dead in the thickest
corner crawl out and survive.
“If we miss these meadows—” said Woodhouse, presently in his slow way.
“My dear chap,” said Monson, whose spirits had been rising fitfully
during the last few days, “we mustn’t miss these meadows. There’s a
quarter of a square mile for us to hit, fences removed, ditches
levelled. We shall come down all right—rest assured. And if we don’t—”
“Ah!” said Woodhouse. “If we don’t!”
Before the day of the start, the newspaper people got wind of the
alterations at the northward end of the framework, and Monson was
cheered by a decided change in the comments Romeike forwarded him. “He
will be off some day,” said the papers. “He will be off some day,” said
the South-Western season-ticket holders one to another; the seaside
excursionists, the Saturday-to-Monday trippers from Sussex and Hampshire
and Dorset and Devon, the eminent literary people from Hazlemere, all
remarked eagerly one to another, “He will be off some day,” as the
familiar scaffolding came in sight. And actually, one bright morning, in
full view of the ten-past-ten train from Basingstoke, Monson’s
flying-machine started on its journey.
They saw the carrier running swiftly along its rail, and the
white-and-gold screw spinning in the air. They heard the rapid rumble of
wheels, and a thud as the carrier reached the buffers at the end of its
run. Then a whirr as the flying-machine was shot forward into the
networks. All that the majority of them had seen and heard before. The
thing went with a drooping flight through the framework and rose again,
and then every beholder shouted, or screamed, or yelled, or shrieked
after his kind. For instead of the customary concussion and stoppage,
the flying-machine flew out of its five years’ cage like a bolt from a
crossbow, and drove slantingly upward into the air, curved round a
little, so as to cross the line, and soared in the direction of
Wimbledon Common.
It seemed to hang momentarily in the air and grow smaller, then it
ducked and vanished over the clustering blue tree-tops to the east of
Coombe Hill, and no one stopped staring and gasping until long after it
had disappeared.
That was what the people in the train from Basingstoke saw. If you had
drawn a line down the middle of that train, from engine to guard’s van,
you would not have found a living soul on the opposite side to the
flying-machine. It was a mad rush from window to window as the thing
crossed the line. And the engine-driver and stoker never took their eyes
off the low hills about Wimbledon, and never noticed that they had run
clean through Coombe and Malden and Raynes Park, until, with returning
animation, they found themselves pelting, at the most indecent pace,
into Wimbledon station.
From the moment when Monson had started the carrier with a “_Now!_”
neither he nor Woodhouse said a word. Both men sat with clenched teeth.
Monson had crossed the line with a curve that was too sharp, and
Woodhouse had opened and shut his white lips; but neither spoke.
Woodhouse simply gripped his seat, and breathed sharply through his
teeth, watching the blue country to the west rushing past, and down, and
away from him. Monson knelt at his post forward, and his hands trembled
on the spoked wheel that moved the wings. He could see nothing before
him but a mass of white clouds in the sky.
The machine went slanting upward, travelling with an enormous speed
still, but losing momentum every moment. The land ran away underneath
with diminishing speed.
“_Now!_” said Woodhouse at last, and with a violent effort Monson
wrenched over the wheel and altered the angle of the wings. The machine
seemed to hang for half a minute motionless in mid-air, and then he saw
the hazy blue house-covered hills of Kilburn and Hampstead jump up
before his eyes and rise steadily, until the little sunlit dome of the
Albert Hall appeared through his windows. For a moment he scarcely
understood the meaning of this upward rush of the horizon, but as the
nearer and nearer houses came into view, he realised what he had done.
He had turned the wings over too far, and they were swooping steeply
downward towards the Thames.
The thought, the question, the realisation were all the business of a
second of time. “Too much!” gasped Woodhouse. Monson brought the wheel
half-way back with a jerk, and forthwith the Kilburn and Hampstead ridge
dropped again to the lower edge of his windows. They had been a thousand
feet above Coombe and Malden station; fifty seconds after they whizzed,
at a frightful pace, not eighty feet above the East Putney station, on
the Metropolitan District line, to the screaming astonishment of a
platform full of people. Monson flung up the vans against the air, and
over Fulham they rushed up their atmospheric switchback again,
steeply—too steeply. The ’busses went floundering across the Fulham
Road, the people yelled.
Then down again, too steeply still, and the distant trees and houses
about Primrose Hill leapt up across Monson’s window, and then suddenly
he saw straight before him the greenery of Kensington Gardens and the
towers of the Imperial Institute. They were driving straight down upon
South Kensington. The pinnacles of the Natural History Museum rushed up
into view. There came one fatal second of swift thought, a moment of
hesitation. Should he try and clear the towers, or swerve eastward?
He made a hesitating attempt to release the right wing, left the catch
half released, and gave a frantic clutch at the wheel.
The nose of the machine seemed to leap up before him. The wheel pressed
his hand with irresistible force, and jerked itself out of his control.
Woodhouse, sitting crouched together, gave a hoarse cry, and sprang up
towards Monson. “Too far!” he cried, and then he was clinging to the
gunwale for dear life, and Monson had been jerked clean overhead, and
was falling backwards upon him.
So swiftly had the thing happened that barely a quarter of the people
going to and fro in Hyde Park, and Brompton Road, and the Exhibition
Road saw anything of the aërial catastrophe. A distant winged shape had
appeared above the clustering houses to the south, had fallen and risen,
growing larger as it did so; had swooped swiftly down towards the
Imperial Institute, a broad spread of flying wings, had swept round in a
quarter circle, dashed eastward, and then suddenly sprang vertically
into the air. A black object shot out of it, and came spinning downward.
A man! Two men clutching each other! They came whirling down, separated
as they struck the roof of the Students’ Club, and bounded off into the
green bushes on its southward side.
For perhaps half a minute, the pointed stem of the big machine still
pierced vertically upward, the screw spinning desperately. For one brief
instant, that yet seemed an age to all who watched, it had hung
motionless in mid-air. Then a spout of yellow flame licked up its length
from the stern engine, and swift, swifter, swifter, and flaring like a
rocket, it rushed down upon the solid mass of masonry which was formerly
the Royal College of Science. The big screw of white and gold touched
the parapet, and crumpled up like wet linen. Then the blazing
spindle-shaped body smashed and splintered, smashing and splintering in
its fall, upon the north-westward angle of the building.
But the crash, the flame of blazing paraffin that shot heavenward from
the shattered engines of the machine, the crushed horrors that were
found in the garden beyond the Students’ Club, the masses of yellow
parapet and red brick that fell headlong into the roadway, the running
to and fro of people like ants in a broken anthill, the galloping of
fire-engines, the gathering of crowds—all these things do not belong to
this story, which was written only to tell how the first of all
successful flying-machines was launched and flew. Though he failed, and
failed disastrously, the record of Monson’s work remains—a sufficient
monument—to guide the next of that band of gallant experimentalists who
will sooner or later master this great problem of flying. And between
Worcester Park and Malden there still stands that portentous avenue of
iron-work, rusting now, and dangerous here and there, to witness to the
first desperate struggle for man’s right of way through the air.