windjammer type and yachts of the latest rig, battered tramp and collier
steamers, high-sided rusty looking oil-tankers, pilot-cutters,
coastguard motor-launches, whole fleets of steam-trawlers, thrashed up
and down its broad south side fairways or cannily negotiated the
treacherous channels of the north bank. Ocean-going giants of the
Merchant Service, flaunting the White Bordered Jack, or the Red Duster,
or under Admiralty Warrant, displaying the Blue Ensign. Behemoths of
the North Sea passenger-service showing the three-striped merchant-flag
of Germany--or the tricolour of the Netherlands, or the Crosses of
Norway, Sweden and Denmark--with more rarely some big grey armoured
cruiser upon harbour and Coastal Defence Service, or a brace of stumpy,
square-ended patrol-boats, or a trio of the stinging black hornets we
have learnt to call torpedo-boat destroyers, ranging in company upon
some business of the Powers that order Britannia's naval affairs.
Fascinating, wonderful to look down upon. Alike, however diverse in
size, shape or uses, in the impression of flat unsubstantiality conveyed
to you--together with the doubt that the emmets crawling upon them could
possibly be life-sized men. A drifting daisy-petal meant a smart
private steam-yacht. You looked down from two thousand feet above, on
the open-lidded snuffboxes that signified the fire-control and
signalling-stations of some Leviathan of the Home Fleet, and a string of
black holes jabbed in an oval of floating white millboard represented
her funnels, black discs or white alternately stood for her ventilators;
and her imposing deckworks, her turrets or barbettes, her gun-houses and
casemates, and the terrible monsters bloodthirstily nosing out of them,
were reduced to a more or less symmetrical arrangement in thick or thin
black lines.
The rosy light was greying. The gusts came more fitfully. To the south,
upon the right hand, were stone-built fortifications with black muzzles
of big guns poking from the ramparts, over stretches of salty marsh,
drab-coloured mud-flats, and slimy rocks covered with blackened seaweed,
sticking up from pale silvery sand-shoals, licked by the restless white
tongues of the outgoing tide, and bumped by stranding buoys. Black dots
and grey dots wheeled and scurried and settled. Crows and gulls were
feeding ravenously as the tide drew off the flats and sand-shoals. And
by the queer sensation in his empty stomach, Bawne knew that he too was
ravenous.
From the beaconed north shore of the vast estuary basin, edged now by
low rambling cliffs, and belts of shingle and sand, a long curving
headland with two lighthouses at the crook-end, rushed now towards the
Bird at what seemed the speed of an express train. Bawne winced as the
tall granite towers, topped with helmet-shaped domes of rust-red iron,
rose up like twin giants threatening to destroy. An iron balcony with a
flagstaff and signal-mast ringed the base of each dome-top, a stairway
spiralled round each shaft to a railed stone platform well above
high-water mark. And a shrimp-sized man in a red guernsey waved a speck
of blue handkerchief, and bellowed a disproportionately loud greeting
through what was presumably a megaphone. In reality the
lighthouse-keeper was indicating the M. O. cone storm-signal which hung
point downwards from the west end of the yard-arm, presaging a
south-west or north-westerly gale. Whether or no this warning was lost
upon von Herrnung, proof of its value followed. For a great upleaping
billow of brine-tasting wind caught the Bird as she flashed past the
twin lighthouses upon the headland, tossing her upwards like a withered
leaf. And a curved iron shutter in the nearer of the two rust-red
dome-tops rolled down exactly as the nictitating membrane of a bird's
eye does--and with a wink of glass from the prismatic reflector, a broad
triple beam of blinding-white acetylene light leaped north, east and
south. In the same instant upon each side of the flashing tractor, the
boy sensed a vast, shimmering, liquid restlessness. Here was the Sea,
the very Sea.
*CHAPTER XXXIII*
*BAWNE LEARNS THE TRUTH*
Something in the blood of the child answered to the call of the Ancient
Mother. He cried out, half in terror, half in delight, and the cockpit
tilted so suddenly that he was violently jerked against the seat-back
and the canvas bulkhead behind him. Looking up he saw a large old moon
of luminous yellow, sailing away overhead through a sky all shot with
pink and grey as though hollowed out of a fire-opal. The Bird was
rushing through space at ninety miles an hour, and great lumps of cold
salt wind splashed over Bawne and took his breath away, and his hands
were numbed with bitter cold and his legs were legs of ice.
So brave a spirit dwelt in his little breast, that the sob that heaved
it and the tears that stung his eyelids and dimmed his goggles, were
swallowed and blinked away as soon as shed. The cockpit became level,
and there was an imperious rapping behind him, on the upper canvas deck.
He turned his head and met the hard unflinching stare of von Herrnung,
who held in the hand with which he had rapped a bitten piece of
chocolate. Still munching he signalled:
"Hungry?"
He smiled grimly as the boy nodded in the affirmative, stuffed the bit
of sweetstuff into his mouth, produced from its cache below the level of
the upper deck another square of chocolate, tore off the silver foil
with his teeth, and crunched it greedily.
He smiled, because of a queer tickling pleasure he felt as he did this,
akin to the sensation experienced when his taunts had tortured Patrine.
"Take care of my dearest!" he fancied he could hear her saying.... Not
until she had committed herself to that incautious utterance, had he,
von Herrnung, realised what rich vengeance on the desired, hated woman
might be wreaked by the simple act of carrying off the boy, whom he had
regarded until then as a mere bag of ballast; less useful, but certain
to prove less troublesome, than the Cockney-tongued Welshman, who might
or might not carry a cheap revolver in the hip-picket under his overalls
with which to enforce his protest against being taken away.
Von Herrnung was himself armed with a Browning automatic pistol. A
deadly shot, he would have been capable of dealing with half a dozen
Davises upon the solid ground. But, no lover of avoidable risks, he saw
himself steering with one hand and shooting with the other, while Davis
sat astride the chair in the observer's cockpit, and argued with an
eighteen-and-sixpenny Birmingham four-chamber, loaded with the cheap
little cordite cartridges, whose pea-sized bullet can kill a fine big
man.
"What is this? You are sick?"
Even while keeping his ears open and his eyes skinned, as he negotiated
the Bird through a choppy cross-current, conning his course between the
compass and the roller-chart-map, now illuminated by an electric bulb,
his great shoulders shook with merriment as he saw the boy's head sink
helplessly against the side of the fuselage, and his small body
convulsed by throes of the sickness that is indistinguishable from the
dismal malady of the sea. He had shut off the engine to shout to him.
And in the sudden cessation of the tractor's racket, the deep organ note
of the waters rolled in upon the hearing, mingled with the shrill piping
of the wires and the ruffle of the freshening wind. As he switched on
power once more, the broad white ray from the Bull Light leaped forth
again and caught them as it ran eastwards over the tumbling
white-crested billows, flinging a huge shadow of von Herrnung over the
canvas-covered space of deck before him and showing him to the
white-faced boy who had twisted round once more to look at him, as a
featureless human torso shaped out of solid ebony with diamond specks
for eyes and gleams of grinning ivory teeth.
"When are we going home? Why are we over the sea now?"
Von Herrnung shut off again for the luxury of hearing and answering:
"I have told you because we are going home. Our home is--Germany. You
will not be an English boy but German, once I have got you there!"
The shrill cry of anger that came from the open mouth of the white face
was lost to him in the necessity of switching on the engine. He nodded
pleasantly to the white face and, in the darkness of his own shadowy
visage, there was the glimmer of a laugh. Then he applied himself to
other business, for the tide would turn in an hour, and then the wind
might blow hellishly from the nor'-west. Flying lower, he knew his
course the true one, for the white headlight and green starboard-lights
of a big steamer pricked twinkling holes in the thick grey dusk to
northward on his port beam. He told himself she was one of the Elbe
Company's big bluff-bowed liners making from Newcastle for Hamburg
Docks. The stern-lights of a sister-ship hailing from Grimsby, by her
steerings, were also discernible in the mirk ahead, while the lights
from her tiers of cabins made her look like a black water-beetle with
golden legs, hurriedly scuttling over the sea. Following the course of
the Hamburg-bound liners, even if one failed to make connection with
one's accredited pilot, it would not be long before one picked up Borkum
Riff Lightship and in due course, spiring silver grey against the
pink-and-golden sunrise--the twin towers of Nordeich Wireless--marking
the journey's end.
*CHAPTER XXXIV*
*THE BROWN SATCHEL*
The journey's end. A gust, tearing the mist that veiled the livid
waters, showed the shadowy shapes of a procession of battleships,
steaming southwards in single line.
You see the German assailed by the wind, now hard on the aeroplane's
port beam, craning over, counting the speedlights passing diagonally
underneath. Eight steel Leviathans, stabbing bright points of electric
light through fog and funnel-smoke, with an effect of diamonds seen
against a background of dull grey plush.
Eight rushing, neutral-tinted shapes--conveying a formidable impression
of grim power, and force, and ruthlessness. A Squadron of Battle
Cruisers of the British Home Fleet, new from the brine of Lerwick
Waters, or the fierce green surges of Scapa Flow. Bound for Harwich
Roads or Sheerness, or the Solent, to figure in the huge pageant of
steel and steam, electricity, and man-power that would be called the
King's Review.
What a chance, supposing _Der Tag_ were come already, for the delivery
of a consignment of bombs! It warmed like a draught of wine, to think
of the devastating effect of a couple of such German love-gifts,
exploded in the bowels of one of those steel monsters, packed with
complex machinery, high explosives, and inflammable oil. True, there
might be a reverse to the medal, damping even to the spirits of a
Superman. Wireless signals would go forth at the order of one amongst a
little knot of dark figures on the forebridge of the Flagship, warning
each of those grey monsters of its danger. Not an armoured cruiser
scouting for them on the horizon, not one of all the torpedo-boat
destroyers in their vicinity, not a submarine nosing in the thick cold
darkness below the restless white crests, but would join in the man-hunt
that must ensue.
How the dusk would spring alive with the eyes of foes, and long rays of
searchlight would go probing, and the mobile noses of guns great and
lesser would be thrust from their hoods of proof-armour, sniffing
bloodthirstily for the enemy up in the sky. While from the Flagship's
mothering side, a Navy seaplane, armed with a Vickers' machine-gun,
might swing out and plop upon the water, rise from the white snarl of
waves with a vicious scream of her propeller, and, keen as a
gull-hunting sea-hawk, launch herself in chase.
_Pfui_! The thought made one sick at the stomach. Cold, isolation, and
darkness tried a man, no matter how courageous. Buffeted by the bitter
wind, aching and stiff with weariness, lonely with the loneliness of
some small bird of the migratory order, outstripped by its companions on
the wild journey over the North Sea, the Kaiser's messenger drew energy
and cheer from the conviction that the dispatches entrusted to him by
Imperial favour were such as would hasten the arrival of The Day.
The Day, to which all good German officers devoted the second toast on
Mess nights. When the Black Eagle would swoop, and the nodding
witch-hag Britannia would awaken from her whisky-dreams of
World-Dominion to find her armour obsolete, her sword rusted in its
scabbard, the trident of Sea Power stolen from her hand.
Hurrah! for The Day when the programme arranged by the All Highest War
Lord and his War Chiefs should be carried out in the complete overthrow
of British Supremacy, the seizure and domination of British territory,
the solution of the Great German Race Problem, in the transformation of
the United Kingdom into a German dependency,--the annexation of India
and the British Colonies--and the forcible Teutonisation of the hated
race.
Aha! Much to be locked in an Imperial messenger's letter-bag, thought
von Herrnung, greedily. What in the way of guerdon might not be
lavished by a gratified All Highest upon the danger-braving and
to-duty-fearlessly-devoted Flying Officer who should accomplish the
Secret Mission, and lay the brown satchel at the Imperial feet.
Probably the Second--tchah!--the First Class of the Iron Cross--with
military promotion, and a handsome sum in hard cash. Laudatory articles
in the State-inspired Press organs and Service Gazettes presently.
Meanwhile, was it fitting that the future of von Herrnung should lie,
not upon the knees of the gods, but on the lap of a little, seasick
English boy?
True, the brown satchel was firmly strapped to the boy, now lying in an
attitude of complete exhaustion, with one arm thrown over the gunwale,
and his small round head feebly nodding to and fro. The child knew
nothing of the Imperial dispatches. And yet--one would have been wiser
to keep the bag about one, in spite of the danger of fouling the
controls.
It will be gathered that a chilly premonition of imminent disaster
crawled in the veins of the Kaiser's messenger. Hunger and fatigue were
spurring von Herrnung to imaginativeness unworthy of a Superman.
Now he knew his frail winged craft beset by cunning, treacherous
enemies; the invisible air that cradled and supported her, only waiting
to destroy. Other elemental forces, Gale, Lightning, Hail,
Waterspout--in collusion to bring about her swift and speedy ruin. The
Sea, no less than these, was an implacable adversary, reaching up
innumerable greedy hands to drag her down and drown. The hawk-hoverer
would have been a help at this juncture if one had had some previous
experience in the use of it. As things were, it was wiser to leave the
Englishman's invention alone. A labouring beat admonished the man's
quick ear of impending engine-trouble. Ah, if the motor, that was the
living heart in the aeroplane, should break down at this juncture, or
the human intelligence perched behind the roaring tractor falter, the
game was up. Kaput for von Herrnung, he very well knew.
As though the very fear had brought on the catastrophe, the revolutions
dropped. Below 1000, said the indicator's trembling finger, and there
was a miss. The bang!--bang! of a back-fire followed. If one had
believed in God, now, this would have been the time to pray to Him.
But now the aviator's keen eye, peering downwards through Sherbrand's
binoculars, picked up something that had emerged with a sudden yeasty
swirl among the white-crested waves. No handsomer nor bigger than an
under-sized steam-trawler, the casual observer might as such have
accepted her. But a moment more, and fore and aft of the stocky little
pseudo-steamer, stretched the long snaky, whitey-brown hull of a
submarine.
U-18, on observation-service off Spurn Head, or a Britisher? An Evans
signalling-pistol, loaded, and with a supply of spare rockets, was fixed
in a cleat beside the instrument-board, within reach of the pilot's
hand. The altimeter, illuminated by the electric bulb, gave an altitude
of six hundred, as von Herrnung snatched the pistol, and fired, aiming
towards the sky.
The shot was followed by a second detonation, and a brilliant crimson
light illuminated the grey welter, throwing up orange balls of fire as
it ascended, to burst in showers of incandescent sparks. Switching off,
von Herrnung strained both ears and eyes for an answer to his signal.
With the cessation of the motor the diapason of the North Sea rolled
upwards through the twilight with a threatening of storm. As the
weather-cone had presaged, a gale was coming. It blew strongly from the
north-west. The engine back-fired again, and von Herrnung swore at it,
trying to make out the nationality of the submarine running on the
surface six hundred feet below. There were half-a-dozen tallish figures
on the narrow man-railed catwalk running along her hull forward, and one
upon the screened-in platform of her humpy conning-tower.
Then the blue-white ray of a searchlight leaped forth illuminating her
bows and forward torpedo-tubes--revealing the long neutral-coloured hull
with the Wireless mast raised for use and soapy seas hissing off the
armour-plate. A backwash of brilliance picked out the
black-white-and-red Jack of Germany, fluttering from a short pole-mast
sternwards. Signal-lights of white and two colours broke out upon
another slender mast aft of her conning-tower, and winked and jabbered.
U-18 was in touch with her man.
It was quite time, for the Bird's engine hiccupped more and more
disastrously, and her pilot's frozen hands could only guess the
steering-wheel. He grunted relief. _Sapperlot_! One's star had not
deserted one. Once more the Prussian Field-Flying Service would, with
reason, quote von Herrnung's hellish good-luck.
Meanwhile the submarine's three lights chattered volubly in German Navy
Code. Do Not Attempt Make Harbour. Heavy Weather Coming. Original
Orders Cancelled. Heave To. Will Stand By To Take You Aboard. To which
von Herrnung, keeping pace with U-18, replied with long and short
flashes of an electric signalling-torch. Understood! What Is the Sea
Like? Keep Off and On. Am Coming Down!
And he came forthwith. The Commander of U-18, standing on the little
platform over which furious seas were slashing, watched him critically
through a pair of Zeiss binoculars. You, too, are asked to see him;
pulling round the Bird's head into the teeth of the nor'wester; shutting
off her hiccupping engine, implacably thrusting her nose seawards, and
diving with a splendid swoop into the widening paths of spirals that
ended amidst the angry surges below.
Hitting the North Sea with so shattering a slap that the Bird's
landing-carriage crumpled and buckled, and the frail spars of her wings
crunched like the bones of a small bird in the jaws of a hungry cat.
A fierce green sea leaped, towered, and broke, dumping a ton of water on
von Herrnung, and knocking the breath out of the man. He tore open the
safety-belt as consciousness left him, and recovered in the warm
benzine-flavoured stuffiness of the officer's cabin aboard the U-18, to
the stinging of schnapps in his mouth and gullet, and the cheer of
German words in his ear.
"Hey now, hey now, we are coming about. That is well! Drink another
draught, comrade! You have had a hellishly narrow squeak. Another
time, when flying oversea with dispatches, start early, pick your
weather, and ship a life-belt, if you are wise!"
Thus Lieutenant Commander Luttha of Undersea-boat No. 18. You see him
as a spare, weather-bitten, black-bearded officer in a full panoply of
yellow oilies, and a sou'wester shading little eyes, sharp as
lancet-points and now twinkling with his bit of fun.
But the word "dispatches," coupled with the jest about the life-belt,
volted through von Herrnung like the discharge from an electric battery.
He gulped and choked, collecting enough tinned air to talk with, and at
last got out:
"The boy--the boy, with the satchel! Where is he, in the devil's name?"
Thus adjured the Commander answered pithily:
"If you mean the half-drowned little English rat Petty Officer Stoll
found washing about in the bows of your aviatik, he's alive. Don't
worry about that!"
Through the churning foam upon his lips, von Herrnung spluttered
furiously:
"_Himmelkreuezbombenelement_! What is the _verdammt_ boy to me? It is
the satchel that was strapped about the boy's middle I am asking
for--the Emperor's--_Herr Gott!_--I shall go mad!"
He staggered to his feet, hitting his head a stunning crack against the
low white painted overdeck. The incautious reference to the Emperor
electrified those who heard, squatting on the little folding bunks, or
kneeling on the palpitating deck of the little officer's cabin, into
desperate activity. Von Herrnung found himself boosted up a ladder and
through a manhole, guided along a narrow slippery catwalk, washed by the
surges of the North Sea, to where a collapsible boat was being emptied
of a lot of shipped salt water, and the battered wreck of the Bird of
War, lashed to the U-18's forward man-rail, was waiting the Commander's
order to be finally abandoned to her fate.
*CHAPTER XXXV*
*NUMBER EIGHTEEN*
They launched the collapsible, and ransacked every cranny of the Bird's
waterlogged fuselage. Not the ghost of a brown leather satchel rewarded
their feverish search. In the forward cockpit the belt swung loose, the
patent fastening had been opened by pulling the pin out. Clearly the
boy had released himself when the Bird hit the sea.
"Let us go look at this boy!" suggested the Commander, on receiving the
news that the Kind had breathed, and vomited sea-water. Luttha promptly
led the way to the men's cabin, where Petty Officer Stoll and an
earringed first-class seaman were working over a little limp naked body,
outspread on the jiggetting deck-plates, in the raucous glare of the
electric light.
Bawne was questioned, but nothing could be got out of him just then,
except North Sea, so they wrapped him in a blue Navy blanket, and left
him in charge of Petty Officer Stoll.
"This is hellishly unfortunate, you must know, Count," said the
Commander, alone with von Herrnung in the vibrating steel box over the
upper accumulators, called the officers' cabin, and separated from the
men's quarters by a paper-thin sliding bulkhead of painted steel. You
are asked to consider it furnished with seven narrow folding bunks, a
trestle-table about as wide and long as a coffin-lid, some folding
chairs, a marvellous array of charts on spring-rollers, fixed against
the steel walls, a row of wooden lockers, a chronometer and auxiliary
gyro-compass, several cylinders of oxylithe for respiratory emergencies,
an electric stove of small size, a log-book and writing materials, a
shelf of German literature, chiefly nautical reference-books; sets of
dominoes, a violin and a cornet, speaking-tubes and a telephone, a
gramophone and a giant cuspidor.
Von Herrnung, having swapped his water-logged flying-kit and soaked
underclothes for dry flannels lent by the Second-in-Command, topped off
with a pair of the Commander's spare trousers, and a guernsey frock
belonging to the biggest man on board. You can see him supplementing
the shortness of the trousers with a pair of long sea-boots: thrusting
his huge arms into the guernsey, beginning already to be superior to his
rescuers upon the strength of his family rank and wealth and his
flying-record, his bulk and handsomeness, and his magpie pearl. He was
of the Prussian top-dog breed and let others know it, even whilst
smarting under his loss. That he felt it was shown by the livid pallor
testifying to mental disquiet and physical exhaustion. But he judged it
wisest to bluff, and did.
"The cursed machine would have drowned me if you had not arrived in the
nick of time," he said suggestively, smiling under the red moustache
that hung uncurled over his full sensual lips: "Suppose you say you
found me swimming in the water--the aeroplane having foundered--it is
merely rewording a report!"
"So many thanks!" ... returned the Commander, chewing hard at an
unlighted cigar, sending a jet of saliva into the cuspidor, and smiling
in a wry and dubious fashion. "But when I said things were hellishly
unfortunate, I meant unfortunate for you!"
He moved to the green baize-covered plank that served as a cabin table,
and took from a weighted document-file a pencilled paper-slip.