My uncle was not altogether swallowed up in business and ambition. He
kept in touch with modern thought. For example, he was, I know, greatly
swayed by what he called “This Overman idee, Nietzsche—all that stuff.”
He mingled those comforting suggestions of a potent and exceptional
human being emancipated from the pettier limitations of integrity with
the Napoleonic legend. It gave his imagination a considerable outlet.
That Napoleonic legend! The real mischief of Napoleon’s immensely
disastrous and accidental career began only when he was dead and the
romantic type of mind was free to elaborate his character. I do believe
that my uncle would have made a far less egregious smash if there had
been no Napoleonic legend to misguide him. He was in many ways better
and infinitely kinder than his career. But when in doubt between decent
conduct and a base advantage, that cult came in more and more
influentially: “think of Napoleon; think what the inflexibly-wilful
Napoleon would have done with such scruples as yours;” that was the
rule, and the end was invariably a new step in dishonour.
My uncle was in an unsystematic way a collector of Napoleonic relics;
the bigger the book about his hero the more readily he bought it; he
purchased letters and tinsel and weapons that bore however remotely
upon the Man of Destiny, and he even secured in Geneva, though he never
brought home, an old coach in which Buonaparte might have ridden; he
crowded the quiet walls of Lady Grove with engravings and figures of
him, preferring, my aunt remarked, the more convex portraits with the
white vest and those statuettes with the hands behind the back which
threw forward the figure. The Durgans watched him through it all,
sardonically.
And he would stand after breakfast at times in the light of the window
at Lady Grove, a little apart, with two fingers of one hand stuck
between his waistcoat-buttons and his chin sunken, thinking,—the most
preposterous little fat man in the world. It made my aunt feel, she
said, “like an old Field Marshal—knocks me into a cocked hat, George!”
Perhaps this Napoleonic bias made him a little less frequent with his
cigars than he would otherwise have been, but of that I cannot be sure,
and it certainly caused my aunt a considerable amount of vexation after
he had read _Napoleon and the Fair Sex_, because for a time that roused
him to a sense of a side of life he had in his commercial
preoccupations very largely forgotten. Suggestion plays so great a part
in this field. My uncle took the next opportunity and had an “affair”!
It was not a very impassioned affair, and the exact particulars never
of course reached me. It is quite by chance I know anything of it at
all. One evening I was surprised to come upon my uncle in a mixture of
Bohemia and smart people at an At Home in the flat of Robbert, the R.A.
who painted my aunt, and he was standing a little apart in a recess,
talking or rather being talked to in undertones by a plump, blond
little woman in pale blue, a Helen Scrymgeour who wrote novels and was
organising a weekly magazine. I elbowed a large lady who was saying
something about them, but I didn’t need to hear the thing she said to
perceive the relationship of the two. It hit me like a placard on a
hoarding. I was amazed the whole gathering did not see it. Perhaps they
did. She was wearing a remarkably fine diamond necklace, much too fine
for journalism, and regarding him with that quality of questionable
proprietorship, of leashed but straining intimacy, that seems
inseparable from this sort of affair. It is so much more palpable than
matrimony. If anything was wanted to complete my conviction it was my
uncles’s eyes when presently he became aware of mine, a certain
embarrassment and a certain pride and defiance. And the next day he
made an opportunity to praise the lady’s intelligence to me concisely,
lest I should miss the point of it all.
After that I heard some gossip—from a friend of the lady’s. I was much
too curious to do anything but listen. I had never in all my life
imagined my uncle in an amorous attitude. It would appear that she
called him her “God in the Car”—after the hero in a novel of Anthony
Hope’s. It was essential to the convention of their relations that he
should go relentlessly whenever business called, and it was generally
arranged that it did call. To him women were an incident, it was
understood between them; Ambition was the master-passion. A great world
called him and the noble hunger for Power. I have never been able to
discover just how honest Mrs. Scrymgeour was in all this, but it is
quite possible the immense glamour of his financial largeness prevailed
with her and that she did bring a really romantic feeling to their
encounters. There must have been some extraordinary moments....
I was a good deal exercised and distressed about my aunt when I
realised what was afoot. I thought it would prove a terrible
humiliation to her. I suspected her of keeping up a brave front with
the loss of my uncle’s affections fretting at her heart, but there I
simply underestimated her. She didn’t hear for some time and when she
did hear she was extremely angry and energetic. The sentimental
situation didn’t trouble her for a moment. She decided that my uncle
“wanted smacking.” She accentuated herself with an unexpected new hat,
went and gave him an inconceivable talking-to at the Hardingham, and
then came round to “blow-up” me for not telling her what was going on
before....
I tried to bring her to a proper sense of the accepted values in this
affair, but my aunt’s originality of outlook was never so invincible.
“Men don’t tell on one another in affairs of passion,” I protested, and
such-like worldly excuses.
“Women!” she said in high indignation, “and men! It isn’t women and
men—it’s him and me, George! Why don’t you talk sense?
“Old passion’s all very well, George, in its way, and I’m the last
person to be jealous. But this is old nonsense.... I’m not going to let
him show off what a silly old lobster he is to other women.... I’ll
mark every scrap of his underclothes with red letters,
‘Ponderevo-Private’—every scrap.
“Going about making love indeed,—in abdominal belts!—at his time of
life!”
I cannot imagine what passed between her and my uncle. But I have no
doubt that for once her customary badinage was laid aside. How they
talked then I do not know, for I who knew them so well had never heard
that much of intimacy between them. At any rate it was a concerned and
preoccupied “God in the Car” I had to deal with in the next few days,
unusually Zzzz-y and given to slight impatient gestures that had
nothing to do with the current conversation. And it was evident that in
all directions he was finding things unusually difficult to explain.
All the intimate moments in this affair were hidden from me, but in the
end my aunt triumphed. He did not so much throw as jerk over Mrs.
Scrymgeour, and she did not so much make a novel of it as upset a huge
pailful of attenuated and adulterated female soul upon this occasion.
My aunt did not appear in that, even remotely. So that it is doubtful
if the lady knew the real causes of her abandonment. The Napoleonic
hero was practically unmarried, and he threw over his lady as Napoleon
threw over Josephine for a great alliance.
It was a triumph for my aunt, but it had its price. For some time it
was evident things were strained between them. He gave up the lady, but
he resented having to do so, deeply. She had meant more to his
imagination than one could have supposed. He wouldn’t for a long time
“come round.” He became touchy and impatient and secretive towards my
aunt, and she, I noted, after an amazing check or so, stopped that
stream of kindly abuse that had flowed for so long and had been so
great a refreshment in their lives. They were both the poorer for its
cessation, both less happy. She devoted herself more and more to Lady
Grove and the humours and complications of its management. The servants
took to her—as they say—she god-mothered three Susans during her rule,
the coachman’s, the gardener’s, and the Up Hill gamekeeper’s. She got
together a library of old household books that were in the vein of the
place. She revived the still-room, and became a great artist in jellies
and elder and cowslip wine.
X
And while I neglected the development of my uncle’s finances—and my
own, in my scientific work and my absorbing conflict with the
difficulties of flying,—his schemes grew more and more expansive and
hazardous, and his spending wilder and laxer. I believe that a haunting
sense of the intensifying unsoundness of his position accounts largely
for his increasing irritability and his increasing secretiveness with
my aunt and myself during these crowning years. He dreaded, I think,
having to explain, he feared our jests might pierce unwittingly to the
truth. Even in the privacy of his mind he would not face the truth. He
was accumulating unrealisable securities in his safes until they hung a
potential avalanche over the economic world. But his buying became a
fever, and his restless desire to keep it up with himself that he was
making a triumphant progress to limitless wealth gnawed deeper and
deeper. A curious feature of this time with him was his buying over and
over again of similar things. His ideas seemed to run in series. Within
a twelve-month he bought five new motor-cars, each more swift and
powerful than its predecessor, and only the repeated prompt resignation
of his chief chauffeur at each moment of danger, prevented his driving
them himself. He used them more and more. He developed a passion for
locomotion for its own sake.
Then he began to chafe at Lady Grove, fretted by a chance jest he had
overheard at a dinner. “This house, George,” he said. “It’s a misfit.
There’s no elbow-room in it; it’s choked with old memories. And I can’t
stand all these damned Durgans!
“That chap in the corner, George. No! the other corner! The man in a
cherry-coloured coat. He watched you! He’d look silly if I stuck a
poker through his Gizzard!”
“He’d look,” I reflected, “much as he does now. As though he was
amused.”
He replaced his glasses, which had fallen at his emotion, and glared at
his antagonists. “What are they? What are they all, the lot of ’em?
Dead as Mutton! They just stuck in the mud. They didn’t even rise to
the Reformation. The old out-of-date Reformation! Move with the
times!—they moved against the times.
“Just a Family of Failure,—they never even tried!
“They’re jes’, George, exactly what I’m not. Exactly. It isn’t
suitable.... All this living in the Past.
“And I want a bigger place too, George. I want air and sunlight and
room to move about and more service. A house where you can get a Move
on things! Zzzz. Why! it’s like a discord—it jars—even to have the
telephone.... There’s nothing, nothing except the terrace, that’s worth
a Rap. It’s all dark and old and dried up and full of old-fashioned
things—musty old idees—fitter for a silver-fish than a modern man.... I
don’t know how I got here.”
He broke out into a new grievance. “That damned vicar,” he complained,
“thinks I ought to think myself lucky to get this place! Every time I
meet him I can see him think it.... One of these days, George I’ll show
him what a Mod’un house is like!”
And he did.
I remember the day when he declared, as Americans say, for Crest Hill.
He had come up to see my new gas plant, for I was then only just
beginning to experiment with auxiliary collapsible balloons, and all
the time the shine of his glasses was wandering away to the open down
beyond. “Let’s go back to Lady Grove over the hill,” he said.
“Something I want to show you. Something fine!”
It was an empty sunlit place that summer evening, sky and earth warm
with sundown, and a pe-wit or so just accentuating the pleasant
stillness that ends a long clear day. A beautiful peace, it was, to
wreck for ever. And there was my uncle, the modern man of power, in his
grey top-hat and his grey suit and his black-ribboned glasses, short,
thin-legged, large-stomached, pointing and gesticulating, threatening
this calm.
He began with a wave of his arm. “That’s the place, George,” he said.
“See?”
“Eh!” I cried—for I had been thinking of remote things.
“I got it.”
“Got what?”
“For a house!—a Twentieth Century house! That’s the place for it!”
One of his characteristic phrases was begotten in him.
“Four-square to the winds of heaven, George!” he said. “Eh? Four-square
to the winds of heaven!”
“You’ll get the winds up here,” I said.
“A mammoth house it ought to be, George—to suit these hills.”
“Quite,” I said.
“Great galleries and things—running out there and there—See? I been
thinking of it, George! Looking out all this way—across the Weald. With
its back to Lady Grove.”
“And the morning sun in its eye.”
“Like an eagle, George,—like an eagle!”
So he broached to me what speedily became the leading occupation of his
culminating years, Crest Hill. But all the world has heard of that
extravagant place which grew and changed its plans as it grew, and
bubbled like a salted snail, and burgeoned and bulged and evermore
grew. I know not what delirium of pinnacles and terraces and arcades
and corridors glittered at last upon the uplands of his mind; the
place, for all that its expansion was terminated abruptly by our
collapse, is wonderful enough as it stands,—that empty instinctive
building of a childless man. His chief architect was a young man named
Westminster, whose work he had picked out in the architecture room of
the Royal Academy on account of a certain grandiose courage in it, but
with him he associated from time to time a number of fellow
professionals, stonemasons, sanitary engineers, painters, sculptors,
scribes, metal workers, wood carvers, furniture designers, ceramic
specialists, landscape gardeners, and the man who designs the
arrangement and ventilation of the various new houses in the London
Zoological Gardens. In addition he had his own ideas. The thing
occupied his mind at all times, but it held it completely from Friday
night to Monday morning. He would come down to Lady Grove on Friday
night in a crowded motor-car that almost dripped architects. He didn’t,
however, confine himself to architects; every one was liable to an
invitation to week-end and view Crest Hill, and many an eager promoter,
unaware of how Napoleonically and completely my uncle had
departmentalised his mind, tried to creep up to him by way of tiles and
ventilators and new electric fittings. Always on Sunday mornings,
unless the weather was vile, he would, so soon as breakfast and his
secretaries were disposed of, visit the site with a considerable
retinue, and alter and develop plans, making modifications, Zzzz-ing,
giving immense new orders verbally—an unsatisfactory way, as
Westminster and the contractors ultimately found.
There he stands in my memory, the symbol of this age for me, the man of
luck and advertisement, the current master of the world. There he
stands upon the great outward sweep of the terrace before the huge main
entrance, a little figure, ridiculously disproportionate to that
forty-foot arch, with the granite ball behind him—the astronomical
ball, brass coopered, that represented the world, with a little
adjustable tube of lenses on a gun-metal arm that focussed the sun upon
just that point of the earth on which it chanced to be shining
vertically. There he stands, Napoleonically grouped with his retinue
men in tweeds and golfing-suits, a little solicitor, whose name I
forget, in grey trousers and a black jacket, and Westminster in Jaeger
underclothing, a floriferous tie, and peculiar brown cloth of his own.
The downland breeze flutters my uncle’s coat-tails, disarranges his
stiff hair, and insists on the evidence of undisciplined appetites in
face and form, as he points out this or that feature in the prospect to
his attentive collaborator.
Below are hundreds of feet of wheeling-planks, ditches, excavations,
heaps of earth, piles of garden stone from the Wealden ridges. On
either hand the walls of his irrelevant unmeaning palace rise at one
time he had working in that place—disturbing the economic balance of
the whole countryside by their presence—upwards of three thousand
men....
So he poses for my picture amidst the raw beginnings that were never to
be completed. He did the strangest things about that place, things more
and more detached from any conception of financial scale, things more
and more apart from sober humanity. He seemed to think himself, at
last, released from any such limitations. He moved a quite considerable
hill, and nearly sixty mature trees were moved with it to open his
prospect eastward, moved it about two hundred feet to the south. At
another time he caught a suggestion from some city restaurant and made
a billiard-room roofed with plate glass beneath the waters of his
ornamental lake. He furnished one wing while its roof still awaited
completion. He had a swimming bath thirty feet square next to his
bedroom upstairs, and to crown it all he commenced a great wall to hold
all his dominions together, free from the invasion of common men. It
was a ten-foot wall, glass surmounted, and had it been completed as he
intended it, it would have had a total length of nearly eleven miles.
Some of it towards the last was so dishonestly built that it collapsed
within a year upon its foundations, but some miles of it still stand. I
never think of it now but what I think of the hundreds of eager little
investors who followed his “star,” whose hopes and lives, whose wives’
security and children’s prospects are all mixed up beyond redemption
with that flaking mortar....
It is curious how many of these modern financiers of chance and bluff
have ended their careers by building. It was not merely my uncle.
Sooner or later they all seem to bring their luck to the test of
realisation, try to make their fluid opulence coagulate out as bricks
and mortar, bring moonshine into relations with a weekly wages-sheet.
Then the whole fabric of confidence and imagination totters—and down
they come....
When I think of that despoiled hillside, that colossal litter of bricks
and mortar, and crude roads and paths, the scaffolding and sheds, the
general quality of unforeseeing outrage upon the peace of nature, I am
reminded of a chat I had with the vicar one bleak day after he had
witnessed a glide. He talked to me of aeronautics as I stood in jersey
and shorts beside my machine, fresh from alighting, and his cadaverous
face failed to conceal a peculiar desolation that possessed him.
“Almost you convince me,” he said, coming up to me, “against my
will.... A marvellous invention! But it will take you a long time, sir,
before you can emulate that perfect mechanism—the wing of a bird.”
He looked at my sheds.
“You’ve changed the look of this valley, too,” he said.
“Temporary defilements,” I remarked, guessing what was in his mind.
“Of course. Things come and go. Things come and go. But—H’m. I’ve just
been up over the hill to look at Mr. Edward Ponderevo’s new house.
That—that is something more permanent. A magnificent place!—in many
ways. Imposing. I’ve never somehow brought myself to go that way
before. Things are greatly advanced.... We find—the great number of
strangers introduced into the villages about here by these operations,
working-men chiefly, a little embarrassing. It put us out. They bring a
new spirit into the place; betting—ideas—all sorts of queer notions.
Our publicans like it, of course. And they come and sleep in one’s
outhouses—and make the place a little unsafe at nights. The other
morning I couldn’t sleep—a slight dyspepsia—and I looked out of the
window. I was amazed to see people going by on bicycles. A silent
procession. I counted ninety-seven—in the dawn. All going up to the new
road for Crest Hill. Remarkable I thought it. And so I’ve been up to
see what they were doing.”
“They would have been more than remarkable thirty years ago,” I said.
“Yes, indeed. Things change. We think nothing of it now at
all—comparatively. And that big house—”
He raised his eyebrows. “Really stupendous! Stupendous.
“All the hillside—the old turf—cut to ribbons!”
His eye searched my face. “We’ve grown so accustomed to look up to Lady
Grove,” he said, and smiled in search of sympathy. “It shifts our
centre of gravity.”
“Things will readjust themselves,” I lied.
He snatched at the phrase. “Of course,” he said.
“They’ll readjust themselves—settle down again. Must. In the old way.
It’s bound to come right again—a comforting thought. Yes. After all,
Lady Grove itself had to be built once upon a time—was—to begin
with—artificial.”
His eye returned to my aeroplane. He sought to dismiss his graver
preoccupations. “I should think twice,” he remarked, “before I trusted
myself to that concern.... But I suppose one grows accustomed to the
motion.”
He bade me good morning and went his way, bowed and thoughtful....
He had kept the truth from his mind a long time, but that morning it
had forced its way to him with an aspect that brooked no denial that
this time it was not just changes that were coming in his world, but
that all his world lay open and defenceless, conquered and surrendered,
doomed so far as he could see, root and branch, scale and form alike,
to change.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
SOARING
I
For nearly all the time that my uncle was incubating and hatching Crest
Hill I was busy in a little transverse valley between that great
beginning and Lady Grove with more and more costly and ambitious
experiments in aerial navigation. This work was indeed the main
substance of my life through all the great time of the Tono-Bungay
symphony.
I have told already how I came to devote myself to this system of
inquiries, how in a sort of disgust with the common adventure of life I
took up the dropped ends of my college studies, taking them up again
with a man’s resolution instead of a boy’s ambition. From the first I
did well at this work. It—was, I think, largely a case of special
aptitude, of a peculiar irrelevant vein of faculty running through my
mind. It is one of those things men seem to have by chance, that has
little or nothing to do with their general merit, and which it is
ridiculous to be either conceited or modest about. I did get through a
very big mass of work in those years, working for a time with a
concentrated fierceness that left little of such energy or capacity as
I possess unused. I worked out a series of problems connected with the
stability of bodies pitching in the air and the internal movements of
the wind, and I also revolutionised one leading part at last of the
theory of explosive engines. These things are to be found in the
_Philosophical Transactions_, the _Mathematical Journal_, and less
frequently in one or two other such publications, and they needn’t
detain us here. Indeed, I doubt if I could write about them here. One
acquires a sort of shorthand for one’s notes and mind in relation to
such special work. I have never taught; nor lectured, that is to say, I
have never had to express my thoughts about mechanical things in
ordinary everyday language, and I doubt very much if I could do so now
without extreme tedium.
My work was, to begin with, very largely theoretical. I was able to
attack such early necessities of verification as arose with quite
little models, using a turntable to get the motion through the air, and
cane, whalebone and silk as building material. But a time came when
incalculable factors crept in, factors of human capacity and factors of
insufficient experimental knowledge, when one must needs guess and try.
Then I had to enlarge the scale of my operations, and soon I had
enlarged them very greatly. I set to work almost concurrently on the
balance and stability of gliders and upon the steering of inflated
bags, the latter a particularly expensive branch of work. I was no
doubt moved by something of the same spirit of lavish expenditure that
was running away with my uncle in these developments. Presently my
establishment above Lady Grove had grown to a painted wood chalet big
enough to accommodate six men, and in which I would sometimes live for
three weeks together; to a gasometer, to a motor-house, to three big
corrugated-roofed sheds and lock-up houses, to a stage from which to
start gliders, to a workshop and so forth. A rough road was made. We
brought up gas from Cheaping and electricity from Woking, which place I
found also afforded a friendly workshop for larger operations than I
could manage. I had the luck also to find a man who seemed my
heaven-sent second-in-command—Cothope his name was. He was a
self-educated-man; he had formerly been a sapper and he was one of the
best and handiest working engineers alive. Without him I do not think I
could have achieved half what I have done. At times he has been not so
much my assistant as my collaborator, and has followed my fortunes to
this day. Other men came and went as I needed them.
I do not know how far it is possible to convey to any one who has not
experienced it, the peculiar interest, the peculiar satisfaction that
lies in a sustained research when one is not hampered by want of money.
It is a different thing from any other sort of human effort. You are
free from the exasperating conflict with your fellow-creatures
altogether—at least so far as the essential work goes; that for me is
its peculiar merit. Scientific truth is the remotest of mistresses; she
hides in strange places, she is attained by tortuous and laborious
roads, but _she is always there!_ Win to her and she will not fail you;
she is yours and mankind’s for ever. She is reality, the one reality I
have found in this strange disorder of existence. She will not sulk
with you nor misunderstand you nor cheat you of your reward upon some
petty doubt. You cannot change her by advertisement or clamour, nor
stifle her in vulgarities. Things grow under your hands when you serve
her, things that are permanent as nothing else is permanent in the
whole life of man. That, I think, is the peculiar satisfaction of
science and its enduring reward....
The taking up of experimental work produced a great change in my
personal habits. I have told how already once in my life at Wimblehurst
I had a period of discipline and continuous effort, and how, when I
came to South Kensington, I became demoralised by the immense effect of
London, by its innumerable imperative demands upon my attention and
curiosity. And I parted with much of my personal pride when I gave up
science for the development of Tono-Bungay. But my poverty kept me
abstinent and my youthful romanticism kept me chaste until my married
life was well under way. Then in all directions I relaxed. I did a
large amount of work, but I never troubled to think whether it was my
maximum nor whether the moods and indolences that came to me at times
were avoidable things. With the coming of plenty I ate abundantly and
foolishly, drank freely and followed my impulses more and more
carelessly. I felt no reason why I should do anything else. Never at
any point did I use myself to the edge of my capacity. The emotional
crisis of my divorce did not produce any immediate change in these
matters of personal discipline. I found some difficulty at first in
concentrating my mind upon scientific work, it was so much more
exacting than business, but I got over that difficulty by smoking. I
became an inordinate cigar smoker; it gave me moods of profound
depression, but I treated these usually by the homeopathic method,—by
lighting another cigar. I didn’t realise at all how loose my moral and
nervous fibre had become until I reached the practical side of my
investigations and was face to face with the necessity of finding out
just how it felt to use a glider and just what a man could do with one.
I got into this relaxed habit of living in spite of very real
tendencies in my nature towards discipline. I’ve never been in love
with self-indulgence. That philosophy of the loose lip and the lax
paunch is one for which I’ve always had an instinctive distrust. I like
bare things, stripped things, plain, austere and continent things, fine
lines and cold colours. But in these plethoric times when there is too
much coarse stuff for everybody and the struggle for life takes the
form of competitive advertisement and the effort to fill your
neighbour’s eye, when there is no urgent demand either for personal
courage, sound nerves or stark beauty, we find ourselves by accident.
Always before these times the bulk of the people did not over-eat
themselves, because they couldn’t, whether they wanted to do so or not,
and all but a very few were kept “fit” by unavoidable exercise and
personal danger. Now, if only he pitch his standard low enough and keep
free from pride, almost any one can achieve a sort of excess. You can
go through contemporary life fudging and evading, indulging and
slacking, never really hungry nor frightened nor passionately stirred,
your highest moment a mere sentimental orgasm, and your first real
contact with primary and elemental necessities, the sweat of your
death-bed. So I think it was with my uncle; so, very nearly, it was
with me.
But the glider brought me up smartly. I had to find out how these
things went down the air, and the only way to find out is to go down
with one. And for a time I wouldn’t face it.
There is something impersonal about a book, I suppose. At any rate I
find myself able to write down here just the confession I’ve never been
able to make to any one face to face, the frightful trouble it was to
me to bring myself to do what I suppose every other coloured boy in the
West Indies could do without turning a hair, and that is to fling
myself off for my first soar down the wind. The first trial was bound
to be the worst; it was an experiment I made with life, and the chance
of death or injury was, I supposed, about equal to the chance of
success. I believed that with a dawn-like lucidity. I had begun with a
glider that I imagined was on the lines of the Wright brothers’
aeroplane, but I could not be sure. It might turn over. I might upset
it. It might burrow its nose at the end and smash itself and me. The
conditions of the flight necessitated alert attention; it wasn’t a
thing to be done by jumping off and shutting one’s eyes or getting
angry or drunk to do it. One had to use one’s weight to balance. And
when at last I did it it was horrible—for ten seconds. For ten seconds
or so, as I swept down the air flattened on my infernal framework and
with the wind in my eyes, the rush of the ground beneath me filled me
with sick and helpless terror; I felt as though some violent
oscillatory current was throbbing in brain and back bone, and I groaned
aloud. I set my teeth and groaned. It was a groan wrung out of me in
spite of myself. My sensations of terror swooped to a climax. And then,
you know, they ended!
Suddenly my terror was over and done with. I was soaring through the
air right way up, steadily, and no mischance had happened. I felt
intensely alive and my nerves were strung like a bow. I shifted a limb,
swerved and shouted between fear and triumph as I recovered from the
swerve and heeled the other way and steadied myself.
I thought I was going to hit a rook that was flying athwart me,—it was
queer with what projectile silence that jumped upon me out of
nothingness, and I yelled helplessly, “Get out of the way!” The bird
doubled itself up like a partly inverted V, flapped, went up to the
right abruptly and vanished from my circle of interest. Then I saw the
shadow of my aeroplane keeping a fixed distance before me and very
steady, and the turf as it seemed streaming out behind it. The turf!—it
wasn’t after all streaming so impossibly fast.
When I came gliding down to the safe spread of level green I had
chosen, I was as cool and ready as a city clerk who drops off an
omnibus in motion, and I had learnt much more than soaring. I tilted up
her nose at the right moment, levelled again and grounded like a
snowflake on a windless day. I lay flat for an instant and then knelt
up and got on my feet atremble, but very satisfied with myself. Cothope
was running down the hill to me. ...
But from that day I went into training, and I kept myself in training
for many months. I had delayed my experiments for very nearly six weeks
on various excuses because of my dread of this first flight, because of
the slackness of body and spirit that had come to me with the business
life. The shame of that cowardice spurred me none the less because it
was probably altogether my own secret. I felt that Cothope at any rate
might suspect. Well,—he shouldn’t suspect again.
It is curious that I remember that shame and self accusation and its
consequences far more distinctly than I recall the weeks of vacillation
before I soared. For a time I went altogether without alcohol, I
stopped smoking altogether and ate very sparingly, and every day I did
something that called a little upon my nerves and muscles. I soared as
frequently as I could. I substituted a motor-bicycle for the London
train and took my chances in the southward traffic, and I even tried
what thrills were to be got upon a horse. But they put me on made
horses, and I conceived a perhaps unworthy contempt for the certitudes
of equestrian exercise in comparison with the adventures of mechanism.
Also I walked along the high wall at the back of Lady Grove garden, and
at last brought myself to stride the gap where the gate comes. If I
didn’t altogether get rid of a certain giddy instinct by such
exercises, at least I trained my will until it didn’t matter. And soon
I no longer dreaded flight, but was eager to go higher into the air,
and I came to esteem soaring upon a glider, that even over the deepest
dip in the ground had barely forty feet of fall beneath it, a mere
mockery of what flight might be. I began to dream of the keener
freshness in the air high above the beechwoods, and it was rather to
satisfy that desire than as any legitimate development of my proper
work that presently I turned a part of my energies and the bulk of my
private income to the problem of the navigable balloon.