IV

All my later work in aeronautics is associated in my memory with the

quality of Beatrice, with her incidental presence, with things she said

and did and things I thought of that had reference to her.

In the spring of that year I had got to a flying machine that lacked

nothing but longitudinal stability. My model flew like a bird for fifty

or a hundred yards or so, and then either dived and broke its nose or,

what was commoner, reared up, slid back and smashed its propeller. The

rhythm of the pitching puzzled me. I felt it must obey some laws not

yet quite clearly stated. I became therefore a student of theory and

literature for a time; I hit upon the string of considerations that led

me to what is called Ponderevo’s Principle and my F.R.S., and I worked

this out in three long papers. Meanwhile I made a lot of turn-table and

glider models and started in upon an idea of combining gas-bags and

gliders. Balloon work was new to me. I had made one or two ascents in

the balloons of the Aëro Club before I started my gasometer and the

balloon shed and gave Cothope a couple of months with Sir Peter

Rumchase. My uncle found part of the money for these developments; he

was growing interested and competitive in this business because of Lord

Boom’s prize and the amount of _réclame_ involved, and it was at his

request that I named my first navigable balloon Lord Roberts Alpha.

Lord Roberts α very nearly terminated all my investigations. My idea

both in this and its more successful and famous younger brother, Lord

Roberts β, was to utilise the idea of a contractile balloon with a

rigid flat base, a balloon shaped rather like an inverted boat that

should almost support the apparatus, but not quite. The gas-bag was of

the chambered sort used for these long forms, and not with an internal

balloonette. The trouble was to make the thing contractile. This I

sought to do by fixing a long, fine-meshed silk net over it that was

fastened to be rolled up on two longitudinal rods. Practically I

contracted my sausage gas-bag by netting it down. The ends were too

complex for me to describe here, but I thought them out elaborately and

they were very carefully planned. Lord Roberts α was furnished with a

single big screw forward, and there was a rudder aft. The engine was

the first one to be, so to speak, right in the plane of the gas-bag. I

lay immediately under the balloon on a sort of glider framework, far

away from either engine or rudder, controlling them by wire-pulls

constructed on the principle of the well-known Bowden brake of the

cyclist.

But Lord Roberts α has been pretty exhaustively figured and described

in various aeronautical publications. The unforeseen defect was the

badness of the work in the silk netting. It tore aft as soon as I began

to contract the balloon, and the last two segments immediately bulged

through the hole, exactly as an inner tube will bulge through the

ruptured outer cover of a pneumatic tire, and then the sharp edge of

the torn net cut the oiled-silk of the distended last segment along a

weak seam and burst it with a loud report.

Up to that point the whole thing had been going on extremely well. As a

navigable balloon and before I contracted it, the Lord Roberts α was an

unqualified success. It had run out of the shed admirably at nine or

ten miles an hour or more, and although there was a gentle southwester

blowing, it had gone up and turned and faced it as well as any craft of

the sort I have ever seen.

I lay in my customary glider position, horizontal and face downward,

and the invisibility of all the machinery gave an extraordinary effect

of independent levitation. Only by looking up, as it were, and turning

my head back could I see the flat aeroplane bottom of the balloon and

the rapid successive passages, swish, swish, swish of the vans of the

propeller. I made a wide circle over Lady Grove and Duffield and out

towards Effingham and came back quite successfully to the

starting-point.

Down below in the October sunlight were my sheds and the little group

that had been summoned to witness the start, their faces craned upward

and most of them scrutinising my expression through field-glasses. I

could see Carnaby and Beatrice on horseback, and two girls I did not

know with them; Cothope and three or four workmen I employed; my aunt

and Mrs. Levinstein, who was staying with her, on foot, and Dimmock,

the veterinary surgeon, and one or two others. My shadow moved a little

to the north of them like the shadow of a fish. At Lady Grove the

servants were out on the lawn, and the Duffield school playground

swarmed with children too indifferent to aeronautics to cease their

playing. But in the Crest Hill direction—the place looked

extraordinarily squat and ugly from above—there were knots and strings

of staring workmen everywhere—not one of them working, but all agape.

(But now I write it, it occurs to me that perhaps it was their dinner

hour; it was certainly near twelve.) I hung for a moment or so enjoying

the soar, then turned about to face a clear stretch of open down, let

the engine out to full speed and set my rollers at work rolling in the

net, and so tightening the gas-bags. Instantly the pace quickened with

the diminished resistance...

In that moment before the bang I think I must have been really flying.

Before the net ripped, just in the instant when my balloon was at its

systole, the whole apparatus was, I am convinced, heavier than air.

That, however, is a claim that has been disputed, and in any case this

sort of priority is a very trivial thing.

Then came a sudden retardation, instantly followed by an inexpressibly

disconcerting tilt downward of the machine. That I still recall with

horror. I couldn’t see what was happening at all and I couldn’t

imagine. It was a mysterious, inexplicable dive. The thing, it seemed,

without rhyme or reason, was kicking up its heels in the air. The bang

followed immediately, and I perceived I was falling rapidly.

I was too much taken by surprise to think of the proper cause of the

report. I don’t even know what I made of it. I was obsessed, I suppose,

by that perpetual dread of the modern aeronaut, a flash between engine

and balloon. Yet obviously I wasn’t wrapped in flames. I ought to have

realised instantly it wasn’t that. I did, at any rate, whatever other

impressions there were, release the winding of the outer net and let

the balloon expand again, and that no doubt did something to break my

fall. I don’t remember doing that. Indeed, all I do remember is the

giddy effect upon the landscape of falling swiftly upon it down a flat

spiral, the hurried rush of fields and trees and cottages on my left

shoulder and the overhung feeling as if the whole apparatus was

pressing down the top of my head. I didn’t stop or attempt to stop the

screw. That was going on, swish, swish, swish all the time.

Cothope really knows more about the fall than I do. He describes the

easterly start, the tilt, and the appearance and bursting of a sort of

bladder aft. Then down I swooped, very swiftly, but not nearly so

steeply as I imagined I was doing. “Fifteen or twenty degrees,” said

Cothope, “to be exact.” From him it was that I learnt that I let the

nets loose again, and so arrested my fall. He thinks I was more in

control of myself than I remember.

But I do not see why I should have forgotten so excellent a resolution.

His impression is that I was really steering and trying to drop into

the Farthing Down beeches. “You hit the trees,” he said, “and the whole

affair stood on its nose among them, and then very slowly crumpled up.

I saw you’d been jerked out, as I thought, and I didn’t stay for more.

I rushed for my bicycle.”

As a matter of fact, it was purely accidental that I came down in the

woods. I am reasonably certain that I had no more control then than a

thing in a parcel. I remember I felt a sort of wincing, “Now it comes!”

as the trees rushed up to me. If I remember that, I should remember

steering. Then the propeller smashed, everything stopped with a jerk,

and I was falling into a mass of yellowing leaves, and Lord Roberts α,

so it seemed to me, was going back into the sky.

I felt twigs and things hit me in the face, but I didn’t feel injured

at the time; I clutched at things that broke, tumbled through a froth

of green and yellow into a shadowy world of great bark-covered arms,

and there, snatching wildly, got a grip on a fair round branch, and

hung.

I became intensely alert and clear-headed. I held by that branch for a

moment and then looked about me, and caught at another, and then found

myself holding to a practicable fork. I swung forward to that and got a

leg around it below its junction, and so was able presently to clamber

down, climbing very coolly and deliberately. I dropped ten feet or so

from the lowest branch and fell on my feet. “That’s all right,” I said,

and stared up through the tree to see what I could of the deflated and

crumpled remains that had once been Lord Roberts α festooned on the

branches it had broken. “Gods!” I said, “what a tumble!”

I wiped something that trickled from my face and was shocked to see my

hand covered with blood. I looked at myself and saw what seemed to me

an astonishing quantity of blood running down my arm and shoulder. I

perceived my mouth was full of blood. It’s a queer moment when one

realises one is hurt, and perhaps badly hurt, and has still to discover

just how far one is hurt. I explored my face carefully and found

unfamiliar contours on the left side. The broken end of a branch had

driven right through my cheek, damaging my cheek and teeth and gums,

and left a splinter of itself stuck, like an explorer’s

fartherest-point flag, in the upper maxillary. That and a sprained

wrist were all my damage. But I bled as though I had been chopped to

pieces, and it seemed to me that my face had been driven in. I can’t

describe just the horrible disgust I felt at that.

“This blood must be stopped, anyhow,” I said, thickheadedly.

“I wonder where there’s a spider’s web”—an odd twist for my mind to

take. But it was the only treatment that occurred to me.

I must have conceived some idea of going home unaided, because I was

thirty yards from the tree before I dropped.

Then a kind of black disc appeared in the middle of the world and

rushed out to the edge of things and blotted them out. I don’t remember

falling down. I fainted from excitement, disgust at my injury and loss

of blood, and lay there until Cothope found me.

He was the first to find me, scorching as he did over the downland

turf, and making a wide course to get the Carnaby plantations at their

narrowest. Then presently, while he was trying to apply the methodical

teachings of the St. John’s Ambulance classes to a rather abnormal

case, Beatrice came galloping through the trees full-tilt, with Lord

Carnaby hard behind her, and she was hatless, muddy from a fall, and

white as death. “And cool as a cucumber, too,” said Cothope, turning it

over in his mind as he told me.

(“They never seem quite to have their heads, and never seem quite to

lose ’em,” said Cothope, generalising about the sex.)

Also he witnessed she acted with remarkable decision. The question was

whether I should be taken to the house her step-mother occupied at

Bedley Corner, the Carnaby dower house, or down to Carnaby’s place at

Easting. Beatrice had no doubt in the matter, for she meant to nurse

me. Carnaby didn’t seem to want that to happen. “She _would_ have it

wasn’t half so far,” said Cothope. “She faced us out....

“I hate to be faced out of my opinion, so I’ve taken a pedometer over

it since. It’s exactly forty-three yards further.

“Lord Carnaby looked at her pretty straight,” said Cothope, finishing

the picture; “and then he give in.”

V

But my story has made a jump from June to October, and during that time

my relations with Beatrice and the countryside that was her setting had

developed in many directions. She came and went, moving in an orbit for

which I had no data, going to London and Paris, into Wales and

Northampton, while her stepmother, on some independent system of her

own, also vanished and recurred intermittently. At home they obeyed the

rule of an inflexible old maid, Charlotte, and Beatrice exercised all

the rights of proprietorship in Carnaby’s extensive stables. Her

interest in me was from the first undisguised. She found her way to my

worksheds and developed rapidly, in spite of the sincere discouragement

of Cothope, into a keen amateur of aeronautics. She would come

sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes afoot

with an Irish terrier, sometimes riding. She would come for three or

four days every day, vanish for a fortnight or three weeks, return.

It was not long before I came to look for her. From the first I found

her immensely interesting. To me she was a new feminine type

altogether—I have made it plain, I think, how limited was my knowledge

of women. But she made me not simply interested in her, but in myself.

She became for me something that greatly changes a man’s world. How

shall I put it? She became an audience. Since I’ve emerged from the

emotional developments of the affair I have thought it out in a hundred

aspects, and it does seem to me that this way in which men and women

make audiences for one another is a curiously influential force in

their lives. For some it seems an audience is a vital necessity, they

seek audiences as creatures seek food; others again, my uncle among

them, can play to an imaginary audience. I, I think, have lived and can

live without one. In my adolescence I was my own audience and my own

court of honour. And to have an audience in one’s mind is to play a

part, to become self-conscious and dramatic. For many years I had been

self-forgetful and scientific. I had lived for work and impersonal

interests until I found scrutiny, applause and expectation in

Beatrice’s eyes. Then I began to live for the effect I imagined I made

upon her, to make that very soon the principal value in my life. I

played to her. I did things for the look of them. I began to dream more

and more of beautiful situations and fine poses and groupings with her

and for her.

I put these things down because they puzzle me. I think I was in love

with Beatrice, as being in love is usually understood; but it was quite

a different state altogether from my passionate hunger for Marion, or

my keen, sensuous desire for and pleasure in Effie. These were selfish,

sincere things, fundamental and instinctive, as sincere as the leap of

a tiger. But until matters drew to a crisis with Beatrice, there was an

immense imaginative insurgence of a quite different quality. I am

setting down here very gravely, and perhaps absurdly, what are no doubt

elementary commonplaces for innumerable people. This love that grew up

between Beatrice and myself was, I think—I put it quite tentatively and

rather curiously—romantic love. That unfortunate and truncated affair

of my uncle and the Scrymgeour lady was really of the same stuff, if a

little different in quality. I have to admit that. The factor of

audience was of primary importance in either else.

Its effect upon me was to make me in many respects adolescent again. It

made me keener upon the point of honour, and anxious and eager to do

high and splendid things, and in particular, brave things. So far it

ennobled and upheld me. But it did also push me towards vulgar and

showy things. At bottom it was disingenuous; it gave my life the

quality of stage scenery, with one side to the audience, another side

that wasn’t meant to show, and an economy of substance. It certainly

robbed my work of high patience and quality. I cut down the toil of

research in my eagerness and her eagerness for fine flourishes in the

air, flights that would tell. I shirked the longer road.

And it robbed me, too, of any fine perception of absurdity.

Yet that was not everything in our relationship. The elemental thing

was there also. It came in very suddenly.

It was one day in the summer, though I do not now recall without

reference to my experimental memoranda whether it was in July or

August. I was working with a new and more bird-like aeroplane with wing

curvatures studied from Lilienthal, Pilcher and Phillips, that I

thought would give a different rhythm for the pitching oscillations

than anything I’d had before. I was soaring my long course from the

framework on the old barrow by my sheds down to Tinker’s Corner. It is

a clear stretch of downland, except for two or three thickets of box

and thorn to the right of my course; one transverse trough, in which

there is bush and a small rabbit warren, comes in from the east. I had

started, and was very intent on the peculiar long swoop with which any

new arrangement flew. Then, without any sort of notice, right ahead of

me appeared Beatrice, riding towards Tinker’s Corner to waylay and talk

to me. She looked round over her shoulder, saw me coming, touched her

horse to a gallop, and then the brute bolted right into the path of my

machine.

There was a queer moment of doubt whether we shouldn’t all smash

together. I had to make up my mind very quickly whether I would

pitch-up and drop backward at once and take my chance of falling

undamaged—a poor chance it would have been—in order to avoid any risk

to her, or whether I would lift against the wind and soar right over

her. This latter I did. She had already got her horse in hand when I

came up to her. Her woman’s body lay along his neck, and she glanced up

as I, with wings aspread, and every nerve in a state of tension, swept

over her.

Then I had landed, and was going back to where her horse stood still

and trembling.

We exchanged no greetings. She slid from her saddle into my arms, and

for one instant I held her.

“Those great wings,” she said, and that was all.

She lay in my arms, and I thought for a moment she had fainted.

“Very near a nasty accident,” said Cothope, coming up and regarding our

grouping with disfavour. He took her horse by the bridle. “Very

dangerous thing coming across us like that.”

Beatrice disengaged herself from me, stood for a moment trembling, and

then sat down on the turf “I’ll just sit down for a moment,” she said.

“Oh!” she said.

She covered her face with her hands, while Cothope looked at her with

an expression between suspicion and impatience.

For some moments nobody moved. Then Cothope remarked that perhaps he’d

better get her water.

As for me, I was filled with a new outrageous idea, begotten I scarcely

know how from this incident, with its instant contacts and swift

emotions, and that was that I must make love to and possess Beatrice. I

see no particular reason why that thought should have come to me in

that moment, but it did. I do not believe that before then I had

thought of our relations in such terms at all. Suddenly, as I remember

it, the factor of passion came. She crouched there, and I stood over

her, and neither of us said a word. But it was just as though something

had been shouted from the sky.

Cothope had gone twenty paces perhaps when she uncovered her face. “I

shan’t want any water,” she said. “Call him back.”