“No woman ever has respected the law—ever,” she said. “It’s too
silly.... The things it lets you do! And then pulls you up—like a mad
nurse minding a child.”
She carried some rugs for me through the shrubbery in the darkling.
“They’ll think we’re going mooning,” she said, jerking her head at the
household. “I wonder what they make of us—criminals.” ... An immense
droning note came as if in answer to that. It startled us both for a
moment. “The dears!” she said. “It’s the gong for dinner!... But I wish
I could help little Teddy, George. It’s awful to think of him there
with hot eyes, red and dry. And I know—the sight of me makes him feel
sore. Things I said, George. If I could have seen, I’d have let him
have an omnibusful of Scrymgeours. I cut him up. He’d never thought I
meant it before.... I’ll help all I can, anyhow.”
I turned at something in her voice, and got a moon light gleam of tears
upon her face.
“Could _she_ have helped?” she asked abruptly.
“_She?_”
“That woman.”
“My God!” I cried, “_helped!_ Those—things don’t help!”
“Tell me again what I ought to do,” she said after a silence.
I went over the plans I had made for communicating, and the things I
thought she might do. I had given her the address of a solicitor she
might put some trust in.
“But you must act for yourself,” I insisted.
“Roughly,” I said, “it’s a scramble. You must get what you can for us,
and follow as you can.”
She nodded.
She came right up to the pavilion and hovered for a time shyly, and
then went away.
I found my uncle in my sitting-room in an arm-chair, with his feet upon
the fender of the gas stove, which he had lit, and now he was feebly
drunken with my whisky, and very weary in body and spirit, and inclined
to be cowardly.
“I lef’ my drops,” he said.
He changed his clothes slowly and unwillingly. I had to bully him, I
had almost to shove him to the airship and tuck him up upon its wicker
flat. Single-handed I made but a clumsy start; we scraped along the
roof of the shed and bent a van of the propeller, and for a time I hung
underneath without his offering a hand to help me to clamber up. If it
hadn’t been for a sort of anchoring trolley device of Cothope’s, a sort
of slip anchor running on a rail, we should never have got clear at
all.
V
The incidents of our flight in Lord Roberts β do not arrange themselves
in any consecutive order. To think of that adventure is like dipping
haphazard into an album of views. One is reminded first of this and
then of that. We were both lying down on a horizontal plate of
basketwork; for Lord Roberts β had none of the elegant accommodation of
a balloon. I lay forward, and my uncle behind me in such a position
that he could see hardly anything of our flight. We were protected from
rolling over simply by netting between the steel stays. It was
impossible for us to stand up at all; we had either to lie or crawl on
all fours over the basket work. Amidships were lockers made of Watson’s
Aulite material,—and between these it was that I had put my uncle,
wrapped in rugs. I wore sealskin motoring boots and gloves, and a
motoring fur coat over my tweeds, and I controlled the engine by Bowden
wires and levers forward.
The early part of that night’s experience was made up of warmth, of
moonlit Surrey and Sussex landscape, and of a rapid and successful
flight, ascending and swooping, and then ascending again southward. I
could not watch the clouds because the airship overhung me; I could not
see the stars nor gauge the meteorological happening, but it was fairly
clear to me that a wind shifting between north and northeast was
gathering strength, and after I had satisfied myself by a series of
entirely successful expansions and contractions of the real
air-worthiness of Lord Roberts β, I stopped the engine to save my
petrol, and let the monster drift, checking its progress by the dim
landscape below. My uncle lay quite still behind me, saying little and
staring in front of him, and I was left to my own thoughts and
sensations.
My thoughts, whatever they were, have long since faded out of memory,
and my sensations have merged into one continuous memory of an
countryside lying, as it seemed, under snow, with square patches of
dimness, white phantoms of roads, rents and pools of velvety blackness,
and lamp-jewelled houses. I remember a train boring its way like a
hastening caterpillar of fire across the landscape, and how distinctly
I heard its clatter. Every town and street was buttoned with street
lamps. I came quite close to the South Downs near Lewes, and all the
lights were out in the houses, and the people gone to bed. We left the
land a little to the east of Brighton, and by that time Brighton was
well abed. and the brightly lit sea-front deserted. Then I let out the
gas chamber to its fullest extent and rose. I like to be high above
water.
I do not clearly know what happened in the night. I think I must have
dozed, and probably my uncle slept. I remember that once or twice I
heard him talking in an eager, muffled voice to himself, or to an
imaginary court. But there can be no doubt the wind changed right round
into the east, and that we were carried far down the Channel without
any suspicion of the immense leeway we were making. I remember the kind
of stupid perplexity with which I saw the dawn breaking over a grey
waste of water, below, and realised that something was wrong. I was so
stupid that it was only after the sunrise I really noticed the trend of
the foam caps below, and perceived we were in a severe easterly gale.
Even then, instead of heading southeasterly, I set the engine going,
headed south, and so continued a course that must needs have either
just hit Ushant, or carry us over the Bay of Biscay. I thought I was
east of Cherbourg, when I was far to the west and stopped my engine in
that belief, and then set it going again. I did actually sight the
coast of Brittany to the southeast in the late afternoon, and that it
was woke me up to the gravity of our position. I discovered it by
accident in the southeast, when I was looking for it in the southwest.
I turned about east and faced the wind for some time, and finding I had
no chance in its teeth, went high, where it seemed less violent, and
tried to make a course southeast. It was only then that I realised what
a gale I was in. I had been going westward, and perhaps even in gusts
north of west, at a pace of fifty or sixty miles an hour.
Then I began what I suppose would be called a Fight against the east
wind. One calls it a Fight, but it was really almost as unlike a fight
as plain sewing. The wind tried to drive me westwardly, and I tried to
get as much as I could eastwardly, with the wind beating and rocking us
irregularly, but by no means unbearably, for about twelve hours. My
hope lay in the wind abating, and our keeping in the air and eastward
of Finisterre until it did, and the chief danger was the exhaustion of
our petrol. It was a long and anxious and almost meditative time; we
were fairly warm, and only slowly getting hungry, and except that my
uncle grumbled a little and produced some philosophical reflections,
and began to fuss about having a temperature, we talked very little. I
was tired and sulky, and chiefly worried about the engine. I had to
resist a tendency to crawl back and look at it. I did not care to risk
contracting our gas chamber for fear of losing gas. Nothing was less
like a fight. I know that in popular magazines, and so forth, all such
occasions as this are depicted in terms of hysteria. Captains save
their ships engineers complete their bridges, generals conduct their
battles, in a state of dancing excitement, foaming recondite
technicalities at the lips. I suppose that sort of thing works up the
reader, but so far as it professes to represent reality, I am convinced
it is all childish nonsense, schoolboys of fifteen, girls of eighteen,
and literary men all their lives, may have these squealing fits, but my
own experience is that most exciting scenes are not exciting, and most
of the urgent moments in life are met by steady-headed men.
Neither I nor my uncle spent the night in ejaculations, nor in humorous
allusions, nor any of these things. We remained lumpish.
My uncle stuck in his place and grumbled about his stomach, and
occasionally rambled off into expositions of his financial position and
denunciations of Neal—he certainly struck out one or two good phrases
for Neal—and I crawled about at rare intervals in a vague sort of way
and grunted, and our basketwork creaked continually, and the wind on
our quarter made a sort of ruffled flapping in the wall of the gas
chamber. For all our wraps we got frightfully cold as the night wore
on.
I must have dozed, and it was still dark when I realised with a start
that we were nearly due south of, and a long way from, a
regularly-flashing lighthouse, standing out before the glow of some
great town, and then that the thing that had awakened me was the
cessation of our engine, and that we were driving back to the west.
Then, indeed, for a time I felt the grim thrill of life. I crawled
forward to the cords of the release valves, made my uncle crawl forward
too, and let out the gas until we were falling down through the air
like a clumsy glider towards the vague greyness that was land.
Something must have intervened here that I have forgotten.
I saw the lights of Bordeaux when it was quite dark, a nebulous haze
against black; of that I am reasonably sure. But certainly our fall
took place in the cold, uncertain light of early dawn. I am, at least,
equally sure of that. And Mimizan, near where we dropped, is fifty
miles from Bordeaux, whose harbour lights I must have seen.
I remember coming down at last with a curious indifference, and
actually rousing myself to steer. But the actual coming to earth was
exciting enough. I remember our prolonged dragging landfall, and the
difficulty I had to get clear, and how a gust of wind caught Lord
Roberts β as my uncle stumbled away from the ropes and litter, and
dropped me heavily, and threw me on to my knees. Then came the
realisation that the monster was almost consciously disentangling
itself for escape, and then the light leap of its rebound. The rope
slipped out of reach of my hand. I remember running knee-deep in a salt
pool in hopeless pursuit of the airship.
As it dragged and rose seaward, and how only after it had escaped my
uttermost effort to recapture it, did I realise that this was quite the
best thing that could have happened. It drove swiftly over the sandy
dunes, lifting and falling, and was hidden by a clump of windbitten
trees. Then it reappeared much further off, and still receding. It
soared for a time, and sank slowly, and after that I saw it no more. I
suppose it fell into the sea and got wetted with salt water and heavy,
and so became deflated and sank.
It was never found, and there was never a report of anyone seeing it
after it escaped from me.