THE “ASAHEL”
The half-caste descended upon a path between two coppices on
hill-sides, and rushing about the bush of one with a lantern,
discovered the boats and bodies all within an area of forty yards.
One boat was standing bow-downward, its stern on a fir-tree; another
had hurtled into the ruins of a church buried in the bush, beside this
boat being the butchered and burned body of Lieutenant Burke; and all
were much broken, for the boats’ bottoms were not perfect parachutes
for such a burden as they carried; and, in the case of seven, what the
earth had not smashed the explosions had shattered, one foot being
found in a boat to whose occupant it did not belong.
Three of the men, at the shock of falling, had been tossed aloft by the
deck-springs, and then had dropped back upon the boats, two dropping
back _within_ the boats—the Prince, Pilcher, and a blue-jacket.
Her first business was to remove these out of her way: so, climbing
by the bits of timber nailed on as steps, she dragged and rolled them
over the sides, a heat and vehemence in her, a gasping, her teeth-edges
pecking together with spite at sight of the Prince’s gashes, whose
sweetheart’s hand she might not shake, her raging heart revelling in
all this death and rout and sense of power.
But the lifting of the bodies winded her, and presently she was
propped, panting, in the midst of the three men: and now her heat fast
turned to cold.
For there were drippings amid the underwood; there were droppings of
pine-cones that tolled and echoed; dead leaves reeled at the breathing
of the breezes through the timber; the blue-jacket kept his neck
sideward, interested in her with one eye, with that steady indelicacy
of the dead: and, standing with her lonesome lantern-glow in the
gloom of that unknown wood, with ghosts and all that load of gold and
gallows-work on her hands, she threw her eyes reproachfully skyward,
then suddenly, “Oh, I am afraid,” she breathed, and gave way to weeping.
But no time for weakness—she stood straight.
And first she dragged the blue-jacket out of her sight ten yards to
a summit, rolling him over into bracken on the other slope; did the
same to the Prince and Pilcher; and now ran out to her boat, rose, and
lowered it within the wood, to have it hidden.
She then sat to ponder the problem of the treasure.
She had imagined that it would be a simple matter to bury it, but this
now appeared to her in a different light. The ruins within the wood,
however, quickly occurred to her alert wit, and on penetrating the mass
of bracken and bramble which buried it, she discovered a slab with a
ring behind the site of the sacrarium, and went prying down five steps
into a damp apartment, whence a badger dashed out by her, whitening her
with fright.
Here, she was sure, no human foot ever came, fixed upon it as her
treasure-house, and during the hour that remained before daybreak was
labouring at taking some of the bars fallen within the ruins down into
the vault—ever afresh astonished, with every fresh bar, that anything
so small could possibly be so ponderous.
But suddenly, as she was in the act of stepping with petty steps,
loaded with a bar, the bar tumbled singing, and she stood a thing of
marble, blanched: for about a stone’s throw from her a throat had
outraged the night’s silence with the howl: “_Fire!_”—in English.
The next instant she felt herself drowned in a thousand deaths, as
a racket of musketry seemed to crack her ear-drum, and she dropped
shot-through with fear, for she thought that all the guns of the globe
had discharged their bullets through her heart, and at an odour of
smoke that floated to her nose she moaned.
And from far to the northward followed a rumbling of musketry, and a
mortar barking; and then, not far, a voice calling “_Charge!_” then a
medley of voices crying: “_Retire! Retire!_” then a cry: “_Who said
Retire?_” then a roar of a hundred throats: “_Charge! Charge!_” and
a rush of boots brushing through scrub—and in some minutes distant
musketry—and a bugle going fluty—and stillness.
It was a skirmish of German and English outpost-garrisons going
on—which meant that, so far from being in Holland, as she reckoned, she
was somewhere near the Belgian frontier; and the night-operation had
been occasioned by the air-boats’ lights, descried by the night-glasses
of both garrisons, who were facing each other at a distance of eight
kilometres. And though aeroplanes with coloured lights was a thing
unknown, each captain had taken them to be enemy aeroplanes sent up to
reconnoitre his gun-emplacements or drop bombs—a suspicion which the
sudden vanishing of the bunch of lights had established: so both sides
had sallied to attack, this affair ending in twenty-seven dead.
As for the half-caste, this eruption of musketry shocked all effort out
of her, and stock-still she lay on the steps, listening to a cricket
screaming, hiding her eyes, leering like little mice that leer in fear;
nor was it until the sun was high that she ventured out of the wood,
walked four miles, and took a room at a tavern.
But by three in the afternoon she was back within the wood. And now her
first work was to bury away every trace of blood or flesh. She had a
spade, a saw.
But great was her trouble, on going to the spot where she had dragged
and rolled three of the bodies,—not to see them.
She stepped down a steep piece of ground, very gloomy with bush,
looking for them; and had made perhaps twenty steps when her left foot
stepped upon nothing, and down with an outcry she fell ten feet.
There was cliff here, a road at its bottom; and when she picked herself
up, it was with a horrible pang that she understood that the bodies
must have rolled down here—and been removed.
When she climbed back she sat wringing her hands, lamenting, thinking
that all would be discovered now.
But she set afresh to business, and after burying every blood-stained
bush in one shallow trench with the bodies, a work of hours, and after
covering well with dead leaves, she began the vast task of sawing the
unbroken parts of the boats into bits of a bigness which she could lift
and bury.
In this labour of Hercules she spent two days; and only when every
trace of the ten boats, the guns, the German documents, were gone from
the surface, did she go on with the work of carrying down the bars into
the church-vault—a navvy’s travail that harassed her soul four days,
and made her groan at gold.
Meantime, her eyes were on the newspapers—on the tumult that was
in Europe at the raid upon the Teuton treasure, the destruction of
Spandau, the disappearance of the Prince of Wales.
That it was the Prince who had led the raid Europe soon knew. But where
now was either Prince or treasure, companions or boats?
Even in that turmoil of the world—commercial upheaval, tears of
defeat, movements of fleets and troops, dearness of food, frenzies
of triumph—men’s minds were centred upon this thing, and a thousand
thousand eyes were busied about the route between Berlin and London,
seeking, seeking.
But the boats seemed to have been caught to the stars like the
Argonauts’ boat! and as many fantastic guesses as there were men were
made to explain the fantastic catastrophe that had caused them _all_ to
fall into the sea!—for after a time only the Queen any longer refused
to believe that they had fallen into the sea.
She had revealed that the boats were an invention of Mr Chinnery, and
that Chinnery himself had gone with the expedition—the Prince having
told her that Chinnery would be going. So that no one had approached
Chinnery for inquiries; though during two days a crowd stood vaguely
gazing at his house, little divining what lay in the shed behind.
It was only on the morning of the fourth day after the raid that a
captain of Hussars happened to visit, at the street-end of the village
of Plessy, one of the two field-hospitals of his division, which was
following his company; and he, entering his company ambulance-waggon
to cast an eye at his sick, suddenly, as he stood over one of the
spring-beds, stretched his finger at it, and said to a dresser: “But
_that’s_ the Prince! _that’s_ he!”
That night the King and Queen were at Plessy, listening over that
spring-bed to the Prince wandering a little, his left elbow broken, his
forehead cut open.
How he had got there was soon investigated.
Three rustics, trudging in the daybreak of the night-operation, had
noticed three bodies lying by the road in the bush at a cliff’s bottom,
and had borne them to some company stretcher-bearers seeking their
wounded with red-crossed arms in a field some way off.
Whereupon the stretcher-bearers, assuming them to be civilians wounded
in the skirmish—for they were _en pékin_—had borne the two living to
a first-aid dressing-station, whence they had passed through a main
station to the field-hospital.
So, then, the expedition had not, after all, fallen into the sea?
Where, then, were the six million pounds, the boats? Tidy for a private
fortune, six millions! and the world set itself to search an area of
some thirty miles round that church in which it lay.
Within three weeks this thing had become a crazer of men’s brains,
hundreds of imbeciles in the rage and mania throwing up their daily
occupations to become discoverers—seeking, not the treasure, but the
boats! which were the clue to the treasure; and many may have entered
in vain that very wood in which boats and treasure were.
This was one of the Prince’s first questions on the seventh midnight
when he came to himself at Windsor: “But the treasure?”
“No sign of it so far,” answered Engineer Vice-Admiral Sir Robert
Barrington, K.C.B., who was a friend of the Prince, and had been much
at his bedside.
“And Pilcher?”
“Doing well. Broken humerus.”
“Others all gone?”
“All.”
“But _what_ made us fall?”
“That is quite unknown.”
“Chinnery—what does _he_ say?”
“But Chinnery perished, too.”
“Chinnery did? No! Chinnery didn’t come with us! He started, but turned
back.”
“Then—I am in a maze.”
“But the treasure—it is somewhere near where Pilcher and I were found,
of course.”
“No doubt: but where that is cannot be discovered, for the rustics who
found and bore you to the stretcher-bearers cannot be discovered—owing,
no doubt, to the fact that many of the villages in that war-area
have been destroyed or abandoned, and the population in a fluid and
migratory state.”
The Prince stared at the battle painted on the ceiling; and he
murmured presently: “Well, this is how it was to turn out. I can’t
understand—see Chinnery to-morrow. But—the Queen?”
Sir Robert Barrington’s eyes softened and smiled. “The Queen is said to
have been as brave as usual all through.”
[Has it not been mentioned that shortly before her marriage the young
girl Minna Simmons pressed to her face, before throwing into a grate,
the photograph of a young man?—which young man was now Engineer
Vice-Admiral Sir Robert Barrington; and it may be mentioned that it was
into Sir Robert Barrington’s house in Grosvenor Place that the Queen
and the Princess Elizabeth had seen the Prince let himself in with a
key—with his Eulalia.]
Some minutes afterwards Her Majesty herself stole into the chamber,
while Sir Robert and the nurses retired to its farthest shades; and
the Prince, sitting up to receive Her Majesty, saw tears spring to her
lids and her lip quiver, as she stood pressing his hand: but he noticed
with some wonder that she did not kiss him, nor was long with him.
When day came a gentleman of the Prince thrice tried to telephone to
Chinnery—without reply.
And that afternoon Chinnery’s house was entered by the police by means
of Monty’s key—for a neighbour’s servant knew Monty’s abode.
Monty’s statement was, that she had known that Mr Chinnery was going
away through the air, and she had not gone to the house the day after
the expedition, but had looked in several times since to feed the cat,
etc. And had she then seen nothing of Mr Chinnery? She had seen nothing.
So now the place was searched throughout: but no sign anywhere of
Chinnery.
And now a pernicious suspicion as to Chinnery crept into the public
head: that Chinnery had wanted six million pounds! that he had not
really turned back, as the Prince imagined, but had tracked the
expedition in the dark, and destroyed it—for Lieutenant Pilcher,
when he could speak, declared that he had had a distinct impression
of shells being thrown upon the boats an instant before he lost
consciousness.
And if Chinnery had really turned back—if Chinnery had not now the
treasure—where, then, was the treasure, and why was Chinnery now in
hiding?
The truth, of course, was, that, though Chinnery _was_ in hiding, it
was not he who was hiding himself, but the half-caste hiding him.
On the sixth midnight she had risen out of that brake in Lorraine, her
six-days’ labours ended, and, flying high, had wantonly dropped her
last three bombs upon a German position outside Bouillon, as who should
say: “I spit loud on you”; then, striking England near Deal, had left
her boat in a field, had found out her whereabouts, had discovered
London about 3 +a.m.+, passed over it high, and come down into the
Chinese house grounds at Regent’s Park, unseen by any eye.
But even now she did not rest: one more labour; and then sweet sleep.
She had gathered from the papers that Chinnery had not yet been
discovered in the shed: for, as she had foreseen, Monty had not looked
into the shed, believing him away.
But she knew that Chinnery’s body must soon be discovered, and then
suspicion might fall upon her for his death, and for everything; but,
if it was buried away, then suspicion might pitch upon Chinnery for
destroying the boats.
She therefore determined to bury it quickly; to get that Redlike Ray of
which she had heard to send to China; and be done with Horseferry Road
for ever.
So she walked through the Chinese house and the sleeping streets to
some mews where A-lu-te’s Chinese chauffeur lived; and in twenty
minutes was driving for Westminster—with her spade.
She found the house-door shut, but got in by an area-window; and, after
sending the car to wait some way off, ran to the yard with a candle
which her hand had no need to shade, that morning-hour was so calm and
heavy with haze.
A black cat, unfed that day, flew mewing to her human friendship
across the yard. She took no notice: stood listening, leering, to a
policeman’s feet beating up a street.
Then, crushing her reluctance, she entered the shed: and there he lay,
just as he had dropped in his fur-coat and chest-wrappings, his cap on
his head; and horror hopped in her heart when, as she peered, his head
suddenly started up at her with awful eyes, crying harshly: “_Water!
Water!_” and tumbled back with shut eyes.
It bumped in tumbling upon a board, that sage head, never more now to
be so sage and knowing, its cheeks concaves of famine and nearness to
death; and when, all at once, she perceived that he was living, pity
pierced her to tears, compunction, love of him for his gentle love of
her, love of him for being with the living, and not with the foreign
dead; and, instead of bringing him drink, she lay with him, kissing his
fingers, his lips, whimpering pity at his thinness; but then ran and
brought him wine.
But, living or dead, he had to be hidden—probably not for long,
since he had never been strong, and could hardly outlive all this
ill-treatment.
So now the question was to get him into the car; and, since he was too
tall to lift, she called in her chauffeur, who bore him to the door,
while she with her candle ran up to get the Redlike Ray.
It was a black box, cubical, two feet broad, and she knew exactly
where it had been placed, for after the Prince had gone that day of
his visit, she had watched Chinnery attach the cap which made it safe
to handle, had asked many questions about it, had seen him lay it on
the shelf by the lathe, and knew that he had not since removed it, for
there it had lain on the day of the raid. But now it was not there....
She ransacked the room, stamping, exasperated—all the rooms: no box.
Fascinated and fretted, she kept on seeking, hissing at the thing,
until weariness compelled her to give in; then, getting Chinnery lifted
into the motor, she drove away an hour before daybreak to the Regent
Park house, from which she intended him never more to come out.
Fourteen years previously a Member of the Peking Board of Civil
Appointments had been kidnapped and imprisoned there in a back-room
which still had its two windows bricked up: here was to be the future
home of Richard Chinnery.
It was not till the next noon that the lady A-lu-te knew that a
stranger was in the house, when Oyone told her that her return to
Court-life depended upon his captivity—A-lu-te now being old, and well
under the sway of Oyone.
That same night of Chinnery’s removal the Prince recovered
consciousness, and the next day Chinnery’s house was searched in vain
for him.
Two days later Oyone once more went to Horseferry Road, for it was
incredible to her that the Redlike Ray was not there: and first she
went to question Monty, and then with Monty on to the house.
A brougham bearing the Prince of Wales’ arms stood before the door
and two plain-clothes men, who would not let the pair enter, till
Oyone explained that she was only going to a top-room to get some
knick-knacks of her own; but she spied a little at the workroom
keyhole, her teeth-edges pecking with spite at the sight of the Prince
sitting alone in there, brooding on the stool, a bandage aslant under
his cap, one arm in a sling. He had escaped her—twice: but still had
been well peppered.
She guessed that he had come on the same errand as herself—to get the
Redlike Ray: and this was true, for, with Chinnery vanished, he had
remembered the terrible peril of the ray in the hands of unwitting,
wicked, or ambitious people; and he, too, had searched in vain for it,
and then had put the hunt in the detectives’ hands. But he had come,
moreover, to brood in that room over the gloomy enigma of his schoolboy
friend, to ask himself there that ever-repeated question: “Where is
Richard Chinnery now?” for he did not believe that Chinnery had fallen
into the sea.
Anyway, Chinnery was gone, the Redlike Ray gone, all the boats gone—he
still ignorant of the secret of their mechanism; though, if he had
known that secret, boats like them might have brought the war to a
quick end.
However, he was not long lamenting there, having that afternoon to go
northward to join his _Asahel_.
For it was fairly certain that a world-battle on the sea was impending;
it was in everyone’s mouth that an attempt was about to be made to
invade Britain; and the result of the _Mauretania_ battle had loaded
men’s brains with boding.
Indeed, a thousand evil dreams that week were in everyone’s mouth, for
suddenly a disease of jumpiness had seized upon the people, and behind
each door a ghost was ogling.
A company of soldiers marched up Pall Mall, and men rushed to windows
with wildness in their eyes to see if they were Prussians.
Visions of vague things were seen sailing in the air, visions of
phantom fleets which vanished seen on the sea.
On a gentleman’s aeroplane appearing in the air, the villages of
Alvington and Aylburton near Chepstow took fright, and precipitated
themselves like one man into bramble and spinney.
Men swore that drums were rumbling and guns booming where it could not
be that guns were booming; rich ladies living on scrip stood cool and
courageous for days, and suddenly one day, terror-struck, were away, as
though hounds were mouthing at their heels, to the mountains of Wales.
Yet, even in the thick of this state of scare, when the nation gathered
that the Prince of Wales was being permitted to go to a battle with his
arm in a sling, it found time to frown at it.
Everybody felt that he had already abundantly served his country for
this war—for the subtraction of those 120 million marks from Germany’s
rather meagre war-chest was a grievous gash.
Accordingly, when at 2 o’clock he drove toward King’s Cross, he was
astonished to find the whole _route_ thronged, and the people cheering
with so much heart and friendship, that his eyes softened, and, though
his forehead was still bandaged, he kept bending toward his brougham
window, lifting his cap.
This may have loosened the bandage somehow, for at the corner of
Southampton Row Eulalia, on her toes in the crowd, was afresh breathing
to herself: “Heavens! how like,” when the bandage and dressing lifted
with the lifting cap, and she got a sight of the long gash, her nurse’s
eye noticing that it had a hook over the right eye.
She felt a kind of property in him, he was “so like!” wished that he
would see her, and clapped loud; but her clapping was drowned in the
row, in the shouts of “_Teddy!_” the eager god-speeds: for it seemed to
everybody a needless hardship that he should rise from bed to join his
squadron.
“_Needless_”—since no one (or very few) had any particular faith in
his ideas about ships and sea-fighting—though it was well known that
he had ideas of his own, that from his cadet-days he had been a rebel
in the Service, and that he had got two ships built to his liking—the
_Asahel_, of which he was the “Captain” (a courtesy-title), and the
_Blunderbus_.
But those ships he had only managed to get built with the greatest
difficulty; and one memorable night had cried to the Queen: “Oh,
Mother, if you don’t believe in me, who will?”
“Teddy,” the Queen had answered, “you have knowledge, but you are not
an expert.”
“Expert!” he had cried—“I despise experts. Chinnery is not an
‘expert’—he is just a thinker: and he agrees with me that the
Dreadnought ship is wrong from control-station to keel. Experts? Their
intellect gets quite fixed! like putty in a hole—except when it is
rushing off into little crazes and scares: as when forty years ago
France started torpedo-boats, and the cry was “battleships must be
abandoned!” Then happened Tsushima, and ever since it’s been Tsushima,
Tsushima, on the brain, and the battleship rage. But at Tsushima the
fighting was all on one side!—the Russians did not _pretend_ to be any
good, or all the battleships on both sides would certainly have sunk.”
The Queen had asked him how he could be so sure of that; and he had
answered: “Mother, it is common-sense. A battleship is a weak thing,
because she is a compromise between two efforts—to be heavy, and to be
light. But guns have definitely beaten armour, Mother—definitely—such
armour as ships of any speed can carry, so what’s the good of their
armour? And they can’t run away, their armour so limits their speed,
so what’s the good of their speed? Oughtn’t they to have enough armour
to be some good, and no speed, or enough speed, and no armour? not a
useless little of both?”
In the end the Queen had said: “I will use what influence I have for
you”; and Engineer Vice-Admiral Sir Robert Barrington had helped, too.
So the _Asahel_ and _Blunderbus_ had been built.
What was the _Asahel_? She was not a destroyer: the _rôle_ of the
destroyer is to sting and fly; the _rôle_ of the _Asahel_ was to fly
and sting.
She was not a _Dreadnought_: she was smaller than any third-class
cruiser. She was not a third-class cruiser: she carried bigger guns
than any _Dreadnought_.
She was the very swiftest thing at whose rage and chase the sea’s face
had ever changed colour—her contract-speed forty-eight knots.
As for the _Blunderbus_, she was a semi-submarine _Dreadnought_, with a
speed of six knots.