THE RAY RADIATES
But days before this Lord Percy Burnett, sent to search for Eulalia’s
body, had managed to get back—with tidings on his tongue! for, though
it was known in Britain that Oriental troops were in Eastern Europe,
nothing was known of their numbers, character, and rate of advance.
It was about ten at night, and the Queen, daringly holding a Court
amid the break-up of civilisation, had lately stepped into the State
Ballroom with the Royal Family, the King _en_ colonel-in-chief of the
Coldstreams, she in an all-round crown, with Koh-i-Noor, Order of
the Garter, cloth-of-silver train, parading her Prince on her left,
her Elizabeth, the King’s Band babbling to six hundred glitterers a
_ballade_ which breathed that there was no such thing as grief or
grinning dead—not there, anyway.
On the top of which let Lord Percy Burnett drop hot-footed to have
speech with the Prince, and at Belshazzar’s banquet is handwriting on
the wall, awe, and harrowed hearts.
The Chinese had already sat down before Königsberg. And it was not a
river, it was the sea....
The Prince, listening, siffled through his teeth-edges: “Onward,
Christian soldiers....”
Suddenly he was up—and his action, when he acted, was like a clock, or
a watt, at so many units of work per second—and, throwing behind him,
“Percy, try to see the Queen,” he vanished headlong, was quickly in a
carriage at the Garden Gate, and off for “Ning Shou Kung.”
For a week, since the Battle of Margate, his thought had been: “Just
possibly, if it is true that I am tricky, I may crush Li Ku Yu at sea”;
and already he had set going a great haste of hammering, gun-casting,
overhauling, and repairing at Paisley, at Portsmouth, at Newcastle, at
Glasgow, at Sunderland, at Chatham; but even if the sea was his, the
air was Li Ku Yu’s with Chinnery’s air-boat in Oyone’s hands—perhaps in
Oyone’s head; hardly yet in Li Ku Yu’s head, since she had so lately
read aloud Li Ku’s statement that he could understand nothing of her
account of it.
Where the boat was he had no notion—it might be at “Ning Shou Kung”!
Anyway, the thing was to seize Oyone quickly.
He had had qualms, however, as to seizing her, because of his contract
with her; but while Lord Percy Burnett had been blurting his flood
of news, he had said to himself that that contract referred only to
seizure by the police, not by himself.
On the way he picked up two policemen, made them await him at the gate,
went in to find a scared Huang smoking her pipe, and, without saying
one word, took a lantern to roam in search through room after room, she
moving mutely after: and her pipe went out that night.
No sign of Oyone! He half expected to see her still sitting there
before that hole in the door, sewing, painting, speaking unceasingly;
and in that narrow long room, and in the alcove, he spent several
minutes, holding up the lantern to everything, remembering how he had
asked himself which was the yellowest, momentum or energy, and how he
had heard “boo-boo, whose boy....”
Then it was down in the grounds, prying about with the lantern’s light;
and at the back he saw an odd thing: four stakes where the air-boat
had stood! and in the garden-house on a window-ledge an odd thing: a
pipe—Chinnery’s! for it had a chloride chamber for moisture-absorption
like Chinnery’s pipes: which put anew into his head a question on which
he stood there brooding many minutes: “Is Richard Chinnery living? Is
he? Fifty words of his could rescue this Europe....”
But nothing else was found, and he went away heavy-hearted....
Yet Oyone was not, in fact, far from him—living in a solitary cottage
on the borders of Epping Forest, near which she had alighted on the
night of her flight, awaiting every day Li Ku Yu’s summons to join him
with the air-boat, which lay under tarpaulins in her back-yard. There,
too, Richard Chinnery might anon have been seen, pottering feebly in
slippers.
She, meantime, was lying quite low, her only servant a little
English girl, she herself venturing out very rarely, in general as a
coster-girl, though sometimes in the hush of night a lone figure which
was Oyone could have been caught in that back-yard of No. 11 Frith
Street, a spot which fascinated her, wringing her hands over the hole
where the Redlike Ray had lain, sure that the Prince had it now from
Eulalia, wondering where Eulalia was: for since her flight from “Ning
Shou Kung” she had been once by night through the air to France to see
the Six Millions still untouched, but had failed to discover anything
of the 2nd Somersetshires—which had been cut to pieces.
But on the day when the flood of immigration from the Continent
suddenly stopped, when the Chinese, having everywhere reached the
sea, were lying gorged in the rock-galleries of Gibraltar, and were
slaughtering the inhabitants of Hammerfest, she ventured upon a day
out as far as Regent Street, and there in a way wonderful to her came
across the Redlike Ray.
Her object was partly to buy some crêpe de Chine, partly to see that
changed aspect of things of which the papers spoke: and for hours she
enjoyed herself in it, seeing now that she need not have come in her
coster disguise, she was so utterly lost in the whirl and swirl of
this wonderful new London, whose population must have been swelled
by millions, as everywhere in Britain, the Mediterranean and Ægean
Islands, North Africa, America.
Such a brushing of shoulders like an everlasting Lord Mayor’s Day, a
polyglot of gabbling, an eager and heated atmosphere of life, thronging
the centres of streets and pavements alike, all the old ways and
restraints broken down now, everyone speaking to everyone, like members
of a jolly, hot family on a holiday, the merchant Jew of Astrakhan in
fur cap and coat, the gabardine and ear-lock of Bokhara, the hausfrau
of the Black Forest with her last packet of coffee, the Parisienne
affectedly slurring her r’s, the Amurski Cossack with his sabre, the
English girl with her blush, the drosky-driver in full-skirted coat
and fur _shapka_, all intimate in a whirlpool of intercourse, many
destitute, most more or less hungry.
France would have grumbled if Britain had overflowed her so; but
Britain—world-brotherly, world-worthy—did not grumble, though she had
once grumbled a little for nothing. If she had, it would have made no
difference.
But the shops were much less thronged, so it was not a crush which
prevented Oyone buying her crêpe in a shop at Oxford Circus, but a
commotion outside which she rushed to see. It was then near three
o’clock: a bright Spring afternoon.
The source of the trouble, whatever it was, was away down toward the
Marble Arch: for there was a pelting eastward thence of feet, and
thence came eastward a distinct wind of wailing and lamentation.
“What is it? What’s the matter?” everyone was asking everyone in that
region of the crowd round Oyone; and, even as they inquired, the word
“blind! blind!” had spread up from the west, and was with them.
Some moments more and they could see the fleeing stream of people split
in the middle of the street, the split reaching nearer and nearer, as
if a bull in eastward career was throwing them from his road into two
crushes; and all at once the cause of it all broke into Oyone’s sight—a
man madly running with spider’s legs, panting, wildly staring—a Yankee,
like Yankee caricatures, lank like ribbed sea-sand, goatee-bearded,
hugging like a terrified mother the Redlike Ray.
By this time he was in a region of people who divided before his flight
by mere imitation, without knowing why he was flying, and was being
fled from: so a cabman who was creeping westward a little eastward of
Oxford Circus took him in without question, turned with him; Oyone
flew after; and, as vehicles thereabouts could only bore their way
coaxingly, she had little difficulty in following until she met another
cab, in which she followed him eastward to Aldgate.
There he alighted, and, still wild-eyed, anon going off into
daddy-long-legged runnings, with ogling glances, he gained No. 11 Frith
Street. Oyone saw him toss one last ogle from the door, and go in.
So the Redlike Ray had been there in the cottage all the time while she
had been groaning over the hole in the ground.... She would get it now!
In that same hour the news of the Marble Arch event reached the
Prince’s ears, and _he_, too, said: “I’ll get it now.”
And the same day Eulalia, fresh come to London through the air, told
herself: “I should not delay in digging up the box for the Russian,
Hartmann.”
But look at Mr Silas P. Stickney, stretched there on his bed at No. 11,
sobbing like a child—a respectable ship’s captain, he, of “Chicago,
Illinois” (he always added “Illinois,” with a nasal fling on the
“nois”—I guess), who had lately decided to end his days in London near
a married niece, and had bought a forty-years’ lease of No. 11, to
settle in. It was even yet not furnished, save a top room.
But already he had planted the back with stripling trees, and, in
digging to plant, had happened upon the Redlike Ray, where it had been
buried by Alexis the Sexton while the house had been still “For Sale.”
Alexis had been a man of some enlightenment and science, and had once
gone a pilgrim to see Chinnery, who, with his habitual affability, had
admitted and shown him round, showing him with the rest the Redlike
Ray, not knowing that Alexis was an Anarchist, or not caring; and
as soon as ever Chinnery was said to be dead at the date of the Six
Million raid, Alexis had entered Chinnery’s place by an area window,
and was away with the ray.
He had then handed on to Hartmann the secret of the ray in the event of
his arrest or death, as Hartmann, in breathing his last, had laid it on
Eulalia to hand on to one Taska.
It had been Alexis’s terror of blindness that had protected society
from the ray during two weeks preceding his death: for Chinnery had
stuck on the box a strip of paper for “Monty’s” benefit, written with:
“Do Not Touch The Cap.”
But the burying had much obscured this. “The Cap” had been rubbed off:
and it was only by studying it through a magnifying glass that Mr Silas
P. Stickney had deciphered “Do Not Touch.”
This for three weeks had kept his eyes constantly on, and his hands
constantly off, the box. The box became the man’s mania. He _suspected_
that it was packed with diamonds, and that “Do Not Touch” was only
a bogey. But, then, it might well be an infernal machine. And the
question was: how to find out.
In the end he decided to take it into some open place, slip down the
cap-thing, and fly. If nothing happened, he would make other flying
experiments; and, if still nothing, then the thing was full of diamonds.
So, that afternoon, he had gone to Hyde Park, laid the box on a bench,
uncapped it, and fled: nor had looked back till a lamentation came to
him out of Park Lane.
Then he could see that out of the apparatus was proceeding a pencil of
rays, very large in area, though very faint, for whose strange shade he
had no name—something like the sawdust of cedar-wood—just revealed to
the eye by the dust-particles which the rays touched in the air.
But it was some time before his brain connected the ray with the
lamentation, till the lamentation spread to those who had rushed to
their windows, to those who had rushed in the street, to see why the
wailing was. Men, women, children, were every instant being struck
blind by scores.
When the truth entered his head he flew to the box, himself now very
troubled in the eyes—for _behind_ the box, too, the reflected rays
from motes in the air had a blinding effect—and catching up the box,
he dashed with it through the Marble Arch, too madly agitated, too
preoccupied with the sorrow in his own tight-shut eyes, to think of
shutting the cap, and, as he ran stretched and long-shanked, he ran
disseminating calamity and lamenting.
Three different policemen who flew to seize him stood still midway,
their knuckles in their eye-sockets, moaning: and Oxford Street was
half a moan, and half a scamper, before he had the cap closed.
And now he lay on his bed sobbing, thinking of the ill it had been
his lot to do, thinking that, with his marked appearance, he would
be tracked that day, and, if not hanged, then lynched. England was
no place for him: possibly he might hook it to America, if he looked
alive. As to that devil’s-thing, which he hardly dared look at now, he
would rebury it just as he had found it, and so, washing his hands of
its bewitchment, do a bunk for Liverpool without bidding good-bye to a
soul.
This he did: sallying out soon after dark, bareheaded, his wide hat
left behind, his beard shaved off: and Oyone, who for hours had not
taken her eyes off the house, saw him go.
She instantly slipped into the yard, found the back-kitchen open, and
in she stole, to seek, and seize, and flee.
However, to her horror of astonishment, no box: not in the little trunk
left unlocked; in no cupboard: up no chimney.
She tapped all the walls, carrying his chair to stand on, reckless if
he came back upon her, though gradually growing conscious of the ghosts
gathering round her in that gloom to mock her agonies.
When he did not come, she guessed that he had taken to flight,
but about nine ran to throw a glance out of a front window, and
now—again—saw the ray—in Eulalia’s hands, Eulalia having tranquilly
dug it up with a shovel which she had fetched, while Oyone had been
moaning about the house.
Oyone pulled her coster-shawl farther over her face and ran shivering,
tracking Eulalia eastward through teeming streets, where to shoot might
have been to shoot an unintended head, and to stab would have been to
be mobbed; Eulalia, meantime, making her way east and then north into a
tumbledown slum of tall houses, a back street rabbit-warren of Hebrews
and Slavs that ran east-and-west.
There Oyone saw her go into a house, and now propped her back against a
wall, dropping with fatigue of soul and body, thinking what next to do,
how to get the ray, and then drop and die.
Eulalia, meantime, in the wee back-room on the third floor which she
had hired at five shillings—for lodging was dear—was scribbling off
Hartmann’s message to “Taska”; and she wrapped up the Redlike Ray in
a newspaper, and directed it to “Mr Taska, Shoemaker, Bowery, New
York”—having no notion that the box was of any importance to humanity.
Oyone, during this, was being sore tempted to throw up everything for
that day, and get some rest, when she again saw Eulalia sally out—with
a parcel.
About the same size as the ray—but wrapped up: impossible to be certain
whether it was the ray or not.
Round the corner, to a crowd pressing round a pawnshop—a Saturday
night. Eulalia entered the press; and it was long to wait while she
gained an entrance, and came out again.
Then the way was along by-streets toward a main street, Oyone more than
ever uncertain now, her eyes troubled, the parcel sometimes looking
smaller to her, as if something had been taken out in the pawnshop.
But in the main street a species of little shriek pitched from her
lips: “She is posting it to the Prince!” as Eulalia made into a
district post-office.
Now, then, was the second for electric energy and concentrated venom,
all mortal things hanging on the hazard of an instant.
The throng scattered before Oyone’s fury. When Eulalia was already at
the parcels’ counter, suddenly the box was gone out of her grasp. And a
second later a tigress’s arrogant cry rang through the place: “_Do not
stop me!_”
For the room was full of men, and two postmen with empty bags on their
arms who had spotted the robbery barred her escape.
A moment more, and she was struggling like ten men with twenty men,
trying to tug off the wrapping and get at the cap to strike mankind
blind, not minding if she was struck blind, too.
But the mass of force, the number of hands, was too much for one, and
in half-a-minute she was hanging dead-like in someone’s arms, sobbing a
little in her faint.
Four then dragged her out to hand her over to the law; but after
forty yards of it, when her weight became a bore, they threw her on a
doorstep, and left her.
For in the new London snatchings and such-like acts were common, and
crime had now quite a new aspect.
Civilisation, in fact, was on the brink of disorganisation—in Britain,
too; and one of the first nerves of the State to be infected with the
disease was the police. Having, in fact, far more to do than they could
handle, they had begun to do nothing.
Thus it took them three days to trace so marked a personality as Mr
Silas P. Stickney to Frith Street—and this in spite of the zeal which a
Prince could inspire. By which time Silas and ray had well vanished.
However, two days later a report came to the Prince that on the evening
of the Hyde Park event _a certain nurse_ had been observed by three
persons carrying a black box not far from Frith Street.
“Then,” said the Prince, “_find me this nurse_.”
But that was no easy work in the new whirl and turmoil.
At any rate, as Oyone fainted, a Polish Jew handed back the box to
Eulalia, its wrapping rather damaged; but she put it on the counter,
and turned to go.
A clerk, however, called after her: “This can’t go like this.”
“Why?” she asked: “the postage will be paid at the other end.”
“American packages aren’t taken in that way now,” he answered:
“besides, it must be fastened with sealing-wax.”
But to pay the postage was more than she liked—no clothes now but what
she wore, no jewellery left but the wedding-ring, six shillings in
money from a ring just pawned.
So she took the box away, till she should be better off, wondering at
the face of the coster-girl who had snatched it, with a thought of the
Japanese at the back of her consciousness.
Oyone still lay at the door where the four men had thrown her, thinking
wearily that the ray, if it was the ray, was posted now; and she,
Oyone, had touched it, yet had it not.
Afterwards she rose to get home; and there, as soon as she had rested,
sat and wrote:
“Li Ku Yu: strange things have happened this day. An American
struck many blind with the Redlike Ray. I tracked him, and
while seeking it in his house, looked out and saw the ray in
the hands of that same Eulalia Bayley, the Prince’s honey, of
whom I wrote. I tracked her to her lodging, after which she
came out with a parcel like the ray-box in size, but wrapped
up, went to a pawnshop with it, and thence to a post-office,
where, in spite of an attempt which I made, she succeeded in
posting it.
“Li Ku Yu, I am not perfectly certain that it was the ray,
nor to whom it was posted. It _may_ have been posted to the
Prince, but many things now incline me to think that, all the
time, this woman may be quite unconscious of its value, so it
_may_ have been posted to ‘Taska, Shoemaker, Bowery, New York.’
I am a work-basket thick with knick-knacks of wonderings,
contradictions and intricacies.
“Li Ku Yu, it is for you, who are as obvious as the Nine
Tripods of Yü, to decide whether a ship should be sent to
America to take the ray from ‘Taska,’ or how it is to be taken
from the Prince, if it is he who has it, whether in this the
Princess Elizabeth may be of use, or whether I shall first
determine that it was really the ray then posted, though it is
dangerous for me to be prominent and active at present, with
the air-boat here. The foolish Chinnery still forgets when I
get him to attempt to tell how the ray was made. I think he has
not long to live. London is now incredible, a nostril stopped
up with cold. Farewell.”
In order to get this to Li Ku Yu, she made a midnight trip three
thousand feet up, striking the French coast by Gravelines, where a very
great temptation suddenly assailed her to go on to Paris to spy upon Li
Ku Yu’s face; but her pride still waited to be summoned: she sent the
letter by camel-riders.
Three nights afterwards a Japanese captain, after lying low about her
house, suddenly ran to it. He had reached her by special ship from
France, with a letter in cypher within his cloak lining:
“Oyone, my business is immense.
“But to-morrow, the third, at noon, I transfer headquarters to
Dunkirk, Casino des Dunes. Meet me, then, soon before the hour
of the tiger (3 +a. m.+) two kilometres to the north with the
air-boat. There, south of the Sea Baths that are at Rosendaël,
I will light a fire to guide your descent.
“You will then be requested to conduct an aide-de-camp to the
wood of the hoard of gold.
“It may be His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales (not so
deeply buried as you reported) who has the Ray, or ‘Taska,’ or
neither. I calculate, from the facts I have, that it is Taska,
so am sending emissaries to America. But you get Mr Chinnery
to write a dexterous letter, asking His Royal Highness to meet
him on Rosendaël sand-dunes, that I may capture His Royal
Highness....”
On this Oyone cried out: “I shall see him!”
But the hitch in the Chinnery-plan was that Chinnery resisted, saying:
“Oyone, it would kill me to write again to the Prince of Wales.... The
Prince of Wales has forgotten me, because God has withdrawn himself
from me....”
To this Oyone, who had suppressed two letters to the Prince, answered:
“It is only because of the war that he has not replied! Now he will fly
to you, if you write.”
“Oh, Oyone, I cannot.”
“Then, no wine to-morrow.”
This conquered Chinnery. Paper and pen were got. But when it became
a question of dating the letter from Rosendaël, his brows knit. “Why
Rosendaël?” he wished to know.
“Because I am taking you there in the air-boat.”
“Oh, not in the air again, Oyone!”
“Then, by a ship.”
But, little suspicious though Chinnery was, the whole thing scented of
a mystery: he would not: and now no threats or rage could change him.
Oyone spent the night in writing a letter in his handwriting.
It came to the hand of the Prince while dictating letters at three in
the afternoon, and he read:
“+Villa de Rosendaël.+
“+My dear Teddy+: There have been reasons for my silence, since
I am a kind of prisoner to a girl who is your enemy. Can you
help me for old times’ sake? I am here in a country flooded
with yellow men, where my life is bitterness and my bread
unleavened. If you can come to me in a ship at 3 +a.m.+ of the
4th, when the Chinese are all asleep, I may manage to light a
fire on the dunes to guide you to the spot where I shall be
waiting. I ask much, my friend: but I have much to tell you of
new inventions. A Japanese sympathiser takes this; but I am
ill, my hand shakes, I cannot write. Your sincere friend....”
Now, the Prince, like Chinnery, may have been little suspicious, but
it was impossible for this letter to escape suspicion. “My life is
bitterness and my bread unleavened” was so furiously curious as from
Richard Chinnery.... And the bribe! “Much to tell of new inventions”
... “old times’ sake” ... “sincere friend”....
“Bring me the Japanese who brought this,” the Prince said: but the
Japanese had gone.
However, just the _possibility_ that the letter might be from Chinnery
when drunk agitated the Prince’s fingers, and drew him to see the end
of it.
At eleven he was at Dover; at midnight the fires of a swift little
yacht in the harbour were lit and banked, and a little quick-firer
from South Front Barracks mounted in her bows: at half-past one he was
darkly cruising, without lights, quite close in to the French coast,
noting an inconceivable host of floating things of every species massed
in every roadstead, port, harbour-basin; Calais sleepless; Dunkirk
flaring; each a reel of revelry mixed with military movements; no moon,
the ocean’s floor smooth like a pool, the night quite calm, darksome,
starless, till the comet (Tempel’s) entered it in Capricorn with horrid
locks sprawling aloft, tempering the vapours a little, brindling a
little the black sea in tracts of quicksilver.
At two the Prince, springing from a boat’s bow, was in Oriental
territory, in the Dragon’s jaws, he all swathed in oilskins, a black
mask over his nose, and with him in oilskins and masks twenty-seven
fellows—all that were left of his old _Asahel_ men—all armed to the
teeth with revolvers, rifles, knives, hatchets, and one of them, named
Commander Pilcher, the smartest of the smart, who had passed part of
his youth in racing over the Iowa prairies, had a lasso—the Prince
fairly sure now of a Li Ku plot to capture him, and wishing rather to
capture Li Ku Yu.
So he had come an hour before the rendezvous.
They lay in a patch of scraggy grass on a sand-hill, gazing stilly
inland.
Two miles south, on their right, a shine in the night which was
Dunkirk; on their left, a mile north, a hint of Rosendaël houses,
darkling, uninhabited now; and between Rosendaël and them a row of
seven bathing-machines on the edge of the sand before it breaks to
roll into a roughness of scrubby dunes; two boats lolling beyond the
surf; the yacht lolling a long way beyond, all dark; the surf purling
murmurings, like a murderer’s lips speaking secret things in sleep.
Half-an-hour:—and now a sound somewhere, like horses’ hoofs afar; then
ten minutes—and now a light, a fire, about half-a-mile inland, between
the bathing-houses and Rosendaël, though it was impossible to see who
lit it in its deep dune—the land all wavy here in hills and hollows;
and very quickly there was the radiance of a pharos blazing there like
a building on fire.
The watchers did not budge: no sound now, nor sight but the light.
But suddenly the Prince clutched Pilcher’s sleeve on his right,
hissing: “Pilcher! a girl!—capture at any price! if not, shoot. Follow,
you five!”—and he was flying, stooping, into the sea.
For he had spied a black object drop down out of the air a little north
and inland of the blaze: and as against the chance of grabbing both
Oyone and the air-boat in one beautiful swoop danger was nothing.
He, then, with Pilcher and five, ran north through the sea-surf past
the bathing-machines, until they had the fire behind them, then inland,
with the fire on their right, flying through hollows, dropping on
hill-tops, until they were over against the blaze, and now saw south of
them a crowd of about fifty yellow men in khaki.
At the same time they themselves were spied in the off-shine of the
fire by a hill-top sentry, who cried out and fired; and in a second a
volley flew from the group round the conflagration—without effect, the
seven adventurers being three hundred yards off, and like ghosts to the
firers with glare in their eyes.
The seven, then, successfully ran the blockade of the forty yards of
valley across the hollow; and instantly as they attained the next
hill-top the Prince’s eyes distinctly descried Oyone, hardly more than
twenty yards ahead, labouring frantically away up the next slope,
apparently to get back to the air-boat.
And between her and him, two hundred yards south, stood a group of
five—four small, one tall, whom the Prince’s eyes divined to be Li Ku
Yu.
These five must have been going to meet Oyone coming, when she had
taken fright at the firing, and had fled back to get herself and the
boat safe into the air again.
The five Orientals instantly dropped behind _cagnards_ (low rocks in
sandy scrub) to fire at the seven adventurers, while six of the seven
dropped behind _cagnards_ to engage the five, Pilcher alone of the
seven pitching onward like a wind to catch Oyone, who saw and flew:
and twice in that flight he fired, twice he cast the lasso, four times
he missed her: for though her quarrelling frocks were quite nigh him,
things were very indistinct, the light of the fire in the dune being
quite local, that dune being big; and she vanished from him beyond the
next hill-top.
But even as she vanished, he had the ray of an electric torch on her,
and was casting again.
This last cast caused him to fall flat forward: but the tug told that
he had got something; an agony of angry cat-screams told; and soon he
was over her, his handkerchief down her throat, he staring about for
the air-boat.
To his amazement, he could see no air-boat; but he had _her_, and
within six ticks was off northward with her kickings.
Meantime, the fifty or so by the fire were flying uphill to the support
of their fighting five; but almost before they were on the hill-top,
they were attacked in the rear by the Prince’s reserve who had spurted
inland; and as the attackers were in darkness, the attacked lit up,
some twenty of the latter instantly fell.
But now a terrible sound fell upon the British ears—guns going off over
the sea: and they knew that their yacht was done for.
Li Ku Yu, in fact, had posted a ship without lights a little north of
Rosendaël with the object of destroying the Prince’s ship and chance of
escape; and this ship, on hearing the row of rifles inland, had gone
to scout for and had easily found the Prince’s ship, though unlit. The
Prince’s ship, indeed, had had a six-pounder mounted in her, but was
powerless against guns of so big-mouthed a sound as those now pounding
her.
Hearing which, the Prince wriggled snakelike on his belly from his
_cagnard_ to go to see to the air-boat—the rifle-fire pattering rapidly
as pattering typewriters at present, the two main-bodies pattering, and
the two small parties pattering, too: so he got to the next hill-top
inland unnoticed, down the next hollow, looked about, flew about—no
air-boat.
Yet he was certain that this was about the spot of its descent....
He ran on to the next hollow—to the next—still no sign of it; and no
bush anywhere that could half hide it; nor could he think that Oyone
had escaped in it, for, having heard her screams, he believed her
captured by Pilcher.
He could not conceive how the air-boat had disappeared.
And as he ran about wondering, he heard pantings and feet in the next
hollow seaward, and creeping up to peep, saw some ten yellow men
running every way, evidently seeking the air-boat (despatched by Li Ku
Yu to guard her), and apparently as aghast as he was at her vanishing.
Some of them presently ran up toward his hill-top to search further; he
then spurted serpentlike away on the belly, first northward and then
seaward; and, in passing behind his firing five, butted upon Pilcher,
who was running from the sea to rejoin the five.
“You, Pilcher? Got the girl?” leapt from the Prince’s lips.
“Gagged and tied up in one of the bathing-machines!”
“Good work, Pilcher”—the Prince’s under-look dwelt on him—“but the
air-boat, man!”
“Couldn’t see it anywhere!”
“Now, how odd. Well, yacht’s gone, I expect. Am running to see if
anything of boats left. Kill or catch Li Ku, if you love me”—he was
gone.
Whereupon Pilcher, instead of running southward to rejoin the firing
five, ran on inland, and then southward, and then seaward, so as to get
behind the Li Ku Yu group, keeping afar in the dark, catching sights,
meantime, of horses which had been galloped to the group round Li Ku,
who doubtless found the spot hot for such as he. Anyway, before Pilcher
could get to their back, Li Ku and four were a-horse, two falling as
they mounted, three drumming the ground south-eastward.
These three passed within twenty yards of Pilcher, who hissed to
himself: “The middle’s Li Ku—_no missing!_”
Another second and the lasso sang snake-songs in air, darting, and had
a pigtail within its grip, dragging a man from his saddle; but like
a magical Jack-in-the-box the man was back sitting within two ticks,
as if sprung back by springs, so that he could not have let go his
reins an instant; upon which Pilcher, seeing with astonishment the
lasso coming back, shot sharp three bangs: but the horsemen vanished,
apparently unharmed. He found the noose cut smooth as by a razor; and
said bitterly to himself: “Oh, I wanted to be smart: I ought to have
shot from the first.”
Meantime, Li Ku Yu, in fleeing, must have felt quite at ease as to the
Prince’s ultimate capture, since the ship appointed to destroy the
Prince’s ship was now lying, visibly to the night-glass, at anchor in
the offing; and, as to the two boats, the Prince could see no trace of
them but some wreckage resting on the sea.
Decision had now to be quick: so quickly he shrilled a whistle of
recall, and collecting his men behind the bathing-machines, which
the shooting Chinese were chary of approaching, he spoke a few
phrases, even as he stripped naked, and in two minutes they had widely
scattered, were crawling over the sands, were in the water, swimming
with revolvers, knives, hatchets in hand and teeth, far scattered and
under-water, forty-three of them—sixteen from the sunk yacht, three
boatmen, and the twenty-seven fighters, less three disappeared.
The ship, one of those Havre-Antwerp mail-boats, lay with a show
of rouge over her funnels about three hundred yards south of the
bathing-machines, a hundred yards out: and darkly, soundlessly, by
roundabout routes, the swimmers drew near her.
Not a sound now on her: no sound but the shore Chinese still shooting
from the dunes toward the bathing-machines, where no one was but Oyone.
And now the Prince and Pilcher are travelling up the anchor-chain like
white night-flies; others are arriving fast; and that pigtail gazing
over the port bow toward the dunes is drawing his last breaths here
below, for suddenly a grain of sea-salt is lodged in his brain from a
hatchet which chops it, as he silently dies; and the same with a little
mate pacing the bridge, and a watch-keeper leaning under a dinghy—they
die quite silently as the shade of the angel of death steals upon the
sleeping and the wakeful alike through the ship; only once, far down,
one echo like a gun-shot sounds; then three stokers surrender; and the
ship is English.
Now a boat was rowed shoreward for the clothes in the bathing-machines,
and for Oyone; the bodies were dropped into the sea; the dunes were
sprinkled for fun with shell from two four-inch guns; steam hurriedly
made; and the ship steered for English land, not wishing to have a
Japanese battleship on her back.
“But the air-boat!” said the Prince half-way home. “_Where_ was it?
_Ask_, Pilcher—see what she says.”
So Pilcher, grinning, went down to Oyone lying on crimson
cabin-cushions, the Prince hanging behind at the door; and said
Pilcher: “You may just as well mention what became of the air-boat.”
She lay with her face buried; the spasmodic shivering of the ship at
the screws shook her body; but she lifted herself a little to utter
with a sullen sideward eye: “It is in one of those valleys not far from
the fire. If you go back, you will find it.”
“No, we won’t go back,” remarked Pilcher.
Suddenly she was upright like a squirrel twisting, with: “Is this Your
Royal Highness’s promise to an unfortunate girl?”
The Prince had uttered not one syllable to her, nor answered now, but a
lavish blush bathed his face.