It did not occur to either Tom or Bert Smallways that this remarkable
aerial performance of Mr. Butteridge was likely to affect either of
their lives in any special manner, that it would in any way single them
out from the millions about them; and when they had witnessed it from
the crest of Bun Hill and seen the fly-like mechanism, its rotating
planes a golden haze in the sunset, sink humming to the harbour of its
shed again, they turned back towards the sunken green-grocery beneath
the great iron standard of the London to Brighton mono-rail, and their
minds reverted to the discussion that had engaged them before Mr.
Butteridge's triumph had come in sight out of the London haze.
It was a difficult and unsuccessful discussions. They had to carry it
on in shouts because of the moaning and roaring of the gyroscopic
motor-cars that traversed the High Street, and in its nature it was
contentious and private. The Grubb business was in difficulties, and
Grubb in a moment of financial eloquence had given a half-share in it
to Bert, whose relations with his employer had been for some time
unsalaried and pallish and informal.
Bert was trying to impress Tom with the idea that the reconstructed
Grubb & Smallways offered unprecedented and unparalleled opportunities
to the judicious small investor. It was coming home to Bert, as though
it were an entirely new fact, that Tom was singularly impervious to
ideas. In the end he put the financial issues on one side, and, making
the thing entirely a matter of fraternal affection, succeeded in
borrowing a sovereign on the security of his word of honour.
The firm of Grubb & Smallways, formerly Grubb, had indeed been
singularly unlucky in the last year or so. For many years the business
had struggled along with a flavour of romantic insecurity in a small,
dissolute-looking shop in the High Street, adorned with brilliantly
coloured advertisements of cycles, a display of bells, trouser-clips,
oil-cans, pump-clips, frame-cases, wallets, and other accessories, and
the announcement of “Bicycles on Hire,” “Repairs,” “Free inflation,”
“Petrol,” and similar attractions. They were agents for several obscure
makes of bicycle,--two samples constituted the stock,--and occasionally
they effected a sale; they also repaired punctures and did their
best--though luck was not always on their side--with any other repairing
that was brought to them. They handled a line of cheap gramophones, and
did a little with musical boxes.
The staple of their business was, however, the letting of bicycles on
hire. It was a singular trade, obeying no known commercial or economic
principles--indeed, no principles. There was a stock of ladies' and
gentlemen's bicycles in a state of disrepair that passes description,
and these, the hiring stock, were let to unexacting and reckless people,
inexpert in the things of this world, at a nominal rate of one shilling
for the first hour and sixpence per hour afterwards. But really there
were no fixed prices, and insistent boys could get bicycles and the
thrill of danger for an hour for so low a sum as threepence, provided
they could convince Grubb that that was all they had. The saddle and
handle-bar were then sketchily adjusted by Grubb, a deposit exacted,
except in the case of familiar boys, the machine lubricated, and the
adventurer started upon his career. Usually he or she came back, but at
times, when the accident was serious, Bert or Grubb had to go out and
fetch the machine home. Hire was always charged up to the hour of return
to the shop and deducted from the deposit. It was rare that a bicycle
started out from their hands in a state of pedantic efficiency. Romantic
possibilities of accident lurked in the worn thread of the screw that
adjusted the saddle, in the precarious pedals, in the loose-knit chain,
in the handle-bars, above all in the brakes and tyres. Tappings and
clankings and strange rhythmic creakings awoke as the intrepid hirer
pedalled out into the country. Then perhaps the bell would jam or a
brake fail to act on a hill; or the seat-pillar would get loose, and the
saddle drop three or four inches with a disconcerting bump; or the loose
and rattling chain would jump the cogs of the chain-wheel as the machine
ran downhill, and so bring the mechanism to an abrupt and disastrous
stop without at the same time arresting the forward momentum of the
rider; or a tyre would bang, or sigh quietly, and give up the struggle
for efficiency.
When the hirer returned, a heated pedestrian, Grubb would ignore all
verbal complaints, and examine the machine gravely.
“This ain't 'ad fair usage,” he used to begin.
He became a mild embodiment of the spirit of reason. “You can't expect a
bicycle to take you up in its arms and carry you,” he used to say. “You
got to show intelligence. After all--it's machinery.”
Sometimes the process of liquidating the consequent claims bordered on
violence. It was always a very rhetorical and often a trying affair, but
in these progressive times you have to make a noise to get a living. It
was often hard work, but nevertheless this hiring was a fairly steady
source of profit, until one day all the panes in the window and door
were broken and the stock on sale in the window greatly damaged and
disordered by two over-critical hirers with no sense of rhetorical
irrelevance. They were big, coarse stokers from Gravesend. One was
annoyed because his left pedal had come off, and the other because his
tyre had become deflated, small and indeed negligible accidents by Bun
Hill standards, due entirely to the ungentle handling of the delicate
machines entrusted to them--and they failed to see clearly how they put
themselves in the wrong by this method of argument. It is a poor way of
convincing a man that he has let you a defective machine to throw his
foot-pump about his shop, and take his stock of gongs outside in order
to return them through the window-panes. It carried no real conviction
to the minds of either Grubb or Bert; it only irritated and vexed them.
One quarrel makes many, and this unpleasantness led to a violent dispute
between Grubb and the landlord upon the moral aspects of and legal
responsibility for the consequent re-glazing. In the end Grubb and
Smallways were put to the expense of a strategic nocturnal removal to
another position.
It was a position they had long considered. It was a small, shed-like
shop with a plate-glass window and one room behind, just at the sharp
bend in the road at the bottom of Bun Hill; and here they struggled
along bravely, in spite of persistent annoyance from their former
landlord, hoping for certain eventualities the peculiar situation of the
shop seemed to promise. Here, too, they were doomed to disappointment.
The High Road from London to Brighton that ran through Bun Hill was like
the British Empire or the British Constitution--a thing that had grown
to its present importance. Unlike any other roads in Europe the British
high roads have never been subjected to any organised attempts to
grade or straighten them out, and to that no doubt their peculiar
picturesqueness is to be ascribed. The old Bun Hill High Street drops at
its end for perhaps eighty or a hundred feet of descent at an angle
of one in five, turns at right angles to the left, runs in a curve for
about thirty yards to a brick bridge over the dry ditch that had once
been the Otterbourne, and then bends sharply to the right again round
a dense clump of trees and goes on, a simple, straightforward, peaceful
high road. There had been one or two horse-and-van and bicycle accidents
in the place before the shop Bert and Grubb took was built, and, to be
frank, it was the probability of others that attracted them to it.
Its possibilities had come to them first with a humorous flavour.
“Here's one of the places where a chap might get a living by keeping
hens,” said Grubb.
“You can't get a living by keeping hens,” said Bert.
“You'd keep the hen and have it spatch-cocked,” said Grubb. “The motor
chaps would pay for it.”
When they really came to take the place they remembered this
conversation. Hens, however, were out of the question; there was no
place for a run unless they had it in the shop. It would have been
obviously out of place there. The shop was much more modern than their
former one, and had a plate-glass front. “Sooner or later,” said Bert,
“we shall get a motor-car through this.”
“That's all right,” said Grubb. “Compensation. I don't mind when that
motor-car comes along. I don't mind even if it gives me a shock to the
system.”
“And meanwhile,” said Bert, with great artfulness, “I'm going to buy
myself a dog.”
He did. He bought three in succession. He surprised the people at the
Dogs' Home in Battersea by demanding a deaf retriever, and rejecting
every candidate that pricked up its ears. “I want a good, deaf,
slow-moving dog,” he said. “A dog that doesn't put himself out for
things.”
They displayed inconvenient curiosity; they declared a great scarcity of
deaf dogs.
“You see,” they said, “dogs aren't deaf.”
“Mine's got to be,” said Bert. “I've HAD dogs that aren't deaf. All I
want. It's like this, you see--I sell gramophones. Naturally I got to
make 'em talk and tootle a bit to show 'em orf. Well, a dog that isn't
deaf doesn't like it--gets excited, smells round, barks, growls. That
upsets the customer. See? Then a dog that has his hearing fancies
things. Makes burglars out of passing tramps. Wants to fight every motor
that makes a whizz. All very well if you want livening up, but our place
is lively enough. I don't want a dog of that sort. I want a quiet dog.”
In the end he got three in succession, but none of them turned out well.
The first strayed off into the infinite, heeding no appeals; the second
was killed in the night by a fruit motor-waggon which fled before Grubb
could get down; the third got itself entangled in the front wheel of a
passing cyclist, who came through the plate glass, and proved to be an
actor out of work and an undischarged bankrupt. He demanded compensation
for some fancied injury, would hear nothing of the valuable dog he had
killed or the window he had broken, obliged Grubb by sheer physical
obduracy to straighten his buckled front wheel, and pestered the
struggling firm with a series of inhumanly worded solicitor's letters.
Grubb answered them--stingingly, and put himself, Bert thought, in the
wrong.
Affairs got more and more exasperating and strained under these
pressures. The window was boarded up, and an unpleasant altercation
about their delay in repairing it with the new landlord, a Bun Hill
butcher--and a loud, bellowing, unreasonable person at that--served to
remind them of their unsettled troubles with the old. Things were at
this pitch when Bert bethought himself of creating a sort of debenture
capital in the business for the benefit of Tom. But, as I have said,
Tom had no enterprise in his composition. His idea of investment was the
stocking; he bribed his brother not to keep the offer open.
And then ill-luck made its last lunge at their crumbling business and
brought it to the ground.
2
It is a poor heart that never rejoices, and Whitsuntide had an air of
coming as an agreeable break in the business complications of Grubb &
Smallways. Encouraged by the practical outcome of Bert's negotiations
with his brother, and by the fact that half the hiring-stock was
out from Saturday to Monday, they decided to ignore the residuum of
hiring-trade on Sunday and devote that day to much-needed relaxation and
refreshment--to have, in fact, an unstinted good time, a beano on Whit
Sunday and return invigorated to grapple with their difficulties and
the Bank Holiday repairs on the Monday. No good thing was ever done
by exhausted and dispirited men. It happened that they had made the
acquaintance of two young ladies in employment in Clapham, Miss Flossie
Bright and Miss Edna Bunthorne, and it was resolved therefore to make
a cheerful little cyclist party of four into the heart of Kent, and to
picnic and spend an indolent afternoon and evening among the trees and
bracken between Ashford and Maidstone.
Miss Bright could ride a bicycle, and a machine was found for her, not
among the hiring stock, but specially, in the sample held for sale. Miss
Bunthorne, whom Bert particularly affected, could not ride, and so with
some difficulty he hired a basket-work trailer from the big business of
Wray's in the Clapham Road.
To see our young men, brightly dressed and cigarettes alight, wheeling
off to the rendezvous, Grubb guiding the lady's machine beside him with
one skilful hand and Bert teuf-teuffing steadily, was to realise how
pluck may triumph even over insolvency. Their landlord, the butcher,
said, “Gurr,” as they passed, and shouted, “Go it!” in a loud, savage
tone to their receding backs.
Much they cared!
The weather was fine, and though they were on their way southward before
nine o'clock, there was already a great multitude of holiday people
abroad upon the roads. There were quantities of young men and women on
bicycles and motor-bicycles, and a majority of gyroscopic motor-cars
running bicycle-fashion on two wheels, mingled with old-fashioned
four-wheeled traffic. Bank Holiday times always bring out old
stored-away vehicles and odd people; one saw tricars and electric
broughams and dilapidated old racing motors with huge pneumatic tyres.
Once our holiday-makers saw a horse and cart, and once a youth riding a
black horse amidst the badinage of the passersby. And there were several
navigable gas air-ships, not to mention balloons, in the air. It was
all immensely interesting and refreshing after the dark anxieties of
the shop. Edna wore a brown straw hat with poppies, that suited her
admirably, and sat in the trailer like a queen, and the eight-year-old
motor-bicycle ran like a thing of yesterday.
Little it seemed to matter to Mr. Bert Smallways that a newspaper
placard proclaimed:-- --------------------------------------- GERMANY
DENOUNCES THE MONROE DOCTRINE.
AMBIGUOUS ATTITUDE OF JAPAN.
WHAT WILL BRITAIN DO? IS IT WAR?---------------------------------------
This sort of thing was alvays going on, and on holidays one disregarded
it as a matter of course. Week-days, in the slack time after the midday
meal, then perhaps one might worry about the Empire and international
politics; but not on a sunny Sunday, with a pretty girl trailing behind
one, and envious cyclists trying to race you. Nor did our young people
attach any great importance to the flitting suggestions of military
activity they glimpsed ever and again. Near Maidstone they came on
a string of eleven motor-guns of peculiar construction halted by the
roadside, with a number of businesslike engineers grouped about them
watching through field-glasses some sort of entrenchment that was going
on near the crest of the downs. It signified nothing to Bert.
“What's up?” said Edna.
“Oh!--manoeuvres,” said Bert.
“Oh! I thought they did them at Easter,” said Edna, and troubled no
more.
The last great British war, the Boer war, was over and forgotten, and
the public had lost the fashion of expert military criticism.
Our four young people picnicked cheerfully, and were happy in the manner
of a happiness that was an ancient mode in Nineveh. Eyes were bright,
Grubb was funny and almost witty, and Bert achieved epigrams; the
hedges were full of honeysuckle and dog-roses; in the woods the distant
toot-toot-toot of the traffic on the dust-hazy high road might have been
no more than the horns of elf-land. They laughed and gossiped and picked
flowers and made love and talked, and the girls smoked cigarettes. Also
they scuffled playfully. Among other things they talked aeronautics,
and how they would come for a picnic together in Bert's flying-machine
before ten years were out. The world seemed full of amusing
possibilities that afternoon. They wondered what their
great-grandparents would have thought of aeronautics. In the evening,
about seven, the party turned homeward, expecting no disaster, and it
was only on the crest of the downs between Wrotham and Kingsdown that
disaster came.
They had come up the hill in the twilight; Bert was anxious to get as
far as possible before he lit--or attempted to light, for the issue
was a doubtful one--his lamps, and they had scorched past a number of
cyclists, and by a four-wheeled motor-car of the old style lamed by a
deflated tyre. Some dust had penetrated Bert's horn, and the result was
a curious, amusing, wheezing sound had got into his “honk, honk.” For
the sake of merriment and glory he was making this sound as much as
possible, and Edna was in fits of laughter in the trailer. They made a
sort of rushing cheerfulness along the road that affected their fellow
travellers variously, according to their temperaments. She did notice a
good lot of bluish, evil-smelling smoke coming from about the
bearings between his feet, but she thought this was one of the natural
concomitants of motor-traction, and troubled no more about it, until
abruptly it burst into a little yellow-tipped flame.
“Bert!” she screamed.
But Bert had put on the brakes with such suddenness that she found
herself involved with his leg as he dismounted. She got to the side of
the road and hastily readjusted her hat, which had suffered.
“Gaw!” said Bert.
He stood for some fatal seconds watching the petrol drip and catch, and
the flame, which was now beginning to smell of enamel as well as oil,
spread and grew. His chief idea was the sorrowful one that he had not
sold the machine second-hand a year ago, and that he ought to have done
so--a good idea in its way, but not immediately helpful. He turned upon
Edna sharply. “Get a lot of wet sand,” he said. Then he wheeled the
machine a little towards the side of the roadway, and laid it down and
looked about for a supply of wet sand. The flames received this as a
helpful attention, and made the most of it. They seemed to brighten and
the twilight to deepen about them. The road was a flinty road in the
chalk country, and ill-provided with sand.
Edna accosted a short, fat cyclist. “We want wet sand,” she said, and
added, “our motor's on fire.” The short, fat cyclist stared blankly for
a moment, then with a helpful cry began to scrabble in the road-grit.
Whereupon Bert and Edna also scrabbled in the road-grit. Other cyclists
arrived, dismounted and stood about, and their flame-lit faces expressed
satisfaction, interest, curiosity. “Wet sand,” said the short, fat man,
scrabbling terribly--“wet sand.” One joined him. They threw hard-earned
handfuls of road-grit upon the flames, which accepted them with
enthusiasm.
Grubb arrived, riding hard. He was shouting something. He sprang off
and threw his bicycle into the hedge. “Don't throw water on it!” he
said--“don't throw water on it!” He displayed commanding presence of
mind. He became captain of the occasion. Others were glad to repeat the
things he said and imitate his actions.
“Don't throw water on it!” they cried. Also there was no water.
“Beat it out, you fools!” he said.
He seized a rug from the trailer (it was an Austrian blanket, and
Bert's winter coverlet) and began to beat at the burning petrol. For a
wonderful minute he seemed to succeed. But he scattered burning pools
of petrol on the road, and others, fired by his enthusiasm, imitated his
action. Bert caught up a trailer-cushion and began to beat; there was
another cushion and a table-cloth, and these also were seized. A young
hero pulled off his jacket and joined the beating. For a moment there
was less talking than hard breathing, and a tremendous flapping.
Flossie, arriving on the outskirts of the crowd, cried, “Oh, my God!”
and burst loudly into tears. “Help!” she said, and “Fire!”
The lame motor-car arrived, and stopped in consternation. A tall,
goggled, grey-haired man who was driving inquired with an Oxford
intonation and a clear, careful enunciation, “Can WE help at all?”
It became manifest that the rug, the table-cloth, the cushions, the
jacket, were getting smeared with petrol and burning. The soul seemed
to go out of the cushion Bert was swaying, and the air was full of
feathers, like a snowstorm in the still twilight.
Bert had got very dusty and sweaty and strenuous. It seemed to him his
weapon had been wrested from him at the moment of victory. The fire lay
like a dying thing, close to the ground and wicked; it gave a leap of
anguish at every whack of the beaters. But now Grubb had gone off to
stamp out the burning blanket; the others were lacking just at the
moment of victory. One had dropped the cushion and was running to the
motor-car. “'ERE!” cried Bert; “keep on!”
He flung the deflated burning rags of cushion aside, whipped off his
jacket and sprang at the flames with a shout. He stamped into the ruin
until flames ran up his boots. Edna saw him, a red-lit hero, and thought
it was good to be a man.
A bystander was hit by a hot halfpenny flying out of the air. Then Bert
thought of the papers in his pockets, and staggered back, trying to
extinguish his burning jacket--checked, repulsed, dismayed.
Edna was struck by the benevolent appearance of an elderly spectator in
a silk hat and Sabbatical garments. “Oh!” she cried to him. “Help this
young man! How can you stand and see it?”
A cry of “The tarpaulin!” arose.
An earnest-looking man in a very light grey cycling-suit had suddenly
appeared at the side of the lame motor-car and addressed the owner.
“Have you a tarpaulin?” he said.
“Yes,” said the gentlemanly man. “Yes. We've got a tarpaulin.”
“That's it,” said the earnest-looking man, suddenly shouting. “Let's
have it, quick!”
The gentlemanly man, with feeble and deprecatory gestures, and in the
manner of a hypnotised person, produced an excellent large tarpaulin.
“Here!” cried the earnest-looking man to Grubb. “Ketch holt!”
Then everybody realised that a new method was to be tried. A number of
willing hands seized upon the Oxford gentleman's tarpaulin. The others
stood away with approving noises. The tarpaulin was held over the
burning bicycle like a canopy, and then smothered down upon it.
“We ought to have done this before,” panted Grubb.
There was a moment of triumph. The flames vanished. Every one who could
contrive to do so touched the edge of the tarpaulin. Bert held down
a corner with two hands and a foot. The tarpaulin, bulged up in the
centre, seemed to be suppressing triumphant exultation. Then its
self-approval became too much for it; it burst into a bright red smile
in the centre. It was exactly like the opening of a mouth. It laughed
with a gust of flames. They were reflected redly in the observant
goggles of the gentleman who owned the tarpaulin. Everybody recoiled.
“Save the trailer!” cried some one, and that was the last round in
the battle. But the trailer could not be detached; its wicker-work had
caught, and it was the last thing to burn. A sort of hush fell upon
the gathering. The petrol burnt low, the wicker-work trailer banged
and crackled. The crowd divided itself into an outer circle of critics,
advisers, and secondary characters, who had played undistinguished parts
or no parts at all in the affair, and a central group of heated
and distressed principals. A young man with an inquiring mind and a
considerable knowledge of motor-bicycles fixed on to Grubb and wanted
to argue that the thing could not have happened. Grubb wass short and
inattentive with him, and the young man withdrew to the back of the
crowd, and there told the benevolent old gentleman in the silk hat
that people who went out with machines they didn't understand had only
themselves to blame if things went wrong.
The old gentleman let him talk for some time, and then remarked, in a
tone of rapturous enjoyment: “Stone deaf,” and added, “Nasty things.”
A rosy-faced man in a straw hat claimed attention. “I DID save the front
wheel,” he said; “you'd have had that tyre catch, too, if I hadn't kept
turning it round.” It became manifest that this was so. The front wheel
had retained its tyre, was intact, was still rotating slowly among the
blackened and twisted ruins of the rest of the machine. It had something
of that air of conscious virtue, of unimpeachable respectability, that
distinguishes a rent collector in a low neighbourhood. “That wheel's
worth a pound,” said the rosy-faced man, making a song of it. “I kep'
turning it round.”
Newcomers kept arriving from the south with the question, “What's up?”
until it got on Grubb's nerves. Londonward the crowd was constantly
losing people; they would mount their various wheels with the satisfied
manner of spectators who have had the best. Their voices would recede
into the twilight; one would hear a laugh at the memory of this
particularly salient incident or that.
“I'm afraid,” said the gentleman of the motor-car, “my tarpaulin's a bit
done for.”
Grubb admitted that the owner was the best judge of that.
“Nothin, else I can do for you?” said the gentleman of the motor-car, it
may be with a suspicion of irony.
Bert was roused to action. “Look here,” he said. “There's my young lady.
If she ain't 'ome by ten they lock her out. See? Well, all my money was
in my jacket pocket, and it's all mixed up with the burnt stuff, and
that's too 'ot to touch. Is Clapham out of your way?”
“All in the day's work,” said the gentleman with the motor-car, and
turned to Edna. “Very pleased indeed,” he said, “if you'll come with us.
We're late for dinner as it is, so it won't make much difference for us
to go home by way of Clapham. We've got to get to Surbiton, anyhow. I'm
afraid you'll find us a little slow.”
“But what's Bert going to do?” said Edna.
“I don't know that we can accommodate Bert,” said the motor-car
gentleman, “though we're tremendously anxious to oblige.”
“You couldn't take the whole lot?” said Bert, waving his hand at the
deboshed and blackened ruins on the ground.
“I'm awfully afraid I can't,” said the Oxford man. “Awfully sorry, you
know.”
“Then I'll have to stick 'ere for a bit,” said Bert. “I got to see the
thing through. You go on, Edna.”
“Don't like leavin' you, Bert.”
“You can't 'elp it, Edna.”...
The last Edna saw of Bert was his figure, in charred and blackened
shirtsleeves, standing in the dusk. He was musing deeply by the mixed
ironwork and ashes of his vanished motor-bicycle, a melancholy figure.
His retinue of spectators had shrunk now to half a dozen figures.
Flossie and Grubb were preparing to follow her desertion.
“Cheer up, old Bert!” cried Edna, with artificial cheerfulness. “So
long.”
“So long, Edna,” said Bert.
“See you to-morrer.”
“See you to-morrer,” said Bert, though he was destined, as a matter of
fact, to see much of the habitable globe before he saw her again.
Bert began to light matches from a borrowed boxful, and search for a
half-crown that still eluded him among the charred remains.
His face was grave and melancholy.
“I WISH that 'adn't 'appened,” said Flossie, riding on with Grubb....
And at last Bert was left almost alone, a sad, blackened Promethean
figure, cursed by the gift of fire. He had entertained vague ideas of
hiring a cart, of achieving miraculous repairs, of still snatching some
residual value from his one chief possession. Now, in the darkening
night, he perceived the vanity of such intentions. Truth came to him
bleakly, and laid her chill conviction upon him. He took hold of the
handle-bar, stood the thing up, tried to push it forward. The tyreless
hind-wheel was jammed hopelessly, even as he feared. For a minute or so
he stood upholding his machine, a motionless despair. Then with a great
effort he thrust the ruins from him into the ditch, kicked at it once,
regarded it for a moment, and turned his face resolutely Londonward.
He did not once look back.
“That's the end of THAT game!” said Bert. “No more teuf-teuf-teuf for
Bert Smallways for a year or two. Good-bye 'olidays!... Oh! I ought to
'ave sold the blasted thing when I had a chance three years ago.”
3
The next morning found the firm of Grubb & Smallways in a state
of profound despondency. It seemed a small matter to them that the
newspaper and cigarette shop opposite displayed such placards as this:--
--------------------------------------- REPORTED AMERICAN ULTIMATUM.
BRITAIN MUST FIGHT.
OUR INFATUATED WAR OFFICE STILL
REFUSES TO LISTEN TO MR. BUTTERIDGE.
GREAT MONO-RAIL DISASTER AT
TIMBUCTOO.---------------------------------------
or this:-- --------------------------------------- WAR A QUESTION OF
HOURS.
NEW YORK CALM.
EXCITEMENT IN BERLIN.---------------------------------------
or again:-- --------------------------------------- WASHINGTON STILL
SILENT.
WHAT WILL PARIS DO?
THE PANIC ON THE BOURSE.
THE KING'S GARDEN PARTY TO THE MASKED TWAREGS.
MR. BUTTERIDGE TAKES AN OFFER.
LATEST BETTING FROM TEHERAN.---------------------------------------
or this:-- --------------------------------------- WILL AMERICA FIGHT?
ANTI-GERMAN RIOT IN BAGDAD.
THE MUNICIPAL SCANDALS AT DAMASCUS.
MR. BUTTERIDGE'S INVENTION FOR
AMERICA.---------------------------------------
Bert stared at these over the card of pump-clips in the pane in the
door with unseeing eyes. He wore a blackened flannel shirt, and the
jacketless ruins of the holiday suit of yesterday. The boarded-up shop
was dark and depressing beyond words, the few scandalous hiring machines
had never looked so hopelessly disreputable. He thought of their fellows
who were “out,” and of the approaching disputations of the afternoon. He
thought of their new landlord, and of their old landlord, and of bills
and claims. Life presented itself for the first time as a hopeless fight
against fate....
“Grubb, o' man,” he said, distilling the quintessence, “I'm fair sick of
this shop.”
“So'm I,” said Grubb.
“I'm out of conceit with it. I don't seem to care ever to speak to a
customer again.”
“There's that trailer,” said Grubb, after a pause.
“Blow the trailer!” said Bert. “Anyhow, I didn't leave a deposit on it.
I didn't do that. Still--”
He turned round on his friend. “Look 'ere,” he said, “we aren't gettin'
on here. We been losing money hand over fist. We got things tied up in
fifty knots.”
“What can we do?” said Grubb.
“Clear out. Sell what we can for what it will fetch, and quit. See?
It's no good 'anging on to a losing concern. No sort of good. Jest
foolishness.”
“That's all right,” said Grubb--“that's all right; but it ain't your
capital been sunk in it.”
“No need for us to sink after our capital,” said Bert, ignoring the
point.
“I'm not going to be held responsible for that trailer, anyhow. That
ain't my affair.”
“Nobody arst you to make it your affair. If you like to stick on here,
well and good. I'm quitting. I'll see Bank Holiday through, and then I'm
O-R-P-H. See?”
“Leavin' me?”
“Leavin' you. If you must be left.”
Grubb looked round the shop. It certainly had become distasteful. Once
upon a time it had been bright with hope and new beginnings and stock
and the prospect of credit. Now--now it was failure and dust. Very
likely the landlord would be round presently to go on with the row about
the window.... “Where d'you think of going, Bert?” Grubb asked.
Bert turned round and regarded him. “I thought it out as I was walking
'ome, and in bed. I couldn't sleep a wink.”
“What did you think out?”
“Plans.”
“What plans?”
“Oh! You're for stickin, here.”
“Not if anything better was to offer.”
“It's only an ideer,” said Bert.
“You made the girls laugh yestiday, that song you sang.”
“Seems a long time ago now,” said Grubb.
“And old Edna nearly cried--over that bit of mine.”
“She got a fly in her eye,” said Grubb; “I saw it. But what's this got
to do with your plan?”
“No end,” said Bert.
“'Ow?”
“Don't you see?”
“Not singing in the streets?”
“Streets! No fear! But 'ow about the Tour of the Waterin' Places of
England, Grubb? Singing! Young men of family doing it for a lark? You
ain't got a bad voice, you know, and mine's all right. I never see a
chap singing on the beach yet that I couldn't 'ave sung into a cocked
hat. And we both know how to put on the toff a bit. Eh? Well, that's my
ideer. Me and you, Grubb, with a refined song and a breakdown. Like we
was doing for foolery yestiday. That was what put it into my 'ead. Easy
make up a programme--easy. Six choice items, and one or two for encores
and patter. I'm all right for the patter anyhow.”
Grubb remained regarding his darkened and disheartening shop; he thought
of his former landlord and his present landlord, and of the general
disgustingness of business in an age which re-echoes to The Bitter Cry
of the Middle Class; and then it seemed to him that afar off he heard
the twankle, twankle of a banjo, and the voice of a stranded siren
singing. He had a sense of hot sunshine upon sand, of the children of at
least transiently opulent holiday makers in a circle round about him, of
the whisper, “They are really gentlemen,” and then dollop, dollop came
the coppers in the hat. Sometimes even silver. It was all income; no
outgoings, no bills. “I'm on, Bert,” he said.
“Right O!” said Bert, and, “Now we shan't be long.”
“We needn't start without capital neither,” said Grubb. “If we take the
best of these machines up to the Bicycle Mart in Finsbury we'd raise six
or seven pounds on 'em. We could easy do that to-morrow before anybody
much was about....”
“Nice to think of old Suet-and-Bones coming round to make his usual row
with us, and finding a card up 'Closed for Repairs.'”
“We'll do that,” said Grubb with zest--“we'll do that. And we'll put
up another notice, and jest arst all inquirers to go round to 'im and
inquire. See? Then they'll know all about us.”
Before the day was out the whole enterprise was planned. They decided at
first that they would call themselves the Naval Mr. O's, a plagiarism,
and not perhaps a very good one, from the title of the well-known troupe
of “Scarlet Mr. E's,” and Bert rather clung to the idea of a uniform of
bright blue serge, with a lot of gold lace and cord and ornamentation,
rather like a naval officer's, but more so. But that had to be abandoned
as impracticable, it would have taken too much time and money to
prepare. They perceived they must wear some cheaper and more readily
prepared costume, and Grubb fell back on white dominoes. They
entertained the notion for a time of selecting the two worst machines
from the hiring-stock, painting them over with crimson enamel paint,
replacing the bells by the loudest sort of motor-horn, and doing a ride
about to begin and end the entertainment. They doubted the advisability
of this step.
“There's people in the world,” said Bert, “who wouldn't recognise us,
who'd know them bicycles again like a shot, and we don't want to go on
with no old stories. We want a fresh start.”
“I do,” said Grubb, “badly.”
“We want to forget things--and cut all these rotten old worries. They
ain't doin' us good.”
Nevertheless, they decided to take the risk of these bicycles, and they
decided their costumes should be brown stockings and sandals, and cheap
unbleached sheets with a hole cut in the middle, and wigs and beards of
tow. The rest their normal selves! “The Desert Dervishes,” they would
call themselves, and their chief songs would be those popular ditties,
“In my Trailer,” and “What Price Hair-pins Now?”
They decided to begin with small seaside places, and gradually, as they
gained confidence, attack larger centres. To begin with they selected
Littlestone in Kent, chiefly because of its unassuming name.
So they planned, and it seemed a small and unimportant thing to them
that as they clattered the governments of half the world and more were
drifting into war. About midday they became aware of the first of
the evening-paper placards shouting to them across the street:--
-----------------------------------------------
THE WAR-CLOUD DARKENS-----------------------------------------------
Nothing else but that.
“Always rottin' about war now,” said Bert.
“They'll get it in the neck in real earnest one of these days, if they
ain't precious careful.”
4
So you will understand the sudden apparition that surprised rather than
delighted the quiet informality of Dymchurch sands. Dymchurch was one of
the last places on the coast of England to be reached by the mono-rail,
and so its spacious sands were still, at the time of this story, the
secret and delight of quite a limited number of people. They went there
to flee vulgarity and extravagances, and to bathe and sit and talk and
play with their children in peace, and the Desert Dervishes did not
please them at all.
The two white figures on scarlet wheels came upon them out of the
infinite along the sands from Littlestone, grew nearer and larger and
more audible, honk-honking and emitting weird cries, and generally
threatening liveliness of the most aggressive type. “Good heavens!” said
Dymchurch, “what's this?”
Then our young men, according to a preconcerted plan, wheeled round from
file to line, dismounted and stood it attention. “Ladies and gentlemen,”
they said, “we beg to present ourselves--the Desert Dervishes.” They
bowed profoundly.
The few scattered groups upon the beach regarded them with horror for
the most part, but some of the children and young people were interested
and drew nearer. “There ain't a bob on the beach,” said Grubb in an
undertone, and the Desert Dervishes plied their bicycles with comic
“business,” that got a laugh from one very unsophisticated little boy.
Then they took a deep breath and struck into the cheerful strain of
“What Price Hair-pins Now?” Grubb sang the song, Bert did his best to
make the chorus a rousing one, and it the end of each verse they danced
certain steps, skirts in hand, that they had carefully rehearsed.
“Ting-a-ling-a-ting-a-ling-a-ting-a-ling-a-tang...
What Price Hair-pins Now?”
So they chanted and danced their steps in the sunshine on Dymchurch
beach, and the children drew near these foolish young men, marvelling
that they should behave in this way, and the older people looked cold
and unfriendly.
All round the coasts of Europe that morning banjos were ringing,
voices were bawling and singing, children were playing in the sun,
pleasure-boats went to and fro; the common abundant life of the time,
unsuspicious of all dangers that gathered darkly against it, flowed
on its cheerful aimless way. In the cities men fussed about their
businesses and engagements. The newspaper placards that had cried
“wolf!” so often, cried “wolf!” now in vain.
5
Now as Bert and Grubb bawled their chorus for the third time, they
became aware of a very big, golden-brown balloon low in the sky to the
north-west, and coming rapidly towards them. “Jest as we're gettin' hold
of 'em,” muttered Grubb, “up comes a counter-attraction. Go it, Bert!”
“Ting-a-ling-a-ting-a-ling-a-ting-a-ling-a-tang
What Price Hair-pins Now?”
The balloon rose and fell, went out of sight--“landed, thank goodness,”
said Grubb--re-appeared with a leap. “'ENG!” said Grubb. “Step it, Bert,
or they'll see it!”
They finished their dance, and then stood frankly staring.
“There's something wrong with that balloon,” said Bert.
Everybody now was looking at the balloon, drawing rapidly nearer before
a brisk north-westerly breeze. The song and dance were a “dead frost.”
Nobody thought any more about it. Even Bert and Grubb forgot it, and
ignored the next item on the programme altogether. The balloon was
bumping as though its occupants were trying to land; it would approach,
sinking slowly, touch the ground, and instantly jump fifty feet or so in
the air and immediately begin to fall again. Its car touched a clump of
trees, and the black figure that had been struggling in the ropes fell
back, or jumped back, into the car. In another moment it was quite
close. It seemed a huge affair, as big as a house, and it floated down
swiftly towards the sands; a long rope trailed behind it, and enormous
shouts came from the man in the car. He seemed to be taking off his
clothes, then his head came over the side of the car. “Catch hold of the
rope!” they heard, quite plain.
“Salvage, Bert!” cried Grubb, and started to head off the rope.
Bert followed him, and collided, without upsetting, with a fisherman
bent upon a similar errand. A woman carrying a baby in her arms, two
small boys with toy spades, and a stout gentleman in flannels all got to
the trailing rope at about the same time, and began to dance over it
in their attempts to secure it. Bert came up to this wriggling, elusive
serpent and got his foot on it, went down on all fours and achieved a
grip. In half a dozen seconds the whole diffused population of the beach
had, as it were, crystallised on the rope, and was pulling against the
balloon under the vehement and stimulating directions of the man in the
car. “Pull, I tell you!” said the man in the car--“pull!”
For a second or so the balloon obeyed its momentum and the wind and
tugged its human anchor seaward. It dropped, touched the water, and made
a flat, silvery splash, and recoiled as one's finger recoils when one
touches anything hot. “Pull her in,” said the man in the car. “SHE'S
FAINTED!”
He occupied himself with some unseen object while the people on the
rope pulled him in. Bert was nearest the balloon, and much excited and
interested. He kept stumbling over the tail of the Dervish costume in
his zeal. He had never imagined before what a big, light, wallowing
thing a balloon was. The car was of brown coarse wicker-work,
and comparatively small. The rope he tugged at was fastened to a
stout-looking ring, four or five feet above the car. At each tug he drew
in a yard or so of rope, and the waggling wicker-work was drawn so much
nearer. Out of the car came wrathful bellowings: “Fainted, she has!” and
then: “It's her heart--broken with all she's had to go through.”
The balloon ceased to struggle, and sank downward. Bert dropped the
rope, and ran forward to catch it in a new place. In another moment he
had his hand on the car. “Lay hold of it,” said the man in the car, and
his face appeared close to Bert's--a strangely familiar face, fierce
eyebrows, a flattish nose, a huge black moustache. He had discarded coat
and waistcoat--perhaps with some idea of presently having to swim for
his life--and his black hair was extraordinarily disordered. “Will
all you people get hold round the car?” he said. “There's a lady here
fainted--or got failure of the heart. Heaven alone knows which! My name
is Butteridge. Butteridge, my name is--in a balloon. Now please, all
on to the edge. This is the last time I trust myself to one of these
paleolithic contrivances. The ripping-cord failed, and the valve
wouldn't act. If ever I meet the scoundrel who ought to have seen--”
He stuck his head out between the ropes abruptly, and said, in a note
of earnest expostulation: “Get some brandy!--some neat brandy!” Some one
went up the beach for it.
In the car, sprawling upon a sort of bed-bench, in an attitude of
elaborate self-abandonment, was a large, blond lady, wearing a fur
coat and a big floriferous hat. Her head lolled back against the padded
corner of the car, and her eyes were shut and her mouth open. “Me dear!”
said Mr. Butteridge, in a common, loud voice, “we're safe!”
She gave no sign.
“Me dear!” said Mr. Butteridge, in a greatly intensified loud voice,
“we're safe!”
She was still quite impassive.
Then Mr. Butteridge showed the fiery core of his soul. “If she is
dead,” he said, slowly lifting a fist towards the balloon above him,
and speaking in an immense tremulous bellow--“if she is dead, I will
r-r-rend the heavens like a garment! I must get her out,” he cried, his
nostrils dilated with emotion--“I must get her out. I cannot have her
die in a wicker-work basket nine feet square--she who was made for
kings' palaces! Keep holt of this car! Is there a strong man among ye to
take her if I hand her out?”
He swept the lady together by a powerful movement of his arms, and
lifted her. “Keep the car from jumping,” he said to those who clustered
about him. “Keep your weight on it. She is no light woman, and when she
is out of it--it will be relieved.”
Bert leapt lightly into a sitting position on the edge of the car. The
others took a firmer grip upon the ropes and ring.
“Are you ready?” said Mr. Butteridge.
He stood upon the bed-bench and lifted the lady carefully. Then he sat
down on the wicker edge opposite to Bert, and put one leg over to dangle
outside. A rope or so seemed to incommode him. “Will some one assist
me?” he said. “If they would take this lady?”
It was just at this moment, with Mr. Butteridge and the lady balanced
finely on the basket brim, that she came-to. She came-to suddenly and
violently with a loud, heart-rending cry of “Alfred! Save me!” And she
waved her arms searchingly, and then clasped Mr. Butteridge about.
It seemed to Bert that the car swayed for a moment and then buck-jumped
and kicked him. Also he saw the boots of the lady and the right leg of
the gentleman describing arcs through the air, preparatory to vanishing
over the side of the car. His impressions were complex, but they also
comprehended the fact that he had lost his balance, and was going to
stand on his head inside this creaking basket. He spread out clutching
arms. He did stand on his head, more or less, his tow-beard came off
and got in his mouth, and his cheek slid along against padding. His nose
buried itself in a bag of sand. The car gave a violent lurch, and became
still.
“Confound it!” he said.
He had an impression he must be stunned because of a surging in his
ears, and because all the voices of the people about him had become
small and remote. They were shouting like elves inside a hill.
He found it a little difficult to get on his feet. His limbs were mixed
up with the garments Mr. Butteridge had discarded when that gentleman
had thought he must needs plunge into the sea. Bert bawled out half
angry, half rueful, “You might have said you were going to tip
the basket.” Then he stood up and clutched the ropes of the car
convulsively.
Below him, far below him, shining blue, were the waters of the English
Channel. Far off, a little thing in the sunshine, and rushing down as if
some one was bending it hollow, was the beach and the irregular cluster
of houses that constitutes Dymchurch. He could see the little crowd of
people he had so abruptly left. Grubb, in the white wrapper of a Desert
Dervish, was running along the edge of the sea. Mr. Butteridge was
knee-deep in the water, bawling immensely. The lady was sitting up with
her floriferous hat in her lap, shockingly neglected. The beach, east
and west, was dotted with little people--they seemed all heads and
feet--looking up. And the balloon, released from the twenty-five stone
or so of Mr. Butteridge and his lady, was rushing up into the sky at the
pace of a racing motor-car. “My crikey!” said Bert; “here's a go!”
He looked down with a pinched face at the receding beach, and reflected
that he wasn't giddy; then he made a superficial survey of the cords and
ropes about him with a vague idea of “doing something.” “I'm not going
to mess about with the thing,” he said at last, and sat down upon the
mattress. “I'm not going to touch it.... I wonder what one ought to do?”
Soon he got up again and stared for a long time it the sinking world
below, at white cliffs to the east and flattening marsh to the left, at
a minute wide prospect of weald and downland, at dim towns and harbours
and rivers and ribbon-like roads, at ships and ships, decks and
foreshortened funnels upon the ever-widening sea, and at the great
mono-rail bridge that straddled the Channel from Folkestone to Boulogne,
until at last, first little wisps and then a veil of filmy cloud hid the
prospect from his eyes. He wasn't at all giddy nor very much frightened,
only in a state of enormous consternation.