I
Bert Smallways was a vulgar little creature, the sort of pert, limited
soul that the old civilisation of the early twentieth century produced
by the million in every country of the world. He had lived all his life
in narrow streets, and between mean houses he could not look over, and
in a narrow circle of ideas from which there was no escape. He thought
the whole duty of man was to be smarter than his fellows, get his hands,
as he put it, “on the dibs,” and have a good time. He was, in fact, the
sort of man who had made England and America what they were. The luck
had been against him so far, but that was by the way. He was a mere
aggressive and acquisitive individual with no sense of the State,
no habitual loyalty, no devotion, no code of honour, no code even of
courage. Now by a curious accident he found himself lifted out of his
marvellous modern world for a time, out of all the rush and confused
appeals of it, and floating like a thing dead and disembodied between
sea and sky. It was as if Heaven was experimenting with him, had picked
him out as a sample from the English millions, to look at him more
nearly, and to see what was happening to the soul of man. But what
Heaven made of him in that case I cannot profess to imagine, for I have
long since abandoned all theories about the ideals and satisfactions of
Heaven.
To be alone in a balloon at a height of fourteen or fifteen thousand
feet--and to that height Bert Smallways presently rose is like nothing
else in human experience. It is one of the supreme things possible to
man. No flying machine can ever better it. It is to pass extraordinarily
out of human things. It is to be still and alone to an unprecedented
degree. It is solitude without the suggestion of intervention; it is
calm without a single irrelevant murmur. It is to see the sky. No sound
reaches one of all the roar and jar of humanity, the air is clear and
sweet beyond the thought of defilement. No bird, no insect comes so
high. No wind blows ever in a balloon, no breeze rustles, for it moves
with the wind and is itself a part of the atmosphere. Once started, it
does not rock nor sway; you cannot feel whether it rises or falls. Bert
felt acutely cold, but he wasn't mountain-sick; he put on the coat and
overcoat and gloves Butteridge had discarded--put them over the “Desert
Dervish” sheet that covered his cheap best suit--and sat very still for
a long, time, overawed by the new-found quiet of the world. Above him
was the light, translucent, billowing globe of shining brown oiled silk
and the blazing sunlight and the great deep blue dome of the sky.
Below, far below, was a torn floor of sunlit cloud slashed by enormous
rents through which he saw the sea.
If you had been watching him from below, you would have seen his head, a
motionless little black knob, sticking out from the car first of all for
a long time on one side, and then vanishing to reappear after a time at
some other point.
He wasn't in the least degree uncomfortable nor afraid. He did think
that as this uncontrollable thing had thus rushed up the sky with him it
might presently rush down again, but this consideration did not trouble
him very much. Essentially his state was wonder. There is no fear nor
trouble in balloons--until they descend.
“Gollys!” he said at last, feeling a need for talking; “it's better than
a motor-bike.”
“It's all right!”
“I suppose they're telegraphing about, about me.”...
The second hour found him examining the equipment of the car with great
particularity. Above him was the throat of the balloon bunched and tied
together, but with an open lumen through which Bert could peer up into
a vast, empty, quiet interior, and out of which descended two fine cords
of unknown import, one white, one crimson, to pockets below the ring.
The netting about the balloon ended in cords attached to the ring, a big
steel-bound hoop to which the car was slung by ropes. From it depended
the trail rope and grapnel, and over the sides of the car were a number
of canvas bags that Bert decided must be ballast to “chuck down” if the
balloon fell. (“Not much falling just yet,” said Bert.)
There were an aneroid and another box-shaped instrument hanging from the
ring. The latter had an ivory plate bearing “statoscope” and other words
in French, and a little indicator quivered and waggled, between Montee
and Descente. “That's all right,” said Bert. “That tells if you're
going up or down.” On the crimson padded seat of the balloon there lay a
couple of rugs and a Kodak, and in opposite corners of the bottom of
the car were an empty champagne bottle and a glass. “Refreshments,” said
Bert meditatively, tilting the empty bottle. Then he had a brilliant
idea. The two padded bed-like seats, each with blankets and mattress, he
perceived, were boxes, and within he found Mr. Butteridge's conception
of an adequate equipment for a balloon ascent: a hamper which included
a game pie, a Roman pie, a cold fowl, tomatoes, lettuce, ham sandwiches,
shrimp sandwiches, a large cake, knives and forks and paper plates,
self-heating tins of coffee and cocoa, bread, butter, and marmalade,
several carefully packed bottles of champagne, bottles of Perrier water,
and a big jar of water for washing, a portfolio, maps, and a compass,
a rucksack containing a number of conveniences, including curling-tongs
and hair-pins, a cap with ear-flaps, and so forth.
“A 'ome from 'ome,” said Bert, surveying this provision as he tied the
ear-flaps under his chin. He looked over the side of the car. Far below
were the shining clouds. They had thickened so that the whole world was
hidden. Southward they were piled in great snowy masses, so that he was
half disposed to think them mountains; northward and eastward they were
in wavelike levels, and blindingly sunlit.
“Wonder how long a balloon keeps up?” he said.
He imagined he was not moving, so insensibly did the monster drift with
the air about it. “No good coming down till we shift a bit,” he said.
He consulted the statoscope.
“Still Monty,” he said.
“Wonder what would happen if you pulled a cord?”
“No,” he decided. “I ain't going to mess it about.”
Afterwards he did pull both the ripping- and the valve-cords, but, as
Mr. Butteridge had already discovered, they had fouled a fold of silk in
the throat. Nothing happened. But for that little hitch the ripping-cord
would have torn the balloon open as though it had been slashed by a
sword, and hurled Mr. Smallways to eternity at the rate of some thousand
feet a second. “No go!” he said, giving it a final tug. Then he lunched.
He opened a bottle of champagne, which, as soon as he cut the wire, blew
its cork out with incredible violence, and for the most part followed
it into space. Bert, however, got about a tumblerful. “Atmospheric
pressure,” said Bert, finding a use at last for the elementary
physiography of his seventh-standard days. “I'll have to be more careful
next time. No good wastin' drink.”
Then he routed about for matches to utilise Mr. Butteridge's cigars; but
here again luck was on his side, and he couldn't find any wherewith
to set light to the gas above him. Or else he would have dropped in a
flare, a splendid but transitory pyrotechnic display. “'Eng old Grubb!”
said Bert, slapping unproductive pockets. “'E didn't ought to 'ave kep'
my box. 'E's always sneaking matches.”
He reposed for a time. Then he got up, paddled about, rearranged the
ballast bags on the floor, watched the clouds for a time, and turned
over the maps on the locker. Bert liked maps, and he spent some time in
trying to find one of France or the Channel; but they were all British
ordnance maps of English counties. That set him thinking about languages
and trying to recall his seventh-standard French. “Je suis Anglais.
C'est une meprise. Je suis arrive par accident ici,” he decided upon
as convenient phrases. Then it occurred to him that he would entertain
himself by reading Mr. Butteridge's letters and examining his
pocket-book, and in this manner he whiled away the afternoon.
2
He sat upon the padded locker, wrapped about very carefully, for the
air, though calm, was exhilaratingly cold and clear. He was wearing
first a modest suit of blue serge and all the unpretending underwear
of a suburban young man of fashion, with sandal-like cycling-shoes and
brown stockings drawn over his trouser ends; then the perforated
sheet proper to a Desert Dervish; then the coat and waistcoat and big
fur-trimmed overcoat of Mr. Butteridge; then a lady's large fur cloak,
and round his knees a blanket. Over his head was a tow wig, surmounted
by a large cap of Mr. Butteridge's with the flaps down over his ears.
And some fur sleeping-boots of Mr. Butteridge's warmed his feet. The car
of the balloon was small and neat, some bags of ballast the untidiest of
its contents, and he had found a light folding-table and put it at his
elbow, and on that was a glass with champagne. And about him, above and
below, was space--such a clear emptiness and silence of space as only
the aeronaut can experience.
He did not know where he might be drifting, or what might happen next.
He accepted this state of affairs with a serenity creditable to the
Smallways' courage, which one might reasonably have expected to be of a
more degenerate and contemptible quality altogether. His impression was
that he was bound to come down somewhere, and that then, if he wasn't
smashed, some one, some “society” perhaps, would probably pack him and
the balloon back to England. If not, he would ask very firmly for the
British Consul.
“Le consuelo Britannique,” he decided this would be. “Apportez moi a le
consuelo Britannique, s'il vous plait,” he would say, for he was by
no means ignorant of French. In the meanwhile, he found the intimate
aspects of Mr. Butteridge an interesting study.
There were letters of an entirely private character addressed to Mr.
Butteridge, and among others several love-letters of a devouring sort
in a large feminine hand. These are no business of ours, and one remarks
with regret that Bert read them.
When he had read them he remarked, “Gollys!” in an awestricken tone, and
then, after a long interval, “I wonder if that was her?
“Lord!”
He mused for a time.
He resumed his exploration of the Butteridge interior. It included
a number of press cuttings of interviews and also several letters
in German, then some in the same German handwriting, but in English.
“Hul-LO!” said Bert.
One of the latter, the first he took, began with an apology to
Butteridge for not writing to him in English before, and for the
inconvenience and delay that had been caused him by that, and went on
to matter that Bert found exciting in, the highest degree. “We can
understand entirely the difficulties of your position, and that you
shall possibly be watched at the present juncture.--But, sir, we do not
believe that any serious obstacles will be put in your way if you wished
to endeavour to leave the country and come to us with your plans by the
customary routes--either via Dover, Ostend, Boulogne, or Dieppe. We
find it difficult to think you are right in supposing yourself to be in
danger of murder for your invaluable invention.”
“Funny!” said Bert, and meditated.
Then he went through the other letters.
“They seem to want him to come,” said Bert, “but they don't seem hurting
themselves to get 'im. Or else they're shamming don't care to get his
prices down.
“They don't quite seem to be the gov'ment,” he reflected, after an
interval. “It's more like some firm's paper. All this printed stuff at
the top. Drachenflieger. Drachenballons. Ballonstoffe. Kugelballons.
Greek to me.
“But he was trying to sell his blessed secret abroad. That's all right.
No Greek about that! Gollys! Here IS the secret!”
He tumbled off the seat, opened the locker, and had the portfolio open
before him on the folding-table. It was full of drawings done in the
peculiar flat style and conventional colours engineers adopt. And, in,
addition there were some rather under-exposed photographs, obviously
done by an amateur, at close quarters, of the actual machine's
mutterings had made, in its shed near the Crystal Palace. Bert found he
was trembling. “Lord” he said, “here am I and the whole blessed secret
of flying--lost up here on the roof of everywhere.
“Let's see!” He fell to studying the drawings and comparing them with
the photographs. They puzzled him. Half of them seemed to be missing.
He tried to imagine how they fitted together, and found the effort too
great for his mind.
“It's tryin',” said Bert. “I wish I'd been brought up to the
engineering. If I could only make it out!”
He went to the side of the car and remained for a time staring with
unseeing eyes at a huge cluster of great clouds--a cluster of slowly
dissolving Monte Rosas, sunlit below. His attention was arrested by a
strange black spot that moved over them. It alarmed him. It was a
black spot moving slowly with him far below, following him down there,
indefatigably, over the cloud mountains. Why should such a thing follow
him? What could it be?...
He had an inspiration. “Uv course!” he said. It was the shadow of the
balloon. But he still watched it dubiously for a time.
He returned to the plans on the table.
He spent a long afternoon between his struggles to understand them and
fits of meditation. He evolved a remarkable new sentence in French.
“Voici, Mossoo!--Je suis un inventeur Anglais. Mon nom est Butteridge.
Beh. oo. teh. teh. eh. arr. I. deh. geh. eh. J'avais ici pour vendre le
secret de le flying-machine. Comprenez? Vendre pour l'argent tout
suite, l'argent en main. Comprenez? C'est le machine a jouer dans l'air.
Comprenez? C'est le machine a faire l'oiseau. Comprenez? Balancer? Oui,
exactement! Battir l'oiseau en fait, a son propre jeu. Je desire de
vendre ceci a votre government national. Voulez vous me directer la?
“Bit rummy, I expect, from the point of view of grammar,” said Bert,
“but they ought to get the hang of it all right.
“But then, if they arst me to explain the blessed thing?”
He returned in a worried way to the plans. “I don't believe it's all
here!” he said....
He got more and more perplexed up there among the clouds as to what he
should do with this wonderful find of his. At any moment, so far as he
knew he might descend among he knew not what foreign people.
“It's the chance of my life!” he said.
It became more and more manifest to him that it wasn't. “Directly I come
down they'll telegraph--put it in the papers. Butteridge'll know of it
and come along--on my track.”
Butteridge would be a terrible person to be on any one's track.
Bert thought of the great black moustaches, the triangular nose, the
searching bellow and the glare. His afternoon's dream of a marvellous
seizure and sale of the great Butteridge secret crumpled up in his mind,
dissolved, and vanished. He awoke to sanity again.
“Wouldn't do. What's the good of thinking of it?” He proceeded slowly
and reluctantly to replace the Butteridge papers in pockets and
portfolio as he had found them. He became aware of a splendid golden
light upon the balloon above him, and of a new warmth in the blue dome
of the sky. He stood up and beheld the sun, a great ball of blinding
gold, setting upon a tumbled sea of gold-edged crimson and purple
clouds, strange and wonderful beyond imagining. Eastward cloud-land
stretched for ever, darkling blue, and it seemed to Bert the whole round
hemisphere of the world was under his eyes.
Then far, away over the blue he caught sight of three long, dark shapes
like hurrying fish that drove one after the other, as porpoises follow
one another in the water. They were very fish-like indeed--with tails.
It was an unconvincing impression in that light. He blinked his eyes,
stared again, and they had vanished. For a long time he scrutinised
those remote blue levels and saw no more....
“Wonder if I ever saw anything,” he said, and then: “There ain't such
things....”
Down went the sun and down, not diving steeply, but passing northward as
it sank, and then suddenly daylight and the expansive warmth of daylight
had gone altogether, and the index of the statoscope quivered over to
Descente.
3
“NOW what's going to 'appen?” said Bert.
He found the cold, grey cloud wilderness rising towards him with a wide,
slow steadiness. As he sank down among them the clouds ceased to seem
the snowclad mountain-slopes they had resembled heretofore, became
unsubstantial, confessed an immense silent drift and eddy in their
substance. For a moment, when he was nearly among their twilight masses,
his descent was checked. Then abruptly the sky was hidden, the last
vestiges of daylight gone, and he was falling rapidly in an evening
twilight through a whirl of fine snowflakes that streamed past him
towards the zenith, that drifted in upon the things about him and
melted, that touched his face with ghostly fingers. He shivered. His
breath came smoking from his lips, and everything was instantly bedewed
and wet.
He had an impression of a snowstorm pouring with unexampled and
increasing fury UPWARD; then he realised that he was falling faster and
faster.
Imperceptibly a sound grew upon his ears. The great silence of the world
was at an end. What was this confused sound?
He craned his head over the side, concerned, perplexed.
First he seemed to see, and then not to see. Then he saw clearly little
edges of foam pursuing each other, and a wide waste of weltering waters
below him. Far away was a pilot boat with a big sail bearing dim black
letters, and a little pinkish-yellow light, and it was rolling and
pitching, rolling and pitching in a gale, while he could feel no wind
at, all. Soon the sound of waters was loud and near. He was dropping,
dropping--into the sea!
He became convulsively active.
“Ballast!” he cried, and seized a little sack from the floor, and heaved
it overboard. He did not wait for the effect of that, but sent another
after it. He looked over in time to see a minute white splash in the dim
waters below him, and then he was back in the snow and clouds again.
He sent out quite needlessly a third sack of ballast and a fourth, and
presently had the immense satisfaction of soaring up out of the damp and
chill into the clear, cold, upper air in which the day still lingered.
“Thang-God!” he said, with all his heart.
A few stars now had pierced the blue, and in the east there shone
brightly a prolate moon.
4
That first downward plunge filled Bert with a haunting sense of
boundless waters below. It was a summer's night, but it seemed to him,
nevertheless, extraordinarily long. He had a feeling of insecurity that
he fancied quite irrationally the sunrise would dispel. Also he was
hungry. He felt, in the dark, in the locker, put his fingers in
the Roman pie, and got some sandwiches, and he also opened rather
successfully a half-bottle of champagne. That warmed and restored him,
he grumbled at Grubb about the matches, wrapped himself up warmly on the
locker, and dozed for a time. He got up once or twice to make sure that
he was still securely high above the sea. The first time the moonlit
clouds were white and dense, and the shadow of the balloon ran athwart
them like a dog that followed; afterwards they seemed thinner. As he lay
still, staring up at the huge dark balloon above, he made a discovery.
His--or rather Mr. Butteridge's--waistcoat rustled as he breathed. It
was lined with papers. But Bert could not see to get them out or examine
them, much as he wished to do so....
He was awakened by the crowing of cocks, the barking of dogs, and a
clamour of birds. He was driving slowly at a low level over a broad land
lit golden by sunrise under a clear sky. He stared out upon hedgeless,
well-cultivated fields intersected by roads, each lined with
cable-bearing red poles. He had just passed over a compact, whitewashed,
village with a straight church tower and steep red-tiled roofs. A number
of peasants, men and women, in shiny blouses and lumpish footwear, stood
regarding him, arrested on their way to work. He was so low that the end
of his rope was trailing.
He stared out at these people. “I wonder how you land,” he thought.
“S'pose I OUGHT to land?”
He found himself drifting down towards a mono-rail line, and hastily
flung out two or three handfuls of ballast to clear it.
“Lemme see! One might say just 'Pre'nez'! Wish I knew the French for
take hold of the rope!... I suppose they are French?”
He surveyed the country again. “Might be Holland. Or Luxembourg. Or
Lorraine 's far as _I_ know. Wonder what those big affairs over there
are? Some sort of kiln. Prosperous-looking country...”
The respectability of the country's appearance awakened answering chords
in his nature.
“Make myself a bit ship-shape first,” he said.
He resolved to rise a little and get rid of his wig (which now felt
hot on his head), and so forth. He threw out a bag of ballast, and was
astonished to find himself careering up through the air very rapidly.
“Blow!” said Mr. Smallways. “I've over-done the ballast trick.... Wonder
when I shall get down again?... brekfus' on board, anyhow.”
He removed his cap and wig, for the air was warm, and an improvident
impulse made him cast the latter object overboard. The statoscope
responded with a vigorous swing to Monte.
“The blessed thing goes up if you only LOOK overboard,” he remarked, and
assailed the locker. He found among other items several tins of liquid
cocoa containing explicit directions for opening that he followed with
minute care. He pierced the bottom with the key provided in the holes
indicated, and forthwith the can grew from cold to hotter and hotter,
until at last he could scarcely touch it, and then he opened the can at
the other end, and there was his cocoa smoking, without the use of match
or flame of any sort. It was an old invention, but new to Bert. There
was also ham and marmalade and bread, so that he had a really very
tolerable breakfast indeed.
Then he took off his overcoat, for the sunshine was now inclined to be
hot, and that reminded him of the rustling he had heard in the night.
He took off the waistcoat and examined it. “Old Butteridge won't like
me unpicking this.” He hesitated, and finally proceeded to unpick it. He
found the missing drawings of the lateral rotating planes, on which the
whole stability of the flying machine depended.
An observant angel would have seen Bert sitting for a long time after
this discovery in a state of intense meditation. Then at last he rose
with an air of inspiration, took Mr. Butteridge's ripped, demolished,
and ransacked waistcoat, and hurled it from the balloon whence it
fluttered down slowly and eddyingly until at last it came to rest with
a contented flop upon the face of German tourist sleeping peacefully
beside the Hohenweg near Wildbad. Also this sent the balloon higher,
and so into a position still more convenient for observation by our
imaginary angel who would next have seen Mr. Smallways tear open his own
jacket and waistcoat, remove his collar, open his shirt, thrust his hand
into his bosom, and tear his heart out--or at least, if not his heart,
some large bright scarlet object. If the observer, overcoming a thrill
of celestial horror, had scrutinised this scarlet object more narrowly,
one of Bert's most cherished secrets, one of his essential weaknesses,
would have been laid bare. It was a red-flannel chest-protector, one of
those large quasi-hygienic objects that with pills and medicines take
the place of beneficial relics and images among the Protestant peoples
of Christendom. Always Bert wore this thing; it was his cherished
delusion, based on the advice of a shilling fortune-teller at Margate,
that he was weak in the lungs.
He now proceeded to unbutton his fetish, to attack it with a penknife,
and to thrust the new-found plans between the two layers of imitation
Saxony flannel of which it was made. Then with the help of Mr.
Butteridge's small shaving mirror and his folding canvas basin he
readjusted his costume with the gravity of a man who has taken an
irrevocable step in life, buttoned up his jacket, cast the white sheet
of the Desert Dervish on one side, washed temperately, shaved,
resumed the big cap and the fur overcoat, and, much refreshed by these
exercises, surveyed the country below him.
It was indeed a spectacle of incredible magnificence. If perhaps it was
not so strange and magnificent as the sunlit cloudland of the previous
day, it was at any rate infinitely more interesting.
The air was at its utmost clearness and except to the south and
south-west there was not a cloud in the sky. The country was hilly,
with occasional fir plantations and bleak upland spaces, but also with
numerous farms, and the hills were deeply intersected by the gorges of
several winding rivers interrupted at intervals by the banked-up
ponds and weirs of electric generating wheels. It was dotted with
bright-looking, steep-roofed, villages, and each showed a distinctive
and interesting church beside its wireless telegraph steeple; here and
there were large chateaux and parks and white roads, and paths lined
with red and white cable posts were extremely conspicuous in the
landscape. There were walled enclosures like gardens and rickyards and
great roofs of barns and many electric dairy centres. The uplands were
mottled with cattle. At places he would see the track of one of the
old railroads (converted now to mono-rails) dodging through tunnels
and crossing embankments, and a rushing hum would mark the passing of a
train. Everything was extraordinarily clear as well as minute. Once or
twice he saw guns and soldiers, and was reminded of the stir of military
preparations he had witnessed on the Bank Holiday in England; but there
was nothing to tell him that these military preparations were abnormal
or to explain an occasional faint irregular firing of guns that drifted
up to him....
“Wish I knew how to get down,” said Bert, ten thousand feet or so above
it all, and gave himself to much futile tugging at the red and white
cords. Afterwards he made a sort of inventory of the provisions. Life in
the high air was giving him an appalling appetite, and it seemed to him
discreet at this stage to portion out his supply into rations. So far as
he could see he might pass a week in the air.
At first all the vast panorama below had been as silent as a painted
picture. But as the day wore on and the gas diffused slowly from the
balloon, it sank earthward again, details increased, men became more
visible, and he began to hear the whistle and moan of trains and cars,
sounds of cattle, bugles and kettle drums, and presently even men's
voices. And at last his guide-rope was trailing again, and he found it
possible to attempt a landing. Once or twice as the rope dragged over
cables he found his hair erect with electricity, and once he had a
slight shock, and sparks snapped about the car. He took these things
among the chances of the voyage. He had one idea now very clear in his
mind, and that was to drop the iron grapnel that hung from the ring.
From the first this attempt was unfortunate, perhaps because the place
for descent was ill-chosen. A balloon should come down in an empty open
space, and he chose a crowd. He made his decision suddenly, and without
proper reflection. As he trailed, Bert saw ahead of him one of the
most attractive little towns in the world--a cluster of steep gables
surmounted by a high church tower and diversified with trees, walled,
and with a fine, large gateway opening out upon a tree-lined high road.
All the wires and cables of the countryside converged upon it like
guests to entertainment. It had a most home-like and comfortable
quality, and it was made gayer by abundant flags. Along the road a
quantity of peasant folk, in big pair-wheeled carts and afoot, were
coming and going, besides an occasional mono-rail car; and at the
car-junction, under the trees outside the town, was a busy little
fair of booths. It seemed a warm, human, well-rooted, and altogether
delightful place to Bert. He came low over the tree-tops, with his
grapnel ready to throw and so anchor him--a curious, interested, and
interesting guest, so his imagination figured it, in the very middle of
it all.
He thought of himself performing feats with the sign language and chance
linguistics amidst a circle of admiring rustics....
And then the chapter of adverse accidents began.
The rope made itself unpopular long before the crowd had fully realised
his advent over the trees. An elderly and apparently intoxicated peasant
in a shiny black hat, and carrying a large crimson umbrella, caught
sight of it first as it trailed past him, and was seized with a
discreditable ambition to kill it. He pursued it, briskly with
unpleasant cries. It crossed the road obliquely, splashed into a pail of
milk upon a stall, and slapped its milky tail athwart a motor-car load
of factory girls halted outside the town gates. They screamed loudly.
People looked up and saw Bert making what he meant to be genial
salutations, but what they considered, in view of the feminine outcry,
to be insulting gestures. Then the car hit the roof of the gatehouse
smartly, snapped a flag staff, played a tune upon some telegraph wires,
and sent a broken wire like a whip-lash to do its share in accumulating
unpopularity. Bert, by clutching convulsively, just escaped being
pitched headlong. Two young soldiers and several peasants shouted things
up to him and shook fists at him and began to run in pursuit as he
disappeared over the wall into the town.
Admiring rustics, indeed!
The balloon leapt at once, in the manner of balloons when part of their
weight is released by touching down, with a sort of flippancy, and
in another moment Bert was over a street crowded with peasants
and soldiers, that opened into a busy market-square. The wave of
unfriendliness pursued him.
“Grapnel,” said Bert, and then with an afterthought shouted, “TETES
there, you! I say! I say! TETES. 'Eng it!”
The grapnel smashed down a steeply sloping roof, followed by an
avalanche of broken tiles, jumped the street amidst shrieks and cries,
and smashed into a plate-glass window with an immense and sickening
impact. The balloon rolled nauseatingly, and the car pitched. But the
grapnel had not held. It emerged at once bearing on one fluke, with
a ridiculous air of fastidious selection, a small child's chair, and
pursued by a maddened shopman. It lifted its catch, swung about with an
appearance of painful indecision amidst a roar of wrath, and dropped
it at last neatly, and as if by inspiration, over the head of a peasant
woman in charge of an assortment of cabbages in the market-place.
Everybody now was aware of the balloon. Everybody was either trying to
dodge the grapnel or catch the trail rope. With a pendulum-like swoop
through the crowd, that sent people flying right and left the grapnel
came to earth again, tried for and missed a stout gentleman in a blue
suit and a straw hat, smacked away a trestle from under a stall of
haberdashery, made a cyclist soldier in knickerbockers leap like
a chamois, and secured itself uncertainly among the hind-legs of a
sheep--which made convulsive, ungenerous efforts to free itself, and was
dragged into a position of rest against a stone cross in the middle of
the place. The balloon pulled up with a jerk. In another moment a score
of willing hands were tugging it earthward. At the same instant Bert
became aware for the first time of a fresh breeze blowing about him.
For some seconds he stood staggering in the car, which now swayed
sickeningly, surveying the exasperated crowd below him and trying to
collect his mind. He was extraordinarily astonished at this run of
mishaps. Were the people really so annoyed? Everybody seemed angry
with him. No one seemed interested or amused by his arrival.
A disproportionate amount of the outcry had the flavour of
imprecation--had, indeed a strong flavour of riot. Several greatly
uniformed officials in cocked hats struggled in vain to control the
crowd. Fists and sticks were shaken. And when Bert saw a man on the
outskirts of the crowd run to a haycart and get a brightly pronged
pitch-fork, and a blue-clad soldier unbuckle his belt, his rising doubt
whether this little town was after all such a good place for a landing
became a certainty.
He had clung to the fancy that they would make something of a hero of
him. Now he knew that he was mistaken.
He was perhaps ten feet above the people when he made his decision.
His paralysis ceased. He leapt up on the seat, and, at imminent risk of
falling headlong, released the grapnel-rope from the toggle that held
it, sprang on to the trail rope and disengaged that also. A hoarse shout
of disgust greeted the descent of the grapnel-rope and the swift leap
of the balloon, and something--he fancied afterwards it was a
turnip--whizzed by his head. The trail-rope followed its fellow. The
crowd seemed to jump away from him. With an immense and horrifying
rustle the balloon brushed against a telephone pole, and for a tense
instant he anticipated either an electric explosion or a bursting of the
oiled silk, or both. But fortune was with him.
In another second he was cowering in the bottom of the car, and released
from the weight of the grapnel and the two ropes, rushing up once more
through the air. For a time he remained crouching, and when at last he
looked out again the little town was very small and travelling, with the
rest of lower Germany, in a circular orbit round and round the car--or
at least it appeared to be doing that. When he got used to it, he found
this rotation of the balloon rather convenient; it saved moving about in
the car.
5
Late in the afternoon of a pleasant summer day in the year 191-, if one
may borrow a mode of phrasing that once found favour with the readers of
the late G. P. R. James, a solitary balloonist--replacing the solitary
horseman of the classic romances--might have been observed wending his
way across Franconia in a north-easterly direction, and at a height of
about eleven thousand feet above the sea and still spindling slowly. His
head was craned over the side of the car, and he surveyed the country
below with an expression of profound perplexity; ever and again his lips
shaped inaudible words. “Shootin' at a chap,” for example, and “I'll
come down right enough soon as I find out 'ow.” Over the side of
the basket the robe of the Desert Dervish was hanging, an appeal for
consideration, an ineffectual white flag.
He was now very distinctly aware that the world below him, so far from
being the naive countryside of his earlier imaginings that day, sleepily
unconscious of him and capable of being amazed and nearly reverential
at his descent, was acutely irritated by his career, and extremely
impatient with the course he was taking.--But indeed it was not he
who took that course, but his masters, the winds of heaven. Mysterious
voices spoke to him in his ear, jerking the words up to him by means
of megaphones, in a weird and startling manner, in a great variety of
languages. Official-looking persons had signalled to him by means of
flag flapping and arm waving. On the whole a guttural variant of English
prevailed in the sentences that alighted upon the balloon; chiefly he
was told to “gome down or you will be shot.”
“All very well,” said Bert, “but 'ow?”
Then they shot a little wide of the car. Latterly he had been shot at
six or seven times, and once the bullet had gone by with a sound so
persuasively like the tearing of silk that he had resigned himself to
the prospect of a headlong fall. But either they were aiming near him or
they had missed, and as yet nothing was torn but the air about him--and
his anxious soul.
He was now enjoying a respite from these attentions, but he felt it was
at best an interlude, and he was doing what he could to appreciate
his position. Incidentally he was having some hot coffee and pie in an
untidy inadvertent manner, with an eye fluttering nervously over the
side of the car. At first he had ascribed the growing interest in his
career to his ill-conceived attempt to land in the bright little upland
town, but now he was beginning to realise that the military rather than
the civil arm was concerned about him.
He was quite involuntarily playing that weird mysterious part--the part
of an International Spy. He was seeing secret things. He had, in fact,
crossed the designs of no less a power than the German Empire, he had
blundered into the hot focus of Welt-Politik, he was drifting helplessly
towards the great Imperial secret, the immense aeronautic park that had
been established at a headlong pace in Franconia to develop silently,
swiftly, and on an immense scale the great discoveries of Hunstedt and
Stossel, and so to give Germany before all other nations a fleet of
airships, the air power and the Empire of the world.
Later, just before they shot him down altogether, Bert saw that great
area of passionate work, warm lit in the evening light, a great area
of upland on which the airships lay like a herd of grazing monsters at
their feed. It was a vast busy space stretching away northward as far as
he could see, methodically cut up into numbered sheds, gasometers, squad
encampments, storage areas, interlaced with the omnipresent mono-rail
lines, and altogether free from overhead wires or cables. Everywhere was
the white, black and yellow of Imperial Germany, everywhere the black
eagles spread their wings. Even without these indications, the large
vigorous neatness of everything would have marked it German. Vast
multitudes of men went to and fro, many in white and drab fatigue
uniforms busy about the balloons, others drilling in sensible drab. Here
and there a full uniform glittered. The airships chiefly engaged his
attention, and he knew at once it was three of these he had seen on
the previous night, taking advantage of the cloud welkin to manoeuvre
unobserved. They were altogether fish-like. For the great airships with
which Germany attacked New York in her last gigantic effort for
world supremacy--before humanity realized that world supremacy was a
dream--were the lineal descendants of the Zeppelin airship that flew
over Lake Constance in 1906, and of the Lebaudy navigables that made
their memorable excursions over Paris in 1907 and 1908.
These German airships were held together by rib-like skeletons of steel
and aluminium and a stout inelastic canvas outer-skin, within which was
an impervious rubber gas-bag, cut up by transverse dissepiments into
from fifty to a hundred compartments. These were all absolutely gas
tight and filled with hydrogen, and the entire aerostat was kept at any
level by means of a long internal balloonette of oiled and toughened
silk canvas, into which air could be forced and from which it could be
pumped. So the airship could be made either heavier or lighter than air,
and losses of weight through the consumption of fuel, the casting
of bombs and so forth, could also be compensated by admitting air to
sections of the general gas-bag. Ultimately that made a highly explosive
mixture; but in all these matters risks must be taken and guarded
against. There was a steel axis to the whole affair, a central backbone
which terminated in the engine and propeller, and the men and magazines
were forward in a series of cabins under the expanded headlike forepart.
The engine, which was of the extraordinarily powerful Pforzheim type,
that supreme triumph of German invention, was worked by wires from this
forepart, which was indeed the only really habitable part of the ship.
If anything went wrong, the engineers went aft along a rope ladder
beneath the frame. The tendency of the whole affair to roll was partly
corrected by a horizontal lateral fin on either side, and steering was
chiefly effected by two vertical fins, which normally lay back like
gill-flaps on either side of the head. It was indeed a most complete
adaptation of the fish form to aerial conditions, the position of
swimming bladder, eyes, and brain being, however, below instead of
above. A striking, and unfish-like feature was the apparatus for
wireless telegraphy that dangled from the forward cabin--that is to say,
under the chin of the fish.
These monsters were capable of ninety miles an hour in a calm, so that
they could face and make headway against nearly everything except
the fiercest tornado. They varied in length from eight hundred to two
thousand feet, and they had a carrying power of from seventy to two
hundred tons. How many Germany possessed history does not record, but
Bert counted nearly eighty great bulks receding in perspective during
his brief inspection. Such were the instruments on which she chiefly
relied to sustain her in her repudiation of the Monroe Doctrine and her
bold bid for a share in the empire of the New World. But not
altogether did she rely on these; she had also a one-man bomb-throwing
Drachenflieger of unknown value among the resources.
But the Drachenflieger were away in the second great aeronautic
park east of Hamburg, and Bert Smallways saw nothing of them in the
bird's-eye view he took of the Franconian establishment before they shot
him down very neatly. The bullet tore past him and made a sort of pop as
it pierced his balloon--a pop that was followed by a rustling sigh and
a steady downward movement. And when in the confusion of the moment he
dropped a bag of ballast, the Germans, very politely but firmly overcame
his scruples by shooting his balloon again twice.