Chapter 1: The Stick Of The Rocket

I

That evening I talked with my uncle in the Hardingham for the last time. The atmosphere of the place had altered quite shockingly. Instead of the crowd of importunate courtiers there were just half a dozen uninviting men, journalists waiting for an interview. Ropper the big commissionaire was still there, but now indeed he was defending my uncle from something more than time-wasting intrusions. I found the little man alone in the inner office pretending to work, but really brooding. He was looking yellow and deflated.

“Lord!” he said at the sight of me. “You’re lean, George. It makes that scar of yours show up.”

We regarded each other gravely for a time.

“Quap,” I said, “is at the bottom of the Atlantic. There’s some bills--We’ve got to pay the men.”

“Seen the papers?”

“Read ‘em all in the train.”

“At bay,” he said. “I been at bay for a week ... Yelping round me ... And me facing the music. I’m feelin’ a bit tired.”

He blew and wiped his glasses.

“My stomack isn’t what it was,” he explained. “One finds it--these times. How did it all happen, George? Your Marconigram--it took me in the wind a bit.”

I told him concisely. He nodded to the paragraphs of my narrative and at the end he poured something from a medicine bottle into a sticky little wineglass and drank it. I became aware of the presence of drugs, of three or four small bottles before him among his disorder of papers, of a faint elusively familiar odour in the room.

“Yes,” he said, wiping his lips and recorking the bottle. “You’ve done your best, George. The luck’s been against us.”

He reflected, bottle in hand. “Sometimes the luck goes with you and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it doesn’t. And then where are you? Grass in the oven! Fight or no fight.”

He asked a few questions and then his thoughts came back to his own urgent affairs. I tried to get some comprehensive account of the situation from him, but he would not give it.

“Oh, I wish I’d had you. I wish I’d had you, George. I’ve had a lot on my hands. You’re clear headed at times.”

“What has happened?”

“Oh! Boom!--infernal things.”

“Yes, but--how? I’m just off the sea, remember.”

“It’d worry me too much to tell you now. It’s tied up in a skein.”

He muttered something to himself and mused darkly, and roused himself to say--

“Besides--you’d better keep out of it. It’s getting tight. Get ‘em talking. Go down to Crest Hill and fly. That’s YOUR affair.”

For a time his manner set free queer anxieties in my brain again.

I will confess that that Mordet Island nightmare of mine returned, and as I looked at him his hand went out for the drug again. “Stomach, George,” he said.

“I been fightin’ on that. Every man fights on some thing--gives way somewheres--head, heart, liver--something. Zzzz. Gives way somewhere. Napoleon did at last. All through the Waterloo campaign, his stomach--it wasn’t a stomach! Worse than mine, no end.”

The mood of depression passed as the drug worked within him. His eyes brightened. He began to talk big. He began to dress up the situation for my eyes, to recover what he had admitted to me. He put it as a retreat from Russia. There were still the chances of Leipzig.

“It’s a battle, George--a big fight. We’re fighting for millions. I’ve still chances. There’s still a card or so. I can’t tell all my plans--like speaking on the stroke.”

“You might,” I began.

“I can’t, George. It’s like asking to look at some embryo. You got to wait. I know. In a sort of way, I know. But to tell it--No! You been away so long. And everything’s got complicated.”

My perception of disastrous entanglements deepened with the rise of his spirits. It was evident that I could only help to tie him up in whatever net was weaving round his mind by forcing questions and explanations upon him. My thoughts flew off at another angle. “How’s Aunt Susan?” said I.

I had to repeat the question. His busy whispering lips stopped for a moment, and he answered in the note of one who repeats a formula.

“She’d like to be in the battle with me. She’d like to be here in London. But there’s corners I got to turn alone.” His eye rested for a moment on the little bottle beside him. “And things have happened.

“You might go down now and talk to her,” he said, in a directer voice. “I shall be down to-morrow night, I think.”

He looked up as though he hoped that would end our talk.

“For the week-end?” I asked.

“For the week-end. Thank God for week-ends, George!”

II

My return home to Lady Grove was a very different thing from what I had anticipated when I had got out to sea with my load of quap and fancied the Perfect-Filament was safe within my grasp. As I walked through the evening light along the downs, the summer stillness seemed like the stillness of something newly dead. There were no lurking workmen any more, no cyclists on the high road.

Cessation was manifest everywhere. There had been, I learnt from my aunt, a touching and quite voluntary demonstration when the Crest Hill work had come to an end and the men had drawn their last pay; they had cheered my uncle and hooted the contractors and Lord Boom.

I cannot now recall the manner in which my aunt and I greeted one another. I must have been very tired there, but whatever impression was made has gone out of my memory. But I recall very clearly how we sat at the little round table near the big window that gave on the terrace, and dined and talked. I remember her talking of my uncle.

She asked after him, and whether he seemed well. “I wish I could help,” she said. “But I’ve never helped him much, never. His way of doing things was never mine. And since--since--. Since he began to get so rich, he’s kept things from me. In the old days--it was different...

“There he is--I don’t know what he’s doing. He won’t have me near him...

“More’s kept from me than anyone. The very servants won’t let me know. They try and stop the worst of the papers--Boom’s things--from coming upstairs ... I suppose they’ve got him in a corner, George. Poor old Teddy! Poor old Adam and Eve we are! Ficial Receivers with flaming swords to drive us out of our garden! I’d hoped we’d never have another Trek. Well--anyway, it won’t be Crest Hill ... But it’s hard on Teddy. He must be in such a mess up there. Poor old chap. I suppose we can’t help him. I suppose we’d only worry him. Have some more soup George--while there is some?...”

The next day was one of those days of strong perception that stand out clear in one’s memory when the common course of days is blurred. I can recall now the awakening in the large familiar room that was always kept for me, and how I lay staring at its chintz-covered chairs, its spaced fine furniture, its glimpse of the cedars without, and thought that all this had to end.

I have never been greedy for money, I have never wanted to be rich, but I felt now an immense sense of impending deprivation. I read the newspapers after breakfast--I and my aunt together--and then I walked up to see what Cothope had done in the matter of Lord Roberts B. Never before had I appreciated so acutely the ample brightness of the Lady Grove gardens, the dignity and wide peace of all about me. It was one of those warm mornings in late May that have won all the glory of summer without losing the gay delicacy of spring. The shrubbery was bright with laburnum and lilac, the beds swarmed with daffodils and narcissi and with lilies of the valley in the shade.

I went along the well-kept paths among the rhododendra and through the private gate into the woods where the bluebells and common orchid were in profusion. Never before had I tasted so completely the fine sense of privilege and ownership. And all this has to end, I told myself, all this has to end.

Neither my uncle nor I had made any provision for disaster; all we had was in the game, and I had little doubt now of the completeness of our ruin. For the first time in my life since he had sent me that wonderful telegram of his I had to consider that common anxiety of mankind, --Employment. I had to come off my magic carpet and walk once more in the world.

And suddenly I found myself at the cross drives where I had seen Beatrice for the first time after so many years. It is strange, but so far as I can recollect I had not thought of her once since I had landed at Plymouth. No doubt she had filled the background of my mind, but I do not remember one definite, clear thought. I had been intent on my uncle and the financial collapse.

It came like a blow in the face now; all that, too, had to end!

Suddenly I was filled with the thought of her and a great longing for her. What would she do when she realised our immense disaster? What would she do? How would she take it? It filled me with astonishment to realise how little I could tell...

Should I perhaps presently happen upon her?

I went on through the plantations and out upon the downs, and thence I saw Cothope with a new glider of his own design soaring down wind to my old familiar “grounding” place. To judge by its long rhythm it was a very good glider. “Like Cothope’s cheek,” thought I, “to go on with the research. I wonder if he’s keeping notes ... But all this will have to stop.”

He was sincerely glad to see me. “It’s been a rum go,” he said.

He had been there without wages for a month, a man forgotten in the rush of events.

“I just stuck on and did what I could with the stuff. I got a bit of money of my own--and I said to myself, ‘Well, here you are with the gear and no one to look after you. You won’t get such a chance again, my boy, not in all your born days. Why not make what you can with it? ‘“

“How’s Lord Roberts B?”

Cothope lifted his eyebrows. “I’ve had to refrain,” he said. “But he’s looking very handsome.”

“Gods!” I said, “I’d like to get him up just once before we smash. You read the papers? You know we’re going to smash?”

“Oh! I read the papers. It’s scandalous, sir, such work as ours should depend on things like that. You and I ought to be under the State, sir, if you’ll excuse me.”

“Nothing to excuse,” I said. “I’ve always been a Socialist--of a sort--in theory. Let’s go and have a look at him. How is he? Deflated?”

“Just about quarter full. That last oil glaze of yours holds the gas something beautiful. He’s not lost a cubic metre a week.”...

Cothope returned to Socialism as we went toward the sheds.

“Glad to think you’re a Socialist, sir,” he said, “it’s the only civilised state. I been a Socialist some years--off the Clarion. It’s a rotten scramble, this world. It takes the things we make and invent and it plays the silly fool with ‘em. We scientific people, we’ll have to take things over and stop all this financing and advertisement and that. It’s too silly. It’s a noosance. Look at us!”

Lord Roberts B, even in his partially deflated condition in his shed, was a fine thing to stare up at. I stood side by side with Cothope regarding him, and it was borne in upon me more acutely than ever that all this had to end. I had a feeling just like the feeling of a boy who wants to do wrong, that I would use up the stuff while I had it before the creditors descended. I had a queer fancy, too, I remember, that if I could get into the air it would advertise my return to Beatrice.

“We’ll fill her,” I said concisely.

“It’s all ready,” said Cothope, and added as an afterthought, “unless they cut off the gas.”...

I worked and interested myself with Cothope all the morning and for a time forgot my other troubles. But the thought of Beatrice flooded me slowly and steadily. It became an unintelligent sick longing to see her. I felt that I could not wait for the filling of Lord Roberts B, that I must hunt her up and see her soon. I got everything forward and lunched with Cothope, and then with the feeblest excuses left him in order to prowl down through the woods towards Bedley Corner. I became a prey to wretched hesitations and diffidence. Ought I to go near her now? I asked myself, reviewing all the social abasements of my early years. At last, about five, I called at the Dower House. I was greeted by their Charlotte--with a forbidding eye and a cold astonishment.

Both Beatrice and Lady Osprey were out.

There came into my head some prowling dream of meeting her. I went along the lane towards Woking, the lane down which we had walked five months ago in the wind and rain.

I mooned for a time in our former footsteps, then swore and turned back across the fields, and then conceived a distaste for Cothope and went Downward. At last I found myself looking down on the huge abandoned masses of the Crest Hill house.

That gave my mind a twist into a new channel. My uncle came uppermost again. What a strange, melancholy emptiness of intention that stricken enterprise seemed in the even evening sunlight, what vulgar magnificence and crudity and utter absurdity! It was as idiotic as the pyramids. I sat down on the stile, staring at it as though I had never seen that forest of scaffold poles, that waste of walls and bricks and plaster and shaped stones, that wilderness of broken soil and wheeling tracks and dumps before. It struck me suddenly as the compactest image and sample of all that passes for Progress, of all the advertisement-inflated spending, the aimless building up and pulling down, the enterprise and promise of my age. This was our fruit, this was what he had done, I and my uncle, in the fashion of our time. We were its leaders and exponents, we were the thing it most flourishingly produced. For this futility in its end, for an epoch of such futility, the solemn scroll of history had unfolded...

“Great God!” I cried, “but is this Life?”

For this the armies drilled, for this the Law was administered and the prisons did their duty, for this the millions toiled and perished in suffering, in order that a few of us should build palaces we never finished, make billiard-rooms under ponds, run imbecile walls round irrational estates, scorch about the world in motor-cars, devise flying-machines, play golf and a dozen such foolish games of ball, crowd into chattering dinner parties, gamble and make our lives one vast, dismal spectacle of witless waste! So it struck me then, and for a time I could think of no other interpretation. This was Life! It came to me like a revelation, a revelation at once incredible and indisputable of the abysmal folly of our being.

III

I was roused from such thoughts by the sound of footsteps behind me.

I turned half hopeful--so foolish is a lover’s imagination, and stopped amazed. It was my uncle. His face was white--white as I had seen it in my dream.

“Hullo!” I said, and stared. “Why aren’t you in London?”

“It’s all up,” he said...

“Adjudicated?”

“No!”

I stared at him for a moment, and then got off the stile.

We stood swaying and then came forward with a weak motion of his arms like a man who cannot see distinctly, and caught at and leant upon the stile. For a moment we were absolutely still. He made a clumsy gesture towards the great futility below and choked. I discovered that his face was wet with tears, that his wet glasses blinded him. He put up his little fat hand and clawed them off clumsily, felt inefficiently for his pocket-handkerchief, and then, to my horror, as he clung to me, he began to weep aloud, this little, old worldworn swindler. It wasn’t just sobbing or shedding tears, it was crying as a child cries. It was oh! terrible!

“It’s cruel,” he blubbered at last. “They asked me questions. They KEP’ asking me questions, George.”

He sought for utterance, and spluttered.

“The Bloody bullies!” he shouted. “The Bloody Bullies.”

He ceased to weep. He became suddenly rapid and explanatory.

“It’s not a fair game, George. They tire you out. And I’m not well. My stomach’s all wrong. And I been and got a cold. I always been li’ble to cold, and this one’s on my chest. And then they tell you to speak up. They bait you--and bait you, and bait you. It’s torture. The strain of it. You can’t remember what you said. You’re bound to contradict yourself. It’s like Russia, George ... It isn’t fair play ... Prominent man. I’ve been next at dinners with that chap, Neal; I’ve told him stories--and he’s bitter! Sets out to ruin me. Don’t ask a civil question--bellows.” He broke down again. “I’ve been bellowed at, I been bullied, I been treated like a dog. Dirty cads they are! Dirty cads! I’d rather be a Three-Card Sharper than a barrister; I’d rather sell cat’s-meat in the streets.

“They sprung things on me this morning, things I didn’t expect. They rushed me! I’d got it all in my hands and then I was jumped. By Neal! Neal I’ve given city tips to! Neal! I’ve helped Neal...

“I couldn’t swallow a mouthful--not in the lunch hour. I couldn’t face it. It’s true, George--I couldn’t face it. I said I’d get a bit of air and slipped out and down to the Embankment, and there I took a boat to Richmond. Some idee. I took a rowing boat when I got there and I rowed about on the river for a bit. A lot of chaps and girls there was on the bank laughed at my shirt-sleeves and top hat. Dessay they thought it was a pleasure trip. Fat lot of pleasure! I rowed round for a bit and came in. Then I came on here. Windsor way. And there they are in London doing what they like with me ... I don’t care!”

“But” I said, looking down at him, perplexed.

“It’s abscondin’. They’ll have a warrant.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“It’s all up, George--all up and over.

“And I thought I’d live in that place, George and die a lord! It’s a great place, reely, an imperial--if anyone has the sense to buy it and finish it. That terrace--”

I stood thinking him over.

“Look here!” I said. “What’s that about--a warrant? Are you sure they’ll get a warrant? I’m sorry uncle; but what have you done?”

“Haven’t I told you?”

“Yes, but they won’t do very much to you for that. They’ll only bring you up for the rest of your examination.”

He remained silent for a time. At last he spoke--speaking with difficulty.

“It’s worse than that. I’ve done something. They’re bound to get it out. Practically they HAVE got it out.”

“What?”

“Writin’ things down--I done something.”

For the first time in his life, I believe, he felt and looked ashamed. It filled me with remorse to see him suffer so.

“We’ve all done things,” I said. “It’s part of the game the world makes us play. If they want to arrest you--and you’ve got no cards in your hand--! They mustn’t arrest you.”

“No. That’s partly why I went to Richmond. But I never thought--”

His little bloodshot eyes stared at Crest Hill.

“That chap Wittaker Wright,” he said, “he had his stuff ready. I haven’t. Now you got it, George. That’s the sort of hole I’m in.”

IV

That memory of my uncle at the gate is very clear and full. I am able to recall even the undertow of my thoughts while he was speaking. I remember my pity and affection for him in his misery growing and stirring within me, my realisation that at any risk I must help him. But then comes indistinctness again. I was beginning to act. I know I persuaded him to put himself in my hands, and began at once to plan and do. I think that when we act most we remember least, that just in the measure that the impulse of our impressions translates itself into schemes and movements, it ceases to record itself in memories. I know I resolved to get him away at once, and to use the Lord Roberts B in effecting that. It was clear he was soon to be a hunted man, and it seemed to me already unsafe for him to try the ordinary Continental routes in his flight. I had to evolve some scheme, and evolve it rapidly, how we might drop most inconspicuously into the world across the water. My resolve to have one flight at least in my airship fitted with this like hand to glove. It seemed to me we might be able to cross over the water in the night, set our airship adrift, and turn up as pedestrian tourists in Normandy or Brittany, and so get away. That, at any rate, was my ruling idea.

I sent off Cothope with a dummy note to Woking, because I did not want to implicate him, and took my uncle to the pavilion. I went down to my aunt, and made a clean breast of the situation. She became admirably competent. We went into his dressing-room and ruthlessly broke his locks. I got a pair of brown boots, a tweed suit and a cap of his, and indeed a plausible walking outfit, and a little game bag for his pedestrian gear; and, in addition, a big motoring overcoat and a supply of rugs to add to those I had at the pavilion. I also got a flask of brandy, and she made sandwiches. I don’t remember any servants appearing, and I forget where she got those sandwiches. Meanwhile we talked. Afterwards I thought with what a sure confidence we talked to each other.

“What’s he done?” she said.

“D’you mind knowing?”

“No conscience left, thank God!”

“I think--forgery!”

There was just a little pause. “Can you carry this bundle?” she asked.

I lifted it.

“No woman ever has respected the law--ever,” she said. “It’s too silly ... The things it lets you do! And then pulls you up--like a mad nurse minding a child.”

She carried some rugs for me through the shrubbery in the darkling.

“They’ll think we’re going mooning,” she said, jerking her head at the household. “I wonder what they make of us--criminals.” ... An immense droning note came as if in answer to that. It startled us both for a moment. “The dears!” she said. “It’s the gong for dinner! ... But I wish I could help little Teddy, George. It’s awful to think of him there with hot eyes, red and dry. And I know--the sight of me makes him feel sore. Things I said, George. If I could have seen, I’d have let him have an omnibusful of Scrymgeours. I cut him up. He’d never thought I meant it before ... I’ll help all I can, anyhow.”

I turned at something in her voice, and got a moon light gleam of tears upon her face.

“Could SHE have helped?” she asked abruptly.

“SHE?”

“That woman.”

“My God!” I cried, “HELPED! Those--things don’t help!”

“Tell me again what I ought to do,” she said after a silence.

I went over the plans I had made for communicating, and the things I thought she might do. I had given her the address of a solicitor she might put some trust in.

“But you must act for yourself,” I insisted.

“Roughly,” I said, “it’s a scramble. You must get what you can for us, and follow as you can.”

She nodded.

She came right up to the pavilion and hovered for a time shyly, and then went away.

I found my uncle in my sitting-room in an arm-chair, with his feet upon the fender of the gas stove, which he had lit, and now he was feebly drunken with my whisky, and very weary in body and spirit, and inclined to be cowardly.

“I lef’ my drops,” he said.

He changed his clothes slowly and unwillingly. I had to bully him, I had almost to shove him to the airship and tuck him up upon its wicker flat. Single-handed I made but a clumsy start; we scraped along the roof of the shed and bent a van of the propeller, and for a time I hung underneath without his offering a hand to help me to clamber up. If it hadn’t been for a sort of anchoring trolley device of Cothope’s, a sort of slip anchor running on a rail, we should never have got clear at all.

V

The incidents of our flight in Lord Roberts B do not arrange themselves in any consecutive order. To think of that adventure is like dipping haphazard into an album of views. One is reminded first of this and then of that. We were both lying down on a horizontal plate of basketwork; for Lord Roberts B had none of the elegant accommodation of a balloon. I lay forward, and my uncle behind me in such a position that he could see hardly anything of our flight. We were protected from rolling over simply by netting between the steel stays. It was impossible for us to stand up at all; we had either to lie or crawl on all fours over the basket work. Amidships were lockers made of Watson’s Aulite material, --and between these it was that I had put my uncle, wrapped in rugs. I wore sealskin motoring boots and gloves, and a motoring fur coat over my tweeds, and I controlled the engine by Bowden wires and levers forward.

The early part of that night’s experience was made up of warmth, of moonlit Surrey and Sussex landscape, and of a rapid and successful flight, ascending and swooping, and then ascending again southward. I could not watch the clouds because the airship overhung me; I could not see the stars nor gauge the meteorological happening, but it was fairly clear to me that a wind shifting between north and northeast was gathering strength, and after I had satisfied myself by a series of entirely successful expansions and contractions of the real air-worthiness of Lord Roberts B, I stopped the engine to save my petrol, and let the monster drift, checking its progress by the dim landscape below. My uncle lay quite still behind me, saying little and staring in front of him, and I was left to my own thoughts and sensations.

My thoughts, whatever they were, have long since faded out of memory, and my sensations have merged into one continuous memory of an countryside lying, as it seemed, under snow, with square patches of dimness, white phantoms of roads, rents and pools of velvety blackness, and lamp-jewelled houses. I remember a train boring its way like a hastening caterpillar of fire across the landscape, and how distinctly I heard its clatter. Every town and street was buttoned with street lamps. I came quite close to the South Downs near Lewes, and all the lights were out in the houses, and the people gone to bed. We left the land a little to the east of Brighton, and by that time Brighton was well abed. and the brightly lit sea-front deserted. Then I let out the gas chamber to its fullest extent and rose. I like to be high above water.

I do not clearly know what happened in the night. I think I must have dozed, and probably my uncle slept. I remember that once or twice I heard him talking in an eager, muffled voice to himself, or to an imaginary court. But there can be no doubt the wind changed right round into the east, and that we were carried far down the Channel without any suspicion of the immense leeway we were making. I remember the kind of stupid perplexity with which I saw the dawn breaking over a grey waste of water, below, and realised that something was wrong. I was so stupid that it was only after the sunrise I really noticed the trend of the foam caps below, and perceived we were in a severe easterly gale. Even then, instead of heading southeasterly, I set the engine going, headed south, and so continued a course that must needs have either just hit Ushant, or carry us over the Bay of Biscay. I thought I was east of Cherbourg, when I was far to the west and stopped my engine in that belief, and then set it going again. I did actually sight the coast of Brittany to the southeast in the late afternoon, and that it was woke me up to the gravity of our position. I discovered it by accident in the southeast, when I was looking for it in the southwest. I turned about east and faced the wind for some time, and finding I had no chance in its teeth, went high, where it seemed less violent, and tried to make a course southeast. It was only then that I realised what a gale I was in. I had been going westward, and perhaps even in gusts north of west, at a pace of fifty or sixty miles an hour.

Then I began what I suppose would be called a Fight against the east wind. One calls it a Fight, but it was really almost as unlike a fight as plain sewing. The wind tried to drive me westwardly, and I tried to get as much as I could eastwardly, with the wind beating and rocking us irregularly, but by no means unbearably, for about twelve hours. My hope lay in the wind abating, and our keeping in the air and eastward of Finisterre until it did, and the chief danger was the exhaustion of our petrol. It was a long and anxious and almost meditative time; we were fairly warm, and only slowly getting hungry, and except that my uncle grumbled a little and produced some philosophical reflections, and began to fuss about having a temperature, we talked very little. I was tired and sulky, and chiefly worried about the engine. I had to resist a tendency to crawl back and look at it. I did not care to risk contracting our gas chamber for fear of losing gas. Nothing was less like a fight. I know that in popular magazines, and so forth, all such occasions as this are depicted in terms of hysteria. Captains save their ships engineers complete their bridges, generals conduct their battles, in a state of dancing excitement, foaming recondite technicalities at the lips. I suppose that sort of thing works up the reader, but so far as it professes to represent reality, I am convinced it is all childish nonsense, schoolboys of fifteen, girls of eighteen, and literary men all their lives, may have these squealing fits, but my own experience is that most exciting scenes are not exciting, and most of the urgent moments in life are met by steady-headed men.