Chapter VII

“Well, Madame, we’ve arrived. This is the moon and there is the earth. To put it into plain figures, you are now two hundred and forty thousand odd miles away from home. I think you said you would like breakfast on the surface of the World that Has Been, and so, as it’s about eleven o’clock earth-time, we’ll call it a déjeuner, and then we’ll go and see what this poor old skeleton of a world is like.”

“Oh, then we shan’t actually have breakfast on the moon?”

“My dear child, of course you will. Isn’t the Astronef resting now--right now as they say in some parts of the States--on the top of the crater wall of Tycho? Aren’t we really and actually on the surface of the moon? Just look at this frightful black and white, god-forsaken landscape! Isn’t it like everything that you’ve ever learnt about the moon? Nothing but light and shade, black and white, peaks of mountains blazing in sunlight, and valleys underneath them as black as the hinges of----”

“Tophet,” said Zaidie, interrupting him quickly. “Yes, I see what you mean. So we’ll have our déjeuner here, breathing our own nice atmosphere, and eating and drinking what was grown on the soil of dear old Mother Earth. It’s a wee bit paralysing to think of, isn’t it, dear? Two hundred and forty thousand miles across the gulf of Space--and we sitting here at our breakfast table just as comfortable as though we were in the Cecil in London, or the Waldorf-Astoria in New York!”

“There’s nothing much in that, I mean as regards distance. You see, before we’ve finished we shall probably, at least I hope we shall, be eating a breakfast or a dinner together a thousand million miles or more from New York or London. Your Ladyship must remember that this is only the first stage on the journey, the jumping-off place as you called it. You see the distance from Washington to New York is--well, it isn’t even a hop, skip and a jump in comparison with----”

“Oh yes, I see what you mean of course, and so I suppose I had better cut off or short-circuit such sympathies with Mother Earth as are not connected with your noble self, and get breakfast ready. How’s that?”

“Well,” said Lord Redgrave, looking at her as she rose from the table, “I think our honeymoon in Space is young enough yet to make it possible for me to say that your Ladyship’s opinion is exactly right.”

“That’s a hopeless commonplace! Really, Lenox, I thought you were capable of something better than that.”

“My dear Zaidie, it has been my fate to have many friends who have had honeymoons on earth, and some of their experience seems to be that the man who contradicts his wife during the first six weeks of matrimony simply makes an ass of himself. He offends her and makes himself unhappy, and it sometimes takes six months or more to get back to bearings.”

“What a lot of silly men and women you must have known, Lenox. Is that the way Englishmen start marriage in England? If it is, I don’t wonder at Englishmen coming across the Atlantic in liners and air-ships and so on to get American wives. I guess you can’t understand your own womenfolk.”

“Or perhaps they don’t understand us; but anyhow, I don’t think I’ve made any great mistake.”

“No, I don’t think you have. Of course if I thought so I wouldn’t be here now. But this is very well for a breakfast talk; all the same, I should like to know how we are going to take the promenade you promised me on the surface of the moon?”

“Your Ladyship has only to finish her breakfast, and then everything shall be made plain to her, even the deepest craters of the mountains of the moon.”

“Very well, then, I will eat swiftly and in obedience; and meanwhile, as your Lordship seems to have finished, perhaps----”

“Yes, I will go and see to the mechanical necessities,” said Redgrave, swallowing his last cup of coffee, and getting up. “If you’ll come down to the lower deck when you’ve finished, I’ll have your breathing-suit ready for you, and then we’ll go into the air-chamber.”

“Thanks, dear, yes,” she said, putting out her hand to him as he left the table, “the ante-chamber to other worlds. Isn’t it just lovely? Fancy me being able to leave one world and land on another, and have you to say just those few words which make it all possible. I wonder what all the girls of all the civilised countries of earth would give just to be me right now.”

“They could none of them give what you gave me, Zaidie, because you see from my point of view there’s only one Zaidie in the world--or as perhaps I ought to say just now, in the Solar System.”

“Very prettily said, sir!” she laughed, when she had given him his due reward for his courtly speech. “I am too dazed with all these wonders about me to----”

“To reply to it? You’ve given me the most convincing reply possible. Now finish your breakfast, and I’ll tell you when the breathing-dresses and the air-chamber are ready. By the way, don’t forget your cameras. It’s quite possible we may find something worth taking pictures of, and you needn’t trouble much about the weight. You know, you and I and all that we carry will only weigh about a sixth of what we did on the earth.”

“Very well, then, I’ll take the whole-plate apparatus as well as the kodak and the panorama camera. When I’m ready, Murgatroyd will tell you to come down.”

“But isn’t he coming with us too?”

“My dear girl, if I were to ask Murgatroyd to leave the Astronef there’d be a mutiny on board--a mutiny of one against one. No, he’s left his native world; but he says he’s done it in a ship that’s made with British steel out of English iron mines, smelted, forged and fashioned in English works, and so to him it’s a bit of England, however far away from Mother Earth it may be; and if you ever see Andrew Murgatroyd’s big head and good, ungainly body outside the Astronef in any of the worlds, dead or alive, that we’re going to visit--well, when we get back to Mother Earth you may ask me----”

“I don’t think I’ll have to ask you for anything, Lenox. I believe if I wanted anything you’d know before I did, so go away and get those breathing-dresses ready. I didn’t come to the moon to talk commonplaces with a husband I’ve been married to for nearly three days.”

“Is it really as long as that?”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, even if you are beyond the limits of earthly conventionalities. Anyhow, I’ve been married long enough to want my own way, and just now I want a promenade on the moon.”

“The will of her Ladyship is a law unto her servant, and that which she hath said shall be done! If you come down on to the lower deck in ten minutes everything shall be ready.”

With this he disappeared down the companion-way.

About five minutes afterwards Andrew Murgatroyd showed his grizzled, long-bearded face with its high forehead, heavy brows, and broad-set eyes, long nose and shaven upper lip, just above the stairway and said, for all the world as though he might have been giving out the number of the hymn in his beloved Ebenezer at Smeaton:

“If it pleases yer Ladyship, his Lordship is ready, and if you’ll please come down I’ll show you the way.”

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Murgatroyd!” said Zaidie, getting up and going towards the companion-way; “but I’m afraid you don’t think that--I mean you don’t seem to take very much interest----”

“If your Ladyship will pardon me,” said the old man, standing aside to let her go down, “it is not my business to think on board his Lordship’s vessel. I am his servant, and my fathers have been his fathers’ servants for more years than I’d like to count. If it wasn’t that way I wouldn’t be here. Will your Ladyship please to come down?”

Zaidie bowed her beautiful head in recognition of this ages-old devotion, and said as she passed him, more sweetly than he had ever heard human lips speak:

“Thank you, Mr. Murgatroyd. You’ve taught me something in those few words that we have no knowledge of in the States. Good service is as honourable as good mastership. Thank you.”

Murgatroyd put up his lower lip and half smiled with his upper, for he was not yet quite sure of this radiant beauty, who, according to his ideas, should have been English and wasn’t. Then, with a rather clumsy and yet eloquent gesture, he showed her the way down to the air-chamber.

She nodded to him with a smile as she passed in through the air-tight door, and when she heard the levers swing to and the bolts shoot into their places she felt as though, for the time being, she had said goodbye to a friend.

Her husband was waiting for her almost fully clad in his breathing-dress. He had hers all ready to put on, and when the necessary changes and investments had been made, Zaidie found herself clad in a costume which was not by any means unlike the diving-dresses of common use, save that they were very much lighter in construction.

The helmets were smaller, and not having to withstand outside pressure they were made of welded aluminum, lined thickly with asbestos, not to keep the cold out, but the heat in. On the back of the dress there was a square case, looking like a knapsack, containing the expanding apparatus, which would furnish breathable air for an almost unlimited time as long as the liquefied air from a cylinder hung below it passed through the cells in which the breathed air had been deprived of its carbonic acid gas and other noxious ingredients.

The pressure of air inside the helmet automatically regulated the supply, which was not permitted to circulate through the other portions of the dress. The reasons for this precaution were very simple. Granted the absence of atmosphere on the moon, any air in the dress, which was woven of a cunning compound of silk and asbestos, would instantly expand with irresistible force, burst the covering, and expose the limbs of the explorers to a cold which would be infinitely more destructive than the hottest of earthly fires. It would wither them to nothing in a moment.