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CHAPTER III. THE BALLOON § 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 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. “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.
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 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. |