A Honeymoon in Space
from below rather than from above.
"If this isn't heaven it must be the half-way house," said Redgrave,
with what was, perhaps, under the circumstances, a pardonable
irreverence. "Still, after all, we don't know what the inhabitants may
be like, so I think we'd better close the doors, and drop on the top of
that mountain-spur running out between the two rivers into the bay. Do
you notice how curious the water looks after the Earth seas; bright
silver, instead of blue and green?"
"Oh, it's just lovely," said Zaidie. "Let's go down and have a walk.
There's nothing to be afraid of. You'll never make me believe that a
world like this can be inhabited by anything dangerous."
"Perhaps, but we mustn't forget what happened on Mars, _Madonna mia_.
Still, there's one thing, we haven't been tackled by any aerial fleets
yet."
"I don't think the people here want air-ships. They can fly themselves.
Look! there are a lot of them coming to meet us. That was a rather
wicked remark of yours, Lenox, about the half-way house to heaven; but
those certainly do look something like angels."
As Zaidie said this, after a somewhat lengthy pause, during which the
_Astronef_ had descended to within a few hundred feet of the
mountain-spur, she handed her field-glasses to her husband, and pointed
downwards towards an island which lay a couple or miles or so off the
end of the spur.
He put the glasses to his eyes, and took a long look through them.
Moving them slowly up and down, and from side to side, he saw hundreds
of winged figures rising from the island and floating towards them.
"You were right, dear," he said, without taking the glass from his eyes,
"and so was I. If those aren't angels, they're certainly something like
men, and, I suppose, women too who can fly. We may as well stop here and
wait for them. I wonder what sort of an animal they take the _Astronef_
for."
He sent a message down the tube to Murgatroyd and gave a turn and a half
to the steering-wheel. The propellers slowed down and the _Astronef_
dropped with a hardly-perceptible shock in the midst of a little plateau
covered with a thick, soft moss of a pale yellowish green, and fringed
by a belt of trees which seemed to be over three hundred feet high, and
whose foliage was a deep golden bronze.
They had scarcely landed before the flying figures reappeared over the
tree tops and swept downwards in long spiral curves towards the
_Astronef_.
"If they're not angels, they're very like them," said Zaidie, putting
down her glasses.
"There's one thing, they fly a lot better than the old masters' angels
or Dore's could have done, because they have tails--or at least
something that seems to serve the same purpose, and yet they haven't got
feathers."
"Yes, they have, at least round the edges of their wings or whatever
they are, and they've got clothes, too, silk tunics or something of that
sort--and there are men and women."
"You're quite right, those fringes down their legs are feathers, and
that's how they can fly. They seem to have four arms."
The flying figures which came hovering near to the _Astronef_, without
evincing any apparent sign of fear, were the strangest that human eyes
had looked upon. In some respects they had a sufficient resemblance for
them to be taken for winged men and women, while in another they bore a
decided resemblance to birds. Their bodies and limbs were human in
shape, but of slenderer and lighter build; and from the shoulder-blades
and muscles of the back there sprang a second pair of arms arching up
above their heads. Between these and the lower arms, and continued from
them down the side to the ankles, there appeared to be a flexible
membrane covered with a light feathery down, pure white on the inside,
but on the back a brilliant golden yellow, deepening to bronze towards
the edges, round which ran a deep feathery fringe.
The body was covered in front and down the back between the wings with a
sort of divided tunic of a light, silken-looking material, which must
have been clothing, since there were many different colours all more or
less of different hue among them. Below this and attached to the inner
sides of the leg from the knee downward, was another membrane which
reached down to the heels, and it was this which Redgrave somewhat
flippantly alluded to as a tail. Its obvious purpose was to maintain the
longitudinal balance when flying.
In stature the inhabitants of the Love-Star varied from about five feet
six to five feet, but both the taller and the shorter of them were all
of nearly the same size, from which it was easy to conclude that this
difference in stature was on Venus as well as on the Earth, one of the
broad distinctions between the sexes.
They flew round the _Astronef_ with an exquisite ease and grace which
made Zaidie exclaim:
"Now, why weren't we made like that on Earth?"
To which Redgrave, after a look at the barometer, replied:
"Partly, I suppose, because we weren't built that way, and partly
because we don't live in an atmosphere about two and a half times as
dense as ours."
Then several of the winged figures alighted on the mossy covering of the
plain and walked towards the vessel.
"Why, they walk just like us, only much more prettily!" said Zaidie.
"And look what funny little faces they've got! Half bird, half human,
and soft, downy feathers instead of hair. I wonder whether they talk or
sing. I wish you'd open the doors again, Lenox. I'm sure they can't
possibly mean us any harm; they are far too pretty for that. What lovely
soft eyes they have, and what a thousand pities it is we shan't be able
to understand them."
They had left the conning-tower, and both his lordship and Murgatroyd
were throwing open the sliding-doors and, to Zaidie's considerable
displeasure, getting the deck Maxims ready for action in case they
should be required. As soon as the doors were open Zaidie's judgment of
the inhabitants of Venus was entirely justified.
Without the slightest sign of fear, but with very evident astonishment
in their round golden-yellow eyes, they came walking close up to the
sides of the _Astronef_. Some of them stroked her smooth, shining sides
with their little hands, which Zaidie now found had only three fingers
and a thumb. Many ages before they might have been birds' claws, but now
they were soft and pink and plump, utterly strange to manual work as it
is understood upon Earth.
"Just fancy getting Maxim guns ready to shoot those delightful things,"
said Zaidie, almost indignantly, as she went towards the doorway from
which the gangway ladder ran down to the soft, mossy turf. "Why, not one
of them has got a weapon of any sort; and just listen," she went on,
stopping in the opening of the doorway, "have you ever heard music like
that on Earth? I haven't. I suppose it's the way they talk. I'd give a
good deal to be able to understand them. But still, it's very lovely,
isn't it?"
"Ay, like the voices of syrens," said Murgatroyd, speaking for the first
time since the _Astronef_ had landed; for this big, grizzled, taciturn
Yorkshireman, who looked upon the whole cruise through Space as a mad
and almost impious adventure, which nothing but his hereditary loyalty
to his master's name and family could have persuaded him to share in,
had grown more and more silent as the millions of miles between the
_Astronef_ and his native Yorkshire village had multiplied day by day.
"Syrens--and why not, Andrew?" laughed Redgrave. "At any rate, I don't
think they look likely to lure us and the _Astronef_ to destruction."
Then he went on: "Yes, Zaidie, I never heard anything like that before.
Unearthly, of course it is, but then we're not on Earth. Now, Zaidie,
they seem to talk in song-language. You did pretty well on Mars with
your American, suppose we go out and show them that you can speak the
song-language, too."
"What do you mean?" she said; "sing them something?"
"Yes," he replied; "they'll try to talk to you in song, and you won't be
able to understand them; at least, not as far as words and sentences go.
But music is the universal language on Earth, and there's no reason why
it shouldn't be the same through the Solar System. Come along, tune up,
little woman!"
They went together down the gangway stairs, he dressed in an ordinary
suit of grey, English tweed, with a golf cap on the back of his head,
and she in the last and daintiest of the costumes which the art of Paris
and London and New York had produced before the _Astronef_ soared up
from far-off Washington.
The moment that she set foot on the golden-yellow sward she was
surrounded by a swarm of the winged, and yet strangely human creatures.
Those nearest to her came and touched her hands and face, and stroked
the folds of her dress. Others looked into her violet-blue eyes, and
others put out their queer little hands and stroked her hair.
This and her clothing seemed to be the most wonderful experience for
them, saving always the fact that she had only two arms and no wings.
Redgrave kept close beside her until he was satisfied that these
exquisite inhabitants of the new-found fairyland were innocent of any
intention of harm, and when he saw two of the winged daughters of the
Love-Star put up their hands and touch the thick coils of her hair, he
said:
"Take those pins and things out and let it down. They seem to think that
your hair's part of your head. It's the first chance you've had to work
a miracle, so you may as well do it. Show them the most beautiful thing
they've ever seen."
"What babies you men can be when you get sentimental!" laughed Zaidie,
as she put her hands up to her head. "How do you know that this may not
be ugly in their eyes?"
"Quite impossible!" he replied. "They're a great deal too pretty
themselves to think _you_ ugly. Let it down!"
While he was speaking Zaidie had taken off a Spanish mantilla which she
had thrown over her head as she came out, and which the ladies of Venus
seemed to think was part of her hair. Then she took out the comb and one
or two hairpins which kept the coils in position, deftly caught the
ends, and then, after a few rapid movements of her fingers, she shook
her head, and the wondering crowd about her saw, what seemed to them a
shimmering veil, half gold, half silver, in the soft reflected light
from the cloud-veil, fall down from her head over her shoulders.
They crowded still more closely round her, but so quietly and so gently
that she felt nothing more than the touch of wondering hands on her
arms, and dress, and hair. As Redgrave said afterwards, he was
"absolutely out of it." They seemed to imagine him to be a kind of
uncouth monster, possibly the slave of this radiant being which had come
so strangely from somewhere beyond the cloud-veil. They looked at him
with their golden-yellow eyes wide open, and some of them came up rather
timidly and touched his clothes, which they seemed to think were his
skin.
Then one or two, more daring, put their little hands up to his face and
touched his moustache, and all of them, while both examinations were
going on, kept up a running conversation of cooing and singing which
evidently conveyed their ideas from one to the other on the subject of
this most marvellous visit of these two strange beings with neither
wings nor feathers, but who, most undoubtedly, had other means of
flying, since it was quite certain that they had come from another
world.
Their ordinary speech was a low crooning note, like the language in
which doves converse, mingled with a twittering current of undertone.
But every moment it rose into higher notes, evidently expressing wonder
or admiration, or both.
"You were right about the universal language," said Redgrave, when he