That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
What is that thin man doing with the stop-watch and the note-book? And
the fat gentleman beside him, who never leaves off staring at the sky
through those big field-glasses. Nothing is billed to happen--there are
no numbers up on the pylons--yet something seems to be going on!"
"Rather!"
The boy broke into a little gurgle of excited laughter, and began to
dance up and down under the arm that rested on his neck.
"_Rather_! Didn't you know? How funny! Why, man alive, we're waiting
for _him_!"
"For him?"
"For Mr. Sherbrand. Father's friend. The Flying Man I've told you
about."
"Mr.---- Where is he?" Patrine asked vaguely, looking all about her.
In the tumult of her thoughts the name that had been upon a crumpled
card suggested no association with that so rapturously uttered by the
boy.
"There!" Bawne pointed upwards with another of the excited laughs.
"Carrying out a hovering-test. The man with the stop-watch is timing
him, and the other with the binnocs is observing him. He's French--no
end of an official swell! The French Government sent him," went on the
boy, with infinite relish, "to see Mr. Sherbrand test his invention. He
thought they didn't catch on, but the hoverer has fetched them. If he
hovers for twenty minutes, ten thousand feet up, his fortune's made!--I
heard a fellow say so to the Instructor. Man alive! isn't it topping
that you and I should be here to-day!"
*CHAPTER XXVII*
*SIR ROLAND TELLS A STORY*
While yet the Bird of War hovered invisible at ten thousand feet of
altitude, and the lungs of the men aboard her toiled and laboured, and
foam gathered about their nostrils and lips, Saxham stood talking with
the man who in his eyes ranked above all others, the tried and trusty
friend of fourteen years.
In those unforgettable months of the Siege of Gueldersdorp you might
have noticed a crow's foot or so at the corner of the Chief's keen
falcon-eyes. To-day, their hazel brightness undiminished, they looked
at Life from a network of fine criss-crossed lines. But Time, the
spider, had spun no web in the fine alert brain, and the man's heart was
free from crow's feet or wrinkles. Fresh and evergreen, it was as it
would always be, an oasis of kindness for the downhearted or weary,
watered by the twin wells of sympathy and enthusiasm. He said, speaking
to Saxham of the invisible Sherbrand:
"I wish we had a million like him!"
Saxham answered:
"I wish we had several millions. He is a fine, energetic type. A bit
of a hero-worshipper--a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a stoic: '_He
hath seen men rise to authority without envy, and schooled himself to
endure adversity, that he might bear himself the better when his time
should come to rule._'"
"His time is coming, or I am no judge of capability. And you quoted
from the _Encheiridion_ of Epictetus, I think? I've always found good
reading-meat in that and the _Discourses_. Used to carry a little
sixpenny copy about in my pocket, until I wore it to rags."
"I have often seen and noted its raggedness, and its uncompromising
Isabella-hue!"
"It was negroid in complexion before the Relief of Gueldersdorp.
Perhaps you won't be astonished when I tell you I have got it now." The
Chief's smiling eyes narrowed in laughter. "My wife has bound it
gorgeously, and with other volumes of my Siege library, it occupies a
special and most sacred shelf near my writing-desk at home."
He went on:
"This fine fellow Sherbrand is an old correspondent of mine. He would
say I might tell you the story, and I think it's worth hearing, in a
way. It must be eight years ago, when he would be about seventeen, that
he wrote to me from an engineering college at Newcastle, to say he had
read some papers of mine on the subject of scouting, and proposed--if I
thought it would not be presumption on his part--save the mark!--to
enrol and organise a troop on the lines laid down. He wanted a definite
code of Scout law to work on, and Rules and so forth, all of which I
supplied him, you may be sure. Busy as I was drilling and cub-licking
the North British Territorials, I couldn't find time to spare to run up
and see the boy. So he commandeered a holiday and motor-cycled to
Headquarters. Rode all through one night in pelters of rain, and caught
me in my 5 A.M. tub."
"He meant business."
"Business--and it was up to me to encourage such grittiness and
enthusiasm. So I ordered coffee for two, and bacon and eggs for half a
dozen, and when I had fed him I talked. My book wasn't published, but I
lent him some proof-sheets. He thanked me, but before he took them he
had to disburden his mind."
The fine sunburnt hand went thoughtfully to the grizzled moustache, worn
rather longer than of old.
"He had got something on his mind. He had been reading that old
bogey-book, _Hales on Mental Heredity_, and the theory of the
transmission of base or criminal tendencies from the parents to the
children, had haunted him night and day. He said to me, standing up
before me, looking about as long and thin as a fathom of pump-water: 'My
father was dismissed from the Army in War-time, for not backing up his
C.O. Is there a kink in _my_ brain or a bacillus lying waiting in _my_
body that will one day make a slacker of me?"
Saxham's square face was ashen, but the Chief's eyes were elsewhere.
"And you told him----?"
"I told him, that whilst physical disease and deformity are
transmissible from the unhealthy parents to their unlucky offspring, no
sensible Christian regarded the theory of inherited vice or crime, as
anything but the most pernicious lie that the devil ever invented to
spread as a net for the catching of bodies and souls. That seemed to
buck him up!"
"I do not doubt it!" said Saxham. He breathed more freely, and his face
had regained its natural hue.
"I reminded him," went on the Chief, "that our Army and our Fleet are
indebted for thousands of the finest men, morally and physically
speaking, to Reformatories and Industrial Schools and Homes. 'Think of
the character borne by Barnardo's boys,' I told him, 'and grind the
scorpion lie to pulp under your boot-heel, whenever and wherever you
find it cocking up its damnable tail!'"
"So he went back," said Saxham, "cheered and strengthened by your
sympathy, as--other men have been before now!"
"So he went back to the College, fortified by my bit of nervous English,
and worked at his troop for all he was worth. Raked in seventy in the
first month, and kept on raking. He is dandy at drill and organisation,
is Sherbrand. When he left the College they mustered three hundred
strong." The speaker struck his stick upon the turf and said
emphatically: "How it grows!--how the Movement spreads and gathers and
ramifies! Do you know Saxham, that there are moments in my life when I
am tempted to be proud. When rank upon rank of young, fresh, fearless
faces with bright eyes are turned to me. When thousands of active,
lithe, healthy young bodies run out into the open and rally about the
Chief Scout."
There was a mist in the bright eyes that his manliness was not ashamed
of.
"Years ago, when the officer in command of a certain beleaguered
garrison was doing his best to defend it, a great Fear came upon him in
the watches of a particularly anxious night. Perhaps you will guess
what I mean, Saxham? The man had not slept for more weeks than I like to
remember, and the hours of rest in the day-time were hot-eyed staring
horrors of insomnia. He was--up against it! The shrunken lids would
not shut down over his bursting eyeballs, and his jaws were clamped so
that he could not yawn. Then, on this night, his Fear rose up and mopped
and mowed at him, and it had the kind of face that madhouse doctors and
keepers know. He wasn't ordinarily a 'fearful man,' like Kipling's
immortal Bengali, but now he was horribly, sickeningly afraid!"
"I guessed it," said Saxham. "I realised what you were suffering, but I
did not dare to hint my knowledge to you. There was no danger of
madness. But you were certainly on the verge of mental and physical
breakdown."
"And being in such desperate case," said the other, "I prayed to God in
my extremity. I promised Him if He would help me to carry out my duty
to Him, as to my earthly superiors, and those men and women and children
who looked to me as their protector and guide, that I would one day, if
He spared me, build Him a big Temple, made of the little temples that
are the work of His Hands."
"And to-day the Temple is a reality!"
"A grand reality. East, West, North, and South, it spreads and widens
and towers. It is built of boys. Clean-limbed, clean-minded,
self-respecting fellows, scorning vices, eager for service, sensitive in
Honour, chivalrous, patriotic, keen for Truth and Right. It frightens
me, Saxham, when I think what a leaven is working through these boys of
mine, potential fathers of sons in the ripeness of Time, for the
ultimate regeneration of this vicious, degenerate world. It makes me
understand how near old Coleridge got to the live heart of things when
he wrote the _Ancient Mariner_. The service of Almighty God is the love
of your fellow-man. But why to me, and not to another worthier, should
God have given this wonderful, glorious thing to bring about? ..."
"Because you are worthy of doing His work for Him. Has He not used you
as His instrument in my own case? Should I not own to this, I who owe
everything to you?"
The other laid a hand on the great shoulder of the Dop Doctor.
"If ever you owed me anything, Saxham, you paid me long ago!"
He was silent a moment and said in a lighter tone: "I am not quite clear
yet as to how you met my whilom Scoutmaster."
"Our acquaintance dates from a cross-Channel flight he made in the end
of June."
"I know." The Chief prodded the turf with his walking-stick. "A French
pilot-officer of their Service Aeronautique, a certain Commandant
Raymond, who flew here in the contest for the Ivor International Cup in
May, had heard of Sherbrand and his inventions from Lamond of the
Central Flying School. He took a shine to the aerial stabiliser and got
his Chiefs to give it a trial. That came off on the Grand Prix Sunday,
when Paris went wild over the Sarajevo affair."
"And scenting War in the air," said Saxham, "Sherbrand promptly took
wing for England without waiting for the decision of the judges who were
present at the test."
"Did he? He has keen scent."
"Better now," said Saxham laughing, "than when he came to me--on the
recommendation of an old patient--suffering from an aggravated form of
nasal catarrh. He had had it at intervals for years, and suspected it
to be owing to what he described, in the language of the
engineering-shop, as "a defect in the air-intake." He proved to be
right--and I sent him into the Hospital, where Berry Boyle performed a
slight minor operation which removed the trouble, and left him capitally
fit. Then, when he came out of the Hospital, he found a letter from the
French Consul waiting at his office----"
The Chief interpolated:
"Ah yes. The aerial stabiliser had gained the suffrages of Messieurs
the Chiefs of the Aeronautique Francaise. I hope M. Jourdain's report
to his Government will induce them to buy the patent. For, judging by
the interest that the representatives of another Power seem to take
in----"
The Chief broke off. The smiling lines about his eyes and mouth had
vanished as he queried: "Who is the lady my Scout over there is
squiring? A superbly-shaped young woman, with hair of the fashionable
terra-cotta shade. But for the hair, I should have said it was your
niece, Patrine."