That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
sweeping along in the opposite direction, under the rushing body of the
winged thing that bore him, ruled by the hand of von Herrnung upon the
steering-wheel.
Behind her a chaotic, formless greyness brooded on the horizon,
innumerable spires rose out of it and a glittering haze hung over all.
That was London, the great grimy Mother of Cities tearing away from her
little son at eighty miles an hour. The shriek of an engine and the
rumble of a train reduced by distance to infinite tenuity pulled the
boy's eyes downwards. A weeny mechanical toy that meant one of the
double-humped colossi of steam traction, dragging a string of match-box
goods trucks, raced another locomotive, towing a crowded passenger-train
neck and neck along the spider-fine perspective of gossamers that meant
the Great Eastern Railway. Now fear was swamped in the sheer joy of the
experience. This thin air that kept you perpetually gulping and
swallowing saliva, made you feel more than ever how good it is to be
alive.
Billows and billows of green, interspersed with patches of purple
heather, meant Epping Forest, though he did not know it. A great
aggregation of grey walls and housetops, looking like a section of an
old wasp's nest, stood for Waltham Abbey as the Bird drove on. Quite a
tangle of the shiny grey-blue streaks that were rivers meant Lea and
Orwell, Ouse, and their trouty tributaries. East England rolled away
underneath like an endless carpet woven in irregular patches of many
hues. Green and brown, grey and yellow, and innumerable shades of
these, so tempting in their suggestions of good things to eat that a
most unheroic hunger reminded the schoolboy of tea-time, hours and hours
gone by.
He looked round in search of von Herrnung, who maintained unchanged the
same attitude, his shoulders level, his unseen hands steady as rock upon
the wheel of the steering-pillar, his mouth shut tightly, his hard eyes
ranging ahead or lowered, as he conned his course in masterly fashion by
aid of the roller-map, protected by its transparent, rainproof casing,
or the compass, clock, altimeter, and other instruments gimballed in the
wooden frame in front of the pilot's seat.
"How long?" the small fist rapped out. Von Herrnung detached a hand and
signalled in answer:
"One hour!"
"When do we go home?"
"We go home now!" the hand signalled, and the boy settled down in his
seat to wait.
Between hunger and weariness he dozed, and soon slept soundly, his hands
hanging laxly over the leather arm-rests and his head nodding over the
brown satchel lying on his knees. It figured in his dreams as something
huge, oppressive and uncanny, that suddenly took to itself malevolent
life, spread a pair of wide leathery bat-wings, and would have flown
away but that he gripped it fast.
"No, no! You shan't! I promised!" he heard himself crying, and
suddenly the thing collapsed limply in his grasp and became nothing but
a satchel, and he was awake. Awake and very stiff and rather sick and
sleepy, and with the salt smell in his nostrils and the salt taste in
his mouth that meant--that could only mean the Sea.
He looked over the gunwale and cried out in astonishment. For a vast
carpet of rounded woolly-grey-white clouds lay spread beneath. The
carpet beginning to rise and the cockpit floor to incline downwards, a
thin clammy fog suddenly blotted out everything. The Bird had dived
through a field of woolpack mixed with ground-fog. Now flying some
hundred feet beneath it, she regained her level, in the clear light
stained by the sunset as water in which a dash of red wine is mingled,
the light that is the aftermath of a radiant summer's day. And, with
the smell of the sea sharper in his nostrils, the boy became aware of
moving, muddy-grey water, with ships and boats and steamers on it, far
down below.
Now the southerly breeze that had steadily tagged on some twenty-three
miles an hour to the Bird's eighty odd, began to veer and come in
strengthening puffs and gusts from the north-west. Swirling eddies of
air came upwards from the water, rocking the machine as a swell takes a
boat at sea, and splashed upon the frail, silk-covered wings of the
aeroplane in deluges of invisible spray.
On the right hand and the left were wide stretches of muddy grey salt
water, banks of sand, and drain-piped foreshore merging in patches of
potato and swede and yellow squares of unripe corn. Clusters of white
dots, where shingle and sea-walls bordered the drab, restless water,
were fishing hamlets, villages and little coal-port towns. Upon the
north bank, rapidly receding in distance, could be dimly sensed, beyond
a dense fringe of masts standing close as pins in rows upon a
pincushion, the oblongs and squares and rectilinears of docks and
shipyards, stone quays, and piers and tide-basins, mixed up with blocks
and streets of sheds and warehouses, stations and goods-yards, and huge,
many windowed factories, whose towering chimneys yet belched forth thick
black smoke-gouts, licked by red tongues of flame. Though even if the
Saturday noon steam-siren had not silenced the throbbing of pneumatic
rivetting-hammers and the roaring of steam coal-shoots, hydraulic grain
dischargers and oil-pumps, and all the hellish hubbub accompanying the
huge export and import trade of Yorkshire and Lancashire with North
Europe and the Continent, these sounds would not have reached the ears
of the boy in the aeroplane save as a dull and muffled murmur, vaguely
sensed, through the musical moaning of the stay-wires and the racket of
the tractor-screw.
Now the sunset was behind. The land was rushing back upon the right and
left-hand. The two-mile-wide river was broadening to a great estuary,
vaster than the Thames, between Fort Victoria and Shoeburyness.
Long crawling strings of linked-up barges, sailing vessels of the old
windjammer type and yachts of the latest rig, battered tramp and collier
steamers, high-sided rusty looking oil-tankers, pilot-cutters,
coastguard motor-launches, whole fleets of steam-trawlers, thrashed up
and down its broad south side fairways or cannily negotiated the
treacherous channels of the north bank. Ocean-going giants of the
Merchant Service, flaunting the White Bordered Jack, or the Red Duster,
or under Admiralty Warrant, displaying the Blue Ensign. Behemoths of
the North Sea passenger-service showing the three-striped merchant-flag
of Germany--or the tricolour of the Netherlands, or the Crosses of
Norway, Sweden and Denmark--with more rarely some big grey armoured
cruiser upon harbour and Coastal Defence Service, or a brace of stumpy,
square-ended patrol-boats, or a trio of the stinging black hornets we
have learnt to call torpedo-boat destroyers, ranging in company upon
some business of the Powers that order Britannia's naval affairs.
Fascinating, wonderful to look down upon. Alike, however diverse in
size, shape or uses, in the impression of flat unsubstantiality conveyed
to you--together with the doubt that the emmets crawling upon them could
possibly be life-sized men. A drifting daisy-petal meant a smart
private steam-yacht. You looked down from two thousand feet above, on
the open-lidded snuffboxes that signified the fire-control and
signalling-stations of some Leviathan of the Home Fleet, and a string of
black holes jabbed in an oval of floating white millboard represented
her funnels, black discs or white alternately stood for her ventilators;
and her imposing deckworks, her turrets or barbettes, her gun-houses and
casemates, and the terrible monsters bloodthirstily nosing out of them,
were reduced to a more or less symmetrical arrangement in thick or thin
black lines.
The rosy light was greying. The gusts came more fitfully. To the south,
upon the right hand, were stone-built fortifications with black muzzles
of big guns poking from the ramparts, over stretches of salty marsh,
drab-coloured mud-flats, and slimy rocks covered with blackened seaweed,
sticking up from pale silvery sand-shoals, licked by the restless white
tongues of the outgoing tide, and bumped by stranding buoys. Black dots
and grey dots wheeled and scurried and settled. Crows and gulls were
feeding ravenously as the tide drew off the flats and sand-shoals. And
by the queer sensation in his empty stomach, Bawne knew that he too was
ravenous.
From the beaconed north shore of the vast estuary basin, edged now by
low rambling cliffs, and belts of shingle and sand, a long curving
headland with two lighthouses at the crook-end, rushed now towards the
Bird at what seemed the speed of an express train. Bawne winced as the
tall granite towers, topped with helmet-shaped domes of rust-red iron,
rose up like twin giants threatening to destroy. An iron balcony with a
flagstaff and signal-mast ringed the base of each dome-top, a stairway
spiralled round each shaft to a railed stone platform well above
high-water mark. And a shrimp-sized man in a red guernsey waved a speck
of blue handkerchief, and bellowed a disproportionately loud greeting
through what was presumably a megaphone. In reality the
lighthouse-keeper was indicating the M. O. cone storm-signal which hung
point downwards from the west end of the yard-arm, presaging a
south-west or north-westerly gale. Whether or no this warning was lost
upon von Herrnung, proof of its value followed. For a great upleaping
billow of brine-tasting wind caught the Bird as she flashed past the
twin lighthouses upon the headland, tossing her upwards like a withered
leaf. And a curved iron shutter in the nearer of the two rust-red
dome-tops rolled down exactly as the nictitating membrane of a bird's
eye does--and with a wink of glass from the prismatic reflector, a broad
triple beam of blinding-white acetylene light leaped north, east and
south. In the same instant upon each side of the flashing tractor, the
boy sensed a vast, shimmering, liquid restlessness. Here was the Sea,
the very Sea.
*CHAPTER XXXIII*
*BAWNE LEARNS THE TRUTH*
Something in the blood of the child answered to the call of the Ancient
Mother. He cried out, half in terror, half in delight, and the cockpit
tilted so suddenly that he was violently jerked against the seat-back
and the canvas bulkhead behind him. Looking up he saw a large old moon
of luminous yellow, sailing away overhead through a sky all shot with
pink and grey as though hollowed out of a fire-opal. The Bird was
rushing through space at ninety miles an hour, and great lumps of cold
salt wind splashed over Bawne and took his breath away, and his hands
were numbed with bitter cold and his legs were legs of ice.
So brave a spirit dwelt in his little breast, that the sob that heaved
it and the tears that stung his eyelids and dimmed his goggles, were
swallowed and blinked away as soon as shed. The cockpit became level,
and there was an imperious rapping behind him, on the upper canvas deck.
He turned his head and met the hard unflinching stare of von Herrnung,
who held in the hand with which he had rapped a bitten piece of
chocolate. Still munching he signalled:
"Hungry?"
He smiled grimly as the boy nodded in the affirmative, stuffed the bit
of sweetstuff into his mouth, produced from its cache below the level of
the upper deck another square of chocolate, tore off the silver foil
with his teeth, and crunched it greedily.
He smiled, because of a queer tickling pleasure he felt as he did this,
akin to the sensation experienced when his taunts had tortured Patrine.
"Take care of my dearest!" he fancied he could hear her saying.... Not
until she had committed herself to that incautious utterance, had he,
von Herrnung, realised what rich vengeance on the desired, hated woman