That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
applied to battle-ships, and invented the screw-propeller and the big
devil knows how many other things besides the mysterious, secret weapon
that Great Britain has kept hidden up her sleeve a hundred and
twenty-six years! It was offered by Foulis, then Earl of Clanronald, in
1812, to the British Government, and it frightened people like the
drunken Regent and the Duke of York and Lord Mulgrave into refusing it.
It was offered again to their War Office at the time of their Crimean
War,--taken into consideration by the Duke of Newcastle and again
ejected,--because--_Grosse Gott!_--it was too inhuman! As though a
weapon that could end a War in a twinkling by sheer deadly effectiveness
could be anything but a boon to mankind. _Pfui_! Such hypocrisy makes
me vomit worse than thirty hours of submergence. Not because of its
inhumanity has Britain stored up the old man's war-engine. Out of
diplomacy, to brutalise the great Germanic nation into subservience
under the rod of Fear!"
Luttha and von Herrnung, otherwise antagonistic, were alike in their
rabid hatred of Great Britain. Luttha had talked himself plum-coloured
and hoarse by now, but he went on, pounding the air with a knotty,
clenched fist:
"Thus it was well done on the part of the Kaiser's secret agents to
steal Clanronald's War Plan, on the brink of The Day to which we have
drunk so long! Not the duplicates buried in the Whitehall
strong-vaults, see you!--but the originals from the muniment-room of the
Welsh castle, the country-seat of the present Earl. Less than an hour
after you took flight from Hendon, London was alive and buzzing with the
tale! ... How do I know? ... Does not a man know everything with
Wireless? And you, with no inkling that you carried for
Germany--Victory in the World-War that is coming--you who have lost
Clanronald's secret, are a ruined man, _bei Gott_!"
He added, as von Herrnung broke out cursing and raving:
"As I have said, I pity you!--though you have tried to bribe me!--but it
will not do to talk of suicide, for I shall prevent that! Your
cartridges are wetted--your revolver will not serve you. And you will
not get a chance to drown yourself, for I am going to submerge. My
fellows have got the flying-motor out of the stirrups and stowed it
away, with the auto-hoverer and the other things for the Emperor, whose
property they are! Then we run, only periscopes showing, for the Gat of
Norderney. There is a clear-dredged channel to Nordeich Harbour,
navigable in any tide. You have to account there to the All Highest for
the satchel, or I, _bei Gott!_ must account to him for it and you!"
And Luttha slid back the steel door, passed through the narrow gangway
and shot up the narrow steel ladder to attend to affairs on deck. Two
of his subordinates instantly replaced him. On no account was von
Herrnung, the living proof of the Commander's fidelity to his
instructions, to be left alone, you understand.
One would have said the Superman believed in God, he blasphemed Him so
industriously. When he was quite spent and voiceless, the lieutenants
offered him practical sympathy in the shape of gingerbread and lager
beer. He accepted the beer, and sat on one of the sofas drinking it and
brooding lividly, while Undersea-boat No. 18, with hermetically-sealed
hatches, folded down her signal and Wireless masts, shut off her 2000
h.p. Diesel oil engines, sucked water into her ballast-tanks, and with
only her periscopes showing above the surface, ran under her
electric-motor power for Norderney Gat and Nordeich quay.
Behind her as she sped, a red stain upon the angry waters gave back the
last rays of stormy sunset, smouldering out behind bars of drift-wrack,
beyond the bleak east-country beaches and the long blue-black, desolate
worlds.
Von Herrnung's private, personal sun was setting somewhat after the same
fashion, amidst sable clouds of Imperial wrath. It was to sink below
the horizon in deepest disfavour, rise again in The Day's gory dawning,
and fall, its evil fires quenched in a drenching rain of blood.
*CHAPTER XXXVI*
*HUE AND CRY*
Even as petrol and air mingled in the Bird's cylinders, and Davis
rotated the tractor and nimbly leaped out of the way of sudden death,
the buff broadsheets of the _Evening Wire_ edged the kerbs of Fleet
Street and ran up Kingsway to High Holborn. And from Ludgate Hill to
Charing Cross, Pall Mall, and Piccadilly Circus, the raucous voices of
newsboys yelled through a pelting hail of pence:
AMAZING THEFT OF A FAMILY SECRET.
STOLEN FROM GWYLL CASTLE
THE CLANRONALD WAR-PLAN.
AN ECHO OF CRIMEAN DAYS.
THIEF KNOWN. POLICE SANGUINE.
"COMMON CRACKSMAN'S ENTERPRISE OR DIPLOMATIC
STROKE?"
Strings of news-carts laden with bundles of papers were rattling east,
north, south, and west. Trains were taking in the story by bales of
thousands and disgorging it at every stoppage, as Von Herrnung opened
the throttle, and the Bird raced a hundred yards or so, bumping like a
taxi going over a bad road, then rose into the air, as gracefully as a
mallard, and launched upon the first wide spirals of the aerial ascent.
The small audience interested in the aeroplane, her freight, and her
behaviour, watched her as she dwindled in the sight and died upon the
ear. The spectators in the enclosure had departed in dribbles, the last
three-seater air-bus had rounded the aerodrome, landed and deposited the
last passengers. Two or three over-enthusiastic students lingered, but
the rest had shed their grimy overalls and betaken themselves home.
The mellow light of late afternoon lay sweetly on the wide expanse of
treeless greensward and on the woods that tufted the horizon-line.
Rooks and starlings were wheeling over distant tree-clumps, the bands no
longer brayed or tootled, the mechanics were leaving the sheds and
hangars, the waitresses were hastening to other employments, such as
programme-vending at suburban music-halls and picture-theatres, the
selling of stale _boutonnieres_ about the entrances of restaurants, the
serving of drinks and suppers at night-clubs and so on.
On the verge of the white-marked oval from which the Bird had taken her
departure, Saxham was standing with Patrine. Their faces were lifted to
the sky as they talked together, and Sherbrand's eyes were irresistibly
drawn to them, so heroic in mould, and so curiously alike.
There was a puzzled line between the Instructor's thick, fair eyebrows.
He was ready to swear it was the same girl. But the face that had looked
into his that night in Paris was somehow softer, younger.... It was not
only the alteration in the colour of the hair.... If you had taken the
big, hearty, smiling young woman of the Milles Plaisirs, and dipped her
into a vat of hydrogen peroxide, so that not only her hair but her whole
body had been bleached, you would not have accomplished such a
transformation--unless the chemical had possessed the power to change
the colour of her mind and soul.
The girl of the Milles Plaisirs had looked at you frankly, and spoken to
you like a pal. In that atmosphere of sexual excitement, amongst those
crowds of men and women, flushed with meat and wine and the desire of
sensual pleasure, she had appealed to Sherbrand like a heather-scented
breeze from the North.
Beautiful and big and sisterly, she had seemed to him who had no
sisters. He had often wondered how she came to be in that place. But
it had never occurred to him to lump her with the ordinary
pleasure-seeker. He had read--more correctly than von Herrnung, who
believed her from the first to have bitten deep into the Fruit of
Knowledge--Purity if not ignorance, in her wide curving smile, and
honesty in her clear unshadowed eyes.
What eyes they were, long, brilliant, blackly-lashed, browny-green as
agate. What a wonderful voice came out of the depths of her splendid
chest. The arch of her breastbone reminded you of a violoncello. How
splendidly her head was set upon its column of warm, living ivory! Her
firm round chin had a dint in it that the old Greek sculptor had failed
to bestow upon the glorious Venus de Melos, the Lady of the Isle of
Music. Everything about her was planned on the scale of magnificence.
Six feet tall, she walked the earth like a goddess, or as women must
have walked when the Sons of Light mated with the daughters of men.
Thus Sherbrand, meditating on his Fate to be, while Destiny limped
towards him in the person of an undersized telegraph-clerk whose
complexion, previously pallid, had deteriorated to dirty green. He
began, extending a shaky hand, from which dangled a slip of limp paper:
"For you, sir. Rumball 'adn't got a picklock among his tools, so 'e
burst in the door with a No. 10 spanner. They rung us up about twenty
times while he was at the job. And the message is important, sir!"
"I'll see! Thank you, Burgin!"
Sherbrand took the telegram from the jerky hand and read:
"_Your--German--acquaintance--suspected--agent--
robbery--documents--national--importance. At--all--
costs--keep--him--until--I--come._"
The Chief's name at the end was the nail that clinched the thing. But
the cry of Macrombie's undersized assistant was the hammer-blow that
drove the nail to the quick. His sharp eye, following the climbing
aeroplane, had seen her flatten and swing about and leap forwards,
exactly as the carrier-pigeon strikes out its line of flight for home.
"My Gawd," he yelped out. "See there! Blimy, if the --'s not done us!
Bunked it by air to Kaiserland while I was spellin' out the screed.
Gone with the Bird--the Bird and the 'overing gear. My Gawd! Wot's to
be done?"
"Shut your head on what you know!" said Sherbrand's voice in the pale
clerk's ear as Sherbrand's hand fell ungently on his shoulder. "You've
done your best! It's not your fault if luck was on the other side!
But--" His eyes went to the Doctor's great figure standing beside the
tall white shape with the hat of twinkling silver. "But the boy!" A
sickness swirled up in him and a dizziness overtopped it. He caught at
and gripped the clerk's thin shoulder to keep himself upright. "My God!
How shall I break it to the Doctor," Sherbrand asked himself, "if that
German fellow has carried off the boy?"
"Steady-O! Ketch on to me, sir.... Nobody's looking!" said the
telegraph clerk. He was a hero-worshipper on a robust scale and
Sherbrand his chosen deity. "This ain't our young Boss givin' in, but
just his empty inside playin' tricks on him," he assured himself. To
Sherbrand he said humbly: "If you'd come over to the cabin there's hot
cocoa and toke there. Grub'll steady you, if you'll excuse me taking
the liberty of saying so--and you can't do nothing till he comes!"
The person to whom Burgin referred had passed the entrance-gates, almost
before the sentence left the lips of the clerk. Now his alert, upright
figure came in sight, briskly turning the corner of the restaurant, and
wrought to the point of ironic merriment by the greatness of the blow
that had fallen on him, Sherbrand shook off his dizziness and faintness,
straightened his tall body, clapped both hands to his mouth, and gave
the huntsman's view-halloo:
"_Stole away! Stole--awa-aay!_"
Small cause for mirth, and yet he laughed, pointing to the dwindling
speck high upon the north horizon that represented the worldly prospects
of Sherbrand, and a handsome sum in cash. The Bird, just then entering
a broad belt of gold-white mackerel-cloud, was lost to view in another
instant. But the Chief had wheeled upon the pointing gesture, and seen,