That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
sleep came to the child, and presently he awakened under the oilskin
coat that served for bed-covering, to the rustling of the straw under
his head, and through one unglazed aperture that admitted light and air,
shone a large, lucent moon--in her last quarter, with Saturn, blazing
like a great blue diamond, at her pale and silvery side.
In the shed, which had been destined but luckily not used as a kennel
for the Adjutant's Pomeranian boar-hound, the boy remained in durance
vile for a period of several days. The drills and parades, the buglings
and drummings that marked the ordinary course of garrison life, alone
enlivened the cramped monotony. He was given coarse food and drink
three times a day, and permitted to exercise for half-an-hour in charge
of a corporal within the limits of the gravelled courtyard. Soldiers
were drilling there on most of these occasions, big men in the brand-new
green-grey uniform that seemed a kind of Service kit, and who regarded
Bawne with looks of quite incomprehensible malignancy, and when their
mouths were not closed by Prussian military discipline, made coarse or
beastly jokes at his expense.
You are to suppose a pitifully unequal struggle on the part of the boy
to maintain decency, cleanliness, and self-respect under these
conditions, which would have ended in hopeless lethargy had the Saxham
pup sprung from a feebler race. Two things helped him at this juncture.
The Rosary he said in his straw lair at night, and certain stimulating
reading contained in a sea-stained and grimy-paged Scout's Notebook,
that nobody had seen him with, or having seen had thought it worth their
while to take away. You can see him on the sixth morning of captivity
squatting on his straw, poring over the Alphabet of the Morse Signalling
Code, the Rules for First Aid, and so on, following the ten precepts of
Scout Law.
"_Rule No. 7_. A Scout obeys orders of his patrol-leader or
scout-master without question."
He nodded his head as he read the words and his heavy eyes brightened.
He pushed back the dulled and rumpled hair from his forehead and
straightened his hunched back.
"_Rule No. 8_. A Scout smiles and whistles under all difficulties...."
The smile was bravely forced. He held up his head, filled his lungs
with air, inflated his chest, pouted his lips, and began to whistle
_Rule Britannia_. And at the second bar, somebody booted the door
heavily and a thick voice bellowed:
"_Halt den Mund!_"
It was the voice of the soldier who was Bawne's jailor, and the whistle
quavered and broke down. And as the boyish heart swelled to bursting
and the irrepressible tears brimmed over, a musical motor-horn, some
distance off, sounded clearly and sweetly:
"Ta-rara-ta ra!" And a Prussian officer's voice drowned out the
sweetness of the answering echo, shouting:
"_Achtung! Wache heraus!_"
Bugles sounded, side-drums beat, there was a crunching of heavy boots
upon stone and gravel, followed by the click of presented arms, and the
groaning of the heavy gates swung back. Amidst all these significant
noises, you caught the purr and crackle of pneumatic tyres rolling over
the wooden bridge into the courtyard. As they stopped short, a bugle
sounded imperatively, and hoarse voices gave the order:
"_Helm ab!_"
And a multitudinous shout answered--a thick, short, crashing utterance
that suggested the fall of a tree. Three trees fell crashing, and then
in a little still of awe a sharp, hollow voice answered:
"_Danke, meine Kinden!_"
And the boy squatting, listening in the straw, was conscious of a queer
tingling sensation that made his hair stiffen on his scalp and sent odd
little waves of shuddering down the whole length of his spine. The
voice was not melodious or powerful. But it set the nerves on edge, and
made you wonder what he could be like--the man to whom it belonged. And
the question made a picture in the mind, of a mouth with thin lips that
were parched and discoloured, a cruel mouth, matching the harsh and
hollow utterance.
The time crawled on and the sun climbed high. It must have been noon or
nearly when measured steps approached the shed, and the door was
unlocked. This time a non-commissioned officer who had kicked Bawne
yesterday caught hold of the boy, hauled him out of the shed, and made
at the double towards the squat stone building bestridden by the pair of
Wireless towers. Their intolerable shadows, the sun being nearly
overhead, barred the big courtyard with wide lateral and diagonal bands
and stripes of blackness. It was as though two Brobdingnagian spiders
had spun there a pair of webs of incredible size.
There were soldiers on guard with fixed bayonets at the open doors, that
led into the square low-ceiled stone vestibule. Before the two wide
steps stood a bright yellow motor-car. It was big, roomy, and
luxurious, with the Prussian eagle in black and red on both doors. A
young officer in field-grey and flat cap sat immovable at the
steering-wheel. At a little distance waited two other cars. Their
chauffeurs wore a dark blue livery with silver braid and buttons, and
these cars were black-enamelled and studiously plain.
Inside the vestibule were more sentries and a small body of soldiers,
all with fixed bayonets. Also three dubious individuals in black
uniform who might have been detectives or not. They were grouped
outside a heavy door on the right hand as you entered. Despite the
presence of so many persons a singular quiet reigned. Footfalls made no
noise on the floor, presumably of stone, covered with thick, resilient
red rubber. There were no windows, light being admitted from overhead
by a skylight of thick opaline glass.
I have said that quiet reigned, but as the corollary of a sharp harsh
voice that talked without cessation. It upbraided, denounced,
interrogated; interrupted conjectural answers with contradiction; burst
out anew into shrill denunciation, and switched off the current of abuse
to pelt its object with questions again. It rasped the nerves. Of the
men who heard it some grew pale, others were red and sweated freely.
When it broke off in a scream like a vicious stallion's neigh, a
susurration of horror passed from one to another of the erect, silent,
and rigid men waiting in the vestibule. The neighing scream was
followed by a small commotion. The door opened, and a tall,
grey-moustached, grey-cloaked cavalry officer, in a silver helmet
crested with a perching eagle, demanded--Bawne's little German serving
him once more at this juncture:
"Water! Immediately--a glass of water!" and vanished again.
An orderly got the water, passing out by another tall door in the centre
of the vestibule and coming back with a filled tumbler on a china plate.
One of the men in black snatched it from him and knocked officiously.
But the harsh shrill voice had begun to rate again, and when the door
was opened, a thick-set officer in a spiked infantry helmet, with a
glittering gold moustache and sharp blue eyes twinkling through
glittering gold pince-nez, waved the water away as though it had never
been asked for.
"The boy!" he said, in a shrill falsetto whisper. "_Seine Majestaet_
wants the boy!"
Then it seemed as though twenty zealous hands propelled the boy towards
the mysterious room's threshold. The officer in pince-nez grabbed his
arm and pulled him briskly in.
*CHAPTER XLVII*
*THE MAN OF "THE DAY"*
You were in a square, singularly light, though windowless room
immediately underneath the lower, pointed end of the biggest Wireless.
The room was lighted along the top of the walls on two sides by oblong
slabs of thick opaque glass with many ventilators controlled by levers.
The huge metal ribs and supports of the colossal steel tower overhead
were built deep into the solid stone masonry. Through a massive block
of crystal glass--the insulator on which the pointed end of the mast
rested, your vision was snatched up--up dizzily--through the vertical
labyrinth of metal ribs and girders, until it ended at the inner
extremity of the apex, seven hundred and fifty feet above. The shrill
song of the wind amongst the steel ribs, and spars, and guy-ropes, whose
ends were linked to reinforced steel beams or ground-anchors, sunk in
heavy outside foundations of masonry, hardly reached one here. But from
the dynamo-room that absorbed the space between this and the second
Wireless chamber, you heard the deep moan of the Goldberg Alternator,
its rotor speed maintained by a 500 horse-power Krafit engine, sunk, to
lessen the tremendous vibration, in a solid steel and cement lined
power-house, deep below the level of the soggy ground.
The boy's wide blue eyes took in the wonder and the strangeness of his
surroundings. Lightness and whiteness, a ship-shape neatness, a
scrupulous freedom from dust, a dazzling polish and burnish on surfaces
or knobs or handles of wood, brass, or copper, characterised the place.
About the walls were metal cylinders with pipes and induction-coils,
frames supporting reels of wire in rows, and brass things like pincers
in rows above them; and above these, rows of shining crystal bull's-eyes
like port-lights, and yet others with stars and circles of electric
bulbs.
At the distant end of the long, light, shining room, the deck-like run
of the polished boards was broken by a step leading to a platform where
the rigidly-erect figures of three men in dark blue uniform sat at the
middle, and at either end of a long narrow table burdened with
instruments whose use Bawne partly knew. The midmost operator, sitting
with his back to you, wore a head-band with receiver ear-pieces, beyond
which his ears, large, thick, and red as quarter-pounds of beefsteak,
projected in a singularly grotesque way. The man seated on the right of
the table had a paper-pad and pencil, and the man on the left sat in
front of a typewriter, with lowered intent eyes and fingers crooked
above the keys, as one waiting to type off a Wireless message, and the
tingling desire to approach and see the apparatus more closely evoked a
wiggle on the part of the boy that was grimly checked by a big hard hand
that gripped his arm. This reminded him that he was a prisoner. Like
von Herrnung, Bawne thought and--then upon his right he became aware of
von Herrnung, green as a drowned man--and with all the stiffening gone
out of him--wilting over the supporting arms of two officers of the
garrison. And then a voice said something shrilly and harshly--and
Saxham's son found himself looking into a pair of steel-blue, shining,
flickering eyes, with whites curiously veined with red.
The man to whom the eyes belonged sat immediately facing you, on the
opposite side of a big kneehole writing-table with rows of drawers in
its pedestals, and official-looking ledgers upon it, also files of
papers, dispatch-cases, three big inkstands, and the shining metal
pillar of a telephone transmitter, the base of which the officer gripped
with his right hand as he leaned forwards, sharply scrutinising you.
The hand was large and muscular, with short, thick, crooked fingers,
covered with jewelled rings that sparkled in the sun.
Half a dozen other officers stood at some little distance behind the
seated personage.... Five out of the six wore the Service dress of
grey-green serge, with spiked helmets covered with the same material.
Badges, buckles, chain-straps, and the hilts of swords curved or
straight were dulled to rigorous uniformity, and belts, gloves, and
boots were of earth, not tan-coloured, brown. Thus much Bawne grasped,
but of these individualities, save one, he got no clear impression. You
were obliged to look at, and think of, the man sitting in the chair.