Part 13

His boy was his greatest pride, a fine lad, fresh from Eton, and steeped in the old traditions which Hornung thought gave the only grace to the code of an English gentleman. (He had no patience with any other school of thought.) The boy stood one day on the curbstone in High Street Kensington, on a day after war had been declared and the streets were placarded with posters, “Your King and Country Need You.” He raised his hat to my wife, and said, “Do you think I ought to join up?” He joined up, like all boys of his age, and, like most of them in the list of second lieutenants, at that time, was killed very soon. His letters from the front were full of faith and pride. He loved his men, the splendor of being an officer, the thought of the great adventure ahead for England’s sake. He did not live into the times of disillusion and the dull routine of mud and misery....

His father was broken-hearted. His only idea now was how to get out to the front, in spite of being too old for soldiering, and too heavy, and too asthmatical. It was my idea that he should join the Y.M.C.A., and he seized it gladly as a chance of service and heart healing. I met him in his hut at Arras, serving out tea to muddy Tommies, finding a man, now and then, to his enormous joy, who knew his son. Always he was in the spiritual presence of that boy of his. For the sake of that, and for the men’s sake, he endured real agonies of physical discomfort in a drafty hut, with a stove which would not burn, and cocoa as his only drink. The fastidious author of _Raffles_, who had been particular about his creature comforts, and careful of the slightest draft!

He started a lending library for soldiers in the trenches, and I lent him a hand with it now and then. It was in a hut on the ruins of the Town Hall of Arras and because of the daily bombardment, he slept at night in a dugout below an avalanche of stones. I promised to give a lecture to his men on the history of Arras, and “mugged it up” from old books in an old château. The date was announced, and posted up on a placard. It was the 21st of March, 1918! No British soldier needs reminding of the meaning of that date. It was when 114 German divisions attacked the British line and all hell was let loose, and, for a time, the bottom seemed to fall out of the world.

I did not deliver that lecture. I was away at the south of the line, recording frightful happenings. But I heard afterward, from Hornung, that through the smoke and dust of heavy shelling which churned up old rubbish heaps of ruins in Arras, two Scottish soldiers in tin hats loomed up to hear the lecture.... Poor Hornung survived the war, but not long. His soul was eager for that meeting with his son.

One visitor of mine in the little house in Holland Street, which was often overcrowded with a mixed company of writers, artists, and odd folk, was a distinguished little man who came only when there was no one else about. At least, he preferred it that way, using my house as a little retreat from the madding world. This was Monsignor Hugh Benson, the famous preacher and novelist. The son of an Archbishop of Canterbury, he had shocked his family by joining the Catholic Church, in which he found perpetual adventure and delight. He loved its ritual, its color, its legends, its romance, its history, its music, and its faith, like a small child in a big old house constantly discovering new wonders, mysteries, and enchanting treasures. He had the heart of a boy, and an enthusiasm for life and work which would not let him take any rest. As a preacher, he was constantly flying about the country for special sermons and missions, and he preached, or, as he used to say, “praught,” with a passion that almost choked him and tore him to pieces. In spite of a painful little stutter, and intense shyness, he was extraordinarily eloquent, and every sermon was crammed with hard thinking, for he did not rely on sentiment for his effect, but on sheer intellectual reasoning.

That was only one part of his day’s work. He had an enormous correspondence with people of all denominations or none, who used to write to him for advice and help, and every letter he received he answered as though his own life depended on it.

At my house he used to go to his bedroom at ten o’clock to deal with the day’s budget. But when that was done with, he used to get out a manuscript book and begin to enjoy himself. That was when he was writing one of his novels--and as soon as one was finished, he began another.

“My dearest dream of Heaven,” he told me once, “is to be writing a novel which goes well and is never finished. What more perfect bliss than that?”

Among his other passions--and all he liked he loved--was music, and he used to strike wonderful chords on my piano, and one particular combination of notes which he called the “deep sea chord,” because, if you shut your eyes and listened, you could hear deep waters rushing overhead!

He killed himself by overwork, and I heard of his death when I was crossing a field outside Dixmude, which was a blazing ruin, in the autumn of the first year of war.

He used to envy my place in Fleet Street, and say that if he were not a priest, he would like to be a journalist.

XIII

It is most astonishing as a reminder of the rapid progress of mechanical science during the past twenty-one years that a journalist like myself, still young, and almost a babe compared with veterans of Fleet Street still on active service, should have seen the first achievements in aviation, the first motor cars plying for hire in the streets, and the first moving pictures--three inventions that have changed our human destiny and mentality in an incalculable way, and the last not least.

It was, I think, in 1900 that I encountered the first motor “taxi” in Paris, one of those rattle-bone machines which, as far as Paris is concerned, have not improved enormously since that time. But it seemed nothing short of a miracle then, and it was not until several years later than they ousted the dear old hansom of London, which now survives only as a historical relic.

It is difficult to think back to the time when the klip-klop of horses’ hoofs was the most characteristic noise of London by night, when one sat in quiet rooms above the street. It had a sound of its own, and a touch of romance which is missed by the older generation, accustomed now to the honking of motor horns. The younger generation cannot imagine life without that trumpeting.

I remember being sent by my paper to describe a night journey in a motor car as a new and exciting adventure, as it certainly was to me at that time when I traveled down to the Lands End, and saw, for the first time, the white glare of headlights on passing milestones and bewildered cattle, and passed through little sleeping villages where the noise of our coming was heard as a portent, by people who jumped out of bed and stared through the window blinds. In those days a man who owned a car was regarded as a very rich and adventurous fellow, as well as something of a freak, and he was ridiculed with immense enjoyment by pedestrians when he was discovered, frequently, lying in the mud beneath his machine which had hopelessly broken down. Indeed, many people had a passionate hostility to motorists and motoring, and a great friend of mine so hated the sight of an automobile that he used to throw stones after them. He was a rich man, with carriages and horses, which he vowed he would never abandon for “a filthy, stinking motor car.” Now he never moves a yard without one. I am the only consistent enemy of motor cars left in the world. I hate them like poison.

For professional purposes, however, I have been a great motorist, and I suppose that during the four and a half years of war I must have covered sixty thousand miles. I have hired motors in England, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Austria, Poland, Russia, Turkey, Asia Minor, and the United States. I have had every sort of accident that may happen to a motorist this side of death. Wheels have come off and gone rolling ahead of me down steep hills. Axles have broken beneath me. I have been dashed into level crossing gates, I have escaped an express train by something like three inches, and I have had my car smashed to bits by a collision with a lorry which laid my right arm out of action for three months.

Yet I was not such a “hoodoo” as a motorist as a delightful friend of mine named Coldstream. Whenever he sat in a motor car he used to expect something to happen to it, and it always did. The door handle would drop off, just as a preliminary warning. Then one of the cylinders would miss fire, as another sign of impending disaster. Then the back axle would break, or something would happen to prevent any further journey. Once, going with him from Arras to Amiens, we put two motor cars out of action, and then borrowed an ambulance, about ten miles from Amiens. After the first four miles it broke down hopelessly, and, finally, we had to walk the rest of the way.

Moving pictures have caused something like a revolution in social life, and on balance I believe they have been and are an immense boon to mankind--and womankind, especially in small country towns and villages which, until that invention, had no form of entertainment beyond an occasional magic-lantern show, or “penny reading.” They bring romance and adventure to the farm laborer, the errand boy, the village girl, and the doctor’s daughter, and despite a lot of foolish stuff shown on the screen, give a larger outlook on life, and some sense of the beauty and grace of life, to the great masses. They give them also a comparison of the present with the past, and of one country with another. Perhaps in showing the contrast between one class and another, in extremes of luxury and penury, they are creating a spirit of social discontent which may have serious consequence--but that remains to be seen.

I was an actor, for journalistic purposes, in one of the first film dramas ever produced in England. The first scene was an elopement by motor car, and the little company of actors and actresses assembled in the front garden of a large empty mansion in a suburb in the southeast of London, namely Herne Hill. The heroine and the gentleman who played the part of her irate father entered the house, and disappeared.

Meanwhile a number of business men of Herne Hill, on their way to work in the city, as well as various tradesmen and errands boys, were astonished by the sight of two motor cars, half concealed behind the bushes in the drive, and by the group of peculiar-looking people, apparently engaged in some criminal enterprise. They were still more astonished and alarmed at the following events:

(1) A good-looking youth advanced toward the house from a hiding place in the bushes, and threw pebbles at a window of the house.

(2) The window opened, and a beautiful girl appeared and wafted kisses to the boy below. Then disappeared.

(3) The front door opened, and the beautiful girl rushed into the arms of the boy. After ardent embraces, he came with her to one of the motor cars, placed her inside, and drove off at a furious pace.

(4) Another window in the house opened, and an elderly gentleman looked out, waving his arms in obvious indignation, bordering on apoplexy.

(5) Shortly afterward, he rushed out of the front door after the departing motor car (which had made several false starts), with clenched fists, and the words, “My God! My God!... My daughter! My daughter!”

By this time the Herne Hill inhabitants gathered at the gate were excited and distressed. One gentleman shouted loudly for the police. Another chivalrously remarked that he was no spoil-sport, and if the girl wanted to elope, it was none of their business. A fox terrier belonging to the butcher boy, ran, barking furiously, at the despairing father, who was still panting down the drive. Then the usual policeman strolled up and said, “What’s all this ’ere?” Explanation and laughter followed. Nothing like it had ever been seen before in respectable Herne Hill, but they had heard of the cinema and its amazing drama. So this was how it was done! Well, well!

Astonishing things happened in that early film drama, as old as the hills now, but novel and sensational then. The irate father giving chase in another powerful motor, (which moved at about ten miles an hour) was arrested by bogus policemen with red noses, thrown off the scent by comic tramps, and finally blown up in an explosion of the car, creating terror in a Surrey village, which thought that anarchists were loose. After many further incidents the runaway couple were married in a little old church--I walked in front of the camera as one of the guests--while two of the actors were posted as spies to give warning of any approach of the country clergyman. He, dear man, appeared in the opposite direction, and was horrified to find a wedding going on without his knowledge, and an unknown parson (who had dressed behind a hedge) officiating in the most unctuous way. For me it was a day of unceasing laughter, for there was something enormously ludicrous about the surprise of the passers-by, who could not guess at what was the real meaning of the mock drama. Now it is a commonplace, and no one is surprised when a company of film actors takes possession of the road.

Looking back upon the almost miraculous progress of aviation, it seems to me, and to many others, that humanity rose very high and fell very low when it discovered at last the secret of flight. For thousands of years, perhaps from the days when primitive man stood in a lonely world and watched the easy grace, the swift and joyous liberty of the birds above his head, there has been in the soul of man the dream of that power to fly. Men lost their lives in vain attempts, as far back as the myth of Icarus, whose waxed wings melted in the sun. Scientists studied the mechanism of birds, tethered their imagination to rising kites, sought vainly for the power to lift a heavy body from the earth. At last it was found in the petrol-driven engine, and men were seen to rise higher than the clouds, and to travel through the great spaces of the sky like gods. A pity that this achievement came just in time for world war, and that the power and beauty of flight was used for dropping death upon crowded cities and the armies of youth, crouching in ditches beneath those destroying dragons!

I had no clear vision of that, in spite of the wonderful prophecy of H. G. Wells, when I watched the first feeble attempts of the early aviators in England and France. Those first aviation meetings did not promise mastery of the air except by the eye of faith. For hours, and sometimes for days, we waited on the edge of flat fields while men like Graham White, Latham, Blériot, Hamel, and other pioneers whose names, alas! I have forgotten--there is something terrible and tragic in that quick forgetfulness of heroic adventure--tinkered with their machines, stared at the wind gauge, would not risk the light breeze that blew, or rose a little, after running like lame ducks around the field, and crashed again like wounded birds. Death took a heavy toll of them. There was hardly one of those early meetings in which I did not see one or more fatal accidents.

I was close to the Hon. Charles Rolls, a very gallant and splendid fellow, when he fell. That was at the meeting in Bournemouth which I have mentioned before, when the Mayor challenged noonday itself in an artificial nose, and everybody seemed bewitched by some spell of midsummer madness. There was a flower carnival in progress and pretty girls all in white and sprigged muslin, mounted on floral cars, flung confetti and bouquets at the crowd, who pelted them back. From the flying field, while this was going on, Charles Rolls rose in his machine to perform an evolution which had been set as a competition. It was a death trap at that period of flying, for he had to fly four sides of a small square, and then alight in the center of it. No breeze was stirring, or very little, and the sky was cloudless. But rising sharply to form one side of the square, Rolls’s machine side slipped and fell like a stone. His body lay there for a moment before the spectators were conscious of tragedy. Then they rushed toward him.... A few yards away, the floral cars continued their procession, and the pretty girls pelted the laughing crowds with blossoms.

That was later than the beginning of flight. The first time I realized the almost limitless possibilities of heavier-than-air machines was at Doncaster, when Colonel Cody was among the competitors. The Doncaster meeting had been a great failure from the public point of view. There was very little flying, owing to bad weather and elementary aëroplanes. The aviators sulked in their tents, and the gloomy atmosphere was deepened by some financial troubles of the organizers, so that the gate money was seized to liquidate their debts. At least, that was the rumor, as I remember it. But there was one cheerful man, ever ready with a friendly word and jest. That was Colonel Cody who, after many kite-flying experiments, on behalf of the British government, which had failed to give him any financial aid, was putting the finishing touches to a homemade biplane, with the help of his son. It was a monstrous and clumsy affair. It had great struts of bamboo, an enormous spread of wing space, and a petrol tank weighing half a ton. This structure, which was tied up with string, and old wire, and bits of iron, was nicknamed St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Noah’s Ark, and all kinds of ridiculous names, by correspondents who did not believe in its powers of flight. But they loved to talk to old Cody, dressed like “Buffalo Bill” (though he was no relation of the original Colonel Cody of showman fame), with long hair which he used to wind up under his hat and fasten with an enormous bodkin with which he also used to pick his teeth. I laughed loud and long at the first sight of his immense aëroplane, and refused to credit his childlike assertion that it would fly like a bird. But one morning early, he enlisted volunteers to haul it out of its hangar and set its engine going with the noise of seven devils. “Poor old Cody!” said a friend of mine. “One might as well try to fly with a railway engine!”

Hardly were the words out of his mouth, than the great thing rose, and not like a bird, but gracefully and gently as a butterfly, was wafted above our heads, and flew steadily across the field. We chased it, shouting and cheering. It seemed to us like a miracle. It was a miracle--man’s conquest of flight.

Presently, after three minutes, I think, “something happened.” The great aëroplane staggered back, flagged, and took a nose-dive to earth, where it lay with its engine dug deep into the soil and a confusion of twisted wires and broken canvas about it. With two or three other men--among them a brilliant and well-remembered journalist, Harold Ashton--I ran forward, breathlessly, and helped to drag Cody from beneath the wreckage, dazed and bloody, but not badly hurt. His first words were triumphant: “What did I tell you, boys? It flew like a bird!”

It was patched up again, and flew again, until Cody was killed. He was truly one of the heroic pioneers, obstinate in faith, heavily in debt, unhelped by any soul, except that son of his who believed in “the old dad.” It was he who cured me of scepticism. After seeing his heavy machine fly around the course, I knew that the game had been won, and that one day, not one man, but many, might be carried in an aëroplane on great strong wings.

Edgar Wallace, war correspondent, novelist, poet, and great-hearted fellow, was at Doncaster with Harold Ashton and others, and I remember we played poker, which was new to me, after the day’s work. The landlord of the inn in which we stayed watched the game for a few minutes, and saw Wallace scoop the pool with a royal flush. The old man’s eyes fairly bulged in his head. “It’s a great game, that!” he remarked, and insisted on taking a hand. Wallace had phenomenal luck with his hands and so raked the landlord’s money out of his pockets that he fled in dismay. “It’s a devil’s game!” was his final verdict. However, that has nothing to do with the triumph of flight, except on the part of the landlord.

Another revelation of progress rapidly achieved happened at Blackpool, which coincided with the Doncaster meeting. I went on from one to the other and found the weather at Blackpool frightful, from the point of view of flying. Rain poured down heavily, and the wind was violent--so savage, indeed, across the flat fields of the flying ground that it uprooted the poles of the press tent and made the canvas flap like clothes hung out to dry on a gusty day. Before this pavilion finally collapsed in the gale, I used it as a writing place, and remember sitting there with Bart Kennedy, with our collars tucked up, trying to keep our paper dry and our tempers cool. Bart Kennedy who, as a young man, had tramped about the world, not as a literary adventurer but as a real vagabond of the old style, earning his bread by casual labor, discovered in later life the gift of words, which he used in a crude, forceful, ungrammatical, but somewhat biblical, style to describe his experiences of life in the wild places of the world, and the philosophy which he had extracted therefrom. He posed as a rebel and a man of primitive soul in the artificial environment of civilization, and was adopted by the Harmsworth Press as an amusing freak. Although he was conscious of his own pose, and played it for all it was worth, it was based on sincerity. He was truly a rebel and a natural man, with the honesty, brutality, simplicity, and courage of the backwoodsman. In that tent at Blackpool, I remember his talking to a carpenter who was trying to fix the tent poles.

“Say, old friend, have you ever heard of Jack Cade?”

The carpenter scratched his head, thoughtfully.

“Can’t say I remember any lad of that name. He isn’t one of my pals.”

“He was a carpenter like you,” said Bart Kennedy. “Lived five hundred years ago, and tried to gain liberty for the workingmen of England. An honest rebel, was Jack Cade. Why don’t you fellows learn the spirit of revolt? You’re all as tame as sheep, without the pluck of a louse.”

The collapse of the tent interrupted this dialogue, in which “Bart,” as we called him, endeavored to raise rebellion against the British Constitution.