Part 18

And now as they appeared in the doorway, Lord Ottercove flung a chair at them, and they retired in disorder. This left him with five chairs, including the one he was sitting on. He flung the fourth chair at a literary aspirant whose dream was to contribute humorous articles to _The Daily Runner_, and the fifth chair at a lady who wished to sell him tickets for a charity concert in the Albert Hall, and, having flung the sixth and the seventh chair at some nondescripts who peeped through the door to see what was happening, he remained seated in the eighth and only chair in the room. Mrs. Hannibal came in with a fearless smile on her face, the practised smile of a lion trainer whose first rule is to show no fear of the lion for fear of encouraging the lion to behave in a manner compatible with his nature.

Lord Ottercove looked at her affectionately. “Do you admire my moderation?”

She admired him, and this physical symbolism of his political power, and the sincerity of his self-expression, and his freedom from sham convention.

Lord Ottercove seized the receiver--Mrs. Hannibal thought, to speak to Scotland Yard. She was wrong. Lord Ottercove was telephoning to his editors. Here was real news! The end of all things: something not to be missed.

News, he thought, such as Lord Northcliffe would have appreciated at its true value! There was no jealousy in Lord Ottercove. He admired Lord Northcliffe, and though secretly he thought he himself had no peers among living newspaper proprietors, he suffered from an inferiority complex in the presence of Lord Beaverbrook. And so he was glad of the exclusive news. In the beginning there was the Word. And in the end, too. He was proud that it befell to _The Daily Runner_ to write the Omega. “I, Baron Ottercove of Ottercove, hereby announce the end of the world.”

His principal editor, he was informed, was dining out. “As ever! Just like him!” he muttered. “Dining, while the paper--not to say the world--can go to hell.” For some minutes he sat alone in his vast roof office, full of a strange wonder at the imminence of the fate which confronted mankind. At last, he had to believe it. He sat very still, while below the printing presses, with accustomed celerity, manufactured the tidings. Then a sudden foreboding overcame him. It was not so much that he feared the end for himself and his race: it was the uncertainty of it that gnawed at his nerves. The uncertainty of when and under what circumstances he might disintegrate. He stood by the enormous window with a wide view of London roofs, including that of St. Paul’s, and sadness filled his soul. An indescribable sorrow for all mankind descended upon him. But as the minutes passed, the need for action braced his nerves. Hatless he stepped into the lift, and passing the solitary commissionaire, dashed into the busy streets.

XXXIX.

Where he went, he did not know. He walked on and on, his straggling hair blown by the wind, and feeling a little like King Lear on the heath, till, cutting across the Park to the Marble Arch, several open-air meetings beckoned to him as a sign and a portent.

Two hostile meetings, of Free Thinkers and devout Christians, were held side by side, the speakers abusing each other at intervals, as though, Lord Ottercove thought, God and the Day were not in sight! The Christian protagonist, pointing at the blackboard on which a hen and an egg had been sketched by him, questioned his audience: “They talk of science, but what do they know? Can any of them tell me--can any of you here tell me who came first? The hen or the egg? Did the hen first make the egg, or did the egg first make the hen? Now, then, can any one here tell me, I ask ye? Can any of the science students tell me? Ye can’t. Well, _I_ can tell yer!--God made them both!” And he looked round triumphantly.

“They tell us--these Christian fellows,” shouted the Free Thinker, “that Adam and Eve was sent to hell because Eve ‘ad eaten an apple. Now here is an apple.” He held up an apple for all to see. “Now, Ladies and Gentlemen, I ask ye: What is there in an apple? ‘Ere! _And yet they tell us_--the Bible tells us--that Adam and Eve was sent to ‘ell ‘cause Eve’d eaten an apple! Now I ask ye, Ladies and Gentlemen, can ye believe such a silly thing?”

“Free Thinkers!” shouted the Christian protagonist, pointing derisively at his antagonist not five yards away. “Free Thinkers!--Free _Stinkers_ I call them!”

“Because they’d eaten an apple. Now here! Just look at it. Look at it! What is there, I ask, in an apple? And yet they tell us--”

Suddenly the urge to impart to this large gaping audience the momentous message came over Ottercove. It was the end of the visible world. In a few hours, perhaps in a few moments--at most in a week--they would have to face the Judgment. It was for him to break the news. What consolation had he to offer them? Call on their national pride in facing disaster calmly and stoically? Recall the serene joys of eternity? Dwell on the ultimate mercy of God? Or prophesy that there will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Biblical language came readily to his lips: Lord Ottercove, though few knew it, was the greatest living authority on biblical texts. He knew the Bible from cover to cover and backwards: indeed, he could, at a pinch, recite it by heart under an anesthetic.

“What does it profit a man,” he began in a loud robust voice, the crowds gathering round him, “if he gain the whole world (he paused as if to prolong the tension of the ‘poser’; then added quietly:) and lose his own soul? And why should it sadden a man if he lose the whole world (Lord Ottercove paused), never having gained it?” He had the pleasurable sensation of discovering (alas, as the world was about to let him down) that he had the gift of a preacher and prophet, a gift that could hold and sway multitudes. “Before I came here,” he went on, “I sat in the dim light of my study and I dreamed and meditated by the fire; and there came one of the seven angels, and he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and showed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, having the glory of God: and her light was like unto a stone most precious, even”--Lord Ottercove stopped as if seeking the _mot juste_--“like a jasper stone,” he said, “clear as crystal.”

The audience was writhing with excitement, but he stopped them with a movement of his hand, leaning forward over the stand and speaking almost in a whisper: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.”

Once indeed he was taken aback by an interpellation: “Why the dickens didn’t you stop the man, man?” yelled a dingy figure from the crowd, when he had spoken of the adventist-scientist.

“He wouldn’t stop!” returned Lord Ottercove. There was indeed no sort of good in stopping him, he hastened to add. Did they not know that an invention or discovery was at no time the monopoly of a single brain? What use indeed having this scientist arrested when his successor, whose hiding-place they could not know, was waiting to spring the mine?

But suddenly as he spoke a sort of mental cramp seized upon his brain, and he could not bring himself to utter another word. The harder he tried, the more did thought and words elude him. He stood gazing at them with what seemed to him an inane smile, but so magnetic, so masterful was his personality to the people around him that they stood fascinated, with their eyes glued on him, while he gazed back at them, in silence. Three minutes elapsed.

“Come on!” shouted a man from the crowd.

“Sir,” Lord Ottercove turned to him, “will you be good enough to allow me to complete my prayer?”

At which the interlocutor relapsed into the obscurity whence he had emerged.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” said Lord Ottercove: “I thank you for your kind attention.”

As he walked home, posters of his own newspapers informed him of the imminent dissolution of our planet. He groaned as he saw them. How bad! How unimaginative! Posters depressed him. Never a day, never an hour but that they would trot out some fresh disaster. A train derailed, liners colliding in the Channel, a steamer run aground in the fog, a bus toppled over, an airman lost in the Atlantic. Disaster, disaster, disaster! “Disaster mongers!” he called them. How the public must be getting sick of it. Never good news. He’d have to change all that. And suddenly, he remembered that he could not change it: disaster mongers had for ever triumphed.

At a street corner he bought a newspaper. “End of the World” meetings, he read, were being held in various parts of London. People began to close their shops, and the excitement increased to such an extent that later troops were called out, and large forces of police appeared at the street corners, and the approach to Downing-street was barricaded, the Prime Minister having refused to receive deputations who, resenting his wait-and-see policy, were eager to compel him to do something _and do it now_. Riots broke out in the east end of London, led by persons of an irreligious disposition desiring to have a last good run for their money, and men and women were committing suicide and going insane. There was a vast crowd in Trafalgar Square. The Bishop of London, it seemed, was addressing it. “Nearer my God to Thee, nearer to Thee....” Voices, out of time and tune, soared to the skies. A score of elderly virgins, earnest, spectacled ladies in white, sang with transport, invoking speedy transportation to the Seat of Judgment to be first among the Brides of the Lamb. “A scramble,” thought Ottercove. “A queue before a first-night. Wish I could be sure of my dramatic critic. Bright lad, Allan Scoffer, might manage to get in.”

The Brides’ white stood out luminously against the drab crowd. “What a chance to make a corner in muslin,” Ottercove thought to himself, “to meet the sure demand for Ascension robes!” The untimeliness of such an enterprise, in the face of timelessness, which would rob him of the fruits, damped his speculative ardour. He had long since lost interest in making money, though the habit persisted into middle life, and whenever now he sold a yacht or a Venetian palace or a country house in Scotland, he would pride himself on a minimum profit of £5, as a private reassurance that his old cunning had not left him. He was like a veteran golfer who suddenly, during a quiet walk in the country, borrows a club to show his friends the stuff he is made of. “Not lost the knack yet,” they say tonelessly.

He walked all the way home to Stonedge House and, unnoticed by his servants, sauntered sombrely into his ground-floor sitting-room. His mood was sombre. He stood at the wide French windows and looked out at the darkling park which stretched before him, melting away into the mist, stood there, a little weary and disenchanted. So this was the end. Good! He felt sorry for the world, and for himself, and for the race robbed of the promise of fulfilment. The imminent end of human life and, with it, of his career on earth, threw him back upon a reminiscent mood. He saw himself a boy way back in Ottercove, bright-eyed, eager, wide awake, the visible world a glittering prize, a pear waiting to be plucked. Well, he had plucked it. It had proved, however, more than he really cared to chew; his appetite had waned as he partook of it. He had had his fill; and, perhaps--he had always kept an open mind about these things, had always been awake to other worldly possibilities--perhaps there was room for his versatile talents beyond. He had always been keen, modest, ready to learn the rules of the game--any game--to appreciate the change in the nature of things, and always successful. Those oft-quoted words with which his father once adorned his dreary sermons, words whose beauty had arrested his attention, now stood before him, cavernous with meaning: “We shall not all sleep: but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump.”

Probably. His father--a curious man. No pliability of mind. No disinterested curiosity. Only a rigid belief in heaven and hell. Wrong! Life was pliable, generous and miraculous to a degree we could not even guess; it opened out suddenly, wondrously, as a flower overnight. To-day a caterpillar--to-morrow a butterfly. But we, dull, sodden ruffians ruminating over our existence, like cows chewing the cud, could not imagine a heaven other than of grass and water--greener grass and clearer water. Fools!

He paced up and down. A series of articles on the nature of immortality, for _The Sunday Runner_, commended themselves to his mind. A fitting counter-blast to the precocious spiritualism exploited by a rival group of newspapers. He would write them himself. It was wonderful how his mind was opening out, like a bed of flowers, all looking, straining to the sun. Intuitive orientation. Knew where the sun was, in fact had always had a place in it. And God was just there, too, behind the sun. He felt that he would get on well with God, owing to his reasonableness, modesty, and readiness for transfiguration at short notice. He would not ask questions, but watch every movement of God’s brow and anticipate His every mood.

Ah, well! he had faith. He would go on believing in a personal immortality till, with a poker, from behind, Providence would knock him dead.... A sinister afterthought; he brushed it aside. He stretched out his hands to the unseen: “I am reasonable. Will not the reasonable from beyond the grave claim me?” Half forgotten feelings flooded his heart. He remembered his arrival in England back from his New Zealand tour, as the train rolled noisily over the bridge into the great metropolis, the witness of his crowning triumphs. He remembered a thrush outside his bedroom window way back in Ottercove in early boyhood. The trees seemed to stand still, as if waiting for something. These feelings, eternal essences of things, were they to be wasted? These anticipations, were they not to be fulfilled? They were pledges of something that was to be, had always been, existed now, as if round the corner but somehow out of reach. The quickness with which people disposed of dead bodies, the rapidity with which they resigned themselves to their loss, suggested that, at bottom, they thought it was all right. It was all right. _How_ all right, he could not say, but all right it was.

“Time for bed.” He stretched out his arms to the ceiling and yawned. “I am,” he said aloud, “such as I am, and what I am--neither more nor less--for the universe to chew and digest and assign to the requisite uses.”

XL.

Lord de Jones had been in a hurry to cross over to the Continent, for there was no means at all of knowing how much of it had disintegrated to date. The uncertainty of the whole business appalled him. The stationmaster at Victoria might not be able to cummunicate with the _chef de la gare du Nord_. Yet he had no means of knowing whether this was because Paris-Nord (or, for that matter, Paris) had disintegrated, or whether it was because the number was engaged.

There was of course an aeroplane service for abroad, but people still clung to the _terra firma_, Lord de Jones thought, without good cause. Moreover, they were travelling with luggage--a good deal of luggage. It was indeed difficult to know how much luggage to take with one--Eva could not take enough--to last one to the end of one’s days in time. The sight of passengers reclining in the easy luxury of the Pullmans, looking trim and hard, appalled him. They would not come back, he mused. Never come back from this last journey into space whither they were travelling _de luxe_, over viaducts, away, away, urbane materialists melting into air....

And on the French side, against all the easy felicity of the language, the sinuous tones of the restaurant-car attendant who sang out as he squeezed himself along the swaying corridors: “_Prière de prendre place pour le premier déjeuner!_” contrasting favourably with the brisk “First luncheon!” of the British dining-car attendant, the incorrigible insularity of the English passengers who said they wanted to shut out, if possible, French passengers from the coupé (forgetting that they were travelling across France in a French train), stood out a black and reeking ghost of shame which made him think the world was doomed because it lacked all manners. In the night the train stood still, emitting long sighs at intervals; and his heart beat loud within him with foreboding.

Images passed through his mind, of a life _à la_ Jean Jacques Rousseau, in which he must rely on his dexterity of arm and on nature’s bounty. A hardened hunter he is, building her a hut. Eva with only furs from furry animals which he had hunted down for her to hide her nudeness. Primeval love and lust. Long days of bliss. But what is this? The roar of a lion. Bother! He must get up and see about it. He had been dozing, and opening his eyes, she was there indeed, not in the wilderness as yet, but facing him in the coupé, and smiling at him.

But what if it fail him? She, the child,--no more than she could understand how, having undone one atom, he had automatically undone the world,--had not the remotest comprehension of how he could now isolate a specific portion of it from destruction. Yet when he had, to illustrate the process, said to her that all he had to do was to vaccinate the hill they had selected as their future world, she said: “Of course! How silly of me not to think of it myself!”

But even if it fail, then death. And what was death? A change of outlook. He remembered once crossing a wide river somewhere, and as he landed on the other side, straying into a bathing place where lots of naked people sat about on benches in the garden and on chairs in the adjoining restaurant, smoking, eating, chatting, listening to music--but with nothing on them. It was uncanny. And he thought that landing on the other side of death must be as strange: for everything seemed different, yet everything the same.

Dusk fell as the train raced across Austria, and sheaves of corn in the vast whirling fields looked like humans stealing away one by one in the twilight. “Escaping,” he thought.

And, waking in the morning suddenly, they saw the mountains.

In the station square at Innsbruck, a fat German who looked like a pig waved his whip at his dog and threatened it: “_Ach, du Schweinhund!_”

“Disgraceful!” said Eva, and as she passed him she gave him an icy look over her slim shoulder. It was a beautiful day in June. They hired a victoria and drove, at first through the old mellow town with its cloistered streets, domes, turrets, and pinnacles; then by the side of the river, angry and turbulent. A faint hazy summer afternoon was drawing to its close, and as, at sundown, they came to a hanging bridge chained between rocks and the foaming green river rushing angrily under the horse’s hoofs, Christopher’s eyes filled with tears: the beauty of it all was more than he could bear.

And when, at the Pension Kogl, they came out on to their balconies, they were stunned with rapture by the view which opened out on to the mountain scenery. Below was the river, the passionate Inn, and the bridges, the funicular slowly climbing the mountain slope, and all around were pine trees, birches, roses, villas hidden in lanes lined with foliage; and at night when they walked by the river, where lanterns shone forth from between secretive trees, it was as if a wonderful secret, long dreamt and forgotten, awaited one round the corner.

XLI.

That night Lord Ottercove slept at The Cottage, and the following night he spent in the country. It was not till he had got into bed on the third night and turned over on his left side that he was aware of the sound of rustling paper in his pyjama coat pocket, which, on inspection, proved to be a letter, a _billet doux_ from his Eva. She was, she wrote, with Christopher de Jones, who, as Rex probably knew, had gone off his chump and had disintegrated the world, which was unravelling rapidly of its own accord (“like a piece of crochet-work,” she wrote, “if you know what I mean, whose first stitch he has undone,”) and she had with difficulty persuaded him to isolate the top of a hill, which he said he could do by vaccinating it, so to speak, against the spreading corruption, to save her and himself, and she was now secretly indicating the exact location of that hill in the Austrian Alps whither he, Rex, should fly at once. He must not, however, bring anyone with him, as there would be very little to eat. “_I told Him I’d like to have you saved, but He won’t hear of it. I am furious. I told him all the Truth that I have written to you. And He is Furious. Never mind, darling, if I flirt with him perhaps He will not kill you. Your loving wife_

_Eva._”

Lord Ottercove never weighed or reflected: he knew. Light came to him without intermediaries, direct from the Holy Ghost. He must save himself _and Vernon Sprott_. Vernon Sprott was, since the death of a late Prime Minister, his oldest friend, and friendship was to Ottercove a pure and sacred thing. In other departments of life he had displayed a versatile ability, but in friendship he was a genius. No coldness, lack of response, animosity, or even treachery could dull his friendship. If he once liked a man, nothing that that man might do to him would stop his liking him. Equally, he would stop at nothing if he could render even the smallest service to a friend. Lord Ottercove was said to have made the war in order to oblige a friend whose special gifts, he thought, would find their happiest expression in a war cabinet. His tenderness in the cause of friendship knew no bounds. And so, entering hatless into his chariot, he muttered the address of Mr. Vernon Sprott.

But when, his heart thumping within him, he dragged himself up to Vernon’s study at the top of his house in Berkeley-square, Vernon Sprott was writing a novel. Vernon Sprott was invariably writing a novel. That was, according to the more esoteric critics, the special trouble with him. And the special trouble to-night was that Vernon Sprott would not stop writing the novel, hoping to finish, print, sell it, and retire on the proceeds before the world came to its final dissolution. Lord Ottercove beheld the broad industrious back of his friend, who made a slave of himself to keep afloat a large yacht, and said: “Vernon, you’re a writer of talent: but a merchant of genius.”

Vernon Sprott turned round on his chair. “You, Rex,” he said, looking at him with critical thoughtfulness, “who have cut such a figure in the visible world, why don’t you now turn your mind to the invisible mystery of things and solve, say, the Riddle of the Universe?”

Lord Ottercove pondered silently awhile. “I cannot solve it,” he said.

Mr. Vernon Sprott turned back to his desk.

Lord Ottercove looked at his friend with grave significance. He loved Vernon Sprott. All the music, all the poetry in the world was not so strong nor yet so pure as this devotion of the younger for the elder friend, and when he spoke of him his voice grew tender and tears came to his eyes. “Vernon!” he said at last. “I am going to save your life! For, you know, there’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we may. My chariot is at the door and” (looking at his watch) “we must fly.”

“Let me put the last stroke to my novel.”

“I advise you against it.”

“Why?”

“Vernon: it would do you no good.”

“But I must. No first-class artist--”

“Vernon: we must fly.”