Part 19

Vernon Sprott, smoking a long fat cigar, followed Lord Ottercove critically into the chariot which, cutting sharply round the corner, took wing, and clearing the roofs of the Berkeley-square houses, soared into the sky. Lord Ottercove and Mr. Vernon Sprott beheld for the last time the great city of London which, viewed from this imposing height, looked as though it had been inadvertently dropped out of the back of a cart. An architectural effect that, though it was not premeditated, could hardly be called happy, thought Mr. Sprott. However. He puffed at his cigar. “Your secretary and telephone operator gone ahead, I expect?”

“Yuh. Can’t get on without them.”

They were now flying right into the dawn.

XLII.

CASTOR AND POLLUX

Herr Kogl was in charge of the telephone and telegrams. He would come up and say to you with oracular pride: “A--telegram--is--on--the--way--to--you.” He articulated slowly, as if appreciating the necessity of talking distinctly to foreigners.

“How do you know?” Lord de Jones asked him.

“I know,” said Herr Kogl, turning to go. But he came back at once and explained:

“They--have--telephoned--from--the--post--office--to--say--so.”

The telegram arrived an hour later. De Jones opened it and read:

“_Lord Ottercove and Mr. Vernon Sprott arriving by chariot this evening. Reserve first class accommodation._

_Hannibal._”

In the afternoon while everybody was at tea--“_Jause_,” in the vernacular--Mrs. Hannibal and the telephone operator arrived in an aeroplane and installed themselves with the efficiency and celerity of a quartermaster. Mrs. Hannibal occupied the little reception room; the telephone operator, a graduate of the Royal College of Science, commandeered the telephone. Then, there being nothing for them to do till evening, they strolled down the hill into town to inspect the sights.

And Baby?

She was not at the gate, nor at the bandstand, nor in the by-ways of the park. Since his demise from the Pension Kogl, Frank lived in town, often meeting Baby when she came down to Innsbruck. And here she was, as fresh as May, beckoning to him from across the flower-bespangled field. That laughing, slanting look in her eyes stirred something in his frame as though a bird had suddenly flown into him. He was joy, his body the cage. Soon joy would fly out; and he fretted and flurried trying to lock the door of the cage, losing his happiness in the anxiety of losing it. That piquant blend of childish innocence on her face with a suggestion of ripening womanhood about her form, so irresistible to men, was no less irresistible to Frank. They took the funicular up the mountain slope and continued the acclivious ascent by foot, stopping now and then to look down at the town in the valley, when he would feel her lovely weight against him. They wound their way up the Schillerweg and stopped at a Gasthaus in the precincts of the Pension Kogl and had coffee and cakes amidst the beer and wine drinking peasants with goat beards like shaving brushes stuck in their coloured hats, and the women in Tyrolese peasant dress taken in tightly at the waist and showing off their figures to advantage, and sat still and looked down into the green folds of the valley and up at the jagged summits of naked rock. She gave him a look that came straight from the soul. Her eyes were as if they had just been sad, had understood all, and now chose to see only the heavenly, sunny side of your being. And looking at her eyes, you, too, felt but the sunny side of yourself, and wanted to dance and prance in the sunshine that emanated from those eyes. Fowls, chickens, strutted all over the place, jumped on the chairs. The little serving maid, bare-legged, would call them: “Chuck-chuck-chuck!”

They were screened from sight by a tree. He put his hand on her arm. Her look moistened. The sun, as if making a last effort, shone with a tragic brightness; then, unable to sustain the effort, diminished its light. The bare-legged maid had gone in. They kissed. When she came out she wore a pair of brown stockings: and they stopped kissing.

“Hello, hello!”

They turned round and saw Eva and Christopher de Jones. “Wherever have you been?” Eva turned on to her cousin. “We’ve been looking for you everywhere. Chris is anxious to begin.”

“There isn’t any time to waste. It’s coming our way now, spreading fast,” de Jones confirmed.

“Like creeping paralysis,” said Eva, “and Chris is going to vaccinate this hill.” Then, turning to Frank: “Let me see! Have you any hair left?” He quickly removed his hat. “Oh, lots and lots!” she exclaimed.

“It’s about the only thing I have.”

“It’s time I did it,” said de Jones. “Herr Kogl, can you oblige me with a little gasoline?”

“Yes, yes. We’ll see if we can get any,” said Herr Kogl politely. “Kindly follow me to the garage, and we shall see if we are lucky.”

Then in another tone: “Hey there! Herbert! Any gasoline! Any gasoline, I said! Come on and get about it, quick! I’m waiting. I said: _waiting_!”

Christopher de Jones returned with a mysterious air. “I have timed,” he said, “the explosion for 5:15.”

“What explosion is this?” Frank said with enquiring charm.

“Oh, perfectly harmless in itself. But it will frighten away all the rest, and leave this mountain top for our little party.”

“Is this discrimination not perhaps a little heartless?”

“Surplus, surplus. One must always get rid of the surplus.”

He took out his watch and held it in his palm. Three minutes elapsed.

There was a mild crash. Then several faces were thrust enquiringly out of the windows of the Pension Kogl. Next, the word “earthquake” passed from mouth to mouth, and a thin stream of visitors trickled down the narrow mountain path into Innsbruck which stretched below them, sunning itself in the valley. Herr Kogl, Frau Kogl, the policeman and the Frau Policeman with her quicksilver of a little boy, the apoplectic Baron, and some others, made light of Lord de Jones’s warning and refused to budge.

They stood with Frank and Eva and Baby and de Jones in a group on the terrace and watched the other visitors trot down the hill: the Grand Duke, the Frau Professor with the dachshund, the Herr Pastor, the Frau Pastor, Herr and Frau Nikulitsch, the two Scottish old maids, Herr Spatz, Frau Spatz, and their son Willy, the Frau Doktor Wirt, the Frau Direktor Bödingen, the Frau Oberst von Kaisar, and Frau von Endte. There lived among others in the annexe of the Pension Kogl an effeminate-looking young artist from Vienna who was kept by a poor, pale consumptive German girl who paid for him and cooked his meals, whereas he, tired of her love, powdered his face and, adjusting his tie before the mirror, went to town every day to distract himself with her money. On the fatal day he, adjusting his tie, went to town and did not come back. And she, going down the hill to the grocer’s to get him his supper, did likewise.

Frank remembered this afterwards. Now he stood between Eva and de Jones and watched his erstwhile enemies from the _pension_ go down, never to return. It was a warm Sunday afternoon. Far away, a train whistled and then coiled below, like a serpent, on its long journey to Vienna. It will not reach Vienna, Frank thought, not in eternity! All the peasants, save for one old man, had already vanished down the hill. He drank his big mug to the bottom, smacking his lips. Having paid for the beer and lighted his pipe, he rose, and at once there came the sounds of his jolly accordion, as, with twinkling eye, he strode to his own happy tune out of the courtyard. Fresh and alert, he went down the road making his own music, till his long curved pipe, and his knapsack, and the plume in his hat ducked by the hill, and only the jolly tune spoke of his fresh onward strides.

The sun had long ago set behind the hills. It was very still: the empty spell which hangs over the world before twilight.

“And what’s that?” Baby exclaimed, pointing to an approaching dot in the sky. Eva peered at the clouds. An airplane was speeding towards them.

“It’s the chariot,” said Frank.

“It’s Rex! It’s Rex!” she cried. “Hurrah! it’s Rex!”

They could see them now with the naked eye, Lord Ottercove and Mr. Vernon Sprott, seated side by side, puffing at their cigars.

One moment it seemed as if Lord Ottercove’s winged chariot would land safely and gracefully in the courtyard of the Pension Kogl. The next, it looked as though it would do no such thing.

The two occupants of the chariot suddenly looked at each other. They were both, in their different ways, strong men, and said nothing. They were, they knew it, subject to immediate dissolution. And there was method in it. First, Mr. Vernon Sprott began to disintegrate (his eighty-five volumes of fiction and _belles-lettres_ in the British Museum having already preceded him). Mr. Sprott realised with his usual imperturbable objectivity that he, who had always been one for whom the visible world existed, was on the point of no longer existing for the visible world. Now Lord Ottercove also began to get diffuse. He was not aware of any pain or discomfort: he only felt that he was becoming less and less homogeneous. This master of a million voices yielded inaudibly to extinction, his last conscious feeling, one of sorrow not of anger, being a profound regret that Lord de Jones had not remained a Genius of the Untried. Soon their fabric melted into air, into thin air. Their insubstantial pageant faded and left no rack behind.

But in the growing twilight the tips of their cigars, fiery particles immune from dissolution, two beacons of light, two golden stars in the sky, twin brothers, Castor and Pollux, shone for ever and ever.

XLIII.

THE COCK CROWS TWICE

There was no sound at all, and nothing to see: something that had hitherto been ceased to be, like a dream on waking. Nothing crashed, nothing fell: no mist, not a whiff of steam. No gossamer. Things rolled up into nothing, as if they had vanished up their own sleeves.... The world around seemed to be burning, silently, quickly, invisibly.

They stood round and watched intently. Would the vaccination prove adequate in neutralizing the creeping disease? Or would it overtake their little hill, reach them and consume them all? By the answer to this question Christopher de Jones will stand or fall. If he succeed, how will they reward him? Foolish associations intrude their minds. “Payment by results.” How long, how long! Will this ever end? Has it ended? Are they dead, and, in a sense, as good as before? “Come, now,” said Christopher impatiently.

Gradually the hill detached itself, and as Baby and Herbert ran down the slope hand in hand to ascertain if they were clear of the contamination, floated away into space.

“A clean piece of work, what?” said de Jones, looking round at everybody for approbation. “We’re clear of the old earth.”

They all looked admiringly at the wizard.

“We’ve peeled right off the rotten crust of the world; the old planet’s gone off to die by itself.”

“The whole of her fabric vanished by now?” asked Frank.

“Well, there may still be a piece of Asia left as we are talking. But it need concern us no longer.”

“I should hate to think, Chris,” Eva said, “that you have not quite killed the earth and that she is suffering.”

“A matter of a day or so, that’s all. The wound is mortal.”

They stared away into space. “Look out!” he cried. “We are floating away. No need for alarm. Merely changing our bearings in the firmament. The stars are looking at us inquisitively; that is because we are newcomers.”

They could not recognise their Chris, their gloomy, silent Chris. He was gay, excited, communicative; like a Cook’s tourists’ guide. “Hold on!” he cried presently. “We seem to be getting away somewhere, I don’t quite know where.”

Away, away, away! To the sun, Frank thought, to be consumed in its light!

The movement increased in velocity. It seemed they were falling. Falling, falling, still falling; but falling upwards, not downwards. With indrawn breath they awaited the final impact which was to shatter them into space. Now, with a crash, they would fall on the moon.

Trembling, Eva came into Frank’s arms. He held her close that he might drink her breath, commit her kiss into the keeping of his soul, forever lost in hers. For his identity, as it dissolved in the encroaching dusk, clung to his own self’s dream in her soul mirrored. Was it the end? Shut in that vision! Now, Doom, devour them!... “Ever, and again, and forever, thine.”

Yet the minutes passed and no blow came. When they had stood tensely and motionlessly for what seemed to them a decade, the velocity of their fall decreased perceptibly, and they came to a halt. The sky gradually cleared, and the sun flickered through the clouds. It looked as though it might be over.

Lord de Jones looked as nonplussed as the others. “Apparently,” said he, “the law of gravity is no object to God.”

“Yes,” Frank agreed, releasing Eva from his protective grasp, “we are saved--if unscientifically saved.”

“God has shown,” remarked Herr Kogl, “that whatever else He may be, He is no doctrinaire.”

“Apparently,” replied de Jones, still looking worried, “our knowledge of astronomy is incomplete--if this sort of thing can happen.”

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, etcetera,” said Frank.

Herr Kogl looked at Frau Kogl. They smiled faintly at each other. They were pale, yet happy. But where was Herbert?

“Never mind Herbert. Where was Baby?” The question flashed through Eva’s mind.

Steps were taken accordingly to satisfy the curiosity on both sides. Herbert and Baby had, it was remembered, run down the slope hand in hand to ascertain whether the hill was clear of the dissolving earth, before the hill had shot, like a bolt, into space; and neither Herbert nor Baby could be traced any more. Lord de Jones advanced an interesting and plausible theory that Herbert and Baby, having thoughtlessly overstepped the line of demarcation, had rendered themselves subject to the chemical laws operating outside the area he had thoughtfully isolated by means of vaccination, and thus had shared the fate of all matter. While they were discussing the sensational disappearance of two of their number who should have been saved, the ground beneath them gave a jerk and then began to revolve, at first slowly, then faster and faster.

“Hold tight!” cried de Jones. The new globe was whirling with incredible rapidity on its own axis and, what was even more distressing, round the sun; which made it doubly difficult to keep one’s feet. They were, thank God, for the most part of them, Londoners, accustomed to roughing it on the tops of omnibuses, and this sort of thing held no real peril for them. But twenty Austrian citizens, mountain folk who had lived away from urban surroundings, failed to keep their poise and were hurled into infinity to ascertain, but never to report, whether Einsteinian infinity was indeed finite (even though some of the victims had no scientific bias at all).

But all things come to an end sooner or later, as was remarked by some keen observer. Gradually the revolutions slowed down and then almost subsided: and there they were--behold! the new Jerusalem descending out of heaven from God, having the glory of God: and her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal. And they 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.

“By God, John, you’re right!” Frank exclaimed: “as right as sixpence!”

“That was a narrow escape,” said Herr Kogl.

Lord de Jones sat down on the ground and stretched out his limbs and yawned. “Ha!” he laughed.

“What is the joke, if I may ask?” Frank smiled enquiringly.

“Fifty years ago,” said de Jones, “when the laws of science were absolute, this would have been impossible. But in this age of Relativity, nothing, thank God, is absolutely impossible!”

“Relatively speaking,” said Frank.

“I have always put God above mathematics,” said Herr Kogl.

“Either nature lacked science,” Frank said, “or God knew a lot more. Our experience is decidedly novel and interesting.”

“As a matter of fact,” rejoined Lord de Jones, “it all happened according to plan. Just as I thought. Nothing surprises me.”

He _hadn’t_ thought so. He was like a captain who in a storm mislaid his chart and instruments and, when the storm was over, pretended to take his bearings and said that they tallied with his intended course.

They were miraculously saved; and there was still a world. But what a world! A rounded mountain top, peeled away and revolving very slowly by itself round the old sun.

And there, as before, stood the Pension Kogl. Nothing seemed to have happened to it; all the windows were whole. Here was the garden, the courtyard, the stables; and there the fields with the cows and sheep and horses grazing imperturbably as before. Was it a dream? Where was it? When was it?

And here was Herr Kogl standing on the doorstep puffing at his pipe; and there was Frau Kogl, agitated, throwing out her hands, probably saying, Frank thought, “I don’t know what to do!” to the policeman who was mystified, though not disagreeably, by the disappearance of the young shrew who had been his wife. And in her agitation Frau Kogl seemed to be forgetting her own grief.

“The matter is simple,” de Jones was explaining. “When our new little planet began to whirl like a merry-go-round, the Frau Policeman, having failed to clutch at a solid object, or clutching an object that was not solid (possibly her husband), was hurled like a stone outside the now negligible gravitation zone of this little earth of ours, and was attracted by the superior gravitation of the moon.”

“For one who has always whined for the moon,” said Herr Kogl, “the transference must have its attraction.”

“The bump,” retorted de Jones, “will have been fatal. But that is neither here nor there. All I ask you to note is that her death was due to natural causes.”

“Lucid, admirable,” said Frank, “and entirely convincing!”

The apoplectic old Baron came up to say that he had just stumbled over the body of little Hans, the policeman’s boy, and the company, sobered by recent apocalyptic events, slowly made for the spot. De Jones again assumed the initiative.

“Observe,” he said, “an interesting phenomenon. The boy, too small and not used to transit either by omnibus or the Metropolitan Railways, had not developed the instinct of a strap-hanger, and if his ancestors had indeed ever had this instinct, it had been atrophied in him through long disuse. And thus he failed to clutch instinctively at the small bush that might have saved him, and was hurled instead into space. But being light in body he was not hurled far enough to reach the gravitation zone of the moon, but remained within the gravitation halo of this little planet whose power of attraction, as you are aware, is so weak that when we raise our legs in walking we have some difficulty in touching ground again. We might be penny balloons on the day after their purchase when, no longer able to rise in the air, they do the next best thing. And so, observe, this infant’s fall was not heavy: it did not maim or deform him: only knocked the life out of him. All in the natural order of phenomena.”

“Most interesting and instructive,” said Frank.

“Poor child,” said Eva. “Poor Baby! Poor Herbert! I wish now, Christopher, you had never begun it.”

“You can’t have,” retorted Christopher, “a worldwide cataclysm like this without a victim here and there, which is all in the day’s work.”

“The number of your victims,” interjected Frank, “is in the neighbourhood of 1,600,000,000.”

“What!” Frau Kogl was appalled. “That is not allowed! _Das gibt es nicht!_ Herr Wachmann!” she called out to the policeman, “will you have this gentleman arrested. He is the biggest murderer that ever lived!”

The policeman, a tin sword trailing at his side, looked from one to the other with an irresolute air.

“Come, come!” said Lord de Jones, patting him on the shoulder, “this is no longer your old Austria.”

“Now don’t be a funk,” Frau Kogl egged him on, “assert your authority, show what you can do.”

“I am the only policeman in the world, a poor, lonely man. How can I arrest anybody?”

“Come, come, don’t you bother them,” Herr Kogl intervened. “What is done is done and cannot be undone.”

But she would not listen to him. And even when he bawled at her she did not quail, this time, before the man with the strong will; and he turned into the house with a shrug. “Women,” he said tenderly.

“You’re a fine policeman and no mistake,” Frau Kogl jeered, till even Lord de Jones himself felt sorry for the man.

“Leave the poor man alone, can’t you?” he said. “What has he done to you?”

“It’s not what he, but what you’ve done, sir. Killed Herbert, killed everybody. Everybody, everybody ... absolutely everybody one can think of. And now with this funk of a policeman there will be no justice, no authority left in the world; no one to bring you to book!”

“That will do, Frau Kogl.”

“No, it _won’t_ do, sir. This is _my_ pension, bought on my mother’s hard savings she made in Alsace-Lorraine from where we spring, and as an Alsacian I am too proud to tolerate the presence of the murderer of the human race in my house.”

“Stop!” cried de Jones. “Don’t try my patience too far, woman! My nerves are on edge. I’ve had a very exceptional day. Do you know what you are saying? This is the New Jerusalem that you see, the home of pacifism. None of your Alsace-Lorraine now, I beg of you.”

“I came from there--”

“And you’ll go that way, if you are not careful.”

“All this is mine.”

“Oh, is it? Let heaven be my judge.” He snatched the sword from the policeman and struck her on the head.

She collapsed in a heap.

The policeman walked away into the hills with a look which implied: “I haven’t seen it.”

Lord de Jones lit his pipe. Frank and Eva stood by, aghast. De Jones looked at them with a propitiating smile. “I have slain,” he said, removing his pipe, “this dragon of contention, this symbol of war and nationalism, I hope, for ever.”

“Cain!”

A cock crowed twice.

He started; then relaxed again. If the cock crowed twice to remind him that he had betrayed his ideal at least once, he was nevertheless mighty glad to know that there was a cock on the premises. He hoped there were hens, too.

“I have released,” he said, “the spirit imprisoned in a foul house.”

“You’re blaspheming.”

“It had to be done.”

“Oh, had it?”

“A hard thing, I admit, for a pacifist. But we must not sentimentalise if we are to survive; we must fight the peace as we fought the war!” There was silence.

“Even the cock is too sick with you to crow again,” said Frank.

The light sank: there was a long drop of rain, then another. It began to hail. The three of them turned in and stood at the window blurred with rain. The old woman’s body lay out in the wet. Neither the hail nor rain could waken her. The earth was wrapped in a wet mist. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And Lord de Jones said, “Let there be light”: and there was no light. So he switched on the electric light: and he saw that it was quite good.

“You blooming fool, Christopher! You’ve upset all the seasons!” cried Eva. “You’ve made a mess of the weather! It’s neither day nor night, but heaven knows what! It should be summer now, and it is winter.”

“O Wind! If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

He sank into a chair and picked up a periodical, a copy of _The New Statesman_, the last number. The very last! Eva opened the _Illustrated London News_ full of pictures of the _concours hippique_ at the Olympia, and Frank strolled over to the piano and tried his hand at the _Symphony of the New World_, when Herr Kogl came in from the dining-room.

“Bad weather, Herr Kogl, what?”