Part 19

The floor of the cockpit suddenly altered its angle. It had tilted upwards. Now it tilted all to one side. Sick and dizzy, but secure, the boy hung in his straps as she lay over, and saw on his left hand a wing of the Bird rising and blotting out the heavens, while on his right hand the earth reared up so horribly that Bawne could only shut his eyes tight and hold on to the arms-straps of his seat, and gasp out a little prayer. Then the cockpit floor became more level, and the wind buffeted less. The roar of the tractor and the twanging drone of the wires made one's bones hum and tingle to the very ends of one's teeth and finger-tips. But nothing had happened. Perhaps nothing would!

He drew a great breath of relief, and his heart left off bumping. His mouth was cold inside and his tongue felt dry and stiff. Only Our Lord and Our Lady and his guardian Angel had seen him funky, and for this Bawne was grateful. They understood, and--people--would not.

He guessed it about a quarter to six o'clock. By the genial warmth on one cheek and shoulder, and the way his shadow stretched over the pale grained ash-wood that lined the cock-pit, he knew the west must be upon the left.

He raised himself, craning his neck, and through the low wind screen behind him, against the background of a sky all flaming and boiling with molten gold and liquid amber, he saw the wide square shoulders and tall helmeted head of von Herrnung, the hard eyes staring unflinchingly through their round glass goggles, the mouth set in a straight inflexible line under the tight red roll of the moustache.

The red-moustached mouth opened, and von Herrnung shouted something. Nothing reached the boy but a sort of muffled roar. He shook his head vigorously, and then--one does not wear the Signaller's Badge for nothing!--released a stiff little gloved hand from its grip on the arm-rest, and rapped out with his clenched right fist on the edge of the fuselage:

"_I--can't--hear!_"

The Code was understood. The helmeted head, some four feet distant, nodded. One of von Herrnung's gauntleted hands freed itself from the steering-bar. Its knuckles drubbed out the question:

"Have you the brown satchel?"

Bawne had quite forgotten the brown satchel. He screwed back his head and looked down and there it was, lying on the numb knees of him, buckled to him by the tough strap of pigskin that held him in his seat. He nodded assent, and signalled:

"All right!"

"Good!" von Herrnung signalled back through the hurly-burly of the Bird's transit. Bawne mustered courage to knock out:

"Where are we? When shall we go down?"

Von Herrnung's right hand lifted itself, and described a sweeping half-circle. The brusque gesture answered Bawne's first question, bidding him look and see.

The boy, impeded in his view by reason of his small proportions, wriggled in his straps so as to get his chin well over the gunwale of the Bird's fuselage and the buffetting wind that was dug up and spaded over her bows by the dizzying revolutions of the tractor, got hold of him and pummelled and buffetted him again. Her course was still north, the sun was setting in great smoking lakes of gold and sulphur on her left as she flew. Thick patches of dark green bushes that probably were woods, reddish-green blotches that might be heathy commons, shiny, square patches that he guessed at as reservoirs, toybox villages that were thriving suburban boroughs, specks that were villas, glittering ribbons that suggested canals, and one broad shiny stripe that was a river with tiny boats upon it, were swirling from right to left, sweeping along in the opposite direction, under the rushing body of the winged thing that bore him, ruled by the hand of von Herrnung upon the steering-wheel.

Behind her a chaotic, formless greyness brooded on the horizon, innumerable spires rose out of it and a glittering haze hung over all. That was London, the great grimy Mother of Cities tearing away from her little son at eighty miles an hour. The shriek of an engine and the rumble of a train reduced by distance to infinite tenuity pulled the boy's eyes downwards. A weeny mechanical toy that meant one of the double-humped colossi of steam traction, dragging a string of match-box goods trucks, raced another locomotive, towing a crowded passenger-train neck and neck along the spider-fine perspective of gossamers that meant the Great Eastern Railway. Now fear was swamped in the sheer joy of the experience. This thin air that kept you perpetually gulping and swallowing saliva, made you feel more than ever how good it is to be alive.

Billows and billows of green, interspersed with patches of purple heather, meant Epping Forest, though he did not know it. A great aggregation of grey walls and housetops, looking like a section of an old wasp's nest, stood for Waltham Abbey as the Bird drove on. Quite a tangle of the shiny grey-blue streaks that were rivers meant Lea and Orwell, Ouse, and their trouty tributaries. East England rolled away underneath like an endless carpet woven in irregular patches of many hues. Green and brown, grey and yellow, and innumerable shades of these, so tempting in their suggestions of good things to eat that a most unheroic hunger reminded the schoolboy of tea-time, hours and hours gone by.

He looked round in search of von Herrnung, who maintained unchanged the same attitude, his shoulders level, his unseen hands steady as rock upon the wheel of the steering-pillar, his mouth shut tightly, his hard eyes ranging ahead or lowered, as he conned his course in masterly fashion by aid of the roller-map, protected by its transparent, rainproof casing, or the compass, clock, altimeter, and other instruments gimballed in the wooden frame in front of the pilot's seat.

"How long?" the small fist rapped out. Von Herrnung detached a hand and signalled in answer:

"One hour!"

"When do we go home?"

"We go home now!" the hand signalled, and the boy settled down in his seat to wait.

Between hunger and weariness he dozed, and soon slept soundly, his hands hanging laxly over the leather arm-rests and his head nodding over the brown satchel lying on his knees. It figured in his dreams as something huge, oppressive and uncanny, that suddenly took to itself malevolent life, spread a pair of wide leathery bat-wings, and would have flown away but that he gripped it fast.

"No, no! You shan't! I promised!" he heard himself crying, and suddenly the thing collapsed limply in his grasp and became nothing but a satchel, and he was awake. Awake and very stiff and rather sick and sleepy, and with the salt smell in his nostrils and the salt taste in his mouth that meant--that could only mean the Sea.

He looked over the gunwale and cried out in astonishment. For a vast carpet of rounded woolly-grey-white clouds lay spread beneath. The carpet beginning to rise and the cockpit floor to incline downwards, a thin clammy fog suddenly blotted out everything. The Bird had dived through a field of woolpack mixed with ground-fog. Now flying some hundred feet beneath it, she regained her level, in the clear light stained by the sunset as water in which a dash of red wine is mingled, the light that is the aftermath of a radiant summer's day. And, with the smell of the sea sharper in his nostrils, the boy became aware of moving, muddy-grey water, with ships and boats and steamers on it, far down below.

Now the southerly breeze that had steadily tagged on some twenty-three miles an hour to the Bird's eighty odd, began to veer and come in strengthening puffs and gusts from the north-west. Swirling eddies of air came upwards from the water, rocking the machine as a swell takes a boat at sea, and splashed upon the frail, silk-covered wings of the aeroplane in deluges of invisible spray.

On the right hand and the left were wide stretches of muddy grey salt water, banks of sand, and drain-piped foreshore merging in patches of potato and swede and yellow squares of unripe corn. Clusters of white dots, where shingle and sea-walls bordered the drab, restless water, were fishing hamlets, villages and little coal-port towns. Upon the north bank, rapidly receding in distance, could be dimly sensed, beyond a dense fringe of masts standing close as pins in rows upon a pincushion, the oblongs and squares and rectilinears of docks and shipyards, stone quays, and piers and tide-basins, mixed up with blocks and streets of sheds and warehouses, stations and goods-yards, and huge, many windowed factories, whose towering chimneys yet belched forth thick black smoke-gouts, licked by red tongues of flame. Though even if the Saturday noon steam-siren had not silenced the throbbing of pneumatic rivetting-hammers and the roaring of steam coal-shoots, hydraulic grain dischargers and oil-pumps, and all the hellish hubbub accompanying the huge export and import trade of Yorkshire and Lancashire with North Europe and the Continent, these sounds would not have reached the ears of the boy in the aeroplane save as a dull and muffled murmur, vaguely sensed, through the musical moaning of the stay-wires and the racket of the tractor-screw.

Now the sunset was behind. The land was rushing back upon the right and left-hand. The two-mile-wide river was broadening to a great estuary, vaster than the Thames, between Fort Victoria and Shoeburyness.

Long crawling strings of linked-up barges, sailing vessels of the old windjammer type and yachts of the latest rig, battered tramp and collier steamers, high-sided rusty looking oil-tankers, pilot-cutters, coastguard motor-launches, whole fleets of steam-trawlers, thrashed up and down its broad south side fairways or cannily negotiated the treacherous channels of the north bank. Ocean-going giants of the Merchant Service, flaunting the White Bordered Jack, or the Red Duster, or under Admiralty Warrant, displaying the Blue Ensign. Behemoths of the North Sea passenger-service showing the three-striped merchant-flag of Germany--or the tricolour of the Netherlands, or the Crosses of Norway, Sweden and Denmark--with more rarely some big grey armoured cruiser upon harbour and Coastal Defence Service, or a brace of stumpy, square-ended patrol-boats, or a trio of the stinging black hornets we have learnt to call torpedo-boat destroyers, ranging in company upon some business of the Powers that order Britannia's naval affairs.

Fascinating, wonderful to look down upon. Alike, however diverse in size, shape or uses, in the impression of flat unsubstantiality conveyed to you--together with the doubt that the emmets crawling upon them could possibly be life-sized men. A drifting daisy-petal meant a smart private steam-yacht. You looked down from two thousand feet above, on the open-lidded snuffboxes that signified the fire-control and signalling-stations of some Leviathan of the Home Fleet, and a string of black holes jabbed in an oval of floating white millboard represented her funnels, black discs or white alternately stood for her ventilators; and her imposing deckworks, her turrets or barbettes, her gun-houses and casemates, and the terrible monsters bloodthirstily nosing out of them, were reduced to a more or less symmetrical arrangement in thick or thin black lines.

The rosy light was greying. The gusts came more fitfully. To the south, upon the right hand, were stone-built fortifications with black muzzles of big guns poking from the ramparts, over stretches of salty marsh, drab-coloured mud-flats, and slimy rocks covered with blackened seaweed, sticking up from pale silvery sand-shoals, licked by the restless white tongues of the outgoing tide, and bumped by stranding buoys. Black dots and grey dots wheeled and scurried and settled. Crows and gulls were feeding ravenously as the tide drew off the flats and sand-shoals. And by the queer sensation in his empty stomach, Bawne knew that he too was ravenous.

From the beaconed north shore of the vast estuary basin, edged now by low rambling cliffs, and belts of shingle and sand, a long curving headland with two lighthouses at the crook-end, rushed now towards the Bird at what seemed the speed of an express train. Bawne winced as the tall granite towers, topped with helmet-shaped domes of rust-red iron, rose up like twin giants threatening to destroy. An iron balcony with a flagstaff and signal-mast ringed the base of each dome-top, a stairway spiralled round each shaft to a railed stone platform well above high-water mark. And a shrimp-sized man in a red guernsey waved a speck of blue handkerchief, and bellowed a disproportionately loud greeting through what was presumably a megaphone. In reality the lighthouse-keeper was indicating the M. O. cone storm-signal which hung point downwards from the west end of the yard-arm, presaging a south-west or north-westerly gale. Whether or no this warning was lost upon von Herrnung, proof of its value followed. For a great upleaping billow of brine-tasting wind caught the Bird as she flashed past the twin lighthouses upon the headland, tossing her upwards like a withered leaf. And a curved iron shutter in the nearer of the two rust-red dome-tops rolled down exactly as the nictitating membrane of a bird's eye does--and with a wink of glass from the prismatic reflector, a broad triple beam of blinding-white acetylene light leaped north, east and south. In the same instant upon each side of the flashing tractor, the boy sensed a vast, shimmering, liquid restlessness. Here was the Sea, the very Sea.

*CHAPTER XXXIII*

*BAWNE LEARNS THE TRUTH*

Something in the blood of the child answered to the call of the Ancient Mother. He cried out, half in terror, half in delight, and the cockpit tilted so suddenly that he was violently jerked against the seat-back and the canvas bulkhead behind him. Looking up he saw a large old moon of luminous yellow, sailing away overhead through a sky all shot with pink and grey as though hollowed out of a fire-opal. The Bird was rushing through space at ninety miles an hour, and great lumps of cold salt wind splashed over Bawne and took his breath away, and his hands were numbed with bitter cold and his legs were legs of ice.

So brave a spirit dwelt in his little breast, that the sob that heaved it and the tears that stung his eyelids and dimmed his goggles, were swallowed and blinked away as soon as shed. The cockpit became level, and there was an imperious rapping behind him, on the upper canvas deck. He turned his head and met the hard unflinching stare of von Herrnung, who held in the hand with which he had rapped a bitten piece of chocolate. Still munching he signalled:

"Hungry?"

He smiled grimly as the boy nodded in the affirmative, stuffed the bit of sweetstuff into his mouth, produced from its cache below the level of the upper deck another square of chocolate, tore off the silver foil with his teeth, and crunched it greedily.

He smiled, because of a queer tickling pleasure he felt as he did this, akin to the sensation experienced when his taunts had tortured Patrine. "Take care of my dearest!" he fancied he could hear her saying.... Not until she had committed herself to that incautious utterance, had he, von Herrnung, realised what rich vengeance on the desired, hated woman might be wreaked by the simple act of carrying off the boy, whom he had regarded until then as a mere bag of ballast; less useful, but certain to prove less troublesome, than the Cockney-tongued Welshman, who might or might not carry a cheap revolver in the hip-picket under his overalls with which to enforce his protest against being taken away.

Von Herrnung was himself armed with a Browning automatic pistol. A deadly shot, he would have been capable of dealing with half a dozen Davises upon the solid ground. But, no lover of avoidable risks, he saw himself steering with one hand and shooting with the other, while Davis sat astride the chair in the observer's cockpit, and argued with an eighteen-and-sixpenny Birmingham four-chamber, loaded with the cheap little cordite cartridges, whose pea-sized bullet can kill a fine big man.

"What is this? You are sick?"

Even while keeping his ears open and his eyes skinned, as he negotiated the Bird through a choppy cross-current, conning his course between the compass and the roller-chart-map, now illuminated by an electric bulb, his great shoulders shook with merriment as he saw the boy's head sink helplessly against the side of the fuselage, and his small body convulsed by throes of the sickness that is indistinguishable from the dismal malady of the sea. He had shut off the engine to shout to him. And in the sudden cessation of the tractor's racket, the deep organ note of the waters rolled in upon the hearing, mingled with the shrill piping of the wires and the ruffle of the freshening wind. As he switched on power once more, the broad white ray from the Bull Light leaped forth again and caught them as it ran eastwards over the tumbling white-crested billows, flinging a huge shadow of von Herrnung over the canvas-covered space of deck before him and showing him to the white-faced boy who had twisted round once more to look at him, as a featureless human torso shaped out of solid ebony with diamond specks for eyes and gleams of grinning ivory teeth.

"When are we going home? Why are we over the sea now?"

Von Herrnung shut off again for the luxury of hearing and answering:

"I have told you because we are going home. Our home is--Germany. You will not be an English boy but German, once I have got you there!"

The shrill cry of anger that came from the open mouth of the white face was lost to him in the necessity of switching on the engine. He nodded pleasantly to the white face and, in the darkness of his own shadowy visage, there was the glimmer of a laugh. Then he applied himself to other business, for the tide would turn in an hour, and then the wind might blow hellishly from the nor'-west. Flying lower, he knew his course the true one, for the white headlight and green starboard-lights of a big steamer pricked twinkling holes in the thick grey dusk to northward on his port beam. He told himself she was one of the Elbe Company's big bluff-bowed liners making from Newcastle for Hamburg Docks. The stern-lights of a sister-ship hailing from Grimsby, by her steerings, were also discernible in the mirk ahead, while the lights from her tiers of cabins made her look like a black water-beetle with golden legs, hurriedly scuttling over the sea. Following the course of the Hamburg-bound liners, even if one failed to make connection with one's accredited pilot, it would not be long before one picked up Borkum Riff Lightship and in due course, spiring silver grey against the pink-and-golden sunrise--the twin towers of Nordeich Wireless--marking the journey's end.

*CHAPTER XXXIV*

*THE BROWN SATCHEL*

The journey's end. A gust, tearing the mist that veiled the livid waters, showed the shadowy shapes of a procession of battleships, steaming southwards in single line.

You see the German assailed by the wind, now hard on the aeroplane's port beam, craning over, counting the speedlights passing diagonally underneath. Eight steel Leviathans, stabbing bright points of electric light through fog and funnel-smoke, with an effect of diamonds seen against a background of dull grey plush.

Eight rushing, neutral-tinted shapes--conveying a formidable impression of grim power, and force, and ruthlessness. A Squadron of Battle Cruisers of the British Home Fleet, new from the brine of Lerwick Waters, or the fierce green surges of Scapa Flow. Bound for Harwich Roads or Sheerness, or the Solent, to figure in the huge pageant of steel and steam, electricity, and man-power that would be called the King's Review.

What a chance, supposing _Der Tag_ were come already, for the delivery of a consignment of bombs! It warmed like a draught of wine, to think of the devastating effect of a couple of such German love-gifts, exploded in the bowels of one of those steel monsters, packed with complex machinery, high explosives, and inflammable oil. True, there might be a reverse to the medal, damping even to the spirits of a Superman. Wireless signals would go forth at the order of one amongst a little knot of dark figures on the forebridge of the Flagship, warning each of those grey monsters of its danger. Not an armoured cruiser scouting for them on the horizon, not one of all the torpedo-boat destroyers in their vicinity, not a submarine nosing in the thick cold darkness below the restless white crests, but would join in the man-hunt that must ensue.

How the dusk would spring alive with the eyes of foes, and long rays of searchlight would go probing, and the mobile noses of guns great and lesser would be thrust from their hoods of proof-armour, sniffing bloodthirstily for the enemy up in the sky. While from the Flagship's mothering side, a Navy seaplane, armed with a Vickers' machine-gun, might swing out and plop upon the water, rise from the white snarl of waves with a vicious scream of her propeller, and, keen as a gull-hunting sea-hawk, launch herself in chase.

_Pfui_! The thought made one sick at the stomach. Cold, isolation, and darkness tried a man, no matter how courageous. Buffeted by the bitter wind, aching and stiff with weariness, lonely with the loneliness of some small bird of the migratory order, outstripped by its companions on the wild journey over the North Sea, the Kaiser's messenger drew energy and cheer from the conviction that the dispatches entrusted to him by Imperial favour were such as would hasten the arrival of The Day.

The Day, to which all good German officers devoted the second toast on Mess nights. When the Black Eagle would swoop, and the nodding witch-hag Britannia would awaken from her whisky-dreams of World-Dominion to find her armour obsolete, her sword rusted in its scabbard, the trident of Sea Power stolen from her hand.

Hurrah! for The Day when the programme arranged by the All Highest War Lord and his War Chiefs should be carried out in the complete overthrow of British Supremacy, the seizure and domination of British territory, the solution of the Great German Race Problem, in the transformation of the United Kingdom into a German dependency,--the annexation of India and the British Colonies--and the forcible Teutonisation of the hated race.

Aha! Much to be locked in an Imperial messenger's letter-bag, thought von Herrnung, greedily. What in the way of guerdon might not be lavished by a gratified All Highest upon the danger-braving and to-duty-fearlessly-devoted Flying Officer who should accomplish the Secret Mission, and lay the brown satchel at the Imperial feet.

Probably the Second--tchah!--the First Class of the Iron Cross--with military promotion, and a handsome sum in hard cash. Laudatory articles in the State-inspired Press organs and Service Gazettes presently. Meanwhile, was it fitting that the future of von Herrnung should lie, not upon the knees of the gods, but on the lap of a little, seasick English boy?

True, the brown satchel was firmly strapped to the boy, now lying in an attitude of complete exhaustion, with one arm thrown over the gunwale, and his small round head feebly nodding to and fro. The child knew nothing of the Imperial dispatches. And yet--one would have been wiser to keep the bag about one, in spite of the danger of fouling the controls.

It will be gathered that a chilly premonition of imminent disaster crawled in the veins of the Kaiser's messenger. Hunger and fatigue were spurring von Herrnung to imaginativeness unworthy of a Superman.