Part 20

Now he knew his frail winged craft beset by cunning, treacherous enemies; the invisible air that cradled and supported her, only waiting to destroy. Other elemental forces, Gale, Lightning, Hail, Waterspout--in collusion to bring about her swift and speedy ruin. The Sea, no less than these, was an implacable adversary, reaching up innumerable greedy hands to drag her down and drown. The hawk-hoverer would have been a help at this juncture if one had had some previous experience in the use of it. As things were, it was wiser to leave the Englishman's invention alone. A labouring beat admonished the man's quick ear of impending engine-trouble. Ah, if the motor, that was the living heart in the aeroplane, should break down at this juncture, or the human intelligence perched behind the roaring tractor falter, the game was up. Kaput for von Herrnung, he very well knew.

As though the very fear had brought on the catastrophe, the revolutions dropped. Below 1000, said the indicator's trembling finger, and there was a miss. The bang!--bang! of a back-fire followed. If one had believed in God, now, this would have been the time to pray to Him.

But now the aviator's keen eye, peering downwards through Sherbrand's binoculars, picked up something that had emerged with a sudden yeasty swirl among the white-crested waves. No handsomer nor bigger than an under-sized steam-trawler, the casual observer might as such have accepted her. But a moment more, and fore and aft of the stocky little pseudo-steamer, stretched the long snaky, whitey-brown hull of a submarine.

U-18, on observation-service off Spurn Head, or a Britisher? An Evans signalling-pistol, loaded, and with a supply of spare rockets, was fixed in a cleat beside the instrument-board, within reach of the pilot's hand. The altimeter, illuminated by the electric bulb, gave an altitude of six hundred, as von Herrnung snatched the pistol, and fired, aiming towards the sky.

The shot was followed by a second detonation, and a brilliant crimson light illuminated the grey welter, throwing up orange balls of fire as it ascended, to burst in showers of incandescent sparks. Switching off, von Herrnung strained both ears and eyes for an answer to his signal. With the cessation of the motor the diapason of the North Sea rolled upwards through the twilight with a threatening of storm. As the weather-cone had presaged, a gale was coming. It blew strongly from the north-west. The engine back-fired again, and von Herrnung swore at it, trying to make out the nationality of the submarine running on the surface six hundred feet below. There were half-a-dozen tallish figures on the narrow man-railed catwalk running along her hull forward, and one upon the screened-in platform of her humpy conning-tower.

Then the blue-white ray of a searchlight leaped forth illuminating her bows and forward torpedo-tubes--revealing the long neutral-coloured hull with the Wireless mast raised for use and soapy seas hissing off the armour-plate. A backwash of brilliance picked out the black-white-and-red Jack of Germany, fluttering from a short pole-mast sternwards. Signal-lights of white and two colours broke out upon another slender mast aft of her conning-tower, and winked and jabbered. U-18 was in touch with her man.

It was quite time, for the Bird's engine hiccupped more and more disastrously, and her pilot's frozen hands could only guess the steering-wheel. He grunted relief. _Sapperlot_! One's star had not deserted one. Once more the Prussian Field-Flying Service would, with reason, quote von Herrnung's hellish good-luck.

Meanwhile the submarine's three lights chattered volubly in German Navy Code. Do Not Attempt Make Harbour. Heavy Weather Coming. Original Orders Cancelled. Heave To. Will Stand By To Take You Aboard. To which von Herrnung, keeping pace with U-18, replied with long and short flashes of an electric signalling-torch. Understood! What Is the Sea Like? Keep Off and On. Am Coming Down!

And he came forthwith. The Commander of U-18, standing on the little platform over which furious seas were slashing, watched him critically through a pair of Zeiss binoculars. You, too, are asked to see him; pulling round the Bird's head into the teeth of the nor'wester; shutting off her hiccupping engine, implacably thrusting her nose seawards, and diving with a splendid swoop into the widening paths of spirals that ended amidst the angry surges below.

Hitting the North Sea with so shattering a slap that the Bird's landing-carriage crumpled and buckled, and the frail spars of her wings crunched like the bones of a small bird in the jaws of a hungry cat.

A fierce green sea leaped, towered, and broke, dumping a ton of water on von Herrnung, and knocking the breath out of the man. He tore open the safety-belt as consciousness left him, and recovered in the warm benzine-flavoured stuffiness of the officer's cabin aboard the U-18, to the stinging of schnapps in his mouth and gullet, and the cheer of German words in his ear.

"Hey now, hey now, we are coming about. That is well! Drink another draught, comrade! You have had a hellishly narrow squeak. Another time, when flying oversea with dispatches, start early, pick your weather, and ship a life-belt, if you are wise!"

Thus Lieutenant Commander Luttha of Undersea-boat No. 18. You see him as a spare, weather-bitten, black-bearded officer in a full panoply of yellow oilies, and a sou'wester shading little eyes, sharp as lancet-points and now twinkling with his bit of fun.

But the word "dispatches," coupled with the jest about the life-belt, volted through von Herrnung like the discharge from an electric battery. He gulped and choked, collecting enough tinned air to talk with, and at last got out:

"The boy--the boy, with the satchel! Where is he, in the devil's name?"

Thus adjured the Commander answered pithily:

"If you mean the half-drowned little English rat Petty Officer Stoll found washing about in the bows of your aviatik, he's alive. Don't worry about that!"

Through the churning foam upon his lips, von Herrnung spluttered furiously:

"_Himmelkreuezbombenelement_! What is the _verdammt_ boy to me? It is the satchel that was strapped about the boy's middle I am asking for--the Emperor's--_Herr Gott!_--I shall go mad!"

He staggered to his feet, hitting his head a stunning crack against the low white painted overdeck. The incautious reference to the Emperor electrified those who heard, squatting on the little folding bunks, or kneeling on the palpitating deck of the little officer's cabin, into desperate activity. Von Herrnung found himself boosted up a ladder and through a manhole, guided along a narrow slippery catwalk, washed by the surges of the North Sea, to where a collapsible boat was being emptied of a lot of shipped salt water, and the battered wreck of the Bird of War, lashed to the U-18's forward man-rail, was waiting the Commander's order to be finally abandoned to her fate.

*CHAPTER XXXV*

*NUMBER EIGHTEEN*

They launched the collapsible, and ransacked every cranny of the Bird's waterlogged fuselage. Not the ghost of a brown leather satchel rewarded their feverish search. In the forward cockpit the belt swung loose, the patent fastening had been opened by pulling the pin out. Clearly the boy had released himself when the Bird hit the sea.

"Let us go look at this boy!" suggested the Commander, on receiving the news that the Kind had breathed, and vomited sea-water. Luttha promptly led the way to the men's cabin, where Petty Officer Stoll and an earringed first-class seaman were working over a little limp naked body, outspread on the jiggetting deck-plates, in the raucous glare of the electric light.

Bawne was questioned, but nothing could be got out of him just then, except North Sea, so they wrapped him in a blue Navy blanket, and left him in charge of Petty Officer Stoll.

"This is hellishly unfortunate, you must know, Count," said the Commander, alone with von Herrnung in the vibrating steel box over the upper accumulators, called the officers' cabin, and separated from the men's quarters by a paper-thin sliding bulkhead of painted steel. You are asked to consider it furnished with seven narrow folding bunks, a trestle-table about as wide and long as a coffin-lid, some folding chairs, a marvellous array of charts on spring-rollers, fixed against the steel walls, a row of wooden lockers, a chronometer and auxiliary gyro-compass, several cylinders of oxylithe for respiratory emergencies, an electric stove of small size, a log-book and writing materials, a shelf of German literature, chiefly nautical reference-books; sets of dominoes, a violin and a cornet, speaking-tubes and a telephone, a gramophone and a giant cuspidor.

Von Herrnung, having swapped his water-logged flying-kit and soaked underclothes for dry flannels lent by the Second-in-Command, topped off with a pair of the Commander's spare trousers, and a guernsey frock belonging to the biggest man on board. You can see him supplementing the shortness of the trousers with a pair of long sea-boots: thrusting his huge arms into the guernsey, beginning already to be superior to his rescuers upon the strength of his family rank and wealth and his flying-record, his bulk and handsomeness, and his magpie pearl. He was of the Prussian top-dog breed and let others know it, even whilst smarting under his loss. That he felt it was shown by the livid pallor testifying to mental disquiet and physical exhaustion. But he judged it wisest to bluff, and did.

"The cursed machine would have drowned me if you had not arrived in the nick of time," he said suggestively, smiling under the red moustache that hung uncurled over his full sensual lips: "Suppose you say you found me swimming in the water--the aeroplane having foundered--it is merely rewording a report!"

"So many thanks!" ... returned the Commander, chewing hard at an unlighted cigar, sending a jet of saliva into the cuspidor, and smiling in a wry and dubious fashion. "But when I said things were hellishly unfortunate, I meant unfortunate for you!"

He moved to the green baize-covered plank that served as a cabin table, and took from a weighted document-file a pencilled paper-slip.

"As far as they concern you I will read you them as taken down by our Wireless operator. 'To Undersea-boat No. 18, on observation-duty off Spurn Head. Stand by to get in touch with, act pilot, and render aid if necessary to German Imperial Secret Service Messenger, crossing to Nordeich in British aeroplane.' The message comes from the German Embassy in London and the sender is Grand Admiral Prinz Heinrich. I have carried out my instructions to the letter. There is only _one_ man going to be broken over this affair!"

Von Herrnung knew who the man was. The Commander chewed some more of his cigar, picked his oozing yellow oilskins off the deck, thrust himself into them, crowned himself with his sou'wester, and said, taking a farewell shot at the cuspidor:

"And to brew more thunder-beer for you is not my desire! I am sorry for you, _bei Gott_! But to make game of those who command me is not the purpose for which I am commissioned, Herr Count. Nor have I any experience in doctoring reports. I rate only as Lieutenant in the Imperial German Navy--a man born of plain people--without fortune or even _von_ before my family name!"

Von Herrnung sensed that he had bitterly offended the only human being who could help him. He apologised subserviently, and catching at the straw afforded him by the Commander's admission of poverty, offered him the pickings of the wrecked aeroplane.

"For her instruments and signalling outfit--the seats and vacuum flasks even--are well worth the having, and her engine and tractor will sell for----" he named the sum in marks. "There is a patent stabiliser under her belly that I reserve for Majesty--the French have bought it or think they have!"

The speaker rubbed his hands. The hoverer might yet prove a sop for the All Highest. Imperial displeasure thus averted, all would go well. He added, feeling that he might actually afford the luxury of grumbling:

"As for me, I am what the English call 'fed up' with special missions. Conceive it. I am at a Hendon Flying School,--chatting with a handsome Englishwoman who has taken me for her lover--as I am waiting to get an inkling of the sort of invention the French War Ministry think worth buying for use in their Service Aeronautique. I am summoned by a groom of our Embassy to speak to some Excellencies--I follow and find myself clicking my heels before Prinz Heinrich, von Moltke, and Krupp von Bohlen in an Embassy auto-car--to be sent off at a moment's notice in a little cranky devil of an English monoplane--with secret dispatches for the All Highest--on a journey over the North Sea. With the barometer falling and the hour past five meridian. That's my luck!" The speaker paused for breath.

Luttha said, pulling his black beard through his fingers with a crisp sound, a trick of his when in meditation:

"There was no time to lose. And you have a wonderful record for long-distance flying. And luck it was!--if you had been of my mind. Tell me, did not _they_ give you plain instructions?"

"Do 'they' ever speak plainly?" von Herrnung scoffed; and Luttha answered calmly:

"Yes, to an ordinary man, who does not understand obscure language, they would have said: 'Lieutenant Commander Luttha, here is a brown leather satchel, with something inside it belonging to the Emperor. You will convey the satchel to Nordeich and deliver it to His Majesty's hands. And from the moment I entrust it to yours, it shall be close as your very skin to you. If you meet Death upon your errand, die with it next your heart!'"

The speaker added with a wounding accent of irony:

"Perhaps that marks the difference between a plebeian and a nobleman! I would have lashed it to my body, under my clothing. You strapped it about the boy! By the way, what is the boy?"

"The boy! ... Nothing! ... A piece of ballast, merely!"

Von Herrnung, warmed by dry clothes and exhibitions of schnapps, was fast recovering his characteristic arrogance. He added, with a shrug and a wave of the hand:

"As for the lost satchel, it may well be that duplicates of the dispatches contained in it have been sent to the Emperor by another messenger. That is the usual method, perhaps you are not aware?"

"Duplicates exist, but in only one place on earth will you find them, and that place is the London War Office!"

The Commander pitched his cigar-butt into the cuspidor, snapped the three stud-clips that secured his yellow oilskin storm-coat, and dug his piercing little eyes into von Herrnung's as he asked:

"Have you never heard of the War-engine of Robert Foulis, the Scottish sea-captain who first suggested to the British the use of steam as applied to battle-ships, and invented the screw-propeller and the big devil knows how many other things besides the mysterious, secret weapon that Great Britain has kept hidden up her sleeve a hundred and twenty-six years! It was offered by Foulis, then Earl of Clanronald, in 1812, to the British Government, and it frightened people like the drunken Regent and the Duke of York and Lord Mulgrave into refusing it. It was offered again to their War Office at the time of their Crimean War,--taken into consideration by the Duke of Newcastle and again ejected,--because--_Grosse Gott!_--it was too inhuman! As though a weapon that could end a War in a twinkling by sheer deadly effectiveness could be anything but a boon to mankind. _Pfui_! Such hypocrisy makes me vomit worse than thirty hours of submergence. Not because of its inhumanity has Britain stored up the old man's war-engine. Out of diplomacy, to brutalise the great Germanic nation into subservience under the rod of Fear!"

Luttha and von Herrnung, otherwise antagonistic, were alike in their rabid hatred of Great Britain. Luttha had talked himself plum-coloured and hoarse by now, but he went on, pounding the air with a knotty, clenched fist:

"Thus it was well done on the part of the Kaiser's secret agents to steal Clanronald's War Plan, on the brink of The Day to which we have drunk so long! Not the duplicates buried in the Whitehall strong-vaults, see you!--but the originals from the muniment-room of the Welsh castle, the country-seat of the present Earl. Less than an hour after you took flight from Hendon, London was alive and buzzing with the tale! ... How do I know? ... Does not a man know everything with Wireless? And you, with no inkling that you carried for Germany--Victory in the World-War that is coming--you who have lost Clanronald's secret, are a ruined man, _bei Gott_!"

He added, as von Herrnung broke out cursing and raving:

"As I have said, I pity you!--though you have tried to bribe me!--but it will not do to talk of suicide, for I shall prevent that! Your cartridges are wetted--your revolver will not serve you. And you will not get a chance to drown yourself, for I am going to submerge. My fellows have got the flying-motor out of the stirrups and stowed it away, with the auto-hoverer and the other things for the Emperor, whose property they are! Then we run, only periscopes showing, for the Gat of Norderney. There is a clear-dredged channel to Nordeich Harbour, navigable in any tide. You have to account there to the All Highest for the satchel, or I, _bei Gott!_ must account to him for it and you!"

And Luttha slid back the steel door, passed through the narrow gangway and shot up the narrow steel ladder to attend to affairs on deck. Two of his subordinates instantly replaced him. On no account was von Herrnung, the living proof of the Commander's fidelity to his instructions, to be left alone, you understand.

One would have said the Superman believed in God, he blasphemed Him so industriously. When he was quite spent and voiceless, the lieutenants offered him practical sympathy in the shape of gingerbread and lager beer. He accepted the beer, and sat on one of the sofas drinking it and brooding lividly, while Undersea-boat No. 18, with hermetically-sealed hatches, folded down her signal and Wireless masts, shut off her 2000 h.p. Diesel oil engines, sucked water into her ballast-tanks, and with only her periscopes showing above the surface, ran under her electric-motor power for Norderney Gat and Nordeich quay.

Behind her as she sped, a red stain upon the angry waters gave back the last rays of stormy sunset, smouldering out behind bars of drift-wrack, beyond the bleak east-country beaches and the long blue-black, desolate worlds.

Von Herrnung's private, personal sun was setting somewhat after the same fashion, amidst sable clouds of Imperial wrath. It was to sink below the horizon in deepest disfavour, rise again in The Day's gory dawning, and fall, its evil fires quenched in a drenching rain of blood.

*CHAPTER XXXVI*

*HUE AND CRY*

Even as petrol and air mingled in the Bird's cylinders, and Davis rotated the tractor and nimbly leaped out of the way of sudden death, the buff broadsheets of the _Evening Wire_ edged the kerbs of Fleet Street and ran up Kingsway to High Holborn. And from Ludgate Hill to Charing Cross, Pall Mall, and Piccadilly Circus, the raucous voices of newsboys yelled through a pelting hail of pence:

AMAZING THEFT OF A FAMILY SECRET. STOLEN FROM GWYLL CASTLE THE CLANRONALD WAR-PLAN. AN ECHO OF CRIMEAN DAYS. THIEF KNOWN. POLICE SANGUINE. "COMMON CRACKSMAN'S ENTERPRISE OR DIPLOMATIC STROKE?"

Strings of news-carts laden with bundles of papers were rattling east, north, south, and west. Trains were taking in the story by bales of thousands and disgorging it at every stoppage, as Von Herrnung opened the throttle, and the Bird raced a hundred yards or so, bumping like a taxi going over a bad road, then rose into the air, as gracefully as a mallard, and launched upon the first wide spirals of the aerial ascent.

The small audience interested in the aeroplane, her freight, and her behaviour, watched her as she dwindled in the sight and died upon the ear. The spectators in the enclosure had departed in dribbles, the last three-seater air-bus had rounded the aerodrome, landed and deposited the last passengers. Two or three over-enthusiastic students lingered, but the rest had shed their grimy overalls and betaken themselves home.

The mellow light of late afternoon lay sweetly on the wide expanse of treeless greensward and on the woods that tufted the horizon-line. Rooks and starlings were wheeling over distant tree-clumps, the bands no longer brayed or tootled, the mechanics were leaving the sheds and hangars, the waitresses were hastening to other employments, such as programme-vending at suburban music-halls and picture-theatres, the selling of stale _boutonnieres_ about the entrances of restaurants, the serving of drinks and suppers at night-clubs and so on.

On the verge of the white-marked oval from which the Bird had taken her departure, Saxham was standing with Patrine. Their faces were lifted to the sky as they talked together, and Sherbrand's eyes were irresistibly drawn to them, so heroic in mould, and so curiously alike.

There was a puzzled line between the Instructor's thick, fair eyebrows. He was ready to swear it was the same girl. But the face that had looked into his that night in Paris was somehow softer, younger.... It was not only the alteration in the colour of the hair.... If you had taken the big, hearty, smiling young woman of the Milles Plaisirs, and dipped her into a vat of hydrogen peroxide, so that not only her hair but her whole body had been bleached, you would not have accomplished such a transformation--unless the chemical had possessed the power to change the colour of her mind and soul.

The girl of the Milles Plaisirs had looked at you frankly, and spoken to you like a pal. In that atmosphere of sexual excitement, amongst those crowds of men and women, flushed with meat and wine and the desire of sensual pleasure, she had appealed to Sherbrand like a heather-scented breeze from the North.

Beautiful and big and sisterly, she had seemed to him who had no sisters. He had often wondered how she came to be in that place. But it had never occurred to him to lump her with the ordinary pleasure-seeker. He had read--more correctly than von Herrnung, who believed her from the first to have bitten deep into the Fruit of Knowledge--Purity if not ignorance, in her wide curving smile, and honesty in her clear unshadowed eyes.

What eyes they were, long, brilliant, blackly-lashed, browny-green as agate. What a wonderful voice came out of the depths of her splendid chest. The arch of her breastbone reminded you of a violoncello. How splendidly her head was set upon its column of warm, living ivory! Her firm round chin had a dint in it that the old Greek sculptor had failed to bestow upon the glorious Venus de Melos, the Lady of the Isle of Music. Everything about her was planned on the scale of magnificence. Six feet tall, she walked the earth like a goddess, or as women must have walked when the Sons of Light mated with the daughters of men.

Thus Sherbrand, meditating on his Fate to be, while Destiny limped towards him in the person of an undersized telegraph-clerk whose complexion, previously pallid, had deteriorated to dirty green. He began, extending a shaky hand, from which dangled a slip of limp paper:

"For you, sir. Rumball 'adn't got a picklock among his tools, so 'e burst in the door with a No. 10 spanner. They rung us up about twenty times while he was at the job. And the message is important, sir!"

"I'll see! Thank you, Burgin!"