by H. G. Wells
Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer
THE WAR IN THE AIR
By H. G. Wells
CONTENTS
I. OF PROGRESS AND THE SMALLWAYS FAMILY II. HOW BERT SMALLWAYS GOT INTO DIFFICULTIES III. THE BALLOON IV. THE GERMAN AIR-FLEET V. THE BATTLE OF THE NORTH ATLANTIC VI. HOW WAR CAME TO NEW YORK VII. THE "VATERLAND" IS DISABLED VIII. A WORLD AT WAR IX. ON GOAT ISLAND X. THE WORLD UNDER THE WAR XI. THE GREAT COLLAPSE THE EPILOGUE
PREFACE TO REPRINT EDITION
The reader should grasp clearly the date at which this book was written.It was done in 1907: it appeared in various magazines as a serial in1908 and it was published in the Fall of that year. At that time theaeroplane was, for most people, merely a rumour and the "Sausage" heldthe air. The contemporary reader has all the advantage of ten years'experience since this story was imagined. He can correct his author at adozen points and estimate the value of these warnings by the standardof a decade of realities. The book is weak on anti-aircraft guns, forexample, and still more negligent of submarines. Much, no doubt, willstrike the reader as quaint and limited but upon much the writer may notunreasonably plume himself. The interpretation of the German spiritmust have read as a caricature in 1908. Was it a caricature? PrinceKarl seemed a fantasy then. Reality has since copied Prince Carl withan astonishing faithfulness. Is it too much to hope that some democratic"Bert" may not ultimately get even with his Highness? Our author tellsus in this book, as he has told us in others, more especially in TheWorld Set Free, and as he has been telling us this year in his Warand the Future, that if mankind goes on with war, the smash-up ofcivilization is inevitable. It is chaos or the United States of theWorld for mankind. There is no other choice. Ten years have but added anenormous conviction to the message of this book. It remains essentiallyright, a pamphlet story--in support of the League to Enforce Peace. K.
THE WAR IN THE AIR
CHAPTER I. OF PROGRESS AND THE SMALLWAYS FAMILY
1
"This here Progress," said Mr. Tom Smallways, "it keeps on."
"You'd hardly think it could keep on," said Mr. Tom Smallways.
It was along before the War in the Air began that Mr. Smallways madethis remark. He was sitting on the fence at the end of his garden andsurveying the great Bun Hill gas-works with an eye that neither praisednor blamed. Above the clustering gasometers three unfamiliar shapesappeared, thin, wallowing bladders that flapped and rolled about, andgrew bigger and bigger and rounder and rounder--balloons in courseof inflation for the South of England Aero Club's Saturday-afternoonascent.
"They goes up every Saturday," said his neighbour, Mr. Stringer, themilkman. "It's only yestiday, so to speak, when all London turned out tosee a balloon go over, and now every little place in the country hasits weekly-outings--uppings, rather. It's been the salvation of them gascompanies."
"Larst Satiday I got three barrer-loads of gravel off my petaters," saidMr. Tom Smallways. "Three barrer-loads! What they dropped as ballase.Some of the plants was broke, and some was buried."
"Ladies, they say, goes up!"
"I suppose we got to call 'em ladies," said Mr. Tom Smallways.
"Still, it ain't hardly my idea of a lady--flying about in the air, andthrowing gravel at people. It ain't what I been accustomed to considerladylike, whether or no."
Mr. Stringer nodded his head approvingly, and for a time they continuedto regard the swelling bulks with expressions that had changed fromindifference to disapproval.
Mr. Tom Smallways was a green-grocer by trade and a gardener bydisposition; his little wife Jessica saw to the shop, and Heaven hadplanned him for a peaceful world. Unfortunately Heaven had not planneda peaceful world for him. He lived in a world of obstinate and incessantchange, and in parts where its operations were unsparingly conspicuous.Vicissitude was in the very soil he tilled; even his garden was upon ayearly tenancy, and overshadowed by a huge board that proclaimed it notso much a garden as an eligible building site. He was horticulture undernotice to quit, the last patch of country in a district flooded by newand (other) things. He did his best to console himself, to imaginematters near the turn of the tide.
"You'd hardly think it could keep on," he said.
Mr. Smallways' aged father, could remember Bun Hill as an idyllicKentish village. He had driven Sir Peter Bone until he was fifty andthen he took to drink a little, and driving the station bus, whichlasted him until he was seventy-eight. Then he retired. He sat by thefireside, a shrivelled, very, very old coachman, full charged withreminiscences, and ready for any careless stranger. He could tell you ofthe vanished estate of Sir Peter Bone, long since cut up for building,and how that magnate ruled the country-side when it was country-side, ofshooting and hunting, and of caches along the high road, of how "wherethe gas-works is" was a cricket-field, and of the coming of the CrystalPalace. The Crystal Palace was six miles away from Bun Hill, a greatfacade that glittered in the morning, and was a clear blue outlineagainst the sky in the afternoon, and of a night, a source of gratuitousfireworks for all the population of Bun Hill. And then had come therailway, and then villas and villas, and then the gas-works and thewater-works, and a great, ugly sea of workmen's houses, and thendrainage, and the water vanished out of the Otterbourne and left it adreadful ditch, and then a second railway station, Bun Hill South, andmore houses and more, more shops, more competition, plate-glass shops,a school-board, rates, omnibuses, tramcars--going right away intoLondon itself--bicycles, motor-cars and then more motor-cars, a Carnegielibrary.
"You'd hardly think it could keep on," said Mr. Tom Smallways, growingup among these marvels.
But it kept on. Even from the first the green-grocer's shop which he hadset up in one of the smallest of the old surviving village houses inthe tail of the High Street had a submerged air, an air of hiding fromsomething that was looking for it. When they had made up the pavement ofthe High Street, they levelled that up so that one had to go down threesteps into the shop. Tom did his best to sell only his own excellentbut limited range of produce; but Progress came shoving things into hiswindow, French artichokes and aubergines, foreign apples--apples fromthe State of New York, apples from California, apples from Canada,apples from New Zealand, "pretty lookin' fruit, but not what I shouldcall English apples," said Tom--bananas, unfamiliar nuts, grape fruits,mangoes.
The motor-cars that went by northward and southward grew more and morepowerful and efficient, whizzed faster and smelt worse, there appearedgreat clangorous petrol trolleys delivering coal and parcels inthe place of vanishing horse-vans, motor-omnibuses ousted thehorse-omnibuses, even the Kentish strawberries going Londonward in thenight took to machinery and clattered instead of creaking, and becameaffected in flavour by progress and petrol.
And then young Bert Smallways got a motor bicycle....
2
Bert, it is necessary to explain, was a progressive Smallways.
Nothing speaks more eloquently of the pitiless insistence of progressand expansion in our time than that it should get into the Smallwaysblood. But there was something advanced and enterprising about youngSmallways before he was out of short frocks. He was lost for a wholeday before he was five, and nearly drowned in the reservoir of the newwater-works before he was seven. He had a real pistol taken away fromhim by a real policeman when he was ten. And he learnt to smoke, notwith pipes and brown paper and cane as Tom had done, but with a pennypacket of Boys of England American cigarettes. His language shockedhis father before he was twelve, and by that age, what with touting forparcels at the station and selling the Bun Hill Weekly Express, he wasmaking three shillings a week, or more, and spending it on Chips, ComicCuts, Ally Sloper's Half-holiday, cigarettes, and all the concomitantsof
a life of pleasure and enlightenment. All of this without hindranceto his literary studies, which carried him up to the seventh standard atan exceptionally early age. I mention these things so that you may haveno doubt at all concerning the sort of stuff Bert had in him.
He was six years younger than Tom, and for a time there was an attemptto utilise him in the green-grocer's shop when Tom at twenty-one marriedJessica--who was thirty, and had saved a little money in service. But itwas not Bert's forte to be utilised. He hated digging, and when hewas given a basket of stuff to deliver, a nomadic instinct aroseirresistibly, it became his pack and he did not seem to care how heavyit was nor where he took it, so long as he did not take it to itsdestination. Glamour filled the world, and he strayed after it, basketand all. So Tom took his goods out himself, and sought employers forBert who did not know of this strain of poetry in his nature. And Berttouched the fringe of a number of trades in succession--draper's porter,chemist's boy, doctor's page, junior assistant gas-fitter, envelopeaddresser, milk-cart assistant, golf caddie, and at last helper in abicycle shop. Here, apparently, he found the progressive quality hisnature had craved. His employer was a pirate-souled young man namedGrubb, with a black-smeared face by day, and a music-hall side in theevening, who dreamt of a patent lever chain; and it seemed to Bert thathe was the perfect model of a gentleman of spirit. He hired out quitethe dirtiest and unsafest bicycles in the whole south of England, andconducted the subsequent discussions with astonishing verve. Bert andhe settled down very well together. Bert lived in, became almost a trickrider--he could ride bicycles for miles that would have come to piecesinstantly under you or me--took to washing his face after business, andspent his surplus money upon remarkable ties and collars, cigarettes,and shorthand classes at the Bun Hill Institute.
He would go round to Tom at times, and look and talk so brilliantlythat Tom and Jessie, who both had a natural tendency to be respectful toanybody or anything, looked up to him immensely.
"He's a go-ahead chap, is Bert," said Tom. "He knows a thing or two."
"Let's hope he don't know too much," said Jessica, who had a fine senseof limitations.
"It's go-ahead Times," said Tom. "Noo petaters, and English at that;we'll be having 'em in March if things go on as they do go. I never seesuch Times. See his tie last night?"
"It wasn't suited to him, Tom. It was a gentleman's tie. He wasn't up toit--not the rest of him, It wasn't becoming"...
Then presently Bert got a cyclist's suit, cap, badge, and all; andto see him and Grubb going down to Brighton (and back)--headsdown, handle-bars down, backbones curved--was a revelation in thepossibilities of the Smallways blood.
Go-ahead Times!
Old Smallways would sit over the fire mumbling of the greatness of otherdays, of old Sir Peter, who drove his coach to Brighton and back ineight-and-twenty hours, of old Sir Peter's white top-hats, of Lady Bone,who never set foot to ground except to walk in the garden, of the great,prize-fights at Crawley. He talked of pink and pig-skin breeches, offoxes at Ring's Bottom, where now the County Council pauper lunaticswere enclosed, of Lady Bone's chintzes and crinolines. Nobody heededhim. The world had thrown up a new type of gentleman altogether--agentleman of most ungentlemanly energy, a gentleman in dusty oilskinsand motor goggles and a wonderful cap, a stink-making gentleman, aswift, high-class badger, who fled perpetually along high roads from thedust and stink he perpetually made. And his lady, as they were ableto see her at Bun Hill, was a weather-bitten goddess, as free fromrefinement as a gipsy--not so much dressed as packed for transit at ahigh velocity.
So Bert grew up, filled with ideals of speed and enterprise, andbecame, so far as he became anything, a kind of bicycle engineer of thelet's-have-a-look-at-it and enamel chipping variety. Even a road-racer,geared to a hundred and twenty, failed to satisfy him, and for a time hepined in vain at twenty miles an hour along roads that were continuallymore dusty and more crowded with mechanical traffic. But at last hissavings accumulated, and his chance came. The hire-purchase systembridged a financial gap, and one bright and memorable Sunday morning hewheeled his new possession through the shop into the road, got on to itwith the advice and assistance of Grubb, and teuf-teuffed off intothe haze of the traffic-tortured high road, to add himself as one morevoluntary public danger to the amenities of the south of England.
"Orf to Brighton!" said old Smallways, regarding his youngest son fromthe sitting-room window over the green-grocer's shop with somethingbetween pride and reprobation. "When I was 'is age, I'd never been toLondon, never bin south of Crawley--never bin anywhere on my own whereI couldn't walk. And nobody didn't go. Not unless they was gentry. Nowevery body's orf everywhere; the whole dratted country sims flying topieces. Wonder they all get back. Orf to Brighton indeed! Anybody wantto buy 'orses?"
"You can't say _I_ bin to Brighton, father," said Tom.
"Nor don't want to go," said Jessica sharply; "creering about andspendin' your money."
3
For a time the possibilities of the motor-bicycle so occupied Bert'smind that he remained regardless of the new direction in which thestriving soul of man was finding exercise and refreshment. He failedto observe that the type of motor-car, like the type of bicycle, wassettling-down and losing its adventurous quality. Indeed, it is astrue as it is remarkable that Tom was the first to observe the newdevelopment. But his gardening made him attentive to the heavens, andthe proximity of the Bun Hill gas-works and the Crystal Palace, fromwhich ascents were continually being made, and presently the descent ofballast upon his potatoes, conspired to bear in upon his unwilling mindthe fact that the Goddess of Change was turning her disturbing attentionto the sky. The first great boom in aeronautics was beginning.
Grubb and Bert heard of it in a music-hall, then it was driven home totheir minds by the cinematograph, then Bert's imagination was stimulatedby a sixpenny edition of that aeronautic classic, Mr. George Griffith's"Clipper of the Clouds," and so the thing really got hold of them.
At first the most obvious aspect was the multiplication of balloons.The sky of Bun Hill began to be infested by balloons. On Wednesday andSaturday afternoons particularly you could scarcely look skyward for aquarter of an hour without discovering a balloon somewhere. And then onebright day Bert, motoring toward Croydon, was arrested by the insurgenceof a huge, bolster-shaped monster from the Crystal Palace grounds, andobliged to dismount and watch it. It was like a bolster with a brokennose, and below it, and comparatively small, was a stiff frameworkbearing a man and an engine with a screw that whizzed round in front anda sort of canvas rudder behind. The framework had an air of dragging thereluctant gas-cylinder after it like a brisk little terrier towing ashy gas-distended elephant into society. The combined monster certainlytravelled and steered. It went overhead perhaps a thousand feet up(Bert heard the engine), sailed away southward, vanished over the hills,reappeared a little blue outline far off in the east, going now veryfast before a gentle south-west gale, returned above the Crystal Palacetowers, circled round them, chose a position for descent, and sank downout of sight.
Bert sighed deeply, and turned to his motor-bicycle again.
And that was only the beginning of a succession of strange phenomenain the heavens--cylinders, cones, pear-shaped monsters, even at last athing of aluminium that glittered wonderfully, and that Grubb, throughsome confusion of ideas about armour plates, was inclined to consider awar machine.
There followed actual flight.
This, however, was not an affair that was visible from Bun Hill; it wassomething that occurred in private grounds or other enclosed places and,under favourable conditions, and it was brought home to Grubb andBert Smallways only by means of the magazine page of the half-pennynewspapers or by cinematograph records. But it was brought home veryinsistently, and in those days if, ever one heard a man saying in apublic place in a loud, reassuring, confident tone, "It's bound tocome," the chances were ten to one he was talking of flying. And Bertgot a box lid and wrote out in correct window-ticket style, an
d Grubbput in the window this inscription, "Aeroplanes made and repaired." Itquite upset Tom--it seemed taking one's shop so lightly; but most of theneighbours, and all the sporting ones, approved of it as being very goodindeed.
Everybody talked of flying, everybody repeated over and over again,"Bound to come," and then you know it didn't come. There was a hitch.They flew--that was all right; they flew in machines heavier than air.But they smashed. Sometimes they smashed the engine, sometimes theysmashed the aeronaut, usually they smashed both. Machines that madeflights of three or four miles and came down safely, went up the nexttime to headlong disaster. There seemed no possible trusting to them.The breeze upset them, the eddies near the ground upset them, a passingthought in the mind of the aeronaut upset them. Also they upset--simply.
"It's this 'stability' does 'em," said Grubb, repeating his newspaper."They pitch and they pitch, till they pitch themselves to pieces."
Experiments fell away after two expectant years of this sort of success,the public and then the newspapers tired of the expensive photographicreproductions, the optimistic reports, the perpetual sequence of triumphand disaster and silence. Flying slumped, even ballooning fell away tosome extent, though it remained a fairly popular sport, and continuedto lift gravel from the wharf of the Bun Hill gas-works and drop it upondeserving people's lawns and gardens. There were half a dozen reassuringyears for Tom--at least so far as flying was concerned. But that was thegreat time of mono-rail development, and his anxiety was only divertedfrom the high heavens by the most urgent threats and symptoms of changein the lower sky.
There had been talk of mono-rails for several years. But the realmischief began when Brennan sprang his gyroscopic mono-rail car upon theRoyal Society. It was the leading sensation of the 1907 soirees; thatcelebrated demonstration-room was all too small for its exhibition.Brave soldiers, leading Zionists, deserving novelists, noble ladies,congested the narrow passage and thrust distinguished elbows into ribsthe world would not willingly let break, deeming themselves fortunateif they could see "just a little bit of the rail." Inaudible, butconvincing, the great inventor expounded his discovery, and sent hisobedient little model of the trains of the future up gradients, roundcurves, and across a sagging wire. It ran along its single rail, on itssingle wheels, simple and sufficient; it stopped, reversed stood still,balancing perfectly. It maintained its astounding equilibrium amidst athunder of applause. The audience dispersed at last, discussing howfar they would enjoy crossing an abyss on a wire cable. "Suppose thegyroscope stopped!" Few of them anticipated a tithe of what the Brennanmono-rail would do for their railway securities and the face of theworld.
In a few, years they realised better. In a little while no onethought anything of crossing an abyss on a wire, and the mono-rail wassuperseding the tram-lines, railways: and indeed every form of trackfor mechanical locomotion. Where land was cheap the rail ran alongthe ground, where it was dear the rail lifted up on iron standards andpassed overhead; its swift, convenient cars went everywhere and dideverything that had once been done along made tracks upon the ground.
When old Smallways died, Tom could think of nothing more striking to sayof him than that, "When he was a boy, there wasn't nothing higher thanyour chimbleys--there wasn't a wire nor a cable in the sky!"
Old Smallways went to his grave under an intricate network of wires andcables, for Bun Hill became not only a sort of minor centre of powerdistribution--the Home Counties Power Distribution Company setup transformers and a generating station close beside the oldgas-works--but, also a junction on the suburban mono-rail system.Moreover, every tradesman in the place, and indeed nearly every house,had its own telephone.
The mono-rail cable standard became a striking fact in urban landscape,for the most part stout iron erections rather like tapering trestles,and painted a bright bluish green. One, it happened, bestrode Tom'shouse, which looked still more retiring and apologetic beneath itsimmensity; and another giant stood just inside the corner of his garden,which was still not built upon and unchanged, except for a couple ofadvertisement boards, one recommending a two-and-sixpenny watch, and onea nerve restorer. These, by the bye, were placed almost horizontally tocatch the eye of the passing mono-rail passengers above, and so servedadmirably to roof over a tool-shed and a mushroom-shed for Tom. All dayand all night the fast cars from Brighton and Hastings went murmuring byoverhead long, broad, comfortable-looking cars, that were brightly litafter dusk. As they flew by at night, transient flares of light and arumbling sound of passage, they kept up a perpetual summer lightning andthunderstorm in the street below.
Presently the English Channel was bridged--a series of great iron EiffelTower pillars carrying mono-rail cables at a height of a hundred andfifty feet above the water, except near the middle, where they rosehigher to allow the passage of the London and Antwerp shipping and theHamburg-America liners.
Then heavy motor-cars began to run about on only a couple of wheels, onebehind the other, which for some reason upset Tom dreadfully, and madehim gloomy for days after the first one passed the shop...
All this gyroscopic and mono-rail development naturally absorbed avast amount of public attention, and there was also a huge excitementconsequent upon the amazing gold discoveries off the coast of Angleseamade by a submarine prospector, Miss Patricia Giddy. She had taken herdegree in geology and mineralogy in the University of London, and whileworking upon the auriferous rocks of North Wales, after a brief holidayspent in agitating for women's suffrage, she had been struck by thepossibility of these reefs cropping up again under the water. She hadset herself to verify this supposition by the use of the submarinecrawler invented by Doctor Alberto Cassini. By a happy mingling ofreasoning and intuition peculiar to her sex she found gold at herfirst descent, and emerged after three hours' submersion with about twohundredweight of ore containing gold in the unparalleled quantityof seventeen ounces to the ton. But the whole story of her submarinemining, intensely interesting as it is, must be told at some other time;suffice it now to remark simply that it was during the consequent greatrise of prices, confidence, and enterprise that the revival of interestin flying occurred.
It is curious how that revival began. It was like the coming of a breezeon a quiet day; nothing started it, it came. People began to talk offlying with an air of never having for one moment dropped the subject.Pictures of flying and flying machines returned to the newspapers;articles and allusions increased and multiplied in the seriousmagazines. People asked in mono-rail trains, "When are we going to fly?"A new crop of inventors sprang up in a night or so like fungi. The AeroClub announced the project of a great Flying Exhibition in a largearea of ground that the removal of slums in Whitechapel had renderedavailable.
The advancing wave soon produced a sympathetic ripple in the Bun Hillestablishment. Grubb routed out his flying-machine model again, tried itin the yard behind the shop, got a kind of flight out of it, and brokeseventeen panes of glass and nine flower-pots in the greenhouse thatoccupied the next yard but one.
And then, springing from nowhere, sustained one knew not how, came apersistent, disturbing rumour that the problem had been solved, thatthe secret was known. Bert met it one early-closing afternoon as herefreshed himself in an inn near Nutfield, whither his motor-bicycle hadbrought him. There smoked and meditated a person in khaki, an engineer,who presently took an interest in Bert's machine. It was a sturdy pieceof apparatus, and it had acquired a kind of documentary value in thesequick-changing times; it was now nearly eight years old. Its pointsdiscussed, the soldier broke into a new topic with, "My next's goingto be an aeroplane, so far as I can see. I've had enough of roads andways."
"They TORK," said Bert.
"They talk--and they do," said the soldier.
"The thing's coming--"
"It keeps ON coming," said Bert; "I shall believe when I see it."
"That won't be long," said the soldier.
The conversation seemed degenerating into an amiable wrangle ofcontradiction.
"
I tell you they ARE flying," the soldier insisted. "I see it myself."
"We've all seen it," said Bert.
"I don't mean flap up and smash up; I mean real, safe, steady,controlled flying, against the wind, good and right."
"You ain't seen that!"
"I 'AVE! Aldershot. They try to keep it a secret. They got it rightenough. You bet--our War Office isn't going to be caught napping thistime."
Bert's incredulity was shaken. He asked questions--and the soldierexpanded.
"I tell you they got nearly a square mile fenced in--a sort of valley.Fences of barbed wire ten feet high, and inside that they do things.Chaps about the camp--now and then we get a peep. It isn't onlyus neither. There's the Japanese; you bet they got it too--and theGermans!"
The soldier stood with his legs very wide apart, and filled his pipethoughtfully. Bert sat on the low wall against which his motor-bicyclewas leaning.
"Funny thing fighting'll be," he said.
"Flying's going to break out," said the soldier. "When it DOES come,when the curtain does go up, I tell you you'll find every one on thestage--busy.... Such fighting, too!... I suppose you don't read thepapers about this sort of thing?"
"I read 'em a bit," said Bert.
"Well, have you noticed what one might call the remarkable case ofthe disappearing inventor--the inventor who turns up in a blaze ofpublicity, fires off a few successful experiments, and vanishes?"
"Can't say I 'ave," said Bert.
"Well, I 'ave, anyhow. You get anybody come along who does anythingstriking in this line, and, you bet, he vanishes. Just goes off quietlyout of sight. After a bit, you don't hear anything more of 'em at all.See? They disappear. Gone--no address. First--oh! it's an old storynow--there was those Wright Brothers out in America. They glided--theyglided miles and miles. Finally they glided off stage. Why, it must benineteen hundred and four, or five, THEY vanished! Then there was thosepeople in Ireland--no, I forget their names. Everybody said they couldfly. THEY went. They ain't dead that I've heard tell; but you can't saythey're alive. Not a feather of 'em can you see. Then that chap who flewround Paris and upset in the Seine. De Booley, was it? I forget. Thatwas a grand fly, in spite of the accident; but where's he got to? Theaccident didn't hurt him. Eh? _'E_'s gone to cover."
The soldier prepared to light his pipe.
"Looks like a secret society got hold of them," said Bert.
"Secret society! NAW!"
The soldier lit his match, and drew. "Secret society," he repeated, withhis pipe between his teeth and the match flaring, in response to hiswords. "War Departments; that's more like it." He threw his match aside,and walked to his machine. "I tell you, sir," he said, "there isn't abig Power in Europe, OR Asia, OR America, OR Africa, that hasn't gotat least one or two flying machines hidden up its sleeve at the presenttime. Not one. Real, workable, flying machines. And the spying! Thespying and manoeuvring to find out what the others have got. I tell you,sir, a foreigner, or, for the matter of that, an unaccredited native,can't get within four miles of Lydd nowadays--not to mention our littlecircus at Aldershot, and the experimental camp in Galway. No!"
"Well," said Bert, "I'd like to see one of them, anyhow. Jest to helpbelieving. I'll believe when I see, that I'll promise you."
"You'll see 'em, fast enough," said the soldier, and led his machine outinto the road.
He left Bert on his wall, grave and pensive, with his cap on the back ofhis head, and a cigarette smouldering in the corner of his mouth.
"If what he says is true," said Bert, "me and Grubb, we been wasting ourblessed old time. Besides incurring expense with that green-'ouse."
5
It was while this mysterious talk with the soldier still stirred in BertSmallways' imagination that the most astounding incident in the whole ofthat dramatic chapter of human history, the coming of flying,occurred. People talk glibly enough of epoch-making events; this wasan epoch-making event. It was the unanticipated and entirely successfulflight of Mr. Alfred Butteridge from the Crystal Palace to Glasgowand back in a small businesslike-looking machine heavier than air--anentirely manageable and controllable machine that could fly as well as apigeon.
It wasn't, one felt, a fresh step forward in the matter so much as agiant stride, a leap. Mr. Butteridge remained in the air altogetherfor about nine hours, and during that time he flew with the ease andassurance of a bird. His machine was, however neither bird-like norbutterfly-like, nor had it the wide, lateral expansion of the ordinaryaeroplane. The effect upon the observer was rather something in thenature of a bee or wasp. Parts of the apparatus were spinning veryrapidly, and gave one a hazy effect of transparent wings; but parts,including two peculiarly curved "wing-cases"--if one may borrow a figurefrom the flying beetles--remained expanded stiffly. In the middle wasa long rounded body like the body of a moth, and on this Mr. Butteridgecould be seen sitting astride, much as a man bestrides a horse. Thewasp-like resemblance was increased by the fact that the apparatusflew with a deep booming hum, exactly the sound made by a wasp at awindowpane.
Mr. Butteridge took the world by surprise. He was one of those gentlemenfrom nowhere Fate still succeeds in producing for the stimulation ofmankind. He came, it was variously said, from Australia and America andthe South of France. He was also described quite incorrectly as the sonof a man who had amassed a comfortable fortune in the manufacture ofgold nibs and the Butteridge fountain pens. But this was an entirelydifferent strain of Butteridges. For some years, in spite of a loudvoice, a large presence, an aggressive swagger, and an implacablemanner, he had been an undistinguished member of most of the existingaeronautical associations. Then one day he wrote to all the Londonpapers to announce that he had made arrangements for an ascent from theCrystal Palace of a machine that would demonstrate satisfactorily thatthe outstanding difficulties in the way of flying were finally solved.Few of the papers printed his letter, still fewer were the people whobelieved in his claim. No one was excited even when a fracas on thesteps of a leading hotel in Piccadilly, in which he tried to horse-whipa prominent German musician upon some personal account, delayed hispromised ascent. The quarrel was inadequately reported, and his namespelt variously Betteridge and Betridge. Until his flight indeed, hedid not and could not contrive to exist in the public mind. There werescarcely thirty people on the look-out for him, in spite of all hisclamour, when about six o'clock one summer morning the doors of the bigshed in which he had been putting together his apparatus opened--it wasnear the big model of a megatherium in the Crystal Palace grounds--andhis giant insect came droning out into a negligent and incredulousworld.
But before he had made his second circuit of the Crystal Palace towers,Fame was lifting her trumpet, she drew a deep breath as the startledtramps who sleep on the seats of Trafalgar Square were roused by hisbuzz and awoke to discover him circling the Nelson column, and by thetime he had got to Birmingham, which place he crossed about half-pastten, her deafening blast was echoing throughout the country. Thedespaired-of thing was done.
A man was flying securely and well.
Scotland was agape for his coming. Glasgow he reached by one o'clock,and it is related that scarcely a ship-yard or factory in that busy hiveof industry resumed work before half-past two. The public mind was justsufficiently educated in the impossibility of flying to appreciate Mr.Butteridge at his proper value. He circled the University buildings, anddropped to within shouting distance of the crowds in West End Park andon the slope of Gilmorehill. The thing flew quite steadily at a paceof about three miles an hour, in a wide circle, making a deep hum that,would have drowned his full, rich voice completely had he not providedhimself with a megaphone. He avoided churches, buildings, and mono-railcables with consummate ease as he conversed.
"Me name's Butteridge," he shouted; "B-U-T-T-E-R-I-D-G-E.--Got it? Memother was Scotch."
And having assured himself that he had been understood, he rose amidstcheers and shouting and patriotic cries, and then flew up very swiftlyand easily into the south-easter
n sky, rising and falling with long,easy undulations in an extraordinarily wasp-like manner.
His return to London--he visited and hovered over Manchester andLiverpool and Oxford on his way, and spelt his name out to eachplace--was an occasion of unparalleled excitement. Every one was staringheavenward. More people were run over in the streets upon that one day,than in the previous three months, and a County Council steamboat, theIsaac Walton, collided with a pier of Westminster Bridge, and narrowlyescaped disaster by running ashore--it was low water--on the mud onthe south side. He returned to the Crystal Palace grounds, that classicstarting-point of aeronautical adventure, about sunset, re-entered hisshed without disaster, and had the doors locked immediately upon thephotographers and journalists who been waiting his return.
"Look here, you chaps," he said, as his assistant did so, "I'm tired todeath, and saddle sore. I can't give you a word of talk. I'm too--done.My name's Butteridge. B-U-T-T-E-R-I-D-G-E. Get that right. I'm anImperial Englishman. I'll talk to you all to-morrow."
Foggy snapshots still survive to record that incident. His assistantstruggles in a sea of aggressive young men carrying note-books orupholding cameras and wearing bowler hats and enterprising ties. Hehimself towers up in the doorway, a big figure with a mouth--an eloquentcavity beneath a vast black moustache--distorted by his shout to theserelentless agents of publicity. He towers there, the most famous man inthe country.
Almost symbolically he holds and gesticulates with a megaphone in hisleft hand.
6
Tom and Bert Smallways both saw that return. They watched from the crestof Bun Hill, from which they had so often surveyed the pyrotechnics ofthe Crystal Palace. Bert was excited, Tom kept calm and lumpish, butneither of them realised how their own lives were to be invaded by thefruits of that beginning. "P'raps old Grubb'll mind the shop a bit now,"he said, "and put his blessed model in the fire. Not that that can saveus, if we don't tide over with Steinhart's account."
Bert knew enough of things and the problem of aeronautics to realisethat this gigantic imitation of a bee would, to use his own idiom, "givethe newspapers fits." The next day it was clear the fits had been giveneven as he said: their magazine pages were black with hasty photographs,their prose was convulsive, they foamed at the headline. The next daythey were worse. Before the week was out they were not so much publishedas carried screaming into the street.
The dominant fact in the uproar was the exceptional personality of Mr.Butteridge, and the extraordinary terms he demanded for the secret ofhis machine.
For it was a secret and he kept it secret in the most elaborate fashion.He built his apparatus himself in the safe privacy of the great CrystalPalace sheds, with the assistance of inattentive workmen, and the daynext following his flight he took it to pieces single handed, packedcertain portions, and then secured unintelligent assistance in packingand dispersing the rest. Sealed packing-cases went north and east andwest to various pantechnicons, and the engines were boxed with peculiarcare. It became evident these precautions were not inadvisable in viewof the violent demand for any sort of photograph or impressions ofhis machine. But Mr. Butteridge, having once made his demonstration,intended to keep his secret safe from any further risk of leakage. Hefaced the British public now with the question whether they wanted hissecret or not; he was, he said perpetually, an "Imperial Englishman,"and his first wish and his last was to see his invention the privilegeand monopoly of the Empire. Only--
It was there the difficulty began.
Mr. Butteridge, it became evident, was a man singularly free from anyfalse modesty--indeed, from any modesty of any kind--singularly willingto see interviewers, answer questions upon any topic except aeronautics,volunteer opinions, criticisms, and autobiography, supply portraits andphotographs of himself, and generally spread his personality acrossthe terrestrial sky. The published portraits insisted primarily upon animmense black moustache, and secondarily upon a fierceness behind themoustache. The general impression upon the public was that Butteridge,was a small man. No one big, it was felt, could have so virulentlyaggressive an expression, though, as a matter of fact, Butteridge had aheight of six feet two inches, and a weight altogether proportionate tothat. Moreover, he had a love affair of large and unusual dimensions andirregular circumstances and the still largely decorous British publiclearnt with reluctance and alarm that a sympathetic treatment of thisaffair was inseparable from the exclusive acquisition of the pricelesssecret of aerial stability by the British Empire. The exact particularsof the similarity never came to light, but apparently the lady had, ina fit of high-minded inadvertence, had gone through the ceremonyof marriage with, one quotes the unpublished discourse of Mr.Butteridge--"a white-livered skunk," and this zoological aberration didin some legal and vexatious manner mar her social happiness. He wantedto talk about the business, to show the splendour of her nature in thelight of its complications. It was really most embarrassing to a pressthat has always possessed a considerable turn for reticence, that wantedthings personal indeed in the modern fashion. Yet not too personal.It was embarrassing, I say, to be inexorably confronted withMr. Butteridge's great heart, to see it laid open in relentlesssself-vivisection, and its pulsating dissepiments adorned with emphaticflag labels.
Confronted they were, and there was no getting away from it. Hewould make this appalling viscus beat and throb before the shrinkingjournalists--no uncle with a big watch and a little baby ever harpedupon it so relentlessly; whatever evasion they attempted he set aside.He "gloried in his love," he said, and compelled them to write it down.
"That's of course a private affair, Mr. Butteridge," they would object.
"The injustice, sorr, is public. I do not care either I am up againstinstitutions or individuals. I do not care if I am up against theuniversal All. I am pleading the cause of a woman, a woman I lurve,sorr--a noble woman--misunderstood. I intend to vindicate her, sorr, tothe four winds of heaven!"
"I lurve England," he used to say--"lurve England, but Puritanism, sorr,I abhor. It fills me with loathing. It raises my gorge. Take my owncase."
He insisted relentlessly upon his heart, and upon seeing proofs of theinterview. If they had not done justice to his erotic bellowings andgesticulations, he stuck in, in a large inky scrawl, all and more thanthey had omitted.
It was a strangely embarrassing thing for British journalism. Never wasthere a more obvious or uninteresting affair; never had the world heardthe story of erratic affection with less appetite or sympathy. On theother hand it was extremely curious about Mr. Butteridge's invention.But when Mr. Butteridge could be deflected for a moment from the causeof the lady he championed, then he talked chiefly, and usuallywith tears of tenderness in his voice, about his mother and hischildhood--his mother who crowned a complete encyclopedia of maternalvirtue by being "largely Scotch." She was not quite neat, but nearly so."I owe everything in me to me mother," he asserted--"everything. Eh!"and--"ask any man who's done anything. You'll hear the same story. Allwe have we owe to women. They are the species, sorr. Man is but a dream.He comes and goes. The woman's soul leadeth us upward and on!"
He was always going on like that.
What in particular he wanted from the Government for his secret did notappear, nor what beyond a money payment could be expected from a modernstate in such an affair. The general effect upon judicious observers,indeed, was not that he was treating for anything, but that he was usingan unexampled opportunity to bellow and show off to an attentive world.Rumours of his real identity spread abroad. It was said that he had beenthe landlord of an ambiguous hotel in Cape Town, and had there givenshelter to, and witnessed, the experiments and finally stolen the papersand plans of, an extremely shy and friendless young inventor namedPalliser, who had come to South Africa from England in an advanced stageof consumption, and died there. This, at any rate, was the allegationof the more outspoken American press. But the proof or disproof of thatnever reached the public.
Mr. Butteridge also involved himself passionately in a tangle
ofdisputes for the possession of a great number of valuable money prizes.Some of these had been offered so long ago as 1906 for successfulmechanical flight. By the time of Mr. Butteridge's success a reallyvery considerable number of newspapers, tempted by the impunity of thepioneers in this direction, had pledged themselves to pay in some cases,quite overwhelming sums to the first person to fly from Manchester toGlasgow, from London to Manchester, one hundred miles, two hundredmiles in England, and the like. Most had hedged a little with ambiguousconditions, and now offered resistance; one or two paid at once, andvehemently called attention to the fact; and Mr. Butteridge plunged intolitigation with the more recalcitrant, while at the same time sustaininga vigorous agitation and canvass to induce the Government to purchasehis invention.
One fact, however, remained permanent throughout all the developments ofthis affair behind Butteridge's preposterous love interest, his politicsand personality, and all his shouting and boasting, and that was that,so far as the mass of people knew, he was in sole possession of thesecret of the practicable aeroplane in which, for all one could tellto the contrary, the key of the future empire of the world resided. Andpresently, to the great consternation of innumerable people, includingamong others Mr. Bert Smallways, it became apparent that whatevernegotiations were in progress for the acquisition of this precioussecret by the British Government were in danger of falling through. TheLondon Daily Requiem first voiced the universal alarm, and publishedan interview under the terrific caption of, "Mr. Butteridge Speaks hisMind."
Therein the inventor--if he was an inventor--poured out his heart.
"I came from the end of the earth," he said, which rather seemed toconfirm the Cape Town story, "bringing me Motherland the secret thatwould give her the empire of the world. And what do I get?" He paused."I am sniffed at by elderly mandarins!... And the woman I love istreated like a leper!"
"I am an Imperial Englishman," he went on in a splendid outburst,subsequently written into the interview by his own hand; "but therethere are limits to the human heart! There are younger nations--livingnations! Nations that do not snore and gurgle helplessly in paroxysmsof plethora upon beds of formality and red tape! There are nations thatwill not fling away the empire of earth in order to slight an unknownman and insult a noble woman whose boots they are not fitted to unlatch.There are nations not blinded to Science, not given over hand and footto effete snobocracies and Degenerate Decadents. In short, mark mywords--THERE ARE OTHER NATIONS!"
This speech it was that particularly impressed Bert Smallways. "If themGermans or them Americans get hold of this," he said impressively tohis brother, "the British Empire's done. It's U-P. The Union Jack, so tospeak, won't be worth the paper it's written on, Tom."
"I suppose you couldn't lend us a hand this morning," said Jessica,in his impressive pause. "Everybody in Bun Hill seems wanting earlypotatoes at once. Tom can't carry half of them."
"We're living on a volcano," said Bert, disregarding the suggestion. "Atany moment war may come--such a war!"
He shook his head portentously.
"You'd better take this lot first, Tom," said Jessica. She turnedbriskly on Bert. "Can you spare us a morning?" she asked.
"I dessay I can," said Bert. "The shop's very quiet s'morning. Thoughall this danger to the Empire worries me something frightful."
"Work'll take it off your mind," said Jessica.
And presently he too was going out into a world of change and wonder,bowed beneath a load of potatoes and patriotic insecurity, that mergedat last into a very definite irritation at the weight and want of styleof the potatoes and a very clear conception of the entire detestablenessof Jessica.