Number 87

by Harrington Hext

  “You can trust no man to be reasonable,” admitted Jacobs, “though, no doubt, each of us imagines himself to be the most reasonable person on earth.”

  “In nothing does our unreason more appear than in our private opinion of ourselves,” confessed Sir Bruce. Then we left him at his door and went homeward to the bachelor diggings we shared.

  No light was thrown upon the death of Alexander Skeat, and nothing further heard of the chimera assumed to have destroyed him. Chemical analysis showed a prodigious alteration in the constituents of the dead man’s blood and revealed a mineral substance, akin to one of the radio-active elements, developed in it; but the reason for such an extraordinary change was hidden, and what had entered by the thread-like orifice to destroy life, science could not detect.

  Rumors came that the apparition of a flying monster had been seen both in Surrey and in Yorkshire; yet investigation ended in nothing trustworthy. Meantime London felt no alarm, while maintaining an active interest for longer than it condescends, as a rule, to devote to any solitary sensation. Everybody supposed that Skeat would have left a direction to be cremated; therefore, since he never conformed to public opinion and delighted to refute general conclusions, he had done no such thing. His relations buried him at Kensal Green, and the greatest living sculptor declined to design the tomb, because Skeat had insulted him during the previous year.

  Londoners were said to walk less in the parks after dark; but if that were true of certain nervous individuals, it certainly did not apply to the mass, who make the green spaces of the metropolis their thoroughfares.

  The actual spot where Skeat had fallen and the neighboring region from which the flying monster was declared to have ascended were subject to intelligent scrutiny; but not a clue of any sort rewarded it. John Syme had vowed the creature hopped twice, and if his narrative were true, it appeared probable that some mark of the operation must surely appear; but no trace of any impress was recorded on the winter herbage, and the detectives, together with the public at large, soon regarded the alleged apparition as a feat of imagination on the constable’s part. It was left to a later date to restore credence in Policeman Syme and reawaken the curiosity and alarm of the metropolis.

  CHAPTER IV

  THE ALBERT MEMORIAL

  NOTHING is more puzzling to me than the attitude of a man to his friend’s friend. I have often wondered why people for whom I entertained the greatest regard, and who reciprocated my attachment as heartily, should yet number among their closest companions and confidants somebody else whom I detested. And my friends have observed the same phenomenon in connection with myself. Doubtless we are all built up in different facets and echo different flashes from our fellow creatures. Thus, when Leon Jacobs began to develop an active understanding and comradeship with the Jugo-Slav, Paul Strossmayer, I was not indeed perturbed or jealous — but the fact caused me to wonder. The comradeship did not extend to much beyond conversation at the club, for both men were exceedingly busy and their operations lay in different directions; but a certain quality of mind was common to both: they found themselves reflecting life from the same angle and each, I think, was eminently endowed with that faculty of reason, the lack of which in human affairs, Sir Bruce Fordyce so often and so feelingly deplored.

  Nor did I myself find Strossmayer antipathetic, for the judgment of Leon Jacobs was good enough for me; but I never understood the stranger as well, or shared his ideals so fully as did Leon. My insular bent of mind preserved an element of doubt and suspense concerning him until we became far better acquainted, and though I never shared the dislike and suspicion openly expressed at the Club of Friends behind Strossmayer’s back in the light of subsequent events, I was not at first prepared to champion Strossmayer through thick and thin, as Jacobs did.

  The man certainly challenged us, and it was hard to feel indifferent towards him. Indeed the majority disliked him for his self-assertion — a trait always offensive to the average Englishman — and as time passed I was constrained to mark that, despite his plea for reason, Sir Bruce shared to the full his brother’s concealed aversion towards the new member.

  I think, perhaps unconsciously, the warning of dead Alexander Skeat influenced some of us. He had hated Strossmayer, and there is no doubt that Jack Smith and possibly others grew in time to associate the foreigner with Skeat’s death.

  As a matter of fact, so far as his comments and opinions on the subject went, Paul Strossmayer appeared absolutely indifferent to the end of the great publicist. He merely reiterated a former opinion, that Skeat was better dead than alive, and he took no part in my hearing upon the interminable discussions of the mystery that followed; but then happened another sensation that banished the death of Skeat from men’s minds, and London gasped before such a wonder as it had never experienced until now. This new shock did wake up Strossmayer to some purpose and he declared a theory with which Science speedily found itself in complete agreement. Indeed, before phenomena so unique and beyond all previous human experience, it appeared that only one theory was admissible.

  On a night near the end of the year, there fell down that great memorial in Hyde Park erected to the Consort of her late Majesty, Queen Victoria. Yet to say that the Albert Memorial fell down is hardly a correct statement. The huge affair, with its central statue, canopy and elaborate decorative groups of sculptured, emblematic figures, was destroyed so strangely that it would be more correct to say it was pulverized, than that it fell down.

  At half past two, on a clear December night, the police in the neighborhood heard a long-drawn, hissing and rendering sound, but nothing to be described as an explosion. It was, they declared, as though a torrent of water descended — the liquid rush of a waterfall. Terrific forces were applied to the memorial, and they left the mass of it redistributed. The monument ceased to exist; but in its place was no such chaos of shattered pillars, broken masonry and dismembered statues as an explosion must have wrought. Such a spectacle as the war had rendered only too familiar was not here. No haphazard ruin appeared before the dazed sight of the night watchers who collected round it. Instead they were faced with a huge, conical pile of fine dust. It was as though the Albert Memorial had been lifted bodily from its roots in the earth, set in some gigantic mortar and brayed to powder, then poured out again upon the original site.

  All London visited the gray pile next morning and a thousand explanations of this extraordinary metamorphosis occupied men’s minds. The energy responsible for the change had worked within limits clearly defined. It had operated as smoothly as the cut of a knife. There was no surrounding disturbance. A few adjacent trees were burned as to their nearest boughs by the great heat produced by this instantaneous disintegration, but no evidences of explosive matter marked the scene. Only a little mountain of fine dust towered in place of the familiar monument, and a preliminary scientific assumption received universal acceptation. It was quite clear that energies beyond all experience had produced these results. They resembled in no way those created by the highest explosives as yet discovered and applied; nor did their operation place them in the same category with any known power. They worked differently and liberated an infinitely greater volume of force. Whether the stroke had come from earth or air none could assert; but Science held that air had freed the energy and rained it directly down upon the doomed memorial.

  Examination of the elemental dust of stone and metal to which all had been reduced, revealed a startling chemical fact. The material had suffered radical changes. The force directed against it was responsible, not only for turning all into the smallest constituent particles; but had actually modified the matter, imparting novel attributes that neither stone nor metal before possessed.

  It was left for the genius of a foreigner to link this extraordinary circumstance with another, and I shall return to the point in a moment.

  First, however, one must record the impression conveyed and the emotion awakened in London by the event. ‘Catastrophe’ it can hardly be called,
for no actual public regret was expressed by any journal or man of authority. Indeed artists openly rejoiced in the disappearance of the memorial, and a tentative proposal to rebuild it on the old model received no support from any responsible person. But the smaller question of the thing itself was entirely lost in the larger one of the reason for its disappearance; for all men felt that what mattered was not the vanished object, but the unknown powers that had caused it to vanish.

  The discussion centered upon one point. Was the world faced with a deliberate manifestation of consciously directed action; or did it behold the accidental effect of some physical phenomenon? Had some wandering vehicle of huge radio-activity penetrated our atmosphere and struck by chance, or was the incident the work of intelligent beings? The general opinion, the wish being father to the hope, no doubt, inclined to a belief that an aërolite of great size had reached earth and liberated thereon properties of matter as yet only in the dawn of their human discovery; but a more highly educated conclusion opposed this belief and very definitely declared the destruction of the monument to be a work of conscious beings. Some of these inquirers (inspired by ingenious works of fiction) went so far as to affirm possible interference from extra-terrestrial causes; but the more reasonable thinkers suspected that human agency must be responsible — an opinion hardly less disturbing than the other. The humorous aspect of the event was not ignored, and I recollect that, within our own circle, Jacobs pointed out the discrepancy between the prodigious powers marshalled to destroy the Albert Memorial and the insignificant object itself.

  “It is as though somebody had taken a fifteen-inch gun to shoot a rabbit,” he said; and it was upon the same occasion, at the club, that an increasing interest and divergence of opinions upon the subject of Paul Strossmayer were advanced in the one case and widened in the other, by himself. We had not seen him since the incident in Hyde Park; but perceived, when he did reappear among us, that he had taken it far more to heart than any Englishman. He was tremendously impressed by what had happened; and he was also depressed, for he told us frankly that, in his opinion, certain unknown persons had stolen a march upon him, his friends and their hopes.

  “I need not trouble you with my own fears,” he said, in answer to a question, “but I may say that my ‘super-chemist,’ as I call him, shares my view. Ian Noble believes that a tremendous secret advance has been made along the line of radio-active research, and he suspects that this apparently senseless operation is no more than a private experiment with a newly discovered energy.”

  “Then why such a senseless and mischievous outrage?” asked General Hugh Fordyce. “I know nothing of art, but the Albert Memorial stood for something far more important than art. It commemorated a famous and dignified personage — a royal character of whom nothing but good can be spoken. Moreover he was the grandfather of the reigning monarch, and there is, therefore, an element of disloyalty in such a performance that must make any decent man prefer to believe that it happened by chance and was an accident. If otherwise, then an enemy to England is responsible.”

  “Be sure those that did this thing were not concerned with the memory of the late Prince Albert,” replied Strossmayer. “Very probably they never heard of him. We cannot tell whence they come, or what their purposes are. Ian Noble inclines to believe that they are in our midst; and he takes a grave view of the event, for it is clear that these people are concealing their discovery from the rest of civilization. In any case he suspects that we shall not be left long in doubt.”

  We argued the point and Bishop Blore was very positive that no conscious agency would be found responsible.

  “In a sense,” he said, “we may regard the mystery as on all fours with that which preceded it and is already nearly forgotten. I mean the death of Alexander Skeat. As Sir Bruce pointed out in that connection, had some actual, living, but unconscious, thing destroyed the man, it could only have done so for its own needs and to satisfy the physical craving of hunger. In that case it must have been heard of again quickly. But it has not been heard of again, and we justly assume, therefore, that ‘the Bat,’ as the newspapers called it, was a myth. The same position is created here. If this is the work of men who have become possessed of new knowledge, then they will not stop at this childish performance. It is now some days since the monument in Hyde Park was destroyed, but we have not heard of any similar disaster. Therefore I cherish a growing conviction that this event is natural and offers us a glimpse into some operations of nature denied the world until the present time. Tremendous energy has descended from space, and chance directed it upon England, upon London, upon Hyde Park, upon the Albert Memorial. It entered our atmosphere — this foreign body — from limitless space and braved the perils of combustion, or may have largely suffered from them. Yet no great fire ball, or shooting star, or other celestial visitor was reported. We may assume, then, that this aggregation of unknown matter — this unfamiliar element launched upon us — found the atmosphere harmless to affect it. The mass — it may have been great — it may have been small — strikes an object composed of terrestrial material — marble and metal — and instantly it transforms all to dust.”

  “And more than that,” added Jack Smith, “it transmutes these familiar things and imparts to them a quality which was not there before.”

  Some agreed with the bishop, and I confess my inclination made me do so, since only along a line of natural interpretation lay peace of mind for humanity. We were left in suspense and Strossmayer declared again that such suspense would be of short duration. Bishop Blore’s theory reduced him to silence for a while; but, as he confessed afterwards, it did in reality something very significant and flashed a light into his mind which took the shape of a letter to The Times.

  At the moment, however, he gave no sign of his inspiration. We asked him concerning his “super-chemist” and he was apparently quite frank upon that subject. Indeed the Jugo-Slav’s candor always inclined Jacobs and myself towards him. We believed in it from the first — especially Leon Jacobs; but Medland, General Fordyce, Sir Bruce and Bishop Blore declared that Strossmayer’s ingenuous attitude was assumed deliberately and by no means represented the real man. They held it a mask — a stalking-horse of unreality — behind which he pursued his own purposes. For they reminded us that the stranger did not always choose to be artless and had a convenient way of failing sometimes to hear a pertinent question. Their suspicions, indeed, gained ground and point during subsequent events and Strossmayer’s letter to The Times which appeared two days later, while it strengthened my conviction that he was honest, served to establish opposite conclusions in the minds of most of us.

  For the moment Paul Strossmayer spoke of Ian Noble in response to our questions. He praised the young man’s genius and declared that he was already on the track of great discoveries. He also temporarily disarmed doubt by promising to bring Noble to the club upon a future evening.

  “If you are not tired of great men — for a great man he is — I shall invite him to dinner presently,” he promised. “And then you will meet a rare personality, one, as I believe, destined to future honors and distinction — in Jugo-Slavia.”

  We promised his protégé a hearty welcome, and after Strossmayer’s departure again debated the foreigner’s puzzling personality.

  Merrivale Medland committed himself to a strong suspicion and, to my surprise, Sir Bruce and the bishop supported him.

  “The man’s a humbug and thinks he’s fooling us,” declared our wine merchant with conviction. “What’s more, I believe he knows a great deal about this business — perhaps all about it.”

  “Time will probably show,” admitted Sir Bruce. “I do not like the man for this reason: he is a gross materialist. His ambitions are mean and he is concerned only for Jugo-Slavia and himself. Despite certain feeble protestations to the contrary, he is not moved by any enthusiasm for humanity at large; and did he and his scientific slaves really hit upon those latent radio-active energies presently destined to tran
sform the face of the world and make, or mar, civilization, I do not for a moment believe that he and his immature and backward people could be trusted to employ it for the welfare of all. They would use it to erect a barrier of personal advantage between themselves and mankind. They would seek to put themselves on a pedestal, threaten all other nations and exploit their discovery to the disadvantage of their neighbors and the world at large.”

  “One cannot forget that Alexander Skeat, who, whatever else he may have been, was a profound student of human nature, warned us very forcibly against Strossmayer. We have Granger’s word for it,” said Bishop Blore.

  “He certainly said so,” I replied. “Both Jacobs and I heard him. We set it down to a personal animosity, because Paul Strossmayer did not fear to contradict him.”

  “But you have to remember also,” Jacobs reminded them, “that Strossmayer has often spoken of all men in a friendly and kindly spirit. He is a patriot, I grant; but one can admit no direct word fairly creating a suspicion that Strossmayer would ‘exploit’ a discovery, as Sir Bruce says, to the disadvantage of other nations, even though he might naturally desire his own people should gain first and principal advantage.”

  “For that matter, Sir Bruce,” I asked, “supposing that the energy were really ready and waiting for the world, into whose hands would you place it with absolute conviction that you were doing well and wisely?”

  “A tremendous question,” answered Jacobs.

  “No question at all,” replied General Hugh. “My dear fellow, can there be a shadow of doubt as to the reply? Emphatically England, and England alone, could be trusted with, such a terrific responsibility. If you want an analogy, look at the Seven Seas. To whom could the dominion of the ocean be entrusted but ourselves? None but a fool entertains two opinions.”