Number 87

by Harrington Hext

  But Joseph Ashlar’s death awoke far deeper emotions than either of the mysteries that preceded it. No light whatever could be thrown upon the event and no rational man for a moment supposed that the Government was responsible for this cowardly elimination of their first antagonist. London asked itself who next might be struck, and since no blow fell, people again veered to the opinion that only an extraordinary coincidence had destroyed these two prominent men.

  We threshed the subject to its dregs among us, I recollect, and Jack Smith it was who pointed out the amazing dilemma with which civilization now appeared to be faced.

  “You are forced to grant ‘the Bat,’ if bat there be, is possessed of self-consciousness,” he declared, “for it is nonsense to imagine these assassinations were the work of a dumb and unreasoning animal. Either it exists and knows what it’s doing, or else it is all nonsense and a figment of the mind in those who saw it. Either it seems to me that a being from some other sphere than earth is responsible for these things, or else we are up against a freak of imagination, repeated, by unconscious suggestion, in the constable who heard Ashlar’s death cry; or a deliberate optical illusion — an elaborate conjuring trick, a phantom thing arranged to throw men off the scent and confuse those whose business it is to get to the bottom of the business and find out the real terrestrial cause. Two famous men are struck down, and each of them represented a power for good, or evil. Both were in deadly earnest and one certainly threatened a revolution the extent of which could not be foretold. But the man, or society of men, who hated one, might, and probably did, hate the other also.”

  “There is no shadow of doubt that the same agency removed both under like conditions,” said Bishop Blore.

  “And there is not a shadow of doubt,” added Strossmayer, who was present, “that the agency is one with the destroyer of the monument.”

  Medland, however, stood out for his vampire, and, to my surprise, I found that General Fordyce now agreed with him.

  “I still believe the choice of victims was a coincidence, and that these things are the work of a dragon, a huge, venomous reptile which has survived past ages under conditions perfectly natural if we understood them,” he declared. “We know the toad will exist in entombment for centuries; why, then, should his vitality be denied to greater creatures, or limited in its duration?”

  We were all interested to learn Paul Strossmayer’s views, but he made no secret of them. Most firmly he believed in a human agency.

  “I am only disappointed that certain unknown people have got the start of Jugo-Slavia,” he said. “If this force, for that is all I will call it, is going to apply itself actively on the side of Capital against Labor’s gathering powers of dictation, so much the better for civilization at large, and so much the better for this country, where the danger appears to be greatest. And whether it is human as I steadfastly believe, or super-human, as Smith suggests, so long as it is sound on economics, we shall not quarrel with its operations. If it helps the world to see that wealth is at the root of national prosperity, so much the better. One would think that the fact had been made apparent to the deaf and blind during the past two years; but the power now apparently interested in the question may do much to throw light. On the other hand, the unknown may be after something quite different that only time will reveal. It is at this moment apparently doing what I envy it the power to do; but we cannot predict the line of thought behind it, or guess how those who direct it design to proceed. Ian Noble, my young chemist with genius, is asking himself the next step and wondering if it may presently be in our power, through our own work, which is advancing swiftly, to get in touch with it.”

  “What do you think, Sir Bruce?” I inquired, for the general’s brother had committed himself as yet to no theory of the problem.

  Tonight, however, he did so, though his idea failed to convince us. He took a view, as one might have expected, based on rational opinion.

  The old Indian discoursed of the poison of serpents and the immense difficulties opposed to Science in its study of these subtle essences.

  “I do not deny, or affirm,” he added after an exposition on the physical effects seen in the two dead men. “I do not say that it was not a living creature beyond our experience, though in that case I should certainly imagine it terrestrial — a survival possibly liberated by some unheaval, or earthquake, or fluvial denudation in central Africa or America.”

  “In that case how would it withstand the rigors of our winter climate for a week?” asked Bishop Blore.

  “It might not, Bishop. The suggestion lessens the probability of a tropical or subtropical visitant; but there are vast temperate regions of which we know little also. The creature might not be equatorial, but polar.”

  “You believe in it, then?” asked Medland, well pleased to win a scientific supporter of distinction.

  But he was disappointed.

  “Most emphatically I do not believe in it,” replied Sir Bruce. “The idea strains credulity too painfully. I incline to a far more prosaic opinion. I suspect these men have suffered at the hands of their fellow men, and I suppose, therefore, the apparition of ‘the Bat’ to be a very real and material one. In a word I should suspect an airplane, or something of that kind, either actually controlled and operated by man, or embodying some new knowledge, obedient to new powers and capable of doing its work, though the actual agents may be miles away.”

  “A theory distinctly more improbable than the other,” declared the general. “No, no, Bruce, that really won’t do. You let your scientific imagination run away with you.”

  Paul Strossmayer, however, supported the learned man. He had already advanced the same view, and many people found in it the only possible explanation consonant with reason. Before he spoke, however, Jacobs argued for a still more immaterial explanation and repeated his opinion that the image of the monster had never been real at all.

  “How do you account for the smell then?” asked Bishop Blore. “There is no shadow of doubt about the smell. Even grant the monster a shadow, or a subconscious suggestion handed from the first policeman, at Skeat’s death, to the second, who discovered Ashlar, there still remains the vulpine stench, such as Sir Bruce has admitted might belong to some order of flying mammals.”

  “A bat — yes; but not a reptile,” interrupted Sir Bruce. “The smell is that of a warm-blooded creature, whose duration of life must be limited so far as we know. A snake, or flying saurian would not emit any such odor, if we judge by existing reptilia.”

  “Well, bat or lizard, the smell was reported by four men on the first occasion and three on the second. The smell cannot have been imagination and cannot have been produced by anything but a living animal.”

  “Your argument is worthless,” returned Sir Bruce, “for smell is purely a chemical question and means the liberation of certain gases and emanations. We can imitate all odors — sweet or foul — in the laboratory.”

  “And what is more,” struck in Strossmayer, “we are in no position to speak with authority about this effluvium, seeing we are ignorant of the energy that produced it. How many noses had ever come in contact with the smell of petrol till the advent of the motor car? That this overpowering odor accidentally resembles a smell we associate with animal life is nothing at all. Do not your people humorously describe all chemistry as the making of ‘stinks’?”

  He waived this minor problem from us with his long hands as a thing of no practical account and resumed, his eyes on Sir Bruce.

  “Granted an airplane,” he said. “What follows? Much more must certainly be granted, for if a mechanical flying vessel of some kind, then it is guided, controlled and driven by a force of which as yet no human record exists.”

  “Do you suggest a visitor from another planet?” asked Bishop Blore.

  “No, no; I only assert that no record exists. How do we know what is happening in the laboratories of Europe, or America? We only know that since the Great War every eye is opened, that vistors and
vanquished alike are straining along the road and exhausting every nerve to discover secrets, which will not only ensure their own security for the future, but leave the rest of the world at their mercy.”

  “That may actually have been done,” said Jacobs.

  “It has been done — up to a point,” admitted Strossmayer. “The achievement may even be complete. At any rate there exists in some human hands a power far superior to any that is common possession. The forces which have destroyed your Albert Memorial must be terrific; and the manner of that operation shows they are perfectly under control. Nothing that we know of explosives can explain the business-like and absolute destruction recorded there, or the tight hand kept on the tremendous powers responsible for it. The new energy is already being exploited, as I think, not by a nation, but a community, or society of private individuals. And since its activities take place here, we may assume that Englishmen are involved.”

  “A very great assumption,” answered General Fordyce. “Seeing that the alien is welcome here as in no other country, and enjoys our own liberties once his foot is on our shores, we may imagine that those responsible for the discovery would naturally turn to England as the most promising country in which to pursue their initial experiments. Nor do I, for one, quarrel with them so far, seeing what form their experiments have taken. For it is certain that no Bolshevists have the secret, otherwise they would have already applied it to very different purposes.”

  “True,” admitted Jack Smith. “They would have destroyed the Houses of Parliament rather than an object only offensive from an artistic standpoint, and they would not have smudged out Skeat, or Ashlar, but the King of England and the Prince of Wales.”

  “There is comfort in the thought that good conservatives may have the secret,” confessed Merrivale Medland, “though, for my part, nothing I have yet heard lessens my conviction that I am right.”

  “In any case,” I added, “it is less terrible to believe that men, like ourselves, are responsible, than to suppose that beings outside our knowledge have entered our atmosphere from another world, and are assaulting us from an angle of vision and a basis of opinion concerning which we know nothing.”

  “The absurdity of such an idea defeats it,” declared Jacobs. “Conscious beings from another planet would hardly arrive here to quarrel about the parish pump and ‘take sides’ in our industrial squabbles.”

  “We naturally fly from contemplation of any attack directed against us by beings from another world,” said Sir Bruce. “One has only to mention the possibility to see how human nature shudders at it. The idea of being approached by conscious creatures — differing from ourselves as much as we differ from familiar, unconscious creatures — plunges us into a train of thought which must be horrible in the measure of our own imagination. Suppose, for example, that some marine order of crustaceans developed the power to think and determined to invade the land and destroy our civilization and ourselves in order that they might substitute what they conceived was better; can anything more fearful than such an encounter be imagined? They would turn their submarine resources upon us and attack us with weapons of which we should have no idea until they were employed; while we should retaliate and seek to make the sea uninhabitable for them. Peace, until one side had exterminated the other, seems unthinkable, for this reason: that we should have no means of inter-communication. We might as easily imagine making a truce with a tiger, or other savage animal, as suppose that we could come to an understanding with these super-lobsters from the depth of ocean.”

  The gruesome idea was elaborated, and Jacobs stoutly opposed Sir Bruce’s assumption that no agreement would be within reach.

  “Granted the possession of intellect,” he said, “then, surely, a via media might be attained? Even now we have considered the possibility of signalling to Mars, by huge symbols which would indicate to that planet’s inhabitants how conscious beings dwell in this one. Surely, therefore, if we were confronted with self-conscious crustaceans, or any other order of living creatures, it should not be beyond our power, or theirs, to establish some code, or system of signs to understanding.”

  “As we do when faced with tribes of savages,” I added.

  It was then that this somewhat unprofitable conversation ceased before a revelation which came to us in the shape of the last edition of The Pall Mall Gazette.

  John Linklater brought it with him from London. He was a rare visitor to the club, though popular enough when he cared to appear. His work was that of a reporter in the House of Commons. He looked in now on his way home with a startling item of intelligence.

  “The murder’s out,” he said, handing Medland his newspaper. “Or rather both murders are out. ‘The Bat’ is a reality and very much alive indeed. Here’s chapter and verse for the whole story, and we must look out for squalls, since the gentleman is still at large.”

  CHAPTER VI

  TO SAVE JUGO-SLAVIA

  IT was reported that a seaman from Africa — a middle-aged foreigner, who had worked with an expedition in the forest areas of the equatorial hinterland — had brought the murderous animal back to Europe with him as a cub; that, on being secured, it was no larger than a flying fox; that it had grown enormously in captivity and finally escaped.

  A portrait of Joan Silva appeared in an illustrated paper next morning, with a circumstantial account of his discovery, and his own picturesque career. He was a dago from a Spanish tramp steamer, and he asserted that the place of ‘the Bat’s’ captivity had been Rosas. He was about to approach scientific authorities and invite them to take charge of his find, when it broke the iron bars of a stout cage and disappeared by night. He offered remarkable particulars of his original capture, and was ready with all details and apt answers to the questions addressed to him by Science; but, as time passed, and ‘the Bat’ was neither seen again nor reported, Joan Silva’s story began to have grave shadows cast upon it.

  A skeptical journal took the matter in hand and the course of its investigations reminded the last generation of a famous and ingenious gentleman whose narrative, of adventures in Australia, gulled not only the public but the intelligence of the British Association. Joan, indeed, turned out to be of the order of Louis de Rougemont and Ananias. The mariner proved himself rich in imagination and for a while his story held together and defied unfriendly criticism; but, little by little, under remorseless cross-examination, the weak spots grew larger. He could produce no witnesses and no confirmatory reports of his operations in central Africa; while the opposition was able to find a man or two who had sailed with Silva and told odd stories concerning him. He began to contradict himself and get into difficulties. He bluffed valiantly, but had not the iron memory vital to successful lying; and within a month that happened to convict him of probable falsehood. Medical men proved, at any rate to their own satisfaction, that he was weak in his head, and suffered from an innocent sort of megalomania, which made him seek to challenge a wider attention than the ordinary man before the mast could hope to win. His messmates confirmed the diagnosis, and scarcely had poor Silva disappeared in a hurricane of laughter, directed more against those who had believed him than himself, when ‘the Bat’ was again in people’s minds and added very definitely to the world’s knowledge of its powers. For purpose was now revealed and the certainty that it operated with full consciousness of its actions.

  Time passed, spring returned and the endless business of settling the world into the ways of peace still occupied mankind and his leagues and conferences. Then, amid half a dozen other international complications, there happened a clash and confusion of interests which directly interested the Club of Friends; because strange events, arising from this conflict, offered fresh evidence and renewed grounds of suspicion against Paul Strossmayer.

  His nation was directly involved in tribulation, for the politics of the little kingdom were running awry and Europe, instead of speaking with no uncertain voice, permitted Jugo-Slavia to be inflicted by a sort of comic-opera assau
lt and looked on while a section of her neighbors, under a romantic adventurer, persisted in offensive operations having for their object the annexation of a city and the appropriation of a port. The difficulties appeared endless, and the national hero responsible for them made it hard to determine the boundaries between Jugo-Slavia and a greater nation. The Government of the ancient power desired to offer the new State all assistance; but a large and belligerent body had followed the banner of the famous artist-dictator now opposed to Jugo-Slavia. He was an aviator, celebrated during the war for his achievements against Austria, and, before it, for his magnificent orchestral compositions. Lorenzo Poglaici disputed Jugo-Slavia’s rights and declined to abandon certain territory, which represented great natural wealth and stood, not only for national honor, but also for the way to the sea.

  Strossmayer took a dark view of the situation and did not hesitate to declare that Poglaici’s nation was in reality behind him, though it pretended to be otherwise. He proved to the satisfaction of most of us that Jugo-Slavia was right, the famous musician and his following wrong. We shared a measure of his indignation that the Entente remained dumb. And then our new member found the call of his people imperative and returned to Jugo-Slavia before the existing difficulties were composed.

  The tangle was most complete and offered little hope of solution at this time; yet Strossmayer had not been in his native land a week when all changed and a grotesque situation became relieved by the sudden fate which overtook Lorenzo Poglaici himself. Flying by night above the city and territory he had appropriated in the name of his nation, this famous and picturesque being met his death. It was supposed that he had crashed, and that the hero of a thousand achievements in mid air had at last suffered the too familiar fate of hundreds as bold and skilful as himself; but investigation proved the contrary and enabled Science to determine that the great man had perished aloft by means identical with those that destroyed Skeat and Ashlar in England. Thousands pictured the conflict under the stars at an elevation unguessed, and thousands were confident that Poglaici had given a good account of himself and might be counted upon to have fought to a finish and wounded or slain his awful antagonist, if given any opportunity to do so; but evidence of harm to ‘the Bat’ was not forthcoming and whether it also had received a fatal wound and fallen to perish on land or sea, none could say. As for the dead man, it was clear that his own death and no other cause had brought his monoplane to earth. Wounds, now familiar, had robbed him of life, and it was certain that he had perished aloft and only crashed at a much lower elevation, when his machine nose-dived and came to earth headfirst.