The Golden Age of Science Fiction Novels Vol 05

by Anthology

  In consequence of this decision, they had all left London on the Saturday and Sunday by different trains for various parts of the kingdom, with the intention of keeping constantly on the move, either on land or sea, until the hour of execution had actually passed, and it was known what form, if any, the vengeance of the anarchists was to take. In this way they were able to put the anarchist spies, for the time being, completely off their track, and, it is probable, to this course of action some of them, at any rate, owed their lives.

  It is hardly necessary, perhaps, to mention that very good care was taken to send Dora Merton, her mother, and all their friends into places where they would be safe, at least for the present, from the attacks of their enemies. Some had gone to remote villages in Wales and Scotland, some were scattered among English watering-places, and some had been sent to the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands; and as all had, of course, renounced the picturesque Utopian costume on their arrival in England, they found no difficulty in losing themselves among the inhabitants of the places in which they took refuge.

  By nightfall on Monday, the whole of London was in a state of feverish and irrepressible anxiety and apprehension. The terror of the unknown hung over everyone, from the mansions of Mayfair to the slums of Whitechapel. No one talked of anything but the approaching doom of the arch-anarchist and the vengeance that had been threatened by his still invisible allies. An epidemic of unreasoning fear had seized upon the whole people, from those who wandered about the streets arguing and gossiping with each other and buying up every new special edition that the newspaper offices kept pouring out full of repetitions of what had gone before, to the Cabinet Council that was sitting in Downing Street discussing the telegrams that were constantly arriving from the various points of the Empire threatened by Russian attack.

  Many believed that London would be bombarded from the air during the night, and this belief was strengthened by a fire which broke out among some warehouses on the Rotherhithe bank of the river, but which had, in fact, nothing whatever to do with the work of any incendiary. Of course, it was taken for granted that the anarchists had set them on fire, and thousands of people wandered about the streets all night, wondering where the next conflagration was going to break out, or when the fire bombs would begin to descend from the sky.

  The whole strength of the Fire Brigade and of the police force was kept on duty until the morning, but nothing happened, and the grey dawn of a cloudy April morning broke over London, showing its buildings still uninjured, and without bringing any news or warning of aggressive action on the part of the anarchists.

  By five o'clock, the anxious watchers in the street began to move with one accord from all points towards what was now the common centre of interest- the dark, smoke-grimed prison of Newgate; and by six, Ludgate Hill, Old Bailey, Newgate Street, Holborn, and the southern end of Giltspur Street, were packed with an excited throng of anxious, pale-faced people, waiting, some to see the hauling up of the black flag, and others, who could not see it, to hear the shout of relief and the cheer of triumph that would hail its appearance as the sign that the master spirit of the Anarchists had ceased to exist.

  All round the prison and its approaches, strong cordons of police were drawn up to keep the crowd in the roadways, and to prevent it getting on to the pavement or too near to the doors of Newgate, while hundreds of other policemen in plain clothes mingled with the crowd, keeping a sharp look-out for anarchists who might have come armed with hand bombs to take a mad and indiscriminate vengeance for the death of their chief. Half a dozen squadrons of lancers and dragoons were also kept in readiness, but out of sight, at the Horse Guards, in case any rioting or outrages on the part of the anarchists, who were believed to be in strong force in London, should make it necessary to clear the streets, and all the public buildings were guarded by double sentries and extra policemen.

  Amidst the general excitement, the man who was the cause of it all was, outwardly at least, the calmest man in London. Certainly, no one in the whole metropolis had slept more soundly than Max Renault had done when the warders woke him at half-past five. He dressed himself leisurely, and with his usual care, in his own clothes, which, in accordance with the usual custom, had been returned to him after his sentence. At six, his breakfast was brought to him, and he ate as hearty a meal as though he had been going out hunting, instead of to the gallows, and when it was over, he washed it down with half a pint of champagne, in which he drank "success to Anarchy and destruction to Society."

  Of any attempt that might be made for his rescue, or any revenge that might be taken for his death, he said not a word. There was no bravado in his manner or boasting in his speech; he was simply cool and collected, polite to everybody, and apparently anxious to give as little trouble as possible. When the chaplain entered the condemned cell to make one last effort to bring him into a frame of mind befitting the terrible position in which he stood, he shook hands with him, and said, in the easiest manner imaginable-

  "My dear sir, I'm afraid you're giving yourself quite unnecessary trouble on my behalf. I know you're doing it from a sense of duty, and if I were not so averse to listening to wasted words, I would hear you with pleasure, if not with profit; but, you see, I have no creed but anarchy, and no faith save in the ultimate triumph of its principles, and so I must really decline to waste the short time that appears to be left to me in unprofitable conversation."

  "I can neither force you to listen, nor would I if I could," said the chaplain gravely and almost sternly. "To a man standing as you do on the brink of eternity, argument is worse than useless, and I will not tempt you to further mockery. Is there anything that I can do for you - I mean in the worldly sense? Have you any message to leave or any property to dispose of? If you have, you may command me."

  "Thank you," replied Renault, smiling, as he could sometimes smile, with a rare sweetness. "The only message I have to give has been given, and my property belongs of right to my comrades in arms, to be used in the work to which we are devoted. And now, if you wish to do me a real service, get me one of this morning's papers, and let me read quietly until the time comes."

  The good chaplain was far too familiar with the behaviour of men in Renault's position not to be able to see that his callousness was genuine, and in no measure assumed. He saw, too, that to make any attempt to perform the last offices of the Church for him would only be to give him opportunity for scoffing, which might, if he were provoked too far, degenerate into blasphemy; so he left the cell and went to the governor's room, where he got a copy of the Standard, which he sent to the condemned cell by a warder.

  Max took it, and soon became absorbed, as he might well be, in its contents. The editorial page opened with a leading article, a column and a half long, on his career and the justly merited fate that awaited him; and on the next page there were three columns concerning the anarchists and their doings in all parts of the world; and after them came the war news, the chief item of which was to the effect that Kronstadt and the Russian Baltic ports were now free from ice, and that the mobilisation of the Russian fleet would be complete in a day or two. All this, however, was of no importance, in Max's eyes, in comparison with one brief paragraph in the summary of news which ran as follows:-

  "As stated in our late edition last night, the Home Secretary has declined to entertain the suggestion that the convict Renault, now under sentence of death should be executed at some unknown date and hour, in order to obviate any possible attempt at rescue. Such a rescue is rightly considered to be absolutely impossible, and the execution, which is fixed for eight o'clock this morning, will have taken place before these lines are in the hands of the majority of our readers."

  Max continued apparently absorbed in the perusal of the paper until a quarter to eight, not even seeming to hear the muffled note of the bell of St. Sepulchre as it tolled his own death-knell. When the governor and the chaplain entered the cell with the executioner, he looked up, laid the paper down, and rose to his feet
with a slight bow. The governor briefly informed him the purpose they had come for, and without a word he submitted to the process of pinioning.

  As soon as this was completed, the door of the cell was thrown open, and the usual procession was formed, the governor leading the way and the chaplain bringing up the rear, reading the burial service of the English Church. So they went from the cell, down Dead Man's Passage, and out into the yard. On the threshold, Max paused for just an instant, giving a glance up into the sky, in which the clouds hung low, and then one look at the open shed under which the rope was already dangling from the black-painted beam.

  So far he had not opened his lips, but when a fourth of the way between the passage and the scaffold had been traversed, he stopped suddenly, drew a deep breath, and then a long, piercing, screaming cry came from his lips, and rang out high above the murmur of the excited throng outside the prison walls. The next instant, the murmur of the crowd was changed into a roar of amazement, which grew shriller and shriller, until it became one mighty, long-drawn yell of fear.

  Before the cry Max had raised had died away, a huge grey shape dropped swiftly and vertically from the clouds, and passed from the view of the crowd behind the walls of Newgate Yard. Then came the sound of a rapid fusillade of small-arms, and then the air-ship soared up again, with the still-pinioned body of Max dangling in a lasso from one of the ports in the hull. Before the Vengeur had reached the clouds, it had been hauled in. Then she stopped, just under the clouds, and the vast crowd, knowing intuitively what was to come, began to surge to and fro with wild yells and hoarse shouts of terror, for the rescue had been achieved after all, and the moment of revenge had come.

  CHAPTER XXIII.

  REVENGE!

  BRAVO, Raoul! that was the neatest thing you ever did in your life, mon brave, and you'll live to be pretty old before you do anything smarter! Tonnerre! How that canaille yelled when they saw me go up instead of the black flag. I can be as good a friend as I can an enemy, and you shall never want a friend now as long as I'm alive."

  The scene over which the Vengeur floated was even now terrible enough to have shaken the nerves of any but an anarchist or a professional soldier. The vast throngs packed into the streets about Newgate were swaying to and fro in great masses, struggling to force their way out, and, after the manner of crowds possessed by panic, doing everything to frustrate their own object.

  For fully ten minutes the Vengeur circled slowly round over the agonised thousands, as though her captain and crew were enjoying in anticipation the horrors that they were about to add to the frightful scene beneath them. Then Max stopped her a couple of hundred feet over the cross of St. Paul's, with her bow pointing westward, and called down one of the tubes-

  "Ready with the forward guns - one on the end and one on the middle of the street. Let go!"

  There was a sharp, hissing sound as the pent-up air in the breech-chambers forced the projectiles out. Then two bright masses of flame blazed out, followed by the mingled roar of the explosions and the crash of glass as the neighbouring shop windows were blown in.

  Two great ragged gaps were torn in the densely packed masses amidst which the shells fell, as though the earth had burst open beneath their feet, and bodies of men and women were hurled up into the air, mingled with limbs and torn fragments of other bodies, and fell back upon the heads of those who thronged the pavements. Then, in the midst of such a cry of agony and terror as had never reached human ears before, Max took up another tube, and said-

  "Ready with the port stern gun! Send a shell into that lot where the four streets meet!"

  Again the hissing sound came, and the shell burst in the midst of the throng that was packed into the junction of Cheapside and Newgate Street, with the same hideous effects.

  "Starboard bow gun - a couple of shells in the crowd by the church there. Port bow, another under the bridge! Port stern, send a shell at that big building with the pillars in front of it - that's what they call their Royal Exchange - a bourgeois swindling den!"

  His orders were obeyed almost as soon as they were given, and, as each shell struck and burst, the scene of wholesale murder became more and more hideous, for the fearful effects of the projectiles seemed to strike the helpless throngs with paralysis, and all they could do was to sway to and fro, and scream and moan with terror, as though they intuitively knew that they were at the mercy of an enemy from whom there was no escape.

  Some made wild rushes into the shops and houses, and as soon as he saw this, Max ordered the guns to play upon them, loaded with fire-shell, and a few minutes later unquenchable fires were blazing furiously in a score of houses and shops all round the area of slaughter and destruction. Then, like the incarnation of an evil spirit brooding above the scene of indescribable horror, the Vengeur passed slowly over the streets dropping bombs charged with fire-mixture as she went, and when she had completed the circuit, a ring of flame and smoke encircled the black frowning walls of the prison in which everyone had believed by this time Max Renault would have been hanging by the neck.

  "I think that will do for this part of London," he said to himself, as the Vengeur once more floated over the cross of St. Paul's; "and as we have a good many visits to pay to-day, we may as well be off. Ah, yes! that's a happy thought. It's nearly nine o'clock, and the City men will be just coming up from the county to begin their day's swindling. We'll smash up the railway stations first, and begin with Cannon Street. I've owed the South-Eastern a personal grudge for some time."

  He took up the mouthpiece of a tube and called into it-

  "Stern guns there, train on that railway station with the rounded roof. Starboard gun, load with anarchite and fire into the station and at the trains on the bridge. Port gun, load with fire-shell and train on the hotel in front. Let go when you're ready - six shells each."

  Then he took up another tube and gave the order, "Starboard bow gun, blow up that bridge at the bottom of the street. Port bow gun, load with fire-shell and set those two railway stations on fire. Ludgate Hill hasn't been fit for anything but burning for a good many years now," he added to himself, with a low, malicious laugh.

  By the time his orders had been obeyed, Cannon Street Hotel was ablaze in half a dozen places, the station was half wrecked, and the wrecks of a couple of trains were lying scattered over the bridge. The bridge across Ludgate Hill had been blown to pieces, and Ludgate Hill and St. Paul's stations were both on fire. He now turned the Vengeur's prow eastward and brought her to a standstill again over the Bank of England. Then the pitiless order went down the tube-

  "Ready with the bomb tubes!- that's the Bank of England. I don't think they'll do much business to-day. Let go half a dozen pills for the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street to digest, if she can. Ah, that's a sort of run on the Bank they haven't had since the Old Lady started in business! Money will be a trifle tight to-day, I fancy, in the City."

  He kept the Vengeur moving very slowly as the bombs were dropped, so that they might fall in different places. As they crashed down through the roof and burst, jets of flame and smoke rose through the holes they made, showing how terribly they had done their work, and in a few minutes the interior of the treasure-house of England was blazing like a furnace.

  After this came the turn of the General Post Office, and soon the bombs were crashing through the roofs of the great buildings in St. Martin's-le-Grand, setting floor after floor on fire as they burst and scattered their fearful contents through the rooms and passages. Then a shell struck the cupola of St. Paul's and wrecked it at a blow. The great golden cross tottered for a moment and then crashed downwards, smashing a great hole in the dome, and shivering to fragments on the marble pavement of the cathedral.

  Then Max steered the Vengeur at easy speed towards Westminster, still keeping his elevation of three thousand feet, and sending an occasional shell from his guns at random over London to north and south, in sheer wantonness of destruction, for the mere sake of keeping up the panic he had created.

/>   As the Vengeur passed up the river, Max caught sight of the square red-turreted building which he recognised as New Scotland Yard.

  "Ah!" he said, looking down at it through his glasses, "I mustn't forget that. I'll let the national windmill alone for the present, for I may be able to catch some of the hereditary legislators and misrepresentatives of the sovereign people in it a bit later on; but our friends of the police and the Criminal Investigation Department will probably be at home, and pretty busy too, so I'll just stop a minute and leave my card."

  So saying, he stopped the air-ship high above the great square building, and then half a dozen fire-bombs descended on its roof in quick succession. They crashed through it as though it had been made of glass, and presently tongues of flame and wreaths of smoke began shooting and creeping out of the windows. As soon as he saw this, he ran half a mile to the southward, and sent a dozen anarchite shells through the windows to help on the conflagration that his fire-bombs had started.

  "That'll do for you, my friends, I think. Scotland Yard was always a pretty warm corner, but I don't thick it was ever quite as hot as it is now. There are a good many fellows in there who'll never hunt down any more poor devils of anarchists and hand them over to the tender mercies of M. de Paris. Now, where shall we pay the next call? Ah, of course, I have it. It would never do to forget that. We'll go and scare the rooks out of the legal dovecots.