*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77957 ***




                               THE DRAGON

                                   BY
                               M. P. SHIEL

                   AUTHOR OF “THE YELLOW DANGER,” ETC.

                             [Illustration]

             “Where shall wisdom be found? And where is the
                        place of understanding?”


                                 LONDON
                           GRANT RICHARDS LTD.
                               PUBLISHERS


                 PRINTED BY THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED
                                EDINBURGH
                                  1913




                                CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                                           PAGE

      I. PRINCE EDWARD                                                 9
     II. OYONE                                                        29
    III. THE COUP D’ÉTAT                                              37
     IV. AUSTRALIAN GOLD                                              46
      V. THUNDERY WEATHER                                             51
     VI. THE GIRL IN THE CROWD                                        56
    VII. THE “MAURETANIA”                                             65
   VIII. THE TREASURE                                                 78
     IX. FATE OF THE SIX MILLIONS                                     93
      X. THE “ASAHEL”                                                106
     XI. GERMANS IN PALL MALL                                        119
    XII. THE PRINCESS                                                135
   XIII. THE REDLIKE RAY                                             150
    XIV. THE SIX MILLIONS                                            163
     XV. THE HAUNTED SUBMARINE                                       181
    XVI. THE BURIED RAY                                              196
   XVII. THE FLOOD                                                   217
  XVIII. THE RAY RADIATES                                            240
    XIX. THE HOARD OF GOLD                                           259
     XX. THE SEA AND THE AIR                                         276
    XXI. THE DYING LIPS                                              288
   XXII. THE RAY MIGRATES                                            295
  XXIII. INTO WHOSE HANDS?                                           302
   XXIV. THE YELLOW DELUGE                                           307
    XXV. IN THE COMET’S TAIL                                         333




                                CHAPTER I

                              PRINCE EDWARD


It is the eye that begets and conceives: suddenly by the hap and
fecundity of glances which meet a child is summoned from the place of
dumbness, and hears, and quickens, and arises to come among men.

Never a conception of Prince “Teddy,” who contended with Li Ku Yu, had
entered a human head to the moment when Prince John, his father-to-be
(whom the French have called Jean _l’Entêté_, or “the Stubborn”) landed
from the _Dominion_ at Scarboro’ to attend a dance one February night.

He, having just got his “executive curl” as a sub., was sitting among
his new wardroom messmates, looking at the dancing, when he made the
remark: “Set of frights!—not a pretty girl among the lot.”

But just then three passed before his eyes—sisters—all tall, dark, but
the middle one, who was the youngest, the tallest of all; and she came
upon his eyes surprisingly, like some being superior to men.

Before long he was waltzing with her, his eyes tied to her eyes whose
dark-blue anon looked black.

She was Minna Simmons, a doctor’s daughter, already at nineteen a
Bachelor of Science, now “swotting” to get a degree in medicine.

His Royal Highness was amazed at her “cleverness”; and queens suddenly
appeared to him mean in the presence of this imperial creature and more
reigning thing than queens, a lady.

But with that sea-dog bluntness on which he prided himself, he said to
her within a den of Union Jacks and smilax: “You are the very nicest
girl I ever dreamt of!”

On which she shook her head slowly at him, murmuring with an indulgent
smile: “I am not to be commandeered.”

His answer was: “I don’t believe you are: what I should rather choose
would be to offer you my hand in marriage.”

“Ah! the vast paw,” she breathed, her eyes turned white to heaven.

He said: “Suppose I did so, what would you say to it?”

“I am sorry, Sir,” she answered: “I should say no.”

“We will see about that,” muttered John _l’Entêté_.

And before midnight he had got from her a promise of correspondence in
six months’ time—on general topics.

Within two he began to write frequently; within three he appeared
suddenly at The Priory (her house), vowing that he would go mad; he
kept telephoning across Britain; and after six months she began to
answer his letters, as promised.

He had got his second stripe when he received from her at Shotley this:

    “My sisters, whose judgment is considered good, urge it upon
    me that that may well turn to the public advantage, if I am
    given the honour to unite my mother’s blood with your Royal
    Highness’; and though I pity _you_, Sir, for the quite hot
    water which this business must bring you into, I will now
    profess myself ready to act as your Royal Highness directs....
    Your Royal Highness divines that I could not long be kept a
    back-stairs consort.... If centuries of custom attempt to
    suppress me, I think it is the custom that will see itself
    suppressed.... God only grant that I may be some good, if it is
    to be so....”

Count three months thence, England is under snow—it is seven days
before Christmas—when from him at Balmoral comes to her: “I am now
taking car to come....”

She locked herself into her room then, to stare....

Afterwards she opened a steel casket by knobs that revolved to
cypher-numbers, to get from it the photograph of a young man in
flannels, with which she sat again; and, gazing at it, presently said
to it: “Dear, it is no good, it can’t be helped—unless I turn tail, and
don’t play the game. I was to be one of the mother-women, you see, not
one of the wife-women—God’s will be done.”

Now tears filled her lids, her lip quivered: she held the photograph
tenderly pressed to her face, her eyes closed; but then with a gasp of
anger and anguish dashed it off her into the fire.

Six months later she was the Queen of the Britains and Empress of
India; and her “bowing-manner” was considered good.

But from the first her reign was a troubled reign.

Here at home she was not universally adored. That wit of her tongue
was too swift and withering. Her talk, if always distinguished, was
always vigorously vernacular, dashed anon with a sort of slang, and
anon, for all her moral severity, with the _risqué_—that which came
to her tongue’s tip out it flew, like new knives flying. Then, too,
no daughter of a hundred kings was ever so jealous a stickler for the
intricacies of ritual. She pestered the Cabinet. The anger of her
glance became a social apprehension, and her censorship of morals
extended to males. Lords, grooms, equerries, had to be Bayards! and,
like Victoria, she looked coldly upon widows who remarried.

As to the foreign Royalties, the home aristocracy, who, for a
fortnight, had a thought of patronising her, they were taught in
torrents of lava-torments that she was twice the sovereign of subjects,
and once the sovereign of sovereigns. If a dowager was proud of
monkey-ancestry, be sure her sin would find her out, and a tongue
like the Avenging Angel’s edge would singe her. Some day Her Majesty
would manage to put to her some simple question in biology or physics,
and then was lost in horror at the Hottentot ignorance of European
women with coronets on their foreheads. But if all this caused her
domineering forehead, her tongue, and the play of her eyes to become a
terror in the land, it did not tend to make her idolised.

But nothing much troubled her but her son, she truly a “mother-woman,”
every day finding time to be with him; and to him the privilege of her
presence was ever more fascinating than his toy-submarine.

Seldom a day but she spoke to him of Germany growing, of China
changing. “The Chinese are pretty shrewd, Teddy,” she said in showing
him a lump of white jade, sent her by the Dowager Empress, one day
at Windsor: “the only man who can outwit a Jew in business is a
Chinaman—don’t forget. And, then, there are so many of them! How many?”

“Four hundred and ten millions, mother,” the Prince promptly responded.

“Just think—more than all Europe. God wanted them to be so many: and
there they _are_. But nobody quite knows why!”

“Teddy” meditated the matter; and he said: “Mother, why don’t all the
countries make themselves into one under one King? Save such a mass of
energy! How absurd for Berks to set up as a separate kingdom, and Bucks
as another——”

“But of what nation would that one King be?”

“English, I suppose.”

“His name ‘_Teddy_’?”

“Teddy” blushed under her roguish ogle, and she, seeing him in
distress, came to his rescue, saying, “Dear, you will deserve to
be such a King: your mind is large enough. And don’t think that I
disagree, for I quite see that all sorrow is due to that folly of
nations and men in calling bits of an earth their ‘own.’ When nations
do it, the result is wars, and all this cost of armaments; when
individuals do it, the result is all the failure and perplexity and
bread of tears that we see men eat. But if one King owned it all for
everybody, and hired out bits, then we might see some fun, and soon
would be flying to the moon! That what you meant?” The boy was gazing
into her great flamboyant eyes with such adoration, that it made her
laugh, and dip a kiss inside his sailor collar.

But her plans for him were beset by obstacles. There was King John
_l’Entêté_, for one, to be reckoned with; as one morning when she
exclaimed: “I am his mother!” pacing a room of the Winter Palace at
Petersburg; to which His Majesty answered: “Your Majesty speaks as if a
father was of no account!”

“Oh, of course, a father, too,” she said—“though fathers are only a
modern development, mind! Formerly there were no fathers, only mothers.”

The King fingered his beard, saying with his touch of pompousness:
“Indeed! But Your Majesty fails to mention at what precise period of
the world’s history this innocent condition of things prevailed.”

“It prevails still!—among bees, for instance.”

“This is strange,” said the King.

“Ah!” said the Queen.

“But what have bees to do with the matter?” asked His Majesty: “the
point is, that Your Majesty wishes to deprive the Prince of learning
what all gentlemen learn——”

“Oh, I do! since a decent boy hasn’t _the time_ to: and if the point of
that boy’s intellect be soppyfied and softened by learning six hundred
words of Greek—if he becomes the least bit like any of them—I shall go
mad, I think, I _couldn’t_ stand it. What I want him to learn is that
about bees—God’s facts—infinitely Divine, awful, lovely, romantic,
religious, significant, educating. But, if a boy learns that it pleases
some people to call a boy a ‘_pais_,’ or a ‘_garçon_,’ does _that_ give
him to think and adore? Oh, Your Majesty knows very little Greek, and I
know lots—through no fault of my own, God knows—and some other things,
too—can’t you listen to me?”

“But everyone differs from Your Majesty!”

“Except thinkers,” she said, almost crying, “and, oh, isn’t that hard
that the brightness of the wise should be for ever overborne by the
dullness of the stupid?”

That break of tears in her voice, her throbbing throat, touched His
Majesty. Her figure, moreover, as she roamed the room, with that glory
of her gallant grand eyes aglow, was very magnetic, so that the King
lowered his lids a little, let slip a look at her hips, lowered them,
stole a look, then said: “Well, I only hope Your Majesty’s plans won’t
compromise the Throne’s popularity.”

“No”—in a gentler tone, touching his shoulder—“people will understand.”

“But will they?” he asked: “I pride myself upon my knowledge of the
people—or does Your Majesty imagine yourself so popular a monarch as I
am?”

She smiled down now upon him. “No, I don’t dispute that with you. _You_
have the popularity, but, oh, let _me_ have Teddy.”

And in the end she managed: the Prince went to Brockweir.

Now, already at Brockweir was Li Ku, called “Sky-Blue” (since he was
a Celestial!) son of a member of the Min Cheng Pu (Home Office); and
nine days after the Prince’s arrival, he slapped Li Ku across the face.
Whereupon a formal fight.

It was toward the end of lunch-time, and a small boy, flying with
tidings toward the Lower School, panted, “Prince and Sky-Blue—fight!”
to one Richard Chinnery, sitting on the Fourth Form steps, intent upon
winding primary wire round a bobbin; and Chinnery called after: “What’s
the row?”

“Caught Sky-Blue trephining cat not properly anæsthetised!”—he was gone.

Whereupon Chinnery dashed off to the shed down in the hollow, and made
his way through a throng that already had no little respect for him,
to see the champions already stripped—like David and Goliath, Sky-Blue
being a tall strip of yellow, six months the elder.

But there was little fun; and after the third lead-off Chinnery,
muttering, “It’s a butchery,” dashed back to his induction coil. The
Royal combatant, in fact, had all the art, and presently muttering,
“Oh, well, doesn’t matter,” put on his jacket.

It was over, then? Li Ku Yu sat on the shed-bench, his legs under
him—impossible to guess if he was humbled, if he was ratty inside, he
smiling as ever his insolent smile, chin up—huge-headed, tough as
orange-skin, breezy, brazen, a cool blade, looking ready to wink.

He smiled ever; but seldom laughed, except on Saturdays—when he was
younger—when he would stand in the town’s electric shed watching the
commutators spinning asleep, six revolutions a second; and a moment
would come when that depth of insolence would be riven by a little
giggle—a giggle of glee and victory at the trickiness of man and
the admission of God; and he laughed one Tuesday when a crusher was
crushing up the old school-chapel bricks, when, after gazing many
minutes at the engine jigging, the glee digged him, and he giggled.

“But there’s something wrong about that orange lately,” said Chinnery
after six months: “he has changed his Saturday-habits.”

The Prince was “doing arsenic”—a Wednesday afternoon when he
did the metals; and Chinnery, whose drawer was next to his, was
under instructions to show him his way about in analysis—Chinnery
two years the elder, and already his young head was a garden of
consciousness—tall—hollow-chested ... gentle....

“Know that man they call Spider?” he asked—“retired poacher and
gaol-bird—cottage back of the Chasewood. I go up there to get
rock-specimens, and twice I’ve spied Sky-Blue and Spider in the dell
there. Deighton wouldn’t like it, though Sky-Blue’s a Steer.”

(“Steers” were town-boys, and Dr Deighton the Head-Master—a bearded
Sea-King, blushing rich with brandy, his gown dropping down his right
shoulder, the howl of a cow in him, heart-harrowing, memorable, a
wrangler—“mathematics”—not perhaps “learned,” but the very best of
earth’s teachers.)

“What would Sky-Blue be doing at Spider’s?” the Prince asked.

“Not sure, but you look out: for if you two meet in serious battle, you
kill each other. My idea is that Sky-Blue is taking lessons in boxing
from Spider.”

“Free country—Or the attraction may be Spider’s gal.”

“Ah, don’t underestimate my Sky-Blue,” Chinnery said: “that’s no
ordinary orange. I’ll swear that he hasn’t wasted five minutes since
he was nine—I know him, for I have some attraction for him apparently,
and he comes to watch me messing about up in that library alcove. Dumb
as a mummy! But one afternoon he began to gas, and, Ted-of-the-Throne,
I never knew speech so fascinating. The things that saffron sack of
thoughts vomited out of his chasm! you’d hardly believe.”

“Oh, aye, I guess,” muttered the Prince, holding up a precipitate to
squint at.

“Said that white people are a freak! ‘like white mice,’ not a permanent
type; hence we produce a shudder in the yellow breast. And you know
that old sixpenny atlas which is his Bible—he produced that to show me
that Europe and Asia are just like twins in structure; and he calls the
two islands, England and Japan, the negative and positive terminals of
a cell, the continents being the plates, Europe the white zinc, Asia
the yellow copper.”

“Scott, that’s gas,” “Teddy” said.

“Anyway, an intellect above Spider’s gal.”

“Oh, aye, I think I know.”

“Yes, and above gals diviner far than Spider’s! Look here—don’t tell
anybody——” Chinnery produced from his drawer a curious document, a
folio of silk-paper on a stick of ivory round which the folio rolled,
sending an aroma of roses into that sulphuretted stench of the room.

“This must have dropped out of Sky-Blue’s pocket when he snatched
out Asia to show me, and I confiscated it as contraband. Passion,
my boy.... Ever seen one Oyone motoring in the town? Not? Then you
never beheld human beauty. Visits at my cousins, the Santleys—oh,
Oyone, would that I had never beheld the phiz and evil peeper of
thee! A half-caste—her father a P. & O. ship’s-surgeon—Irish—mother
a geisha-girl of Nagasaki. How Oyone ever got into a Wesleyan
mission-school at Tientsin I can’t say, but she did, then fell in with
Sky-Blue’s present guardian, A-lu-te.—Surely you have seen A-lu-te
somewhere? Little old woman like a monkey?”

Teddy said no.

“But you know where Sky-Blue lives?”

“Isn’t it that mansion with gables up on the hill?”

“That’s it. But A-lu-te and Oyone are mostly at Regent’s Park, where
they have to be for the intrigues. Talk of intrigues! A-lu-te,
it seems, was a conspirator, and was banished with Oyone to ‘the
post-roads’; and now for Oyone and A-lu-te the puzzle is, so to
intrigue as to get back again to the whisperings and peepings of
Court-life. As to Oyone—pretty. Blessed are your eyes that have not
seen her: some day you may, and then over goes the blooming Throne.
Her age, though, is rather in advance of the Heir-apparent’s:
seventeen!—twenty-seven she will never see—assassinated, beheaded
perhaps, long ere then: tragedy sleeps in those ravishing peepers.
But see Sky-Blue’s height above Spider’s ‘gal’: he disdains Venus.
Here’s her scroll to him; unroll. Observe the neat, crude, school-girl
writing.”

    “Li Ku Yu, Her Excellency asks about your health, and wishes
    you well.

    “It is now five weeks since she or I have seen you; and your
    writing is like a miser’s kindnesses.

    “Li Ku Yu, persons are born and flung up into the sun’s light
    not when or where they choose. From China round to America
    and back, life in its tossings, like a fish which is caught
    and tosses, flings this one up in one generation, and that
    one up in another, and the rubbings together of persons is as
    was ordained. Each is sent to his own generation, to rub with
    it, so that everything may be as was ordained with life; and
    when one generation is buried, the sun shines on brightly on
    another. You, Li Ku Yu, and I, Oyone Umé, have been flung up in
    the same generation, and been flung together, to rub.

    “It is a sin in life that you are ice and iron to me! Others
    tend to me, but not I to them; I to you, but not you to me? You
    are ice, but I will make you bubble; and iron, but I will make
    you flow.

    “I have the leprosy for you, Li Ku Yu. I think you are like
    Indian pansupari of areca-nut, and like chunam with spices
    rolled up in a betel leaf.

    “Li Ku Yu, when someone speaks of the end of your college-term,
    this makes me pale, but afterwards in my chamber my little body
    dances at this.

    “I have the hope that you are in health, and not troubling your
    brow always about studies.

    “My prayer is that you write to me separately and comfortingly,
    for my tongue suffers thirst in this furnace.

    “When I think of you, Li Ku Yu, I stretch myself and kiss the
    wind. _Sayonara!_

                                                        “Oyone.”

“Oh, the miserable...!” muttered Teddy, with a little flush.

“Yes,” said Chinnery, “but the point is, that Sky-Blue is ‘ice and
iron’ to _her_—the nymph of nymphs, earth’s thickest thimbleful of
intense liqueur—compared with whom Spider’s han’some gal is a gross
frog squatted, a goggling gecko of the rocks. Sky-Blue has other
business with Spider.”

But Chinnery’s warning came too soon, and was forgotten in a month. In
eighteen nothing had happened.

Meantime, the Prince did well with his eyes and fingers. On the
football field, moreover, everything scattered before his passionate
impetuosity: for which alone, and then for his decent way, he was well
loved. If a boy new to that most anxiously _élite_ “schoolboy spot”
“Highnessed” him, he’d say, “My name’s Teddy Reeks to you, kid”: and
only one boy, who never forgot, saw his chin lift with a chilling
hauteur. It was an amusing thing at Brockweir that after a year many
were to be found imitating his nimble way of lifting his toes in
stepping, his brisk and restless little roll, his trick of saying
“Scott!”

He had no resemblance to the men of the House of Hanover—his face open
as a summer’s day, quite English in expression, fair like a face of
milk-and-pink in a picture, his eyes light like a Norfolk sky: no weak
line, from whatever angle one glanced. Taller than his father: shorter
than his mother; slightly bow-legged.

He had been at Brockweir eighteen months when one day—as if the Star
Venus should descend to earth—the Queen descended upon Brockweir. It
was well with “Teddy” that day, and well with all: holiday! throats
hoarse with hurrahs! a Teddy carried shoulder high.

Using that day as a date, we count six months to the date when Li Ku
Yu received an order to return to China. That was on a Thursday in the
Autumn term.

The next Saturday afternoon being fine, the Prince was permitted to
take part in a paper-chase—Brockweir being great on running; several of
its lads could range a country-side like stags; and none surpassed the
Prince in this.

He was in a solitary spot on an estate named Penryth, rather separated
from “the hounds,” running down a steep field through sheep toward the
river tow-path, when he heard a calling: “Ho! Hi! Help!”—seeming to
proceed from a chapel-of-ease which stands half-way down the field—a
little ruin no bigger than a room—roofless—just four walls, two with
gable-ends, and some Gothic window-slits.

A wall of loose stones runs round it, enclosing a bit of ground crammed
with bracken (in the summer); so the Prince vaulted the wall, and ran
to see what the matter was.

He looked in; and there within stood Li Ku Yu.

But he did not at once recognise Sky-Blue!—a Sky-Blue arrayed in
Oriental raiment, as for a ceremony! The Prince wondered whether the
pigtail had grown in a day; but it was a silken _queue_ platted on, as
many upper-class Chinese wear them.

And the significance was this: that it was China there to interview
Europe.

“Well?” said the Prince.

Li Ku Yu made no reply.

“Did you call out ‘help’?”

Li Ku Yu was mute. They looked at each other—well-grown lads now, the
Prince in the Upper Fifth, Li Ku Yu the head of the Sixth, but for
Chinnery, who lingered on several terms after Brockweir ceased to have
anything to teach him.

All at once Li Ku Yu, with a moan, threw his arm round the Prince’s
neck, and began to rub his cheek on the Prince’s cheek, up and down,
moaning, like a lover moaning for love.

The other, very astonished, tried to draw back, saying: “I say, what’s
all this?” But even as he asked, he knew: knew that he would never
forget that day.

The Prince wrenched himself spinning from that venomous affection; and
he said sharply: “Hurry up! What’s it all about?”

Li Ku Yu was smiling: but in the expression of his eyes was something
very terribly tense and strained, atrociously cruel and ferocious; the
eye-whites looking bloodshot.

Now at last he spoke, in that strange voice of his—foreign as an
animal’s from another planet.

“You were unwise to strike me, Prince.”

“Who? When? Years ago? Got that in you still, have you?”

“_Cluck!_ a minute ago to me.”

“So it’s a fight, is it? But stay—let me warn you; the boys and men
of this land can’t be conquered. You may kill and mince them, but you
won’t see them strike their flag. Are you prepared for all that? In for
bloodshed, and a fight to the finish?”

He was now eyeing the Chinese loweringly under the eyes, his tones, as
he spoke, more and more trilling with emotion: in the back of his head
a question as to his mother—how she would wish him to act now.

Li Ku Yu, with one finger out, commenced to lecture: “‘The boys and
men of this land’? _Cluck!_ poor stuff. Done nothing great. The
steam-engines they use? Papin! Electricity? the Voltas of Italy!
Explosion motors? the French! Guns, navigation? the Chinese! Chemistry?
a French science! The Saxon a gross dog—obedient! a slave: as you
English aristocrats know with secret glee. William the Conqueror
conquered them by one single battle. It took his sons three hundred
years to conquer the Scotch, the Welsh. Not conquered the Irish yet.
Gross dogs. But for the Celts around who have mixed blood, England
still a fifth-rate state. As it is, great in nothing! only big.
Half-discovered Uranus; invented boxing, roast beef: and I now about
to teach their King’s son the secrets of boxing, and of raw beef. Even
their robbing-career done now: now their turn to be robbed from. See if
Japan doesn’t have Australia—Canada! and be not surprised if before you
die you catch sight of the saffron Dragon-flag of the Manchus flapping
from the staff atop of your Parliament-house. I say this because I
happen——”

“Make haste finish!” said the Prince, harsh and sharp.

“Yes, proud, I know!—though not of what——”

“Of being a white boy!”

“I proud of my head! though I should not wish the skin over it to be
sickly, faded. White? the colour of decay!—old hair—the louse——”

“And yellow of death, of corruption, cholera, and tropical
rottenness”—each speaking now with a bitterness that hissed, their
faces leaning toward each other.

“Hence English hair yellow!” said Li Ku Yu: “I have seen old Manchu
women’s hair turn yellow, too, like other plants in Autumn, their
skins bleach. Yet the fair races not like that through age—freak of
nature! You are proud of your ancestry: but your father’s line? a fly’s
lifetime to mine! As to your mother, she is only——

“_Slave!_”—Lucifer said it, and instantaneously with that lightning of
his eye broke the bolt of his knuckles upon the other’s nose.

Li Ku Yu staggered, licking his blood.

He fell upon an altar-step near the east end that divided the stone
floor into an upper and lower level; and, sitting there, he very
deliberately took off slippers, hat, _bluse_—threw them into grass
and bracken that grew thicker along the rims than in the middle, the
Prince, too, throwing away cap and jacket; and he stood waiting with
his fists tight, high-strung, smiling, white.

All at once Li Ku Yu, with a slight cry, was up; and without another
syllable the battle began.

The Prince’s aim was mainly the eye; the Chinese aim mainly the heart.

Whenever the Prince led off with the left, Li Ku Yu would parry,
and spin the Prince round by pressure on the Prince’s left; then
cross-counter with a sounding pound in the unprotected right ribs—he
having at this time more science than the other; but perhaps less art.

With every blow that he planted—with every blow that he received—Li Ku
Yu let out a slight cry, a little scream of laughter.

But the floor was uneven, slippery—made mainly of grave-slabs,
grass-grown and dislocated—and thrice Li Ku Yu, though in his socks,
flew staggering; the Prince’s feet, on the contrary, were his strong
point, his two legs advancing and retreating like one, at a constant
angle; and, in attacking, he advanced as if taller grown, with quite a
light and dominant step, impending upon his enemy.

But both had pretty soon enough of it to please them, the flush and fun
of the thing finished; and now they found themselves with the burden
of its earnest on their backs, Li Ku’s nose now a rotten apple, the
Prince in considerable distress for breath, trickling blue blood under
the right eye, both fists of both all swollen and deformed. And now the
consciousness fell heavily upon their young hearts that this was only
the beginning, the grimness of the game yet to come; nor was there any
hope of rescue in that lonely place.

Li Ku Yu sent such a left-hander into the right side of the Prince’s
neck, that the Prince was driven to stand inactive several seconds, his
back against the west wall, his mouth gaping, Li Ku, meantime, stooping
before him in a species of crouch, just able to get out the gasp: “You
done now?”

At this question, an attempt at laughter distorted the Prince’s lips an
instant, as he lifted his foot and kicked the Chinese fiercely on the
shin.

Whereupon Li Ku Yu lost temper and form; and from that second the
battle degenerated wretchedly into a horror of random rancours.

Like a cat Li Ku Yu was in the air with a cry, abandoning now the
restraints of the art taught him by “Spider,” and backsliding to the
simple instincts of nature.

He got all his ten claws riveted on the Prince’s neck, and pressed;
but at the same time the Prince contrived to get the pigtail round Li
Ku’s throat, and pulled: a sound like a creaking proceeding out of both
their crowded throats; and their faces went sombre, as under the shade
of the cloud of death.

And when presently the pigtail came away from the other’s head, the
Prince realised that it was an ill case now with him. The face before
him had grown bony somehow, ugly to indelicacy in the nakedness of its
lust; no chance of compassion there.

But the outstanding fact of the battle to a looker-on would have been
this—that in every extremity the young Prince did not fail to find a
way out, contriving every time to skip nimbly out of his fix, his knee
in this case saving him, he kicking up with it so lucky a blow, that Li
Ku Yu fell away convulsed, and fled, looking backward, as he fled, with
an expression of fright in his eyes.

The Prince stumbled after, lashing feebly at him with the pigtail,
laughing with distorted lips—feeble, but still dominant; and when Li
Ku, flying east, came to the altar-step, he was too far gone to lift
his foot enough, and, stumbling, tumbled in a lump. The Prince lashed
him once with the pigtail, gasping at him: “Had enough?”

There was no answer; and he dropped back to the west wall, upon which
he propped his back, thankful enough for the respite and space to draw
his breath in, wondering if it was ended, or when it would end, or if
no rescue would spring up out of those grassy graves to deliver two
poor lads entangled there in the trap of their natures and fate.

And during some moments only the rasping drone of the two throats
broke the stillness, and the prattle of a wren tripping on the west
window-sill, and distant bleatings of sheep feeding in the field.
Till, all at once, with a little cry of laughter Li Ku Yu was up from
the step to dash himself desperately afresh upon the adversary.

After three blows only, they closed to a wrestle, the Oriental hugging
in a strangling grasp of his right arm, while his left fingers got into
the Prince’s shirt-collar, which he first dragged to rags, and then the
vest. Meantime, though, he was being severely kicked and beaten, and
suddenly experienced a cuff so deep in the left ear, as set his cranium
breaking out into cricket-song.

Again he fell away; again in an impulse of panic he ran; and again the
Prince followed laughing. Past the step they pelted, on to the east
wall, where Li Ku made a leap to catch the sill of the chancel-window,
as if to escape that way—though the window was obviously far too narrow
for a body to pass through. His first try failed, but by his second
he contrived to catch the sill; and there hung stretched. Instantly,
though, the Prince was dragging at a leg, gasping again: “Had enough
now?” and when Li Ku Yu kicked, the Prince grasped at him and dragged
him down.

Li Ku Yu dropped....

But the instant he dropped, he again let slip his rollick cry of fight,
and attacked with such a cat-o’-mountain franticness, that in the
tempest of it the Prince had to retreat rapidly, panting as if to die;
and, flying backward, his face to the foe, he stumbled on coming to the
step, and slapped down flat. Li Ku Yu fell over him.

An Oriental grotesque in bronze now glared through that stare of the
Orient as it rode its overthrown foe. The Chinese rubbed his cheek on
the Prince’s, and kissed him, even as he banged upon the battered face,
panting, “You done now?” and he dragged off the last of the rags from
the already naked breast, gasping: “Were you _wise_ to strike Li Ku
Yu?” and he grabbed a handful of grass and bracken to cram into the
other’s throat, panting, as he crammed it: “You done now?” and he spat
his foam over the other’s face, and licked the other’s lips, and bit
bestially with his teeth, and knocked at the gates of the dead under
the grave-slab with the prostrate skull, asking: “Were you _wise_ to
strike Li?”

But his undoing was in the twinkling of an eye....

The Prince, with a twist of the wrist, swift as the swift’s wing,
clapped a sprig of nettle that he had grasped upon those eyeballs over
him, and, in the instant of Li Ku Yu’s confusion, was free.

He had fallen with one of his heels on the upper level of the step; he
put up the other on it; and winning himself swiftly footward, came up
with his face between Li Ku Yu’s legs, who clapped his legs together,
but too late.

And as Li Ku Yu himself was in the act of scrambling upright, he
staggered down again upon his palms—the pigtail having been twisted
with a dazzling alacrity round and round his ankles.

Long before it had dropped just there, and the Prince, on rising, had
spied it. A little push behind sent the entangled Chinaman flat. The
Prince sprang at him, and rapidly had the pigtail tied tight.

“Had enough?” he panted, as he himself dropped upon the platform.

“_Oh!!_”—as he dropped, a little cry was at the door yonder to the
west, a young lady’s face there.... The Prince rose on his elbow,
blushing....

A minute’s use of her eyes, and she uttered a sound of compunction,
then came with decision to undo the pigtail, glancing daggers at the
Prince.

Li Ku Yu, loosed, got up to stagger away against the north wall: and
the three looked at one another.

“Oh, how could you!”—to the Prince.

The Prince glanced up to shake at her his abandoned brow, murmuring:
“Not my fault.”

At this point Li Ku Yu staggered from that wall to the opposite where
his slippers and things were, gathered them, leant aside to whisper the
Prince, “Not finished, Prince,” then bowed, _o’jiji_, to the girl and
staggered away out, his things on his arm.

“But where is he going?” the girl asked: “he can hardly walk.”

“He doesn’t live far,” the Prince mourned despondently.

“And you?”

“I am at the College.”

“College?... Well, it is your own fault if I took you for a plough-boy.”

“It wasn’t my fault. I heard a cry of ‘help!’ and it was he waiting to
attack me. I couldn’t give in—forgive me for offending your eyes——”

She seemed to him an angel sent to rescue him and Li Ku Yu.

“I will, then,” she said, “since that was how it was.”

At which sympathy the Prince covered his eyes and began to
cry—“swing-of-the-pendulum” to softness after the grimness and tension
of the fight.

“Never mind,” she said to him, “it’s over now; and you did get him
nicely tied up in the end, didn’t you?”

Now her lips split in a smile, and he, peeping between his fingers,
felt that he had never seen anything so neat and nice, like fine white
linens.

“Well, better come with me,” she said, “let’s see what can be done”;
and he followed her, picking up jacket and cap—through bracken—over a
slab-stile—through fifteen yards of scrub to a marshy spot with rocks
to step on, and so to the river-brink.

There is a flat spot just there—a break in the lines of cliff thick
with timber that rise on both sides of the Wye; and there in the little
bay a boat lay, made fast to a bunch of bulrushes.

“It is well that I got out,” she said over her shoulder: “something
seemed to say to me: ‘have a look at that little church’—and I went.
Otherwise, how would you have got back to the College—and what _will_
they say to you?”

“I’m afraid poor Dr Deighton will be wishing himself dead,” he said
half to himself: “but not his fault, not anyone’s.”

She thought that that would be excessive of Dr Deighton to wish himself
_dead_—for the thought did not happen to crop up in her mind that this
might possibly be the Prince: else she might have been saved the pangs
of her fate.

When he had sat opposite her, she pulled in the rope, and the tide,
just turning, bore them slowly up-stream, while she worked away at
wiping his wounds with her wetted handkerchief, the quick female-organs
of her fancy immediately conceiving him a warrior-knight of old,
victorious, though sore wounded.

He, meantime, kept his eyes on her face. “How is it I never saw you
before? belong to Brockweir?”

“Nottingham!—spending three weeks with a school-friend.”

“Brockweir school?”

“No, we’re Cheltenham College girls.”

“Like Brockweir?”

“Anywhere near the sea I love. It is in me, I suppose.”

“How’s that?”

“A sea-faring lot. One of my grandfathers was a Chief Coastguardsman,
the other a mercantile-marine captain; and _his_ grandfather—if you
can conceive a grandfather’s grandfather—fought at Trafalgar. Irish
Paddies. And my father’s a Sergeant-Major of Marines, not to mention a
cousin who’s a naval Boy-Telegraphist—so you see.”

His eyes dwelt on her pointed soft face, smooth-rounded like good
sculpture, her pointed hat of black velvet half hiding her globe of
gold-hair, her ring not costly, her brooch cheap. But with those eyes
she had no need of sapphires, eyes that shrank and reproached with a
shy and roguish guile. And she soothed his wounds with touches soft as
fondness itself. He wished that a compelling impulse would push her to
put her lips on them, like a young mother, and make them well.

“Better now?”

“Skull all cracked to atoms apparently,” he answered: “but that’s
excellent of you—oh, thanks. Pansy-petal fingers. You—should tell your
name.”

“Bayley.”

“That’s the unchristian one.”

“Eulalia, then.”

“Aged sixteen and seven months,” he said.

“Just! You can hit other things beside eyes, can’t you? And _yours_?”

“Mine’s—Edward Reeks.”

“Like the Prince!... Oh, I should so like to see him before I go, to
say that I have! Tell me—do you see him every day?”

“Why, yes.”

“They say that he’s not at all like ordinary princes—lots of brains and
character. Is that so? And handsome——”

“Then, _I_ am: for they say I am like him—or was. But I think I could
procure you a sight of him—let me see—next Saturday, if you meet me in
there by the little church. How would that do?”

His heart sank guiltily, asking it, his voice lowered: for the standard
of conduct was high at home; and he had been brought up with two
facts constantly hammered into his skull: that his father had married
a subject; and that his father’s son never, never must, since human
nature could not stand it twice.

He knew that his mother, if there to hear that rendezvous, would have
been furious. Yet he could not help saying “Well?” when the girl turned
her face toward the cliffs.

“It is getting cold for boating,” Eulalia said, with her begging eyes.

“Still—could you not?”

Maiden meditation.

“I’ll see if I can possibly see my way.”

“Now, decent of you!”

The turrets of the College appeared through trees beyond a bend.




                               CHAPTER II

                                  OYONE


Three days after the battle Li Ku Yu departed; for, though the Prince
declined to tell how he had got his injuries, the whole thing had
been anxiously probed to the bottom. Indeed, Li Ku’s absence from
the College, and his blotched body, told their own story. There had
followed a solemn interview between Dr Deighton and him up at the
Chinese mansion on the hill: which was the end of the spot of yellow at
Brockweir.

This was no inconvenience to Li Ku Yu, who had taken care to restrain
his craving for revenge until his father had summoned him home; but
the fact of expulsion rankled. He sent by Chinnery one bitter line
of writing to the Prince: “You will need to wake up early in the
mornings.” Then he went.

But it was not until after Christmas that he started for the East.
Meantime, he lived at the back of the Regent’s Park house in an
outhouse called the Garden House—a square structure with Norman windows
and three steps in a jungle of shrubbery, all shut in by a tall wall.

Here he insolently smiled and toiled: and during those months passed
through a cruel ordeal of self-torture. The self-discipline of
Spartans, of Samurai, was child’s play to his then: no fire throughout
that hard winter, day after day neither food nor sleep.

When he deigned to eat, his teeth would grind a little raw rice, raw
gristle, or grass; when he slept it was out on the snow in the blue
cotton dress of peasants.

All which did not please his own Oyone, the Irish-Japanese. “But you
must soon be dead!” she would lament.

“If I let you stay with me, Oyone,” answered Li Ku Yu, “you must not be
a Tu Mu, who constantly spoke at the wrong moment.”

On which she tossed her body away—a body entangled in three
gold-spotted tree-snakes, seeming as boneless as the snakes; then
lay silent on her face, light-looking and lithe as a withe, her eyes
dwelling on him where he squatted on the floor, reading Chesney’s
“Military Prussia.”

Anon she shivered at a whistling of wintry winds without; and anon
he absently poked his finger at her hair, stuck thick with jewelled
_kanzachis_. Clearly, her presence pleased him in some way. In fact,
Chinnery’s statements about her were hardly an exaggeration, for she
was of a strange and ravishing charm.

The gloaming deepened to bleak evening, until the gold god Fo only
dimly glimmered on his chair of jade; and presently a head peeped in
between the door-hangings, making Oyone wriggle quickly footward from
Li Ku—under the head-dress (wide to the shoulders!) being a little
woman shimmering in rich silks on Manchu shoe-heels inches high—Li
Ku’s guardian, an exile of the Yehonala clan, named A-lu-te; and she
murmured unconcernedly in Mandarin Manchu: “It is the hour of the cock;
shun the passions, you children”—and vanished.

“No fear of passions,” thought the frozen Oyone with a pout. And she
put her face sideward with a coaxing smile, saying: “Shall I light the
lanterns? You strain the sense of sight.”

“To train and test it.”

“But why will you kill yourself?”

Li Ku Yu now put down the book, to sit chin up, smiling his smile of
triumph, like a yellow rock that sublimely smiles—clean-cut and clear,
sleek and keen—hairless but for the clean clear snake of his pigtail,
coarsely yellow, looking a ’cute blade, made for business with men.
“Kill? Tra-lar! It is to keep myself and all us yellow folk alive that
I am bathed with the rain, and combed with the wind. Or are you not
sure that you are doomed, unless a deliverer comes for you?”

“Yes, I have always thought this,” replied Oyone, springing upward
like a spring to sit by him: “though I have never understood why the
Fan-quei” (foreign devils) “cannot let us be.”

“Can’t help! Nature likes all-of-one-kind!—as the strongest weed in
a field either kills or marries the rest. So, in time, one universal
world-race—mixed—ruby-coloured—prettier and better than any at present.
But, before that, we to eat the flesh of half the whites—or they ours.
Be glad if I lie on brambles and eat bitterness”—his speech clean-cut
like his skull: short, choppy: no word wasted.

“But you—so young——” she muttered.

“_Cluck!_ the foolishness of people. They think that Li Hung Chang or
Gladstone at seventy can be as wise as a child of sixteen. No science.
But, even so, can they not guess that when an animal’s knee has
stiffened, arteries hardened, nobler stuff of heart and liver become
tough with spread of fibrous tissue, the brain cannot remain intact
from all that havoc? Fact is, his brain is in the very same state as
his hair, his insight as his sight. Only the young of use, Oyone.”

“I know that, too,” said Oyone, “and I intend when I am thirty to
commit suicide. And because it is so, therefore the young should love,
for they can spend their time in nothing that is so good as love.”

“_Cluck!_ so you pretend to think: but love not nearly so good as
a hero’s self-satisfaction. Yet I love you, Oyone: quick-witted—a
squirrel! and though you squint—for your left eye is wider——”

Quick like quicksilver she caught his arm, twisting to stare into his
eyes with a wily smile. “Do you not like them like that?”

“Maybe: for Nature has turned your very defects into traps to kidnap;
still——”

“Oh, I am not vain,” muttered Oyone, kissing one of her snakes: “I know
that I am not too ugly: but all we Japanese with barbarian fathers have
beauty.”

“Who are barbarian? Your mother! A barbarian nation? one that thinks
the thoughts of dead men. A civilised? one that thinks the thoughts of
men not born. Russia, England, Spain, yes—more or less barbarian for
the moment: not France, Germany much; all infected with Christianity;
but none half so barbarian as China. China? land of pundits, bandits,
salt-smugglers, pirates, who all spend their pious lives in making
quotations from dead apes. Now, a Statesman can do much with a bandit;
but a pundit? _Cluck!_ send him down to the Halls of Hades to muse
and quote beside the Nine Springs. Which is how I intend to begin in
China—decapitations!—one-two-three. Still, the difference in eyes is a
defect, Oyone; so, if I love you——”

“Kiss the little one—you may—see if that will open it wide!”—she hissed
it leaning over his knees, pouring into his nose a steam of aromas.

But he remained cold as a Buddha of stone. “You won’t catch me kissing
it, Oyone. Listen: I wish to speak with you seriously before I leave
next week. I mean to make you some day my consort——”

She started! Then, with lowered lids: “I do not hope for that.”

“But I will”—his lids disdainfully lowered—“on one condition.”

“Yes——?”

“I must know that you hate your father’s people, love your mother’s.”

It was too dark in there now for her to see the cunning meaning in Li
Ku Yu’s eyes; and she answered: “But you know already that my mother,
who was wronged by my father, brought me up to abhor Fan-queis. If
abhorring could slaughter, all whites would die in one night!”

Li Ku Yu hit her shoulder and laughed. “Glad of that, Oyone, so that
during the next few years I may know that I have one like you in
Europe: for you have the salt and qualities. You have taken it into
your head to be very soft and love-sick to Li Ku Yu: but half of this?
due to a luxury in your nature like the concubine Ti Chi’s on her Lake
of Wine; the other half? to a crafty pretence, so as to get me to
entangle myself with a gutter-sparrow like you—for you are deep-dyed in
sin, but I deeper still, I think, and can read you. So throw all that
away, enter seriously into business with me—my comrade! For which—not
for your squinting eyes—you shall be my Fu Jen (legal wife) some day.”

She moved her shoulder to touch his now; her head hung dumbly.

“And don’t think,” he continued, “that it will be marrying some common
Mandarin’s lamb! Truth is, I feel a great force in me, Oyone—since I
was so high!—don’t tell anyone. Something spurs me to burst out into
the world and tumble with whirlwinds and earthquakes for fun; and a
vigour tingles within my fingers that could fly this world like a
kite—lightly! It is so—somehow!—some god gallops in me. This to make
you zealous. You may become like the Empress Wu, managing a continent
with a strong hand, a masculine strategy, riding at my right hand the
champing chargers of majesty. For you see that China and Japan are
crying aloud for a master to ride them.”

She rubbed her cheek on his blue-cotton shoulder, her eyes wide in
silent excitement. She breathed: “What kind of thing will I have to do?”

“You shall be my intelligence-officer, spy! perhaps financial agent, or
assassin——”

“In Europe....”

“Will you not do this blindly?”

“Yes, then.”

“Do not shrink from assassination for your country’s good—Brutus, the
_Soshi_ of Japan, Corday!—for, a man’s life? _tra-lar!_ an Autumn leaf.
The Prince of Wales, for instance—suppose some day I cable you: ‘track,
destroy X.’?”

Some mutter, but no answer, came from her. A snake hissed soft like
a kettle in the stillness. He looked down upon her bowed head in the
darkness.

“Speak, Oyone.”

“Yes, then,” she muttered in low throat-tones, “for my soul is on
yours, Li Ku, like one clinging to a reef in the middle of the sea.
Only—let one kiss you.”

“Kiss me, Oyone, if that comforts you,” he said; and within one tick
she was fitted to him like all the eight arms of the octopus enlacing
him—till he called out with an absurd matter-of-factness: “_Enough!_”

“Now, don’t spoil it,” she muttered with hurried reproach in the thick
of her business.

“Enough, enough,” grumbled the other, thrusting her roughly off; and
she sat again by him, ruffled and robbed, her heart throbbing in her,
both silent; till she muttered: “But why the Prince of Wales? Do you
hate him for what has happened?”

“Hate? _Love!_ And hate, too, for not thinking me more the Prince of
Wales than himself. Destined to be a leader! cannot be still—restless!
Three eyes! Sees that a wrestle between East and West is ordained—the
sooner the better! since the progress of Europe the quicker at present.
It should have been two hundred years ago! Before another ten, though.”

“And if the hairy devils beat?” muttered Oyone, holding a joss-stick
to her cigarette-end to incense more an air already smothered with
sandal-wood smoke.

“Yes,” answered Li Ku, “if the struggle is on open ground! But the
weakness of the white mind? its gullibility! The gift of the yellow?
its guile. _Cluck!_ Asia would not fight Europe square, as things are.
First ruin Europe—devastate, exhaust—then overrun, garrotte—chicken and
dog.”

“How first ruin?” asked Oyone, languidly smoking, her back relaxed, her
throat thrown back.

“You never thought of the ways in which China could drive Europe into
war?” asked Li Ku.

“How?”

“Do not repeat to A-lu-te things you hear me say!”

“As if I would.”

“Old trick of China!—to play off one white against another: only
she never had the craft and grasp to carry it out grand-style. But
suppose China were to pretend to grant a protectorate to Germany, a
province-lease? hear the British lion roar! Or suppose that at a moment
of Anglo-German strain Japan discovered that she no longer wanted all
her navy—weightier now than the United States’—and offered to sell
cheap, on trust, to Germany? Can you see Germany turn from that dish of
birds’-nest soup? Germany couldn’t. Then just as the purchased ships
pretended to leave the East for Germany, let the secret of the deal
leak out sweet as mice-in-honey: and before the Jap ships were off
Shanghai, British battleships would be battering the Baltic littoral.”

“_Banzai!_” broke from Oyone’s lips, as she slapped her sleeve, adding
languishingly: “Oh, Li, I like you, a gay devil lives in you.”

“And _he_ is the same, I think, this Ta-A-Ko (Prince of Wales),” said
Li Ku, “so, at a time of European war, if I thought his wits might
shorten the war, I should wish him down by the Yellow Springs.”

“But to reach a prince—that is not so easy,” breathed Oyone, staring.

“I’ll tell you how,” answered Li Ku with a glance of guile: “Prince
has a great friendship with Richard Chinnery. Now, Chinnery?—the
greatest of wits!—creative!—the Prince will probably keep near him.
But Chinnery? cranky ship!—a chest-weakness affects his character—and
I once dropped a letter of yours, to show him that you are not
unconquerable. You, Oyone, become Chinnery’s lover.”

At this she shrank, very wounded, sighing: “Ah, how slightly you prize
me....”

“Poh—nothing,” said Li Ku; “you shall still be my Fu Jen. Become
Chinnery’s lover politically. And learn a little science from now,
enough to spy into his inventions, and keep me posted.”

She threw up her eyes to the roof: for she was only nineteen.

Later on she became—older: but the brutality of Li Ku Yu struck her
dumb now. A fugitive eunuch looked in to mutter: “Oyone is called
for,” but she did not move, took up her _koto_, and began to finger
its strings, rolling low in her throat the notes of a tune most
lugubriously moody, gloomier than the gloom that now brooded in the
room, where only little glimmers and glamours were any longer seen,
gleaning green or crimson from screen, or lacquer, or god. Outside
sounds of wintry winds mouthed round the house; and she was conscious
of the Chinese rocking himself as if to spread demon-wings and fly,
rocking like the snakes which reared and rocked at the song, he hugging
himself as the gale raged, and Oyone’s throat gave out its strange
melodious moaning.





                               CHAPTER III

                             THE COUP D’ÉTAT


The carriages that rolled to the Buckingham Palace ball about a year
later rolled through snow, and snow was falling when, some minutes
after Her Majesty had danced the square-dance, a lady came to breathe
near her ear: “I understand, Ma’am, that His Royal Highness the
Prince of Wales has arrived, and craves to know if Your Majesty will
graciously grant him a ten-minutes’ interview where he waits alone in
the Picture Gallery.”

The Queen’s heart went a beat quicker. “I will do so,” she gave answer
with that gracious smile which distinguished her; and her steps set out
slow but grew hurried.

The Prince in a splashed mackintosh, pilot cap in hand, half knelt, and
then felt her heart on his.

“So here you are!”

“Here I am, Mother: straight from Paddington with Manning and Sir
Martin Raine.”

“I had my eyes on my watch!”

“Oh, aye, I thought I’d see if you’d see me straight away.”

“Have you succeeded?”

“That’s all right.”

“So this is the end of Brockweir?”

“So it seems.”

“Did I do well to send you to Brockweir?”

He lowered his lids to say: “You are always my lucky star, Mother.”

“Sit here: I give you ten minutes, and two more for love—Oh! and I have
won about Dartmouth!”—she clapped her finger-tips—“you’re to travel
first!”

“You always win, Mother, when I’m the stake.”

“Haven’t I made you a credit to your country? Haven’t I? Tell me.”

“Well, I think so, though I’m something of a duffer in some things.”

“But you never say ‘heavy as lead,’ lead being rather light? you know
where your pancreas is, and some little something of the Divinity of
the universe you live in?”

“Oh, aye, that’s all to the good.”

“And you have been good, too.... _Have_ you been?”

The Prince rushed red as a rose. “Well, I hope so.”

A little pause now—a rising of alarm in Her Majesty’s eyes. She said:
“Edward the Red Prince.”

“Ha, ha. Really, Mother——”

“_A girl?_”

Now he looked her straight, saying: “I may have met a girl, mother.”

Her eyes shut, she moving her face intolerantly, making a little
lip-sound of vexation. The thing that she feared had come upon her. And
there was silence.

Then: “Oh, well, Teddy, it won’t do.”

“Mother, I hope you are not cross. Possibly, if you knew the lady——”

“_I?_ Milk-maid? Frizzy hair?”

“Oh, Mother, we have only a few minutes, and here we are out of step——”

“But stay—is it to be supposed that you are what is called ‘in love’?”

“I do seem to think of one——”

“Now, how annoying. And the lady knows this? and who you are?”

“She doesn’t happen to know who I am. I did tell her once that there
were immense obstacles to our uni——”

“Union forsooth, Your Royal Highness!”—Her Majesty’s eyes flashing like
that Star of South Africa which bathed her brow in its blaze—“pray
select your words to me with greater circumspection! _There_ is the
Union that concerns you”—she pointed to that huge picture of the first
sitting of the Union Convention at Cape Town—“for your so ‘democratic’
colonies want their ‘Royalty’ royal, let me tell you, and Kings are not
masters of themselves, but servants of the world. I am astonished that
you venture to say such things to me!”

“Mother, I attend to what you say.”

“But stay,” said the Queen; “when you mentioned to the lady that there
were immense obstacles—what did the lady say?”

“She said that as I conquered Li Ku, so I should conquer the obstacles.”

The Queen smiled a little now, saying: “I see! Poor little thing, I’ll
think of it, and see what can be done to let her down gently. But you
should have told her plainly, Teddy. Li Ku was yellow, the obstacles
blue.—When, by the way, did all this rapture happen?”

“Year ago. We met just after I had fought Li Ku; then—twice;
then—thrice.”

The Queen thought that an odd way of putting it—twice, then thrice: why
not ‘five times’? But she only said: “And, Teddy, you never told me.”

“Mother, I longed to. But I knew there would be a frown, and I thought
that if I could first manage somehow to get you to see her—then
you might—I can’t quite explain—there are natural aristocrats, as
you know—cellularly select—essentially precious somehow—strangely
rare—gentle——”

This praise afresh alarmed Her Majesty. Her next words were: “And the
lady lives—where?”

Now the Prince’s eyes sprang into wide-awakedness. “Had I better tell,
Mother?”

“Well!—I think so.”

“Scott, Mother, I don’t want to have the poor girl appalled and
thundered upon.”

“Well!—But if I command?”

“Your Majesty is seventy times seven my Queen——”

“And you my little king of kings. Tell.”

“Teddy” moaned. “She lives at Nottingham.”

“And her name?”

“Eulalia.”

“Eulalia what?”

“She told me Bayley.”

“Good old Teddy—hero of all my novels,” the Queen fondly said, hardly
noticing the queerness of that “she told me.” “And don’t think,” she
added, “that I am going to thunder upon her. We’ll see how things go:
and it is just as well that I should have her name and place. But how
could she possibly like you the day you fought Li Ku? You must have
been so Chineaten, Manchewed, and Sky-Blued! And, by the way, talking
of Li Ku Yu, do you know what he now is? I have a letter from Sir John
Pilkinton at Peking.”

“What is Li Ku, Mother?”

“A Sub-Chancellor of the Grand Secretariat. Now, think what that
means—that in about a year he has romped through Pundit ‘learning,’
such as it is—has, in fact, got an Optimus in the Peking Chin Shih
exam. (Doctor’s Degree)—a stiff physical ordeal, apart from the cram.
So you see.”

“Oh, aye, he will do something or other,” said the Prince—“says I must
get up early, and I mean to. Perhaps we haven’t seen the last of each
other, Mr Chin-chin and I.”

This was to come true only four months later when the Prince got a
sight of Li Ku Yu going robed in a green (official) chair through the
East Gate Glorious of the Forbidden City—for before his Investiture, or
his actual cadetship, “Teddy” had eaten with chop-sticks, had learned
buck-jumping and stock-whip cracking in the Australian Bush, had
collected uniform-buttons of Cossacks and Redifs, had bagged big game
in Somaliland, and been half drowned in a flood of the Great Fish River.

By the time he was leaving Dartmouth, Li Ku Yu was carrying out a
bloody reform in the administration of the Yu Chuan Pu (Post-Office);
and when the Prince had been six months on the _St Vincent_, Li Ku was
a Chargé d’Affaires, making frequent trips between Peking and Tokio.

This man never lost an hour. Steadily, like a rat darkly gnawing a hole
through the night-watches, he was gnawing at the old condition of the
world, with the plan of a new world ready in his head: and as at an
electric shock Asia thrilled at the presence of his vigour.

His first high attempt was a secret treaty, frankly framed against the
white races, between the Dragon-flag and the Rising Sun.

But in this he failed. The Anglo-Japanese alliance, though very
thin-worn, still existed; and in the eyes of the Japanese Chancellery
that very young diplomat, Li Ku Yu, had rather the character of a
dreamer. Now, though every great man may be a dreamer, not every
dreamer is a great man; and to distinguish between the two sorts of
dream is not always easy. But he smiled at all contradiction with his
ordinary patience, for no being ever had so unshakeable a faith in his
innate kingship, trickiness, and luck.

He was always sure, too, of his Dowager. Tea-room gossip in the Capital
persistently said that she was his _bonne amie_; but, then, Li Ku Yu
was little of a lover, though he certainly provoked women by his very
aloofness, as the sparrow attracts the cat.

Anyway, Lung Lü from the first saw in him her master; and it is
probable that from the first she and he had doomed her son, the young
Emperor, to death.

Lung Lü was then about thirty-five, a woman of strong mind, though much
under the influence of eunuchs, and not less notorious for her orgies
in the dark seclusion of her palaces than the Empresses Wu and Tzu Hsi.

Her powers were again now fairly absolute, for though the Throne had
been utterly overthrown by the Constitution of a few years before, the
pendulum as usual had swung anew, and the Heavenly Empire was again
governed by the “Decrees” and “Edicts” of a woman’s moods.

Now, the Emperor, who was sixteen, and nearly ready to take the reins,
detested his mother and Li Ku Yu.

He knew well that they had sentenced him to death, if not by drug or
dirk, then by the life of riot to which they pushed him, a hated life
from which his frail nature was helpless to escape: for they two took
care that each of the eunuchs, and even his tutors, should be his
teachers in evil.

Besides, the young Emperor, who had some spirit, felt himself a fly in
the presence of Li’s smile, of Li’s bulk of skull, whose lines bulged
largely as at the horse-power of some engine pumping within: and in his
head on his bed at night he meant no good to Li Ku Yu.

And there were many on his side to plot with him—Censors, Grand
Councillors, the Manchu Clansmen, who all abhorred the scholar from
Brockweir, the pigtail with opinions more hairy-devil than the hairy
devils’.

Accordingly, upon the failure of Li Ku Yu’s mission to the Court of
Japan, his assassination was determined upon as soon as he should
return; and, meantime, Memorial after Memorial was presented to the
Throne, urging his cashiering and impeachment before the Board of
Punishments.

But he did not return—to Peking. Before he left Tokio, a rebellion had
broken out, once more, among “the Turbans” (Turkestan Mohammedans); and
an Edict from the Throne—which Li Ku Yu wrote—gave him the Governorship
of Shensi, with the command to suppress the rebellion—for he danced
from office to office like dancers dashing through “the daisy-chain,”
changing hands in an entanglement of arms, with laughter; and, having
some instinct of the intrigue against him in the Imperial City, he
passed straight on to his Yamên at Sianfu.

There he raised some militia; and with 17,000 raw levies, and one
brigade from the Northern Army, started out westward—without the least
experience in the handling of masses of troops.

This business occupied him fourteen months.

He had to sit down before garrisoned towns with disgraceful guns and
ragged brigades; once he had to grow the millet that gave porridge to
his troops; and, meantime, his discipline was so grim and rigid, that
very many of his men perished on the way.

During all which, in the Throne-Hall of Exalted Peace, the young
Emperor had begun to govern; Lung Lü had retired with her eunuchs and
ladies to her lake-picnics, stage-plays and other delights to her
I-Ho-Yüan or Summer Palace (five miles out); and at once by a Vermilion
Rescript the Emperor dismissed Li Ku Yu, “permitting him to commit
suicide,” and despatching another General to take his place.

The body-guard of “Old Style” soldiers, carrying great two-handed
swords, who surrounded this General, were pounced upon by the rank
and file of Li Ku Yu’s soldiers, who adored him, and were killed by
the “slicing” process, then dismembered. The heads of the General and
of the Commissioner who had come to inspect Li Ku Yu’s suicide, were
carried for days on the markers’ standard-staffs of two rear-guard
companies.

Thus Li Ku Yu crossed the Rubicon, and broke with the Throne of his
country.

By this time his military advance had grown more rapid—it gradually
grew rapid to a ravaging avalanche. He scourged Turkestan as far as
Kashgar of man, cattle and plant. Never did regiments leave in their
rear so complete a desert. In captured cities his troops ran riot like
terriers let loose on rats; they cracked the skulls of the young upon
rocks; they hacked off the bosoms of mothers before they stabbed them;
for intervals of three hundred miles not a thing was left alive where
their withering fire had run.

It was on his return march from Kashgar that he despatched couriers to
make the vast order of 125,000 cinematographs through the agency of a
German firm at Shanghai.

As his victorious host approached the Capital, crackers spattered in
every town, and the Dowager despatched him a poem of congratulation,
a Dragon-robe, four rolls of “auspicious” silk, twenty pounds of
swallow-nests, and a tablet bearing the inscription: “Backbone of the
State.”

Now, on the Emperor’s seventeenth birthday, his mother had summoned
before her the most beautiful of the daughters of noble Manchu
families, from whom to select a score of ladies for her son’s harem;
and among those selected had been a certain Niuhulu, a half-sister
of Li Ku Yu—Li’s own mother being a Chinese woman, though his father
was Manchu. And this Niuhulu contrived to send him out a message when
he was still ninety miles from Peking, saying that his death was a
settled thing, if he once entered the city.

The next morning at the Hour of the Hare (six) Li Ku Yu entered the
city by the Shih Che (N.W.) Gate—apparently alone—in peasant’s dress:
he had come flying through the night, as the vulture stoops: and he
proceeded southward toward the Imperial City.

At that early hour the Supernal Countenance was granting audience to
the Grand Councillors, Princes, and Ministers of the Presence in the
Pavilion of Ceremonial Phœnixes in the Lake Palace; and there they were
kneeling, looking pigmy in a room most gloomily grand, grouped round
the Dragon Throne, on which sat the Glorious One, his face to the south.

Li Ku Yu was still felt to be at a safe distance away, and they
were discussing the disposing of the troops at their command in the
Capital, when suddenly Li Ku Yu, two pistols in his hands, was among
them like the typhoon’s swoop—darted in howling, astounding the heart,
a sort of laugh distorting his bawling mouth, as he howled: “I am
here to save Your Majesty from your enemies!” in shouting which he
half-knelt—without kow-towing, and instantly was up again.

Now, one may not enter unsummoned, nor stand up. So, pallid as death,
the boy-Emperor sprang to his feet, frantically pointing, screaming
out: “Why, that man has designs upon my life! You see him there, that
man? My Guards! My Guards!”

In flocked a mob of guards and eunuchs; but at the same time revolvers
were crackling outside; and almost at once a half company of infantry
in civilian garb darted into the hall.

A few shots were exchanged, a few corpses dropped, while Li Ku Yu,
grasping the Emperor, held him behind his body, as if to protect him;
and then Guards, Ministers, eunuchs, fled pell-mell. But only to
be everywhere captured outside by the battalion in mufti which now
surrounded the Imperial and Forbidden Cities. They were Li Ku Yu’s
veterans.

At the same time Lung Lü was reclining on the lofty deck of a large
barge-of-state carved with dragons and phœnixes, coming along the canal
that leads from Summer Palace to Imperial City: for she was duly in the
secret of the _coup d’état_; and she issued an Edict that day in her
son’s name:—“ill-health had moved him to implore his Most Holy Mother
to resume the onerous duties of a ruler for him.”

Four months later the poor boy robed himself in the Ceremonial Robes of
Long-life, turned his face to the south, mounted the Dragon, and was
carried rotten to the stars.

He had been put into semi-imprisonment in the South lake Palace,
surrounded by a foul crew of eunuchs and scoundrels, and died of many
things.




                               CHAPTER IV

                             AUSTRALIAN GOLD


Li Ku Yu, for his part, put on the Double-eyed Peacock’s Feather, with
a Marquisate of the First Rank, and other honours; and his government
began.

Those of his enemies who had been captured were set free unpunished;
those who had fled in all directions one by one crept back, and, to
their utter astonishment, were left unpunished—Li Ku Yu too big and
busy to think of punishing them.

It is true that under his rule very many fell; but the lingering death
and dismemberment fell into disuse.

The men upon whom he meditated with a malign and silent eye were men of
the harmless “scholar” sort, who thought that they knew a lot, but knew
nothing—the official who chanced to quote from Confucius, or Mencius,
or Jesus, or Buddha, from the Philosopher Chu or Chou, from Wang Hou’s
“Admonitions to his Sons,” or “The Book of Ceremonies” of the Chou
Dynasty: sooner or later that scholar’s neck would skip off him beyond
the city walls; flashing was the falchion that slashed him; crude and
ruthless the dawn of the morning of his execution: that afternoon he
quoted no more.

One other man, too, stood in more ticklish danger than ever—the
millionaire, whose wealth, when his head fell, could be confiscated.
From this source alone the Empress was said to have accumulated in two
years eighty million taels in the vaults of the Palace of Celestial
Purity, where she was accustomed to govern behind the curtain of yellow
silk that veiled her and her chief eunuch from the view of men.

Meantime, the cargo of ordered cinematographs had arrived—Li Ku Yu’s
first open act of war against the Christian races.

He himself was head-master of one of the schools which he instituted
to teach the use of the machines; he himself invented many of the
“plots”—“plots” which had only one subject in infinite variety—a combat
between white men and yellow, white women and yellow. And ever the
yellow ended best man, disembowelling the colourless mouse, cutting out
his or her tongue, bamboozling him in business, hacking out his heart,
dancing on his carcass.

These films went out to districts of China and Japan where it was
not even known that there were such things as white men; and, the
entrance fee being only a few _li_, they soon proved popular apostles
of atrocity, became a dissipation, an all-day orgy of fun to hundreds
of millions—for Li Ku Yu intimately knew the mood and instincts of his
countryman.

When the Embassies protested against these shows, and against the
multitude of new “Government Gazettes” which had begun to promulgate
the same two gospels of greed and cruelty, Li Ku Yu constantly promised
that “the evil should be checked”; and advised them, meantime, to get
permission to increase the strength of the Legation Guards!

About this time, when Count Markino, the Japanese Ambassador, said
to him: “China must wake from four thousand years of sleep, Your
Excellency,” Li Ku Yu answered: “Different degrees of wakefulness!
China is awake! You know what woke her.”

“Tell me again,” the Count said, smiling.

“It was the gonging of the English guns that captured the hill forts
above Canton in 1841: she stretched then. They thought themselves very
big and godlike, capturing the poor Tartar General—and they _were_
‘catching a tartar,’ as they say. It was the gonging of the guns in
1857 when the French and British bombarded the south coast: she rubbed
her eyes then. It was the gonging of the French guns which shelled
the junks in the Min River in 1884, and of the guns of all the globe
which bombarded Peking in 1900: _tra-lar!_ she stood up then, and
looked around. Beware who touches her! She is the Dragon and grand
Anti-Christ: she stands awake.”

“Dreadful: if only the dragon had teeth in her gums,” said the other.

“Wait four months,” muttered Li Ku Yu.

Within those four months a beginning of Conscription on the Swiss model
was made throughout China—a thing at which imagination fails.

It chanced that just then Germany and England were at loggerheads over
an African tract; also, just then, Persia was afresh in some trouble
with Russia; and some Russian squadrons at Resht were afresh ready to
rush upon Teheran.

Now, since the Russo-Japanese war, the Persian fancy had rather been
aburn at Japan’s Pan-Asian dream; and several secret Persian (as well
as Indian!) missions had gone in pious pilgrimage to Tokio and Peking.

So Persia, in her adversity, now turned to Japan: for England, with
Germany on the nerves, had been flirting with Russia ever since the
Convention of 1907, and afresh shirked meddling in the Persian mess.
Persia turned to Japan, asking “How long?” and Li Ku Yu flew to Tokio.

He had now more than all the weight and authority that he needed; being
recognised, even in Europe, as the very greatest force in the Orient.

He was “Adviser to the Throne”; Viceroy of the Metropolitan Province.

He had dared to display apricot yellow in the hangings of his
palanquin—a piece of cheek that caused him to be the idol of all
Southern China.

Indeed, he had already assumed not a few of the airs of Royalty. To
the amazement of men his name had “double-elevation” in documents. He
pompously accompanied the Empress to the Eastern and Western Tombs, and
dared to take a principal part in her sacrifices to river, or ancestor,
or deity.

Moreover, the man pretended to magic, the rapt eye, Divine inspiration,
and gift of miracles—a pretence made pretty easy for him to maintain
by his intimacy with scientific things.

The Chinese believe that a Divine Saviour periodically arises for
China: Li Ku Yu said: “Look into my brazen eyes, and see Him.”

On reaching Tokio, he now afresh proposed his “secret treaty”; and he
proposed, in addition, the following plot:

(1) That China should apply for a German loan, offering as security a
protectorate of Shantung—this to electrify the Anglo-German atmosphere.

(2) That the Persian Megliss, meantime, should be urged to knuckle
under to Russia; and the Persian incident be used to bring about a
(sham) _rapprochement_ between Petersburg and Tokio.

(3) That Japan should now openly declare that she really no longer
needed all her warships, now that she lay happy on the breast of the
Bear.

And (4) that she should then secretly offer to sell to Germany—which
should end in Anglo-German war.

But again the international juggler failed.

The Japs, indeed, now agreed to the secret treaty: but as regards
the sweeter part of the intrigue, although they grinned with greedy
interest, they shook sagacious heads. There were dangers—and no hurry.
Some other time.

Li Ku Yu said: “Wise men think in the future, but fools live in it.”
He was very bitter in those days; called the Japanese by his bitterest
word—“pedants”; and prepared to return to Peking.

He had still one rendezvous at the Foreign Office to keep, when
one evening there came to him at the Embassy a cypher-cable from
London—from Oyone, his Irish-Japanese—which said: “England gone wild
to-night. Wonderful discovery gold Australia.”

Li Ku Yu slapped his sleeve; and he cried: “_Tra-lar!_ the tricky are
even luckier than they are tricky.”

He did not keep his rendezvous at the Foreign Office the next day—was
“ailing”; and he ailed eight days, until the still-coming news of the
new Eldorado had well saturated the Japanese head.

Gold in “back-of-beyond country” of North-Western Australia on No
Man’s Land! And no grudging Palmer’s Diggings, apparently, or niggard
Coolgardie, granting a wage to the digger’s sweat, but, by all
accounts, a Golconda, grounds rugged with nuggets, crags of gold, a
coast of gold, with glancing sands!

Already within eight days of the first bursting out of the tidings, the
world’s eyes were turned that way, the world purchasing kit-bags for
the journey....

And Japan was padlocked out: her nationals had to write fifty words of
English dictation, nicely spelled, before landing; captains were fined
a hundred pounds for allowing a yellow man to escape to land.

“The fate of men and nations who delay!” said Li Ku Yu: “God, Marquis,
will pardon every sin, except the unpardonable sin—the waste of time.
_Cluck!_ let a man be bold to-day, and to-night all the stars will clap
their hands at him, calling to him: ‘_You are one of us!_’ Really, I
can’t think of a reason why this field of riches is not in Japanese
territory to-day.”

The Chinaman now had the negotiation all his own way, as if he was
dealing with dazed men: for the gold-find in Australia appears to have
deeply digged at the greed of the little people of Nippon.

Among the high there were searchings of heart; to delight the low
the _Ju Ju_ newspaper used the withering word “_cranes_” against the
governors of its country.

Li Ku Yu flew back to China, chin up, smiling at the horizon—with
pledges in his portfolio.




                                CHAPTER V

                            THUNDERY WEATHER


Two months later the _rapprochement_ of Russia and Japan was a _fait
accompli_; and at the same time a new 18,000,000 Chinese loan was on
the counters of the Deutsche-Asiatische Bank.

At this thing England, as it were, started! The Banque de l’Indo-Chine
had some under-part in the handling of the loan—but no British, no
American, syndicate. And immediately a feeling of unease ran through
our land.

It was as when wild-fowl in flight foreknow tempests from the puffy
fuffs and the scent of thunder, and ten thousand outcries of fright are
drowned within the row of rising winds.

Queer things seemed at work in the world, purposes, symptoms, like
thieves’ feet creaking in corridors at midnight, causing one to finger
one’s trigger. But as to their meaning, the scheme had been too subtly
plotted for any mind to construct the pieces in the right sequence.
The Prince of Wales wrote to the Queen from Queensferry: “Things seem
singular to me, though I don’t quite see what’s what. Why should the
Mikado wish to rush like this into Russia’s arms?”

It was on the morning of the 11th of October that a Peking telegram
of Reuter’s Special Service asserted that Germany had been offered
the lease of the Shantung Peninsula as guarantee, on similar terms as
Kiao-Chow, Port Arthur, Wei-hai-Wei, and Mirs Bay.

“Never,” said Manchester and the City.

“But yes,” said Potsdam through the _Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung_.

So it was true? In an apparently inspired article _The Times_ declared
that if China was going to be partitioned in this fashion, then the
Yangtse Valley was due to England. Upon which Russia, France, clapped
hand to dirk against Germany, against England, against vague Fate.
The heads of men commenced to dizzy in the chaos and uncertainty of
contradictory interests, the whirl of forces working of themselves.
A Polar Ocean was breaking up: but as to how the masses might range
themselves in the crash the Creator alone knew.

The world had as yet no Government. Each nation had: but the planet was
an Anarchy, a rabble of nations without arrangement or police, where
each might murder, cheat, or steal at its own sweet will.

For fifty years Germany had conceived the idea that she needed
“colonies”: she did not need any “_colonies_”: but the fact that
she passionately imagined that she did was an urgent fact which a
world-Government would have looked to.

Everywhere in her frenzy for “_colonies_” she had been blocked. Did she
look toward Brazil?—there was the Monroe Doctrine. Did she dream of
cotton-fields waving over Asia Minor?—eight million Magyars, chattering
an Asiatic language, ranged themselves against her peaceful penetration
of the Near East.

When she aimed at the Germanisation of Trieste and Fiume as “outlets,”
a handful of Croatian Slavs under Hungarian and Italian influence
waxed angry. When she wished to win the goodwill of Galicia and the
Austrian Poles by soft-soaping the Poles of Posen, Petersburg impeded
the eastward eagle of Teutonic ideas and capital by going one better in
benevolence to her own Poles.

Her “Drang Nach Osten” toward Constantinople, Syria, Mesopotamia was
blocked by the Balkan States. Her vision of an Austro-German Empire
washed by the North-Sea was a vision still—the “Balance of Power”
blocked her.

What, then, was the good of that mass of army toeing the globe with
challenging eye, chin up, of that weight of navy big with child, whose
expense kept the spectre of bankruptcy ever at her elbow?

Whether her own fault or Fate’s, it could not last! She was poor for
nothing! Her red-hot energies raged like men fighting in a fire in
a nightmare,—and for nothing! she was bewitched, she was stung with
the tarantula, she danced frantically, and no locomotion, she swelled
monstrously, and not with porridge, but with dropsy.

It could not last—she was too ’cute, and not wise enough, too strong,
and not great enough.

In these very days of the Russo-Japanese _rapprochement_, of the loan,
and of the question of Shantung, hot rancour was in her heart at the
withdrawals of capital by Paris and London, large selling orders, and
drop in securities. She was poor still!

But Shantung seemed luscious to her—a piece of luck to be seized; and
the Kaiser made a dinner-speech. He was a neurotic character, who
ranted, and had Anglophobia—and the Heir-Apparent still more! though
our Queen had fixed upon his sister, the Princess Elizabeth, to be
the wife of our “Teddy.” He was said to have some ability—was then a
ship’s-commodore.

The German High Seas Fleet was thereupon recalled from Autumn Manœuvres
on the Norway coast; our First and Fourth Destroyer Flotillas were
operating with specific orders about the Orkneys and North Sea;
submarines were on the watch at Lamlash; the First and Second Battle
and Cruiser Squadrons were mobilised about Queensferry and Cromarty.
There was a rumour that they were being cleared for action. Twice in
five days there were meetings of the Cabinet. Bread had gone up a penny
a quartern.

The French First Line of Defence was mobilising in Toulon Harbour;
three brigades of Zouaves from North Africa had landed at Marseilles.

In the midst of which world-turmoil, how perplexing the news, flashed
by a New York Herald correspondent, that the new Kotohito Ministry had
promised the Diet enormous economies in the Naval Estimates—a drop of
two hundred and fifty million yen (25,000,000 sterling)!

The Chancellor’s speech had dwelt upon the cordial relations of
Japan with all nations, upon her poverty, upon the immorality of the
monstrous armaments of modern man...!

Did Japan, then, no longer need a navy? Was the outlandish yellow ally
of England failing her in the hour of need?

Wire on wire! like lightnings winking here, there, here, when the
weather is weird, and peewits wheel and wail....

But on the afternoon of the 22nd the Under-Secretary, Sir B. S.
Gilbert, stated in the Commons that the situation was still not beyond
the skill of diplomats; for if Germany would but leave unfettered the
land-taxes and Custom-dues of Shantung, which furnished part of the
source of repayment of the last British loan, a _modus vivendi_ might
yet be discovered. And that night London went to bed with a quieter
mind. Many gales had gathered, and had passed again.

But three terrible days of strain followed, in which Whitehall waited
for a reply from Wilhelm-Strasse, and none arrived....

And on the fourth day an intense interest took hold upon Englishmen at
the rumour of a most singular meeting—at Königsberg—between the Tsar,
the Kaiser, their two Foreign Ministers, and Mons. Cambertin of the
Quai d’Orsay.

When England gathered that France was there in the conference, she
said: “And you, too...?”

The old “Entente Cordiale” was a phrase of the earlier years of the
century; but its spirit, one hoped, lived. France stood for Light,
England for Good-will: if they two fought, then the Kingdom of God was
divided against itself.

And, if they fought—with Morocco now “a second France”—Gibraltar was
useless, Suez blocked, Malta gone—especially if Spain was with the
Continentals. For, with Tarifa fortified on one side of the Straits,
and on the other Tangier, the heights of Gibel Musa, and the low-lying
dunes by Ceuta bristling with batteries, then the Mediterranean Fleet
was in prison.

How would France go, if it was war, in truth, at last? That was the
question now. Would her larger light fail her, her world-instinct, and
temptation prevail with her? Rumours, rumours, flew from agitated lip
to agitated lip. _The Daily Mail_ had information that Germany, in her
urgency to attract the alliance of France, was lavishing the wildest
offers—Alsace-Lorraine! a whole North-African Empire! _The Telegraph_
gave it that the Persian Gulf, India, Manchuria, Mongolia were to go
to Russia. It was reported that crowds were daily ranging about Berlin
singing old Schneckenburger’s _Wacht am Rhein_; that in the _bureaux_
of the British Ambassadors at Berlin, at Petersburg, were already
declarations of war.

And if Russia was going, must not France, too, go with the powers of
darkness? The Franco-Russian Alliance, indeed, had lapsed; but its
habit and leaning persisted. In which case, England stood alone to sink
or swim with America? who might have enough to handle west and south?
For all saw that, if it was war at last, then it was war world-wide and
final, to terminate in a new earth, and a new look of the skies.




                               CHAPTER VI

                          THE GIRL IN THE CROWD


England, meanwhile, remained careless of face, with faith in the old
luck; and men did their business, saying little of the knell in their
inwards. There were distraints for rent, a ballet at the Alhambra, and
marriages, and preachings in streets.

But on the night of the 29th the nation gave way to a gush of emotion.
It was a misty night, starless, with horses lying wrecked in the slime
of streets—about ten-thirty; when suddenly through Bloomsbury, Tooting,
newsboys ran clamouring in twos, startling the darkness as with news of
doomsday.

They were selling a special ten-o’clock edition of _The Evening News_,
which had in it five wild lines of pica. It had come from Paris
roundabout by Mackay-Bennett cable: and it stated that 350,000 tons of
Super-Dreadnoughts had been sold by Japan to Germany—were under weigh,
with coal-ships, store-ships.

Whereupon it was a question of postage-stamps that night, for at once
the men of London were flying with fire in their eyes to pen and paper,
writing to the papers, writing to Whitehall. To Arms! To Arms!—no talk,
no nonsense. “_To Arms!_” re-echoed every paper the next day; and white
lips in Whitehall whispered “War!”

For no one knew one atom which way God’s arm was dragging France: the
Home Fleet might be hopelessly outweighted...!

Only one dissentient letter appeared—in _The Times_. The writer advised
calm: he, for his part, did not believe that those Japanese ships would
even reach European seas, since, by putting two and two together, he
could now see that the whole scare was a piece of Chinese chicane.

But this attracted no attention: it was not divined that the writer was
the Prince of Wales, who the previous day had hastened south to town,
to speak with the Queen.

All that day the Government gave no sign, though panic was in the City,
and traffic stopped within a mile of Westminster. It was known that
the Brighton and South-Coast Railway were under Government Orders,
that the War Office, Foreign Office and Admiralty were feverishly
in intercommunication; but the people had to go home unsatisfied at
midnight: no Cabinet Minister had been present at Questions in the
Commons.

That evening, however, something was said at a house in Grosvenor Place
where the Queen was in a set of ten.

After dinner one of three men told a story of a mission-teacher in
China, who was pointing with pride to the British reds on the map, when
his crowd of boys with one voice drowned him in the shout: “You robbed
them!”

This anecdote had the effect of making Her Majesty’s eyes flash fire;
and she cried:

“Robbed them from whom? No part of a planet in space can possibly be
robbed, since the man or tribe that it is robbed from cannot possibly
have any special right to it. But let’s call it robbery, since our own
barbarous old laws call it robbery: then I say, may someone so rob from
_me_, robbing my coppers, and dropping sovereigns into my pocket! Is
it not cruel, ladies, how the mood of this country has been everywhere
misunderstood? The oceans and shores were made roomy for roaming in,
and her sons have gone out, looking the sun gallantly in the face—not
all-unconscious of the stars, I think—with harmless high hearts that
meant well to men. Is someone somewhere the worse for it? Who is not
the better? Every port on the globe would be thrown open, if England
could throw it! and we have called to all, ‘these our conquests are
yours, too: come, buy wine without money.’ What wind that blows is of
a mood more boundless than this bounty? Is the ocean, our home, larger
than our hearts? Aren’t we the fatherland of the outcast, and the ally
of the cowering and downtrodden? Why, ladies, I think that somewhere
in the universe there must surely be some Tribunal or Jury where such
action is passionately approved, and officially stamped ‘In Tune.’ And
are we to be plotted at, and potted at, and turned off the earth? Oh,
I am no Chauviniste or hiccuping Jingo: we here know that the French
are more intelligent and mentally liberated than we, the Germans more
organising and orderly: yes, but there are certain world-ideals of
conscience, of generosity, of moral pride, which are special to us, and
are very precious—we are the salt in the ham! and deserve to live. Our
friends, the French, are reckoned mightily ‘polite’ and warm, because
they bow low: they may be so; and we pretty rigid and chill: but what I
assert I know, that there’s more murmuring mercy breaking and blessing
bread in one good English breast than in any ten roods of Continental
territory. We have that: yes, and we have another quality that’s of
some value—luck!—favouritism with the Soul of Things—luck: a quality
innate in personality, I think—a mental trait: we have it. And so, on
the whole, I say, ladies, Bravo, John Bull! you’re a bit stodgy on your
stumps, but you are something of a credit, and much of a blessing to
your planet; and I say, ladies, let them all come, the whole concerted
world, and this little mole of earth is of a temper and mettle that’ll
hurl their hosts superbly off her in the name of the Eternal Purposer,
as she spurns the surfs of the oceans that churn on her shores.”

Her Majesty spoke with so gallant and angry an arrogance glancing
in her eyes, that some of the more high-strung shrank abashed and
thrilled, for Her Majesty seemed queen enough to lift her arm and order
the stars on their orbits, or bid storms submit. And at once among the
men the word went: “Oh, well, war is certain, or she wouldn’t have
spoken like that—‘let them all come.’...”

Gossip of this incident got into all the clubs that night, and
thence into the newspaper offices. The next morning—that last day of
October—war was taken for granted: war of one slight David against a
gang of Goliaths-of-Gath.

But there was no certainty, till an early eleven-o’clock fourth edition
of _The Star_ confirmed it.

This was bought up like hot cakes in the streaming streets: and it
was with a thrilling solemnity that those three little lines of print
fell upon men’s minds: “The Stock Exchange has suddenly closed.
The Government is appointing private brokers to transact necessary
business.”

This news could not reach the region of Westminster, which was already
one mass of humanity; but a medical student, who had got a copy, gored
his way like a bull to one of the lion-bases in Trafalgar Square,
dragged himself up on it, and read out the momentous thing. Which
done, he roared red-throated: “This means that you are in for it, you
beggars, are you downhearted?”

“_No!!_” howled a thousand mouths at him.

“Are you still English?”

“_Yes!!_”

“That’s all right,” he muttered, and jumped down.

“Absurd person,” murmured Richard Chinnery to his own Oyone, who stood
pressed sandwichlike to his breast. She smiled up at him, and a wild
kind of light lit her eyes an instant, and died out. But Chinnery did
not like this. He had been pulled from his house in the Horseferry Road
by Oyone to see the ado; but the fate of nations very little interested
Chinnery; and now he stood there pressed and in prison: for like a
passionate ocean lashing a shore London was dashing her multitudes,
mass on mass, toward her middle; and those who occupied the windows saw
hats that day, and caps.

This million of men, wetted all day by a steady little mizzling,
would have been pitiable in its lack of knowledge; but whoever had
telephone, tape-machine, or wireless turned themselves into newsagents;
and squares of paper in many façades told the latest, or uttered some
thought that was in all hearts.

For passion had banished for the moment the national habit of stoic
mumness. “Alone Against Europe” stood some time at “_The Christian
World_,” and “No Ally But Our Own Arm,” at a picture-shop at Charing
Cross.

And ever and anon regions of the throng would be seized with song:
yonder, then yonder, the Rule Britannia would be droning, like the
bumble-bee that becomes dumb here, but then hums out there, all a
summer’s day.

“Look,” said Eulalia Bayley at about two o’clock, she being then jammed
with a married sister not far from the Admiralty; and she pointed to a
square of paper at the Cockspur Street corner, on which had just been
written up:

“German, Austrian, Italian, and Russian Ambassadors have left Victoria.”

“Which means war with the lot of them,” said Eulalia’s sister, Alice.

A dew lay in Eulalia’s eyes, like dews in blue-bells, her bosom moved.
She was silent; but then said: “But not the French.”

“No, that’s true,” muttered Alice: “I wonder!”

The bells of St Martin’s-in-the-Fields broke out, slowly telling the
notes of “Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom.”

But now mounted police drove the crowd round the sisters into still
closer pressure, clearing a way down Whitehall: for the crisis had
taken the police by surprise; and Members had to pass somewhere, since
it was nearly three—a Thursday.

Before long shouts were greeting them, as they moved one by one in cabs
toward the House, with cries of “give it ’em hot!” as one or the other
was recognised. But it was hours before any certain news came out of
the House. As night fell, the Junior United Club’s paper-square had it:
“_Invincible_ and _Inflexible_ have left Lamlash westward: possibly
to convoy _Mauretania_”—making Chinnery sigh with utter _ennui_: a
night dark and thick with drizzle-spray, unlit in some places by
street-lamps, which no lamplighter’s effort could reach. There was a
paper-square statement at Haxell’s Hotel that “A Paris crowd round the
Chamber of Deputies is now singing ‘God Save the King,’” but in the
darkness there hardly anyone saw it. By that time those who had brought
no provisions had grown hungry and faint.

At seven Eulalia and her sister had been drifted in the currents and
eddies of that sea all down Birdcage Walk: and it was thus that, for
the first time, Eulalia came to see the Queen, who soon after seven
appeared with the King and Prince on the East Balcony of the palace.

A comet’s tail of luminosity, whose hazy glare shot a longish way into
the foggy gloom, illumined the group: and the sisters got a good view.
The Queen was smiling down, almost laughing, it seemed, at that ocean
whose drone of cheering rolled more and more remotely away from her
feet, and then in fresh waves rose once more, and droned, and rolled
repeatedly: and her eyes that night shone bright as with some sublime
joy, some wondrous triumph.

At her left hand stood the King dressed _en amiral_, and on his left
the Prince, looking sullen or shy, _en lieutenant_; and, vaguely
suggested behind them, a group of the royal family—among them the
German Princess Elizabeth (“Teddy’s intended”), who had been visiting
the English Court, and been caught here in the storm.

Eulalia’s eyes were nailed to the Queen. And presently she breathed:
“Isn’t she a wonderful woman!” And presently again: “One could die for
_her_.”

Then, as her eyes shifted to the Prince, she threw them on high, with
the sigh: “Ah, Heaven, how like!”—as she always sighed on seeing a
photograph of the Prince.

She resolved to greet her “Edward Reeks” on the morrow morning with the
words: “My Prince!”—for she had a rendezvous with him at Chinnery’s at
ten +a.m.+

But her attention was drawn away from the balcony by an extraordinary
yell of many thousands of mouths that now broke out—up Piccadilly
way, it seemed—and came roaring and roaring toward her, accompanied
by an agitation of hats shaking in the air, like agitated aspen-tops
twinkling in a wind.

“What can it be?” murmured Alice on tiptoe, with stretched chin.

“Whatever it is, the Queen knows,” said Eulalia: “look! she is
laughing!”

But the cause of this noise will be better seen before the National
Liberal Club, whither Chinnery in his chest-wrappings and his Oyone,
had now been drifted.

Chinnery by this time was in a rather pitiable way. He had brought in
his pockets two quartern bottles, one containing water, one wine; and
some moments before the tumult of that yell that Eulalia wondered at,
he had given a flying wild glance round, and drunk the last of the
water—that glance not being due to the presence of others, since he
glanced like that fifty times a day whenever he drank, though quite
alone.

At twenty-seven he was a dipsomaniac—not meaning a drunkard, for he
drank water oftener than wine; but he must ever be drinking a gulp, and
from a bottle; and before each gulp a thievish glance round!

And now both water and wine had failed him, and he was very weary and
uninterested.

Usually he was the essence of patience and sweetness; everyone said of
Chinnery: “he is such a gentleman!”—and “gentle” he was: for, though
recognised by critics of intellect as being by far the greatest brain
on the face of the globe, his goodness of heart made him such that he
could be fooled by any woman, or led by any child.

But now he was in such a mess there, that he let a peevish word escape
him. With a wrinkled forehead, he said: “This is a terrible thing! Am I
to die here among these idle people?”

Oyone, as brisk and fresh as at noon, answered: “But it amuses!”

“In that case there is nothing to be said,” said Chinnery. “But, as for
me, I doubt whether I shall get any sleep after this day. And at nine
in the morning the Prince of Wales is coming to visit me....”

She made no answer—stood there suddenly blanched, half-fainting,
pressing on his arm.

“I did not know that,” she remarked presently in a low tone.

“I had a letter this morning. He has seen something in a paper about
the air-boat, guesses that it is due to me, and wants to see it, I
suppose.”

During many moments now Oyone stood mute, meditating.

Two days before this, she had telegraphed to China part of that
letter of the Prince in _The Times_, which tried to expose the
Chinese political plot; and Li Ku Yu had recognised in the letter the
“Brockweir style”; had said: “The Prince”; had taken fright; and had
wired to Oyone a certain most sinister code-word.

Hence her faintness when she heard that the Prince was coming, of his
own accord, into her power the next morning.

After ten minutes she said: “I find that I must go.”

“But, dear, how?” asked Chinnery.

“Somehow. You come behind me.”

“Oyone, it would kill me!”

“Stay, then. See you to-morrow afternoon.”

She turned, begged her way, attacked, battled, begged her way, gained
a yard, hot, envenomed, her hand against every man, yard after yard,
ragged, streaming, unwearied—resistless.

When she had gained Tottenham Court Road, she could run here and there;
and she ran till she was in her own room in the Regent’s Park house.

There she put match to a lantern, in whose opal glamour she looked a
lovely hag in her bedraggled dress and red-hotness; and she got from a
cabinet a kokotana dagger, a god, and incense-sticks, her object being
to fumigate the dagger through the night, and thus curry favour with
gods in whom she did not believe.

And she lay writhing, wringing her hands, moaning for awe and dismay
of what lay before her, pitiably in travail with a thousand terrors:
for she was the greatest coward!—and yet one of the bravest of beings,
desperately brave at the decisive instant in spite of clammy hands
and dying heart. And even as she lay there heaving up white eyes of
appeal, grovelling, groaning, she was planning the deed she had to do.
Then, like a witch, she set to making spells and incantations over the
weapon.

Meantime, Chinnery, left by himself, had been pricked into interest
in his country, when that yell that amazed Eulalia Bayley farther
west broke out here also, as it broke out here and there all over
Central London. The National Liberal Club put up on its illuminated
paper-square the words: “France! Hurrah! our Ally!”

Up Parliament Street another façade had: “France our Ally! Hurrah!”

Even as men cheered, they looked about them for hands to wring. Before
the National Gallery steps a little Swiss barber (mistaken for French!)
was snatched to men’s shoulders and passionately exhibited amid
cheering which reached to the night’s dim sky. Men sang and danced. In
clubs men, lifting their glasses to clink, looked into one another’s
eyes, and muttered “France”; in public-houses; in hotels; or they
grasped one another’s hands, and with eyes not dry, said: “France.” The
Light had not failed....




                               CHAPTER VII

                            THE “MAURETANIA”


The morning after dawned bleak, with an easterly sea running wet, and
convulsive wind.

When the night began to lift a little at five bells in the morning
watch, the _Mauretania_ was in longitude 10° 37′, and, in the centre a
hall all vault and water, was vaulting her eastward way like a foxhound
in the teeth of the swell—making haste! as when the cockchafer is
conscious of the hawk not far.

She was deeply laden—with wheat; for twelve days previously, when
skies had darkened, she had been taken by Government from bearing
globe-trotters, and despatched to Canada for food-stuffs—she, like
her _Lusitania_ sister, having been built by Government subvention to
Government specification; and at the same time the _Inflexible_ group
of cruisers, too, had been laid down, with the same contract speed—25
knots: the idea being that, in war, the two globe-trotters, with their
cargo-carrying dead-weight of 80,000 tons, convoyed by the cruisers,
might maintain between them a food-supply of some 20,000 tons a week.

Hence she ran there pressed, pregnant, a rat in a tract of cats, three
of her four black-and-red funnels puffing breath, her crowd of cowls
showing steam, spray reaching to that four-storied street of top-hamper
that ran and sprang, three lines of lights still twinkling along her
length, like watchlights within some mansion of romance, which show
strange and garish in the glare of day. And the winds of that daybreak
sang weird snatches of sea-songs within her funnels’ throats, like
banshee-dirges and birds of boding, moaning omens.

For the sea is deep, and the 70,000 haughty horses that hauled her had
still far to snort and haul.

But at six minutes to seven by the ship’s chronometers she understood
that she was not alone, and felt safer.

Her captain, raw-eyed for lack of sleep, was drinking black coffee
among the trees of the verandah-café, when a message from the
wireless-room came in—bidding him report his whereabouts and course
to the _Inflexible_; and ten minutes later came another: “Prick your
course three points to port.”

The captain sprang up with a light in his eyes. “Which means hawks
about,” he said to his first officer: “the British must have a
destroyer or something out scouting.”

“And hawks about,” answered the other, “means hawks sent out
beforehand—the treacherous wretches: for war doesn’t seem to have been
declared till yesterday.”

They spoke, as it were, secretly, hoarsely, like conspirators.

“Prick her off,” said Captain Arthur, “and try her with another
half-knot: let her rip.”

And she went ripping, until the crow’s-nest was suddenly telephoning,
an agitated watchkeeper was pointing toward the clouds, and a surgeon
who had been idly eyeing the winds winnowing within his beard at the
lounge-door, glanced at the sky, and pitched with tidings toward the
bridge, employing his pipe as a pointer.

Up there in the air was a monoplane flying north-west, the size of a
swallow; and within two minutes her engine’s singing was with them.

“They’ve got me,” muttered the captain glass-gazing: “it’s a fight.”

“Or she may be British,” suggested the surgeon.

“British to the north,” the captain said, “she from the south. Be ready
for some red to-day.”

No voice there quivered; only, the eyes of the little knot of men spat
sparks of fire.

The monoplane was now nearly overhead, fifteen hundred feet up; but
before reaching the ship she swiftly wheeled on the winds, and was
winging south once more.

At the same time the surgeon exclaimed: “Look! another!”—pointing out
northward a speck greyer than the grey air; and the captain, having
fixed the glass on it, said, “Yes, a biplane—British—out scouting.”

But as he spoke the speck vanished.

For she had sighted the German and turned tail, as the German had
sighted her and turned tail.

But this movement of mutual horror was only momentary: for the biplane
had to stop the reconnaissance of the _Mauretania’s_ whereabouts from
being carried to the Germans; and the monoplane had to stop the fact of
that reconnaissance from being carried to the British; so both wheeled
to meet, climbing for life, the monoplane flying right overhead, so
that the _Mauretania_ group could clearly hear the roar of her flurry
droning, and see the little hydro-boots under her chassis by which she
had been launched down bow-rails from her parent-ship.

Ten seconds later the biplane, too, flew anew into sight, and anew
vanished skywards; and then the monoplane vanished skywards, trying
to outclimb her climbing adversary, while the men of the _Mauretania_
pored sternward upward at nothing, their nerves in a hell of
expectation of that murder in heaven, they murmuring words which were
unheard, but which served the purpose of concealing their wish to
shriek.

And before any more was seen of the planes, the added distraction of
“Ship Ahoy!” was upon them; and before they could look to see the
sighted ship, once more the planes were upon them—not behind, but
before now—hardly a league off, it seemed, on the starboard beam: for
thither they had now dashed their anguished wings, ranging the air in a
rage of flights, like fighting angels that fill space with wings: and
though nothing could be observed of them, a sound within the clouds was
distinctly heard—the pop of a pod bursting, a bomb; then the patter
of a packet of pins spilling somewhere; then six ticks, and now the
clouds parted with a crowd of particles—_débris_ and instruments
dribbling—and racing after to catch them two men raining, two men in
caps and padded wrappings, who passionately span in partnership or
competition, as at the starting-call of One, Two—Away! and slightly
behind the men a biplane diving, divided into two bits.

It seemed an age ere those men reached the sea, so that a shriek rent
the outraged breast—an age of over thirty-seven seconds. Ahead of the
_Mauretania_ when they set out earthward, they were somewhat astern
when, neck-and-neck, like tumblers racing, they span with a passion
which had waxed to the rapture of catherine-wheels into the splash that
they trashed up in vanishing.

Almost at the same moment the monoplane was again heard buzzing, a
blood-guilty thing, southward to regain her parent-ship.

That parent-ship already lay a little oblong of black, blocking the
continuity of the southern horizon; and four cables behind her stood
another oblong of black, stuck in the sea, heading north-eastward.

The _Mauretania_ men were like rats in a trap. In vain the glasses
investigated the north for any sign of the English, though far
south-westward there stood a third oblong of black—no one knew of what
flag.

“God, I’ll run for it,” Captain Arthur muttered to himself; and an
officer was flying from him with the order to bolt northward, when
he got the wireless: “Do not try flight, if sighted: the enemy are
the _Von der Tann_ and _Scharnhorst_”—on which the captain threw
up his hands, for the _Von der Tann_ had three knots more than the
_Mauretania_—was at one time the fleetest capital-ship on the sea.

And she grew rapidly big, swaggering like a bully, rolling through four
degrees, her starboard beam beaten by swell which she wedged like flesh
in her heavy haste, anon giving a view of all her eight deck-guns, like
eight notes-of-exclamation, waiting to exclaim, and dot themselves.

And she came in her colours—just saluted—with extra colours on stays
and masts, which the keen east wind was spitting on and whipping into
kettle-drums—kettle-drums which accompanied strains of band-music
floating from her over the ocean.

At her common-code signal to slacken speed to forty-two revolutions,
a redness of angry arrogance sprang to the _Mauretania_ captain’s
face.... “Foreigners on the sea giving orders....”

But there was no way out. Still no English on the sea—though that third
warship from the south-west had now grown so much bigger astern, that
the glasses made her out to be Yankee; and the first officer made the
remark: “Looks to me like the _Arkansas_.”

At the same time the _Mauretania’s_ speed died away to 6 knots; the
two Germans, too, slowed down—one two miles south, the other hardly a
thousand yards off; and now clouds of steam were wheeling about the sea
with the winds; a smell of heat reeked from the curbed turbines; and at
the engines’ venom of hissing the ships shivered.

So for some time they forged ahead, while the _Von der Tann_ signalled
to the _Scharnhorst_; the _Scharnhorst_ sent out a pinnace full of men
to the _Von der Tann_; and the _Von der Tann_, making preparations to
send a prize-crew to the _Mauretania_, lowered a launch.

On the _Mauretania_, meantime, there was so much agitation and
preoccupation with the enemy, that little heed had been paid to the
ship in the rear; till now a sound screaming out of a stream of steam
reached the ear—a sound of band-music—“Yankee Doodle Doo” on the breeze.

And all at once the _Arkansas_, a rear-admiral’s flag at her foremast,
was at the _Mauretania’s_ quarter, fifty yards off her, between her and
the _Von der Tann_, keeping the same speed.

Her flag-captain, a lank Yankee, could be seen with three
staff-officers in frock-coats perambulating his bridge with a brisk
and devil-may-care fling; then was seen looking down at a school
blackboard which some marines held up for him to see; then a laying of
heads together; and then the blackboard was being held up aport for
the _Mauretania’s_ glasses to read what was chalked large on it: “+Do A
Bolt+.”

And now was Captain Arthur a distracted man, he being under British
orders not to fly, and no time to wireless—Germans just coming.
After ten different impulses, he flew on an eleventh impulse to his
communications to order Full Ahead.

And as she spurted to the spur, the _Arkansas_, too, all her boilers
lighted up, her engines running full even while her screws had run slow
under a transformer, ordered Full Ahead.

The two were off together about N.E. by E., the battleship getting left
a little, with her only 20 knots, but bow-butting like a bounding bull,
ramming her monstrous mass at the rollers, crushing the ocean to a rush
of rubbish-stuff round her—streaming creams—like crushers crushing
rubble.

The two Germans, meanwhile, kept their crawl, lost in astonishment
at this sudden outcome, at their wits’ end: for to try to stop the
_Mauretania_ with a twelve-pounder or so meant a risk of striking
the _Arkansas_—an _Arkansas_ obviously battle-ready, her control and
gun-houses manned, torpedo-nets handy—the German combined weight being
only three thousand tons greater than her monstrous twenty-six.

As to what the _Arkansas_ was doing there, all alone, and with what
motive—this was a disturbing question for the Germans.

So it was only when the _Arkansas_ was quite a mile away that the _Von
der Tann_ at last signalled her; and something like the following
conversation took place between the Chief-signalmen of the two ships:

_The Von der Tann_: We are not combatants?

_The Arkansas_: Surely not.

_The Von der Tann_: Then, get out of the way!

_The Arkansas_: All right. But what’s your hurry?

_The Von der Tann_: I am about to fire!

_The Arkansas_: Try not to strike me.

A wild silence of five minutes followed this thing—the Germans not
giving chase, since they did not wish to separate, and since the
_Scharnhorst_ had not speed to steam with the _Mauretania_. So the
_Scharnhorst_, at a distance of three miles, beautifully aimed a
3·4-inch shell from her superstructure at the _Mauretania’s_ screws:
and the boom of a voice moved over the waters.

By a tragic chance the shell dropped upon the centre of the _Arkansas_
fore-turret, broke, blew away her aeroplane rails, dented the
trellis-work of her foremast, and lay dead the sons of four American
mothers.

Whereupon hell and frenzy broke up through the ocean that morning,
and Germany and America were at war: for it is not good to play with
volcanoes; but the war-fever and let’s-all-be-jolly was all on the
breeze and in the brain like a brandy and a wedding-breakfast, and
they wanted yankee-doodle, and they got it, and they hankered after
thunder, and were thunder-struck. In that second the _Arkansas_ left
the _Mauretania_ to take care of herself, knocked forty revolutions off
her screws, and the _Mauretania_ trembled to her bottom, and her men
were boxed doddering and staring by the back-blast and brawl of the
broadside that the _Arkansas_ vomited upon the _Von der Tann_.

War, then: and let the best-padded ear see afterwards what the
ear-specialist can do.

They were at pretty close quarters to begin a fight!—not three miles,
though the mist that the wind had in it made that far enough for
effective smashing.

Anyway, the _Von der Tann_ instantly answered with five of her
5·9-inch, and five of her eight 11-inch—one of these eight having been
struck on the chase. Some moments more, and the _Scharnhorst_ was in
it; and the three British who just then climbed above the north-east
horizon, and were struck in the ear by blustering air-waves, questioned
Heaven as to who was fighting whom.

However, a _Mauretania_ dope soon told them; and, concluding that the
_Arkansas_ had left her battle-squadron with the objective of seeing
the _Mauretania_ through, agile Jack dashed off his jacket, and was in
it.

They were the _Inflexible_, the _Invincible_, and a destroyer, the
_Swift_—say 36,000 tons: and, after steaming south three minutes so as
to clear the _Arkansas’_ bows, the _Inflexible_ got six twelve-inchers
trained upon the _Scharnhorst_, and from the horizon’s edge parted with
5100 lb. of blasting bad language in idiomatic Saxon.

At the same time the _Invincible_ engaged the _Von der Tann_, who,
having her broadside to the American, was raked fore-and-aft by the
British shells; and though not one quarter from that distance touched
her, her control platform with all its contents of gunnery-officer,
switchboard and crew flew like rooks, its mast collapsed, and her two
forward primary-guns torqued like candles at a fire.

However, most German ships (very wisely) had a second control amidships
between decks, where a series of tubes with total-reflection prisms
formed images on reflectors—like the periscopes of submarines—enabling
the ship’s fighter to see round the sea. And the _Von der Tann’s_
answer to the _Invincible_ was in broken English—broken English
armour above-belt, where two shells of her starboard _échelon_
struck—long-capped shells of low trajectory that flew straight like a
cuff, their fuses arranged to explode after penetration; and these,
piercing three armour-inches and some eight feet of coal in the upper
portion of her bunkers, bounded exultantly into the redoubt, where,
in the space between the main and protective decks, the pair of them
danced the serpentine-dance in purple amid a clatter like clapping and
applause of diabolic horse-laughter bawling, down among turbines and
furnaces.

The fore-bulkhead of the _Scharnhorst_, meantime, was full of
sea-water, she listed to starboard, and the _Mauretania_, who had
made paces like a scared hen to tuck her head below the horizon, was
standing motionless, steadily trembling like a mare among cobras, her
rudder and two starboard screws broken off her.

And every second the combat was closing up: for the hand that touched
the range-finder shook, gun-layers stood astonished and stung with
vapours, so that big guns that should have been firing two rounds a
minute were firing only one in three, and hits were leagues below all
target-practice averages.

To this result the mistiness and the ships’ rolling contributed; and,
in the case of the _Arkansas_, a swaying of her trellis-masts in her
rocking deranged the range-finding, while, in the case of the Germans,
the large number of their anti-mosquito guns, which they were using as
primary-armament guns, thickened the air with heated vapours, which
refracted the sunlight, with the effect of bewildering the sightings.

So they closed: for the horseflesh-eaters, having mettle from their
diet, would not strike their colours; and flight from the first had
been impossible for them owing to the _Scharnhorst’s_ want of speed: so
they closed and closed: six thunderclouds of smoke: the _Invincible_ a
creeping cloud; the _Swift_ a sweeping; the Germans to perish dearly;
the rest to have it finished quickly and sit and think of it.

And they were all in this position,

                        .Mau

      .Ark                            .Invin

                        .Swi

             .Von

  .Sch                     .Inflex

the _Arkansas_ hardly any longer a mile from the _Scharnhorst_, her
bow now to the west, when all that war paused in awe at a thing
that happened: for the great battleship was in the very act of
overwhelming the wreck of the _Scharnhorst_ with the sharp wrath of
all a broadside,—jabbering quick-firers winking, and the bale of her
bellowing barbettes—when a _Scharnhorst_ 8·2-inch entered her well
under the water-line for’ard, and apparently burst in a magazine.

Whereupon a flame seems to have run through and through her; and she
set to stuttering such tons of thundering, like Etna rhetoric, as no
tongue can tell: took the ocean and shook it, as dreader and still
dreader she roared and roared in that redness of her death-throes,
while what was left of her 800 men were seen through a volcano of
reek leaping from her in every direction like sprats spattering from
a trap-net; then, like an old lion which, after roaring, gruffly guns
from his guts a humph of venom, and again a humph, and a humph, and
is done, and grunts, his eruption hushed, his say said; or like a
pump which, after pouring, chucks a gush, and a gush, and a gush, and
is done, and grunts, its eruption hushed; so the _Arkansas_, after
thundering, thumped a humph, and a humph, and a humph from her drum
to the sun, and was done, her death-anthem chanted, her death-passion
passioned, and was a skeleton before her burial, leaving over the sea a
mausoleum of smoke.

She had within her 290 tons of big-gun projectiles alone: so far over
the ocean her tragedy darkened the day with the shadows of night, and
many men on the _Scharnhorst_ were laid low under the sharp shower of
the lavas which she spouted.

Some moments more and a roller rolled foaming over the mastless hull of
the _Scharnhorst_; and she rose no more.

At the same moment the _Von der Tann_, sinking fast, started sharply
north-eastward to put a sure hole in the _Mauretania_ while she
could—heedless of the _Swift_, which was now tearing near to sting
and fly, pouring as she tore a rain of twenty-eight 4-inch shells a
minute—heedless of the _Inflexible_, which also was speeding near to
launch a torpedo—for little heed was left in any head on that sea, each
ship now a shrieking lazaretto: and, as the _Von der Tann_, now within
two thousand yards, sent out a needle at the stationary _Mauretania_,
the _Swift_ was ready to send needles from her two tubes, and the
_Inflexible_ to send.

But just then tragedy overwhelmed the _Swift_: for a shell from the
_Invincible_, still creeping well to eastward—a 12-inch shell shot
out of rent rifling—fell far short of the _Von der Tann_ into the
engine-room of the _Swift_, which stopped.

Upon which that low length of the _Inflexible_, with its tripod-masts
amidships, and topmasts like bayonets, went ranging on ahead of the
_Swift_, not far from her; and when the _Swift’s_ torpedo-crews had
recovered their feet, and two 18-inch needles flew out of her under
water at fifty miles an hour, the one to port appears to have been led
astray into the _Inflexible’s_ wake.

This hulled her; crumpled her screws; ruined her rudder; and she,
rudderless, steered askew by her port wing-screw, went her own way,
rushing perniciously for the _Von der Tann_, which with shattered
steering-gear was rushing her way, both bellowing at those terribly
close quarters with all their cannon still battle-worthy, billows
already breaking over the _Inflexible’s_ poop, over the _Von der
Tann’s_ beam.

And as they got near, entangled in some magnet-plight, as the bicycle
of the beginner heads straight for the lamp-post, and can’t be drawn
off, they were shut from each other by a column of water, which gushed
with a dogged gong-sound two hundred feet aloft from under the _Von der
Tann_—a torpedo from the _Swift_.

When this dropped back broad-showering, with it dropped showering a
rain of wreckage upon the _Inflexible’s_ deck.

And before it was over, every soul on both vessels dropped flat, as the
cracking ram of the _Inflexible_ went with a racket like Distraction
itself through the _Von der Tann’s_ six inches of armour; nor did it
stop; but walked on and on into the other ship, splitting the tympanum
with shrillness in a sombre dusk.

This probably preserved the German above water a minute longer; and
within that minute, while they so stood two-in-one, a Whitehead burst
beneath both beams—a Whitehead fired by the _Inflexible_, which had
missed, but had been whirled into the German’s wake.

Whereupon the twain started a little apart; a pillar of smoke that
mixed with the clouds rose round them, and remained steady in the air
like a temple, mucking their dusk into midnight: in which gloom, under
which tomb, the two settled down together, unseen, and still.

Some of their men escaped by leaping: for immediately upon the
_Arkansas_ tragedy the fleet of the _Mauretania’s_ boats had gone out,
save two whose bottoms had dropped out in sympathy with the tragedy;
and now, too, those of the _Invincible’s_ boats that could still float
were out, picking up swimmers.

And all were quickly filled, some trailing from their wales men whose
heads the waves swept over.

But the wind had lulled; the sun was now bright, the battle having
lasted forty minutes; the air hazy with gun-vapours; and yonder,
still lingering, the mound of smoke that the _Arkansas_ had left, and
crumbling yonder the pillar of cloud within which the _Inflexible_ and
_Von der Tann_ had foundered.

The _Swift_, though abandoned, was still visible, standing there bowed,
steep in the bows, like the camel that kneels and waits; and still
visible was the _Mauretania_, waiting large and tragic, listed to
starboard, showing all her deck-shape like a leaf, the sea like troops
of multitudinous wolves trooping upon her to have her.

She lingered there a long time: until with a sudden flurry, as of
resolve to make the plunge and try the new state under-sea, she skipped
ahead and left the sea, sucking after her Captain Arthur and some forty
of her men.

The loaded boats, meantime, made as best they could in the swell for
the _Invincible_, a stare of scare and amazement on those sailors’
faces, as of men who have passed through what the heart can’t fancy,
those within the boats gripping at the gunwales or seats, for the sea
seemed to reel fiercely round their ears.

In one boat sat Captain Stickney of the _Arkansas_ and the captain of
the _Scharnhorst_ side by side, the latter—a large German whose name
was Bergmann—having a gash across his freckled red neck.

This was visible, for his upper clothes had apparently been singed
off him, save his vest, which his buxom breasts bulged; and he kept
stanching the gash with a canvas rag, already wet through with red, for
the scratch ran like a tap.

The two captains uttered no word to each other for a long time; but
presently the American, producing a handkerchief sidewards with his
face averted, murmured: “Handkerchief?”

Up sprang Bergmann half-way in a surprise of politeness, and after
searching a second for expression, blurted in his big and vigorous
voice:

“Beautiful thank, my sir!”

“That’s it,” muttered the Yankee, gazing pensively over the sea.

Soon afterwards the boats were at the _Invincible_. But she was very
sick and feeble; and it was not until three nights later that tidings
of the fight arrived in Britain.

It arrived the same night in Peking, where Li Ku Yu, hearing that
result, clucked his tongue, with “As I thought! Man has learned to
destroy better than to build.”




                              CHAPTER VIII

                              THE TREASURE


At that morning hour of the sea-fight the half-caste Oyone and her
dagger were already at Chinnery’s in the Horseferry Road—a common old
house, whose door was as often open as shut, but was shut now; so the
girl lurked about till “Monty” came—an old soul rather shaky in her
gait and being, who “did” for Chinnery (Chinnery for some reason called
her his “laundress,” though few were the things that Monty washed). And
when Monty went in, leaving the door “on the jar,” Oyone slipped into
the closet under the stairs.

The dash from closet-door to front-door would hardly occupy a second;
and she had an _alibi_ and everything planned in case of mishap.

But let us not watch her horrors while she waits there in darkness with
wet hands, groaning again and again, “I can’t do it! gods, I can’t!”
her will still fixed like nickel—needless agitations, for a cypher
was even then on the wires for her from Li Ku Yu, countermanding that
sinister cypher of his respecting the Prince before the declaration of
war—but let us watch instead a young man away up in the Whitechapel
Road in the dress of a private of Marines, a cloak hanging over one
arm, he walking briskly to and fro a little, his palm anon on his brow,
feeling seedy and fretful, having spent the night in a vile den on a
four-penny bed—in a doss-house in Dorset Street near.

And presently he stepped into a “Cocoa Rooms,” up into a “First Class
Room,” paid threepence at a counter, and carried his fare to a table
nailed to the floor—no one up there but him.

But when he tasted the coffee it did not please him—it was not really
coffee; the bread-and-butter—it was not really butter. And the cup
displeased him deeply, the saucer, the saw-dust—everything there.

And he tapped with his nail, saying: “It’s bad, it’s wrong, it’s
beneath the dignity of modern man: so, if foreigners surpass and smash
us, here will be the reason—feudalism in the twentieth century—the
monstrous tommy-rot! And if I haven’t gun-fire and gumption enough in
me to worry it to rags, then, I’ll go with my girl to Samoa, and smoke
under a cocoa-nut tree.”

Now he rose, picked up a little poker, and, smiling with his lips,
but not with his eyes, he smashed his cup and saucer, muttering, “not
good enough,” he brought down the shop-mirror in a shower of sherds,
murmuring, “not good enough,” he spurted past an agitated man in an
apron who ran up staring, and he hurled the urns of tea, coffee, cocoa,
one after the other, into a flood over the floor, muttering “not good
enough,” and now the poker was scattering crackling crockery from
shelves, until wreckage was the condition of that first-class room.

By this time the attendant had afresh rushed below, keenly seeking a
policeman; but now the young man was with him at the door, muttering:
“Don’t make a fuss—only letting off steam a little. What’s the damage?
Twenty pounds? With five for yourself”—and, tossing some bank-notes,
he was gone with a brisk and busy sailor-gait that waggled his
jack-trousers round his legs, leaving behind him a thing that said:
“Well, I’m ——!”

But the more he advanced westward, the more he found his way impeded
with people, and in Leadenhall Street had to stop and wait long: for a
crowd had surrounded all that Bank-region to hear the Sergeant-at-Arms,
attended by a throng of City dignitaries, read out the Declarations of
War from the steps of the Stock Exchange.

When at last he could move to procure a cab, the cab had to creep, and
near Charing-Cross was blocked by a rattle of limbers and the showering
hoofs of a 15th Hussars battalion bound for Dover: for already England
was pouring into France, troops debarking at up and down platforms
alike, and at sidings. So, at the stoppage, the young man, who had
given an address in the Horseferry Road, called to his cabman: “Do get
me out of this! Drive round to Buckingham Palace”—and now he threw
round him a roomy cloak which covered his costume.

At the palace-gate he asked a sentry if the Queen had come in, was told
no, and went on to stroll about the grounds, praising God for the air
of heaven after his night of pain.

But, as he went, he caught a glimpse of the Princess Elizabeth with
three ladies near the Lake; and it may almost be said that he hid—stood
behind laurel, and cut an eye at space: for the Queen was in love with
the Princess for him, and the Princess in love with him for herself.

Soon, however, a sound of cheering reached him from without, and the
Queen, who had set the fashion of early Park-drives, dashed into
the courtyard, the damask of her colour still comely as a damsel’s,
she habited in royal simplicity, but for the boisterous sea of her
immoderate hat.

The royal horses drew up, as the cloaked figure came bare-headed to
speak at the carriage, from which the Princess Alexandra and a Maid
of Honour got out after some talk; and the Queen then said: “Again?”
nodding toward the costume which she knew that the military cloak
covered.

“Yes, Mother,” he answered.

“Why is it necessary? I don’t see.”

“I have imposed it upon myself, Mother: once a month, if ashore, I
sleep there, if it kills me.”

“Is it very bad?”

“You wouldn’t believe—headache, sickness. The men—sigh. And these
people feed me, cushion me, love me in a way—for nothing: I’ll taste
their cup just once in a month to show good-will.”

“Do it, do it, I don’t want to stop you.”

“I see that I should, till it’s ended. A good race, mother: but, oh, we
do need a dictator for one week.”

“Yes, but that word is too often on your lips of late, Teddy! Drop it,
mind you. Your place is to influence men, not yourself to take upon you
the cure of your country.”

“I hear you, Mother. But what news? I couldn’t sleep till five, then
overslept, and couldn’t get one paper to buy.”

“Well—do you know that the House three times read last night a Bill
granting eighty millions for the war? and reducing Government Stock
interest by one and a quarter?”

“Yes, I knew that. But about the _Mauretania_? She reported?”

“I—don’t think so,” the Queen answered; “I haven’t seen or heard
anything.”

“I have had her on the brain all night! Suppose the Germans have
snapped her up? That would be rather sharp practice—so soon—don’t
you think? And shouldn’t I revenge myself for it, if I can manage
something.”

“Manage what?”—the Queen leaned keenly toward him; for what she called
“manfulness” in the Prince of Wales was now her liquor and secret meat:
and her doubt whether all men saw in him the Drake which she saw, her
care that they should, had become rather common and morbid. He and hats
were her vanities.

The possibility that some day he might turn out to be “manful” beyond
her liking, “manful” enough to scare her to death, had not yet occurred
to her.

He put his foot on the step to tell her: “You saw the paragraph on
Tuesday about a strange object having been seen in the air—standing
still, mind—a most momentous thing in history, Mother, if it is true.
Well, I assume that it is Chinnery’s doing, and, if so, I have a
thought of going to Spandau in it, blowing up the Tower, and grabbing
what the Tower contains. What do you think?—if I find it practicable.”

The Queen shrank sharply, but said nothing; considered it with lowered
lids; flushed a little; paled a little; and suddenly bringing her eyes
close to his, let her lips breathe: “You might try it on.”

The Prince laughed, saying: “Mother, I think you’re the most audacious
She that ever buckled on stays.”

“And you?” she said, smiling at him with her forehead raised; but then,
touched with sudden gravity: “You are aware that ladies buckle on such
armour.”

“Scott, Mother,” said the Prince with lowered lids: “aren’t I a sailor?
and ships feminine? and often in stays?”

“Not very brilliant,” the Queen’s lips just muttered: “ships are in
stays when coming round, but ladies when standing off”—adding aloud:
“But have you spoken with the Princess Elizabeth? There she is over
yonder, thinking of you, I declare! Let the footman run and request Her
Imperial Highness to join us a minute.”

“Mother,” said the Prince ruefully—“if you could forgive me: I have to
go to Chinnery’s, and am late.”

“Oh, you are going now to Mr Chinnery’s? You didn’t say. My goodness,
how I should love to be there!”—with the levity of a schoolgirl
hankering after a spree—“to hear you two chit-chatting about chucks,
and jockeys, and washers, and rockers, and ‘H’ and ‘B’—the holiest,
highest, Divinest babble yet babbled on this planet—Divine because
true, Divinest because truest. I _love_ that young man!—don’t tell your
exalted father.”

“Then—come, Mother.”

The Queen reflected. “I’m afraid it can’t be contrived—though it
might!—No, I think not”—and when the Prince had left her side, she
half-rose to say that she might after all, but sat again.

He, not seeing a cab beyond the gates, started to walk fast, heated
himself, and threw off the cloak, having little fear that the streets
would see the Prince of Wales in a marine.

Meantime, in the closet at Chinnery’s Oyone waited—the Prince over an
hour late; and her growing doubt whether he would come, and the long
tension of her nervous system, had proved very enervating, for each
carriage-wheel drew from her the hiss “this is he!” and at the last she
was on the floor, prostrated, vaguely wretched.

But suddenly a brisk step—the door pushed open—and she was up afresh,
tense and ready.

However, she was so sure of a _carriage_, and his appearance on
entering was so different from the image of him in her expectation,
that her sub-conscious conclusion was that this was a sailor sent to
make an excuse. She had never seen the Prince, and it was only when
a voice pelting up the stairs called “_Richard!_” that the thought
stabbed her heart: “_that—was—he!_” whereupon she collapsed again,
weeping at her defeat and her relief, and when her weeping ceased, the
catches of her breath still reached the rats’ ears in there, going on
like gutter-sobs gushing on nights of rain long after the rain has
dried its tears.

Her chance for that day was gone, since Chinnery would be sure to
accompany the Prince down, so she stole upstairs, washed her face with
the right decoctions, and went to listen at the workroom keyhole.

Chinnery by this time had told the Prince that the _Mauretania_ had
been waylaid, for he had instruments of great delicacy, and Oyone
could hear the Prince stepping restively about, talking hotly,
saying: “Germany, eh?—touch the old coffee-pot with the oxy-hydrogen,
Richard—to see Germany grow and grow like this, and sit still! Thirty
years ago—ten—why didn’t we blast every German battleship out of the
sea, as we could, and then say ‘Shake hands, but no more German ships
eternally’? Or if we _must_ let Germany, why didn’t we say to Germany:
‘Here’s India—Australia—call them German, if they’ll let you, you
leaving them as open to us as we to you, and let’s abolish navies and
educate mankind.’ Would England have been a penny the worse, Germany
the better? They _think_ so: but, then, the heads of the mass of men
are infested with such a fog of feckless, fantastical fixed-ideas got
from their grandmothers, that when they think that they are thinking,
they are only remembering—remembering what some dead Swazi thought
that he thought. Whenever they do think straight, it is only due to
their mother-wit, not to any training in mentation that they are given!
Nor have their governors any! By whom is the world still handled? Not
by young scientists trained in facts, but by old lawyers trained in
opinions—quoting ignoramuses—pundits—scott, what can you expect? The
Queen tells me, Richard, that within two years Sky-Blue has cut off
370 pundits’ heads—crass rascal: but I can quite understand why he
is doing it. Pundits! Fantastic catchwords!—‘colonies,’ ‘Empire,’—as
though such a thing as a modern Empire was the least bit possible
outside China; ‘slow evolution’—as if ‘slowness’ improved evolution;
‘hasty legislation’—as if every scientific experiment ought not to be
as ‘hasty’ as life is short. Fantastic fads! The contribution of the
colonies to us is £667,000—just think: they cost tens of millions; this
war will cost hundreds of millions, because some English and German
lawyers have heard someone say ‘colonies,’ ‘Empire’—little rages and
delusions of Crusaders! Considering that £87,000,000 of British capital
has been invested in Argentina within five years, could Argentina
be more profitable to Britain if a British colony? What is wanted
is not colonies! but the recognition that the whole globe, and each
inch of it, is the private property of each man, as in Law the whole
of a business, or ship, and each inch of it, is the private property
of each partner. But think of France shutting in Madagascar against
trade without paying one penny of rent to the rest of men, and all the
nations not instantly declaring war against France! Well, the French
are our good friends. I don’t want—but—scott—was it the arm of some
mannikin at the Quai d’Orsay that dragged up Madagascar out of the
main, and granted her mangoes, and gross groves, and grace of face? Oh,
my earth, my mother, my own, my poem, my Altar, my heirloom—I am not
a Martian, but of her dark marl—and is not this thing an intolerable
wrong to me that some impossibly crude little duke, or some ’cute fool
at the Quai d’Orsay should say to me ‘this bit of her is somehow more
mine than yours,’ and rob me of her roundness? Forgive me, Richard, I
can’t always talk calmly of the insolence of these little slaves, my
blood boils——”

“And now the coffee, too, Ted,” Oyone heard Chinnery say, “and now for
Monty and the kidneys!”

A button was pressed: and the Prince was next heard to say: “Not that
the Germans are so lawyer-ridden—I see that in 1897 the French navy
was thrice stronger than the German; in 1909 the German was 40,000
tons the stronger; and in those twelve years had spent £36,000,000
less on her navy than France—just think. France?—no go at sea. What’s
the French for ‘Stand by!’ ‘_Attonsiaun!_’—with a nasal singing of the
‘aun.’ That’s no good. ‘Fred, dear, please try’—_attonsiaun!_—scott.
On land, yes; but England on the sea. Not that I believe one bit in
English, or any, sea-power as represented in Dreadnoughts—as you know.
‘_Dreadnoughts_’ is one of the fixed ideas!—nothing weaker—not a clock.
I calculate, Richard, that one German capital-ship is a match for any
four English, and one English for any four-and-a-half-German—meaning
that they’ll all sink: and where’s your sea-power then? We shall soon
see.”

“And your _Asahel_ will be put to the test of thunder, Ted,” Chinnery
said. “Don’t get killed.”

“Scott, not I. Too busy to stop to die. I shouldn’t wonder if, for one
thing, I shall have Mr Chin-Chin to stamp on before I’m done, for I had
a dream of it one night. Do you know I believe he’s at the bottom of
this war?”

“It sounds quite likely”—from Chinnery. “The day he left Brockweir,
guess what he said: ‘I go, but will come back in multitudes’—amusing
person. And I dare say he will, since he says so—good luck to him.”

“To Sky-Blue? I say, don’t you care at all for your country, my friend?”

“I wonder?” said Chinnery: “not much, I think, Ted. His ‘multitudes’
will certainly never come into the Horseferry Road, for I should stop
them at the corner. But, for the rest, if we know that blessedness
is the destiny of Life, isn’t it a little irreligious to fret about
the road—Here’s my Mont!” as Monty, smart in cap and apron that
morning, entered with a tray: and for about a minute Oyone heard no
sound—Chinnery seeing to the coffee, which he always cooked himself:
but all at once an outcry—a howl as of horror—was heard to burst from
Chinnery: “For God’s sake! _Teddy!_ Don’t touch!”—mixed with a clatter
of the dropped coffee-pot.

Then silence: and Oyone knew that Chinnery had dropped into a chair,
panting—his heart not strong.

The Prince was now heard to say: “You mean that cubical box?”

Then Chinnery: “Oh, Teddy, you startled—forgive me. It is my Redlike
Ray of which I wrote you—just finished—and I meant to cap it yesterday,
but was dragged out to see the crowd; and now the coffee’s done for. It
would have struck us blind, not to mention Monty and half Horseferry
Road, if you had chanced to touch the little spider-hub just inside the
hole. As to the coffee—Run, Mont!—a jugful at Marzucco’s——”

On which Monty trotted tottery, exchanging a smile with Oyone outside;
and Oyone knew that the Prince was now eating and discussing the
Redlike Ray with Chinnery in a jargon of which she understood nothing:
for, with all her nimbleness, science remained a rocky and foreign
thing to her forehead.

In fact, Chinnery was telling of a method of changing five of the
waves of white light into an X-wave resembling the red, yet not the
red—shorter—which irritated to hyperpyrexia, and then instantly
atrophied, the optic nerve, striking a dog blind in five seconds. But
the Prince seemed bewildered, and Chinnery said: “when you’ve finished
you’ll see the mechanism.”

The Prince presently remarked: “Which seems to mean that you may become
the king of any country any day you please.”

“Quite so—I never thought of that,” answered Chinnery smiling: “but oh,
Ted, the bore.”

In fact, so far from wishing to be a King, Chinnery lived on just two
hundred pounds a year, for from the list of his inventions he had made
not a penny. Many of them were not even known to have been made! for he
forgot last year’s inventions like last year’s socks, no more seeking
reward from science than the sweet-tooth seeks reward for eating
sweets. Some little men whose lives like flies were in his hand had
offered him—a knighthood! But he had forgotten to post his reply.

“But about the boat,” Oyone heard the Prince say next: “no engine, you
say?”

“No,” answered Chinnery; “you’ll see her presently.”

“Then, how on earth—Tut, how magical!”

“Not really, Teddy, I think,” said Chinnery. “You must remember that
the problem of flying has not hitherto been tackled by thinkers: for
the aeroplane, of course, is not a product of thought, but of the
gallantry of some nobodies who dared to go into the air on a kite with
an engine for string—grand lads! but, of course, not great. You, I
know, are a famous ‘flyer’; but ah, Teddy, the risk! I should die of
heart-failure the instant the engine started with me! Its absurdity
consists in its imitation of the bird! When we want to run faster than
the deer, we don’t imitate the deer’s legs, we get into a train; to
swim faster than the shark, we don’t imitate fins, as canoe-savages
do, we use sails and screws. And the problem of flight, even beyond
the atmosphere, is not really difficult. I know of four ways of making
an apple fall up instead of down; and there must be eight ways: for I
haven’t given the matter any systematic thought.”

“But what is it takes this boat up—something new in the way of force?”

“Oh, Lord, no: just a trick with the old forces.”

“Electricity?”

“No, magnetism. A little electricity, of course, to get the magnetism—a
few amps. out of a toy dynamo-and-oil-engine. A battery would do. It is
quite simple, as you will say presently.”

“And quite safe, you say?”

“Safe five times over—since I, the chief of cowards, went over London
in it on Tuesday, with a young lady, who steered and managed it.
Several times safer, even in a storm, than riding a bicycle in a
lane—barring lightning. Even if this particular one fell a thousand
feet, one wouldn’t be hurt, though one would if she fell five hundred.”

“But how does magnetism—— By the way, does this young lady know the
secrets of your inventions?”

“It’s Oyone Umé—which signifies ‘Plum-blossom,’ Ted.... Yes, as far
as I can tell her, she knows the ‘secrets’; but that’s not far, I’m
afraid.”

“A good thing perhaps, Richard. But what weight would this boat carry?”

“This particular one?—half-a-ton: but any desired weight—according to
the size of the electro-magnets, their ampere-turns, and the _mu_ of
the iron specimen.”

“I see. And her speed?”

“Seventy-five miles, this one. But any speed, according to the stern
magnet, or magnets.”

“And how long did she take you to make?”

“Five hours. She is just rough boards nailed together.”

“So in three days you could get me ten of her to carry five tons at 120
miles?”

“If I can get some carpenters to work on Sunday. But why?”

“Let’s blow up the Julius Tower at Spandau and grab the lucre!—six
millions sterling in gold bars. I’ll send you a cheque—What do the
boats cost?”

“About £25. But what is this Julius Tower?”

“Where the Germans keep the French war-indemnity of ’71. I know it
well; and I’ll get ten of my best _Asahel_ fellows, and pilot the
expedition myself. This treasure, which comes out of the woollen
stocking of many a poor French peasant, has been set aside by the
Germans for their next-war war-chest; nor have they touched it yet, I
know, for it can only be touched by a joint order of the Bundesrat and
the Reichstag. We’ll show them _Mauretania_.... And you, Richard, will
come with us.”

“_I_, Teddy, throw bombs?” Oyone heard Chinnery say with a break of
laughter in his voice: and the girl was pallid at those words “_six
millions_,”—which is a lot in China.

“You come,” she heard the Prince say: “you need not throw anything;
but you will thank me for dragging you out of this hole. You have got
to grovel here over your gold; though I praise you, Richard, with bent
head, priest of God, because your delight is in the laws of your
Lord, and in His laws you meditate day and night; and when you have
entered into your closet and shut your door, you draw near to your
Father who is in secret, and your Father who walks in secret rewards
you publicly”—extracts from the so-called “Brockweir Praise-book”
which “Teddy” uttered in a low, slow recitative with no little unction
and relish, during which Oyone’s prying eye saw Chinnery’s eyes fly
skywards once, and drop: for all Brockweir boys were very profoundly
devout—Li Ku Yu, too, though he disliked quotations.

“Still, one needn’t fester in one’s closet,” the Prince added: “you
come for the spree. As for the coffee, doesn’t matter: I’ll see the
boat now, and then the redlike ray, for my girl will soon be due, and
then I must go.”

But in that moment Monty had arrived outside the door, Oyone was taking
the coffee from her, and the half-caste rapped, and entered.

There, smiling, looking under her eyes, she stood like a show at
the end of the long litter that lay under two frosted skylights—the
Prince’s breakfast-table a brass coffer near the lathe in the centre,
the linoleum holey, the bookcase shaky, and there were chemical
shelves, dusty old motors, ammeters, microscopes, with tools, tools,
invading the electric furnace, the brazing-hearth, and, ah, how many
different kinds of iron! Swedish, mild steel, cast dynamo-steel, alloys
of tungsten, titanium, tantallum—without any end. The girl stood in it
like a bird-of-paradise in a stable, dressed in Kyoto silk—crimson with
large splashes of pansy—but _à la Européenne_, a toque cocked on her
top.

The Prince started at that sight!

“Well, I did not know that you had come,” Chinnery said.

“Here is your coffee.”

“This is—Mr Edward Reeks; Mademoiselle Oyone, Teddy—Plum-blossom.”

Hands were shaken amid smiles.

Then—“conversation”! Was Mr Reeks a sailor? in the Navy? How terrible
a thing was war! Why could not nations contrive——? So she had been up
in the air? Had she not been afraid? She _had_, but still had gone. And
how did it feel? It felt sweet: like sitting on a throne with one’s
feet on the throat of the world; and the wild flight: ah! the wild wine
rioting through one’s arteries. Some delights only a woman could fully
taste; men were a little stolid, were they not?

Chinnery, proud of her, kept glancing at “Teddy,” glad to see “Teddy’s”
glances rest on her, and drop. A cup of coffee had been poured, but was
never drunk.

The formality of “conversation” was broken by the exhibition to Mr
Reeks of a Taoist amulet-ring on Oyone’s finger, whereupon Chinnery
tickled the finger with a copper commutator-brush, Oyone slapped
Chinnery, and Chinnery chased Oyone round the lathe. Thereafter
Oyone stood crucified, her two arms stretched against the wall,
chatty and kittenish, letting her eyes rest kindly upon the pretty
milk-and-pinkiness of the Prince—eyes into which some kind of fire
would wildly fly up an instant, and die out.

Then Chinnery, putting hand to pocket, flung a flying glance round,
drank a gulp—the Prince and Oyone pretending not to see—and now
suggested a geisha-dance: on which Oyone ran, got her long-handled
_gaita_, and her dagger, and first geishaed like a bird-girl through
the intricate litter, bringing a brightness into the boys’ eyes, and
then began a dagger-dance, in which she lassooed the Prince with her
stole, dragged him to act as foil, and having him in bondage with one
hand, with the other kept stabbing with the dagger at his neck, his
side, smiling with an underlook, as she danced.

And this gaiety was at its height, when a fourth person was suddenly in
the room—a girl in nurse’s uniform—Eulalia.

Monty had rapped unheard, and had let her in.

Eulalia remained standing within the door, taking it in: and the first
fact that registered itself in her chronicles was the half-caste’s
loveliness, then the fact of “Teddy” foolishly lassooed with Oyone’s
stole, while the half-caste brandished the _kokotana_ with a dancing
arm. In another instant Chinnery noticed the new-comer; Oyone and the
Prince started apart, he rather red and vexed.

Chinnery flew to Eulalia—she had met her “Teddy” here before—then
proceeded to present the two ladies, and their hands were half out to
meet, when “Teddy,” by a very deft and tactful piece of acting, took
both of Eulalia’s hands to swing them a little in welcome—not wishing
her to shake hands with Plum-blossom: and the ladies exchanged a bow
instead.

But Oyone understood: and for a moment a most ferocious expression of
rancour marred her face.

The Prince, meantime, was whispering Chinnery that he must go, and,
without having seen either the boat or the Redlike Ray after all, he
was soon in the taxicab which had brought Eulalia.

In it Eulalia sat with her lids pensively lowered; and for some time
not much speech was between them.

“It is two months, three days, and three hours since we have been
together,” he said.

She did not answer this, but presently asked: “Why are you dressed like
a marine?”

“Just a masquerade!” he answered with a laugh.

“Just a masquerade” was not very understandable. But she had become
accustomed to obscure replies from him, and had learned not to pursue
inquiry.

They were silent. Then he, shaking her little finger: “Cross about
anything?”

“Why, no.”

“What’s your name?”

It was with the same pensiveness that she said: “My name’s Eulalia.”

“Whose girl are you?”

“I am Teddy Reeks’ girl.”

“All of you?”

“Yes, all.”

And with the same pensiveness and lowered lids she asked: “What’s your
name?”

“My name,” said he, “is Teddy.”

“Whose boy are you?”

“I am Eulalia’s boy.”

“_All_ of you?”

“Yes, all.”

With this he quickly kissed her fingers—they were passing out of the
crowd of Victoria Street into Buckingham Palace Road—and the Queen and
the Princess Elizabeth both saw that kiss.

These two were on the way to Chinnery’s in a motor brougham to meet
the Prince! for Her Majesty had, after all, managed, and, having to
keep the Princess interested, had considered that a visit to Chinnery’s
den would be a piquant little experience for her, so had brought her,
always eager for the Princess to meet the Prince: and they got a
glimpse of that finger-kiss.

When the Princess next looked at Her Majesty, it was to see her with
her lids shut down, her countenance blanched and rigid; and she said:
“Your Majesty!” but Her Majesty did not answer.

Quickly the Princess—a palish, plainish Gretchen, thin, very German
in expression, spectacled, with a spiteful little pressure of her
lip—quickly she bid the coachman “turn back”; and while she held ottar
under Her Majesty’s nostrils, kept the taxicab in view. When it turned
into Grosvenor Place, she told the coachman “up here.”

She saw the pair enter a mansion with blinded windows, to which the
Prince had a key: and she marked the house-number.

Her Majesty, meantime, was not unconscious, more or less saw, but was
too overwhelmed for speech or motion. All at once her Kingdom was
departed from her, on her white knight’s scutcheon—a _tache_.

Of course, all her sorrow was for the male, all her hatred, rage and
red revenge for the hussy, whose face she had distinctly seen.




                               CHAPTER IX

                        FATE OF THE SIX MILLIONS


Late in the day of the Prince’s visit to Chinnery, London was again
agaze at the boat in the air: for Oyone had forced the ever-pliant
Chinnery to take her over Harrow, and this time made herself fully
mistress of the two or three little tricks of its working.

To be the _Fu Jen_ of Li Ku Yu one day!—this had become her mania—to
ride at his side—to attain to that. Alone of the men whose eyes fell
upon her Li Ku Yu had pooh-poohed her: and for this thing, apart from
her audacious ambition, she had made the man her famine, her madness,
her star.

And he had promised “though she squinted.” Had he forgotten? Why did
he not recall A-lu-te and her from banishment? She could never bring
herself to remind and pray him, but waited, hoping: and as the years
passed a fury of rancour grew in her heart.

So, when she had heard the Prince utter those words, “six millions,”
she had paled, it was such a lot in China, could buy her much favour
there. And she got from Chinnery all that would probably happen in the
expedition.

During the next three days Chinnery was much in the yard, helping
with the building; and she with a busy brain watched him from a
workroom-window—no one else in the house, Monty being a morning
phenomenon.

At about two on the Monday a load of different kinds of bombs and
shells arrived, and she watched Chinnery and three bluejackets pack
them into the boat’s holds, with some rifles, some that were left over
being put into Chinnery’s own boat: for Chinnery, unable to disobey any
bidding, was going, though with secret bitterness, and had increased
the speed of his boat to keep pace; and Oyone ran down, handled a
shell, tried its weight—a mass that had marked across it “4-inch Shell,
Special Type, Firth, 5 Calibres,” and, as she laid it down tenderly,
threw her eyes mutely to the skies.

At four Chinnery was again in the yard, showing to seven bluejackets
the boats’ working; and two of them, getting into boats, rose into the
air, as one rises in a lift: whereupon Chinnery, while the rest were
gazing upward, took flask from pocket, and showed it, emptied, to Oyone
at the workroom window—with a wink; on which Oyone ran down for the
flask, ran with it to a sitting-room cabinet, filled it with Chianti,
then dropped into the Chianti three drops of liquid out of a pigmy
flagonette of greyish jade from her pocket; and ran to Chinnery.

Till four-thirty the men were up and down in twos and threes in the
boats; then arrived the Prince and two lieutenants together, and
Chinnery, in hurrying to the front-door, whispered to Oyone at the
closet-door: “I am feeling beastly bad! I can’t go!”

“Oh, you must,” she said.

When the three entered she peeped from within the closet; and when
they had hurried through to the yard, she stood within the back-door,
hearkening.

When the officers had been saluted by the men, Chinnery first showed
them the boats’ working, and then commenced to explain their scientific
principle; but the Prince, who was all business and briskness, cut him
short, saying: “Another time, Richard: we are late, let’s start.”

“I was just going to give the fellows some whisky,” said Chinnery.

“Then, do be quick.... Long trip.... Show them _Mauretania_....”

The men now trooped inwards after Chinnery, who, as he passed by Oyone,
anew whispered: “Dear, it is impossible, I _can’t_ go.”

“What’s the matter?” she whispered: “you must try.”

The Prince, meanwhile, and the two lieutenants went from boat to boat,
prying into the mechanism; and said one: “Does your Royal Highness
understand the principle of this thing?”

“Not a bit so far,” answered the Prince: “it seems to me an
impossibility. Here are electro-magnets, keepers, wire-ropes connecting
the keepers with the deck: and it seems clear that it is tension in the
ropes that lifts the boats. But a magnet’s attraction of a keeper is
equalled by the keeper’s attraction of the magnet: so that the downward
pull on each magnet-support should be equal to the tension in the rope,
and the boat should not rise—so far as I can see. The secret of it
probably lies under this tin thing here, which he seems to intend to
protect what’s under it from rain.... He says it’s simple; I’ll find
out to-morrow; and may let you into it. I wish he’d come....”

There lay the eleven boats in a row, very roughly knocked together—long
six-sided things, 20 feet long, 5 high, their decks narrow and short
in comparison with their bottoms, which broad bottoms were slightly
hollow to act as parachutes in case of mishap from lightning; and each
bottom had on it two levers, one lever-end to press upon a spring near
the bow-point, the other upon a spring near the stern-point, and they
were of an angelic ingenuity to prevent the boat from dipping bowwards
or sternwards in the greatest gale; nor could she rock much, for with
these two levers were associated two heavy masses of lead, one for’ard,
one aft, so that the centre of gravity was very low, and equilibrium
so stable, that one could move freely about; the deck, moreover, was
supported on powerful coil-springs.

When Chinnery and the men returned, the Prince was already in his seat,
and now everyone was buttoning great-coats and gloves, it was the
moment of departure, and no one had eyes to notice how ghastly bad one
of them was looking.

The Prince now again mentioned to the men the signification of the
variegated pistol-lights to be fired as signals; a lieutenant reminded
them where the grub had been put; and at nine minutes to five the
Prince started a little oil-engine, depressed a lever connected with a
ratchet-wheel, and went up.

And swiftly the swarm of ten was aloft, and gone.

Chinnery alone remained, Oyone now standing with him by his boat at
the shed-door; and, “Something is wrong,” he sighed, his palm on his
forehead, “I can’t——”

“Try,” she said, lifting to his a face as wan as wax, as wan as his:
“drink a little of this.”

She produced the same flagonette from which she had poured three drops
into his wine.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Ginseng,” said she.

He knew that ginseng was her cure for all human woes, and, to humour
her, took the flagonette, having long got into the habit of doing her
bidding mechanically; and then—anything for a drink.

He glanced guiltily round, drank a gulp, and at once staggered against
the door-post, where with his forehead dropped forward, he stood
ten, fifteen seconds; then sighed, staggered backwards, staring,
death-struck, into the shed, fell among boards and shavings, and lay
still.

On which she with her wild white face went flying into the house, flew
out again under a load of furs, a spade, a saw, hurled them into the
boat, clambered in, started the little engine, depressed the lever; and
her planet sank and sailed away from under her, and left her in space.

Two miles away eastward she saw the swarm of boats: she depressed a
lever behind her, and followed.

The wind was almost ahead, rather raw, and, though not strong, it soon
harangued the ear to weariness with its wrangling and ceaseless tongue
at the boat’s irruption and rush through it.

But, though heard, it was hardly felt, for the gunwale for’ard was
higher than the steerer’s head, so that she had to lean a little aside
to see the boats ahead.

She sat at a square hole in the deck, her feet on one of two
ladder-steps that led to the bottom, tiller-ropes in hand: and after
the first two minutes a sense of perfect security warmed and welled in
her.

Passing over Chelmsford, she buried herself within fur on fur, drank
some ginseng, lit a cigar, and throwing back her throat, began to sing
loud, to howl a song, blasphemously above the thundering of the blast.

Meantime, she took care to keep her distance behind—the speed like the
elevation being regulated by a ratchet-wheel; and the swarm in front
thought that in her boat was Chinnery.

As they left Colchester on the left, and took the sea at Clacton, she
shrieked to heaven like a fury: “_Come, Li Ku Yu!_”

Down there below appeared a little fleet of seven submersibles with
their mother-ship, making apparently for Harwich; and here or there a
sail that looked stuck in the centre of immensity.

Soon, however, as she went on and on over the sea without any sense of
motion or progress—for one wave was twin-brother to every other—a first
fear occurred to her when she began, in a reaction to feel sleepy—sleep
meaning, she knew, that the petrol might exhaust itself, and the boat
would go down, perhaps into the sea. She began to sing again, but
lugubriously low in her throat, moaning gloomy things to the sea-gulls
and the gust.

As the sun went down from its clouds and glories, now ahead appeared a
crowd of glow-flies—the boats’ green starboard, scarlet port, and white
lantern-lights, some above her, some below, scattered, yet forming
something of a bunch.

Now darkness reigned awfully, and with it a little drizzling of
something; no moon to be seen; but between cloud-masses brand-new stars
were crackling in crowds, not lying round any sky, but profoundly back
in the bowels of the boundless black.

They were over the glow that The Hague made when a pink pistol-light
from the foremost boat cut the night.

This meant “Assemble”; and presently a blue shine shooting meant
“Stop”; whereupon one of their number dropped to earth at a village to
make sure of their whereabouts, though, as the wind was nearly ahead,
little lee-way was to be feared.

Meantime, the Prince and the rest, very perplexed and worried as
to Chinnery, were thinking: “He must have turned back!”—for the
half-caste, hiding in the night, had not lighted any of her lights.

Then when the investigator had mounted again and howled out “_Hague!_”
a green glow streamed out, and the voyage was resumed; nor did it stop
again, save once over a hamlet three miles from Brandenburg, whence
they made a straight fly for Berlin.

Over the western suburbs the pilot signalled “Lights out,” and flying
as low as 1000 feet so as to be just visible to each other in the
off-shine of the city, they went on eastward: the hour then 10.45.

Moving slow over the parts of Berlin eastward of the Thiergarten, they
found the town in a state of the greatest uproar and eruption—hurrahs
that rang and reigned in the air like echoes of cataracts—for no people
on earth can cheer and blow off steam like Germans—national songs sung
by multitudes, houses gala with flags, crowds careering through some
streets, or standing blocked before some balcony or façade.

At the Austrian Embassy opposite that old home of M. Benedetti, so full
of memories of ’71, the boat’s glasses saw a throng so thick, that a
cigar-end remained on the back where it had dropped from a boat; and,
even as the unseen boats moved over them, a roar broke out like a clap
at the sight of the Ambassador standing, all smiles, on the balcony.

The fact was, that tidings of the _Mauretania_ fight had not long
arrived, to be at once hailed as a great German victory: for the
two Germans, though sunk, had sunk a far greater weight of metal,
and had achieved their objective—the destruction or capture of the
_Mauretania_. Whereupon—_Hoch!_ reeling beer-gardens, gush, flushed
foreheads, flags, promiscuous dancing, hot heads, hats on high,
hurrahs, special late editions—the tumult of the newsboys’ hootings
through the Unter den Linden soaring distinctly above the other tumults
to the boats. England’s day was done—call it to the stars!—another sun
dawning.

At the Schloss the Emperor and Crown-Prince had but now presented
themselves, when the crowd of ten boats cruised that road, for the
roaring remained present in the air like an evaporation exhaling. What
was moving in the gloom above their glee they little knew; as those
above them little knew what was above _them_.

Meantime, a fresh scheme had entered the Prince’s head, his eyes now
sparkling in spiteful thought; he turned, and after following the
boulevard westward, bent six points northward toward Bismark Strasse,
and the Spree.

He came to rest over a block of building by the river, twice blew a
whistle, and slowly descended upon the building’s top.

Now he ran soft a little to stretch his limbs; and, as the next boat,
Lieutenant Pilcher’s, touched the roof, he ran to whisper: “Palace of
the General Staff—_documents_!”

And by the time the others had alighted, these two had discovered an
iron trap-door between two slate-roofs separated by areas of lead; and
the whisper went forth: “Bring rifles and a lantern.”

Lying flat, the ten got the trap-door up, and then, the lantern first,
the Prince next, they stole down an iron ladder into a vast low place
full of dust and darkness, save for one square of light in the centre
of its floor. To this with thieves’ feet they went, lay down, and
peered beneath.

Here some wooden ladder-steps led down into a room: and they saw there
a man in spectacles reading a paper at a table that had two stoups of
beer on it, he in undress uniform, his cap on; and by a bed a woman
undressing, abusing the man, who read and took no notice; and a redness
of coke roared in a stove.

All in a wink the man was on his back under the Prince, a handkerchief
in his throat; the woman was in strange arms, her mouth stuffed up;
and Pilcher, who knew languages, was saying: “Don’t struggle! or we
brain you!”

They then tore the bedclothes into strips, tied up the two, and taking
the remainder of the strips, went out.

The place appeared not less vast in its darkness than a deserted city,
and they had treaded a journey of interminable corridors and noble
stairs, searching for some open door, before they came upon any sign of
life—an off-shine of light afar at a corridor-end. They crept that way.

On prying round the corner, they saw the next corridor lit, and a
sentinel stalking in the German toe-first way—a strapping “tapferer
Krieger” of the 17th (West Prussian), who had heard talk of English
beef, but never yet tasted.

“Eyes front!”—too late. See the Prince sprinting like a spirit in his
socks! and like a cat he sprang and had him, Pilcher next. And from
first to last not a sound from the man in the hands of handy Jack, but
the crash of his tumbling musket.

The fellow lay writhing and grinding at his fetters, gurgling at his
gag, his eyes gloating out of his head upon the ten rough ghosts
grouped over him.

And now the Prince turned to the guarded door, which had “Ratstube” in
gold letters over it; and he very slowly moved the handle, and looked
in.

In there, seated all round a long table in solemn conclave, he saw the
leaders of Germany.

A large hall with walls of pallid apple-green; the table all a medley
of plans, maps, documents, books, charts; and they sat on large chairs
that gleamed.

Most of them the Prince knew well—Count von Athem at the far head,
Chief of the Army General Staff, and near at the foot Prince Radziwill
of Prussia, Inspector-General of the Navy: for it was a General
Conference of both branches of the Imperial Forces; and there in the
centre was Grand-Admiral von Bräckner, Chief of the Admiral Staff,
near Field-Marshal Prince Albrecht of Prussia; and yonder that bald
skull and walrus moustache of Graf von Grossmann, Chief of the
Reichs-Marine-Amt, and that piercing peeper in a pig’s face of Naval
Secretary of State Herr Ohorn-Hartmann—and many other stars, orders,
epaulettes.

The Prince muttered to himself, “_Mauretania_,” flew to put on his
boots, and get his rifle, then, returning to the door, said quite
loudly, “Come, Pilcher, come, Burke,” turned the handle, and was in.

See them now at that table—their faces! if one can call them faces.
There is a bewilderment that is ineffable!

The Prince bowed, grounding his rifle.

“Gentlemen, you are my prisoners,” he said in English.

Each German looked into some other German face to see what German
expression was printed there!

“No doubt you admit yourselves my prisoners,” said the
Prince—“considerable force at hand. Tell them, Pilcher, in French.”

Pilcher bowed, and told them.

Now, it was impossible for them to doubt this: for down in the
courtyard were six sub-sections of a grenadier company on guard, and
their natural assumption, since these spectres stood before their
eyesight, was that those sub-sections had been overpowered.

But prisoners!—in the middle of military Berlin, with Berlin shouting
in victory about them! And if _they_ were prisoners, why, then, the war
was at an end, Germany conquered.

All at once, as if the astonishment had just come upon them, they
sprang unanimously to their feet; and Count von Athem called out:
“How—came you here?”

“Sorry, gentlemen, no time for explanations,” said the Prince: “you
submit to superior force”—and glancing out, he cried: “Let seven of you
come in, and take possession of these papers.”

Whereupon the seven blue-jackets trooped in in their great-coats,
saluted and set briskly to gather up plans, charts, maps, books,
papers, like waiters clearing away.

Meantime, the whisper was running: “It seems to be the Prince of
Wales!” and Graf von Grossmann leant his palms on the table to say:
“May we demand to know——?”

But the Prince interrupted. “I see that you have water and fire,
gentlemen, so I shall lock you temporarily in here. Good-night.” He
went out, locked the door, pocketed the key.

“Pity we aren’t twenty instead of ten,” he remarked, as they went up,
leaving the sentinel in his bonds; but they released the man and woman
above, after locking them in.

The war documents the Prince stowed into his own boat; and soon the
swarm was on the wing north-westward for Spandau.

They arrived in five minutes, Spandau now deep in sleep, when a sound
of great guns roused it—one, two, booms; and 60,000 human beings had
sat up in darkness to hearken at that thing, when a sudden sense of
destruction overwhelmed them all, a foreknowledge of overthrow, as a
thundering broke out among them, and in some moments more the city was
lit with a dusky dawn, as the arsenal darted and took the sky.

This town, besides, was crowded with military establishments, of which
the Prince had well conned the map: so that the Small Arms Factory,
the Gun Foundry, the Military School, the great Horse-market, the
Barracks, the railway, all in turn came under the rain of shells: for
thoroughness is not a quality confined to Germans; and those of the
people who survived that night’s experiences lived through them again
in nightmares to their dying day, and had a stock recurring dream of
screaming streets that ran, like men calling upon the rocks and hills
to cover them.

In the town were some Garde-Grenadiere, No. 4 regiment and half of No.
3, and a battalion of Guard-foot-artillery: but sections of these could
only be mobilised for moments when floods of Tophet burst among them,
and the nerves of men shirked it, they having no idea whence the fire
came, simply found it spouting it in their midst, and supposed Spandau
to be surrounded by two hundred thousand troops.

It was an hour before it entered a dying colonel’s head that this curse
of fire might be coming out of the sky.

And then a 9-pounder balloon-gun, mounted on an armoured motor-car
that had arrangements to resist the recoil of high-angle firing,
was brought out of the Citadel, followed by what was left of the
foot-artillery: for the night-glass of one gallant captain standing out
on the glacis seemed to detect certain specks in the height beyond the
night-mists—though it baffled understanding that aeroplanes could drop
bombs with the precision with which these bombs dropped.

Anyway, the balloon-gun was produced and aimed; but before any shot was
discharged, it and forty-men were shattered in a splash of shrapnel,
and the rest fled through the carnage and darkness of the shrieking and
reeking city.

Within fifty minutes Spandau was a conquered city, every trace of
resistance at an end, and yonder within the Citadel’s vast wall—a
townlet within a town—the Julius Tower was half down.

Berlin, meantime, warned by telephone, was preparing to pour forth
troops; but before these could be moved, the _Ratstube_ door in the
Palace of the General Staff had to be broken open; nor did any troops
enter Spandau that night: for when the Tower was all down, and nine
of the boats were engaged in getting in the gold, a tenth was always
watching the Berlin-road, to throw back any advance.

They found the gold piled in a square vault lined with steel, the mass
occupying some three cubic yards in bars 10 inches long, some of the
bars much broken and battered by the bombardment, inscribed, each of
them, across its middle with “Reichs-Kriegs-Schatz, 54 Kg.” (120 lb.);
and after half-an-hour’s toil in clearing away stone _débris_, they
disposed the boats as conveniently as they could for the loading, threw
out remaining bombs, and set to it, looking like ghouls grovelling
there amid their gleams of green and crimson.

At twelve-thirty the workers heard musketry and balloon-gun booming
going on in the direction of Berlin, but did not stop toiling; and
presently the boat that had been up came down with the report of the
enemy scattered, on which a loaded boat rose to keep guard.

At one-fifty the last bar of gold was dropped into Lieutenant Burke’s
boat, and the blue-jackets were then given leave to gather up the
shattered fragments for themselves, which they did very shamefacedly
and loth, tongue in cheek; everyone now wet with the sweat of the
labour, worn out; and but slightly disposed for the dark flight back.

However, the Prince, who was a tough and merciless worker, would
suggest no rest, for night was their friend; and at three minutes to
two, rising with their three beams burning, they started to return
home, loaded with this portion of France’s war-indemnity to Germany,
which the Prince purposed to return to France.

But, as their lights appeared in the air, the half-caste, who had
been asleep for two hours in the hold of her boat in a field near by,
started her little engine, and darkly followed, flying now well higher
than the swarm.

At this hour the wind was much stronger, had changed several points to
northward, was blowing now on the boats’ starboard quarter, and causing
far more lee-way than the leader seems to have realised.

Consequently, after failing to sight several landmarks, and after
looking out in vain for the lights of Arnhem when they had been in the
air two hours and a half, he became anxious, and shot off pistol-lights
to signify “Assemble” and “Stop.”

It was that dark hour before any sign of dawn, though now Orion away
down by the horizon was brighter and better than the Queen’s Necklace,
and there was one sphere in the sky that seemed a beetle of diamond
beaming, with feet and feelers trembling round it, and very richly the
shivering Fishes were shimmering.

And one of the boats was about to drop for inquiries at a solitary
light in forested country which they could descry south of them, when
a shower of eleven shells in pelting succession tumbled out of heaven
upon the ten boats, as they stood bunched two thousand feet up.

One shell only missed, but was instantly followed by another.

Three did not explode; but still wrecked the mechanism, and laid low
the men.

And the ten boats fell.




                                CHAPTER X

                              THE “ASAHEL”


The half-caste descended upon a path between two coppices on
hill-sides, and rushing about the bush of one with a lantern,
discovered the boats and bodies all within an area of forty yards.

One boat was standing bow-downward, its stern on a fir-tree; another
had hurtled into the ruins of a church buried in the bush, beside this
boat being the butchered and burned body of Lieutenant Burke; and all
were much broken, for the boats’ bottoms were not perfect parachutes
for such a burden as they carried; and, in the case of seven, what the
earth had not smashed the explosions had shattered, one foot being
found in a boat to whose occupant it did not belong.

Three of the men, at the shock of falling, had been tossed aloft by the
deck-springs, and then had dropped back upon the boats, two dropping
back _within_ the boats—the Prince, Pilcher, and a blue-jacket.

Her first business was to remove these out of her way: so, climbing
by the bits of timber nailed on as steps, she dragged and rolled them
over the sides, a heat and vehemence in her, a gasping, her teeth-edges
pecking together with spite at sight of the Prince’s gashes, whose
sweetheart’s hand she might not shake, her raging heart revelling in
all this death and rout and sense of power.

But the lifting of the bodies winded her, and presently she was
propped, panting, in the midst of the three men: and now her heat fast
turned to cold.

For there were drippings amid the underwood; there were droppings of
pine-cones that tolled and echoed; dead leaves reeled at the breathing
of the breezes through the timber; the blue-jacket kept his neck
sideward, interested in her with one eye, with that steady indelicacy
of the dead: and, standing with her lonesome lantern-glow in the
gloom of that unknown wood, with ghosts and all that load of gold and
gallows-work on her hands, she threw her eyes reproachfully skyward,
then suddenly, “Oh, I am afraid,” she breathed, and gave way to weeping.

But no time for weakness—she stood straight.

And first she dragged the blue-jacket out of her sight ten yards to
a summit, rolling him over into bracken on the other slope; did the
same to the Prince and Pilcher; and now ran out to her boat, rose, and
lowered it within the wood, to have it hidden.

She then sat to ponder the problem of the treasure.

She had imagined that it would be a simple matter to bury it, but this
now appeared to her in a different light. The ruins within the wood,
however, quickly occurred to her alert wit, and on penetrating the mass
of bracken and bramble which buried it, she discovered a slab with a
ring behind the site of the sacrarium, and went prying down five steps
into a damp apartment, whence a badger dashed out by her, whitening her
with fright.

Here, she was sure, no human foot ever came, fixed upon it as her
treasure-house, and during the hour that remained before daybreak was
labouring at taking some of the bars fallen within the ruins down into
the vault—ever afresh astonished, with every fresh bar, that anything
so small could possibly be so ponderous.

But suddenly, as she was in the act of stepping with petty steps,
loaded with a bar, the bar tumbled singing, and she stood a thing of
marble, blanched: for about a stone’s throw from her a throat had
outraged the night’s silence with the howl: “_Fire!_”—in English.

The next instant she felt herself drowned in a thousand deaths, as
a racket of musketry seemed to crack her ear-drum, and she dropped
shot-through with fear, for she thought that all the guns of the globe
had discharged their bullets through her heart, and at an odour of
smoke that floated to her nose she moaned.

And from far to the northward followed a rumbling of musketry, and a
mortar barking; and then, not far, a voice calling “_Charge!_” then a
medley of voices crying: “_Retire! Retire!_” then a cry: “_Who said
Retire?_” then a roar of a hundred throats: “_Charge! Charge!_” and
a rush of boots brushing through scrub—and in some minutes distant
musketry—and a bugle going fluty—and stillness.

It was a skirmish of German and English outpost-garrisons going
on—which meant that, so far from being in Holland, as she reckoned, she
was somewhere near the Belgian frontier; and the night-operation had
been occasioned by the air-boats’ lights, descried by the night-glasses
of both garrisons, who were facing each other at a distance of eight
kilometres. And though aeroplanes with coloured lights was a thing
unknown, each captain had taken them to be enemy aeroplanes sent up to
reconnoitre his gun-emplacements or drop bombs—a suspicion which the
sudden vanishing of the bunch of lights had established: so both sides
had sallied to attack, this affair ending in twenty-seven dead.

As for the half-caste, this eruption of musketry shocked all effort out
of her, and stock-still she lay on the steps, listening to a cricket
screaming, hiding her eyes, leering like little mice that leer in fear;
nor was it until the sun was high that she ventured out of the wood,
walked four miles, and took a room at a tavern.

But by three in the afternoon she was back within the wood. And now her
first work was to bury away every trace of blood or flesh. She had a
spade, a saw.

But great was her trouble, on going to the spot where she had dragged
and rolled three of the bodies,—not to see them.

She stepped down a steep piece of ground, very gloomy with bush,
looking for them; and had made perhaps twenty steps when her left foot
stepped upon nothing, and down with an outcry she fell ten feet.

There was cliff here, a road at its bottom; and when she picked herself
up, it was with a horrible pang that she understood that the bodies
must have rolled down here—and been removed.

When she climbed back she sat wringing her hands, lamenting, thinking
that all would be discovered now.

But she set afresh to business, and after burying every blood-stained
bush in one shallow trench with the bodies, a work of hours, and after
covering well with dead leaves, she began the vast task of sawing the
unbroken parts of the boats into bits of a bigness which she could lift
and bury.

In this labour of Hercules she spent two days; and only when every
trace of the ten boats, the guns, the German documents, were gone from
the surface, did she go on with the work of carrying down the bars into
the church-vault—a navvy’s travail that harassed her soul four days,
and made her groan at gold.

Meantime, her eyes were on the newspapers—on the tumult that was
in Europe at the raid upon the Teuton treasure, the destruction of
Spandau, the disappearance of the Prince of Wales.

That it was the Prince who had led the raid Europe soon knew. But where
now was either Prince or treasure, companions or boats?

Even in that turmoil of the world—commercial upheaval, tears of
defeat, movements of fleets and troops, dearness of food, frenzies
of triumph—men’s minds were centred upon this thing, and a thousand
thousand eyes were busied about the route between Berlin and London,
seeking, seeking.

But the boats seemed to have been caught to the stars like the
Argonauts’ boat! and as many fantastic guesses as there were men were
made to explain the fantastic catastrophe that had caused them _all_ to
fall into the sea!—for after a time only the Queen any longer refused
to believe that they had fallen into the sea.

She had revealed that the boats were an invention of Mr Chinnery, and
that Chinnery himself had gone with the expedition—the Prince having
told her that Chinnery would be going. So that no one had approached
Chinnery for inquiries; though during two days a crowd stood vaguely
gazing at his house, little divining what lay in the shed behind.

It was only on the morning of the fourth day after the raid that a
captain of Hussars happened to visit, at the street-end of the village
of Plessy, one of the two field-hospitals of his division, which was
following his company; and he, entering his company ambulance-waggon
to cast an eye at his sick, suddenly, as he stood over one of the
spring-beds, stretched his finger at it, and said to a dresser: “But
_that’s_ the Prince! _that’s_ he!”

That night the King and Queen were at Plessy, listening over that
spring-bed to the Prince wandering a little, his left elbow broken, his
forehead cut open.

How he had got there was soon investigated.

Three rustics, trudging in the daybreak of the night-operation, had
noticed three bodies lying by the road in the bush at a cliff’s bottom,
and had borne them to some company stretcher-bearers seeking their
wounded with red-crossed arms in a field some way off.

Whereupon the stretcher-bearers, assuming them to be civilians wounded
in the skirmish—for they were _en pékin_—had borne the two living to
a first-aid dressing-station, whence they had passed through a main
station to the field-hospital.

So, then, the expedition had not, after all, fallen into the sea?
Where, then, were the six million pounds, the boats? Tidy for a private
fortune, six millions! and the world set itself to search an area of
some thirty miles round that church in which it lay.

Within three weeks this thing had become a crazer of men’s brains,
hundreds of imbeciles in the rage and mania throwing up their daily
occupations to become discoverers—seeking, not the treasure, but the
boats! which were the clue to the treasure; and many may have entered
in vain that very wood in which boats and treasure were.

This was one of the Prince’s first questions on the seventh midnight
when he came to himself at Windsor: “But the treasure?”

“No sign of it so far,” answered Engineer Vice-Admiral Sir Robert
Barrington, K.C.B., who was a friend of the Prince, and had been much
at his bedside.

“And Pilcher?”

“Doing well. Broken humerus.”

“Others all gone?”

“All.”

“But _what_ made us fall?”

“That is quite unknown.”

“Chinnery—what does _he_ say?”

“But Chinnery perished, too.”

“Chinnery did? No! Chinnery didn’t come with us! He started, but turned
back.”

“Then—I am in a maze.”

“But the treasure—it is somewhere near where Pilcher and I were found,
of course.”

“No doubt: but where that is cannot be discovered, for the rustics who
found and bore you to the stretcher-bearers cannot be discovered—owing,
no doubt, to the fact that many of the villages in that war-area
have been destroyed or abandoned, and the population in a fluid and
migratory state.”

The Prince stared at the battle painted on the ceiling; and he
murmured presently: “Well, this is how it was to turn out. I can’t
understand—see Chinnery to-morrow. But—the Queen?”

Sir Robert Barrington’s eyes softened and smiled. “The Queen is said to
have been as brave as usual all through.”

[Has it not been mentioned that shortly before her marriage the young
girl Minna Simmons pressed to her face, before throwing into a grate,
the photograph of a young man?—which young man was now Engineer
Vice-Admiral Sir Robert Barrington; and it may be mentioned that it was
into Sir Robert Barrington’s house in Grosvenor Place that the Queen
and the Princess Elizabeth had seen the Prince let himself in with a
key—with his Eulalia.]

Some minutes afterwards Her Majesty herself stole into the chamber,
while Sir Robert and the nurses retired to its farthest shades; and
the Prince, sitting up to receive Her Majesty, saw tears spring to her
lids and her lip quiver, as she stood pressing his hand: but he noticed
with some wonder that she did not kiss him, nor was long with him.

When day came a gentleman of the Prince thrice tried to telephone to
Chinnery—without reply.

And that afternoon Chinnery’s house was entered by the police by means
of Monty’s key—for a neighbour’s servant knew Monty’s abode.

Monty’s statement was, that she had known that Mr Chinnery was going
away through the air, and she had not gone to the house the day after
the expedition, but had looked in several times since to feed the cat,
etc. And had she then seen nothing of Mr Chinnery? She had seen nothing.

So now the place was searched throughout: but no sign anywhere of
Chinnery.

And now a pernicious suspicion as to Chinnery crept into the public
head: that Chinnery had wanted six million pounds! that he had not
really turned back, as the Prince imagined, but had tracked the
expedition in the dark, and destroyed it—for Lieutenant Pilcher,
when he could speak, declared that he had had a distinct impression
of shells being thrown upon the boats an instant before he lost
consciousness.

And if Chinnery had really turned back—if Chinnery had not now the
treasure—where, then, was the treasure, and why was Chinnery now in
hiding?

The truth, of course, was, that, though Chinnery _was_ in hiding, it
was not he who was hiding himself, but the half-caste hiding him.

On the sixth midnight she had risen out of that brake in Lorraine, her
six-days’ labours ended, and, flying high, had wantonly dropped her
last three bombs upon a German position outside Bouillon, as who should
say: “I spit loud on you”; then, striking England near Deal, had left
her boat in a field, had found out her whereabouts, had discovered
London about 3 +a.m.+, passed over it high, and come down into the
Chinese house grounds at Regent’s Park, unseen by any eye.

But even now she did not rest: one more labour; and then sweet sleep.

She had gathered from the papers that Chinnery had not yet been
discovered in the shed: for, as she had foreseen, Monty had not looked
into the shed, believing him away.

But she knew that Chinnery’s body must soon be discovered, and then
suspicion might fall upon her for his death, and for everything; but,
if it was buried away, then suspicion might pitch upon Chinnery for
destroying the boats.

She therefore determined to bury it quickly; to get that Redlike Ray of
which she had heard to send to China; and be done with Horseferry Road
for ever.

So she walked through the Chinese house and the sleeping streets to
some mews where A-lu-te’s Chinese chauffeur lived; and in twenty
minutes was driving for Westminster—with her spade.

She found the house-door shut, but got in by an area-window; and, after
sending the car to wait some way off, ran to the yard with a candle
which her hand had no need to shade, that morning-hour was so calm and
heavy with haze.

A black cat, unfed that day, flew mewing to her human friendship
across the yard. She took no notice: stood listening, leering, to a
policeman’s feet beating up a street.

Then, crushing her reluctance, she entered the shed: and there he lay,
just as he had dropped in his fur-coat and chest-wrappings, his cap on
his head; and horror hopped in her heart when, as she peered, his head
suddenly started up at her with awful eyes, crying harshly: “_Water!
Water!_” and tumbled back with shut eyes.

It bumped in tumbling upon a board, that sage head, never more now to
be so sage and knowing, its cheeks concaves of famine and nearness to
death; and when, all at once, she perceived that he was living, pity
pierced her to tears, compunction, love of him for his gentle love of
her, love of him for being with the living, and not with the foreign
dead; and, instead of bringing him drink, she lay with him, kissing his
fingers, his lips, whimpering pity at his thinness; but then ran and
brought him wine.

But, living or dead, he had to be hidden—probably not for long,
since he had never been strong, and could hardly outlive all this
ill-treatment.

So now the question was to get him into the car; and, since he was too
tall to lift, she called in her chauffeur, who bore him to the door,
while she with her candle ran up to get the Redlike Ray.

It was a black box, cubical, two feet broad, and she knew exactly
where it had been placed, for after the Prince had gone that day of
his visit, she had watched Chinnery attach the cap which made it safe
to handle, had asked many questions about it, had seen him lay it on
the shelf by the lathe, and knew that he had not since removed it, for
there it had lain on the day of the raid. But now it was not there....

She ransacked the room, stamping, exasperated—all the rooms: no box.

Fascinated and fretted, she kept on seeking, hissing at the thing,
until weariness compelled her to give in; then, getting Chinnery lifted
into the motor, she drove away an hour before daybreak to the Regent
Park house, from which she intended him never more to come out.

Fourteen years previously a Member of the Peking Board of Civil
Appointments had been kidnapped and imprisoned there in a back-room
which still had its two windows bricked up: here was to be the future
home of Richard Chinnery.

It was not till the next noon that the lady A-lu-te knew that a
stranger was in the house, when Oyone told her that her return to
Court-life depended upon his captivity—A-lu-te now being old, and well
under the sway of Oyone.

That same night of Chinnery’s removal the Prince recovered
consciousness, and the next day Chinnery’s house was searched in vain
for him.

Two days later Oyone once more went to Horseferry Road, for it was
incredible to her that the Redlike Ray was not there: and first she
went to question Monty, and then with Monty on to the house.

A brougham bearing the Prince of Wales’ arms stood before the door
and two plain-clothes men, who would not let the pair enter, till
Oyone explained that she was only going to a top-room to get some
knick-knacks of her own; but she spied a little at the workroom
keyhole, her teeth-edges pecking with spite at the sight of the Prince
sitting alone in there, brooding on the stool, a bandage aslant under
his cap, one arm in a sling. He had escaped her—twice: but still had
been well peppered.

She guessed that he had come on the same errand as herself—to get the
Redlike Ray: and this was true, for, with Chinnery vanished, he had
remembered the terrible peril of the ray in the hands of unwitting,
wicked, or ambitious people; and he, too, had searched in vain for it,
and then had put the hunt in the detectives’ hands. But he had come,
moreover, to brood in that room over the gloomy enigma of his schoolboy
friend, to ask himself there that ever-repeated question: “Where is
Richard Chinnery now?” for he did not believe that Chinnery had fallen
into the sea.

Anyway, Chinnery was gone, the Redlike Ray gone, all the boats gone—he
still ignorant of the secret of their mechanism; though, if he had
known that secret, boats like them might have brought the war to a
quick end.

However, he was not long lamenting there, having that afternoon to go
northward to join his _Asahel_.

For it was fairly certain that a world-battle on the sea was impending;
it was in everyone’s mouth that an attempt was about to be made to
invade Britain; and the result of the _Mauretania_ battle had loaded
men’s brains with boding.

Indeed, a thousand evil dreams that week were in everyone’s mouth, for
suddenly a disease of jumpiness had seized upon the people, and behind
each door a ghost was ogling.

A company of soldiers marched up Pall Mall, and men rushed to windows
with wildness in their eyes to see if they were Prussians.

Visions of vague things were seen sailing in the air, visions of
phantom fleets which vanished seen on the sea.

On a gentleman’s aeroplane appearing in the air, the villages of
Alvington and Aylburton near Chepstow took fright, and precipitated
themselves like one man into bramble and spinney.

Men swore that drums were rumbling and guns booming where it could not
be that guns were booming; rich ladies living on scrip stood cool and
courageous for days, and suddenly one day, terror-struck, were away, as
though hounds were mouthing at their heels, to the mountains of Wales.

Yet, even in the thick of this state of scare, when the nation gathered
that the Prince of Wales was being permitted to go to a battle with his
arm in a sling, it found time to frown at it.

Everybody felt that he had already abundantly served his country for
this war—for the subtraction of those 120 million marks from Germany’s
rather meagre war-chest was a grievous gash.

Accordingly, when at 2 o’clock he drove toward King’s Cross, he was
astonished to find the whole _route_ thronged, and the people cheering
with so much heart and friendship, that his eyes softened, and, though
his forehead was still bandaged, he kept bending toward his brougham
window, lifting his cap.

This may have loosened the bandage somehow, for at the corner of
Southampton Row Eulalia, on her toes in the crowd, was afresh breathing
to herself: “Heavens! how like,” when the bandage and dressing lifted
with the lifting cap, and she got a sight of the long gash, her nurse’s
eye noticing that it had a hook over the right eye.

She felt a kind of property in him, he was “so like!” wished that he
would see her, and clapped loud; but her clapping was drowned in the
row, in the shouts of “_Teddy!_” the eager god-speeds: for it seemed to
everybody a needless hardship that he should rise from bed to join his
squadron.

“_Needless_”—since no one (or very few) had any particular faith in
his ideas about ships and sea-fighting—though it was well known that
he had ideas of his own, that from his cadet-days he had been a rebel
in the Service, and that he had got two ships built to his liking—the
_Asahel_, of which he was the “Captain” (a courtesy-title), and the
_Blunderbus_.

But those ships he had only managed to get built with the greatest
difficulty; and one memorable night had cried to the Queen: “Oh,
Mother, if you don’t believe in me, who will?”

“Teddy,” the Queen had answered, “you have knowledge, but you are not
an expert.”

“Expert!” he had cried—“I despise experts. Chinnery is not an
‘expert’—he is just a thinker: and he agrees with me that the
Dreadnought ship is wrong from control-station to keel. Experts? Their
intellect gets quite fixed! like putty in a hole—except when it is
rushing off into little crazes and scares: as when forty years ago
France started torpedo-boats, and the cry was “battleships must be
abandoned!” Then happened Tsushima, and ever since it’s been Tsushima,
Tsushima, on the brain, and the battleship rage. But at Tsushima the
fighting was all on one side!—the Russians did not _pretend_ to be any
good, or all the battleships on both sides would certainly have sunk.”

The Queen had asked him how he could be so sure of that; and he had
answered: “Mother, it is common-sense. A battleship is a weak thing,
because she is a compromise between two efforts—to be heavy, and to be
light. But guns have definitely beaten armour, Mother—definitely—such
armour as ships of any speed can carry, so what’s the good of their
armour? And they can’t run away, their armour so limits their speed,
so what’s the good of their speed? Oughtn’t they to have enough armour
to be some good, and no speed, or enough speed, and no armour? not a
useless little of both?”

In the end the Queen had said: “I will use what influence I have for
you”; and Engineer Vice-Admiral Sir Robert Barrington had helped, too.

So the _Asahel_ and _Blunderbus_ had been built.

What was the _Asahel_? She was not a destroyer: the _rôle_ of the
destroyer is to sting and fly; the _rôle_ of the _Asahel_ was to fly
and sting.

She was not a _Dreadnought_: she was smaller than any third-class
cruiser. She was not a third-class cruiser: she carried bigger guns
than any _Dreadnought_.

She was the very swiftest thing at whose rage and chase the sea’s face
had ever changed colour—her contract-speed forty-eight knots.

As for the _Blunderbus_, she was a semi-submarine _Dreadnought_, with a
speed of six knots.




                               CHAPTER XI

                          GERMANS IN PALL MALL


Germany had some 854,000 tons at Emden—53 capital ships—which the
British sought to blockade and contain, lying in a long curve beyond
Borkum (the island that lies before Emden).

The British were the 1st and 2nd Divisions, consisting of all newest
battleships with their affiliated cruisers, destroyers, dépôt-ships,
and with them half the French 1st battle-squadron, all under the
Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Sir Richard Ramsay, borne in the _Lion_.

But this idea of containing had not lasted three days when it changed
into the keenest eagerness to draw to a battle—firstly because it
was realised that the Germans were awaiting the to-be-purchased
Japanese ships, said to be “coming round the Cape,” and then because
of the mobilising of three _corps d’armée_ upon Larrelt, and of an
accumulation of troopships and war _matériel_ under the guns of
Wilhelmshaven (connected with Emden and Borkum by the Ems-Jahde Canal).

Now, Emden had not always been a naval station—for capital ships; nor
Larrelt a garrison-town. The dredging of the Emden fairway, and the
establishment of vast barracks at Larrelt had been costly; hence that
spot had long been looked to by us as the base of “invasion”; and
now “invasion” was bitter in the bread and beer, and dreadful in the
dreams, of Britain.

The danger was probably not so acute as was assumed: for, as a matter
of fact, trouble was in the German Admiral-Stab in those very days at
the message from the East that—the “purchased” fleet seemed to have
vanished somehow! for ever since a steamer of the Yusen Kaisha fleet
had sighted it in trouble in a typhoon near the Kiu-Kiu reefs, no
report of them! Vanished!—that mass. On which there are indications
that doubt and hesitation entered into the counsellors of Germany.

But there had really been an awful Autumn storm in the China Sea; and
two days afterwards Europe seemed to have caught it. Then began “the
great gale.”

During two days the sun went out, the heavens, as it were, tinted with
inks; and the blockading vessels, with seas breaking through casemates
and screen-doors, fled from the face of a tempest that fell upon them
at eighty-five miles an hour; while chill trembling fell upon Britain
with the instinct that now was the German chance while a pitched battle
on the sea was an impossibility.

A King’s-messenger coming wild with tidings in the Ostend mail-boat was
lost within sight of Dover, where the breakwater and Admiralty Pier
were under water, large storm-doors were washed down, offices wrecked
on the Main Pier, ships fouled and ashore in the Naval Harbour.

It fell upon the _Asahel_ half-way to Emden, and the Prince, after a
defiant fight, had to fly S. by W. half a night with the sea on his
port quarter. Life-lines rigged for the seamen to secure equipment
could not save two blue-jackets from being washed overboard, so swung
were the feet between deep and steep, and only two of the boats were
not torn from their davits.

Meantime, no one in the _Asahel_ was asleep, since tons of water were
washing even over engine-room hatchways down into the engine-depths,
the seamen’s mess awash, water in the wardroom, in the wireless room,
in the Prince’s cabin, having plunged down through a broken scuttle and
wardroom funnel, so that she seemed as much within the sea as on it.

The Prince, sitting on a narrow end of a lashed trunk, his brow-bandage
spotted with blood, his shins bare, was swinging his head about over
a concertina, playing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” to the legion of
dæmons that seemed careering with shrieks through the rayless air.
This was what _he_ called fine weather, and a delightful night.

But as he rocked and rollicked there in his solitary cabin, things
blacker than the night were in the back of his mind, for he understood
that doom was hanging over the land of his love.

And the instant he could dare to turn back, on that murky daybreak of
the 23rd, he turned the _Asahel’s_ bow to the mountains, seeking his
fleet.

But the day was only a less dense land of night—no observations to be
taken, no certainty even of his position.

He staggered up the outside of his tripod-mast (the tripod-tubes could
not be climbed inside, they were so slight and light—but high), and,
riding there, he clung on long, one-handed, with a troubled brow,
frowning over the sea which swung and flung him, his hair stretched
between his head and the wind, and in his bosom a boding that the feet
of foreigners were even then _en route_ to violate the pride of that
island that had proved herself the rightful ruler of rulers.

Now, he could act in the situation almost as he chose, for he had long
been a sort of institution apart in the Service, having come to be
looked upon as something of a free-lance, his two ships were so unique,
and so due to his pressure upon the Construction Department.

They had cost the country only £2,400,000; and men had said: “Well, to
humour him ... he is a Prince.”

His _Asahel_ was under 2000 tons, without torpedo-tubes, unarmoured,
without armoured deck, but of powerful scantling, strongly braced,
to carry two 20·6-inch (unarmoured) wire-guns of 50 calibres on
turn-tables, one for’ard, one aft—to be fired one at a time! since one
took and shook her like a tempestuous stepmother.

Besides, she had four (unarmoured) 4-inch quick-firers in _échelon_
pairs amidships for mosquito-attack, a little balloon gun, and a little
Maxim.

Her “captain,” having seen no other ship on the sea, near ten o’clock
came to a decision, and wirelessed to the _Blunderbus_—to learn that
the _Blunderbus_ was steering south, practically under water, fifty
miles from the English coast, and now somewhere in latitude 55°,
opposite Sunderland. The _Asahel_ pricked off eight points to port to
seek her.

It was about three minutes afterwards that the Prince said to a
boy-servant at his cabin-door: “Here—_hist_—tell me if you hear
anything.” He caught the boy’s arm, and they listened, lurching,
clinging. But the boy shook his head.

“_Now!—hist!_” the Prince hissed.

“Is it gun-fire, Sir?”

“You heard?”

“It struck me I did hear something like thunder somewhere.”

“Go through the ship and ask.”

Only 3 of 120 had heard anything, yet gun-fire was actually going on to
the north-east, where a German battle-squadron was destroying a flock
of ten “Tribal” class destroyers and two scouts, the _Adventure_ and
_Boadicea_—all the twenty-eight warships having found themselves mixed
up together on a sudden; and astern of the squadron were discernible in
the murk some nine to twelve liners.

The destroyers made no attempt to fly—it was too late; the scouts
attempted, but some of a crowd of quick-fire shell (which mostly shot
the sky or the sea-bottom) disabled the two little cruisers.

The ten decided to sell their lives dearly; and a fleet of twenty-five
torpedoes went piercing the swell, kept tolerably steady by their
gyroscope-pull, while an exclamatory racket of pop-guns from the boats
and of 4, 6, 8-inch shot from the giants, as the two fleets tore
through each other, was shrieked by the winds far over the North Sea.

But there were many more shots than torpedoes, the British all sank,
the little _Boadicea_ moving ten seconds on a mountain-summit, her bow
perpendicular, two funnels showing, two hidden in the sea; and with her
went down into dark water the 27,000 tons of the thundering _Aegir_,
which the billows bounded upon and devoured when her propellers were
blown away; and always near her at the sea-bottom will be the _Kaiser
Karl der Grosse_, which graciously raised and exposed her port bottom
to a torpedo as it posted near, and was opened beneath her boilers;
and down into dark water went two of the troopships with six thousand
infantrymen, born without a caul.

It was this brief affray that faintly reached the ear on the _Asahel_;
and an hour later there was another, unheard by her, far south.

The enemy, in fact, guessing the English more or less demobilised by
the gale, were slipping across in the gloom in three groups by three
_routes_, to rendezvous in the latitude of Hornsea: thence to effect
a landing wherever coast-defence was least effective, the moment the
condition of the sea should permit.

Then, after the landing, to fight for a clear sea—for the _Mauretania_
lesson had been rapidly analysed and learned in Germany: and now their
hope was mutual destruction in one great struggle after invasion, thus
to secure to the invading troops communication with their base.

As for the British third and fourth lines of defence round the
coasts—old battleships, destroyers, submarines, coast-guns—these,
alert, but scattered, would hardly be formidable to such a mass of
metal.

However, at eleven that night the _Asahel_ spied two of the three
groups just effecting a junction 90 miles E. by N. of Hornsea.

She knew where she was now and could just wireless the _Blunderbus_ to
come, though the apparatus had been put out of gear by the gale. The
_Blunderbus_ answered, but only one of the _Asahel’s_ other messages
was answered—by a scout, and the sound of the dope told that it came
from far.

She lay now nine miles from the outermost details of the converging
Germans, forging slow, and, herself hidden, could see them fairly well,
for although something of a gale still gunned its gusts, the sea had
quieted, and the sky, wild that night with flying vapours, was alight
with constellations which sailed like a navy gliding, gliding, the
half-moon their flag-ship guiding them.

The Prince thought: “They are waiting for others.”

And he thought: “To-morrow! Will God make the sun rise bright for
England?”

All that night his eyes did not shut. He watched that host as a
famished wolf watches food which is just beyond his jaw.

Meantime, the _Asahel’s_ three lights were out, and thrice in the
night, shy as a fowl, she was in flight from scouts of the enemy,
coming in or out.

It had happened so that all the world-burden had fallen upon his one
back, and he had to handle it: but to tackle a navy! He knew that one
half-a-shell would finish the _Asahel_; and he knew that she was a
nearly useless thing if much mist was on the sea.

The gale seemed to have cleared the sea of craft—not a tramp, not a
smack, to be seen; and even when day broke he did not know what to do.
To await the _Blunderbus_? To seek the fleet? To venture to lose touch
with the armada in order to warn the shore? No wireless! His aching
head sweated with the care and weight of it; and though Brockweir boys
never “prayed,” thinking that irreligious, he, oppressed to passion as
day began to break, dropped down in his cabin, crying out: “Guidance!”

After this he watched the sun come, watched fifteen ships join the
armada, seven of them warships with quite a battered aspect, like ships
after a battle, looked at the saluting of the colours, breakfasted,
attended “prayers,” ordered a ration of grog for the ratings: and now,
though pale, pale, an uplifting spirit was in his feet, a pride in his
eyes, and in his blood a sense which his mother blent in him that the
sea was his dominion.

The day had come quite bright and clear! the wind no longer
particularly strong! the _Asahel_ rolling through less than three
degrees! and the band brabbling “Rule Britannia!”

She watched the Germans roll themselves in smoke, form into column of
divisions—two endless lines ahead, sixteen cables apart—and set out at
the speed of their slowest detail for England.

And she stood still, and watched.

But she was busy—her guns cast loose, their crews raising shells by
dredger-hoists from magazines, her chief engineer down in the deeps
seeing to his steam-power, his air-compressor for quick reversing,
the Prince and his little staff up in their control seeing to their
range-clock, their long-based 18-ft. range-finder: and suddenly the
_Asahel_, which could be at her top speed within six seconds, sprang
and ran the sea.

The smokes stooped at her funnels like the ears of the deer which he
lowers, shying, as his feet fly into fleetness (her central shaft was
oil-driven—a Diessel 2-cycle—her wing-shafts turbine-driven, with
oil-fuel); and like the galloping stag she was gone.

Hope at this hour was high in the heart of Grand-Admiral von Grad as
to the outcome of the expedition, no scout of his in sight, no scout
of the British, for he had sunk or dodged all the “whiskers” of the
maid British body; and he was looking over the brightness of the sea
that played blue-and-white in the aisle between the two processions
of ships steaming gallantly beneath their flags that streamed on the
breeze—captain’s pennant, rear-admiral’s flag, vice-admiral’s, and
astern the German ensign, the Eagle screaming with greed, his talons
sharp.

This was “the Event!”—Invasion—so often toasted with hochs! in
officers’ mess or Service-club; and it was to be like this—something
like a holiday! a gala of flags on a glad morning after storm—almost
too good to be true, yet true.

True—till the _Kaiser_ burst into turbulence beneath the
Grand-Admiral’s heels, he in a whirligig hurtling thirty yards toward
the firmament in the midst of a midnight of smoke, his dark and tragic
chariot.

For a shot (weighing 1988 lbs.) had entered her from 18,000 yards to
northward, where nothing of the _Asahel_ was visible to the glass but a
misty thing that might be a smack’s mast; and to the _Asahel_ herself
nothing but the upper works of the battleships was visible.

Hence for fifteen seconds the enemy could only think that the _Kaiser_
had exploded spontaneously; until the _Blücher_, too, broke into
smoking before their stare: and then their conscience smote them.

Think of a bell tolling once every fifteen seconds—four doleful times a
minute—a passing-bell that tolls for you before you are gone, and, as
it tolls, you go: so did the _Asahel’s_ two guns go, one every thirty
seconds in turn and turn—like scurrility and banter bandied betwixt
Jove and Jehovah, and before the tremblement of merriment could finish
in her ribs at the ribaldry of Jove, Jehovah joked and shook her.

She had, in fact, a special type of breech-block and obturator which
made her guns capable of very rapid handling, the opening of the
breech-mechanism by hand occupying less than five seconds through
the power of toggle-levers; her shells and cordite, moreover, were
separately raised; her gun-layers cooler than men in the fury of
a fight—for she was not a fighter, but an executioner; their ears
were deeply protected; and as the gun-sights were adjusted from
the control-position by a little electric motor that drove the
hydraulic-engine valve (transmitting both range and deflection), the
gun-layer had merely to keep the gun on the target, and fire it.

Also, the error of her range-finder was only 39 yards in 18,000, so
that four out of five shells struck. And some that fell short still
struck: for they had caps with little slots in them all round, through
which slots bits of tin-plate dropped down (by their own gravity), and
these acted as planes, as the shell flew, so that, if it struck the
sea, it neither ricochetted, nor was refracted by the water density.
These little planes—a Chinnery contrivance—were said, moreover, to
lessen wind-influence and to affect that “pendulum motion” of shells.

Now, the wind had been too gusty for aeroplane scouting; none of the
armada’s scouting ships had so far reported the _Asahel_; and, as
her structure had been kept quite dark from the spies, her sudden
shells so whelmed the armada with wonderment, that three German ships
had been death-struck, and that pea-soup hull of the _Cesarewitch_
was flurriedly sinking, before ever the Admiral Second-in-Command
could signal order-of-battle, and a battle-squadron of eight started
northward after a swarm of destroyers to silence those two disastrous
wraths.

At the same moment the air began to grow populous with aeroplanes
popping aloft, and guns had begun to growl in crowds.

The _Asahel_ did not fly: went on her westward way following the main
body of the enemy, steadily sending it bales of cordite, while her
three hydro-planes bounded down her bow-rails, and went mounting in
spirals as narrow as aeroplanes may, climbing to protect her from the
flying flock.

During which, mortality and arson were so actively harvesting among
the armada, that soon another squadron was starting northward;
and within three minutes practically the whole force was evolving
northward—forming, as they evolved, such a throng, that it was almost
impossible for the _Asahel’s_ bombs not to tumble upon something;
so that, in the press, an 11-inch shell of the manœuvring _Elsass_
smashed up one of the 3-gun turrets of the _Dante Alighieri_ near: for
an _Asahel_ shell had entered the _Elsass_ under-water, at which she
coughed consumptively a cough which rent her frame, and red was her
hæmorrhage, her armoured deck tearing lengthways like cardboard which
one tears, several of her bulkheads riddled, flame breaking out in two
places on her gun-deck, whereat she, like a distracted creature, who,
starting from dreams, fires out right and left with fist and foot at
friend and foe alike, fired her loaded guns among the crowd round her.

What was the _rationale_ of those “armoured decks” and “bulkheads”
in those ships it is at this date impossible to say. They were very
heavy, and death to the ship’s speed—the deck some 3 inches thick, the
bulkheads some 10—but much too thin to resist gun-fire, just offering
sufficient resistance to explode shells to the best advantage, so that
they would have been better made of tin, wood, or compressed paper. The
_Asahel’s_ packages that she posted made light of them.

Packages like trunks—deferred action shells, with adapted fuses to
explode after penetration, thick-walled like the _obus alourdi_, and
cased in aluminium to lessen erosion, so that the “life” of the two
guns was as high as 180 rounds: she had only to keep out of harm’s way,
and keep on firing, to make that day a date for ages.

Gossip has said that one of those shells made a hole eight feet across
right through the cruiser _Gnaisenau_, and, coming out on the other
side with a downward deflection, struck the big _Helgoland_, which,
smartly smacked on her bottom, clamoured flammivomitant.

But now the _Asahel_ is in flight northward: for at the second of two
spent shells which crashed upon her deck without bursting, but smashing
five limbs by their mass, she, shy as a bird, turns tail, and now is
hurling only end-on fire from her stern-gun.

“But we are going right for the _Blunderbus_, if God send her,” the
Prince called out, though none of his party caught it, for now the air
of the North Sea was in such a state of wave-agitation at the guttural
going-off of guns, as if the globe had been tumbled into some boiling
pot that bustlingly boiled with bubblings and bumpings, boxing with
hubbub the squealing car; and as he stood looking abroad with his palms
on his ribs, the wind caught a laugh out of his mouth: for now all the
south heaven was already red as with the fires of ten thousand pyres
rising, as dreadfully red as the death-day of Nature, and the ocean’s
floor a cemetery of flames.

“And surely,” he thought, “this firing must be audible over all the
North Sea, over all the coast! Help must come!”

At that moment, looking over the spiked rim of the control, he saw
a man who had dropped from the clouds stab his bowels upon the bow
ensign-staff, while an aeroplane rained down with bombs and another man
some yards to starboard; and aloft he saw a swarm, and war in the air,
and bombs falling here and there, and his balloon-gun potting at the
planes in vain.

But the _Asahel_ was (theoretically) in no danger from aeroplanes,
not only because her own three, climbing direct from her, had the
higher position, but because, with her speed and theirs, there was as
little likelihood of their striking her as of her striking them. Her
balloon-gun, in fact, proved a useless tool in practice.

But, beside aeroplanes, there came tearing in her wake a navy of
destroyers, high stems trailing low trains of hull through furrows of
froth; and although she easily distanced them, even as, one by one, she
sank them, they kept her “on the run,” and from dealing so effectively
as previously with the _Dreadnoughts_.

She was, in fact, made to co-operate with the _Blunderbus_; and the
_Blunderbus_ was away.

But she had not been nine minutes in flight when a wild cheer reached
to the men in the skies from the men on her deck: yonder, hardly seven
hundred yards off on her starboard bow was the _Blunderbus_ ploughing.

The glasses had not seen her until now! she was so low in the water,
foamless owing to her slowness—and painted sea-blue.

Moreover, there were only two objects on her deck, both sea-blue—a low
conning-tower, and a low column which carried some searchlights, with
a little stick on it for flagstaff. She had no funnels (oil-driven),
no mast, no superstructure, no deck-guns, even her boats being between
decks at the sea-level.

As they dashed past each other, the _Asahel_ dipped ensign, and
signalled to the _Blunderbus_: “England.”

And the _Blunderbus_ signalled back: “England.”

And each went her way, the _Asahel_ flying, firing, the _Blunderbus_
silent, advancing.

Until, in ten minutes, she was amid the throng of destroyers, almost
before they had marked her: and harshly with a snarl she sank them, and
passed on.

In three minutes more all between her and her horizon were battleships
battering at her, she at them.

Now, their biggest guns were considerably the bigger, hers being all
Woolwich-type 9·2-inchers near the sea-level: so it was only a question
of time which sank first, she or they.

But her armour was not only so thick that no shell in existence could
pierce it at 2000 yards, if it had been smooth armour, but it was not
smooth armour, she had the appearance of a hedgehog, horrid all over
with spears and nipples, like a cavern of stalactites, so that instead
of being pierced by a shell, she pierced the shell; and only protracted
smashing at some one square yard of her could hole her.

And, though but little bigger than an ordinary super-Dreadnought, her
displacement was 48,000 tons, so great was her draught: she being
equally thick all over, even her upper deck being one bulk of rough
Krupp 19·5 inches thick, like a district of spikey ice in Iceland, and
her conning-tower a box 76 inches thick.

She was instantly deluged under shells.

Three of the huge _Thüringens_, and two of the _Nassaus_ (18,000),
were all at one moment within 2000 yards of her, and these together
sent forty shells from forward and aft turrets, and from two of their
central turrets placed at the four corners of citadels.

But, even so near, she was not very distinguishable from the sea;
and her own fire-delivery was pretty rapid—three rounds per gun per
minute—guns that were protected by traps that dropped automatically
after explosion, and then rose a moment for the shot to pass, and
dropped, like quick-winking lids, the guns themselves having little
range of movement, her rudder playing a part in their aiming. She was,
in fact, fought wholly from the conning-tower, from which also she was
steered, her steering-gear all under armour, and her rudder of such a
tonnage that three Schneider torpedoes with charges of 331 lb., could
not shatter it all.

Also, since she was made for a _mêlée_ and hand-to-hand hell-play, a
steady stream of torpedoes went speeding out from her numerous tubes.

And it was quick work, and stern work, and showery work, all Germany
shouting, all England grinning in the grimness of a three-minutes’
struggle for the government of a globe.

Like razors the rain of shells shaved her of her spikes and nipples,
and it was next a question of picking a way through her thickness
inch by inch, for she was impregnable else everywhere, except in her
propellers.

And while they made her white, soaping her with foam to razor her
whiskers, she razored their flesh, and made them red.

Half a salvo of her port guns transformed the starboard side of the
_Nassau_ into scrap-iron cracked and rent from end to end; in five
minutes a conflagration was raging within the great _Ostfriesland_,
aspiring high like a spire out of her chart-house top; yonder limped
the _Thüringen_ like one knee-sick; and the _Moltke_ with solitary
oratory away yonder to the north was prophesying dolorously of her
death, with one _Asahel_ and several _Blunderbus_ poison-pills rumbling
in her belly; so that after six minutes it was quite a fresh bunch of
the enemy which the _Blunderbus_ was bludgeoning to the sea-bottom.

Even when a hole was bored into her starboard quarter she did not sink,
as the shot chanced not to smash the walls of the compartment into
which the water washed, though her bulkheads were only one-eighth inch
thick; and six minutes afterwards, when at last a wave swept over her
desert esplanade of deck, and she lurched and gurgled like a world, and
was gone, it was at an _Asahel_ portmanteau of cordite which had come
and crashed through and through her.

For the _Asahel’s_ two guns, grown hoarse in the throat, were throwing
now less effectively; and the _Asahel_ herself, slowly sinking, was
being kept afloat by her pumps—a boxful of aeroplane bombs, by very bad
luck, having tumbled about and hulled her, blowing down her mast among
other things, injuring all the control-party, killing three gun-layers.

But she had still most of her speed, and was now following northward
a flock of troopships which, a long way inland, were stealing north
before turning east for Germany: for, out of sight to the south, two
British squadrons which had come up were now engaging the relics of the
enemy.

And in the latitude of Flamboro’ Head, at ten past eleven o’clock, the
Prince, who had afresh broken his broken arm in the crash of the mast,
suddenly recommenced the attack, the land-troops being convoyed now
only by the cruisers _Fürst Bismarck_, _Yorck_, and _Roon_.

Soon after eleven-thirty the _Fürst Bismarck_ sank, the _Yorck_ stood
motionless, and the little _Roon_ struck her flag.

The _Asahel_, on which a pole-mast had now been rigged, then signalled
the crowd of troopships and liners southward, and, shepherding the
32 of them, was not permitted to sink until she had come up with the
British.

It was only when taken into the _Lion_ flag-ship, that the Prince heard
of the _Blunderbus’s_ fate, and shook the hand of her captain and of
some of her 680 (seven had been wounded).

He then heard also of a terrible brief battle between the two fleets,
disastrous to both, the enemy seeking to break away and escape
eastward, with a success of probably seven capital ships only.

The business of putting prize crews into the liners, into three
captured ships-of-war, and three mine-sweepers with trawls, now went
forward, the sea lying fairly quiet, though a stiff sea-wind still
swept it, and the sun sunny above.

At three in the afternoon the crowd started southward for the
Thames-mouth.

And during the next two days London saw that spectacle which she had so
dreaded, Prussian troops pouring through London: but prisoners.

Troop after troop, regiment on regiment, all day long, streaming
through the teeming streets to the stations for the prisons, all London
on its pavements, at its windows, patiently seeing it through, in
wonderful weather like spring.

There seemed no end to them!—grand gallants some of them, regiments
of giants, shining helmets of the 17th and 3rd (West Prussia and
Brandenburg), Bismarck cuirassiers, uhlans—Prussian, Russian—curious
uniforms of troops in ruby robes flowing loose (Turkomans),
with sapper battalions, and specimens of Terek cavalry, and
horse-grenadiers garbed in laces and epaulettes, the rainbow
variegations of Russian regiments.

And since there are hours in which our country bounds to the very plane
of greatness, never a bravo from all those crowds of spectators was
raised to break their hearts, as they silently passed, unfortunate but
haughty, through silently haughty lines. Only the bells of Britain
could not be kept from breaking into melody, telling one to the other
of it; and the name of God was in many mouths.

When the Crown-Prince, a prisoner from the _Fürst Bismarck_, had the
taste to say in our Prince’s car on the way from Limehouse that the
victory had been won by the weather, our Prince is said to have made
the answer: “Nothing more fickle than weather, Your Imperial Highness;
but you may rely upon it for being always on the side of this island.”

Even at the Prince’s passage the streets hardly cheered; a few flowers
struck him; men bent their heads, and stood dumb.

When a king, a prince, a duke even, is not absolutely beneath humanity
the people tend to consider him a man of ability; if he is that, they
consider him a great man; if great, they regard him as godlike. And so
now.

On first learning the news of the Battle of the North Sea, the Queen
had run into a room of the King at Windsor, and dropping her forehead
upon him, had called out “_Oh!_” and broken down into sobbings, as who
should say, “Here is the money which long since you lent me, which I
now pay back in full, with interest.”

Those were her lordly days, in which she stalked exalted on air, her
eyes alight. To hear these bells she had lived and endeavoured.

But all in her bliss was one bitter bit: and an uglier tone of
malignity now envenomed her against the girl who mingled alegar in her
glass of gladness, and rendered imperfect her crowning hour.

From thoughts of that girl she would turn to lavish pettings upon the
Princess Elizabeth; who, however, was in no pretty mood just now.

Wildly in love with the Prince, the Princess had always disliked him
in a sort of patriotic spite and jealousy; and, never letting him out
of her thoughts, she was always either dreaming amorously of him, or
speaking slightingly of his alleged admirableness.

Seeing him now bring her brother a prisoner, a venom of tenfold love
and of tenfold enmity poisoned all her nature to a nest of snakes.

Nor was she solitary in this morbid and, in fact, mad passion for the
Prince of Wales, considering the singular epidemic of love-sickness
which suddenly broke out among girls shortly after the North Sea
event, infecting high society and low alike, _débutantes_, milliners,
resulting within one month in four suicides. One poor Margaret, a
Norfolk farmer’s daughter, after going haggard with her love-hunger,
drugged herself with hedge hemlock, and was discovered dead and at rest
in a bed of bay, with her “Teddy’s” photograph under her face—and there
were others.

Meantime, the nation named him “saviour,” called him both darling
and father of his country, and, demanding the waiving of ceremony,
clamoured for his elevation to flag-rank.

He was also at once appointed a member of the Permanent Committee of
National Safety.

“But,” said the then Duke of Norfolk, an unkempt little gentleman
with a beard teeming with micro-organisms, to the then Marquess of
Tullibardine in a Pall Mall club that night of the Prince’s coming, “it
might have been better for our lot if the Germans had come.”

Whereat the Marquess—a young man who stood every inch a lord, tall,
left arm akimbo, right leg cocked, lifted his finger to utter something
prophetic, but checked himself.

In truth, the aristocracy, as a caste, had long distrusted the Prince,
did not quite like all this idolisation of him, and looked forward with
dismay to the day when a King who was a scientist and a thinker should
come to the Throne.




                               CHAPTER XII

                              THE PRINCESS


Meantime, the Queen could not rest—for her happiness and her
wretchedness.

For to one highly happy a mote in the eye is a calamity! and a mouse in
one’s soup as huge as a mountain.

“But for that—that _one_ thing,” she sighed, “ah! how well would it be
with me to-day!”

The spot of drab looked black as soot; she hated; and on the day that
the Princess Elizabeth said to her: “Ah, Your Majesty, you have seen
yourself—there is a life between Teddy and me,” the Queen hurried to
the Newmarket Parlour, and scribbled in an agitation: “I must speak
with you. To-night at nine I will be at your house.”

But in order to “speak with” Sir Robert Barrington, it might have been
a possible thing to summon him to the palace, perhaps? The weathers and
well-springs of even a Queen’s inwards can be very queer.

Now, it happened that Sir Robert Barrington was at the Admiralty when
that note was handed in at his door; thence he drove to a club; and it
was only when dining there at seven-forty that the note caught him.

The Vice-Admiral was profoundly moved—filled with a thousand
wonderments: and after ten minutes deliberation in a brain of no little
strength and judgment, he rose sharply, wrote a note, and despatched it
post-haste to Marlborough House.

    “I deeply regret to have to beg Your Royal Highness not to
    go to my house to-night before ten. Your Royal Highness will
    rightly surmise that only the very gravest reasons, etc.”

But the Prince of Wales, after an afternoon spent in inspecting
“Immediate Reserves,” was dining that night _en fils de famille_ at
Buckingham Palace; and it was not until twenty minutes past eight that
Sir Robert’s note came to his hand.

Whereupon he, for his part, despatched a note to St George’s Hospital,
saying: “Do not go to Barrington’s at nine: I shall be in a brougham
awaiting you opposite Crewe House at 9.30.”

But Eulalia had already then left the hospital, and was chatting in
her sister’s house in Wardour Street. So she duly made her way through
drizzle and misty streets to the rendezvous at Sir Robert Barrington’s
at nine.

And at one minute to nine a cloaked and hooded Queen passed alone
through the palace park-gate on foot; and at once was in Grosvenor
Place, walking fast.

Both she and Eulalia were punctual.

And the engineer, posted just inside his door, was listening like a
thief to the rolling of wheels, bidding his soul be still and bold,
when the two ladies met on his porch-steps.

Her Majesty, a step the higher, turned to look down at the other, on
whose face a lamplight shone, and she recognised, realised.... This was
why the Prince had been hurried and restive....

Strong indignation now agitated Her Majesty’s lip; and with a
brushing-away movement of her hand, she muttered: “_Miserable little
woman!—go_.”

Whereat Eulalia’s lips fell agape, as she gazed up, like a sylph
gazing in awe at a goddess, till it was suddenly suggested to her
consciousness that this was no one else than the Queen herself; and in
some moments more she found herself walking away in a new universe made
all of wounds and awe and mute amazement.

At the same time Sir Robert Barrington was profoundly bowed, with a
murmur of “Your Majesty,” and silently he led the Queen to a desert of
drawing-room with two hearths, and a file of drawn blinds, and gilt,
and moulding, and discreet chandeliers.

The Queen, for her part, was pretty short and haughty, and rather
pinched in her wind, and suspicious of shadows and corners, sitting by
a table on which was wine, the Vice-Admiral standing with firelight on
his square face of the village blacksmith, all clumps of muscle, a thin
spot showing now on his top; and his eyes smiled: for now that she was
actually there before him, he felt warmer, calmer, master of himself;
so that, in the reaction, the frolicsome thought crossed his mind: “How
much did her cloak cost the country?”

But her chin! its uplifted pitch. She was very resentful; and he, as
she spoke, very taken aback, and pained, and embarrassed.

What she had seen with her eyes she could even now hardly believe—that
_he_—Sir Robert Barrington—could lend himself—to countenance—to abet—in
his own house—the baneful influence over a young prince of a creature
who wore the livery of an honourable profession——

“Permit me, Ma’am,” the Vice-Admiral interrupted with some curtness,
“I have to say that the relations between the Prince of Wales and that
_lady_ are—innocent.”

A little bent, he eyed the fire, while her eyes and eyebrows played
incessantly upward upon him.

“Well!—you say that. Innocent. I confess that I have wondered what you
would discover to say, Sir Robert Barrington; but that you might say
_this_ did not occur to me. Let me tell you, if you do not know—His
Royal Highness has known this person since he was a boy at Brockweir:
I knew; I found out her address and family circumstances; I have
followed her career from a distance; I have known that he has seen her,
and have been uneasy—without ever conceiving—he has been brought up a
Nazarene, and no razor had come near his dear head”—here the Queen’s
tones lowered and broke a little in her throat, and Barrington rapidly,
quietly, poured wine, of which she drank a sip at the pretty lip below
the shadow’s tip that shadowed her nose.

He, in a muteness of sympathy too deep for speech, uttered nothing at
the moment, for there was a unison of emotional movement betwixt their
souls, afflicting him in her afflictions, and when her body danced, his
cut a caper; so she went on to say: “But the circumstances of his entry
here—the cab—a caress in it!—the key—no footman opened to them, Sir
Robert Barrington!—the creature’s ease——”

“That _lady_, Ma’am——” Sir Robert began to say.

“Oh, the days are past,” the Queen said testily, “when a light o’ love
is to have the title of a lady, just because she is the _amourette_ of
a Prince: it is an injustice to Sally in the alley. But I quite fail
to understand you! I am here to seek an explanation, and _this_ is
it—‘lady,’ ‘innocent’! Of course, you are sincere, since you say it,
but I am amazed. Pray say something, Sir Robert Barrington, to abate my
amazement.”

And she waited, her lids hanging on his profile, perpendicular like a
plumb-line, which he bent toward the blaze; and since his lips were
deeply sealed, like steel in pain the muscles of his face convulsed a
moment, and his teeth met.

“It is my belief,” he said at last, “that what I have stated is the
truth. And I think that the characters of the pair in question justify
that belief. This is my answer to the Queen.”

Now, the Queen, always, had a pretty free and formidable tongue:
and she said off-handedly: “Oh, well, then, I must confess myself
disappointed in either the acumen or the candour of Sir Robert
Barrington.”

Sir Robert bowed, turned a little, looked at her, and their eyes met
and communed; until hers suddenly dropped to her lap.

“At any rate,” she said—with the half of the half of a laugh!—“I cannot
share in your ideal view of things. I wish I was so beatified and
unworldly! So, this being so, I have next to consult you, since you are
said to be the closest friend of the young Prince, and are, apparently,
a friend of his friend”—she laughed!—“how are these two people to be
separated? There must be some way of getting the young woman out of the
country.”

Sharply on which Sir Robert Barrington was masterful, his finger
lifting. “I have to warn Your Majesty that there is _no_ such way!” And
now the Queen stood up, muttering to herself: “We’ll see about that”;
and aloud: “I’ll go”: and that ended it.

The rest of that night Sir Robert spent alone by the fire of that room
over an old diary and an old shirt-cuff, reading and rereading some
leaves that had old rose-leaves between them.

“After this third dance on that third night after her eighteenth
birthday we were together fifty minutes in the orangery.... I then said
to her, ‘Yes, this in me is love. It was during the night of Friday the
9th of June, while designing a dynamo for a mine, that it struck me
that it was so with me.’

“She then said to me: ‘Was the dynamo a success?’ to which I answered:
‘A perfect success.’

“She then said to me: ‘What is this thing, this love? What is its place
and source in Nature?’

“My reply was: ‘You define me _a pound_, and I’ll define you _love_.’

“‘_A pound_,’ she answered, ‘is the force of the earth’s attraction for
the mass in a certain bar of platinum deposited at the B.O.T. in Gwydyr
House.’

“‘But you speak of “_force_,”’ I said to her: ‘what is _a force_?’

“Her reply to this was: ‘Oh, but that’s not a fair question: force is
the Holy of Holies, the Real Presence, the +Thing+ Itself: no life in
any height of heaven can ever arrive at any notion what a force is; but
if you want the definition current among crickets and cricketers, then
“a force is +That Which+ tends to alter a body’s state of rest or of
uniform motion in a straight line.”’

“I now said to her: ‘Quite so: and now we have the required definition:
Love is +That Which+ alters a mortal body’s state of rest or of
uniform motion; and a horse-power-hour of it is that energy contained
in a standard mass deposited in the breast of one Robert Barrington,
impelling him toward one Minna Simmons.’

“She was pleased to laugh, as it were to herself, when I had said this;
and she next said to me: ‘Is Love a god, or is it a devil?’

“‘Every force,’ was my reply, ‘is (necessarily) Divine.’

“‘Nevertheless,’ said she, ‘I think I will call Love a devil.’

“‘And why will you do this?’ I asked her.

“‘Because,’ said she—not without some hesitation, I think—‘it seems to
be frequently tempting.’

“Promptly as a hammer’s stroke I was on her, saying: ‘If, now, you had
said _is_, and not _seems_, I should have felt myself a made man!’

“Upon which she became specially grave, gazing downward at her fingers.
I heard her say, ‘Rob Roy’; and she then said: ‘Robert, your will of
steel is scheming against my career, and means to wring its little
neck, I think.’

“At those words I inwardly exulted; but made haste to say, to console
her: ‘Well, love does alter a state of uniform motion, but is not
altogether incompatible with a girl’s career.’

“To this she made me no answer, but laughed strangely, as to herself,
and now with her programme-pencil wrote something on my left cuff. As
the moon was bright beyond the tree, I tried to rise to read, but she
restrained me, and then attempted to smudge out with her glove what she
had written. However, after we had parted, I contrived to decipher the
wildly written letters which I found to spell: ‘I always go the whole
hog.’ Her being electrifies mine like live wire....

“The stable clock was striking eleven when she said to me, ‘I expect it
will be like that,’ but that her definite answer would be on that day
eight months....”

The Engineer Vice-Admiral clicked the diary’s clasp, wrapped up the
old cuff, and sighed in asking himself: “Has she forgotten it all? Or
does memory straying in her head on her bed in the dead of night ever
remember, and make her sigh?”

“Anyway,” he added, with sudden energy, “I’m not going to permit
her shrewish tongue to touch the fair name of so fair a lady as the
Princess of Wales in my presence”—and he went off to bed.

At that hour that “Princess of Wales” herself lay on no bed of roses.

After “_going_” at Her Majesty’s command, she had wandered, pondering
upon “miserable little woman—go.” The mystery!—unless she had been
mistaken for someone? for that it was the Queen who had spoken she had
no doubt. And the fact that Her Majesty was at that house at all caused
to be born in her heart’s heart all a swarm of formless doubts, awed
questionings, too shadowy as yet to shape themselves into consciousness.

She only got back to her hospital at half-past nine, so only then got
the note: “Await you opposite Crewe House ...” and she was off, late,
covering the distance fleetly, love the motor in her feet.

Twenty yards off she could see the standing carriage through the thick
of Piccadilly traffic and mist; but all at once eagerness failed in her
legs, and she stopped agape to gaze. There at the carriage-door, as it
seemed to her, was a girl.

And she would have known that girl under many veils—that “Mademoiselle
Oyone,” in whose charming arms she had caught her Teddy dancing at
Chinnery’s....

In fact, though, Oyone was not at the carriage-door, but behind it:
and she was there because, since the North Sea Battle, instructions
had afresh come to her from Peking as to the Prince, and had found
her willing now. In those days, therefore, she was hovering upon the
Prince’s steps, patient as a shadow, watching for her perfect chance.

She waved to her chauffeur; and it looked to Eulalia like a wave of
farewell to the brougham.

Night-shades touched that smile of anticipation on Eulalia’s face; and
a thought was in her, “something must be against me to-night,” as she
paced on with graver steps.

Her Teddy sprang out to her with, “I am glad! Was getting afraid—You
didn’t go to Barrington’s? He wrote to say—Never mind, here are the
old eyes that shock me afresh each time?—So what did I do?—Scott, I was
thrown on my beams’ ends—I hired a little hotel in Knightsbridge—But, I
say, what’s up? Not glad to see one?”

It suddenly struck him that those eyes that surprised him each time
were even wider this night: there was awe in them, there was also a
something of horror, and a lost distracted something, as of one who
asks himself: “In which one of God’s worlds am I now?”

For his left arm was in a sling, as had been the Prince of Wales’s when
she had seen him passing through the street northward to the battle;
across his forehead a scar hooked over the eye, precisely like the
Prince’s.

From that sight her eyes could not move themselves one moment; and as
she stood musing on it, the thought passed through her heart: “Mother
doesn’t know what I am.”

Now all was clear! now it flashed upon her why Her Majesty had said:
“Miserable little woman!” The Queen was not aware what she, Eulalia,
was.

After the shock of awe, of horrid elevation in airy spaces, and wild,
white light at the height of the sun, her next sensation was pride!
for, if she was the Princess of Wales, was not this because she was
born like that? of that quality and quintessence? the equal of Queens
by inbred heredity? and in another moment her soul was moving to an
emotion of love and motherliness, and her moan was, “My poor boy.”

“Teddy,” in his headlong way with swaying shoulders, had bustled
her into wedlock at their fourth meeting, a year before he had left
Brockweir! Lately she had begun to think that that was scarcely a fair
thing to consider a man bound by such a marriage....

When he said again, “But what’s up? The cut? The arm? that’s nothing!”
at last she found the power to utter something; but he could not
recognise her voice, those strained tones in which she spoke as to
a stranger. “I have to tell you—I cannot come to-night—I am sorry—I
have——”

He had felt certain that her first words would be a question as to the
cut! and stood amazed. “Not come?”

“No—I beg—time—you must give me—I have to go——”

“Well?”

In a secret and begging way she said, for some reason: “To Shepherd’s
Bush.”

“Shepherd’s bosh, Eu! So what is to become of poor me, meanwhile? Why
didn’t you write? _I’ll_ come to Shepherd’s Bush, too, of course.”

“I have to go alone,” she said beggingly in confidence, bending to him.

“In that case——But, Eu, ought one to be sudden and mysterious? Let me
come!”

“I beg—_you_ go to the hotel, and perhaps—I am sorry—I can’t exactly
promise, but perhaps—I may come. Please call me a cab.”

He frowned now, did her bidding, handed her into the cab, tossed in a
box of bon-bons—for she had a passion for jawing chocolates in bed,
and had taught him also to sit and nibble; and he gave her the hotel’s
name, without again begging her to come, and just touched her fingers
with his lips, and turned from her, but then again half turned to say
curtly with an offended chin: “What’s your name?”

She in a strained voice straining against tears answered: “My name’s
Eulalia.”

“Whose girl are you?”

“I am Teddy Reeks’ girl.”

“All of you?”

“Yes, all.”

“Au ’voir, then!”

“Good-night ...” the cab drove off—to Shepherd’s Bush!

She could not have believed, if told an hour before, that she would
drive that night to Shepherd’s Bush! and at Shepherd’s Bush she cried:
“_Drive on!_” and the cab drove over the Uxbridge Road to Colney Hatch,
and back to the Docks, and back to Shepherd’s Bush, during all which
she was in the throes of the question—to go to him only once more—not
to go to him even this once.

Though it wasn’t her fault that she had not known what he was! but his.
When she had asked him about the Prince at their second meeting at
Brockweir, he had said: “If you see me, you see him—many of the fellows
take me for him”—prevarication falsely true, truly false. Yet when he
had constantly evaded telling her the name of his ship, and details
about his family, she should have guessed things, she saw now—many
evidences should have opened her eyes to the truth that he was no
duke’s son or country squire: but her wits had been hypnotised by his
initial fib.

“But he did it to get me!” she moaned with tears near the Marble Arch,
rolling west, and suddenly ordered the cab to the hotel, saying to
herself, “he is my husband”: for she liked his hand, that had in it an
electric battery, and little workshop cuts and stains on it, to hold
hot and long, feeling the bones, till it was as near to her as her
own hand, and as much her hand as his, and his fleece of curls, and
a certain fleet glance of his eye sideward, as gallant and imperial
as Cæsar, and the tissue of his skin like silk, and there was a smell
about him as of the sea and ships, mixed with benzoline, naphtha,
shellac, mastic, which ever made something in her soul faint with
emotion.

Why, though, had he _never_ told her who he was? What did that mean?
That she was a toy sharing in a royal escapade? not a wife, but a kind
of wife? She commanded the taxicab back westward. Her grandfather’s
grandfather had fought at Trafalgar in the very _Victory_, and, though
only a gunner, laying his gun with tackle, hand-spike, and quoin, if
England was grand, that was because _he_ had been grand....

She would not be a miserable little woman; if she was a Princess, she
would be Princess-like....

And yet—he loved her well: there was no doubt: _she_ knew what she
knew. How often had he worried her to surround herself with town-house
and country-house, and crowds of flunkeys, and crowns about her brows,
till he should get a “really good chance,” as he always said, to
announce her. But she had preferred to work, hardly caring to face
the inquiring eye of her dad. He was a Puritan—a Methodist local
preacher ever since his retirement—proud—Irish blood. She knew that
only Irishmen know pride—that attar-of-pride, supremely _élite_, that
is haughtier _far_ in its heart’s heart than Hanover, or Hapsburg,
or Hohenzollern, and will spurn the lightning’s eye with a superber
lightning. Her dad was like that: he called kings and kings’ dogs
“_hogwash_.” And her (English) mother had caught it from him, and she
herself, perhaps, had it: so had refused, and gone her own way—had
refused to tell him her birthday, and never had had a present from
him, save boxes of bon-bons and the wedding-ring, which she took out
from her bosom where it hung, and wet, kissing it, and thought of him
waiting for her, fretting his restive heart out, and ordered the cab
again to the hotel.

However, it entered her head on the way that that was hardly very
honest to pretend to herself that it was for him that she was going,
when perhaps it was for herself, that she might have his hand. For if
she was really going to give him up, to-night was the time, since, if
she broke down once, then it would be a case of breaking down always.
It would be best to be able to say to herself that she had never once
been, after knowing: and now was her chance to be strong.

But why give him up at all? Even that point was not properly argued
out! Was she not acting on impulse, driven on every wind? It was
something to be the Princess of Wales, since many girls would die eight
times, if they had nine lives, to be that: and she was it by right, and
he her own, after all, her flesh and blood, nearer to her than to the
Queen, and dearer; and though her intellect might not be cultivated to
a quite high degree like the Queen’s, what then? did that make her a
miserable little woman? Her soul might be as pure and golden; and she
certainly thought more highly of her own people than of the Queen’s:
so why should she stab herself so very deep to the heart, and with
her own butcher hands wrench out both her eyes? That did not seem very
reasonable to expect of one.

But, then, after all, it was no good arguing, since there was he to
be considered. She knew very well that the fact of his father having
married “a commoner” would make it monstrous for the next Queen to be
a commoner: so, if she kept him to his boy’s marriage, she would be
bringing him into infinite hot-water and embarrassment: his mother, who
was prouder than other crowned heads, would perish in hysterics. And
there was the Princess Elizabeth: everyone knew that for three years
the Queen and the Liberal Party had set their hearts on her marriage
with him, in a hope of Anglo-German _rapprochement_. She would be a
miserable little woman, in truth, if she stood in the way.

And she had been dreaded, and known, and spied upon!—she understood
that now. Once, three years previously, a man had appeared in Holmend,
the hamlet near her home, and had made secret inquiries as to her
people and her whereabouts: her dad had heard, and not liked it! She
had been dreaded, and eyed at! But she would no longer be a danger, and
a horror, and a bugbear to those above her.

She would disappear: before long he would begin to think her dead; and
then might begin to look at that outlandish Japanese popinjay in her
pageantries.

But if she stayed anywhere in England, he would surely scent her out,
and be after her again.... Where, then, to go?

There was the war: a shortage of nurses was being felt at the front
since the last big battle, and volunteers were being asked for. She had
been enrolled in Queen Alexandra’s Royal Naval Nursing Service Reserve,
and would be eagerly received in the emergency. That night she would
apply.

Only, she would indulge her soul with one more night at his side; in
which one night she would live fifty years; and would tell him that he
would never find another wife to love him as well as Eulalia.

But the cab was within some yards of the hotel when she said to
herself, “Oh no, really, I am not going to,” and all in a flurry, with
shivering lips, called “_turn back!_”

She drove to the hospital prostrate, her mouth stretched back in a
tension of self-pity, horrified now at the hollowness of the chasm of
loss in which she felt herself falling.

It was now past midnight: nevertheless, she sat and wrote to Pall Mall.

Her offer was accepted: and three days later a harrowing ordeal awaited
her at St James’s Palace, where she was amid twenty-seven others of
the Volunteer Corps and a committee of ladies. They were expecting the
Princess Kitty, the King’s second sister, who was said to be coming to
wish them well, when all at once, tall and formidable as a wall falling
upon one, in walks the Queen in heliotrope, followed by a throng of
satellites. Eulalia’s heart failed her.

Her Majesty had come to say “it is good of you to go,” and to pin some
red-cross ribbons on their uniforms; so they stood in a row, while the
smile moved along the line, picking out of the casket, pinning, Eulalia
waiting through a century of strain and distress, pining to fly, to
sink into the floor, to become invisible.

The Queen seems not to have seen her until they were actually face to
face; in fact, she was in the act of bringing the ribbon to the other’s
breast, when...! But her nerves were so perfectly cultured, that she
hardly started at all: only her hands leapt one inch up, and, letting
the ribbon drop, she stepped on to the next, still mightily and mildly
smiling.

The thing, of course, was seen—with no little wonder: and then Eulalia
knew confusion of face, and pain, and did not know where to look or put
herself; but one of the ladies, eyeing her askew, considered that she
looked gracefuller writhing there in the grip of her pretty distress,
like a sylph in a picture ashamed of nakedness, than Her Majesty
reigning in her high-tower.

With this gash in her, she dashed down that night to say good-bye,
climbing the long hill from Holmend just as the sunset’s flush went
utterly grey, and the moon stood full-faced over the covert up there
before her, growing every moment more glorious as the daylight died.

She had disclosed to no one yet that she was going away, and went
smiling in anticipation of the old folks’ surprise and disquiet. Here,
indeed, she could not but smile; this little circle of the earth’s
surface was so well loved, affecting her with such sensations of
intimacy, of rest, of religion, that while she smiled dews of piety
suffused her eyes: for that brook, those rough furrows, were not only
her very own, but they were Eulalia, and Eulalia they, though some
foreigner was permitted to call them “_his_.”

She pushed back a garden-gate, and passed between two old yews to a
white home buried in red-berried briony, stepping silent, to surprise
them; and quietly opened the door; and was in.

But no glad start! no fuss of welcome! and, instantly chilled, she
stood still.

Near a green-covered table, reading Deuteronomy out of a great Bible,
sat her dad, who gazed at her steadily over his glasses; and her
mother, sitting in grey silk and a cap, reading a _Sunday Companion_
serial, did not (apparently) cease to read through her magnifying glass.

Eulalia, suspended, scared, bag in hand, said: “What’s the matter, dad?”

Her father smiled, eyeing steadily at her as at a specimen of seed;
didn’t say anything for a minute; but then quietly: “You go.”

Whereupon, immediately, a scream, a horrid outcry of the drowning:
“Almighty God, John Bayley, I can’t stand this!”—from the mother, who,
casting her arms aloft, had fallen forward upon her knees.

And upon this an eruption of the most pallid and passionate rapture
transacted itself during two minutes in that room, each of the three
battling for breath as if in the passion of death, shouts of “Woman,
learn to command yourself!” mingling with “I am not going to see
mother killed by anyone!” and with “Don’t dare touch your mother with
your shameful low hand!” and with “God Almighty be her father!” like
people stricken with ranting in an atmosphere all oxygen. It ended
with Eulalia finding herself outside in a kind of ecstasy, having been
pushed by the shoulders; and it was all in a tremble from top to toe
like a motor-bus that she got down the mountain with her bag.

This was work of the Princess Elizabeth, who was considered a
distinctly “clever” young lady!—something of a blue-stocking!—a student
of Kant!—a solver of problems!—whose suggestions had weight with
friends and relatives. She it was who had suggested that, if the girl
was to be made submissive to proposals, all her props should first be
knocked away, and her improper course of conduct communicated to her
honest home. Hence an ambassadress of known tact and discretion had
come down, and had dropped in at Yew Cottage for a chat.

And the next night when Eulalia presented herself at her sister’s door
in Soho, a maid delivered her the message that it might be as well if
she kept away. She leant her head then on the door some moments before
she moved slowly thence....




                              CHAPTER XIII

                             THE REDLIKE RAY


The next morning she had a letter: “Since I am very perplexed, please,
dear, relieve me. I must see you to-morrow night at nine for five
minutes ... the Piccadilly Fountain....”

But she did not go. As he waited there at nine, an unknown nurse came,
asked “Mr Reeks?”, handed him an envelope.

“From his sweetheart,” thought Oyone in her motor-car by Swan and Edgar.

And, “Love affair” muttered one of two detectives under the Monico—for
ever since the mystery of the air-boats’ destruction, the Chief
Commissioner had had the Prince’s every step shadowed for his
protection.

    “Dear,” she had written, “I cannot meet you, not ever, I’m
    afraid. I think I see you wince, dear, in reading this, but it
    is not that I am really cruel, but that I cannot in all cases
    trust myself; and I seem to see that it is better for me to
    go from England, not to come back. Always remember that our
    marriage was entirely my fault, for you were only a boy, but a
    girl should know better; and now that I abandon you, it will
    not be very binding on you. But you will not altogether forget
    Eulalia, ever? I will keep the ring where I have always kept
    it, in the warm.”

It took the Prince minutes to peruse this, and no muscle of his
face moved, though he stood so long motionless, that Oyone thought:
“Something has stunned him.”

However, he lifted his hand quite coolly to a cab, got in in his long
cloak, and started eastward, this being his monthly doss-house night;
and behind him the detectives; and behind them Oyone, who said to
herself: “That cab is following his: they are detectives.”

When his cab passed Aldgate, one of the detectives exclaimed, “God’s
name, where _is_ he going?” and their eyes widened in alarm when
he alighted at an alley marked at the corner “Duval, _late_ Dorset
Street,” for the name “Dorset” had become so associated with filth and
infamy and one “Jack-the-Ripper,” that an attempt had been made to
change its name—in vain.

Whoever entered it was suspect—_ipso facto_. In the glances that ogled
you out of the glooms was the question: “What’s _his_ little game?”

Half-way down it, on a lamp, was marked “Noted House for Single Men”;
and in, though married, stepped the Prince.

Having now thrown off his cloak, he got at a wicket a 4d. ticket,
passed in his marine-garb into a “kitchen,” where some singing was
going on, and there sat out of the way in shadow behind a corner of the
fireplace, bent down with heaviness.

This den was essentially black somehow, dingy, dismal, though two
gas-jets struggled against its blackness—spacious enough, but low,
stuffy, windowless, filled with men, many naked to the waist (shirts
drying!), and occupied with blackened benches and blackened blocks
meant for tables, and tobacco smells, fishy stenches, fumes of cooking.

Some of the group round the great blaze, _habitués_, the Prince
knew—little Tim, the Jew, and “Alexis the Sexton,” and Burrows, the
tramp-poet in his velveteen jacket and knickerbockers, whose booklet of
poems “the press” had praised. He, especially, was now in a state of
exaltation over the North Sea Battle, ever and afresh singing a snatch
of the Alhambra battle-ballad that within three days was being sold by
millions in the streets, and sung by every ragamuffin through England;
and when the fire-group left off, away yonder at the wash-basins the
thing might begin again in the voice of a saw in labour-pains.

One Tookey remarked: “Aye, ’e knows ’ow to give it ’em ’ot all right,
thank God for that”—a man sodden to flabbiness, who lived by day before
the doors of the _Duke of Beaufort_—year after year—dull in a universe
no huger than two streets.

And “Beer?” suggested Burrows, who had a quart-bottle, to “Alexis the
Sexton,” a big and fiercely bearded being; but Alexis, brooding over
the blaze, brushed the bottle away without answer.

Whereat Burrows drank himself, and now let out of his lungs:

    “They breathed, ‘We are near!’
       And they leered, with a ‘Hush!
     We are near!’ But just here
       Did the _Asahel_ gush
     Live _As_-id to germs on the Germans,
       On the Russians like _hel_ to a rush.”

But now stamped “Alexis the Sexton,” his hands quivering near his ears,
as he shouted: “Shut up that blasted howling!”—the utterance all the
more foreign for the idiomatic correctness: for he knew every language.

“Moy loife,” said little Tim, the Jew, who was proud of being English,
“can’t anybody sing? Go back to Odessa and throw bombs, if London don’t
suit you.”

Alexis deigned no answer; and Burrows irrelevantly put forth both arm
and voice, some others joining at the third word:

    “For her skipper was Ted,
       And Teddy’s a bear,
     When he’s sore on the head,
       And is out on the tear:
     And a bear that is likewise a lion
       The Muscovy Bear couldn’t bear.”

The Prince, brooding in his obscurity, was thinking: “They love
England, these men.... But _why_? the singular beings! It’s no
privilege to be an Englishman—just the opposite, since they’d be much
happier in Samoa, where there’s no aristocracy, or in France, where the
aristocracy’s heads have been cut off. But they _do_, they choose to,
in their great patience: I put that to their credit.”

But now afresh upon his reflections crashed the caterwaul of all the
cats:

    “And the Eagle he blinked,
       And ‘_Blitzwetter!_’ he cried,
     And ‘Al-Ass!’ as she kicked,
       And ‘Ah-Hell!’ as he died:
     ‘Though her bray is the bray of the donkey,
       There’s more Hel than As in her side.’”

After which Burrows, smacking his lips with an “Ah!” rose to stroll a
little, his fists expanding the pockets of his opulent knickerbockers,
and, having sauntered toward the Prince, brought a paw down upon the
bowed back, calling out: “What, Jack, down on your luck again? And
what’s wrong with the arm?”

“Don’t worry, mate,” muttered the Prince, “I’m not in the mood.”

“A drink?”

“No, go to hell.”

“_Asa_hel, perhaps, friend?”

No answer, Burrows looked down on the back a little, then, spinning,
stamped with the outcry: “Now put some lungs into it!” and started to
chortle:

    “‘Her forward-gun’s stern
       As vit’rol!’ they yell;
     ‘And her stern-gun in turn
       Is forward as well:
     The forwarder’s name must be Asid,
       And the sterner one’s name must be Hel!’”

At this “Alexis the Sexton” leapt upright, colossal, confronting the
crowd of choristers with clenched fists and scowling frown, afresh
interrupted in his profound reflections. But no one took any notice,
and on drawled the wawling in every tone of rawness:

    “Then, with bluster and buzz,
       The _Blunderbus_ bowed,
     ‘Are you come, Max, Coz?
       Of your visit I’m proud:
     Forgive, if in kissing you welcome,
       I blunder in bussing too loud.’”

Now that thick lip of Alexis, who still stood scowling, bent downward,
and he stopped the song with the bellow: “You crowd of fowls! Sitting
here singing of your masters—yes? You see not, then, that now is your
chance while they are busy? But you not even think of it! You serfs by
birth! You timid mice! If you were to make to them a millionth piece of
the wrong that they make to you, they would ravage Britain to one mass
of ashes—if they could. And you can, but will not——”

“Which only shows that we are the better men of the two!” called out
Tookey, the loafer.

“_You?_” said Alexis the Sexton with a lip of bitterness: “_you_ better
than somebody—yes? Never, never, a dog was born of she-dog that was not
a better being than things like you! I tell you——”

“Oh, stow it,” somebody put in, “we don’t want no shindy here.”

“No, you tame——”

“Howl it, boys!” howled Burrows, bringing down the bottle from his
mouth, and out anew broke the row:

    “He has saved us from harm
       With his dreadful flails,
     With his stretched-out arm
       He has saved us from bales:
     Let’s leap to our feet as we scream it:
       ‘God bless the Prince of Wales!’”

And they did leap, nearly everyone, whereupon Alexis the Sexton,
finding himself standing in the throng of standers, suddenly sat down.

The gabbling of the two gloomy gas-lights, hanging on a thin =T=-tubing
from a beam in the ceiling, filled some moments’ stillness, while the
Prince said to himself: “All right, you are not asked for any love, but
you choose to give it; and I choose to give you mine. Only wait till I
get a _good_ chance to show it, and then I will—without mercy to your
merciless enemies.”

A moment more, and with a pang, new and sharp, he was thinking:
“_Gone!_”

And he set to peruse anew that letter of Eulalia—he could in his
obscurity, since already he knew it by heart: but in the midst started!
his ear cocked—to listen to Alexis the Sexton.

Alexis was now saying to those round him: “They have it their own way
for the moment, the rich—yes? but they have one horrible enemy, who
no will fail to overthrow them. Who is their enemy? A few poor heroes
throwing some bombs, yes? They are nothing. But their enemy is a still
little man in an aparterment prying into a microscope—Edison and
Diessel were their enemies, Chinnery was their enemy, Darwin and Watt
and Faraday were their enemies, God’s light is their enemy. How will
they feel if you go and tell to them, ‘Somewhere I have a little box
that will strike blind ten thousand of you every twenty seconds’? They
will feel a little bit chilly—yes? Maybe it is invented already—who
knows?”

It was at this that the Prince hurried Eulalia’s letter into his
pocket. “A _little box_”—the name “_Chinnery_”—this made him ask
himself: “_Can it be possible_ that this man has the Redlike Ray?” The
jeopardy to civilisation of such a thing for even one day more was
clear enough.

He bent his ear to hear more with an intense interest; but just then
the plaguey _Asahel_ song started again, whereat Alexis the Sexton with
an “_Ach Gott!_” cast his arms aloft, got up, and walked out. Swift and
still the Prince slipped out after him.

The Russian sauntered out of Dorset Street into Commercial Street
northward, his hands in the pockets of clothes that hung loose on
his huge bulk, the Prince, meanwhile, all eyes for a policeman,
not dreaming that those two men near the Dorset Street corner were
detectives (though Alexis knew), while yonder in shadow eight hundred
yards northward stood Oyone’s motor-brougham, she standing before its
door. She had not been able to see the Prince enter that noted house
for single men, because of the detectives’ presence, and had been
wondering; till now she saw him far off, coming.

As for the Russian, accustomed to be shadowed, he had the
circumspection of Argus—eyes in the back of his head!—and knew that he
was being tracked by the marine. Why? “What’s _his_ game?” he asked
himself in some language. Had not he, Alexis, been mouthy to blab about
the “striking blind”? His heart smote him.

Now, that big body could be pretty nimble; so with a quick twist he
doubled back, landed a sudden blow, envenomed and heavy as a club, upon
the Prince’s breast, and was gone with all his long legs northward.

Seeing which thing, the two detectives flew, shrilling whistles, Alexis
flew, and fleeter than the three flew the Prince’s twinkling feet,
wrestling with space. But he had been knocked spinning, so that the
Russian had had quite a longish start, and while the Prince was still
two hundred yards from him, and the detectives perhaps four hundred,
the Japanese, who had seen everything, rushed a little way toward the
Russian, as he approached, to hiss at him: “Jump into my motor, and
you’ll escape.”

Alexis, ever shy of traps and “the rich,” did not stop; but he had
instantly realised that she was non-English, saw that the Prince was
winning upon him, so in an impulse, when he had run some steps past the
car, resolving to risk it, he doubled back, darted into the car; Oyone
was in before him; and before ever its number could be noted, the motor
was shooting away, booming music of the jews’-harp.

It spurted round the first corner, so by the time the two detectives
could get into their taxicab and give chase, the car was nowhere; and
a third detective who had come from the further end of Dorset Street,
groaned to himself: “God! I’ve lost track of Alexis the Sexton, and
to-morrow is the ceremony at St Paul’s.”

Meantime, the Russian and the Japanese within the motor-car stared at
each other, mutually startled and alarmed to find themselves there face
to face: for in moments of rush and pressure something that is not
exactly we acts instead of us, and _her_ invitation had been as much
an impulse as _his_ acceptance—in her sub-consciousness no doubt being
a sense that he could give her information as to the Prince, and that
since he was the Prince’s enemy, he must be her friend.

So there was embarrassment, until the Russian bowed to say: “Well, I am
much obliged!—supposing that your intention is friendly.”

“What else can it be?” asked that light hard voice, without
inflections, as if a bird should speak.

“What, madam, may I demand, was your motiff?”

“I saw you pursued—I am good-hearted—those two behind were detectives!”

“Ah,” he thought at once, “she’s no _ingénue_—knows things—some game in
hand.”

“Why,” Oyone asked, “did you—strike him?”

“May I demand, madam, what is your motiff for demanding it?”

“Curiosity. You are very cautious! What are you?”

“Well, you demand that of a man? _What he is?_ What answer expect you a
man could make to such a demand?”

Her eyes dwelt on him, she saying to herself: “Accustomed to skulking—a
life under the eye of the police.” She said aloud: “There is no
need—since I do not care. I should say you are a Russian——”

He started! “I may be! And you, madam?”

“My nation? I am Irish.”

“I doubt it,” meditated Alexis: “more likely Magyar or Slovene.”

“And you are also very likely an Anarchist,” said Oyone.

Violently started Alexis off his seat! and with grinding teeth, glaring
at her with his great eyes that ever had the exaggerated expressiveness
of eyes in pantomime or the cinematograph, he hissed at her: “I _am_ an
Anarchist! I am p-r-r-oud of it!”

“Well, you need not eat me”—her eyes dwelling, dwelling, on him, while
a whole web suddenly wove itself in her subtle Oriental brain, that
doomed this man to death on the next day, unless he did her bidding.
She added: “I am an Anarchist, too.”

“You? a rich?”

“In principle, that is.”

“Word of honour, madam?”

“Since I was a child.”

Out popped the Russian’s confraternal paw, on which the girl deposited
her glove with a chuckle in her shoulder.

“Besides,” she said, “you are a handsome fellow, and I not such an ugly
girl that you should wish to gobble me up.”

“That is even the reason!” he gallantly answered, ogling now, asking
himself: “_Is_ she an _ingénue_? and I in luck’s way?”

The car was passing beneath the shadow of Holborn Viaduct, whence it
drove north to Regent’s Park, and there round and round the Outer
Circle, deserted now, under a moon that illumined thick mist.

“But the man you struck, why did he follow you?” the girl asked.

“Believe me, I know nothing of his motiff,” Alexis answered.

“Nor his name?”

“‘Jack’ one has called him in the doss-house.”

“Why _does_ he go there?” she wondered; and aloud: “Jack is not his
name. I am going to tell you his name, just to see you start up.”

“She is no _ingénue_!” Alexis reflected afresh—“has special knowledge,
special motiffs!”

“That man was—no, why should I tell?—yes, I will—_the Prince of Wales_.
Ha! ha! You needn’t——”

His great eyes glared like eyes goggled in concave mirrors! Then
suddenly: “It is the truth—I was stoo_peed_ not to see it!” And now, to
her astonishment, he caught off his cap to mutter with bent head: “Now,
God bless him!”

“Well!” she went on in her light way—“an Anarchist.”

“But yes! For what can his motiff be but to see himself the condition
of the people whom he must some time ‘govern’—as they say. I say again,
God bless the man!”

“He is really an honest fool whom they hunt as a criminal,” the
Japanese thought; adding aloud: “But principles: principles are no
respecter of persons.”

“It is true,” said he.

“When he goes to this doss-house, how long does he stay?” she asked.

“He _sleeps_ there! And you know not what that signifies, I think!
Those vermin who hate an open window, fester fifteen, twenty—I call it
herolike! grandiose! No, I regret at the actual moment to have struck
this man.”

“But principles,” said she.

“It is true,” said he: “you are a true Anarchist, or else,” he added to
himself, “a Government spy.”

“You could stab him there in his sleep; no one would know,” she said
low; but a grumble answered her: “One does not do that, madam”; and she
then thought: “_I_ could disguise myself as a man, and sleep there,
if necessary.” She said aloud: “But the Royal Family pass through the
Strand to St Paul’s to-morrow to ‘_return thanks_’ for the victory: are
you going to let such a chance pass?”

On which he afresh had the thought: “She _is_ very likely a spy set to
pump me.” “Forgive me, madam,” he said to her, “but you speak with the
inexperience of a child. It could not be done. In the first place, have
I not struck the Prince of Wales? Is it not probable that I shall be
arrested to-night the moment I return to my lodgings? And, quite apart
from that, will not every step of mine be known till the ceremony of
to-morrow is over?”

“Then, do not return: sleep in my house: no one will know.”

The Russian, looking down upon her upturned smile, suddenly cried
out: “Most charmed! The thing itself that suits me! But as for the
procession to-morrow—no, not for me: it could scarce be done; and I
have a far vaster work to make for the world.”

Oyone bent to smell the roses at her breast, meditating; then said:
“You know best. But I am glad I met you—we think so exactly the same
things! The house is over there in those trees; I will give you some
supper, and treat you well; and to-morrow you may come with me to see
the procession.”

“Charmed!” cried Alexis the Sexton, “if only I may leave my revolver at
your dwelling: for I must not be in the crowd armed.”

“Of course,” said she.

“Well, you are very amiable!” he cried, with a new start: “I seem to be
in luck’s way! It is an adventure!”

“I am like that,” she said lightly. “I have a good heart while I can,
and when I cannot I can be very cruel.” She cried in Chinese: “Drive
home!”

And so it was that the next morning there was consternation all in the
police-force at the question which had arisen: “_Where is Alexis the
Sexton?_”—a poignant question on any day of a royal procession, but on
this day its anxiety was wildly heightened by the Prince’s statement
that this man probably had in his possession that dreadful Redlike Ray,
for which the police had been seeking for weeks.

Hence every ten minutes telephone messages were passing between
Scotland Yard, the City, and the Embankment; and at ten o’clock the
postponement of the ceremony was suggested, every den in London having
then been ransacked, the Russian’s lodgings, all his haunts, his
associates’ haunts—no trace of him or of the ray.

But postponement was now found to be too difficult, so the _route_ was
more than usually betrooped; and all were warned to keep quick and
seeing peepers.

Yet at eleven in the forenoon Alexis was there in the Strand crowd, big
and brown, but as undistinguished as one grain amid the myriads of the
seashore.

He had come up Essex Street from the Embankment with the Japanese, and
just there, at the corner, they stood, a little east of St Clement
Danes, she pressed against the door-rail of _The Freeman’s Journal_,
a little behind, and left of him. Pale, weak in the knees she stood
there, in her muff (unknown to him) his revolver.

When some closed wagonettes passed, taking members of the Palace Staff
to St Paul’s, she almost jumped upon the Russian’s back, to see; and
now she was seen: for a little away on one of the rows of seats reared
round St Clement Danes sat Eulalia, who had to leave England at two
o’clock, so had got a ticket for a last glimpse of her lad; and her
eyes, straying down upon the crowd opposite, chanced to rest upon the
Japanese face.

She started, asking herself: “Is that she?”—peeped and peered—but it
was hard to tell definitely; and just then the ocean’s roar arose,
approached, the procession coming.

The tongues of London bells were telling that it was a day of gladness,
and flags, arches, a profusion of festoons, strewed the route with hues.

Yonder by the Griffin the Lord Mayor in scarlet and ermine waited with
his Pearl Sword to present to the King, surrounded with Councilmen in
their mazarine gowns, Aldermen in scarlet, Sword-Bearer, Mace-Bearer,
Marshal; a band started the National Anthem; at word-of-command the
soldiers in their great-coats sprang to attention, presented.

Eulalia could not see westward, but knew pretty well the position
of the Prince from the quality of the wave of roaring that rose and
rolled as he rolled—something of suddenness in it, a yell that leapt,
he in the second carriage, separated from King and Queen by a body
of aides-de-camp, equerries, Silver Stick, adjutants, and the second
division of escort: and he was said to look sullen or dull.

Nor did the Queen look herself to those who knew—a boding in her that
day. There behind four bays she sat with King’s sister and King, who
lifted hand to a hat of plumes that drooped, Red Indian in suggestion,
and in her rear a train of state-postilion landaus—some Ministers,
Agents-general, Mistress of the Robes, Lord Chamberlain to the Queen;
and when the first division of escort had dashed past St Clement, it
halted beyond the Griffin; and now the King is there, and the Prince in
sight behind the King’s Riders and escort; and now all the procession
has halted, because of the Lord Mayor and his Civic Sword.

The instant it halted, while each eye was tied to the gaud, through the
storm of cheering a gun-shot was, as it were, felt, rather than heard;
and it was instantly followed by another.

The first passed through the Prince of Wales’ neck, the second through
the heart of Alexis the Sexton.

The Japanese had, so to say, _clambered_ up the Russian’s back, to
shoot: and there is this to be said to her credit, that she had no
practice in handling fire-arms, that she was excessively agitated, that
she aimed within one tick, and that the Prince’s carriage on that side
was protected by a squadron commander: so that virtue was in her. And
in the very act of dropping from the Anarchist’s back the cat put a
bullet into him, and dropped his revolver at his feet.

Some of the people near declared afterwards that they never heard any
shot at all!

But they felt, they saw, they screamed; and fiercelier than they stood
Eulalia screaming.

The Prince, quite near under her feet, was aware of that poignant
voice, as he failed and fainted.




                               CHAPTER XIV

                            THE SIX MILLIONS


But the wound proved “not dangerous,” though “grave,” and though
accompanied in its “history” by some delirium; and meantime the most
detested of men was the dead Alexis, since it never entered any head to
question that it was he who had shot, and then shot himself—though a
divisional surgeon took his oath that the course of that bullet was the
oddest which he had ever beheld in any suicide.

“But why a bullet, and not the Redlike Ray?” the Prince wondered on
that morning four weeks later when he began to get well again: “and
where is the ray now? And Chinnery—where’s _he_? And the Six Millions?
There’s a something somewhere at work....”

From these musings he turned to a heap of newspapers by his bed; and
all that forenoon was reading, reading, feasting his interest....

For during those weeks of his weakness the wheeling of the top had
come to the humming mood, and the humdrum old world was whirling in
a vertigo of the giddiest delirium toward the gulf’s rim. He saw
headlines like “All the World at War, save China,” and even as he
wondered of what vertiginous vintage the children of men had drunk, he
himself was drunken with it.

Austria, it appeared, was no longer in the Triple Alliance! Austria
had broken loose from it in order to fly at the throat of Russia; and
_already_ Russian troops of the Reserve Category were being raised, and
_levées en masse_ of her _voiskos_.

Whereat let Roumania, suspecting that Russia is aiming at nothing but
_her_ destruction, rush thundering round her frontiers; and quick now
let Servia, with her back on Knuzevatz, mass two _corps d’armée_ upon
Nisch and Vranja, to spring upon her Bulgarian victors and allies of
old, and have a bitter draught of sour milk and the bacillus Bulgaricus.

It was as when one planet of a system slips on her course, and two
collide, why, then, the whole thing’s upset, and they all decide to
collide for luck, and it is a case of baking days then, yes, and
of break-neck days, Monday fleeing from the wrath to come through
the middle of Sunday, vast arcs of moons that loom from Arctic to
Antarctic, with scarlet laughter of all the gods and dogs of war.

For the European clock had struck the hour, and it was now or never
for placing on the stage a thousand schemes of greed, aggression, and
revenge.

Therefore let Sweden quickly throw two infantry divisions into
Björneborg, with Helsingfors for their _objectif_, to drag her
Finns from that rigorous grip of Russia, and Sweden is an ally of
England—Sweden and Norway, Denmark and America, Spain, Portugal.

Denmark, the long-suffering, long docked and hedged-in, saw the day of
vengeance dawn, and at the alarm of the first mortar, had darted to
arms, to start for Flensburg; while American squadrons, in a drama of
warfare in the Hwang Hai off Chefoo, had fought in French and English
lines of battle: a drama in which 236,000 had sunk 103,000 tons of
Russo-German metal, with only eight ships remaining to the victors:
upon which injured ships a Japanese squadron had fallen the same
afternoon, and sunk or captured them.

On that same day bombarding battleships of Japan were barking from afar
at San Francisco; and a Japanese squadron was sighted on the horizon by
the Cockatoo Island coastguard (Sydney).

All yonder, too, in Texas, is America crackling, hordes of goat-footed
Mexicans in coloured rags attacking “the Gringoes” in guerilla
brigade-sections, sniping from behind hedge and ditch, peeping along
their Lee Metfords’ sights with a piercing eye. And not far from that
crackling is all the area of Ecuador crackling, ravaged by troops of
Peruvian sharp-shooters.

Everywhere the same frenzy of revelry. _Mobilmachung!_ The agitated
hand snatches the rifle, the wild eye dashes for the ranks. Only where
Li Ku Yu sits sipping buttermilk-tea among lotuses and marvels of
marble serene peace breathes on the breezes.

He makes no sign; he waits; he brazenly smiles; he has a clear clean
block of brain without one hair on it, a rock cut out without hands: he
sits and stimulates it with tea.

And he revels in the revel and frenzy. Nothing escapes his eye, his
meditation. Looking over the sea he can see that America has out
hosts of converted merchant-cruisers furnished with box-batteries
of four and six inchers, fighting, to the astonishment of men, with
battleships—fighting, often conquering. A White Star liner of the San
Francisco-Nagasaki trade-route, meeting two large Japanese cruisers
in Mid-Pacific sank both before she sank; and the _Lusitania_, in
an affray with a troop of sea-keeping sloops and torpedo gunboats,
patrolling the Atlantic for tit-bits, sank half before they fled, and
then kept afloat until within sight of Ireland.

Seeing which, Britain had begun late in the day to accumulate stores of
fittings and armaments at home ports and naval stations for such ships;
some of their crews were complemented from Colonial Naval Reserves; and
they were spurting mirthfully over the oceans, having the highest and
liveliest time.

Thanks in great part to them, our country had not yet begun to starve.

Rich still on paper, her consols still taken up, St Swithin’s Lane and
Wall Street her allies, half the owners of securities all over the
globe hoping for her triumph, she was, nevertheless, in the grip of
want, and already saw a skeleton grin at her from the air.

Protective tariffs in other countries had vanished like chaff two weeks
after the going off of the first gun, so that England’s free trade
no longer made her a magnet for imports; and since supplies were
dodging and fighting their way precariously from Canada, the Government
granaries ran every day lower.

A Russian _ukase_ had prohibited the exportation of wheat—a ridiculous
thing, since no creature in Russia would now have dreamed of exporting
wheat. That immense breadth of empire was already doddering horridly to
its drop.

Hardly a week after the _Mauretania_ battle, Austria, with a heart
fond for Salonica, had flung across the Save a body of Uhlans, who had
coolly occupied Belgrade; and the next morning sections of brigades
bivouacking in the squares, and Austrian officers gossiping on the
boulevards, had met the gaze of the amazed Belgradians.

Whereat the Great White Czar waxed whiter, and Young Turkey grew
tough to the teeth of her eaters, massing regulars and redifs,
green-bannered, class on class, calling “gather, gather, all ye birds
of ravin” to her Berbers, Sanoussis. For see Macedonia broken in a roar
of flame, the Vali of Saloniki assassinated on his doorstep, whereupon
the Great Archimandrite, His Holiness the Patriarch of Jerusalem, was
mutilated in a room of his palace, and that same evening telegraphic
communication was broken between Odessa and Constantinople, and the
Suez Canal blown up.

And now an anarchy of thunder and waltz of all the vortices in the
Near East, thirty thousand Athenians surging across the Thessalian
frontier, Crete bursting into burning with bands of bandits girt with
the dirk and carbine of rapine marauding from end to end, upon all
which the Turkish _Turgut Reis_ is hurling shell-fire, quenching hell
with hell; and at the same time a mob of Turkish gunboats is going
northward through the Bosphorus to watch the (Russian) Black Sea
Squadron (convoying two corps from Odessa), quietly occupy Bulgarian
Bourgas—directly connected by rail with Stamboul.

And still faster spins the dance, like the sand-forms of the sand-storm
that vastly, dartly waltz into conflict. The next day Austria declared
against Russia a war which had begun before the declaration; and on
the third day after the occupation of Bourgas the eastern limb of the
British Mediterranean Fleet steamed through the Bosphorus to seek the
Black Sea Fleet, and bombard Sevastopol.

Russia had enough to do: at the fourth week-end, if she looked south,
south-west, north, west, east, or inward at her own bankruptcy,
she everywhere saw handwriting on her walls. Sweden at Helsingfors
was looking toward Cronstadt; twelve Swedish armoured ships at the
Neva-mouth. The Black Sea littoral was British. The Army of India,
with the Teheran railway in its hands, had scattered at Merv the Army
of Turkestan, and after a four days’ carnival of carnage at Novo
Tcherkask, had marched by road to Kharkov, to turn its face toward the
Kremlin.

Another mixed army of Turks and English had thoroughly crushed the
Russian corps that had advanced from Kars to invest Erzeroun.

Russia’s 4th with her 8th to her 12th Southern Corps had, indeed,
inflicted annihilation upon the Austrian army massed on the Dneister
in Eastern Galicia; but Austria’s second army on the San, its back on
Przemsyl (the bulwark of Middle Galicia), and her third based on Cracow
(the key of Western Galicia), had followed the Moltke maxim of marching
apart and fighting together, and after a tug-of-war only surpassed for
carnage by that drama of gore transacting itself over Northern France,
had made Poland Austrian, and crossed the sources of the Niemen.

Add to this that Vladivostock was even now cracking and nodding under
rollicking cataracts of Japanese thunder; and thundering multitudes of
puny Japanese troops, amusing themselves with butchery, were intruding
and intruding through Manchuria, reeling up as on a reel the Siberian
railway.

And France, _la belle_, was unwell of her _règles_, and blanched; and
Max had a malady and chancre from intercourse with her.

In Eastern Germany the Army of the Vistula was at grips with the
gallantry and zeal of the Swedish levies, who with astonishing dash
had advanced far through the great military _dépôts_ of the north-east,
and after capturing the Thorn-Posen railway, had drawn a ring of
earthworks and Schumann gun-turrets round Posen, in the teeth of the
teeming legions of that Eastern region—Royal Saxon Corps, draughts from
Thorn, that Metz of the East, from Königsberg—who in vain had flung
themselves in wave on wave upon these unexpected fairheads.

And northward, with a display of hardly less audacity and energy,
Denmark was campaigning in Schleswig-Holstein, and had sat down before
Kiel; while south-westward on the French frontier the two great
branches of the Teutonic race had dashed together shockingly: so that
eighteen of the twenty German corps were already in the field, her
burghers and shopkeepers now girding on the bandolier, and now was the
winter of her Bourse’s discontent.

As for France, the Light of the world was like a candle flickering in a
draught.

See Italy southward redeeming now her “unredeemed” territories, her
Haute Savoy, Alpes Hautes, for now is the day, and Frenchmen and
vermicelli never yet went well together.

Therefore what is left of the Italian navy (it had been smashed, and
had smashed, in a battle off Cape Spartivento) shall bombard three days
the Riviera batteries, while swarms of Bersaglieri, Alpini, Carabinieri
shall clamber like chamois among the Alp passes under a shadow of
aeroplane-wings, their cannons carried on active-footed mules, pushing
their advance against troops of dragoons and mountain-chasseurs,
swaggering black rascals of Spahis, Zouaves, garbed in gaudy cloths;
and in the European hotchpotch some cynic camels shall sulk and snarl,
and die with a repining eye.

And when the Italian 2nd, 4th and 6th have effected a landing near
Nice, has broken bloodily through the French 7th, 14th and 15th, have
crossed the Isère, then Paris knows panic and _émeute_.

And under the double tonnage of Russia and Germany France must already
have suffocated, but for the rescuing strength of Britain.

Britain, with a slow but increasing heat, was becoming a recruiting
_dépôt_, her Lancashire blackamoors, her Cockney bits of boys, her
Scottish bodies, her Irish devils ever steadier, keener, streaming to
see to it—nimbly! soldiers in a week, warriors in a fortnight, veterans
in a month: for, as things now were, if France went down, Britain, too,
foundered like a ship in the sea: and British men said “not yet.”

There, therefore, all along that north-eastern frontier of France
backed by the charming land of Champagne, the fire was hell-fire, and
the rigour of the game pretty grim—the men of England coming, pressing,
checked, beaten back, defeated, hampered, badgered, butchered, fretted,
pestered, but still coming, pressing, getting every day their dreadful
pecker up, struggling like tunnel-diggers grinning at the ruggedness of
granite, winning an inch, and still an inch, and an inch, until that
momentous December midnight when the men of Mars must have marked the
carmine of the fall of Metz, and have heard some murmur of that turmoil
on earth.

Of it Eulalia wrote to her mother: “I should not care to live through
such a thing again, though not for anything should I like to have lived
without having once lived through it.”

And again nine days later: “I am not well, and even if I be everything
that’s bad, daddy might let you write to say if you are alive, and wish
one a happy Christmas. Perhaps some day twenty years hence you may hear
more than whatever it is you have heard, and may think then of me more
forgivingly.

“It is hard to say quite what is wrong, but I am pretty sickified.
Yesterday Surgeon-Major Burke peeped under my eyelids, felt my pulse,
and said: ‘It is the heart’—wonderful discovery! Doctors amuse me.

“But some of the nursing-staff are beginning to look rather askance at
me, I fancy, for the two company-waggons are pretty full of sick, one
of the junior dressers died of typhoid three days ago, and one, of
course, ought to be ‘all there.’ But I forget things, I am very remiss
really—I can no more help it than be the bedmate of a Long Tom; all
I want to do now is to lie alone in woods, and give myself up, and I
dream such things, that I want to be always asleep. Of course, I make a
good old struggle.

“Early on the morning of the 21st I started out from our sycamore-tree
to go into Nürnfeld—I told you, did I, that the 2nd and 3rd companies
have been billeted on Nürnfeld village after a good deal of hardships
and marching to come up with our brigade? Well, our junior surgeon had
got a permit from Captain Hardinge for one of the six stretcher-bearers
of the 2nd to take the place of Davis, the dresser, who is dead, so I
was going to get the man, when, just as I had passed the baggage-park
sentries, something very strange came over me. There lay the village
before me, the lantern still burning before the senior officer’s
cottage-door, a few Tommies yawning in the dawn at doorways where they
stood sentry over their squads: but I seemed to see it in a dream
somehow. After passing the outlying sentry, I walked on to a cottage
which they call the alarm-quarter, where an inlying picket of six have
to keep awake all night, and I remember seeing the six fellows playing
cards in a room, with their belts loose, round a lantern on a box; but
there I seem to have stopped to lean on the window, and—they _say_ that
I fainted, though I don’t think that I fainted.

“Anyway, I was there so long, that Sister Darling had to come to look
for me, found me sitting in the alarm-quarter, and then—she is such an
angel, always—would not let me go back to the field-hospital, but said
I must wander about all day, and take a good rest.

“Well, I did; and it was a day of destiny to me: for at four in the
afternoon the most marvellous thing that you ever could fancy happened
to me.

“I took something to eat in my knapsack, and in passing beyond the
canteen met a Lieutenant Pierce, who told me that there was a rumour
that fighting was probable that day between our outpost garrison and
an advanced detail of the enemy. Our brigade, you must understand,
is said to be now diamond-shaped, the 2nd and 3rd forming the south
corner of the diamond, we being in the far north wing of our army,
which is now facing the enemy on a front of some seventy-five miles, by
report; and everyone is saying that the two hosts are getting well into
touch, so you can look out for more things happening before you lose
your next tooth. Oh, it is a big business this. On the night of the
12th, the fourth night before the fall of Metz, my company was camped
on an incline, and before I went to sleep I could see the fires of a
whole division in the snows at my feet reaching far into the darkness,
battalion after battalion, with their batteries and their sentries in
great-coats, seeming a scene in some great dream. And this mass of man,
animal, cannon and baggage was but the advance-guard of a far vaster
war-host which occupied the North; and hidden away in the dark was the
still vaster war-host of the enemy.

“Well, after hearing that that advanced corner of our diamond might be
fighting, I thought that I had had enough of bow-wow, and would keep
clear of it. But I must have soon forgotten where I was going, and, as
a matter of fact, put my little shoe into the thick of it, for near two
o’clock, when I must have walked seven or eight miles, I twice heard
band-music going, then a bugle somewhere calling form-company-columns,
and presently I saw a train of artillery-horses straining uphill to my
left, for the country just here is very broken.

“After this I came to a village as big as Holmend, in which I saw not
one living thing but a dog that skedaddled on seeing me. There were
bits of shell about, the houses in ruin, and in front of a school a
little outside the village were two mountain gun-carriages with their
guns and artillery waggons wrecked, and a gunner stretched on the
ground under one of the waggons, with his dragoon-sword and revolvers
still at his belt, poor boy. You wouldn’t think how lonely and
consoling it was there, and I sat a long time on one of the scorched
cottage-steps. The afternoon was quite warm, though there are patches
of snow over the hillsides.

“Then a sound of big guns roused me, and, as it always does, drew me,
for it’s in the creature’s breed, no doubt. So I set out eastward down
some steep fields, and half-way down could see through trees a company
of Greys in column of squads stepping with their swinging kilts, the
gallant laddies, their marker galivanting in advance with the flag like
a man gone dancing and dotty with arrogance, a couple of field-guns
and an _échelon_ of baggage coming in their rear, and in front their
screaming bagpipes that craze men’s brains with bravery. Really, men
are dear creatures, the good-hearted, simple, strong dears. I vow I’d
rather a man than one of those angels that ‘went in to the daughters
of men.’ Perhaps you will say, ‘Yes, that’s why your father has had to
turn you from home.’ Well, perhaps. You must think as you will, mother.
God made us.

“So I went on making my way by fields and paths, the row growing, till
I got in sight of a mountain, beyond the brow of which I saw a haze,
for smokeless powder still makes a haze and a smell when lots of it
are fired by troops in close order; and on the mountain’s slope, near
the top, my fieldglass soon spied a supply-store and headquarters
signalling station, with gun-emplacements, and a dressing-station
lower down, and at the bottom under cover of a crag a group of
ammunition-carts and ambulance-waggons with flags on them.

“Lying down near the top was a line of Inniskillings, forming the
reserve of the firing-line on the farther slope, and two hundred yards
or so below stood the Greys on a road. I was astonished when I got
on the upper ground that the Inniskillings were not touched, for it
looked to me as if small pompom shrapnel was spattering all about the
mountain-top, and the battle was going on with the din of an engine
which roars, groans, whizzes and horridly rattles.

“I wanted to go up to the Inniskillings to see, for that might do me
good to get some lead in me, but a lance-corporal of the Greys shook
his finger furiously at me, so I walked aside till I got to a crag
where I scrambled down with some skirt-dance adventures, for I seem
to be quite strong and active, really, but ‘it’s the heart’; and I got
in the end to a mounting meadow, like the Tump at home, a quarter of
a mile or so to the left front of the mountain, and in it I found a
waterworks reservoir in a mound, and on the reservoir two German girls
lying quite silent with their chins on their fists.

“We were not very safe there, some of the enemy’s shells dropping
pretty near at the bottom of our meadow, but, then, we could see,
though the smoke blown from four cottages and a wood burning on the
slope bothered one’s vision.

“Our men were in four shelter-pits with loopholes, or rather in three,
for I could spy that one was full of nothing but forage-caps stuck on
sticks to draw the enemy’s fire; and there was a covered retreat in the
rear of them out of which I saw three wounded carried up.

“At the moment when I lay down the enemy were pretty near the mountain:
I could spy them like mice in a line darting out of one bit of cover
into another bit, like one in a bitter wind winning one’s way, their
artillery from somewhere miles away still pounding our mountain with
mortar and pompom, having the range exactly apparently, and ours
mouthing back across heaven from the mountain-top.

“Then I could see the enemy’s firing-line running from behind three
houses, then jumping a stone hedge, and their cheer for the charge
reached me faintly; the next minute they were on the hill-slope; and I
pitied them, they looked so little running up there in comparison with
the mountain and with the amount of sound around them that they were
foundering in, for they had hardly advanced ten yards when they broke
like thread before our thundering trenches, upon which our firing line
leapt the trenches to chase them, the reserve Inniskillings ran down to
help, and the signalling-station signalled the Greys, who ran up and
then down to pelt pell-mell into the trenches.

“I think, though, that the enemy’s ranks soon rallied, though I could
hardly tell what was happening for the hazes of smoke that smudged
the valley in patches; moreover, a country house that had broken into
smouldering rolled most of it in smoke.

“In the midst of it a sound made me glance to my left—cavalry!

“The road that runs north and south along the bottom of the mountain
winds eastward at the north end of the meadow where the reservoir is;
and on that east part of it I saw a squadron in column of sixes ride
out from behind a rise on tall white horses. At the same time I was
startled by the two German girls, who sprang wildly up, clapping their
hands and laughing, crying out “Cossacks! Cossacks!”—and no doubt they
were Cossacks, but they were certainly captained by a German, for I
soon heard his frantic howling—they howl ‘_Charge! Double! Hurrah!_’
at a charge—or they may have been a mixed body. Anyway, on they came
straight toward me with their busbies, dark-green knickerbockers and
top-boots, from slow to fast, the white horses fretting wildly neck to
neck, with their wild captain waving his sabre some yards in front of
all, calling them, while quicker and quicker the hundreds of their legs
drummed the ground with a steady growth of passion from a hand-gallop
to a field-gallop and from a field-gallop to an avalanche. It was
frightful, but nice.

“Meantime, they were being knocked over, man and animal, by the Greys,
and trampled, though I don’t think the Greys could see them yet for the
trees: so no wonder they made haste.

“Their aim was to take the mountain while our main body was engaged
away to the east with theirs, and I thought they were going to gallop
and sabre our position; but when they got under the north end of my
meadow, where they were in dead ground from the mountain, two-thirds of
them sprang off, without stopping, every first and third man tossing
their reins to every second man, as I could see by standing up and
peering; and in a moment these two-thirds were jumping the stone hedge
on the farther side of the road, leaving three dead there at the
corner, and I lost sight of them for a minute, till I saw them again
jumping the stone hedge, well spread out now, opposite the mountain:
and they charged.

“There seemed to me to be precious little cover for them on the slope,
for our men must have burnt off much of the bush before occupying it,
so these poor cavalrymen got it hot enough on those lower slopes from
the grim Greys, the row rolling without an instant’s interval for
minutes together, like ten million motor-bicycles going bang-bang,
strong stuff. I saw lots of them catch at imaginary balls, as they
dodged up from point to point; but they did not break; on they
struggled; and suddenly it struck me that the Greys’ fire was growing
slack, and then I was sure, and then it stopped, and my heart sank.
Why they had given in so soon I could not understand, and could have
cried. The two German girls were standing, grinning, on the very brink
of the reservoir, white as milk with excitement, and in another minute
they were screaming, clapping, ‘Victory! The Cossacks! Hurrah!’ Really,
Germans have very offensive manners, and nobody can possibly be more
excitable.

“Well, what followed I would not see the end of, it was too painful.
The Cossacks, or whatever they were, leapt clamouring upon our
trenches, and even as they leapt, poor dears, they were perishing
like sheep. I never saw such a thing—I would not see it. When they
leapt upon the trenches it was to find them empty, since the Greys had
retired secretly by covered retreats to other trenches hidden in some
fold of the hillside, and from that second position, even as the hot
Cossacks cheered in victory, came the withering shock of the Greys’
volley at horridly close quarters. Think of it, their tragic fix, the
mantrap, the massacre. The Cossacks skedaddled like a flock of cats
scattering from dogs, those Greys raining a purgatory of curses after
them, and I scattered also, getting over a gate into the road where a
third of the Cossacks were, holding the others’ horses, and I walked
along it some way, until I came to a wood, where I lay down....

“But no, I am not going to tell even you—not yet, anyway—what befell
me there. I will send you this lot by our post to-night. It is already
a long lot, and has taken me three afternoons, for I like, I suppose,
to talk of it all to you. You might write once: you could, secretly, if
you tried. Remember that I am sick, and even if I am a sinner, though I
do not admit that I am particularly, suffering atones for things. I’ll
think of you all on Christmas Day, for I don’t bear Alice any malice,
tell her, if you will of me, and will write, for I love you more than
any of you know. And will you send any news, and if you see any bits
about the Prince of Wales, will you send, as Sister Darling is madly in
love with him, poor girl, and I, too, I’m afraid. I wonder if any more
girls have gone sillified for him, the sillies?

    “‘For her skipper was Ted,
      And Teddy’s a bear....’

so don’t forget this, and think kindly of your own, and good-bye, God
bless you.

                                                        “+Eulalia.+”

As to “what befell” her in that wood where she “lay down,” it is soon
told.

In the wood she spied a church ruin, which was like a solitude within a
solitude, and, in love with solitude, she went into it, and lay within
a mass of bramble and bracken at its west end, which was a solitude
within a solitude within a solitude.

Indeed, her mind and body were now in a sicklier way than her letter
quite exhibits, so sick now, so afflicted and down with love, that only
a don of Cupid College could have shrewdly construed and doctored her.
It was the air-disease, nameless! Her bosom seemed to yearn for the
moon to nurse, and if this had been given her, she would have hungered
for the sun to hug. As she lay there within the bush, her lids shut,
her hands under her head, crushing her four-penny loaf of gold-hair,
there were moments when the Prince’s face appeared quite visibly to
her, like a vision just over her nose, staring eye to eye at her stare;
and she smiled then at peace, and then it was gone, and her body
tossed for ease, all sighs and pining, pallor and languishment.

Though she had been so very nigh to his life—and few men are fairies to
their wives—he was now quite a Fairy Prince in her brain, the shout of
the world about him perhaps girding him in purple glamours for her; and
since their married intimacy seemed not less than a hundred centuries
ago, she was as fresh and flushed with love as if she had never had
him: for it was necessary to her to look at the ring and reread his
letters, in order to realise that her once nearness to him was not
a dream. So with jealous shoots of pain she pictured him living and
moving among Mohammedan heavens set immensely above her, forgetting her
and her century-old caresses; and stodgy old Buckingham Palace, guarded
by stodgy bobbies, became to her fantasy an achingly enchanted fabric
of romance.

And the thought that it was she herself who had cast it all from her
with her own hand caused her to moan. But the notion of breaking down
in her undertaking does not seem ever now to have entered her head
even, stronger than all tugs and gusts in the gale of her nature being
self-respect; and still her word was, “if I’m a Princess, I’ll be
Princess-like.”

She was no longer conscious of the firing, which continued some twenty
minutes more, nor of its stoppage; what shocked her into consciousness
was a sense that _someone else_ was there in the ruins: she raised her
head; saw “Mademoiselle Oyone”; and in the very thick of her wonder
sucked in her breath, with “How truly lovely she is!”

There stood Oyone in the nave, at the middle, with that lissom hint of
her hips and waist, dressed as ever in reds and splendours, a bag in
her hand, a swath of veil across her forehead, and she was moving her
eyes warily round in such a way, that at once Eulalia was aware that
her visit here was secret.

But before ever Eulalia could reveal herself, Oyone was moving swiftly
into the chancel-part, and Eulalia was so astonished to see her move
her eyes slowly round once more, and then rapidly lift a slab by a
ring, and vanish down a hole, that she had sat hushed.

Now, however, she thought that she hardly ought to watch, so she
gingerly got up to go slipping on tiptoe away; but chanced to step on
some loose stones which rolled; stumbled: and Oyone heard it.

Oyone spurted like a bird to peer at the brink, but a little late to
see Eulalia, who had that instant slipped out. She thought, though,
that she could catch sounds out in the coppice, and made haste to
follow, prepared to slay.

She had already in her bag what she had come for, a bar of gold: the
fact being that the old woman, A-lu-te, was then dying, in consequence
of which there had been some difficulty as to the signature on cheques,
so the Chinese household was in straits for ready money, and Oyone had
come and stolen a bar of Li Ku Yu’s hoard, to break up.

And the question was: _had she been seen_?

She had more sense of ownership in this hoard than labourers in
their honest wage; she had more pride in it than scientists in their
conquests; and the mere thought that any god, or man, or fiend, should
ever dare to ferret it out and drag it from her grasp roused in her
that same gasping, arrogant rancour with which aristocracies resent
any attempt to wrest from their maw the rents of their atrocity and
dishonour. “Have I not _been seen_?” she asked Heaven; and _soft,
soft_, she dropped back the slab, and went peering through the forest,
but she was now well weighted with the bar in the bag, and before she
came to a sight of Eulalia, Eulalia was out on the road.

And now Oyone was left uncertain; but the mere suspicion that she
_might have been seen_ inflamed her to a hissing hate, and was quite
sufficient to be fatal to Eulalia. She had both dagger and fire-arm;
and she suddenly ran out to Eulalia, who was now moving westward toward
a main-station which the Germans had just set up at the roadside; and
she called to Eulalia: “What, Miss Bayley!”

“Think of our meeting!” she said, when Eulalia turned, bowed, and met
her: “You are in the army, then? To what part do you belong?”

“The 2nd Somersetshires.”

“And _I_ have been with an old friend at St Pierre-les-Sapins, and now
have lost my way in woods, looking for the station.”

Saying which, she kept her eyes on Eulalia’s face, and when Eulalia
faintly blushed at the lie, this infuriated Oyone. Her next words were:
“I can’t bear to see those men: will you walk a little this way with
me?”—she pointed eastward, for a little westward were two tents with
lanterns and flags at their doors, and operating-tables within, and
before them a throng of ambulance-waggons and stretchers with gashed
men on them, who gave out a sound of lamentation, and within the tents
two surgeons and their helps, as busily working, and as coolly, as
butchers.

Before these witnesses nothing was to be done by Oyone; and by a
blessed inspiration Eulalia replied to her invitation that she had to
go back to her post.

At this refusal Oyone’s eyes lightened with spite.

“But it is droll,” she grossly said, looking Eulalia straight in the
face, “that you, a Prince’s honey, should be here slaving! Or has he
tired of you?—you look a little ill. I hope _I_ am not the cause, for
His Royal Highness is always teasing me lately.”

Up went the other’s chin; and loftily she uttered a word and a letter:
“My h——!” then turned and went on her way westward, with a hotter wound
in her than those wounded.

Oyone, for her part, glanced at her watch, and went eastward, past the
wood of the ruin; but threw herself on a grass bank beyond a winding
of the road, writhing, wringing her hands, thinking: “I think she
did—I’ll see her dead, I must! or I’ll know no peace.... She said the
2nd Somersetshires....”

Meantime, Eulalia had turned back, to see what was under that slab
with the ring: for now rancour was in her, too; and she thought: “I
will.”

So, after passing the scene of stretchers and shrieks westward, she
passed it eastward again, saw no one on the road before her, ran into
the wood, the ruin, raised the flag, and not without some ghostly
tremors, for now it was growing dark, went down the steps.

Down there it was already black, but she struck a match from her
knapsack: and there before her against a broken wall stood a great cube
of gold bars glowing....

The weight of one that she lifted amazed her....

Now she sat on a step, considering it. And suddenly her hands started
up. “_This is the Six Millions...._”

_Yes!_ There was the “_Reichskriegs-schatz_” stamped in the bars—the
Six Millions found—and by her.

She laughed a little sillily, all in Aladdin-land, dazzled. But after a
time she laughed again not sillily, understanding much.

She saw now that she had long been sub-jealous of the half-caste;
and now that pang was over for ever. “_It was she_ who destroyed the
air-boats, she and Chinnery,” Eulalia was soon saying; “and she was
near to where he was shot in the Strand, for I saw her; it is she who
is at the bottom of everything; and it is not love, but hatred that is
between them!” Then she laughed.

But what now to do? She was there in the dark a long time meditating
it. To tell? To keep it dark? It occurred to her that six million
pounds might well buy her the right and title of Princess of Wales.

To whom, though, did this treasure rightfully belong? Not to Germany,
surely: it had been taken in war-time. Not to England: it had been
taken by private enterprise. Not, of course, to Oyone. It belonged to
“Teddy”! and, if to “Teddy,” then, to “Teddy’s” wife: it was _hers_!
And multimillionairesses can buy many things!

She would wait and see what she would do....

Meantime, Oyone had started to come back to the wood under an impulse
of vague disquiet; but then had been pulled the other way by having to
catch her train.




                               CHAPTER XV

                          THE HAUNTED SUBMARINE


In that train she sat alone with that racking question: _Did she see?_

Only an absolute necessity to be in London dragged Oyone from France
that night.

But she would soon be back to that “2nd Somersetshires,” she said to
herself.

If Eulalia had really seen, then, all was up—the hoard gone—the prison
cell—the English scaffold. What hissing luck! Were there gods who
saw, and maliciously managed chances to punish sin? Undoubtedly she
had sinned; she seemed to be becoming rather deep-dyed and rank, a
new creature from the Oyone she used to be. Should she now repent?
and nourish friendly feelings to everyone? and wrench Li Ku Yu by the
roots out of her flesh? and make a new will? Or was it not too late?
There was a sweet thing in sinning, in being quite, quite untrammelled,
in flying and dropping bombs upon humanity; and, as for gods, they
were well when they gave success, but when they interfered with their
hissing luck, one hissed and hated them. What _was_ the girl doing
there?—she, a Prince’s _mignonne_. Had they quarrelled? Yes, evidently:
for her letter handed him at the Piccadilly Fountain had stunned him.
And this was odd: that the girl had tossed up her chin, and said “My
h——!” Could he be her husband—by chance? In that case he might be
caught like a fish.

She resolved to try it, and did not delay: in the hour that she reached
London she wrote to the Prince.

And three hours later she entered a back room, narrow and long, dim,
windowless, with an alcove at one end—on the first floor. There was a
prisoner in it, yet the door was not locked, for the prisoner never had
any impulse to escape; and said she, as if addressing a child: “Look! I
have brought you a bottle to-day, instead of a half, because——”

“My precious Oyone,” breathed Richard Chinnery, sitting in slippers and
dressing-gown over a fire in a tiny grate in the south-east corner of
the room, whose length ran north-and-south, the door being in the west
wall; and he clutched at the bottle with trembling fingers.

“Because,” repeated Oyone, “I want you to be good, as I am going to
move you——”

“Oh, Oyone, not the stairs! not the stairs!” he cried, with fright in
his eyes.

“Yes,” said she, “the stairs. And if you make the least to-do, I
will take the bottle back. It is a shame in you to be such a coward.
And you should be glad, for I am going to put you to live now in the
Garden-house out of this dark den, where you can walk on fine days, and
see the sun and the trees. It is all ready for you. Come.”

“Oh, Oyone!”

“Come”—she took his hand, led him step by step, he silent,
concentrating his noble soul to it, but at the stair-top failed and
shrank, breathing with bated breath: “Oh, no, no, no....”

This irritated her, and pulling his arm round her neck, she hurried
him cruelly down, he as wildly staring as a zebra with a lion riding
its back; till they were down, and now he was eyeing piningly at her,
panting “my precious ... my precious....”

She now led him out into the tangled back-grounds, in which, when they
were near the Garden-house, his eyes lighted up an instant, as he
cried, “_My air-boat!_”—for there under an awning it lay.

“Yes, I brought it,” she said, and his interest died out, as he
disappeared with her into the Garden-house.

To her letter to the Prince, and her removal of Chinnery, add this:
that three streets away was a house To Let, which she knew well, since
some friends of hers had lived there, and in the late afternoon she
went, veiled, to the letting-agents, got the keys to inspect the house,
and before returning the keys jammed the front-door with a wedge of
wood, leaving it so unlocked....

Her letter, marked “Urgent” and “Private,” got through to the Prince
by the hand of a workshop assistant, an engineer named Sturge, at
eight-thirty that evening, the Prince being then in his workshop.

There he sat in his apron, not yet quite himself from his wound, the
envelope hanging unopened in his fingers, at his feet a model of the
Chinnery air-boat, or an attempt at a model, which had just failed to
work.

But he was not thinking of the failure, but of Eulalia, and an upward
glance of her eyes from the pillow at his side—a Divine glance—perfect
God, perfect man—unfathomable sapphire, implying the whole bottomless
world, eternity, infinity, Kashmir, Mars—a thing like treasure hid in a
field, which when a man finds, he sells all, and buys that field.

It was lost: he could not find it. His ambassador sent to her home for
inquiries had not even been heard by her father—had been turned out of
the garden-gate, with a retriever’s teeth at his heels! and she had
so very cleverly covered up her traces from the moment of leaving the
hospital, that his agents still had no suspicion that she was in the
army. He was now thinking of breaking through everything, clamouring
the fact of his marriage aloud, and demanding her from the whole world.
It was Sir Robert Barrington who patted him on the arm, and bade him
wait, be patient—for his mother’s sake.

_She_, the Queen, knew where Eulalia was—and was full of wonderings as
to the girl’s motive for going! Eulalia, not waiting to be banished,
had banished herself—luck! But the reason? The Queen conceived that
the Prince, having turned over a new leaf, may have dismissed her. But
still, the girl must be rich from him: why, then, did such a person,
a paramour, and rich, rush into the hardships of war-nursing? This
baffled Her Majesty.

She kept her eyes incessantly on the Prince’s face in silent inquiry....

He himself had no more knowledge than his mother of Eulalia’s
motive!—unless she had discovered what he was? But he could not think
how....

Anyway, after a month of her loss the face of death commenced to
acquire a smile for him. It was being said that since the fall of
Metz the combined enemy were making tremendous haste to muster the
remainders of their naval strength, with the aim of making such a rip
in Britain’s metal, as to compel her in self-defence to withdraw her
land-forces from France: in the face of which danger the British people
were frankly eager that the Prince should be the British leader in that
foreseen Armageddon of the sea; and he was now looking forward to it
with thoughts and hopes more curious than any knew.

For he was aware that Eulalia was essentially wayward, wilful,
headstrong, prideful under her smile, difficult to be flexed when once
fixed; and the notion of really losing her both infuriated and made him
a cry-cry baby. Four days before this he had almost quarrelled with
Sir Robert Barrington, scenting that the baronet knew more of Eulalia
than he told—and, in fact, Sir Robert _knew_ where she was, for to him
alone Eulalia had told it in a letter, but had sealed his lips; and the
Prince had looked daggers, but then with water in his eyes had begged
his friend’s pardon.

Suddenly now he sighed, and remembered the letter in his hand....

And there she was! found! found!

He, pleased as Punch in each muscle of his meat, like a castaway
suddenly drunken with luxury at a banquet, muttered: “_I_’ll show her
pride; _I_’ll show her things.”

    “Your Royal Highness does not, I hope, take too seriously
    the moods and whims that actuate cats and women,” Oyone
    wrote.... “My poor Eulalia, since her separation from Your
    Royal Highness, has been much with me, and I have been able
    to determine from the first that she is only suffering from
    her sex.... I have worked hard on her, and I think with some
    success, though I am not yet certain.... Anyway, I am venturing
    to lay a trap for her: she is coming to my place to-night,
    and if Your Royal Highness were then to appear on the scene,
    I think the match would be laid to the bomb that will blow
    you both into heaven. I have to be at a house, No. 13 Seymour
    Street, N.W., at 8.45 +p.m.+, and if Your Royal Highness
    desires to join me there at 9, I could then convey Your Royal
    Highness in my car to my place.... I shall be obliged if Your
    Royal Highness will bring this letter to return to me, since
    Eulalia can be resentful....”

The Prince noticed that no address was on the letter; and also, as he
was being dressed, he thought, “Since when has Eulalia become intimate
with Plum Blossom?” But he was not in a state for reflection; was soon
away; and behind him, shadowing him, two detectives.

When he arrived at No. 13 Seymour Street, he noticed that there were
lights in only two rooms, and at once had an impression of dirty and
uncurtained windows, though the lighted windows had curtains—no blinds;
and he did not observe, what the detectives observed, that “Let” was
painted on a window, the “To” scraped off, the “Let” left—for lack of
time probably!

After passing through a garden, he rapped to find the Japanese girl
stooping through a curtsey before him; at the same time his brougham
turned to return—to the detectives’ wonder, who ran to ask the
chauffeur “_Why?_” The answer was “Orders.”

The girl, meantime, was leading towards the back through a long
hall which had that afternoon been furnished, and yet gave a vague
impression of strangeness—lighted by candles, and those two lighted
rooms, if looked into, would have been seen to be empty, but for
candles standing on boxes, and curtains.

“My car is just there by the back garden-gate,” she said, when they
were on a verandah at the back, and she led down some steps to a
shrubbery-path.

“I am very sensible of all your pains,” he then said in a low and
heartfelt way.

“We are not yet out of the bush, Your Royal Highness”—her voice
was very frail and quavery—“Heaven send that she may not take it
resentfully. Has Your Royal Highness brought me my letter?”

“Here it is. Don’t fear—_I_ can handle her, if I once get hold of her.
Do you know, I have wished to see you, to speak with you of our friend,
Chinnery: but the old woman—what was her name?—_Monty!_—did not know
your address. Ah! Richard Chinnery! What became of _him_? Tell me that,
and I will call you a sibyl. That was a high head, and a wise eye.” He
cast his eyes to the stars of a dark sky.

“He may be still alive, I often think,” murmured the girl, as they
passed by a little green gate across a lane into a narrow street, where
her car was waiting; and they were away to the Chinese mansion.

There was something so curiously recluse about the mood of this house,
that its gate was kept constantly locked, and no tradesman, save the
coalman, ever entered its grounds. Oyone herself had to set a bell
babbling to be admitted by an old pigtail bent down double, who eyed
the ground sidelong, with mutterings.

Thence she led her captive along an avenue dark and mossy into a hall
of lanterns, all hues, but subdued as moonlight, mute as the tomb,
where the foot moved without the faintest sound.

“Up here,” she whispered, with a busy secrecy, a sexual fellowship, “I
will leave you, and bring her from my guardian”—and up the stairs they
stepped, along a passage, to the room whence Richard Chinnery had been
removed that day.

“_You wait in there!_”—and, as he went, she locked the door quick,
catching her hand off the key as if it scorched her, and remained
glaring at it, grinning, some instants, then dropped against the
opposite wall, gasping, relaxed, her eyes closed, worn out, dying,
satisfied.

Meantime, the two detectives waited, watching the Seymour Street
house, until, after two hours, one said: “But is the house on
fire?—look there!”—for one or more candles standing in their own grease
on boxes had probably collapsed, and before the fire-brigade could
effect an entrance, the place was a conflagration.

Let the mental condition of England the next day be conceived—the
Prince gone—no trace of any body in the gutted house.

The furniture store from which the curtains, etc., had been purchased
could only say that the purchaser was a woman, veiled; Sturge, the
workshop assistant, could only say that the Prince had sprung up on
reading the letter at 8.30, and that the handwriting seemed feminine.
Neither letter nor envelope could be found—no trace, no clue.

There was not one English heart which was not gashed now, nor perhaps
one German not urged toward compassion. Western humanity, one may say,
sat down in sorrow to ponder this problem.

All which world-turmoil concerning him the Prince knew in detail: for
from the third day the girl took a habit of coming to sit on a stool
outside his door, in the door being a hole, iron-lined, big enough to
admit plates or a biscuit-box of coals; and she, sitting there for
hours, mornings, afternoons, sewing silks, painting on ivory or satin,
never for two minutes ceased to speak as to an old-established member
of the household, telling him the world-news, her pettiest household
cares, the daily history of A-lu-te’s illness, the secrets of her heart
as regards Li Ku Yu and others, the story of the destruction of the
air-boats, the story of Alexis the Sexton, and how for a century his,
the Prince’s, bones would bear her marks, that scar in his neck, too,
being from her hand, and how she had met Eulalia within the wood of the
Six Millions, and suspected that Eulalia had noticed her, and meant to
end Eulalia before many days. And mixed with all her facts were some
falsehoods for falsehood’s sake.

And never from within the dimness of that prison a syllable answered
her—never, day after day, as if he had become mummy-dumb. He took his
seat, indeed, near the hole, to hear and hear, till the seductive
sculpture of her nose was old and dull to him, but uttered nothing; and
although he more and more suspected that he was being slow-poisoned, he
made no moan.

Of course, she is not to be judged by our standards: for if, just
lately, a Divine Manifestation has enlarged _our_ minds, and assuaged
_our_ hearts of the heinousness of Hottentots, _she_, like her race,
belonged to the age of our grandfathers, nay, farther back to the
blackness of Bloody Mary and Butcher Henry ages: for, not only had
she no science, and the sun was to her nothing more, nor older, than
he looked, but science was quite _alien_ to the stage of development
of the age in which, so to say, she lived, so that she had failed to
acquire any, in spite of her birdlike briskness, her desire to learn,
and her nighness to Chinnery.

Hence her mood was still that of gory old Queens of England, Italy,
gross and gory Popes, grisly Empresses of the Chinese, whose names are
like a sneeze, Tsu Hsi, and Wu of the Han Dynasty, and Lu, with their
“off with his head!” and Blue-Beard cellars, and wells for throwing one
down for fun; so that, as she sat there with her snakes and a parrot,
relating in a sensuality of frankness the narrative of her depravities,
there were seconds when her face had the nakedness of a drunken man’s,
marred by fleeting expressions of feeling, when she was by no means
pretty.

Frequently in the deep of night she would rise to creep to the
peep-hole and try to spy him asleep on the petty iron bed in the
north-west corner, and stay there in the night-silence till the
night-cold, clutching her under her night-attire, drove her shuddering.

In all which she had an uneasy, yet sweet, sense of acting “on her
own”: for Li Ku Yu, on hearing of the capture, had commanded immediate
action, and the same day she had cabled him: “It is done”—so that _he_
believed the Prince dead and buried, and dreamt at night of a Prince.

But she could no more kill him at once than the cat can its victim,
he was so much her secret sweet, which all the world searched after,
but Oyone alone owned. She could see the parabola of his shirt-front,
he being in evening dress, turn gradually from dirty to drab—since he
had to make his own bed, light his own fire, etc.; and though she told
herself every day that she should be going back to France to see to the
Six Millions and Eulalia, she could not tear herself from contemplating
the monument she had accomplished, and resting on her laurels.

“You should like me better than her,” she said one day, a snip of
thread resting on her lip, as she bent over her sewing: “she has a kind
of little English grace, and nice eyes, but I could have whistled you
from her, if I had wished. That day at Richard’s when you danced with
me, do you think I could not see what was going on in you—married or
not? _Are_ you married, I wonder?”

But she had ceased to expect any answer from him. Once only a moan,
smothered in the coming, had broken from his throat, when she told how
she had dosed Chinnery before taking his air-boat, and he must have
longed then to know if Chinnery was living, and where the boat now
was—for she did not say—but had asked nothing.

And on she chattered, slattern this afternoon and loose in a sooty
dressing-gown; and another day she was like a painting of a Parisienne;
another day an Eastern Queen reeking of scents; each day a fresh
creature, her hair changed, her whole impression, everything; and the
more she changed the more she was the same thing, bewitching—like those
working stars on magic-lantern curtains which dart into new hues and
moods, and still are stars.

“Think of a Prince without a harem! Your ancestors had, so why not you?
but they say it is your mother, and your school, that have made you
like that—like Li Ku Yu. I see that she is ill, and is being ‘nursed
by the Princess Elizabeth.’ What is a Princess doing in a country at
war with her own? She must want you very badly! and would no doubt be
glad to strangle your Eulalia for me. They say her father is always
trying to get her back to Germany in vain—dreads the war-dangers of
the voyage! What amuses is that there are references in the papers
to her ‘efforts to unravel the mystery’ of you. That is laughable how
the charlatanism and child’s play of people in high places is taken
seriously! This Princess, it appears, is one of ‘the clever’: she draws
diagrams to find you, wraps herself in abstraction, frowns profoundly,
looks furiously acute, and the Queen and everyone at Court have a queer
hope that she will yet discover her Teddy—so the society papers say.
Courts are queer things.”

Her bird’s-tongue took some seconds rest, and went on: “What makes the
English mad is that you will not be at the sea-fight—it is for their
own skins they care, not for you. _The Times_ says that the war cannot
last another three weeks, for then every nation will be bankrupt and
starving; so the sea-battle will be in a week, people believe, and
America has too much to do to help England.

“The Italians, French, English and Russians have mostly sunk one
another in the five Mediterranean and Black Sea fights; and the
remaining Italians and Russians escaped through the Straits of
Gibraltar three nights since, to join the Germans. The English have
gathered all their Atlantic and Home ships; but if the two forces
annihilate each other, the Continentals will be the victors, since
there will then be nothing to prevent them from invading England again.

“England is already invaded—by aeroplanes. Last night a fourth
town—Hull—was utterly destroyed, and there is a fine outcry about
it. The Germans say it is only what _you_ did to their Spandau, but
one Sir Robert Barrington in to-day’s _Times_ calls that ‘a lie,’
since you dropped your bombs upon military spots, not upon civilians.
It is being suggested that the English should retaliate, but most
of them are against it. That’s stupid—and yet—I don’t know. It _is_
stupid, of course—and yet—no, I don’t know. The English are the best
of the whites—but so gullible. Who could be more gullible than you
and Richard? The night of your capture I groaned a hundred times to
myself: ‘Will the man not _think it odd_ that I should make him go
first to a different house, with my car at the back’—I _had_ to, since
detectives were always following you. But I might have spared myself
all those torments—you came thinking that everyone is exactly like
yourself—sleepy-headed! capable of seeing deeply, but not quickly,
except when your minds are excited.”

She severed a thread with her teeth, and proceeded: “Look at what Li Ku
Yu has done to Europe—only by a trick, and perhaps not a soul, except
you, has seen his hand in it. Even you never can dream what he means,
or you would never have troubled about fighting in the _Asahel_, or
about your Eulalia, or anything. All is over with you whites, you have
had your day, this is your midnight. You do not know the Chinese, they
will fry you in pans like sprats, with onions. Li Ku Yu says it is
‘God’s Will,’ which is what he always says when he wants anything.

“I am glad, for the Easterns know how to enjoy themselves better, eat
nicer things, are nicer clothed and housed, with more colours and
charm, and enjoy life with more delight.

“You here are taught by your lamas and priests to be afraid of your
god, who gets jealous if you enjoy pleasures; but that is an African
fancy.

“The Orientals will paint out the European grey with greens and
crimsons. And they have begun to come. A comet which appeared in the
East some nights ago is growing you would not think how quickly—its
face terrifies: and persons are asserting that this world will dive
into it on a certain night, and that it is an omen of moanings to
humans. I think it is the announcer sent out with the name of Li Ku Yu
in its mouth, though no man can understand its language: for Li Ku Yu
is great to heaven—swift and bright! a younger brother of the heavenly
bodies.

“In China he has the titles of Long-lived, Orthodox, Prosperous, Quite
Obvious, Perfect, Respectful, Glorified, Holy, and All-Nourishing; and
as the Grand Lama has proclaimed him to be Confucius Reincarnate, he
has lately passed through the Empire from Manchuria to Quang-si, and
from Lhassa to Ningpo, to reveal to the people the face of the Saviour
of their race.

“The Orient throws itself down before the throne he rolls on, without
raising its eyes, lest his brightness strike them blind like that Ray
of Richard’s, which, perhaps, _you_ have—have you? Tell me where, and I
will set you free—will you?

“But it is all lies, he is not Confucius, he is Li Ku Yu, and nobody
else, swifter and brighter than two Confuciuses.

“And he is coming! Listen to what he says”—she read from a letter:
“‘impossible to understand anything of air-boat from your account;
therefore, either I send you a steamer for it, or meet you with it on
the Belgian coast about the middle of April’—soon! Then I will see him!
and my veins will entwine his life with a vine of fire!

“Li Ku Yu? Like the bullet of a gun! And China is like a bicycle which
he rides with his legs! He has so worked upon them, that now, he says,
no power could hold them—they suppose that Europe is full of streams
of diamond and anæmic creatures who sigh and make love, just waiting
for Chinamen’s fingers to come and tear their limbs, as one’s thumb and
finger tears mice and tender chicken-flesh.

“You do not know what is happening there, because the cables have been
cut, the Legations sacked, the whites massacred at the concessions and
treaty-ports, and since the Hwang Hai Battle all Hong Kong has been
overrun and put to the sword. Li Ku Yu is the sheen of a sharp falchion
unsheathed! They say that he dislikes tortures, but a life is no more
to him than a kite that flies. Let it be blood: let’s dye our eyebrows,
and clean our teeth, with blood. Glory! A thousand years! Let’s tread
in red, and drown in red!

“There is nothing to stop it now. What is called the Army of India,
after winning its way almost to Moscow, has been cut to atoms by a
mixed German and Russian army, and India is already opening its arms
to embrace the Chinese. From south to north all Asia is shouting ‘a
thousand years!’ over the fall of the fair faces. The Japanese have
crossed Lake Baikal on the ice, and have the Siberian Railway. Russia
has called out all her Reserves, and is asserted to be now exhausted.
The Italian Regular Army is reduced to a few. France has out the
Reserve of her Territorial Army, and her Southern Corps have vanished.
It is being asserted that Germany will have to admit being bankrupt
within two weeks, and England within four. Li Ku Yu says that there are
twenty-nine millions of Mongolians already living in Europe—in Hungary,
Turkey, Finland and Lapland—who will welcome the Chinese, and are to be
left alive to be the nucleus of a new kind of civilisation which he has
invented in his head for Europe. As for the Japanese, they appear to be
penetrating everywhere like fleas ‘on the spree’! Now they have British
Columbia, as well——”

But here her prisoner got up to go into the alcove at the north end.

When he was long she put in her head, and saw him sitting on the alcove
floor, his face in his arms against his washstand leg, and she thought
that she saw his body bob as if with sobs: no sound, however. And
presently he rose, closed the alcove door, and she was conscious of a
plash of water from his tap washing into his basin.

Afterwards he came back, threw coals upon his grate in the south-east
corner, and sat again, his hair brushed, as always, his white-black tie
and collar on.

“I think you have wept,” she said: “did I say anything to make you? I
was speaking about the Japanese having British Columbia. Perhaps you
are getting hungry. There will be swallow-nest soup to-day: it is Li,
the eunuch, who fled with us from Peking, who cooks it for one to lick
the lips, though he is such a dirty lazy pig.

“But as to the Japanese, it is not strange, they have a genius for
war and butchery. In a battle at Nerchinsk they could not get past a
certain trench, and at last the front rank dragged the Russian bayonets
into their own breasts, so that the rest might rush the trench: for
they butcher themselves as merrily as others, if once everything is
red.

“They have only been frightened once, it seems—when taking Australia;
and a very strange story is told of that in the papers. They were
making a raid one midnight upon Williamstown, the naval _dépôt_ near
Melbourne, where those ships of the Australian Navy were which had not
been destroyed in the Hwang Hai Battle, and they stole up the harbour
in the dark in submarines.

“Now one of these submarines, called the E.3, had been British, but had
been captured in the Hwang Hai, and it is said that she had once sunk,
and her British crew had perished in her; but she had been raised.

“At any rate, the raid failed owing to the fact that this submarine,
E.3, rose up prematurely, and stood still on the sea. When she was
taken by the Australians, all her crew of Japanese were seen to be
dead, and the matter cannot be understood.

“It is being said that the submarine may be haunted by her former crew,
since the dead Japanese had stares of awe and horror, and had evidently
intended to cast themselves pell-mell into the water, several having
the aspect of strangled rats.

“The Australians had her two weeks, but in the second raid the Japanese
got her back.... What was ever the good of the Australians struggling
against Japan? It was foolish to think that a few Englishmen could
keep all that continent to themselves. What is the good of any of you
struggling? Look at this bit in _The Times_ to-day: ‘From our own
Correspondent. By Anglo-American Cable Co., New York. An _Evening Post_
correspondent at Astrakhan wires _viâ_ Odessa that a body of Turkestan
Mongols, eight to twelve thousand strong, have captured the railway
from Krasnovodsk to Khokand, and the Samarcand fort which the Indian
Army dismantled, and have finally turned up on the Caspian shore. Their
objects have not been ascertained.’ ... Do you think what this means?
The wall that will fall upon all is drizzling a little dust.

“Good-bye. I will go to see A-lu-te, and will send your dinner. You
will not speak to me, but do not tempt me too long. If a bird will not
please the ear, let him please the teeth.”

She collected her things, and went laden, trailing them.

He saw her no more till eleven in the night when, he being then in
bed, she called in at the hole: “A-lu-te is dying! I have summoned
an English doctor in spite of Huang, and shall order a nurse. You
will see little of me to-morrow, for I am going to France to see to
my interests, so as to get that over before the death, the funeral
troubles, and the invitation to ascend. Good-night! You are not asleep;
you hear me; but will not speak....”




                               CHAPTER XVI

                             THE BURIED RAY


The Queen lay on a bed to which none had access save the Princess
Elizabeth and one maid-of-honour—for Her Majesty would see no doctor.
It was nine in the night, a reddish shine, remote from that tumbled
bed, shedding through the room a mood of the moon in eclipse, and the
Princess at the bedside had on hat and gloves, just come, her gloves
grasped in the Queen’s hands, who feverishly said: “Did you lay before
him all your latest thoughts?”

“Everything!”—from the Princess.

“And he his to you?”

“Everything. Sir Robert does not think Teddy dead, Your Majesty——”

“Call me mama; say ‘mama.’”

“And he thinks that if he and I only keep on collating and dove-tailing
all our latest thoughts, we shall yet discover Teddy.”

With the wild eyes of fever, her palms clasping her forehead, the Queen
said: “Yes! _he_ and you—you two—_you_’ll find him! _He_ knows! _He_ is
strong!”

A furtive smile curved the Princess’s thin lip, enjoyment in her at the
sight of that royal mind which had dominated her now broken and in the
dust.

“I told him I would see him to-morrow evening again——”

“That’s it! And what does he say? Does he stoop? Does he look sad?”

“Yes, but Your Majesty should try to sleep”—she kissed the Queen’s
hand—“I am doing wrong, I won’t stay another moment.”

“Elizabeth, you leave me?” the Queen called to her.

“Let Your Majesty consider that you have not slept for three days,” the
Princess turned her chin to say, “and I, too, am sleepy. I will be with
Your Majesty again at midnight.”

Her Majesty now dropped back upon her pillows, and was tossing there
with distracted changes of attitude until, all at once, she sat up,
stared, pondering, then urgently turned to touch a button, but checked
herself, and then with clandestine haste was standing on the floor,
staggering, yet grand, a ghost in laces.

In a fever of haste she proceeded to dress herself, delicately treading
by an ante-room’s doors beyond which ladies waited, cautiously opening
wardrobe doors, quickly selecting, steadily building herself into a
state of dress, save when she paused at a mirror to hold up on her palm
four grey hairs, at which she gazed with the greatest interest, amazed,
gravely amused.

Soon after which she was in flight through a postern behind tapestry,
hardly very exquisitely groomed, but careless, to make her way into the
Park; and both an amazed Master of the Household and Inspector of the
Palace, who chanced to catch the spurt of her escaping skirt at the
turn of a stair, felt an impulse to address her, this apparition of her
so suggested hectic and ecstasy of mind.

After making her way to the bottom of the Park, she flew from the
little gate there, stumbling, to Sir Robert Barrington’s, a minute’s
distance away.

Luckily, something in her rap inspired him to open the door himself,
and, finding her leaning there, her eyes closed, powerless, like
an outcast at his door, he moaned “Come” to her, took her bodily,
supporting her to a couch spacious like a bed in a morning-room, he
himself very breathlessly agitated at this happening—no longer so young
as he had been!

And hand on heart, panting, he stood, saying: “I cannot think that Your
Majesty—so ill—has done well——”

A lamentable protest broke from her buried throat, breaking his heart:
“Oh, my soul is exceedingly sorrowful in me, Robert Barrington!”

At which his forehead dropped before her, his breath uttered: “God
grant me strength.”

“I have had hope,” she said—“you promised——”

But now he was harshly sharp. “No! It is false! I say that it is
abominable, that it is unpardonable, if any unfounded hopes are
conveyed as from me to Your Majesty. I declare that I am utterly
powerless, absolutely in the dark. The Princess Elizabeth may be an
interesting, if somewhat fantastic, young woman, but I say——”

“You need not be angry,” the Queen wearily said, raising herself: “I
come to you, and you get angry. Why did I come? I am sick of living,
and I come to you.”

“Then, I will say now that you did well to come, Ma’am. But Your
Majesty is aware, by training, that opinions have no value. My
_opinion_ is that Your Majesty’s boy is in the hands of Anarchists, is
still living, may yet be discovered; but, then——”

“Then, that is how it is, if you think so! You will find him, and it
is exceedingly dear of you to give——” Here her hands were going out
to his, but she suddenly saw and snatched them back, with a breath of
scare which she sucked in, which sounded like “Ah, take care, don’t let
me!”

Then, ten seconds, she sat lost in astonishment, not very sure what
she had said, or how loudly; and suddenly, with “let me get away” was
tearing angrily out in advance of her arm which he held; and he, too,
when he had followed her steps to the Park gate, and was back, sat
asking himself in a long reverie: “What, really, was it that she said?”

Then he was roaming the room with a brutal jaw, breathing between his
teeth, “Man, eh? Impotent! Brainless! Vain! The petty pates of apes!
A world to lift with a worm’s sinews!” In the midst of which, in an
impulse, he sat down and penned a letter to Eulalia:

“I am impelled to express the hope that all is well with Your Royal
Highness.... Ever since the Prince’s disappearance I have received not
one line, though I have twice written.... A natural anxiety impels me
to pray Your Royal Highness to send me a word at the first possible
moment....”

                   •       •       •       •       •

Three evenings later when this came to Eulalia’s hand, that was the
first she had heard of any “disappearance” of the Prince: for on the
day after her discovery of the Six Millions she had had attacks of
dizziness, which had caused her to be put to bed in cantonment upon a
pair of peasants in Nürnfeld village; and not only had a surgeon-major
forbidden any news or letter being given her, but the 2nd and 3rd,
after the Battle of the Moselle, had taken up positions thirty miles
further into German territory, and had left her; and since her German
was not fluent, her conversations with her aged hosts had included no
news but news of skirmishes within thirty kilometres of their door.

Then one noon one Sister Darling—a tall strip of uniform under the face
of a saint in a painting—had pelted into Nürnfeld to pay the patient
an angel’s visit, and Eulalia, seeing that face pale and careworn, had
felt so ill at ease, that the next day she had found herself saying,
“No, I am going to do my work—not so much Teddy.”

That day she had got up, had dizzied, fainted, gone back to bed; but
three mornings after, gathering from rumour that her whole brigade was
engaging a garrison of the enemy, she had procured a manure-cart, and,
after travelling all day long, had come up with the brigade’s field
hospital in a field a league eastward of the Soar.

She found her coming eagerly welcomed, for the enemy that evening had
suffered, not merely a defeat, but a rout, and of the crowd of captives
left in the British hands sixteen were wounded: so that, with the host
of British wounded, the hospital had enough to do.

Eulalia was in a waggon at the bottom of a steep field, the waggon
standing beneath a bay-tree by the bank of a brook whose babble among
stones, together with a garrulous soprano of grasshoppers, aggravated
the silence of a night dark and starless, warm and calm. Outside—the
brook, rough scrub, Oyone in an ulster seeking to peep between two
waggon-flaps, some lanterns straying among waggons, waggon-shines
thrown on the grass, a sound of horses’ jaws which grossly ground and
ground in the gloom, a tent, two heaps of stretchers under tarpaulins
in corners of the field; and within—sighs, spring beds, splints, lint,
a hospital scent of sickness and carbolic, scarlet spots on bandages,
and eyes—eyes pining, dying, sightless.

Into which came Sister Darling to throw a busy look from bed to bed,
and to breathe “How are you?” to Eulalia.

And Eulalia with a shrug: “I shall pull through.”

“Brave! You are dropping, really, after that terrible journey. You
shall have these now as a reward”—she gave three letters out of her
pouch.

All from Sir Robert Barrington: and when Eulalia had managed to catch
by snatches the sense of them, she called out lamentably to her maimed:
“_It is Oyone!_”

At which outcry, Oyone, startled into fancying that she had been
noticed, made a motion to run from between the waggon-shafts, but now
saw coming a Tommy who led a horse by the mane, and she crouched under
the waggon, till he should be gone. But the horse came to a stoppage,
and the man also, resting his head on the horse’s neck, like one
dead-weary, or asleep.

After a little she hissed toward him: “_Go away!_”

She had been to the wood of the Six Millions, and, though the gold
had not been touched, in the dust was a footprint which, she had
determined, was not hers. Up to that moment she had more or less
believed what she had fiercely hoped, that she had not really been
seen; but now she was sure: Eulalia had been there.

At which thing a gang of assassins, of Richards III., of grinning
aristocrats, were instantly grinning in her inwards, and she ran to
kill as if to catch a ball; but it had taken her two hissing days to
seek out the 2nd Somersetshires and then the field hospital—she,
meantime, in a state of amazement that Eulalia had done nothing to the
hoard, or to her, all these weeks! for surely, she thought, unless
Eulalia was weak in the head, she must see now that it was Oyone who
had destroyed the air-boats, had shot the Prince in the Strand, and—had
the Prince a prisoner now! At this last thought she had felt faint, and
had made haste.

When it was well dark she had walked to the hospital, had dodged from
waggon to waggon to Eulalia’s, and had been fingering her trigger—for
there was little difficulty as to escaping in the dark—when Sister
Darling’s coming had checked her; and now she was waiting for the man
and horse to pass and not pester her, for it was as if some pestering
thing obstructed her.

Now, Eulalia, on getting the sense of her letters, had started to
run—to abandon her sick, to be off somehow to London; but, as she
started, a dying voice called to her in a key which she could not
resist: “_Mees_,” it groaned, and she moved back to the waggon-head
to bow over a brow that had a bandage aslant about it, hiding the
right eye, while already in his windpipe was the whistle of death:
yet both Eulalia and Oyone, their ears within three feet of his lips,
heard each word when he said: “A favour—service to humanity—my name
Hartmann—Russian. Dig up a black box in the back yard of 11 Frith
Street, Whitechapel—back yard, right-hand corner, dig it up. Send box
to Taska—Bowery—New York—shoe-maker—well known. Tell Taska someone who
is lately dead—he will know—gave me secret to pass on. It is the Ray,
say—just that—he will know—the Ray—and be careful of the cap, say. This
is death—I am going——”

Eulalia hardly waited a few seconds to close his eyes when she flew,
nor did Oyone know when she flew, so open-mouthed she sat there on her
toes at this wondrous discovery of the Ray. It was in the yard of 11
Frith Street—how marvellous a talisman in those three words!

She had once kept Chinnery three days without drink to force him to
make her a new black box like that lost box, and, what was strange for
him, he had resisted, asking her “_why do you want it?_” but then had
yielded, had got her to get together lots of objects, had commenced to
make, but then had failed, or had pretended to fail.

But here it now was: and with the Ray all her terrors were at an end,
all her ambitions realised. Chinnery could be forced to show her how to
use it with her own hands....

She sprang up, careless now of the man and horse still there, measured
her chances swiftly, resolved to act, peeped between flaps more boldly
than before: a dresser was in there, but not Eulalia.

Her heart started at the question: “_Does Eulalia know_ the
preciousness of the Redlike Ray, of those three words just heard, and
has rushed out already to go to clutch it?” She must have rushed very
lightly, flyingly!... Whither? Oyone moved to seek her, clambering
the field from waggon to waggon, and, on being seen by a running
hospital-orderly, who stopped to stare at her, asked him where Nurse
Bayley was.

“I think at the staff-waggon,” he answered, pointed, and ran.

But Eulalia was not there, was nowhere in the meadow, and now Oyone
moaned, “She _has_ gone,” and flew down to the brook, and up to a
pony-trap awaiting her beyond.

Eulalia had, in fact, to the amazement of the staff, gone off in a
flutter with her bag, as she could without formality, being still on
the sick-list; and after stumbling westward seven miles, she tumbled to
slumber some hours with a cow in a hut by a covert.

A comet’s light in the morning sky caused her to start up, and she
plodded on, anon conning her map by the shine of a match, anon
conjecturing her way toward Nancy, for between Nancy and the front the
railway had been destroyed, so that it was not till eleven the next
night that she entered a train.

By that time Oyone was at Boulogne: but the Channel boats,
requisitioned at intervals for war purposes, were not running
regularly, and, having to wait, she lay in the railway restaurant, a
desert now, lamenting, thinking of her air-boat, how well if she had
it now, visited now by a panic as to the Prince, impeaching herself of
dallying and self-pleasing, promising to be prompt as hammer-stroke, if
he was not yet dead, telling heaven with accusing looks that Eulalia
had taken another route, and already had the Redlike Ray safe....

It was not until the next afternoon that she could look back from the
boat upon Boulogne as upon a hell escaped. At about the same hour
Eulalia left Dieppe.

They arrived in London within a few minutes of each other, one
alighting at London Bridge, one at Victoria, and now Oyone stood two
seconds doubtful, still undecided whether to fly home and see things,
or to make straight for the Redlike Ray. The latter drew her strongest:
she flew and got a cab.

Soon after this Eulalia, too, was in a cab, making for the Horseferry
Road, looking out with amaze at the changed air of London—hardly
anyone in the streets, save a flock of jackals _en queue_ before a
soup-kitchen in Marsham Street, and a crowd round a coffee-stall; and
though it was not yet nine in the night she was given a feeling of a
London of three +a.m.+

Even the policemen appeared fewer, and looked as if all was up; she saw
two rolling a dead woman on a hooded stretcher; and between Victoria
and Marsham Street noticed three dead cats, two closed public-houses,
and a coster selling red herrings to a drunken man in evening-dress.

At a paper shop she noticed an _Evening News_ poster: “Let Them Come!”
and a _Star_: “England Expects!” and a _Pall Mall_: “Sea-fight for
To-morrow.”

Then before that darkling old home of Chinnery she alighted, for she
remembered to have read that a neighbour’s maid knew “Monty’s” address,
so she knocked there, hoping to find “Monty,” and so Oyone. But a woman
told her that “Mrs Montgomerry is dead.”

“Don’t say that....”

“Of hunger, I’m afraid”—she closed the door.

What now to do? Her plan had been to go to Oyone, to accuse Oyone
suddenly of having killed the Prince, and if the Prince was dead, or if
he was living, she would know the whole truth without fail from Oyone’s
face, and would then measure strengths with her—a rash thing, for she
had no weapon, nor had thought of such a thing, nor knew her Oyone.

However, she had had the prudence to write a statement of the grounds
of her suspicions, and had posted it to Sir Robert Barrington, marked
“Open After Four Days.”

But as to where Oyone lived she had no notion. The Chinese Embassy
occurred to her; her cabman knew where it was; she drove to Portland
Place.

Here she was received in a room to the right of the door, where a lean
and a portly Chinaman, seated each in an opposite corner, solemnly,
hands on knees, kept exchanging glances; and the interview, which
should have lasted one minute, lasted twenty. Probably they were dull,
and Eulalia an incident: anyway, she had never known anyone who, having
once got her, was so reluctant to part from her.

“What person may she want?” Stout ventured to ask mildly, and Lean
perused the floor with a weak and troubled brow.

“I only know her as Oyone,” Eulalia said: “but I thought you might
know——”

“Is she a friend to you?” Lean thought of asking, to which she lusted
to answer “Yes” (knowing now that they knew Oyone), but, dainty in that
way (by training), she said: “Not a friend: a matter of business, but
very pressing and momentous.”

It was now that one remarked that he thought now that he could guess
who was meant, and might telephone, if the lady would mention her name.

This put Eulalia at her wits’ end: to say “Bayley” would be simply to
prepare Oyone, and in the end, pushed to say something, she came out
with “‘The Nurse’—tell her that.”

Both went out; she heard them at a telephone; and they came back with
some bustle, saying: “But you are late! Go if you like, but you will
only be in time for the invitation.”

Eagerly she seized a piece of paper that gave the address, with a sob
of relief, and was gone, her eyes bright for battle, careless of which
“invitation” that was for which she would only just be in time, they
urging their reluctant steps to chase and gaze wistfully after her to
the last.

By which time Oyone, on her side, was driving home from Whitechapel.
She had discovered Frith Street—an alley five houses long, joining two
streets—decent little homes of retired seamen, say—No. 11 in darkness,
apparently unoccupied, but for curtains at one window on the upper
story.

Oyone pressed the latch of a side gate, peeped, went in: no one about:
and there, leaning against the house-side, was the very thing which she
was wondering how she could get—a spade.

With this she crept on to a strip of back yard planted with some
stripling trees, making straight for the Ray “in the right-hand
corner”; and the night was so dark, that she was quite in the corner
before she became aware that there was a hole already there—square—of
the same area as the Redlike Ray—three feet deep.

“She has beaten me”—her forehead dropped forward, and then her knees
yielded, and, as if prostrate in prayer, she knelt over the hole,
thinking, “she has it, she is more favoured than I, she seems to beat
me, to escape me, to be born to molest, and balk, and waylay, and
pester me, this woman: but wait: if I kill her, I will kill her twice,
and thrice.”

She went back to her cab, and started in haste for home—down Leadenhall
Street—by St Martin’s....

By this time Eulalia was there, ringing a bell under leafage at a green
gate that had “Ning Shou Kung” painted in yellow letters across its
concave top.

A very old Chinaman opened, dwelt upward on her with his eyes, led
her inward through darkness to light, to a hall where stood a small
woman of fifty, gorgeously gowned, stout and chubby, but grim in some
wrinkle about the mouth. She, on seeing Eulalia, crossed her hands and
raised them, bending her head—Chinese, not Manchu; and she muttered
with reproach: “But you come so late: the going-away (funeral) dress
all done.”

Eulalia palely smiled, shrugged, and replied in a shame-faced mutter
that she could not come before, discerning that she was being taken
for some other nurse; so, to make sure of her entrance, she kept
her face as little in evidence as possible—though this proved to be
needless, for even if she had been unlike the other nurse in uniform
and everything, that would not have mattered, when the Chinese woman
was once preoccupied with the idea of identity: for just as to English
eyes fresh in India all Indians are twins, so to Chinese eyes that live
retired in England each English visage is a pea in a heap.

The light, besides, though abundant—Eulalia felt that some _fête_ must
be taking place—was very veiled and restrained, like the vague rainbow,
and those soap-bubble veins of opal and mother-of-pearl; so the woman,
whose name was Huang, said quite naturally: “No trouble, you come see,”
and led Eulalia up to a landing, from which by three steps they entered
a death-chamber.

Eulalia’s eyes, meantime, had been keen for any sign of Oyone, but,
as she now moved into the room, the woman looked at her to moan with
reproach and opening arms: “But no Oyone come!—too bad.”

And now, when Eulalia understood that Oyone was away, there welled in
her a question that made her faint: “If he is alive! and here! and I
can find out!”—Oyone away—and here, evidently, the head of the place
dead, into so splendid a chamber had she been led, and never corpse
more gorgeous than A-lu-te, stretched there in lantern-sheen in her
phœnix hat, her robe and cloak of state, her badges of rank.

At once Huang led Eulalia to exhibit everything, Eulalia’s knees weak
beneath her weight, meantime, at that question that was in her, at
her fear of the real nurse turning up at any moment, of Oyone turning
up, of something happening, at the consciousness of her precious
seconds passing, passing, while she stood there foolishly watching the
exhibition, the chemise of white silk, the jacket of grey silk over it,
the wadded robe of blue satin, the belt of jade, the abounding outer
robe of sable, the badges, the collar of amber, the hair one glow of
gold, the astonishing coffin of lacquer, padded with crimson silk and
straw.

But she could think of nothing to do, to say; any syllable might betray
her; the moment was too pressing for her; she wished to be alone to sit
and think; a gorgeous tall Gorgon at the corpse’s feet appeared to keep
his eyes tied to her face; and she felt her frame trembling in every
limb, like the tongues of little bells that flutter.

Then two more came in, a man and a woman, then the old gateman came,
and she helped to bear the body from the bed and lay its head on the
red “cock-crow” pillow of satin in the coffin, and then they commenced
some ceremony—inviting the dead to rise to heaven: during which she
moved away to a window, anguished at the chance she was casting away,
asking again and again of heaven, “Oh, my God, what can I do?”

In the midst of which she was touched on the shoulder, and Huang, with
one rather cynical eyebrow on high, was saying to her: “You invite
A-lu-te go up, may be?”

At which Eulalia shrank—from an instant train of ideas that sprang
up in her—ideas that meant desecration of the dead, prevarication,
pretence, in recompense for a politeness, for she divined that the
request was made more out of politeness to her than for the benefit
of A-lu-te, who probably had already gone up at the invitation of the
others.

However, as to desecrating the dead, Eulalia had (naturally) much less
respect for dead bodies than, say, her mother had, being accustomed to
see young doctors throw dead men’s arms at one another’s heads across
dissecting-rooms, and bodies cheap as cabbages on fields of battle; and
before she knew that she had resolved, she was saying with a bashful
and begging grace which she had: “But in the English way.”

Huang shrugged and smiled.

“You must let me drive the devils first from all the corners.”

Huang shrugged and smiled.

“Well, then....”

By this time there were only two in the room with her, Huang and the
eunuch; and these strolled with a sluggish and indulgent disgust after
her to the four corners, in which she stood with a booing to-do ...
boo-boo ... boo-boo-boo....

Then it was out on the stair corners, boo-boo-boo, patiently, one by
one, and up, they following, hardly any longer bothering to smile; but
at the first stair-top, when she turned into a certain passage, Huang
stopped her with “No trouble no more.”

“Oh, I must now,” she said bashfully, beggingly, with that grace which
gains everything.

And thenceforth she booed at every door-cornice, managing in the jam
of every boo to mix the pill, “_Whose boy are you?_” until she was
there in the darksome corner of that passage a door of which had a hole
in it, though she did not see any hole; and there, too, she booed a
“boo-boo, _whose boy are you?_ boo-boo-boo.”

There was still no reply, and by this time despair was in her, the
thing was so trying and vile, her two followers becoming obviously
sick of it, and she without any faith now in its success. However, she
moved on, away now from that door with the hole, and was now about to
boo anew, when, fully half-a-minute after her last boo, a dreadful
outcry, pressing, as of one roused in terror out of dreadful depths and
dreams, screamed out of that black darkness of the cross-passage: “_I
am Eulalia’s boy!_”

The franticness of that cry in the silence, the chasm and extremity out
of which it came, its crazy rage, its horrid suddenness, struck Eulalia
colourless to the lips, though she just had the wit left to lift her
hand with “Hark! a devil!”

“Poh,” said Huang, cross now, “no devil—man-cook sick—you come—all
devil gone now.”

“If I must—though I have not finished.”

“No trouble, you come”—and they descended to the death-chamber, where
Eulalia, standing by the coffin, glad enough to hide her mottled face,
raised her arm to say: “A-lu-te, I invite you to rise to the skies.”

But at the same moment the gate-bell began gabbling outside the house,
and Huang, crying to the eunuch, “_Oyone!_” flew out.

From which Eulalia well understood that Oyone was come; and now that
she had found, and that the fire to find was extinguished in her, a
chill and grisly realisation of peril gripped at her; for, if not
killed, she could be imprisoned....

Some moments more and Oyone’s voice was coming up the stair, Eulalia’s
escape cut off now, and all lost that had been won, if Oyone once saw
her. And since Huang had told her that Oyone did not know that A-lu-te
was dead, she felt certain that the death-chamber was the first which
Oyone would enter, and now blamed herself bitterly for not bolting out
at the bell-sound and stowing herself away somewhere. The only hope now
was to look out of a window, and to one she flew....

In some moments Oyone was at the door....

But it was only to cast one flying glance into the room, and she was
gone flying up, to dash along the passage to the door with a hole,
eager before everything to relieve herself of the evil thing that was
hot on her breath.

See her there! stooping at the hole, calling it to the dark, hot,
envenomed: “Here I am back! A-lu-te is dead, and your Eulalia, too.
Two nights ago—she was in a waggon in a field near Siebenberg—so I
crept up—it was quite dark—and pried in through two flaps; and, as she
was stooping over a wounded soldier, I gave it her right through the
brain, the beast, and she bit a piece of her tongue right off, as she
stiffened and kicked. She is well dead. She had been to the wood of the
Six Millions, for I saw her footprint, and she had got the Redlike Ray
from a dying Russian, but I have it safe now—I shall be sending it to
Li Ku Yu to-morrow. I will come again——” she was gone.

Her prisoner, at her coming, had been seated on his bed’s brink,
staring, quivering on the _qui vive_, in a craziness of hopes: if she
could have seen, she would have seen him tumble back, done for, at her
news.

It may be thought, indeed, that he could scarcely believe that Eulalia
had been killed when he had lately heard Eulalia’s voice say: “whose
boy?” but, on the contrary, he believed every word.

Much bane, in fact, had been mixed with his food on the day before
Oyone had left him, and he was aware that his brain was not in a sane
state.

All anight his head had been tossed in nightmare on the horns of the
question, “which is the yellowest, momentum or energy?” and in the
morning he had thought “I am done.”

Hence, on hearing “whose boy,” for some time he had not answered, not
believing his ears. That was nothing odd now for him to hear something
say “boo-boo, whose boy....”

However, the feet of his saviour were in haste. Eulalia was outside
the gate before Oyone was again down, and, running till she found a
cab-driver, she said to him between crying and laughing: “Grosvenor
Place! The Prince of Wales! he is found.”

He sprang upright.

“Fast, will you? He is found.”

They were away.

But she was not wise to tell, since she wished to be quick, for the
man thrice almost stopped to proclaim it, twice to policemen, once to
a lady on a lone pavement, and as though his breath bore death and
pestilence, the three instantly took to their heels.

And at Grosvenor Place Eulalia had to wring her hands—Sir Robert not at
home!

“I mean that Sir Robert is really out,” the man added, “and he may not
see you at once when he comes, as another lady—a Princess—is awaiting
him.”

“No, he will see me first—you tell him—‘Miss Bayley,’” Eulalia said,
and he led her to that large drawing-room where Sir Robert had once
interviewed Her Majesty.

This ran at right angles to the stair-head; and parallel to the stair
ran a small drawing-room, which opened into the large; in which latter,
pacing, was the Princess Elizabeth, fraught with her latest thoughts.

As one of the two sets of folding-doors between the two rooms was open,
she could hear the other led in, and, on peeping—started! It was _she_,
the bliss-licker! though the Queen had informed her that the minx was
at the war. What, then, was she doing here? Her Imperial Highness
condescended to the keyhole, peering with no little greed to get a view
of that plebeian puss who had proved tastier bait than her own imperial
being; nor did Eulalia’s assumed mutiny and raid on dainties make
Eulalia a less interesting object to her—on the contrary.

But she was amazed when Sir Robert hurried in first to Eulalia, though
he must have known...! She saw Sir Robert bend to kiss Eulalia’s hand
like a sovereign’s, or an idol’s, with deference, with reverence; and
then what followed was all a reeling dream to her, intensely immense.
She was aware of Eulalia panting her passion of tidings, of wine
shaking in the baronet’s hand, of the fact that the Prince was found,
found by another woman than she, of the words “Oyone,” “Regent’s Park,”
“Ning Shou Kung”; and the next thing was that she found herself down
and out in her brougham bound for “Ning Shou Kung”—which means “Palace
of Unperturbed Old Age,” not of burning, and bursting, and turbulent
youth.

At Ning Shou Kung gate she sent in her name, left her lady without as
sentinel, and soon in a cosy room had that dark-brown eye of Oyone
resting sidewards on her, cold, darksome in meaning, mysterious,
teeming with strategic and dangerous statecraft: for when at bay she
was ever brave, ready, dexterous, self-protective; while the Princess’s
spectacles stared calmly like starlight, speculative, unblinking,
noting the movement of Oyone’s bosom, her beauty, her sinuousness, her
nose pinched and blanched.

“Your Imperial Highness—honours me?”

“No talk is necessary: conduct me instantly to the Prince of Wales.”

Oyone let slip one half-a-glance toward the gods, and hummed a little.

“Your Imperial Highness thinks that the Prince of Wales is here?”

“No talk is necessary: I know.”

Oyone was up. “How?”

The Princess shrugged. “By deductions from clues.”

“As I hoped!”—Oyone locked the door.

“Oh, that is nonsense to lock the door,” Elizabeth said, _her_ nose,
too, paler now, “when others know that I am here, and that the Prince
is.”

“But do you suppose I do not see that I have beaten _you_ by locking
it?” Oyone looked down upon her with a bitter lip of contempt. “You
come here, alone, hurried, after learning from a nurse that the Prince
is here, your reason being that you want it to be thought that you have
discovered him by your excessive cleverness; and I imprison you as an
evidence of your cleverness.”

“That seems a little silly. Others are coming——”

“Precisely. You tell me everything which I wish to know. I will let
those ‘others’ get the credit you crave for.”

“Why should you—care?”

“Oh, if you are not so clever as you pretend to the Queen, you are
infinitely cleverer than you pretend to me. You see that _my_ liberty
is in danger, and _your_ wedding bed. Let us be friends!”

“I have not said that I am unwilling,” said the Princess Elizabeth,
up-looking.

Palely they smiled at each other.

“Shake hands!” said Oyone authoritatively.

Their right hands just met, while Oyone, reaching sidewards with the
left, unlocked the door.

“Now, how did you know?” she asked: “tell quick!”

“A girl named Bayley, his _bonne amie_, came here, was mistaken for
another nurse, heard his voice——”

“It was _she_? _Eulalia?_ She booed——” This made Oyone faint that such
a thing should be; her arm searched blindly for a chair behind her; she
sat.

“We have no time——” the Princess commenced to suggest, when the other
struck her dumb: “She is not his _bonne amie_, I think she is his
wife....”

At this Elizabeth blanched as from a slash, as there flashed across her
memory Sir Robert Barrington’s manner of kissing Eulalia’s hand. But
this was an idea that would take her brain days to receive and believe,
and she said with a shuddering hauteur: “That is an impertinent
suggestion—you speak of an impossibility.”

“But if the Prince has admitted it to me?” Oyone said. “And you need
not care. She will not live long, if _I_ live.”

At which Elizabeth’s eyes dropped, her lips letting out: “One should
not be horrid.”

“But you will be delighted if I am horrid? All women are the same! we
care much for nothing, except some man. And since you can never get
the Prince, not legally, while this girl is alive, then, you wish me
to live. You agree? You see? Then, you will let me go first to him, to
make him think for a minute that I am releasing him of my own will, on
condition that he signs a promise to protect me from consequences; and
_you_ will help to protect!” She sprang up, and Elizabeth, too, rose,
saying, “On condition that I come with you.”

“Why not?” answered Oyone, eyeing her aside, “are we not allies? Kiss
me.”

Elizabeth’s eyes dropped.

“Four men are said to have committed suicide for my lips,” Oyone
mentioned.

“You _are_—one admits——”

“Then, you may.”

Elizabeth let slip a peep from beneath sheepish lids, but then shook
her head, breathing “Not now.”

Oyone now wrote some phrases in haste, and they ran out, a sense of
no little surprise in the Princess to find herself “the ally” of
the miscreant whom she had come to smite and quell with her mighty
spectacles; and she stood beyond the lantern-shine that stood on the
floor by the door with the hole, while Oyone spoke....

The difficulty, however, was to get a signature to the phrases that
lay on the iron-lined hole, or any kind of reply from within—and every
second so precious.

But when Oyone told her motive—that a naval battle impended, and that
Li Ku Yu instructed her to set free, since he did not wish an invasion
of England until he invaded, then in a rush a shuddering pen was
spluttering, and the thing was done.

On which Oyone’s lips brushed Elizabeth’s cheek with the whisper,
“I’ll write—the key,” and she flew, scattering gold over the hands
of two whom she met, with “fly! fly! for a time: all lost!” then was
wild-handed at a glass, disguising as a Cockney coster-girl, and within
six minutes was out, raining sables and bags into the air-boat, which
she ever kept in petrol, then was heaping a beseeching Chinnery in,
then was wiping her brow, sighing, high behind brown clouds....

Meantime, the Princess was labouring under the Prince’s weight,
staining her rose-satin mantle, broderie anglaise and arum lilies with
that shirt-front and dirty evening-dress—she eager, with “poor Teddy,
try now,” he slow with “It will be well—wait one tick,” during fifteen
minutes from prison door to brougham.

But it was ten minutes more before Sir Robert Barrington, who had been
delayed by communications with Scotland Yard, arrived with a force of
men—to find in “Ning Shou Kung” no one but A-lu-te.

London, meantime, had pricked the ear, and was up, so that as the
Prince drove from street to street, his forehead on the Princess’s
shoulder, he was conscious of commotion each moment increasing,
newsboys who flew hooting the rumour, ten o’clock editions, populous
windows, footsteps of runners that sent echoes of running, as when
there is a fire in the night, and London sends out runners and echoes.

And from Hamilton Place there was some trouble: the carriage doors were
opened, many pressing to shake hands, the police failing to reach him,
and the Princess preaching continuously that he was ill, so that she
was in a condition of exhaustion before they could get to the Park gate.

Just there, at that end of Constitution Hill, some man, seeing Eulalia
straining and fainting to see, snatched her up, and she saw a nose
beyond the Princess’s shoulder, to console her during her night-ride
to the coast. As to how the Princess came to be with him, and not Sir
Robert, was beyond her comprehension.

But if she could have waited, she would have seen him better, for later
the Queen would have him be seen by the people, and he was supported to
the balcony by the King and Elizabeth.

It was now first that the Palace was wrapt in a rapture of sound; and
crowds were still coming to eye its windows almost all the night long.

And the wings of the wind bruited that thing through Britain that
night: the dead was alive again, and somehow through the wonderful
wit of that wonderful Princess Elizabeth, when all the tecs had long
despaired. The heart of England softened toward Germany.

But none the less, England with all its heart longed that the next
day’s battle should be lost by Germany, and with its whole heart wrote
its hope that night, its demand—in nine million letters that drove
crazy the Circulation Office of the London Postal Department—that none
but the Prince should be the British strategist in that battle.

But of this the Queen would not hear, for seeing him on a bed strangely
before her sight, she meant to keep him, sharing her eyes, meantime,
between him and Elizabeth.

Elizabeth had calmly led him to her, saying: “Your Majesty, I have
brought you your son.”

Willy nilly, she _had_ now to be a charlatan, and it was willy, for
by heredity and nature this German girl was a greater charlatan and
farçeur than Cagliostro or Casanova: so, having some genuine dexterity,
she entertained Her Majesty half the morning in showing how clue on
clue had finally led her to the gate of “Ning Shou Kung”; nor had the
Queen’s feverish happiness the time to spy shaky spots in the chain.

Also Elizabeth related how, having gone to share with Sir Robert her
final thoughts, she would not wait, as he had been engaged with some
lady; an untruth which Sir Robert, on hearing of it, knew to be an
untruth, though now, of course, he was discreetly mum; so that the
Queen, and the Prince, remained unconscious that, not one, but _two_,
rescue parties had gone to “Ning Shou Kung” that night.

What the Queen, or no one, could definitely gather was _why_ the Prince
ever went to “Ning Shou Kung,” or its inmates’ motive for imprisoning
him! for the Prince, under contract to Oyone, refused details—the
motive was “political”; and though a mob sacked some of the rooms
of “Ning Shou Kung” the next day, its inmates were soon back in it
unpunished—to the wonder of public and police. Only Oyone lived no more
there, having no confidence in the Prince’s promise; and with her were
Chinnery and the air-boat.

But to the Queen’s fever details were of little importance for the
moment; there he lay safe; his saviour was her favourite and elect for
him; and “All, all, Teddy,” she said that morning, “you owe to this
dear and knowing head.”

At which the Prince lifted himself, bowed, kissed the Princess’s hand
in a particular manner. The Princess’s forehead rushed into a blush,
her eyes blazed. The Queen’s bent head dropped a tear. It was an
engagement.

Some moments later, though, the Prince again raised his head to say: “I
fancy, Your Majesty, that I shall be well enough for the fight”—and she
started! knowing that tone of her son.

He, for his part, had it in him that Eulalia lay dead of Oyone’s hand,
and, on the whole, thought well of wars.




                              CHAPTER XVII

                                THE FLOOD


All that morning Britain was rent by a civil war of placards, “Too
Ill,” “An Hour Will Decide,” “He Will Be Present—Special,” “The Doctors
Forbid,” “Hope Abandoned,” “Prince Leaving Waterloo,” “For Her Skipper
was Ted!”—this last a _Star_ 4th edition placard before noon, which the
widow’s mite was spent to buy.

It was a bright spring morning, breezy: but for him in that compartment
the sun was black in eclipse behind a shadow “like unto the son of
man”: for he had come out of prison to a world perfectly new, in which
the chess-game of Europe that day to be decided, so momentously in
others’ eyes, was to him child’s-play.

“_China!_” he breathed: “how queer! how abstruse!”

When laughter among his suite behind reached his ear in snatches, it
touched him with a sense of astonishment that men should laugh under
the sun. But they did it in ignorance.

He was as surprised as at finding himself straying on a planet where
every plant is saffron, and the heavens a heavy yellow, and stared
before him, smiling with a child’s amaze, his “well-dead” Eulalia
pushed into the back of this brain by Li Ku Yu in the front: for that
shadow like unto the son of man eclipsing the sun dangled a pigtail.

Always, from boyhood, he had thought that Li Ku Yu was born to modify
things—would invade India and Siberia—and that he, the Prince, was
somehow ordained to checkmate him; but his heart had never really
conceived that the stars some night in time might look down upon a
yellow Europe.

Some words of the Japanese girl heard in his confinement had caused him
to start and shy; but it was not that which now bent his head.

He held in his hand a document, that day translated by the Private
Secretary, addressed to him as President of the P.C.N.S. by a certain
Oberstwachtmeister Bergmann, a refugee from Kiao-Chau, just arrived in
Europe, and his eyes read and reread of themselves....

“This my Memorial, which at the same time I venture to address to my
Imperial Master and to your Royal Highness....

“The Memorialist’s escape was due alone to his disguise in the costume
of a Mongolian camel-driver, and to the good graces of the said Hsi,
the junkman.... The Memorialist cannot think that any other European
has been so favoured by Divine Providence.... The scanty European
garrisons were overpowered without difficulty in the same night....

“He has divided the Chinese Empire into 240 corps regions, each
containing a population of two millions, each region being subdivided
into 150 sections, each section to provide one line infantry regiment,
twenty sections forming an infantry-brigade-command, forty an
infantry-divisional-command, the latter under Japanese generals, the
former under both Japanese and Chinese....

“In each region have been quartered the field army-corps elements,
the staffs, recruiting _dépôts_, _dépôts_ of artillery, transport,
clothing, and camp-equipment, and supplies of food and forage.

“Each corps has been provided with a corps-cavalry-brigade of
great dimensions, whose weapon in the main is the “long spear” of
the Daimios, and the animals camels and mules mainly; the regular
organisation of a corps being completed by eighteen batteries of
cannon, six artillery parks, six sections of artificers, six telegraph
sections, twenty-five companies of pontooners, and forty-five
field-bakeries.

“The Memorialist estimates that during the past four months some
30,000 rifles and 20,000,000 rounds per month have poured from Japan
into China, in addition to artillery, swords and spears.

“Many of the conscripts seem to be still armed with nothing but a poker
or a club, which may be considered a sufficient equipment for some of
the elements of a war-host which includes many classes of women, and
may more resemble a locust-swarm than an army.

“For each peloton is provided an armoured cart of considerable length
and weight, making a kind of locomotive shelter-trench with loopholes,
to serve the purposes of transport, of travel, and of defence.

“The Memorialist considers that the China of the moment little
resembles the China habitually conceived by Europeans....

“He regards it as a country characterised by much unrest, and impelled
by a very remarkable tendency toward migration.... The presence and
personality of this one man appears to have acted as an intoxicant, or
goad, upon the masses of the people, goading them to a vague angriness
and a very extravagant adventurousness....

“The load of new taxation is borne with a patience due to their daily
expectation of Messianic marvels.... Li Ku Yu is everywhere regarded as
a sort of angelic juggler....

“The exploitation of the mineral mines of Manchuria, Quang-tung,
Heilung-Chiang and the Kirin Provinces, have yielded to so exact and
administrative an intellect an adequate exchequer.... The results of
all which the Memorialist holds to be at hand....”

The results were present: for a _Times_ paragraph had it that on the
previous evening a yellow regiment had entered Europe, and put to the
sword the Ural _volost_ round Mount Iremel.

He, for his part, so ill, felt his back bend under this thing.

Moreover, a wireless telephone to the train gave the rumour of three
German brigades having quietly occupied Brussels overnight, of a German
squadron engaging the forts of La Floride and de l’Heure in artillery
duels, seeking to effect a landing at Havre or Honfleur.

The French, then, and the British on the French frontier, were to
be taken in the back—that seemed the meaning: this, indeed, being
Germany’s week, in which, if she failed, she failed—perhaps failed
anyway: and now like a gambler staggery and callous, was throwing her
last throw.

The crowd, therefore, of captains and commanders, summoned to
Government House on the Prince’s arrival, met with a flush of
excitement at this German tidings; but a mood of excitement new to
their nerves awaited them there.

The Prince, standing near a window, as the room filled, could see a sea
of heads without, and his face-muscles suddenly convulsed toward tears,
seeing them, he thinking that there are tears in things, and that lives
are like waves, and like leaves....

All that region of England, in fact, had been pouring itself for two
days into Southsea, Portsea, Gosport, Portsmouth, and a bustle of
“them that go down to the sea,” mixed with the other multitude, gave
the day an air of gala. From the Portsea quays, the Cumber, the Hard,
the harbour had an aspect of preparation for some great day and date,
the Portsmouth inner harbour pregnant with craft, with a rattle of
anchor-chains, a chaos of smokes and sails, scouts outgoing, incoming,
and gulls that were aeroplanes playing in the air. But it was not
holiday that was in men’s minds.

The Prince by this time had had copies of the Memorial handed round;
and, as he rose, four-striped now and banded, the others hung on his
face, his manner, his phrases in a hunger of curiosity, with criticism,
with question and wondering.

“After what you have read, gentlemen,” he said, “little need be said
now, for if this destiny is incredible to you to-day, I prophesy that
to-morrow you will see it. In which case, what to do? The P.C.N.S.,
you see, have conspired with Admiral of the Fleet, Sir John Shepherd,
to tempt me into accepting command, and no doubt you wonder, like me,
what sin I have committed: however, here we are—weather winky—sick
skipper at the wheel. Thank God, we belong to a lot who may be a common
enough mob in easy years, but will be well groomed on Judgment Day.
I don’t think we are going to be afraid—even of throwing off our old
modes of doing and thinking in the face of this new day: for we in this
room are the rulers; Civil Power, Navy Staff, are out of it now; and so
I say, since this thing is on our backs, and we may be bitterly wanting
the ships which we shall sink to-day, let us beg the enemy to go back,
and not bother. What do you say to it?”

He sat: and from half, perhaps, a sound of approval surrounded the
table; but others, hardly yet grasping the reality of the Dragon
Antichrist’s advance, sat silent, their eyes bent upon the papers;
and when Sir John Shepherd, an old gentleman, spoke, it was to read a
memorandum of the enemy tonnages, from which it appeared that Britain’s
tough tussle over the ocean had left the allies a preponderance of
32,000 tons in newest-type capital ships.

But it was the Prince’s words that more and more filled the mind....

His flag had been hoisted on the _Queen Mary_; and by 3 o’clock the
Cumberland and Southsea Castle guns were gonging god-speeds to the
double column going at six cables down the flood.

Already at that hour a big-ship battle was in progress with the raiders
on the Havre forts, though the forts themselves had previously been
stilled, and a landing of infantry affected.

But the enemy’s main body was away in lat. 52 between Harwich and
Rotterdam, though their _objectif_ was understood to be our south
coast, the whole east being very thickly patrolled by mosquito
flotillas.

However, about five o’clock, when opposite Brighton, the Prince
received tidings that the enemy’s fleet had turned northward, and he
then signalled eighteen knots—forced draught for his slowest units.

A little later the three ships, _Antrim_, _Argyll_ and _Cæsar_, all
very lame, were sighted southward, as the sun went down, these steering
apparently for Newhaven from the _fracas_ round Havre.

Off Beachy Head the Frenchmen _Jean Bart_ and _Danton_ came up to take
their place in the port British column, these being said to be the only
sound capital ships now left to France.

At the fall of darkness the Germans were still turned northward, and
the British, two interminable processions of searchlights, worked on
at the chase until eleven in the night, when (nigh the Thames-mouth)
the Prince heard by wireless that the Germans had turned south; and he
then changed his formation to single column line ahead at sixty-six
revolutions.

However, the night being rather gloomy, gusty (though the sea was
smooth), the enemy apparently gave the slip somewhere about Long Sand,
and were found to be some miles south at one o’clock. The British,
pretty well in touch, put down the helm to come at them.

It was ten minutes later that a scout-cruiser came in with the news
that probably all along the east coast of England and Scotland a battle
of destroyers and submarines was then raging; and the Prince’s head
fell upon a table to consider it. His thought was: “I wish I was only
well....”

In the midst of which his flag-captain pushed in his head to say: “Here
comes the comet, Sir!” and the Prince rushed to see what was already a
_chose vue_ to everyone else—a brightness sheening on the sea’s eastern
horizon.

It soon had the night alight, and yonder to the south-west, a crowd of
toys, lay the enemy.

And now the Prince wrapped up in oilskins, signalled his departure down
to the ninth in the line (Sir John Shepherd, the _Lion_), and was away
with a sub in a hydroplane of high speed, a night-glass eager at his
eyes.

Within sixteen minutes he was in the cabin of Grand-Admiral von
Bachberg, the _Donnernde_; in thirty he was spurting back to the
British, his blood up, his proposals of peace having been coldly
received; and now his illness was in the background of his being.

He immediately ordered the fleet northward, calling a meeting in his
wardroom, where, speaking very quickly, he said: “Gentlemen, we have
to fight, and the thing now is to do it a little trickily. Their
object, of course, is to destroy our resistance to invasion; all
along the coast the attempt is now going on in detail; and, whether
they themselves are destroyed in the attempt or not, the attempt is a
success, if they destroy _us_. Well, then, since fight we must, let’s
fight shy and fly; let’s kill them without dying ourselves (“_Bravo!_”
and laughter). We _can_: for I’ve seen people snatch up glowing coals
and juggle them trickily on their palms without a scorch, and people
prettily handle nettles without ever a sting. This, then, I recommend
as your primary object—not to be sunk by them; and this, as your
secondary—not to sink them; but to capture them; for I tell you that
you may be wanting ships in Europe.

“And now you want to know—in two ticks—how I think these two objects
can be accomplished.”

He proceeded to lay before them a plan of battle.

By this plan, every British ship was to present a broadside to the
enemy; and every enemy ship was to present herself end-on (whichever
way she turned), to be raked fore and aft by some British.

And the method was quite simple!

The British were to fight in two lines ahead at right angles—along too
sides of a square—with the enemy between.

One British line was to lie east and west, one, a mile eastward of
this, was to lie north and south. He read lists of the ships which he
designed to fill each line.

If an enemy ship turned her broadside to the British ship attacking
her, the British ship was to desist from that particular ship, leaving
her to be raked fore and aft by some ship in the other British line,
to which she would then be end-on: the British aim being, not to kill
ships, but to kill guns and crews, not to shoot at hulls, but to shoot
at decks.

Some other hurried instructions, and the throng of captains were
darting back over the ocean to their various vessels, a blaze raging
in breasts where depression had reigned; instantly the new mood was
pervading the navy; the flagship signalled the battle word: “Sausage
and Smashed”; far over the vast of the ocean the laugh, the challenge,
passed; and Jack, conscious whose gallantry had him now in hand,
buckled to the trouble with an alacrity glad to the galaxy.

And the instant the fleet was out of the enemy’s sight it split into
two: the flagship with 1st and 3rd battle and cruiser squadrons moved
east, south-east, south; the Second-in-Command, mainly with 2nd and 4th
squadrons waited, then went south.

And before the enemy could realise the plan, the Battle of Margate
was upon them—a big ship drama, though all the North Sea fought that
morning in smaller combats; and the comet’s searchlight, urgently
journeying, solemn in the morning, saw.

For three minutes the two flagships were engaged: for when the
_Donnernde_—the behemoth of the Germania Yard, 35,000 tons, the largest
warship yet launched to load the ocean, the men of whose stern were as
foreign to her for’ard crew as Holborn men do not know what Strand men
do—when she, reserved by Germany for this day, turned her broadside
to the _Prince of Wales_ in the British north, she faced the _Queen
Mary_ in the British east, and from the frying-pan was in the fire. An
outbreak of a thousand thunders struck her suddenly dumb, strewed her
superstructure, funnels, masts, guns, steering-gear, bow-works, all in
the shout of one sharp shower; and she lay a flagrant log on a crimson
sea, after lodging three shells in the _Queen Mary’s_ engines.

When, twenty minutes later, the _Queen Mary_ went down by the bow, a
boat that carried the Prince and sixteen sank; but by swimming they
got to the _St Vincent_; and when the _St Vincent_ was sinking, as day
broke, he boarded the _Britannia_ in a boat, having nine lives that
night.

By which time the fight was all but done; the sea a reddish scene of
wreckage wherever the eye could reach; and the dawn came strangely that
morning.

By now results could be estimated. A third more British had sunk
than German, Russian, Italian: the fact being, that the British, in
presenting broadsides, had presented a greater area to fire than the
enemy to them, so that the enemy’s more numerous hits had hulled many
British; and some naval criticism has blamed the Prince, his plan being
what it was, for not engaging at closer quarters than he did.

Be that as it may, the enemy’s more numerous hits proved to have
wrought far less havoc each than the British: so that the thirty
remaining British were still mainly battle-worthy, while the
thirty-four remaining enemy were gunless, some capable of repair, but
shaved of upper-works, and British captures.

The destruction, meantime, among the smaller craft in that vast battle
along the coast had been enormous; but, as to the Margate Battle,
such a result, when the country heard it that forenoon, without quite
troubling about how the trick could be done, was heard as a wonder, the
work of a wizard with a switch which he whirls.

Hodge at the hedge-side, the jobber at the station, the Queen in her
chamber, stood astare at this news, then crazily flew to proclaim that
the Prince of Wales was again bringing Germany in chains, and the war
was warred, and wire-gun had finally beaten Krupp, and comfortable
peace and the day of plenty come again, for ever.

The war, however, was hardly ended: for while the treble of British
bells were again singing to glen and city, German brigades were surging
toward Paris from the west, and three regions of Eastern Europe were
putrid with yelling yellow troops—though during that forenoon this
fact was not known in western Europe, for everywhere the first work of
the yellow men was to destroy the telegraph; and precisely like the
night-floods of African rivers they sprang up to roll over Europe.

But before nine in the night, when the Prince landed at Dover, planning
how best to call warning to western Man, the shriek which was already
rushing through Europe, as of a woman fleeing with shrieks in the pangs
of travail, had reached to British ears. No bell greeted his coming
that evening.

He, for his part, though the heavens fell, felt that he must see yet
once that face which he supposed to be now four days dead; and, as
he could not go himself to get her—again ill in a reaction from the
battle-night, and gashed in the chest—a young man, a certain Lord Percy
Burnett, an aide-de-camp, left Dover at midnight on the mission, with
the 2nd Somersetshires in his mind’s eye.

A fortnight of appalling haps was to be his lot in that howling anarchy
that he now found the Continent to be.

He was shot in the leg by a squad of flying patrols while riding by
night through a pine-wood between Rouen and St-Pierre-les-Elbœuf, in
which a German brigade had an examining-post posted; and he was kept
prisoner as a spy five days and taken to Vaux near Paris: for, as may
be conceived, the momentum of the new German incursion needed _time_ to
check itself, just as the machinery for recalling the British troops
from Europe needed time to be put in motion; so that while Europe was
fleeing in tens of millions to her western and southern ports before
those spread wings of the yellow pestilence, and while the world’s
mercantile marine was churning the seas toward their screaming, German
troops on the back and front of British were getting into touch on a
front of fifty miles over the plain of Picardy, blind to all but this
one last cast of the dice, one last orgy of carnage, and then to fly.
They met on a day when every Russian roadside between Archangel and
Bessarabia was already red with butchered moujiks, when Mongolian flesh
had glutted the guns of Königsberg, and overflowed them; the next day
yellow was on the glacis of Coblenz, in the gardens and bedrooms of
Metz; it swarmed over the European combatants like a wall that falls
upon three battling boys; and what the Europeans mutually slew the
yellow men mutilated.

When Lord Percy Burnett, after many adventures, arrived in sight of
Bar-le-Duc castle, where he had hopes of coming in touch with the
2nd Somersetshires, no battalion of Somersetshires was any longer in
existence, and Bar-le-Duc was a smouldering ruin. The same night he was
flying westward with a banefuller stain of yellow on the brain than
Eulalia’s remains.

These North-French hordes were a portion of the central tentacle of
the three great tentacles which the Mongolian race stretched over
Europe—Midland tribesmen, these, of Shansi, Shensi, Kansu, who, after
reaching the borders of Chinese Turkestan by train, had trailed itself
in interminable caravan through Tarim and those desert stretches of
Siu-Kiang and Chinese Turkestan which, in his earlier day, Li Ku Yu had
strewn with masses of Mohammedan dead.

These were they whose front had been reported on the Caspian foreshore
while nightly the stars still marked their five corps camped from
Kashgar to Bokhara, marked the bakeries’ blaze, the lament of the
baby at the breast, the tethered camels’ clamouring—corps that had
very little resemblance in extent and organisation to the corps in
which men had yet gone to war, since the units of a corps would have
occupied 1200 miles of road (supposing it could have moved over one
road), and have occupied thirteen days in passing any one point: the
administrative convoys and regimental trains occupying by themselves
more territory than is customary for all an ordinary corps.

Of a sallower hue, true Hans, with little Manchu admixture, were the
sinews of the second tentacle, Hunanese, tribesmen of Fukien, Kuantung,
industrious blades, hard-handed by habit, short of stature, sturdy,
who had furnished washermen to Sydney and ’Frisco, and diggers to the
Zootpansberg: men to whom a li, or a pinch of salt, was much, who now
already on the march saw salt squandered round them, with rice, dried
vegetables, tea, sausages, pressed meats, fresh meats, a foretaste of
the Hopeland they are pressing to.

These in seven corps, separated sometimes by quite short distances of
thirty or forty miles, drop half-a-corps for Bengal, as they go working
in interminable worms up to the “Roof of the World” by the caravan
routes betwixt the sources of the Mekong and Yangtsekiang; and under
heavens that weep ceaseless rains, by great swollen streams, they go
pouring, through groves of the mulberry-tree, by priest-cities droll as
a Gulliver’s dream, and by cantonments where their four _échelons_ of
auxiliary convoys take up deposits of cereals, biscuits, hay, two of
the administrative convoy _échelons_ being half-a-day’s march behind
the regimental trains, the other two bringing up supplies from the
rear, the cattle marching between advanced columns and the main body.

As to the third main array, which was the first actually to turn
a European villager into stone, they were composed of the taller
northerners, most of them nomads already by mood and heredity,
Mongolians, Manchurians, Kirinese, Pekingese. Their twenty corps
left Northern China desert, to find the ice of Lake Baikal already
melted, and to be carried across in their trains and armoured carts by
train-ship to the Baikal village side.

From which third-first mass of power, three corps branched off, about
Omsk, to turn toward Balkash and the sources of the Irtish, where the
Central Plateau of Asia has its western gate, thence to go swarming
like many waters down upon those lowlands and lonesome steppes, where
the yowling of the wolf’s mouth breaks the moon’s muteness round about
the Aral Sea, where Russia had so clutched, and in vain spent her
strength.

But even on these arid tracts, there seems to have been no creaking of
the commissariat machine, each unit of a host carrying some utensil
like a mess-tin, containing eight pounds of emergency rations, which it
was death to touch except in extreme need, and each corps headquarters
having droves of dogs, mules, camels, cattle, sufficient at a pinch for
six days’ food.

This streamlet of the northern stream crossed the Caspian narrows from
Krasnovodsk to Baku in twenty-six hours on huge sail-pontoons which the
pioneering (Midland) stream had constructed for its own passage three
days previously: for, by reason of the inconceivable legions which
formed a corps, works could be turned out in hours which other great
aggregations of men would take weeks to begin—the _objectif_ of the
streamlet being the conquest of the Caucasus, and the occupation of New
and Little Russia, as well as of an already Mongol Hungary, while the
pioneering five and twenty were to be Central and Northern European, as
the Thibetan seven Southern European.

Wherever the flood met resistance, as at Königsberg, Paris, Venice,
it was precisely like the resistance of isolated obstacles blocking
a tide; and long before the obstacle was down the tide was about and
beyond it.

It was German forts, really, which furnished the first line of defence,
since in Russia, now utterly an anarchy, part of her nationals fled;
part hid until caught; the rest stared and perished: for the coming of
the yellow feet seems to have been everywhere preceded by rumours of
such a suggestion as to transmute many into pillars—mephitic infamies,
massacre complicated by madness—and it was as if somewhere the earth
had opened to pour forth a smoke that, as it rolled and approached,
clutched the throat with drought, and smote the foot motionless: so
that a refugee, a bugler of the Kuban _voisko_, could report that half
his village stood rooted, staring at yellow troops pelting barefoot
upon them down a lane, and could not stir, fascinated and paralysed
like birds by serpents, like men by spectres, seeing in that crowd
of countenances nothing but a visit of ghosts, ghosts bloodless with
lust of gore, bonily ugly, with rigid grins, and it was then as if
every grave gave up its dead in the great and dreadful day of God, so
that many a woman stood quite mute, rooted, and died of white affright
before ever the spear could pierce her, the club crush her skull, or
the blunderbuss blow out her astonishment and awe; and of those who
fled many died later in a delirious frenzy of memory.

And with instant versatility these eastern pioneers turned from the
work of murder to the works of industry, divisions disintegrating
into brigades, into regiments, into battalions, to form communes of
peasants drinking _vodka_ instead of _samshu_; so that millions of
sticks in midfields round Ural villages were showing some Chinese
claimant’s name, and the Pechili housewife, vowing now to be sage
after the carnage and scarlet dark debauch, was taking stock of her
new belongings, before the slaughter round Paris and Venice was half
accomplished.

It was at these two points that the flood was longest dammed, because
Paris was “impregnable”—or would have been to any other army with the
few aeroplanes used by the Orientals; and because Venice was an island
when the Malghera Garrison had once blown up the Ponte Sulla Laguna.

Yet even here three days saw it all over.

In Paris nearly half-a-million people had been trapped, with such a
speed did the avalanche sweep from Coblenz westward; and these, with
that desperate pride and chivalry of Frenchmen, decided to enrich with
flesh the marsh-land of Île de France ere they perished.

The outer _ceinture_ of forts—Cormeilles, Franconville, Montmorency—had
aeroplanes in plenty, with great 30·5 cm. guns good and new, not half
the Garrison of Paris had fled; so, like a last rock standing out of
the sea of European ruin, Paris stood redly desperate; and when the
yellow hordes, after blowing up railways, drew lines nearly forty-five
kilometres in diameter, and dashed with siege-guns upon Domon, it was
to find Paris of harder heart than Port Arthur.

But the flood was already far west of Paris.

That same night, near eleven, a thin westering moon illumined a
moorland near St Quentin, in the south-east corner of which was a gipsy
camp without any fire, and on a sort of road running north-and-south
across it an ambulance waggon—stationary, since its one horse had just
dropped dead.

But on the heath were three nags, shaggy and long-maned, which
three Tommies in scarlet with white facings were trying to catch in
wide effort, looking like ghosts running crazy over the moor in the
moonlight’s vague mood, when suddenly a flock of fifteen Chinamen and
women came running out of coppice to the south: and, catching sight of
the gipsy camp, the waggon, the runners, these let out the scream which
ever jumps from Chinamen at anything sudden, and went pelting to their
right for the gipsies.

At the same time two ladies, Eulalia and Sister Darling, who had been
standing by the waggon, darted into it, snatching their rifles; the
three Tommies dropped into bracken, and began to pot at the Chinese;
and the flock of gipsies, screeching, scattered and ran.

Three of the Chinese instantly dropped shot, seven dropped into cover
to engage the Tommies’ fire, and five, changing direction, dashed for
the waggon.

On the waggon beds were three wounded, a German, nearly dead, an
Englishman, one-legged, and a young Frenchman, an army aviator named
Bonet, his left arm in a sling.

Besides these, there was a certain Burslem, who, in the flight
north-westward, had somehow become associated with the waggon—a
“living-picture” adventurer, of whom now the Chinese were likely to
make a dead picture.

He, with Bonet and Eulalia, took aim at flaps, while Sister Darling
knelt in the dark behind, her rifle grounded—the battle meantime
cracking away between the seven and the Tommies, while over the rough
road and over scrub pelted the five nigher with silent footsteps, like
death’s-heads running, the one on the road naked-breasted to the waist
but for a bandoleer, one to the left without pigtail, a girl in cotton
trousers, her gun stuck gawkily out before her, running furtively as on
hot bricks with long strides, her mouth howling wide without sound.

When they were a hundred yards off, a clammy hand in the dark was
laid on Eulalia’s arm, clammy on clammy, and a hoarse throat strove to
utter: “Dear, don’t shoot: leave it to the men.”

No answer: the next moment Bonet fired, and like an echo Eulalia, and
like an echo Burslem.

The Chinese girl stopped running, looked downward, sat down.

At the same moment a fourth shot, which rang out of bracken from a
Tommy stopped the Chinaman who was on the path, he, after some thought,
suddenly snatching up bracken with passion, as he dropped.

The other three Chinese, pealing shrieks now, ran on toward the waggon.
But shot after shot met them: two fell coming; the third fell flying.

The battle of seven-with-three, meanwhile, had become a battle of
five-with-two, the Tommies stealing ever nearer to the Chinese.

In the midst of which the girl sitting solitary in the gorse gurgled
forth a sort of dolorous sing-song of two notes, one _sol_ and one
_mi_, like a death-dirge just audible: upon which out to her dashed
Sister Darling.

“Katie, mind, come back!” cried out Eulalia.

She might as well have cried to the deaf dead....

As Sister Darling ran, a shot carried away half her left ear, fetching
a scream from her, whereupon Eulalia in a forage-cap, rifle in hand,
dashed out to her, and they ran toward the sitting girl; but as Sister
Darling in advance bent to raise the girl, in Eulalia some nerve of
passionate aversion burst out with, “Ah, don’t _touch_ her!”

In a moment more, however, she was assisting to lift the girl, who
moaned; but when a shot sang past her, she tossed from the girl—all
their actions being characterised by that jerkiness and distraction of
brains agitated to franticness, and, dropping upon her face in gorse,
she began to pot at the potting Orientals, while Sister Darling, who
was very strong, trotted under the girl’s burden toward the waggon,
dropping red upon yellow.

But three minutes afterwards the firing ceased, and three Chinese were
spied stealing back to the coppice whence they had popped out.

And now the ambulance-lamp was lit for some minutes, to glow upon
visages haggard with hunger and anguishes, while the gashed ear, and
the girl’s hurt, were dressed, and two of the Tommies, having found
their comrade dead, came in.

Whereupon they sat in grass round the waggon to debate, Burslem
observing that their one chance now was to abandon the waggon, and
“make paces to the coast before the Chinese reach it, if they haven’t
already.”

“Then, oh, go,” Sister Darling implored: “Eulalia, go for me! Why, why,
should you all wait and lose your last chance like this!”

“You are not going to catch us leaving you, miss,” said one of the
Tommies, “so it’s no use.”

“But this is a lunacy!” cried the little Bonet in good English: “oh,
but frankly, mees, pardon me, one is no longer able to consider you as
mentally sound. For in clinging to these two men who are dying, you
wilfully murder us six all. Me, I call that—distraction!”

Upon which Sister Darling clapped palms to forehead, distracted, crying
out to God: “I _can’t_ leave them! I would if I could, but I can’t!”

“Right you are, sweet!” cries Eulalia.

“Then,” said Burslem, “since Miss Darling persists in being so wilful,
I think the time is come for us others to consider whether we should
not leave her. Anyway, let us put it to the vote, and if——”

In that instant he was flying, and the council vanished, both the
Tommies in their scarlet lying dead, shot out of hedge-bush to the
west, the two ladies flying into the waggon, Bonet and Burslem buried
away somewhere; and five Chinamen, bursting out of bush, were running
wild-eyed, hot-footed, sweating, gasping gasps audible from afar,
toward the waggon.

One of them Eulalia laid low by three quick-successive bangs four yards
from the entrance-steps; the other four were hotly in, whelming the
ambulance with the raw sirocco of their breaths and frenzied presence,
fleshing a spear quick as one-two-three in the two wounded men and the
Chinese woman, who whooped a shriek, then overpowering and tearing down
the ladies: for many Chinamen did not at once butcher white women, but
idled with them awhile; and if the white woman chanced to be a saint,
or a princess, that made no difference to Chinamen.

Now, then, was the mouse amid ill cats.

However, a few seconds before Eulalia’s first yell of rage burst
from her entrails like a blast of blasting-gelatine upon the night’s
silence, Bonet and Burslem were at the ambulance-shafts, taking
careful-trembling aim lest the ladies should be shot; and soon they had
two of the Chinese shot in the waggon, and two as they were getting
away.

And now it was a question of capturing two of the moor-nags—no easy
thing; and there were the two little gipsy nags; on which four the four
rode barebacked northward, with halters, flogging the nags.

But they knew that few escaped—a new rashness of the Chinese in
the face of gun-fire now showing itself everywhere, as Paris was
then witnessing, Venice: for in neither case was any assault at all
necessary, since the population of Paris was already living on dogs
and cats, and some days’ investment must have ended it; while, as to
Venice, four Japanese cruisers stood beyond the Lido after sinking the
Austrian _Tegetthof_ and _Franz Ferdinand_, and capturing a mob of
Austrian and Italian gunboats: which cruisers, though under orders not
to shell Venice, stopped supplies from the sea (if any had come), and
had under their guns the _murazzi_ of the Lido, and the Lagoon forts.

It was only necessary, then, to wait: but waiting was no longer to
the taste of yellow men—rather dash through marshes of pigtails to a
city-gate now than tarry an hour: for, having got the taste, their
swarms dashed themselves forward, with a trembling intolerance of
obstacles, for the last bath and draught. To drink the red sea dry, to
sin now by mountains, to be crimson in iniquity, to sink, to sigh, to
die of crime—whatever kept them one second from this end they fell
upon with frenzy, making assaults in close order, whose masses the
rains of flame from the air and from forts mowed down by thousands in a
moment.

At St Cyr the guns glutted their gorges with carnage until their tired
rifling could no longer keep range.

One by one, Domon, St Germain, Versailles fell.

Before the seven batteries of the monstrous Fort de Marly massacre was
so common, and the Azrael of mortality so mawful, that at one moment
the Chinese line, advancing with scaling-ladders, wavered and shrank:
whereupon a little Japanese colonel dashed forward to take the fort
alone, calling, waving. They stood lashed by gashing gusts of bullets,
but would not go: he fell. A major dashed forward, waving, calling
_Come!_ They would not budge: he fell. A captain dashed forward to take
the fort alone, calling, waving, inviting. Still they shied at it: he
fell. But, as he fell, the yellow men yelled, pell-mell they pelted;
now red hell will not repel them; and yellow hell within twenty minutes
was the citadel.

At Cotillons the stock of ammunition was all exhausted in slaughter
before the overflow. The next day Vanves was overflowed, Ivry,
Montrouge—closer and closer like a death-malady spreading relentlessly
to the heart. Paris, frantic with panic, knew that yellow was at St
Cloud, at Putoux, at Suresnes, at Sèvres.

That same night the Venetian Canal Grande presented a strange
sight—gondolas and corpses—one throng—gondolas gaudy with lanterns of
Chinese and Japanese design, like a night of Carnival in the olden
times of Venice, only a millionfold more vermilion-tinted, splashed
with pageantry: for within some hours the Chinese were washed and at
home in a town, like old owners, and lords waddling in slippers through
inherited residences; and since Venice, like Paris and Buda-Pesth,
was intended to be the capital of one of the three great States into
which the new Europe was to be federated, greedy had been the press and
competition to get _pied-à-terre_ in it: so that such a crush of human
beings now brushed shoulders with a buzzing of bees within those _rii_
and narrow _calli_, as no city of man had ever seen.

Hour after hour the stars, the comet, saw the watch-night swarming and
gory; half the Ghetto to the north-west a conflagration glaring on
the night; all night that lunar glory of gondolas gliding through the
glooms of the gory Lagoon, clogged with throngs of goggling eyeballs,
pigtails grinning dead amid the Christian dead, all up the Grand Canal,
the Giudecca, away out to the Cemetery and Murano, without end; all
those Byzantine palaces—the Cà d’Oro, the Palazzo Foscari, dreams
of colour and _décor_—reeling unceasingly with the abomination of
desolation; all through the Giardini Pubblici prostrate lives lying
amid corpses, gorged like the cormorant with orgy, dying of licence
in wine and white flesh; all among the graves of the Cimitero; of the
Jews’ Burial-ground; up in the Campanile, the Clock Tower; down in
the vaults of St Mark’s; among the columns of San Giovanni e Paolo,
where an image of Puffa, the many-handed, a joss of eagle-headed Fé,
and of Gan, the big-bellied glutton, grinned at the Mary Magdalene of
Bergamasco, whose marble must have blushed.

Throughout Paris the next night it was the same, yellow men despising
rosewood to carouse at tables of flesh, despising eiderdown to sigh
on couches of flesh; publicly on the Grand Boulevard it raged, in the
Madeleine, Notre Dame; the Dragon-flag on the Elysée flapped.

By which time the four fugitives from St Quentin had contrived to
snatch their lives through jeopardy to within five miles of Douai; and
at about nine in the night were making their way—on foot now, since
their hungry nags had failed them, they themselves footsore, famished,
foredone—when there reached their ears that shriek of the Chinese, well
known now to them, more detested now and dreaded than very death.

A crowd of about a hundred, carousing in a cabaret two hundred yards
ahead on the left of the road, had spied them in the moonlight before
they could hide: and out they flew.

But on the right, closer to the fugitives, were three detached
houses—mansions almost: so they dashed into a gateway, locked the
gate, then through shrubbery to a door, locked it, up a stair, locked a
door, and dropped, all the four, upon a bed, to pant.

Within a minute, though, they were aware that the Chinese were scaling
the gate and garden-railings; and they darted to a window to see the
garden beginning to teem with Chinese.

A moment more and the Chinese were battering on the front, a rough row,
like the Vox Dei, heart-horrifying.

On which Eulalia in her distraction let down the jalousie with a
racket, and dashed open the _persiennes_ to shoot—rashly! revealing
where they were—and turned to snatch her weapon.

At that moment Sister Darling said to her: “Dear, don’t: it can do no
good”; but Eulalia, her face dead-blanched like a white radish, her
teeth rigid, hissed back: “Won’t it? _I’ll_ show them a bit of Irish,”
and with a kind of dance in her gait ran back to the bed for her gun.

However, she was never to fire, for in the instant that her back was
turned a shot was fired from outside, which found Sister Darling’s
heart. When Eulalia turned again to the window, it was to see Sister
Darling down; and the gun tumbled out of her hand.

At the same time Bonet was whispering: “Let us try the back—come——”
dragging at Eulalia by the arm.

But she would not go, lay over the dying girl, who was staring as
if in scare, rolling a death-ruckle in her throat, pouring it low,
hurried, like a purring rolling. And one lover’s-kiss Eulalia pressed,
wild-whispering “beloved?” and one wild press more and deep-secret
“beloved?” then by a cruel tug Bonet had her away, and they were gone
on all-fours amid bullets, not four, but three.

By a covered arbour at the back, soft-running, they made their way down
a sort of park to stables, whose doors they secured; and in there in
blackest darkness the three sat in three corners of a spacious, paved
chamber heavy with harness and saddlery, haunted with stenches of dead
horses.

And soundless through hour and hour of the dark they crouched so
apart, shivering, without prospect, but without much care any more
for the morrow, sleepily hearing as in a dream shrieks of cheer
pealing from the Chinese, who must have crowded into the house, and
were carousing; and if one of the three slipped a little into sleep,
ever, on his starting awake, the dream-shrieks reached the ear, like a
machinery acting everlastingly, afar.

But once toward morning Eulalia started awake to another sound—an
exclamation—“In the name of God, a Blériot!”

For Bonet, shuddering from cold, had risen to pace, and in a
neighbouring chamber had stumbled upon a monoplane.

He found in it a good 7-cylinder Gnome, and, moreover, he found tools,
petrol, rugs, compass.

When he examined it with matches, it seemed good throughout; and now,
clasping one of the chassis-wheels, he sat weeping.

On pulling himself together, he mentioned that it could carry two, and
no more; and set to work.

By a large doorway it was taken out into meadow-land at the
stable-back, as day was breaking, and Bonet fastened it to a larch
there with a strand of shredded rope.

But the engine’s hubbub was instantly heard by the Chinese, who hurled
themselves out of the house to see what was stirring; and quickly Bonet
leapt to his place, Burslem and Eulalia standing pale by the plane.
Not one word as to who was to be Bonet’s passenger had even now been
uttered.

“Now, Miss Bayley, all ready,” said Burslem.

The Chinese screamed at a corner of the meadow, spying them, pelting.

“You go, if you like,” said Eulalia.

“Choose quick!” cried out Bonet intolerantly, in French.

“Women and children first, lady,” observed Burslem with a hideous grin.

A shot from the Chinese chanted past Bonet’s head.

“But _why_?”—from Eulalia—“an excellent rule for clowns and cowards:
but for _us two_, surely, the question is, whose life is the more
valuable? Mine isn’t very.”

“_Vite!_” from Bonet in a shivering shriek, “or I go alone, God be my
witness!”

At which cry Burslem snatched a revolver from his pocket, and
discharged it into his right eye. The Chinese shrieking was near.
A shot tore Eulalia’s shoulder. As Burslem dropped, she sprang up
beside Bonet, her averted head turned toward Burslem, smiling him
into eternity. And Bonet hitched the engine; her strain broke the
restraining string; she tripped down the meadow merrily amid missiles
and throatings, suddenly sat fluttering as with laughter on her throne
in the air, and before long was landing safe at Dover.




                              CHAPTER XVIII

                            THE RAY RADIATES


But days before this Lord Percy Burnett, sent to search for Eulalia’s
body, had managed to get back—with tidings on his tongue! for, though
it was known in Britain that Oriental troops were in Eastern Europe,
nothing was known of their numbers, character, and rate of advance.

It was about ten at night, and the Queen, daringly holding a Court
amid the break-up of civilisation, had lately stepped into the State
Ballroom with the Royal Family, the King _en_ colonel-in-chief of the
Coldstreams, she in an all-round crown, with Koh-i-Noor, Order of
the Garter, cloth-of-silver train, parading her Prince on her left,
her Elizabeth, the King’s Band babbling to six hundred glitterers a
_ballade_ which breathed that there was no such thing as grief or
grinning dead—not there, anyway.

On the top of which let Lord Percy Burnett drop hot-footed to have
speech with the Prince, and at Belshazzar’s banquet is handwriting on
the wall, awe, and harrowed hearts.

The Chinese had already sat down before Königsberg. And it was not a
river, it was the sea....

The Prince, listening, siffled through his teeth-edges: “Onward,
Christian soldiers....”

Suddenly he was up—and his action, when he acted, was like a clock, or
a watt, at so many units of work per second—and, throwing behind him,
“Percy, try to see the Queen,” he vanished headlong, was quickly in a
carriage at the Garden Gate, and off for “Ning Shou Kung.”

For a week, since the Battle of Margate, his thought had been: “Just
possibly, if it is true that I am tricky, I may crush Li Ku Yu at sea”;
and already he had set going a great haste of hammering, gun-casting,
overhauling, and repairing at Paisley, at Portsmouth, at Newcastle, at
Glasgow, at Sunderland, at Chatham; but even if the sea was his, the
air was Li Ku Yu’s with Chinnery’s air-boat in Oyone’s hands—perhaps in
Oyone’s head; hardly yet in Li Ku Yu’s head, since she had so lately
read aloud Li Ku’s statement that he could understand nothing of her
account of it.

Where the boat was he had no notion—it might be at “Ning Shou Kung”!
Anyway, the thing was to seize Oyone quickly.

He had had qualms, however, as to seizing her, because of his contract
with her; but while Lord Percy Burnett had been blurting his flood
of news, he had said to himself that that contract referred only to
seizure by the police, not by himself.

On the way he picked up two policemen, made them await him at the gate,
went in to find a scared Huang smoking her pipe, and, without saying
one word, took a lantern to roam in search through room after room, she
moving mutely after: and her pipe went out that night.

No sign of Oyone! He half expected to see her still sitting there
before that hole in the door, sewing, painting, speaking unceasingly;
and in that narrow long room, and in the alcove, he spent several
minutes, holding up the lantern to everything, remembering how he had
asked himself which was the yellowest, momentum or energy, and how he
had heard “boo-boo, whose boy....”

Then it was down in the grounds, prying about with the lantern’s light;
and at the back he saw an odd thing: four stakes where the air-boat
had stood! and in the garden-house on a window-ledge an odd thing: a
pipe—Chinnery’s! for it had a chloride chamber for moisture-absorption
like Chinnery’s pipes: which put anew into his head a question on which
he stood there brooding many minutes: “Is Richard Chinnery living? Is
he? Fifty words of his could rescue this Europe....”

But nothing else was found, and he went away heavy-hearted....

Yet Oyone was not, in fact, far from him—living in a solitary cottage
on the borders of Epping Forest, near which she had alighted on the
night of her flight, awaiting every day Li Ku Yu’s summons to join him
with the air-boat, which lay under tarpaulins in her back-yard. There,
too, Richard Chinnery might anon have been seen, pottering feebly in
slippers.

She, meantime, was lying quite low, her only servant a little
English girl, she herself venturing out very rarely, in general as a
coster-girl, though sometimes in the hush of night a lone figure which
was Oyone could have been caught in that back-yard of No. 11 Frith
Street, a spot which fascinated her, wringing her hands over the hole
where the Redlike Ray had lain, sure that the Prince had it now from
Eulalia, wondering where Eulalia was: for since her flight from “Ning
Shou Kung” she had been once by night through the air to France to see
the Six Millions still untouched, but had failed to discover anything
of the 2nd Somersetshires—which had been cut to pieces.

But on the day when the flood of immigration from the Continent
suddenly stopped, when the Chinese, having everywhere reached the
sea, were lying gorged in the rock-galleries of Gibraltar, and were
slaughtering the inhabitants of Hammerfest, she ventured upon a day
out as far as Regent Street, and there in a way wonderful to her came
across the Redlike Ray.

Her object was partly to buy some crêpe de Chine, partly to see that
changed aspect of things of which the papers spoke: and for hours she
enjoyed herself in it, seeing now that she need not have come in her
coster disguise, she was so utterly lost in the whirl and swirl of
this wonderful new London, whose population must have been swelled
by millions, as everywhere in Britain, the Mediterranean and Ægean
Islands, North Africa, America.

Such a brushing of shoulders like an everlasting Lord Mayor’s Day, a
polyglot of gabbling, an eager and heated atmosphere of life, thronging
the centres of streets and pavements alike, all the old ways and
restraints broken down now, everyone speaking to everyone, like members
of a jolly, hot family on a holiday, the merchant Jew of Astrakhan in
fur cap and coat, the gabardine and ear-lock of Bokhara, the hausfrau
of the Black Forest with her last packet of coffee, the Parisienne
affectedly slurring her r’s, the Amurski Cossack with his sabre, the
English girl with her blush, the drosky-driver in full-skirted coat
and fur _shapka_, all intimate in a whirlpool of intercourse, many
destitute, most more or less hungry.

France would have grumbled if Britain had overflowed her so; but
Britain—world-brotherly, world-worthy—did not grumble, though she had
once grumbled a little for nothing. If she had, it would have made no
difference.

But the shops were much less thronged, so it was not a crush which
prevented Oyone buying her crêpe in a shop at Oxford Circus, but a
commotion outside which she rushed to see. It was then near three
o’clock: a bright Spring afternoon.

The source of the trouble, whatever it was, was away down toward the
Marble Arch: for there was a pelting eastward thence of feet, and
thence came eastward a distinct wind of wailing and lamentation.

“What is it? What’s the matter?” everyone was asking everyone in that
region of the crowd round Oyone; and, even as they inquired, the word
“blind! blind!” had spread up from the west, and was with them.

Some moments more and they could see the fleeing stream of people split
in the middle of the street, the split reaching nearer and nearer, as
if a bull in eastward career was throwing them from his road into two
crushes; and all at once the cause of it all broke into Oyone’s sight—a
man madly running with spider’s legs, panting, wildly staring—a Yankee,
like Yankee caricatures, lank like ribbed sea-sand, goatee-bearded,
hugging like a terrified mother the Redlike Ray.

By this time he was in a region of people who divided before his flight
by mere imitation, without knowing why he was flying, and was being
fled from: so a cabman who was creeping westward a little eastward of
Oxford Circus took him in without question, turned with him; Oyone
flew after; and, as vehicles thereabouts could only bore their way
coaxingly, she had little difficulty in following until she met another
cab, in which she followed him eastward to Aldgate.

There he alighted, and, still wild-eyed, anon going off into
daddy-long-legged runnings, with ogling glances, he gained No. 11 Frith
Street. Oyone saw him toss one last ogle from the door, and go in.

So the Redlike Ray had been there in the cottage all the time while she
had been groaning over the hole in the ground.... She would get it now!

In that same hour the news of the Marble Arch event reached the
Prince’s ears, and _he_, too, said: “I’ll get it now.”

And the same day Eulalia, fresh come to London through the air, told
herself: “I should not delay in digging up the box for the Russian,
Hartmann.”

But look at Mr Silas P. Stickney, stretched there on his bed at No. 11,
sobbing like a child—a respectable ship’s captain, he, of “Chicago,
Illinois” (he always added “Illinois,” with a nasal fling on the
“nois”—I guess), who had lately decided to end his days in London near
a married niece, and had bought a forty-years’ lease of No. 11, to
settle in. It was even yet not furnished, save a top room.

But already he had planted the back with stripling trees, and, in
digging to plant, had happened upon the Redlike Ray, where it had been
buried by Alexis the Sexton while the house had been still “For Sale.”

Alexis had been a man of some enlightenment and science, and had once
gone a pilgrim to see Chinnery, who, with his habitual affability, had
admitted and shown him round, showing him with the rest the Redlike
Ray, not knowing that Alexis was an Anarchist, or not caring; and
as soon as ever Chinnery was said to be dead at the date of the Six
Million raid, Alexis had entered Chinnery’s place by an area window,
and was away with the ray.

He had then handed on to Hartmann the secret of the ray in the event of
his arrest or death, as Hartmann, in breathing his last, had laid it on
Eulalia to hand on to one Taska.

It had been Alexis’s terror of blindness that had protected society
from the ray during two weeks preceding his death: for Chinnery had
stuck on the box a strip of paper for “Monty’s” benefit, written with:
“Do Not Touch The Cap.”

But the burying had much obscured this. “The Cap” had been rubbed off:
and it was only by studying it through a magnifying glass that Mr Silas
P. Stickney had deciphered “Do Not Touch.”

This for three weeks had kept his eyes constantly on, and his hands
constantly off, the box. The box became the man’s mania. He _suspected_
that it was packed with diamonds, and that “Do Not Touch” was only
a bogey. But, then, it might well be an infernal machine. And the
question was: how to find out.

In the end he decided to take it into some open place, slip down the
cap-thing, and fly. If nothing happened, he would make other flying
experiments; and, if still nothing, then the thing was full of diamonds.

So, that afternoon, he had gone to Hyde Park, laid the box on a bench,
uncapped it, and fled: nor had looked back till a lamentation came to
him out of Park Lane.

Then he could see that out of the apparatus was proceeding a pencil of
rays, very large in area, though very faint, for whose strange shade he
had no name—something like the sawdust of cedar-wood—just revealed to
the eye by the dust-particles which the rays touched in the air.

But it was some time before his brain connected the ray with the
lamentation, till the lamentation spread to those who had rushed to
their windows, to those who had rushed in the street, to see why the
wailing was. Men, women, children, were every instant being struck
blind by scores.

When the truth entered his head he flew to the box, himself now very
troubled in the eyes—for _behind_ the box, too, the reflected rays
from motes in the air had a blinding effect—and catching up the box,
he dashed with it through the Marble Arch, too madly agitated, too
preoccupied with the sorrow in his own tight-shut eyes, to think of
shutting the cap, and, as he ran stretched and long-shanked, he ran
disseminating calamity and lamenting.

Three different policemen who flew to seize him stood still midway,
their knuckles in their eye-sockets, moaning: and Oxford Street was
half a moan, and half a scamper, before he had the cap closed.

And now he lay on his bed sobbing, thinking of the ill it had been
his lot to do, thinking that, with his marked appearance, he would
be tracked that day, and, if not hanged, then lynched. England was
no place for him: possibly he might hook it to America, if he looked
alive. As to that devil’s-thing, which he hardly dared look at now, he
would rebury it just as he had found it, and so, washing his hands of
its bewitchment, do a bunk for Liverpool without bidding good-bye to a
soul.

This he did: sallying out soon after dark, bareheaded, his wide hat
left behind, his beard shaved off: and Oyone, who for hours had not
taken her eyes off the house, saw him go.

She instantly slipped into the yard, found the back-kitchen open, and
in she stole, to seek, and seize, and flee.

However, to her horror of astonishment, no box: not in the little trunk
left unlocked; in no cupboard: up no chimney.

She tapped all the walls, carrying his chair to stand on, reckless if
he came back upon her, though gradually growing conscious of the ghosts
gathering round her in that gloom to mock her agonies.

When he did not come, she guessed that he had taken to flight,
but about nine ran to throw a glance out of a front window, and
now—again—saw the ray—in Eulalia’s hands, Eulalia having tranquilly
dug it up with a shovel which she had fetched, while Oyone had been
moaning about the house.

Oyone pulled her coster-shawl farther over her face and ran shivering,
tracking Eulalia eastward through teeming streets, where to shoot might
have been to shoot an unintended head, and to stab would have been to
be mobbed; Eulalia, meantime, making her way east and then north into a
tumbledown slum of tall houses, a back street rabbit-warren of Hebrews
and Slavs that ran east-and-west.

There Oyone saw her go into a house, and now propped her back against a
wall, dropping with fatigue of soul and body, thinking what next to do,
how to get the ray, and then drop and die.

Eulalia, meantime, in the wee back-room on the third floor which she
had hired at five shillings—for lodging was dear—was scribbling off
Hartmann’s message to “Taska”; and she wrapped up the Redlike Ray in
a newspaper, and directed it to “Mr Taska, Shoemaker, Bowery, New
York”—having no notion that the box was of any importance to humanity.

Oyone, during this, was being sore tempted to throw up everything for
that day, and get some rest, when she again saw Eulalia sally out—with
a parcel.

About the same size as the ray—but wrapped up: impossible to be certain
whether it was the ray or not.

Round the corner, to a crowd pressing round a pawnshop—a Saturday
night. Eulalia entered the press; and it was long to wait while she
gained an entrance, and came out again.

Then the way was along by-streets toward a main street, Oyone more than
ever uncertain now, her eyes troubled, the parcel sometimes looking
smaller to her, as if something had been taken out in the pawnshop.

But in the main street a species of little shriek pitched from her
lips: “She is posting it to the Prince!” as Eulalia made into a
district post-office.

Now, then, was the second for electric energy and concentrated venom,
all mortal things hanging on the hazard of an instant.

The throng scattered before Oyone’s fury. When Eulalia was already at
the parcels’ counter, suddenly the box was gone out of her grasp. And a
second later a tigress’s arrogant cry rang through the place: “_Do not
stop me!_”

For the room was full of men, and two postmen with empty bags on their
arms who had spotted the robbery barred her escape.

A moment more, and she was struggling like ten men with twenty men,
trying to tug off the wrapping and get at the cap to strike mankind
blind, not minding if she was struck blind, too.

But the mass of force, the number of hands, was too much for one, and
in half-a-minute she was hanging dead-like in someone’s arms, sobbing a
little in her faint.

Four then dragged her out to hand her over to the law; but after
forty yards of it, when her weight became a bore, they threw her on a
doorstep, and left her.

For in the new London snatchings and such-like acts were common, and
crime had now quite a new aspect.

Civilisation, in fact, was on the brink of disorganisation—in Britain,
too; and one of the first nerves of the State to be infected with the
disease was the police. Having, in fact, far more to do than they could
handle, they had begun to do nothing.

Thus it took them three days to trace so marked a personality as Mr
Silas P. Stickney to Frith Street—and this in spite of the zeal which a
Prince could inspire. By which time Silas and ray had well vanished.

However, two days later a report came to the Prince that on the evening
of the Hyde Park event _a certain nurse_ had been observed by three
persons carrying a black box not far from Frith Street.

“Then,” said the Prince, “_find me this nurse_.”

But that was no easy work in the new whirl and turmoil.

At any rate, as Oyone fainted, a Polish Jew handed back the box to
Eulalia, its wrapping rather damaged; but she put it on the counter,
and turned to go.

A clerk, however, called after her: “This can’t go like this.”

“Why?” she asked: “the postage will be paid at the other end.”

“American packages aren’t taken in that way now,” he answered:
“besides, it must be fastened with sealing-wax.”

But to pay the postage was more than she liked—no clothes now but what
she wore, no jewellery left but the wedding-ring, six shillings in
money from a ring just pawned.

So she took the box away, till she should be better off, wondering at
the face of the coster-girl who had snatched it, with a thought of the
Japanese at the back of her consciousness.

Oyone still lay at the door where the four men had thrown her, thinking
wearily that the ray, if it was the ray, was posted now; and she,
Oyone, had touched it, yet had it not.

Afterwards she rose to get home; and there, as soon as she had rested,
sat and wrote:

    “Li Ku Yu: strange things have happened this day. An American
    struck many blind with the Redlike Ray. I tracked him, and
    while seeking it in his house, looked out and saw the ray in
    the hands of that same Eulalia Bayley, the Prince’s honey, of
    whom I wrote. I tracked her to her lodging, after which she
    came out with a parcel like the ray-box in size, but wrapped
    up, went to a pawnshop with it, and thence to a post-office,
    where, in spite of an attempt which I made, she succeeded in
    posting it.

    “Li Ku Yu, I am not perfectly certain that it was the ray,
    nor to whom it was posted. It _may_ have been posted to the
    Prince, but many things now incline me to think that, all the
    time, this woman may be quite unconscious of its value, so it
    _may_ have been posted to ‘Taska, Shoemaker, Bowery, New York.’
    I am a work-basket thick with knick-knacks of wonderings,
    contradictions and intricacies.

    “Li Ku Yu, it is for you, who are as obvious as the Nine
    Tripods of Yü, to decide whether a ship should be sent to
    America to take the ray from ‘Taska,’ or how it is to be taken
    from the Prince, if it is he who has it, whether in this the
    Princess Elizabeth may be of use, or whether I shall first
    determine that it was really the ray then posted, though it is
    dangerous for me to be prominent and active at present, with
    the air-boat here. The foolish Chinnery still forgets when I
    get him to attempt to tell how the ray was made. I think he has
    not long to live. London is now incredible, a nostril stopped
    up with cold. Farewell.”

In order to get this to Li Ku Yu, she made a midnight trip three
thousand feet up, striking the French coast by Gravelines, where a very
great temptation suddenly assailed her to go on to Paris to spy upon Li
Ku Yu’s face; but her pride still waited to be summoned: she sent the
letter by camel-riders.

Three nights afterwards a Japanese captain, after lying low about her
house, suddenly ran to it. He had reached her by special ship from
France, with a letter in cypher within his cloak lining:

    “Oyone, my business is immense.

    “But to-morrow, the third, at noon, I transfer headquarters to
    Dunkirk, Casino des Dunes. Meet me, then, soon before the hour
    of the tiger (3 +a. m.+) two kilometres to the north with the
    air-boat. There, south of the Sea Baths that are at Rosendaël,
    I will light a fire to guide your descent.

    “You will then be requested to conduct an aide-de-camp to the
    wood of the hoard of gold.

    “It may be His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales (not so
    deeply buried as you reported) who has the Ray, or ‘Taska,’ or
    neither. I calculate, from the facts I have, that it is Taska,
    so am sending emissaries to America. But you get Mr Chinnery
    to write a dexterous letter, asking His Royal Highness to meet
    him on Rosendaël sand-dunes, that I may capture His Royal
    Highness....”

On this Oyone cried out: “I shall see him!”

But the hitch in the Chinnery-plan was that Chinnery resisted, saying:
“Oyone, it would kill me to write again to the Prince of Wales.... The
Prince of Wales has forgotten me, because God has withdrawn himself
from me....”

To this Oyone, who had suppressed two letters to the Prince, answered:
“It is only because of the war that he has not replied! Now he will fly
to you, if you write.”

“Oh, Oyone, I cannot.”

“Then, no wine to-morrow.”

This conquered Chinnery. Paper and pen were got. But when it became
a question of dating the letter from Rosendaël, his brows knit. “Why
Rosendaël?” he wished to know.

“Because I am taking you there in the air-boat.”

“Oh, not in the air again, Oyone!”

“Then, by a ship.”

But, little suspicious though Chinnery was, the whole thing scented of
a mystery: he would not: and now no threats or rage could change him.

Oyone spent the night in writing a letter in his handwriting.

It came to the hand of the Prince while dictating letters at three in
the afternoon, and he read:

                                              “+Villa de Rosendaël.+

    “+My dear Teddy+: There have been reasons for my silence, since
    I am a kind of prisoner to a girl who is your enemy. Can you
    help me for old times’ sake? I am here in a country flooded
    with yellow men, where my life is bitterness and my bread
    unleavened. If you can come to me in a ship at 3 +a.m.+ of the
    4th, when the Chinese are all asleep, I may manage to light a
    fire on the dunes to guide you to the spot where I shall be
    waiting. I ask much, my friend: but I have much to tell you of
    new inventions. A Japanese sympathiser takes this; but I am
    ill, my hand shakes, I cannot write. Your sincere friend....”

Now, the Prince, like Chinnery, may have been little suspicious, but
it was impossible for this letter to escape suspicion. “My life is
bitterness and my bread unleavened” was so furiously curious as from
Richard Chinnery.... And the bribe! “Much to tell of new inventions”
... “old times’ sake” ... “sincere friend”....

“Bring me the Japanese who brought this,” the Prince said: but the
Japanese had gone.

However, just the _possibility_ that the letter might be from Chinnery
when drunk agitated the Prince’s fingers, and drew him to see the end
of it.

At eleven he was at Dover; at midnight the fires of a swift little
yacht in the harbour were lit and banked, and a little quick-firer
from South Front Barracks mounted in her bows: at half-past one he was
darkly cruising, without lights, quite close in to the French coast,
noting an inconceivable host of floating things of every species massed
in every roadstead, port, harbour-basin; Calais sleepless; Dunkirk
flaring; each a reel of revelry mixed with military movements; no moon,
the ocean’s floor smooth like a pool, the night quite calm, darksome,
starless, till the comet (Tempel’s) entered it in Capricorn with horrid
locks sprawling aloft, tempering the vapours a little, brindling a
little the black sea in tracts of quicksilver.

At two the Prince, springing from a boat’s bow, was in Oriental
territory, in the Dragon’s jaws, he all swathed in oilskins, a black
mask over his nose, and with him in oilskins and masks twenty-seven
fellows—all that were left of his old _Asahel_ men—all armed to the
teeth with revolvers, rifles, knives, hatchets, and one of them, named
Commander Pilcher, the smartest of the smart, who had passed part of
his youth in racing over the Iowa prairies, had a lasso—the Prince
fairly sure now of a Li Ku plot to capture him, and wishing rather to
capture Li Ku Yu.

So he had come an hour before the rendezvous.

They lay in a patch of scraggy grass on a sand-hill, gazing stilly
inland.

Two miles south, on their right, a shine in the night which was
Dunkirk; on their left, a mile north, a hint of Rosendaël houses,
darkling, uninhabited now; and between Rosendaël and them a row of
seven bathing-machines on the edge of the sand before it breaks to
roll into a roughness of scrubby dunes; two boats lolling beyond the
surf; the yacht lolling a long way beyond, all dark; the surf purling
murmurings, like a murderer’s lips speaking secret things in sleep.

Half-an-hour:—and now a sound somewhere, like horses’ hoofs afar; then
ten minutes—and now a light, a fire, about half-a-mile inland, between
the bathing-houses and Rosendaël, though it was impossible to see who
lit it in its deep dune—the land all wavy here in hills and hollows;
and very quickly there was the radiance of a pharos blazing there like
a building on fire.

The watchers did not budge: no sound now, nor sight but the light.

But suddenly the Prince clutched Pilcher’s sleeve on his right,
hissing: “Pilcher! a girl!—capture at any price! if not, shoot. Follow,
you five!”—and he was flying, stooping, into the sea.

For he had spied a black object drop down out of the air a little north
and inland of the blaze: and as against the chance of grabbing both
Oyone and the air-boat in one beautiful swoop danger was nothing.

He, then, with Pilcher and five, ran north through the sea-surf past
the bathing-machines, until they had the fire behind them, then inland,
with the fire on their right, flying through hollows, dropping on
hill-tops, until they were over against the blaze, and now saw south of
them a crowd of about fifty yellow men in khaki.

At the same time they themselves were spied in the off-shine of the
fire by a hill-top sentry, who cried out and fired; and in a second a
volley flew from the group round the conflagration—without effect, the
seven adventurers being three hundred yards off, and like ghosts to the
firers with glare in their eyes.

The seven, then, successfully ran the blockade of the forty yards of
valley across the hollow; and instantly as they attained the next
hill-top the Prince’s eyes distinctly descried Oyone, hardly more than
twenty yards ahead, labouring frantically away up the next slope,
apparently to get back to the air-boat.

And between her and him, two hundred yards south, stood a group of
five—four small, one tall, whom the Prince’s eyes divined to be Li Ku
Yu.

These five must have been going to meet Oyone coming, when she had
taken fright at the firing, and had fled back to get herself and the
boat safe into the air again.

The five Orientals instantly dropped behind _cagnards_ (low rocks in
sandy scrub) to fire at the seven adventurers, while six of the seven
dropped behind _cagnards_ to engage the five, Pilcher alone of the
seven pitching onward like a wind to catch Oyone, who saw and flew:
and twice in that flight he fired, twice he cast the lasso, four times
he missed her: for though her quarrelling frocks were quite nigh him,
things were very indistinct, the light of the fire in the dune being
quite local, that dune being big; and she vanished from him beyond the
next hill-top.

But even as she vanished, he had the ray of an electric torch on her,
and was casting again.

This last cast caused him to fall flat forward: but the tug told that
he had got something; an agony of angry cat-screams told; and soon he
was over her, his handkerchief down her throat, he staring about for
the air-boat.

To his amazement, he could see no air-boat; but he had _her_, and
within six ticks was off northward with her kickings.

Meantime, the fifty or so by the fire were flying uphill to the support
of their fighting five; but almost before they were on the hill-top,
they were attacked in the rear by the Prince’s reserve who had spurted
inland; and as the attackers were in darkness, the attacked lit up,
some twenty of the latter instantly fell.

But now a terrible sound fell upon the British ears—guns going off over
the sea: and they knew that their yacht was done for.

Li Ku Yu, in fact, had posted a ship without lights a little north of
Rosendaël with the object of destroying the Prince’s ship and chance of
escape; and this ship, on hearing the row of rifles inland, had gone
to scout for and had easily found the Prince’s ship, though unlit. The
Prince’s ship, indeed, had had a six-pounder mounted in her, but was
powerless against guns of so big-mouthed a sound as those now pounding
her.

Hearing which, the Prince wriggled snakelike on his belly from his
_cagnard_ to go to see to the air-boat—the rifle-fire pattering rapidly
as pattering typewriters at present, the two main-bodies pattering, and
the two small parties pattering, too: so he got to the next hill-top
inland unnoticed, down the next hollow, looked about, flew about—no
air-boat.

Yet he was certain that this was about the spot of its descent....

He ran on to the next hollow—to the next—still no sign of it; and no
bush anywhere that could half hide it; nor could he think that Oyone
had escaped in it, for, having heard her screams, he believed her
captured by Pilcher.

He could not conceive how the air-boat had disappeared.

And as he ran about wondering, he heard pantings and feet in the next
hollow seaward, and creeping up to peep, saw some ten yellow men
running every way, evidently seeking the air-boat (despatched by Li Ku
Yu to guard her), and apparently as aghast as he was at her vanishing.

Some of them presently ran up toward his hill-top to search further; he
then spurted serpentlike away on the belly, first northward and then
seaward; and, in passing behind his firing five, butted upon Pilcher,
who was running from the sea to rejoin the five.

“You, Pilcher? Got the girl?” leapt from the Prince’s lips.

“Gagged and tied up in one of the bathing-machines!”

“Good work, Pilcher”—the Prince’s under-look dwelt on him—“but the
air-boat, man!”

“Couldn’t see it anywhere!”

“Now, how odd. Well, yacht’s gone, I expect. Am running to see if
anything of boats left. Kill or catch Li Ku, if you love me”—he was
gone.

Whereupon Pilcher, instead of running southward to rejoin the firing
five, ran on inland, and then southward, and then seaward, so as to get
behind the Li Ku Yu group, keeping afar in the dark, catching sights,
meantime, of horses which had been galloped to the group round Li Ku,
who doubtless found the spot hot for such as he. Anyway, before Pilcher
could get to their back, Li Ku and four were a-horse, two falling as
they mounted, three drumming the ground south-eastward.

These three passed within twenty yards of Pilcher, who hissed to
himself: “The middle’s Li Ku—_no missing!_”

Another second and the lasso sang snake-songs in air, darting, and had
a pigtail within its grip, dragging a man from his saddle; but like
a magical Jack-in-the-box the man was back sitting within two ticks,
as if sprung back by springs, so that he could not have let go his
reins an instant; upon which Pilcher, seeing with astonishment the
lasso coming back, shot sharp three bangs: but the horsemen vanished,
apparently unharmed. He found the noose cut smooth as by a razor; and
said bitterly to himself: “Oh, I wanted to be smart: I ought to have
shot from the first.”

Meantime, Li Ku Yu, in fleeing, must have felt quite at ease as to the
Prince’s ultimate capture, since the ship appointed to destroy the
Prince’s ship was now lying, visibly to the night-glass, at anchor in
the offing; and, as to the two boats, the Prince could see no trace of
them but some wreckage resting on the sea.

Decision had now to be quick: so quickly he shrilled a whistle of
recall, and collecting his men behind the bathing-machines, which
the shooting Chinese were chary of approaching, he spoke a few
phrases, even as he stripped naked, and in two minutes they had widely
scattered, were crawling over the sands, were in the water, swimming
with revolvers, knives, hatchets in hand and teeth, far scattered and
under-water, forty-three of them—sixteen from the sunk yacht, three
boatmen, and the twenty-seven fighters, less three disappeared.

The ship, one of those Havre-Antwerp mail-boats, lay with a show
of rouge over her funnels about three hundred yards south of the
bathing-machines, a hundred yards out: and darkly, soundlessly, by
roundabout routes, the swimmers drew near her.

Not a sound now on her: no sound but the shore Chinese still shooting
from the dunes toward the bathing-machines, where no one was but Oyone.

And now the Prince and Pilcher are travelling up the anchor-chain like
white night-flies; others are arriving fast; and that pigtail gazing
over the port bow toward the dunes is drawing his last breaths here
below, for suddenly a grain of sea-salt is lodged in his brain from a
hatchet which chops it, as he silently dies; and the same with a little
mate pacing the bridge, and a watch-keeper leaning under a dinghy—they
die quite silently as the shade of the angel of death steals upon the
sleeping and the wakeful alike through the ship; only once, far down,
one echo like a gun-shot sounds; then three stokers surrender; and the
ship is English.

Now a boat was rowed shoreward for the clothes in the bathing-machines,
and for Oyone; the bodies were dropped into the sea; the dunes were
sprinkled for fun with shell from two four-inch guns; steam hurriedly
made; and the ship steered for English land, not wishing to have a
Japanese battleship on her back.

“But the air-boat!” said the Prince half-way home. “_Where_ was it?
_Ask_, Pilcher—see what she says.”

So Pilcher, grinning, went down to Oyone lying on crimson
cabin-cushions, the Prince hanging behind at the door; and said
Pilcher: “You may just as well mention what became of the air-boat.”

She lay with her face buried; the spasmodic shivering of the ship at
the screws shook her body; but she lifted herself a little to utter
with a sullen sideward eye: “It is in one of those valleys not far from
the fire. If you go back, you will find it.”

“No, we won’t go back,” remarked Pilcher.

Suddenly she was upright like a squirrel twisting, with: “Is this Your
Royal Highness’s promise to an unfortunate girl?”

The Prince had uttered not one syllable to her, nor answered now, but a
lavish blush bathed his face.




                               CHAPTER XIX

                            THE HOARD OF GOLD


But the question now was: where to lock away Oyone?

These were days of scanty house-room, and of a care for half-pence
among Kings. Sandringham, first closed, had then been handed over,
half to the Imperial Family of Russia, half to the Austrian Emperor’s
throng. England was rich in crowned heads: one crowd herding at
Windsor—Servia, Montenegro, Greece, Bavaria, Spain—while Italy, Norway,
Denmark made merry at Osborne—let us not pry into their privy purses.
The German Emperor held Balmoral, though the Princess Elizabeth, by a
kind of right now, bided at Buckingham Palace: for she, when death was
in men’s minds, meditated still on marriage, and, by a steady activity
of negotiation and a sending of telegrams, had now her Imperial
parent’s seal to her espousal to the Prince of Wales, and had kissed
her ring like Kitty in a lane. The Prince, too, now lived at Buckingham
Palace.

Our Civil List, meantime, had undergone much modification. The King,
for one, had suggested a considerable reduction of his income, and had
insisted. For no seer was needed to see that the break-up was so near,
that it would quickly be a question of finding the shilling to pay
the fighter. Treasury Bonds were light as air, Consols a vain thing,
credit, public, private, dead—this _before_ the irruption; _after_ the
European stampede into Britain, every day beheld civilisation more
ailing, every midnight the passions of ten million men dealt her an
added death-blow. Shops, mansions, banks were pillaged; a cracking of
pistol-shots rang in the land.

In which case, nothing was left to be taxed but land; and Sir Bostock
Henry, the Chancellor, suggested in his budget a 2s. 4½d. tax.

To this, however, the “owners” of England—some 2000 men—said in their
hearts “No.”

They made no outcry, as previously when taxed by half-pennies; now they
were in earnest, and quietly said “No.”

And having, of course, seen what was coming, they had leagued
themselves into an essentially secret Landowners’ Protection League.
So—that was four days after the capture of Oyone—they sent ambassadors
to Li Ku Yu.

They were perfectly aware that, if the Prince of Wales managed to crush
Li Ku Yu at sea, he would then be virtually Dictator of England; they
were fairly certain that he would then take what at that date they
still quite seriously called “their” land from them; and since the
land-tax was to be spent in the repair of ships to fight Li Ku Yu, this
gave a basis for negotiation: they sent ambassadors.

It was late in the night, the Prince was in his laboratory, transferred
to Buckingham Palace—a room looking on the park—when his assistant,
Sturge, handed him a letter come “by hand” from the Continent:

    “To His Royal Highness, Prince Edward of Wales, The First, The
    Last.[1]

    “Let the Prince of Wales be aware that the landowners of
    Britain, having made overtures to Li Ku Yu, are in negotiation.
    Terms: Li Ku Yu to give guarantees as to their estates; they to
    refuse to pay tax.

    “Li Ku Yu needs no aid from traitors: but does not reject their
    offers, having reasons for wishing to cheat them.

    “From a Younger Brother to the Prince.”

Now, the passions of the Prince of Wales were volcanic: so away now he
dashed the letter, violently enraged, and went ranging, light-footedly
dodging among obstacles, just shaving bench-corners, saying: “No
more dukes—no more lords—they’ve done it now—they’ve dug their own
graves—no dukes—no crowd of little clown-kings ...” but in the midst
suddenly paused, pshawed, thought, “one mustn’t be incensed at lower
types of life,” and now picked up the letter to pry at the writing,
asking himself: “From _him_?” muttering, “_Decent_,” for some bits of
it looked as if Li Ku Yu had designed to disguise his writing, but had
been impatient of the pains.

He was still studying it, when Lord Percy Burnett—who had been sent to
search for Eulalia’s remains, and had an interview for that hour—was
announced. He entered looking very depressed, so that the Prince said
at once: “Bad news; sit down; stab it in straight—used to it.”

“Only this,” said Lord Percy with a stir of the hand: “I have been a
traitor.”

Silence.

“You in it, too?” the Prince cried out—“Oh, yes, I know all about it!—a
Sky-Blue negotiation.”

“I came back from the Continent this morning, I and—someone.”

“_You_, Percy? A friend of mine? A Brockweir boy?”—the Prince was
frowning piercingly.

“That is the fact. I am sorry. I thought I’d tell you, before——” he
paused, staring at the ground with an expression of great depression.

“Seen Sky-Blue?”

“Yes.”

“But I can’t believe my ears!”—with passion—“I could forgive the
rest!—but you, a cultivated intellect——”

“Teddy——”

“Teddy me no Teddy!”

Lord Percy bowed. “I was going to say, Sir—you speak of ‘a cultivated
intellect,’ but possibly you do not quite fully realise the conditions.
A boy of my caste may have quite strong impulses toward nobility of
living, but, born into a hopelessly false position, what chance has he?
If he can think a little, he pretty quickly realises that he is not
an Englishman, but a true foreigner, as every parasite is a foreigner
to the organism it fastens on—without a country—living _on_ England,
but never _in_ England, having no social function, belonging to a mob
of rent-pocketers, who only care for England for what they can get out
of her, and are quite ready to throw England to the dogs the instant
this jumps with what they imagine to be their self-interest—pure Jews,
only, with their bad heredity, lacking the brains of Jews. What is a
poor boy, so handicapped, to do? He remarks that his caste, living by
a nefarious trade, must necessarily be men of a muddy conscience, and
though, theoretically, a boy might have the mental strength to say,
‘Oh, this isn’t good enough, I’ll chuck the rent, and start on the
square,’—does he ever? Tolstoy did, but not by mental strength, but
by quixotism of temperament. In the case of a sane boy, by the time
he might have the sense to say that, he is already vitiated by his
environment, his ideals dying or dead, his moral sense compromised.
Thenceforth he is hopelessly in it—only one remedy, a bullet. And it’s
not much good if his head’s ‘cultivated’ when the rest of him is stuck
in mud.”

“Well, but I know,” said the Prince stepping petulantly about;
“there’s a saying that ‘to understand is to pardon’; and, of course, I
understand; and yet I can’t pardon. Really, you men have ‘done evil as
you could’—for centuries; and many men have sighed and died of you. And
for what? If twenty million men live in bliss at the expense of twenty
millions in misery, that mayn’t be very ‘just,’ but I think there’s
much to be said for it; or if two thousand live in bliss at the expense
of forty millions—or if one single man live in bliss—I think there’s
something to be said for it. But you men! You are as unacquainted
with gladness of heart in your muggy comfort as the multitudes who
moan under you, scarcely a little less ignorant, vulgar and crass
yourselves than the classes you drag through ignorance, crassness
and vulgarity. Wouldn’t men blessed with one drop of generous blood,
seeing this, have said long ago, ‘No, let’s throw it up, the game’s
not half worth the candle’? But not you cowardly clowns: never, never,
any generous temperature, or pretence of being gentlemen. Let twenty
million women and children sink with bubbling shrieks within reach of
your ear, if _you_ but float with your clown-countess in your loathsome
boat, then you can shower tips all round upon your bishop-boatmen, to
keep men’s mouths from shouting the shame of your meanness. Lately
there has been a little light in the world round you: but you have
deliberately elected to remain eighteenth-century barbarians. The sun
is one of the stars of a constellation, and you persist in thinking
that the universe ends five miles up where the sky is. Well, you’ve
got me against you now, if we don’t all go under. I have been dull in
country-houses, hoping to influence you, and been ill of _ennui_ among
you at race-meetings—no more, by God. You can’t influence wood but with
an axe. You may mention it—it’s no secret. And it won’t be any good for
anybody to come begging me for any money, because I won’t give any.”

“Quite so, Sir: though that may be embittering”—with an under-glance.

“Oh, you’re a worthless lot,” said the Prince, with a laugh:
“embittering? If you shoot at me, you’re sure to miss; if you stab at
me, you probably don’t know that the heart of mammals is on the left,
and you’ll stab on the right. Embittering? I should like to catch
myself being affrighted at such blind mice.”

“I hardly meant any threat, Sir—only to suggest some clemency.
They—we—cherish the superstition that a little of the greatness of
England is due to us——”

“The blindlings!—as though the littlest mouse of good could come out of
a mountain of ignominy. What _right_ have you to cherish superstitions?
If you have never peeped into a history-book yourselves, ask somebody
in the streets whether it is not in spite of the hissings and grins of
you varlets that England is not still a sixteenth-century land? Inch by
inch against you she has had to battle her bitter way; against every
blessing to men you have darted to arms; every noble thing has found in
you a foe, a delay, and a diluter. I say, cursed is the name of men
of that sort; you’re a worthless lot; blessed above men be the man who
exterminates you.”

“Well, so I say, too, Sir.... I only hope you do not include the Throne
in the proposed overthrow.”

“On the contrary, I support the Throne.... Because I’m a Prince, of
course. Think that?”

“No, Sir, I do not think that.”

“Like a publican who is theoretically in favour of public-houses,
because _he_ is a publican—what? Or a King who thinks well of monarchy,
because son métier _à lui_ est d’être roi? I am unable to conceive a
baser being, or to believe that God ever gave birth to a dirtier dog.
So you are right there—that’s not why I support the Throne. Not that I
support it _much_; but—it has something of a function, is pretty and
historic, costs the country nothing—half-a-million—that is, _nothing_.
To abolish it would cost far more energy than the abolition was worth!
And there’s a difference between one king, and two thousand kings,
isn’t there? Between one pound and two thousand pounds? Between one
fire in a room which warms you, and two thousand which scorch you to
ashes? Besides, there’s this to be said for Monarchy, that any day a
monarch may be born with light and eyes; and how splendid then the
room to his elbow that the Throne will lend him! The same thing is
true of aristocracy; but, then, the aristocrat’s uneasy consciousness
of unclean hands and of a false position keeps him from being ever
anything much more than a rent-collector. Hence every class has
produced great-like men, and quite two or three Kings have seen
something new a little, done something a little memorable; but never
one of you men, never, never one.”

“I perfectly see, Sir,” said Lord Percy, rising. “I wished, Sir, to let
you know that there is a negotiation with Li Ku Yu, and that I am in
it. You perceive, Sir, that I first betray the country I live on, and
then I betray my confederates. I will say—good-night, Sir.”

The Prince did not answer. The other passed through the doorway.

But as he vanished, the Prince dashed after, caught him in a passage,
with, “I am willing to make it up, Percy.”

Lord Percy bowed. “Your Royal Highness is very gracious.”

“Rot. A man can do no more than repent. Shake hands!”

Their hands wrung together, and they parted.

But two hours later Lord Percy Burnett blew out his brains in a chamber
in St James’s Street; so that in a new embassy to the Continent on the
next day another took his place.

Now, it appears that at this time Li Ku Yu felt some need of treasure;
and Oyone had been captured just when about to lead him to the Six
Millions. It was not, therefore, only on account of the air-boat
(which had vanished as strangely from him as from the Prince), that he
was eager to get Oyone free: for he needed the Six Millions for the
knocking together of the inconceivable fleet of junks and barges soon
to swarm the sea toward England. Hence, he (a born bargainer) said to
the Landowners’ League ambassadors: “You set me first free a girl named
Oyone, and then we may come to terms.”

But that was the Sphinx’s riddle! no one having any notion where the
Prince had put Oyone.

However, the handsome young Marquis of Tullibardine, who had at one
time rather drawn the eye of the Princess Elizabeth, and was intimate
with her, had an idea: and he, approaching the Princess, suggested that
since this Oyone was said to be so beautiful, that might be rather a
desirable thing if she was set free from being the prisoner of a young
Prince.

Now, it so happened that Oyone was in all the Princess Elizabeth’s
thoughts—ever since Oyone had made the statement that the Prince was
“_married_” to Eulalia: for though the Princess could scarce believe
that the Prince, if married, would have engaged himself to her, the
mere statement was a seed of unease in her. She would not, then, have
wept to be told that Eulalia was in heaven, and often wondered how
Oyone was getting on.

Tullibardine, therefore, found her ears open. She whispered that she
would try to find out where Oyone was kept; and thenceforth set herself
to pry upon the Prince’s steps.

One night when the Royal Family were _chez eux_ after dinner, a card
was handed to the Prince with the name of Commander Pilcher; and just
then the Princess Elizabeth found occasion to step out before the
Prince could.

She did not advance far; saw the Prince enter an apartment to Pilcher;
and since in Courts the luck of the ear is indigenous, she luckily, _en
passant_, could hear the Prince say: “I want you, Pilcher, to have one
more try with this Oyone: I’ll be with you in two minutes.”

On which the Princess tripped back to the _salon_, muttered something
to the Queen, was speedily out again, and then, her head in a wrap, was
out of the palace, she and another looking both ways out of a cab in
Constitution Hill.

She saw Pilcher and the Prince pass from the Park Gate in a brougham,
and she followed slowly through the thronged thoroughfares—to “Ning
Shou Kung.”

For the Prince had, without ceremony, turned out the Chinese occupants
of “Ning Shou Kung,” given the gate a fresh lock, installed three
retainers, and thrown Oyone into the room where he had moaned.

So now Pilcher sat on the stool where she had used to sit sewing before
the hole in the door, while the Prince hung near, unseen, listening;
and Pilcher renewed the offer—liberty within one week, if she would
reveal in what kind of hiding-place she had contrived to secrete the
air-boat.

Soon a voice spoke out of the gloom within, glum, low, slow, as if in
soliloquy: “I am happy here. I no longer long for the insect’s wing
of liberty. The world is vanity and wrapping-paper. I trample under
my feet its sweets and its pomps that merely lead mortals into evil
paths. My heart is changed and white as a virgin’s, and my eyes turn
themselves toward Heaven. Here a Holy Sorrow is my paramour, and I am
the compliant wife of Calamity. For nothing is good but to be good,
and there is no carousing but in renouncing. I, for my part, envelop
Pensiveness with my arms, I smother Moodiness with my kisses——”

“But the air-boat,” suggested Pilcher.

Now she was sharp! “I have told you that the Chinese have the air-boat!
The instant I alighted Li Ku Yu sent men to take her——”

“No; not true,” said Pilcher, getting up; and he and the Prince went
away.

Suddenly, in twenty minutes more, the Princess Elizabeth was with her;
and Oyone’s heart started.

The three retainers—two men and a woman—had duly said, “Against
orders,” but the Princess had said, “I just wish to peep—the Prince
needn’t know,” with an intimate manner; and their toadyism and her
cajolery had readily opened her way to Oyone.

Oyone was like an escaped canary in the room, exclaiming: “Now I shall
be free! free! I expected you, and you did not come!”

The Princess pressed a button in a bracelet, and produced a ray. “You
must see that _I_ daren’t let you out. But there are others who may. We
will see in time.”

“_Time?_ Not to-night?”

“No.”

Oyone wrung her hands, asking at once: “Have you found out now that he
is married to Eulalia Bayley?”

“That is nonsense. The Prince of Wales is definitely affianced to me.”

“Then, he may think her dead! I told him in bragging, for I was
angry-mad, that I had killed her, and—possibly—he thinks her dead. But
she is quite alive in the East End! and he any moment may discover it,
for she has in her possession an object which the police are eagerly
seeking for for him—a black box, that he’d give his life to get——”

“What is in this box?”

“It is a kind of infernal machine,” said Oyone, chary of mentioning the
Redlike Ray: “let me free this night! Then I will get it, and he won’t
find her, even if she keeps alive, otherwise he must; and it is certain
that they are married—_she_ bragged of it—_he_ admitted it—only there
is some quarrel between them——”

Elizabeth was white. “Is this box her property?” she asked.

“No, it is mine.”

“Then, _I_ will get it for you.”

Oyone moaned; but then said: “Do so, then. But I am not sure that
she has it—I saw her posting a parcel like it; but, _if_ she has it,
remember it is dangerous! it will blow Your Imperial Highness to pieces
the size of a fly’s feet, if you handle it wrongly, or keep it without
knowing its moods. So, will you bury it at once, to give to me——?”

“And if it blows me into flies’ feet when I touch it?” suggested the
Princess.

“Not if you hold it carefully by the sides.”

When they had discussed it a long time, Elizabeth set off for the East
End with Eulalia’s address, to fumble through the drizzle of a dismal
London blinking dully upon its muddled multitudes through half the old
number of lamps, it being now about nine in the night.

But, once in the slum, Eulalia’s abode was obvious, for there on a pane
was a square of paper pasted to say in three languages: “A Skilled
Nurse Lives Here.”

And the door was open; a wondering woman told her “third floor back;
she may be in, or she mayn’t”; and the Princess picked her way through
swarms of children and sinister visages, thinking: “What a strange
place!”

At Eulalia’s door she listened, could hear nothing, rapped, no answer,
passed in, and rayed a beam from her bracelet upon a wee oasis of
daintiness within this wilderness—the wee bed lily-white, the Prince
within a silver frame on the petty mantelpiece, a canary, and there on
a chair a parcel which must be “the box.”

She tore the already torn wrapping to see that it was “black”; but
then, on seeing, had a throe of fright....

If she held it “carefully by the sides,” it would be well: but which
were “the sides”? The box was a cube! “Oh, no,” she breathed, and stood
suspended near the door.

Just then, for the third time in two minutes, she heard steps, for the
third time fled out, and this time it was Eulalia.

They passed each other swiftly on the rickety stair, where it was not
so dim but that Eulalia was aware with some amazement of fairy raiment
in Tatter-land; had a fresh surprise in finding her door open; and, on
lighting her lamp, a fresh surprise in spying the wrapping of the box
more torn than before.

“This is funny!” she went, with a laugh.

And as that wrapping was no good any more for the post, she now tore it
off, posited the box on the oilskin of her little table, and sat before
it, for the first time wondering what was in the box—why it had been
buried—and was of importance to “Taska.”

It looked like a kodak; there was a cap to it; if she moved that,
perhaps she could see within....

But there was a paper pasted above the cap, and writing under the
grime, which, when she held the lamp quite near, seemed to say: “Do Not
Touch....”

Which was tempting to one’s curiosity. For who can help touching, when
mysteriously told “_Do Not Touch_” like that? Eve touched, and suffered
touching. No doubt there was money in it....

It was this probability that held her from touching when on the point
of touching: for she had it in trust from the dead. “Better not,” she
said at last.

She then laid out her shopping—bacon, cheese, and loaf—bacon no longer
what it had been, nor bread, nor she any longer the fanciful Sappho,
fanning the atmosphere with volleys of sighs, of her opulent times,
spare diet having dispirited the love-wine in her vitals.

She was very poor: not that she lacked patients, for she was constantly
occupied, but her patients did not pay. Her mother or sister had never
answered her; and butter had become a Sunday luxury.

However, to the rich indigence is a spree, and she was just about to be
infinitely rich.

For it chanced that she had been summoned to nurse a certain nut-brown
young sailor named “Buddo,” a Berkshire boy, stabbed in a Commercial
Street affray: which “Buddo” had conceived for her a passion, half
amorous, half idolatrous: and the point was, that having lived five
years at Shanghai, Buddo was a Chinaman among other things.

So when she had told him that she had a vast mass of gold in France,
but the Chinese would have it now, his answer had been: “They won’t,
miss: I could get it for you as sweet as kissing your hand.”

His plan was to go with a couple of mates in a large sail-barge—“get
one for sixpence now,” he said—to a solitary spot on the French coast,
he to land in Chinese disguise, the others to come home, and go back
for him.

He would need some horses and carts, but he reckoned that £45 would see
him through, if she could get it. The Chinese were pretty deep, but
he an inch deeper still, could speak Chinese better than they, and it
could be worked as sweet as a nut.

In going to her to show himself as a pigtail, he had been twice mobbed
on the way.

Eulalia had then gone late in the night to Sir Robert Barrington to lay
the plot before him; and, finding him suddenly aged ten years, let her
head rest on his shoulder where he drew it.

“Will the Chinese be getting into England?” she breathed to him.

His forehead dropped. “Dear, I can see nothing to prevent it. The
Prince of Wales is a great captain of ships, but cannot create ships.
It is a question whether some even of those we have will be available:
for while the Chinese preparations are near completion, we have an
aristocracy refusing to be taxed——”

“Yes! I have wondered. Do these men by chance call themselves
Englishmen?”

“They even _think_ themselves Englishmen—at least, the more weak-headed
among them. But, as things are, there is scarcely any machinery
available against their combined resistance; the regunning of the
_Donnernde_ has had to be abandoned; and the Prince has enough to do
to——”

“Yet he finds time to get engaged!”

“Yes. And here—frankly—Your Royal Highness is doing wrong. I do entreat
you, dear, to release me immediately from this extremely difficult
position. Not two hours since the Prince was with me—referred to your
death—and for me to stand dumb and see him——”

“I _cannot_ understand how he can think me dead, whatever this Oyone
may have told him, considering that, just before, he heard me call
him—answered me——”

“Hallucination! Boo-boo! And he reasons that, if it had been really
you, it would have been you who released him. But it was the Princess
Elizabeth, a young lady, I assure you, of quite superhuman acumen—in
the Queen’s eyes at least. Hence he, in gratitude to her—to please the
Queen——”

“Is the Queen at all times quite all-wise? He will hate this girl. And
though Her Majesty has been pleased to speak of _me_ as a miserable
little woman——”

“Never mind _that_! One more glass? Yes?”—he had noted with passionate
pain the _soupçon_ of avarice with which she drank sherry now, and ate
cake; insisted upon another glass; and then proceeded to discuss again
the details of the “Buddo” Six Millions scheme, of which his judgment
approved, though he prophesied that the whole hoard would hardly
come to her hand. But to this she answered: “I think it will, every
grain, if any comes: for I trust my rough Buddo not less than I would
an angel. There are people essentially excellent—sincere, competent,
proud——”

Sir Robert had bowed, with “That is very true, Your Royal Highness”;
and he had lent her £45 for the adventure.

At that date of the Princess Elizabeth’s visit to the slum, the hoard
was slowly moving over the Dover road in four old dust-carts for
London....

They arrived before the house in the slum five days later when
Eulalia was out, and there stood the faithful “Buddo,” wiping his
perspiration—for two hours amid crowds of people who, had they
conceived the least suspicion of what lay beneath those pieces
of sail-cloth, would certainly have made short work of Germany’s
Reichskriegsschatz.

Then came Eulalia, and, seeing, leapt in a glee to buss her Buddo
on both brown cheeks; gave one greedy little peep beneath a tip of
sail-cloth; and then, taking a letter from her pocket, said, “Now, you
have to take it straight, with this letter, to Buckingham Palace: and
remember this, whoever wants to know about the sender, you know nothing
whatever.”

And “Buddo,” after one stare of amaze, cried out: “Right you are!” and
rolled to a horse’s head to obey.

This grotesque procession of carts, on arriving before Buckingham
Palace gates at three in the afternoon, was refused admittance. But the
letter bored and bored a way to Her Majesty’s hand:

    “To Her Most Gracious Majesty, the Queen.

    “Your Majesty, I am venturing to present to the service of
    the country in its need (through Your Majesty’s most gracious
    hands) the German Six Millions, which I lately discovered in
    France.

    “Your Majesty’s loyal subject,
                                              “+An Irishwoman+.”

The letter fell of its own weight out of Her Majesty’s hand.

“_Well!_” her lips breathed; then, “listen to this”—she read out the
letter—“or is it some hoax?”

“The carts are said to be before the palace, Ma’am,” answered a lady.

“Fly! Let the Prince know....”

She herself made haste, and the carts soon now found an entrée to
the Quadrangle, to remain there for hours, the King, the Court,
Ministers and everyone coming to visit and revisit them, picking up
the bars, some of them bent and chipped from the bombing, “Buddo”
still there, waiting for his strings of horses, scratching his pate
in a pretence of idiocy at the hosts of questions poured upon him,
everyone on the heights of delight, save Elizabeth, in whose upper
lip was something white and spiteful, for this was German _Gut_, with
“Reichskriegsschatz” stamped on it.

Six millions then was six hundred millions, and when someone said: “Who
can have sent it? What boundless bounty!” the Princess was seen to
smile omnisciently, secretly; and now someone asked someone: “Is it a
German Princess who has presented this German treasure to Britain?” For
it was fashionable at Court to discover ever deeper depths and meanings
in the Princess.

Now, the Prince of Wales was aware (from Oyone) that Eulalia had known
where the hoard had lain, and when he heard that the gift was from “An
Irishwoman,” some half of a half of a something moved in the vague
depths of him, and he said: “Show me this letter.”

The Queen was standing there by the carts with him, so was Elizabeth,
when his eyes fell on the letter, and both noticed him going slowly
pale, paler, to that paleness of the gold before them. For, though
Eulalia had very carefully disguised the writing, she had a fantastic
manner of making her M’s which emerged like murder; and he knew that
she liked to call herself “Irish.”...

To the Queen his pallor was all a mystery; but Elizabeth, seeing it,
felt the world whirl away beneath her feet, with a feeling in her: “It
comes from that girl ... he thought her dead ... and they are really
married....”

But the Prince was left in utter doubt. When he took “Buddo” away to
cross-examine, to tempt, to coax, to command him, Buddo proved even
more ingeniously foolish than before: could tell nothing whatever of
the lady, save that she was an elderly lady.

But when the Prince sent post-haste for Sir Robert Barrington to
tell of it, he noted with a steady under-look of suspicion how the
baronet’s palm slowly rose toward his forehead, and thought: “He knows
something....”

And felt something! for three days later the Queen received this
confidential letter from the baronet:

    “In venturing to pen this to Your Majesty, I commit something
    akin to a breach of trust. But, truth to tell, I am unable
    any longer to bear the strain of refraining from mentioning
    to Your Majesty the fact that I have reason to believe that
    the lady who has presented the Six Millions to the nation is
    living in want on a third-floor of that noisome whirlpool which
    Whitechapel now is.... Her address is 19 Chapel Street....”

This made Her Majesty moan; and she said: “Oh, this day I go myself to
that woman....”

By this time the discovery of the Six Millions, and its presentation to
the nation by a woman, was being bellowed by the papers, most of which
continued to be published in shortened form; and since that unknown
“Irishwoman” was the wonder and joy of the nation, which had lately
raged at the fiasco of the Budget and the action of the aristocracy,
it was quite in harmony with the mood of the moment that Her Majesty
should decide to go herself to that idolised donor.

Yet she had a sense of disappointment at Sir Robert’s letter: for
an innuendo had worked its way to her—through all the Court—into
the papers—that the real secret donor was a certain wonder-working
Princess, whose detective acumen had already been proved in the
discovery of the Prince’s prison; the whisper was now all about
the Court; subtle reasons were discovered by the subtle ones for
the Princess signing herself “Irishwoman,” not “Englishwoman”; the
quick-eyed ones whispered that they had caught knowing looks passing
between her and “Buddo”; the Princess had a smile of Isis, and,
denying, did not deny it. Hence Her Majesty’s sense of disappointment.

And the Princess got a scare on the day of Sir Robert’s letter, when
whispered by a maid-of-honour that Her Majesty was preparing to go
herself to the giver!

“And what is this giver’s address?” the Princess asked.

“It is 19 Chapel Street, East.”

Now she knew that Eulalia was the giver, and instantly was desperate.

“Well, I suppose I must speak out a little,” she now said, “for I
can’t, after all, see the Queen flying off to Whitechapel for nothing.
You, Lady Julia, whisper quickly to Her Majesty that you heard me
say that I don’t think her acumen here quite so keen as usual. Point
out that Sir Robert Barrington must have got some false information
somehow, and give Her Majesty this proof of it: that the giver can’t be
‘living in want’ when, as Her Majesty knows, one whole bar of the gold
has been taken out—over £3000. The giver can’t be ‘in want’: whisper
it, Lady Julia, to Her Majesty: but please do not whisper whom _you_
imagine the giver is, for I know well whom you imagine.”

Now, one complete bar of the gold had, really, been found missing—taken
by Oyone that evening when Eulalia had seen Oyone in the wood. So that
day Her Majesty, after all, made no descent upon Whitechapel; and that
night it was generally known among the sager heads of the Court that it
was the witch-Princess who was the donor: on hearing which that evening
in the reel and rage of his preoccupation the Prince of Wales struck
his forehead.




                               CHAPTER XX

                           THE SEA AND THE AIR


A preoccupation that was “a rage”: for the next day was necessarily a
day of battle, and it was a case of the telephone, the telegraph, and
quick spinning-round.

Britain, meantime, and her added population, saw in the darkness hardly
any ray; perhaps the Prince himself saw none.

Of forty-three super-Dreadnoughts docked to be overhauled, twenty-three
only were ready, _plus_ ten American just come, three Brazilian,
two Argentine, one Austrian, three Spanish; beside which, a tangle
of Continental small-fry thronged Portsmouth Harbour, Swedish,
Netherlands, German, French, Russian, together with five great
greyhounds armed with six-inchers; these, and mosquitoes, were what
white man had left to show.

On the other hand, it was known that fifty-five Japanese and Chinese,
all over 16,000 tons, were patrolling the French coast from Havre to
Calais; and that that day a forward movement of yellow man was due.

Twenty-five thousand red-coats massed upon the south coast—the guns of
Dover—stood ready to make a row; and most Englishmen had quietly laid
by some gun, or club, or old sword, to die game with—wind against the
sea-drift.

Leaden, then, in that day were the spirits of men. The circumstance
that the earth was to traverse Tempel’s comet in three nights’ time,
though there was said to be no kind of peril in the meeting, seems
to have deepened the blackness of humanity’s bile. Some black rain
that fell during a period of midday gloom (due to fog), sent streams
of people about the Italian Quarter careering with piercing screams
through the streets, screaming “God’s comet is upon us!” All along the
edges of pavements the sight of lines of men was to be seen, men seated
with their heads bent to their knees, done for, dumbly waiting. During
which, a certain deranged curate rapidly became a known personage,
journeying the streets in surplice and hood, preaching with his finger
the finish of things. And Life began to be a stagnant thing, and to
gangrene in that dark.

It was, then, with hearts draped in crape that men attempted to conduct
services in churches at that afternoon hour of the navy’s weighing; and
it was in such spirits that the Prince himself left Spithead with his
following of ships, manned mainly by the nucleus crews of old Fourth
Division ships, by the residues of the Royal Fleet Reserve marine
ratings, and by the Volunteer Reserve, consisting, this last, of men of
the middle classes.

In a conference with captains and admirals the Prince had said: “Let us
go and see: a sailors’ grave is the sea; and it is sweeter to be eaten
by a fish than by a worm.”

So they set out: and, as if destiny intended that as little loss as
possible should attend the landing of the millions of yellow men, a
milky mist dimmed the sea.

They moved, then, close in single line ahead, pouring smokes sternwards
which searchlights burning beneath the controls rolled in lurid beams,
the ships’ shapes fretted round with sprays—a spectral procession to
the Prince looking poopwards from the _Colossus_ bridge, they seeming
as broad as they were long, dominant masses of majesty moving mutely to
some mysterious deed or doom in the mood of some mysterious dream.

In succession a motor-pinnace, a hydroplane, and a destroyer came
hastily in with news that the forefront of a floating locust-host was
already four or five miles from the French coast, from St Valéry to
Dunkirk, and that the Oriental navy was at present pacing the sea with
its rear in the longitude of Hastings, and its front on Pevensey.

Then a mysterious wireless was received from a tiny cruiser-scout
that the enemy were more numerous by five Dreadnoughts than had been
estimated—a crushing message, incredible, until it was suggested
that they might be the ships once hypocritically proffered to German
purchase, and then asserted to be wrecked.

Then arrived the wireless that at the back of the enemy’s line of
battle was a 2000-ton yacht flying the Dragon-flag, to which the
enemy’s Admiral Commanding had been called to a conference—she probably
bearing Li Ku Yu.

The floating host in junks, flats, and barges were said to be moving
very slowly on, most with the help of oars, some with an elementary
paddle-wheel astern in the fashion of Rouen river-barges. A ration of
some green mess was being given out, and peals of laughter screaming
across the sea from some of the craft.

A shadowy shape or two soon after this began to show ahead, the Prince
at that moment up a control, gazing through marine glasses. His lips
muttered. He span to order nine knots, and was glass-gazing again.

Immediately afterwards the shadows ahead vanished.

Now, it was evident that the enemy had no reason to be eager for
an engagement. The few troops and coast-guns ranged against the
locust-host, the few scores of submersibles lurking inshore, could not
exclude the innumerable: so that, if the yellow fleet merely interposed
itself between the white fleet and the locust-host until the landing
should be accomplished, it had no other military object. Hence when
the shadows vanished, the supposition that they shrank from a pitched
battle was established.

So did the white fleet shrink: for even if the whole yellow fleet
was sunk at the expense of the destruction of the white, nothing was
gained: the locust-host would land.

Destruction, then, somehow, for life, but not mutual destruction, was
the white man’s captain’s ticket; and destruction, somehow, for fun,
but not mutual destruction was Li Ku Yu’s ticket. They shunned each
other.

And as the shadows vanished in mist the Prince had his plan. A hiss of
“the mist!” was on his breath now. It was a white mist, for white men.
When he span round, there was that in his eyes which was startling, and
he looked taller. From nine knots he ordered five, and dropped down the
tripod-steps.

At about the same time, however, Li Ku Yu, fourteen miles eastward,
was in a yacht’s crow’s-nest, watching the execution by his Admiral of
a stroke of strategy which he had inspired; and he, too, dropped his
spy-glass from eyes that had lights of guile and triumph in them—he,
too, in a glee at the mist, that from minute to minute thickened. It
was a white mist, like white men dead.

As for the Prince, astern of his file of titans came an array of
eighty-three small-craft of every sort, British and foreign, old
ram-monitors, sloops, torpedo-gunboats, old Scotch coastguards,
unarmoured cruisers, mother-ships, R.N. Reserve Merchant-cruisers,
destroyers, torpilleurs, following for following’s sake: all which
by trumpet call running down nineteen miles of ocean he got rapidly
mobilised into a stationary line abreast lying east-and-west, mixing
with them twenty-five picket-boats fitted with dropping-gear for
14-inch torpedoes, and thirty-two hydroplanes with hundred-pound bombs;
and he steamed thence leaving them heaving in serried series on the
swell which gently heaved, secreted in haze, teeming with many hundreds
of torpedoes, prepared for whoever might come rushing that way—prepared
in perishing to perish amid a tremor of western Europe.

They were not, indeed, destined so to do, and end: for, far eastward,
the trap which the Prince laid had been laid for _him_—still more
effectively perhaps: but, if it had happened so, maybe they would have
left a memory among men.

The Flag-ship signalled eighteen knots, her bow now south-east.

When next in contact with the enemy an hour later, the white ships were
steaming west upon the yellow ships which were steaming east, both in
single column line ahead.

The _Colossus_, still at the head of her line, opened upon the shadow
which the _Ibuki_ was two miles away: opened in ghostly gong-shouts
at which the white fog shivered; and a gun of the _Ibuki’s_ forward
12-inch battery cracked. But she did not answer; put her helm hard to
starboard, and immediately was the rearward of a line flying under
forced draught westward.

On which the Prince, like an omnipresent spirit flitting and filling
the _Colossus_ conning-tower, said to himself: “It isn’t fighting
they’re after! I have them dead—Unless——” he sent his eyes out over the
sea.

At that instant he was entering a region of sea where a twelve-mile
line of submersibles lay submerged, to end him in one belch.

They did not depend upon periscopes to see, lest they should torpedo
their own fleet, but had out telephone-buoys, awaiting a megaphone
signal when the moment of action should come, the buoys being just
awash—with slight chance that the white line-of-battle should spy them
through the hazy air five hundred yards to starboard.

  Br. small-fry.
   ● ● ● ● ● ●

                            Subs. 12 miles.
                            ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

                               ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○      ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
                               Jap. 10 miles.     Br. 9 miles.

But in one of the submarines near the east end of the series the
unforeseen was being transacted—a big boat of 800 tons with a 2000-mile
surface-range, whose name had once been “_E3_” she having been British.
She had once sunk, been resurrected, captured by the Japanese in the
East; and something extraordinary that had happened in respect of her
in a raid upon Melbourne Harbour had once caused her to be called
“haunted.”

At any rate, the fog that day of battle apparently gave up all its
ghosts to go into this boat. Five minutes after her sinking in the
waiting line an accident had happened—the sea beginning to pour into
the engine-room by the ventilation-mast valve—unaccountably!—the
indicator pointing to the “shut” position.

This had been remedied—the stern ballast-tank half emptied, the inflow
more than kept down by the bilge-pump—and the crew, under strict orders
not to emerge to the surface, retreated into the midships section after
closing the bulkhead.

But now they were shattered men all—from commander to artificer, the
very spirit of panic rattling their teeth, blanching their cheeks. They
could not speak—sat astare, waiting for what would happen next there in
the lap of the sea.

Nothing happened—for five and twenty minutes: but then with wild hearts
they were aware of vapours pouring, fumes of chloride; and now they
were flying about like lunatics immured in a fire.

It is believed that the heeling may have upset acids in the
accumulators, causing short-circuiting and the smouldering of vulcanite
fittings; anyway, the lieutenant, himself a ghost, gave the order of
retreat into the fourth (torpedo) section, determined not to emerge to
the surface: and this was done.

But they had not been in there six minutes by the clock when, like a
flock of mice, their hairs on end, they were fleeing out in a squealing
squeeze; and now, wildly silent, but decided, they took matters into
their own hands: and before long the boat was bobbing up to the top.

The Prince from the _Colossus_ saw them madly springing from her at
random into the sea about three points on his starboard bow.

Steering a point nearer to starboard, he spied a little of the line of
telephone-buoys—with a baleful harsh heart which danced in him. And,
looking now for it, his eyes descried, or divined, north of the buoys
the shadow of the shadow of a ship—waiting to give the megaphone signal
to the submarines.

He then pricked off four points to port. So did the enemy. And he
pursued their rearmost ship two miles westward of the west end of the
submarines; but in his attempt to push them still farther upon his
trap, they turned upon him, and now heavy battle began—their aim being
to turn _him_ back upon _their_ trap.

For fifteen minutes he showed fight, both lines breaking up to present
broadsides in a hotch-potch of horrible brawling at hardly three
thousand yards between near ships, he washing himself in hundreds of
tons of sudden thunderings like ducks fluttering in puddle, for he
loved the dreadful drench, watching the _Ibuki_ cock her poop up a
little more each moment, until she stood bow downward, and now her
bowels rumbled with tumbling bum-lumber like Stromboli across the
waters solemnly, and she sank; and the _Kashima_ not far; and his own
foremast with all its tackle lashed the water.

Now he fled east-by-south, leaving his _Rio de Janeiro_, his _Odin_,
his _Orion_ behind....

During this fighting, he had ordered twelve of his rear invisible
ships to proceed north of the submarine row by its east end, in order
to blow out of the water quickly, at withering close-quarters, before
the hubbub of the main battle should lull, whatever enemy-ships were
waiting there to give the megaphone signal to the submarines. And this
had been duly done within the dim rooms of the mist—four of the enemy
and five of the twelve being now foundering wrecks.

He, for his part, after reforming his line, started at his fullest
speed east-by-south, with the yellow fleet in his wake.

And when the _Colossus_, now the rearmost of her line, was three miles
east of the east end of the submarine row, he again turned west;
engaged one enemy vessel in an almost momentary gush of gunshot; again
threw their line westward; and they went leading him, always with a
northward leaning, toward the submarine row.

In their former passage across the ambush of submarines, the
ill-starred men had apparently dropped buoys which with disastrous
accuracy now led their helms within a hundred yards of the submarine
row; and when the sun was a blotch just above the horizon, and a shadow
of night had already fallen, they lay stretched, a line ten to eleven
miles long, along a twelve-mile line of submarines.

At the same time the Prince, coming west, two miles east, turned east
with his line, to fly from the face of the immensity that impended. In
those moments the dumbness of sun and sea and mist seemed a dumbness of
shock and stound that such a thing should be about to be.

The British, in fleeing, could hear the megaphone of at least one of
the six British which, appearing now at top speed out of the northern
mist, went with obstreperous trumps of resurrection bawling along the
row of telephone-buoys. “_Come forth!_” And twenty seconds later the
air commenced to be in a dangerous state of wave-agitation, apparatus
and plate to break, the plain of the sea to quaver and quake, rain to
drip, and tremendous terrors to menace men.

And then that which the ear feared was suddenly come upon it; suddenly
that which the tongue cannot utter was: mountains of overpowering sound
that drowned men’s senses profounder down “than ever plummet sounded,”
Alp-masses packed upon Cotopaxis of distracted clattering, like Arctic
trumpeting rantings to Atlantic in the rumpus and rush of Jurassic
dramas of disruption, terrorising rhetoric, reigning, long lasting....

For at least three Japanese torpedoes had pitched upon each of the
Japanese ships—all at once; and on the farthest of the British ships
eleven miles away every man dropped flat, slapped down by the blast.

Even to the floating locust-host far on the Normandy coast it suddenly
seemed to be midnight bleak and stormy, their barges and flats wobbling
on the water’s wash, while every English shop-window and window-pane
between Deal and the Needles darted from its fastenings.

In London the Queen was seated alone in the gloaming over a gold brooch
which she was making, when she noticed that the tools jumped and shook;
and a minute later there came to her a muttering like thunder, then
some kind of thump, then rougher thundering that kept on, like a truck
running a rough road.

Away in the East End Eulalia was attending to her canary, when the
cage-glass began to shake, to be followed by the same sounds; and Oyone
in her prison was washing her hands when the water rocked, and soon
thunder was moaning, then a thump, then rougher thundering....

It was said to exercise a doleful effect on the soul like the tolling
of a knell.

Oyone moved to her pigmy grate where she sat musing in the gathering
gloom.

There was no fire, for it was warm, and, being better treated than she
had treated the Prince, she had a lamp, and no need of the firelight.

So she sat in shadow, first wondering if there had been an earthquake,
and then wondering how the battle had gone: for her wardress had
gossiped to her that this was the day of days.

Presently she became aware of bells ringing carillons; and then, when
she had been seated so about an hour, suddenly there reached her from
somewhere a shriek, brief and muffled; then, near the stair-foot, a
scuffling and shuffling of feet which cut short her breathing, and sent
her peering through the hole in the door. In another minute six men in
masks came running, one tried the lock with several keys of a bunch,
and soon they were with her in the room.

“You are free,” said one.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Don’t mind that. A motor waits you at the gate, and a boat at Dover.
Be off.”

Her hands were at her hair, fast patting like her panting heart. In
three minutes she was ready and running from her liberators, lest they
should change—emissaries of the Landowners’ Protection League, to whom
Oyone’s prison had been revealed by the Princess Elizabeth.

At the gate Oyone asked “Are you under my orders?” of her chauffeur, a
man manifestly agitated, who said “yes,” and laughed to himself. She
said: “Drive fast to Chingford”; and, as he started, asked: “What is
the matter with you? What are the bells for?”

“Don’t know?” said he, amazed: “didn’t feel the thunder? Yellow fleet
wiped out, yellow swarm gone back, hundreds of thousands of them
caught, gunned, run down—wireless—it’s over—it’s done—we’ll scrape
through all right now.”

In an impulse she half lifted her parasol to hit him; then pinned her
veil with agitated fingers, muttering: “He has the air—he will sleep on
your skins this day week.”

Now it was night, they passing—where alone it was possible—through
by-streets, though, even there advance was not easy, the world
wondrously astir as with new birth, such a trump had summoned it
from the old centuries to the new to come. It took her two hours to
penetrate to the outskirts of Epping Forest.

All the way she had a boding of trouble; and there what she had
dreaded ever since her imprisonment fell upon her: her cottage all
dark—Chinnery gone.

It was not astonishing, since she, intending to come back, had left him
with hardly any money. Anyway, he was vanished, the cottage haunted
with the absence of his feet; where to seek him she could not conceive;
and the possibilities of that vanishing planted her a stunned stone on
her doorstep.

Then she dressed herself in reds and splendours, and leapt into the
motor for Dover; and now her thought was: “Before all else I will quaff
wine, I will be a wife.”

But the turbulence of Li Ku Yu’s bustle and momentum whirled her as in
a whirlwind’s urgency the moment she entered his presence at Dunkirk.
She had meant to sell the air-boat, now tenfold precious, for marriage,
casting off bashfulness and delicacy; but the moment he asked her:
“Where is the air-boat?” she, as if mesmerised, told him.

“It is on the dunes!”

“No.”

“It is”—she laughed—“come, you will find it.”

It was really there, quietly lying on the sands near the spot where so
many men had sought it.

For she, when lassoed by Commander Pilcher, had been in the act of
springing into it, but, dragged back, had just had the chance to dash
down the ratchet-lever; and Pilcher’s fall upon his face had prevented
him from seeing, what distance had prevented the others from seeing,
the going up of the boat into the gloomy air.

Moreover, since the night had been quite motionless, Oyone had known
that the boat would parachute down to about the same spot, after rising
beyond the atmosphere probably, and exhausting the petrol in the little
engine.

To fall like a famished man upon the boat Li Ku Yu banished all from
round about him and his screw-drivers, spanners and wrenches: and in
twenty minutes knew its whole simple truth. Now it was his for ever.

But he could find no time to thank the giver, who glanced in vain into
his eyes for a glint of gratitude. The Channel tragedy had slapped him
with a blast of shattering wind and glass which had gashed his chin, as
he lay off Dunkirk, and he had said: “My signature!” but it had been
another’s signature; and this had pestered and tenfold energised him.
Thenceforth he gave man or woman no rest, in one second living two.

So at that morning hour of seven, after her night of travel, he had
Oyone off by train to take men to the wood of the Six Millions; and
at the Casino des Dunes door told her: “Make haste come—to go back to
England.”

For the news of the vanishing of Chinnery from the cottage had much
irritated him, especially as he had no news yet of the Redlike Ray and
“Taska” from the ship despatched to America for it.

As for the Six Millions, though England had rung with its discovery and
presentation to the nation, he had no knowledge of this, for between
England and France was now a great gulf fixed; and the Landowners’
League ambassadors had, of course, been careful to tell nothing of it,
since the English Chancellor’s lack of gold was their only basis of
negotiation.

Nor had Oyone in her imprisonment heard one word of the Six Millions
to-do: so that she bent her steps to the old wood with the old
assurance that the gold was there, thinking: “When I give him this, he
will have to marry me.”

But “her” gold was gone! and now she was an aristocrat without “his”
land, a thing of shreds and patches, wretched, devilish, addicted to
killing.

She went back humble that night to Li Ku Yu; and he said to her, very
ungratefully: “You see! you fail”—judging her with his eye where he sat
cross-legged in apricot on tiger-skins, encompassed with adjutants and
aides.

Her head bent before him.

“Your boat is ready,” he then said in English: “and first—the ray! make
certain whether the lady, Bayley, has it, has it not; then—Mr Chinnery:
seek! Farewell.”

She, very tired, eyed him lingeringly under her eyes, before she said:
“Farewell.”




                               CHAPTER XXI

                             THE DYING LIPS


There in Eulalia’s chamber lay the ray ready for Oyone to enter and
take; but, as to finding Chinnery, at the time of her start from France
Chinnery was where she would never find him.

Chinnery had made the scanty funds which she had left him last to
within two days of her liberation; then had been breadless; the little
servant had deserted him; and he had pottered forlorn.

Now, he had an income of his own, which, however, he had lost the habit
of drawing upon ever since the air-boat raid, for Oyone had found means
to prevent him, because, if he had, that would have been to reveal that
he was not dead.

But now, poverty-struck, his Oyone flown, the lone man, after one
day’s want, resolved to walk to his bankers in Fleet Street, get a
cheque-book, and draw money.

Well, it proved a terrible walk. He had known that he was living
somewhere near London, but not quite where, did not think it would be
far, and set out about eleven in the morning, hatless, for he could see
no hat, asked his way, and walked and walked, anon resting on walls.

When he got to the populous parts, he began to fancy himself
crack-brained, for the drama of humanity had been transacting itself
almost without any knowledge or concern of his, and now for the first
time his eyes lighted upon the turmoil of a London quite unlike the
London he had known. At any rate, he was very unfitted to make his way
through it; was pushed about and sandwiched; the beams of a hot and
hazy day beat into his brain that reeled for hunger, for fatigue, for
feebleness, and for burning thirst; and twice he fainted on the way.

But he knew that he must be at the bank before four, so with the
remnants of that strength of soul which had been his, he trudged
insistently, and found himself in Fleet Street about ten minutes to
four.

But the bank-doors were closed. An Englishman told him that he thought
that it had long since failed....

By this time he had a kind of sunstroke, his forehead branded red,
he hardly any more in his right mind. Dementedly he set out to make
back to his bed at Epping, and now he muttered as he trudged, and now
he chuckled, his eyes glaring wild, his gait wandering, staggery. At
the third street-corner eastward of Commercial Street he fell all his
length in the centre of the street.

This was no uncommon thing, and there he lay unaided ten, twenty
minutes amid the _mêlée_ of footsteps, until Eulalia, making homewards,
almost stepped upon him. When she bent over, she started, recognising
him.

Now, she assumed that he, in collusion with Oyone, had stolen the
Six Millions, but still moaned for him, stretched there so wrecked;
wondered what she could do; remembered the underground den of a gay
Hungarian girl whom she had nursed in Grayson Street near; and with her
begging grace, by saying “he is my brother!” got some help.

He was taken down a narrow stair into a back-room twelve foot square,
where it was difficult to see, and was put on the stupid bed, he
breathing sterterously, she searching his pockets, and on finding not
one farthing, thought, “The Six Millions did not do him much good.”

She then loosened his collar, took off his boots, covered him up, left
a note for the girl on his chest, and went away to her lodging.

It was then, while she was attending to her canary, that the cage was
shaken, and there was thunder, then a thump, then rougher thundering....

An hour later she went back with digitalis and gruel, to find the
Hungarian standing arms akimbo over him, inclined to grumble: but
Eulalia gained her, making an arrangement to share her bed with her.

Chinnery was still unconscious, and though, when he had been fed, his
eyes opened and presently recognised Eulalia, she understood that he
was dying.

She sat an hour with him, he grasping her hand, as the drowning do, and
the next day thrice came with nourishment and brandy, and sat by him.
Near seven in the evening she decided to say: “I think you will die.”

“To-night, I think,” said he.

“You are not afraid?” said she.

“Why, no,” said he: “of what?”

“Of dying,” said she.

“Why, no, dear,” said he: “I shall die almost painlessly.”

“But,” said she, still thinking of the Six Millions, “have you never
committed any sins?”

“_Sins?_” said he, with a look of alarm: “why, dear one, no. Such a
thing as a ‘sin’ is not possible in the cosmos. Everything is just-so
for the time being, don’t you know? or it would not be a cosmos, but a
disorder.”

“Oh, well, no doubt you know more about that than I. But tell me this:
would you not like to see your friend?”

“The Prince of Wales?”

“Yes.”

“I should much. But I must not ask him, dear, for I have asked him
before in vain.”

“That is strange.... He thinks so highly of no one else, I know. And he
is at home, just back from crushing the Chinese power on the sea. If
you had been conscious yesterday evening you would have felt it: there
never was half such an awful thing on earth, they say——”

“Then, he must be busy.”

“No, he will rush to you, if you can write. I have a pencil, and this
notebook—only, you won’t say that you’ve seen me, will you?”

He shrank with alarm when she presented the pencil, but when she
pressed him, partly for herself, that she might listen to the visitor’s
voice from the front apartment, he caught at the pencil, and with the
scrawl of an old man, she holding the candle, wrote.

    “+Dear Teddy+: I am dying. Are you interested physiologically?

                                                +Richard Chinnery.+”

She added the address in print-letters, folded, directed it, wrote over
the address: “_From Mr Chinnery_,” ran to find the Hungarian, sent her
in a cab, and came back to see Chinnery now asleep.

Now not twenty seconds could she sit still, but was up and down, making
snug, tugging the bed-clothes, snuffing the taper, as pale as its
paleness.

And all at once, long, long before she expected him, he was upon her,
his voice suddenly on the stair, addressing the Hungarian, her escape
utterly cut off! “_Oh, God!_” she gasped distractedly, her frocks
darting frantically about the little apartment, filling it—for one
second; in the next she was on her face under the bed—there was nowhere
else!—and, as her dress disappeared under, he entered.

Chinnery slept.

The Prince, in pea-jacket and cap, sat on the chair, which lacked a
back, and, taking up the candlestick from a box, held it over the face
on the bed—a bed very begrimed, the pillow greasy, Chinnery’s cheeks
very hollow, his forehead blanched as alabaster, like a young prophet,
and son of the prophets, prostrate in poverties and sorrows. The
Prince’s face suddenly convulsed....

“_Girl!_” he called low, and when the Hungarian looked in: “where is
this nurse you spoke of.”

That heart beneath the bed was beating quick as cats’ feet twinkling.

“She must be gone, sir,” the girl said.

“Heygate!”—one of two gentlemen looked in—“Have Sir Arthur Lloyd
(King’s Physician) quickly here.”

When he again looked down Chinnery was smiling with him, and his bent
ear, deaf since the battle, could hear: “Well, Teddy.”

“Well, Richard,” he said.

“Thanks, Teddy.”

“Richard, why have you kept so dark from me?”

“Who has? I wrote you twice.”

“Ah! I did not know.”

“Well, here you are now.... I have been much darkened and afflicted....”

“Richard, listen: you have to collect yourself. The girl who has your
air-boat, who was my prisoner, has escaped, and the Orientals are
likely to overwhelm us in it: you have to tell me its structure, and of
your ray.”

“Which ray?”

“Ah, Richard, you _must_——”

“There’s some brandy under the pillow....”

The Prince held it to the dying lips, saying: “Now, Richard, while you
can. The air-boat—I have made a model, and it wouldn’t budge——”

“Why wouldn’t it? A magnet, a keeper, the lower lines through the
keeper ‘doing work’ on a little armature, whose current goes to the
magnet-coils—have you a pencil?”

The Prince’s palm lifted toward his forehead as a sudden half-light
struck him. He quickly produced pencil and paper; Chinnery drew a few
lines; and suddenly was anew asleep.

At the same time the candle began to flicker, so the Prince stole to
the door to send off his second gentleman for candles and brandy; then
sat again; and presently again Chinnery said: “Well, Teddy.”

“Now, Richard, the ray,” said the Prince....

“Ray?”

“Richard, your Redlike Ray.”

“Ah, my Redlike Ray! Did I tell you of it? There are still far more
X-rays than known rays in nature, I think—still half of even the solar
spectrum unknown. I got a ray with only 397 millions of millions of
vibrations a second—almost hot with Herschellian rays—resembling the
two lines of rubidium, but quite faint, and paralysing to the optic
nerve-ends. It is in a black box in the Horseferry Road—or was: I think
my Oyone told me.... She has left me! she is gone. I have had much
religious joy of her, though, I confess, she has not been invariably
gentle to me. But one should be careful of the cap and wear violet
goggles, for its dropping switches on the little flame-arc that has
salts of yttrium and erbium mixed with the silvers. Then the rays are
decomposed by a lens of ruby of high refractive index, and are then
passed, polarised, through three lævo-rotatory—Have you a pencil?
Perhaps....”

His breath was at present puffing very bluffly at his lips; but
instantly the pencil was in his fingers, the Prince bringing the
flickering candle to bear with one hand, supporting the paper on his
other palm; and the drawing began, with letterings, cyphers, chemical
signs, here and there, the Prince a breathless thing in the momentous
dumbness of those moments, broken only by the breath of death and the
remote drone of London. Suddenly the candle-light darted away, and left
darkness behind it.

Chinnery sighed and dropped back; the Prince groaned.

He had no matches; none in the candlestick. He went groaning, groping.
“_Girl!_” he groaned. There was no answer. “Oh, no matches,” he moaned.
Eulalia carefully pushed forth a box of matches beyond the bed-clothes;
but he did not know.

Anyway, he felt, it was too late now; and, hearing Chinnery speaking to
himself, he moved to him, stumbling with a moan against the soap-box
before he could discover the chair.

Now his near ear could just hear Chinnery’s dreamy speech, who seemed
to be wandering a little, his tongue thick, half paralysed....
“Anæsthesia is merely a first step.... I believed that I should be able
to change each pain, as an amputation, or travail, into a corresponding
transport.... But my Megosme interfered, and that, too, I neglected....
I have been flighty, self-pleasing, ill-mixed.... But soon, I think,
God will give birth to good men ... blessed be His name.... It was to
be to smell what the microscope is to sight.... Drunken dancings to
God.... When men of much light shall come ... blessed be His name....
He teaching dances to their heart ... step-dances to their heart’s
heart.... I prophesy ... for though He slays _me_, yet do I trust in
Him.... Teddy, is it you....”

After this he said nothing audible to his friend’s deafness, and just
as a gentleman was dashing down the stair with candles and brandy, his
breathing ceased.




                              CHAPTER XXII

                            THE RAY MIGRATES


Now, then, for some days was the _régime_ of air-boats, Chinnery’s
body still lying in its coffin in Buckingham Palace when twenty
boats lay in the Park, the Prince and Sturge themselves winding,
winding magnet-bobbins—without any very definite object! for it was
a fairly certain thing that Li Ku Yu must have Oyone’s air-boat; and
air-boat-making ceased suddenly in England on the fourth day, when
Pilcher and others who had been scouting over France in air-boats
reported that hundreds of thousands of magnets were being turned
out at every “forges et chantiers”—de la Seyne, de la Gironde, de
la Mediterranée—at Châlons-sur-Saône, at Rochefort, at Cherbourg:
whereupon the Prince set himself to make the ray.

He worked in those days under the eyes of the Princess Elizabeth:
for along one wall of his workshop ran a gallery aloft fronted with
big-bellied balusters of old stone, through which one could peep down
without being seen; and thence day after day, midnight after midnight,
in patient vigil, peeped the Princess down: for the Prince of Wales was
strange to her in those days—stiff, stiff, and still.

She suspected that he may have been told that she had visited Oyone
at “Ning Shou Kung,” suspected that he suspected that Oyone was free
through her: and there in the deepest unease, often when the palace was
deeply asleep, she sat peeping, peeping, keeping her eyes fixed upon
his flying activities, he finding time neither to eat nor sleep.

By this time England, that had sung so glad a song at the damming of
the flood, again knew, not only its doom, but almost the day of it.

Every hour air-boats and aeroplanes flew home with fresh news of the
hosts of Chinese now shrieking like fowl of ill-omen under the clouds,
undergoing air-training in every town and countryside from Ghent to
Guyenne.

Already there had been shots exchanged between air-boat and air-boat;
already three flocks of a dozen air-boats had appeared over London, and
dropped rice-greens into men’s eyes.

The destruction, then, was to be, not from below, but from the air,
not an eruption, but a rain; and western man, knowing nothing of the
Redlike Ray, understood that the Prince was powerless now to save.

He, for his part, reckoned from the reports sent him from Aldershot
that the rain would be during the night of Friday the 9th of May; and
he reckoned, by restless effort, to have the ray ready by the noon of
Tuesday, the 6th of May—in time to send a letter to Li Ku Yu.

But he and Sturge worked with a blackness of uncertainty in their
hearts. At least half of the apparatus they were making was being made,
not in reliance upon known truth, but in reliance upon likelihoods.

And by the noon of that fatal Tuesday Oyone’s steamer was speedily
approaching the English coast near Deal, in haste for Eulalia and the
Redlike Ray.

Oyone had started from France days before, on the very night of
Chinnery’s death, but had not steamed nine miles when she had been
sighted by the third-class cruiser _Pioneer_, with a twenty-knot speed;
and now—a chase.

Oyone’s yacht had finally escaped among the Scheldt channels, and she
had since been a shrinking prisoner on the sea, till now by dodgings
she saw the English cliffs; and instantly on landing was off by motor
for 19 Chapel Street, Whitechapel.

Before that hour, about noon, the Queen had come into the workshop to
see if the work was finished—not knowing what was being made, for her
son would tell no one, but knowing that it was something immensely
momentous. She laid her hand on his shirt-sleeve at the bench to
murmur: “Not finished?”

He did not look at her. “No, Mother.”

“I have brought you these delicious little sandwiches.”

His deafened sense caught “sandwiches,” and now for the first time in
his life he was intolerant of her. “Oh, Mother, for God’s sake!” he
said with a very intense fretfulness of nettle-rash; and now her paled
face went paler, and out mouse-mute she moved.

He nor Sturge ate; at six the work was not finished; at eight it was
not finished; at nine it was near completion; at nineteen past it was
finished.

Now the two faces were like ghost-faces down there in the light’s glow,
their frames in a tremblement resembling the make-and-break of electric
bells that tremble, as they flew about the room, mute but for a breath
tossed anon from one to the other, while Elizabeth wondered, peeping
through balusters above....

Now was the moment of testing. They had a little black cat at hand, so
after locking all doors, they set her on a chair and ran, the Prince
with two strings, to the remotest part of the room behind their black
box on the bench; and there, their backs toward the box, the Prince
pulled: the cap slipped down; a pencil of rays shot from the orifice
upon the cat.

Dumbly now they hung some moments, though their hearts in their bosoms
blabbed like tongues; and suddenly in those mute moments the cat mewed.

The Prince pulled the other string: toward her they flew; and, to their
sorrow, saw her washing her chops with her paw ... cynic.

“Puss, puss, come,” went Sturge, and she ran straight to him.

The Prince sat on her chair siffling through his teeth-edges, calm now,
but blanched like chalk.

At that moment Oyone’s motor was already in South-east London,
travelling fast toward the ray, her chauffeur a Japanese from the
Continent.

But it happened so that now, as the Prince sat there siffling his hymn,
a pressing visitor was announced, and presently the Chief Commissioner
was there, saying:

“The nurse who was observed carrying a black box has been unearthed,
Sir. The box is now actually on a chair in her third-floor back room
at No. 19 Chapel Street, East. Whether it is _the_ black box—it has a
cap——”

“It _is_ it!”—the Prince had sprung to his feet—“I’ll go myself.
’Phone, Sturge, to the stables.”

But before that word “stables” the Princess Elizabeth was away flying,
wild and white, and quickly was at the Queen’s knees, entreating
her: “Teddy has discovered that girl—all is up with my life—has had
out men seeking her—and oh, I know—I know—in ways unknown to Your
Majesty—that he will surely marry, if he once finds her—as he _must_
now—unless—Mother—you graciously intervene. Go yourself—you and I—only
it must be _instantly_—he has telephoned—if you bring her here, he will
never find—everywhere else he will now——”

“Come,” said Her Majesty.

Wraps on heads, hand in hand, they ran.

Just outside the palace-front they chanced upon a cab, dashed down the
Mall; and as they dashed past the Admiralty, the Prince dashed after in
a brougham, Oyone at that moment motoring past the Elephant, between
which and Blackfriars Bridge three people were injured by the speed of
her wheels.

Now, the Prince’s cylinders had more horse-power than his mother’s,
and all along the expanse of the Mall he rapidly overtook her, even
though she, on cautiously looking, thought she saw him coming, and
incited her driver to his highest speed, pleading, “You know me—the
Queen—please—please——”

But once out in the Strand throng, the two were on a more equal
footing, both being forced to forge slower through the misty and muddy
multitudes; and beyond the Charing Cross Hotel the Queen just escaped
what befel the Prince—a fallen horse, round which the crowd thickened
like a boil in the blood’s circulation; and no side-street was there....

Nor was he aware that there was any race or very special necessity for
haste, or he would certainly have turned back, or driven through the
screams of men and women. But he waited.

So the mother got well ahead, dashing into Chapel Street six minutes
in advance of the son—a shudder now in Elizabeth’s nerves lest Her
Majesty, on observing the street-name and house-number, should remember
that this was the very address of the Six Million donor as given by Sir
Robert Barrington. But her Majesty had other troubles, as they dashed
into the drab caravanserai.

Eulalia sat by her table and lamp, letting her eyes rest on a _Pippa
Passes_ that had passed in her pocket through European bloodshed,
through her Chinese nightmare, through the air, when—a thumping at her
door—the door flung open—and before her the Queen—and peering over the
Queen’s shoulder the Princess Elizabeth’s speculative spectacles....

“I am here to take you away”—from the Queen—“no time to explain—for the
good of the State—your country, to which you owe everything—will you
come?”

A stare!

“Will you come?”

“I—suppose so, Ma’am”—with a glance toward a soap-box containing
underclothes.

“What’s in the box? Clothes? Leave those! Come——”

“My canary——”

“Bring that—quickly——” popping upon Eulalia’s head a forage-cap which
she saw while Eulalia was taking the cage; which done, Eulalia cast a
parting look round, spied her “Taska’s” black box, caught that up, and
with the ray and her packet of letters under her right arm, the cage
hanging in her left, the forage-cap cocked awry over her right eye,
they were gone, like straws caught on cyclonic storms.

By which time the Prince, having passed Aldgate, was pretty near.

And down at the house-door there was delay—through Oyone, just come:
for when the Queen reached the door, it was to hear her chauffeur
screaming to Oyone’s chauffeur: “Are you drunk, or what?” the latter
having shocked end-on upon the Royal cab’s engine.

And as Her Majesty stepped into her cab, and then Eulalia, out jumped
Oyone from her motor, and saw the face of Elizabeth, just stepping
in, in the off-shine of a wall-lamp; and she ran to Elizabeth saying:
“_You?_ I have wished to speak——”

But as Elizabeth turned to her, the Queen’s face was out with “_Make
haste!_ Who is this?”—and Oyone, with a starting heart, recognised the
Queen, instantly thinking: “_She_ here? What for? the ray?”

The cab moved before she had had an instant’s chance to peer within and
see Eulalia and the ray; but before the Queen’s head was withdrawn,
Oyone had cut a face of venom and disdain at her.

If, now, the Royal cab had run west, it must have met the Prince, but
it ran east, then north, then west, the Princess’s glasses, meantime,
throwing ogles of distrust at the black box, not half liking the idea
of being blown into “flies’ feet,” even with the Queen for companion.

Meantime, Oyone flew inward with wings, up the stair—resolved, if the
box was absent, to follow the Royal cab, and, if necessary, lay dead....

Without ceremony she rushed into Eulalia’s chamber—plied a hundred
eyes—not there—and down she rushed....

Causing the Prince’s heart to start! who was just near enough now
to the house-door to see her heels pitching into her carriage; and,
instantly convinced that she had the ray, he and Sturge were after her,
as her car turned eastward, whither she had seen the Queen’s car speed.

Now, she in rushing out of doors had noticed his motor and him looking
out of it a second before _his_ recognition of _her_ had leapt into a
conscious recognition: so, seeing him follow to capture her, she leant
out, sent two rapid shots at his car, and dashed off, scattering the
throng from her path.

The Prince’s car ran into wall on the right, and was smashed, his
chauffeur’s right arm fractured; and he pursued on foot, till Oyone’s
motor disappeared, then ceased.

When he and Sturge spurted up to the “third-floor-back,” it was to
discover nothing—a nurse’s coif, tips of little slippers peeping,
_Pippa Passes_, a poor cupboard, a nightdress nicely folded, a photo of
the Prince in silver ... more fay than ray....

And Oyone herself failed to discover the Royal cab, which arrived
safely at the palace.




                              CHAPTER XXIII

                            INTO WHOSE HANDS?


“The Princess Elizabeth and I,” said Her Majesty in a high-up chamber
on the west palace-side, “are both clever with our needles, so we
have plotted together to make you up some lovely dresses with our own
fingers, if you will let us—simple but _chic_. For we consider that it
was amiable and good of you to put yourself into my hands, as you have.”

Eulalia curtsied, silent, standing withdrawn, mysteries of pride
hiding in her eyes, she understanding that she was being patronised,
and condoned, and graciously tolerated, since she was graceful and an
interesting little sinner.

So now was the _régime_ of the tape, the fashion-plate, the scissors,
the prettiest _mousselines_. A trunkful of fairy linens had already
come from (Irish!) Yvonne’s, toilet-things from Bond Street. The
Princess Elizabeth measured with tape and spectacles. Eulalia was to be
made a thing to kiss the fingers at. It was the Queen’s will.

And as they came out, in went the lady-in-waiting, Lady Julia Newcome,
to amuse and be amiable, for Eulalia was never left alone; while
outside Her Majesty cast up hand and eyes, sighing: “She is pretty!”

Whereat the Princess had an unease: for the Queen, with all her moral
severity, was very well known to be amorous, prone to fancies and fads
and favouritisms, often capricious, inconstant, incalculable: and that
she should acquire the same taste as her son in respect of Eulalia was
not a desirable thing to the Princess, who was now inwardly convinced
that Eulalia was a wife.

“How long do you intend her to be here, Mother?” she asked, cutting
muslin over the Last Supper at the centre of the satin tablecover
in the “Newmarket Parlour” (with three horse-scenes by Wootton)—a
favourite retreat of the Queen, a small room, nicely proportioned,
lighted by a bay looking west upon the Park, with a north lobby.

The Queen, vacantly staring, presently murmured: “How long will I keep
_you_ here, or myself? Whatever it was he was making, he has failed in.
He sits like a stone Achilles; no one ventures to address him.... It is
well that _you_ take it stoically....”

The Princess now sat down near on a Chancellor of the Exchequer chest
(in which Chancellors kept their cash before the age of cheques), and,
poring with her spectacles on the Queen, came out with the statement:
“Your Majesty, I am not at all afraid of the Chinese.”

At the moment the Queen seemed not to hear, moving her head musingly
up and down a little, lost in despondency; and the Princess continued:
“Not that I am sublime ... but that I have special knowledge. I _know_
what Teddy was making—a machine to blow thousands of men into quite
tiny pieces in a minute; and I have only stood by and seen him fail
in it, in order to show him clearly that I am a little worthy of him,
in order that _I_, in the day of his failure, might step in and say,
‘Teddy, here is the thing ready made which you have tried to make, and
failed to make.’”

At this the Queen started! for it has already been shown, in regard
to the charlatanism of this young lady, that there is absolutely _no_
limit to the superstitiousness of men—even of men of some clearness of
vision—when the intellect is once predisposed, infected and mesmerised
toward a particular creed and epidemic of belief.

The Princess, for her part, knew from Oyone that Eulalia’s black box
“blew one into flies’ feet”; knew that Oyone was eager to seize it; had
noted that the box made in the Prince’s workshop was exactly like it;
and felt that she would have little difficulty in winning the box from
Eulalia, who, in her present bashful situation, had a natural tendency
to be affable.

As to the Queen, she had seen without seeing Eulalia’s black box like
a kodak, nor had seen at all the black box in the Prince’s workshop.
She was instantly leaning keenly toward the Princess, breathing: “Tell
me, dear....”

“I just say so much to comfort you, Mother,” replied the other with her
smile of Isis: “I am not at present prepared to reveal more—except to
express the confidence I feel that Teddy, with the help of what I have
been able to divine and discover, will find himself quite competent to
cope with all these horrors, and many more. Oh, I take no credit to
myself!—I _know_ now that there is Something that prompts me, whispers
me, like Socrates’ _daimon_—yes, Something, Something. But, as to the
girl, send her quickly to America, Mother! Suppose—_just suppose_—that
Teddy were to discover her here!”

“She is pretty!” sighed the Queen, vacantly staring at a row
of miniatures of the Prince on an old-oak console-table by the
hearthplace; then suddenly: “Give her this from me!—that will flatter
her,” taking a silver-gilt rose-water dish, engraved with lion and
unicorn, from a Queen Anne cabinet.

“Very well”—from the Princess—“though we must not make her think
herself a saint.”

“She is not depraved!” said the Queen quickly—“_ça se voit_. What I
_can_not understand is her motive for keeping herself so completely
from him, that he had to be seeking her; she, meantime, a Prince’s
light o’ love, living in penury in the East End! The thing baffles me!”

“He tired of her—that’s it. Such honeys are only delicious for a day,
Mother: then men cast them aside.”

“How do you—know?”

“From my study of life! Studiosa sum, Mother, nulla studia a me aliena
puto.”

“Very good: let us say, then, that he tired of her; that she resented
it; fled from him, hid from him; and that he then repented and sought
her afresh. But all this does not explain her poverty! Had he never
lavished any presents upon her? Why did she go as a war-nurse? I cannot
understand!—unless she is supremely proud! And pride is never depraved.”

“All that does not alter the fact of her stain....”

“Of course not. But it is pitiful that women must reap as men have
sown.”

“And does not alter the peril of her being in England....”

“Well, but I have given orders for her passage next Wednesday.”

The Princess smiled. “Shall I go and try this on her? and give her the
rose-water dish”—she went out by an east portal, up four steps into
a north-and-south corridor,

[Illustration]

where, turning left, she passed under a draperied archway on to
Eulalia’s apartments on her right. Demurely smiling, the Lady Julia
Newcome came out when she went in.

And presently the Princess was saying: “What is in that box of yours?
Is it photographic?”

Eulalia answered: “I know nothing of it, except that I dug it out of
the ground for a dead man, to send it to America.”

“Curious”—the Princess stood off, inspecting the fit of a bodice—“is it
dangerous to touch, by chance?”

“Not that I know of—though it has marked on it, ‘Do Not Touch.’”

“Curious. Pick it up, let me see how you handle it.”

“There is no particular way,” said Eulalia, complacently raising it
from a Louis XIV. writing-table where it lay.

“It strikes me as curious,” the Princess then remarked—“something
scientific, maybe? You will no doubt permit me to take it to my
apartments and _analyse_ it a little.”

“If that pleases Your Imperial Highness.”

And the fitting went on.




                              CHAPTER XXIV

                           THE YELLOW DELUGE


At three in the afternoon of Friday, the ninth, fewer words probably
were being spoken over the breadth of Britain than ever in a populous
country before. Hundreds of thousands of the moneyed, the aristocrat,
the royal, had migrated to Man and Ireland, where, too, was a silence
that waited. But the British royal household had abided. As for the
Prince of Wales, ever since the hour of the cremation of Chinnery it
was as if a paralysis had taken possession of him.

At that hour of three the Princess Elizabeth had still not the Redlike
Ray from Eulalia: and now all mortal things hung upon the vanity of
this Teutonic fräulein, who sat with guilty tremors, putting off from
hour to hour the revelation that might rescue the relics of western
civilisation, in the hope of yet making that revelation in her own way.

When, on the Thursday morning, the Princess had gone to take up the
box, Eulalia, after consenting, had said: “I think, after all, that I
should prefer it not to be taken away, as I have it in trust....”

And it had been excruciatingly difficult for the Princess to ask
again—the thinnest wall of delicacy now between her and the box, but a
wall of steel.

But she had broken through it that same day, and afresh on the Friday:
had asked afresh—with a scarlet flush.

And this made Eulalia stubborn. She remembered by this time that a
coster-girl who had reminded her of Oyone had snatched the box, and
also that she had seen Oyone speak to the Princess at the cab-door in
Chapel Street, East. This made her stubborn. She resolved to have the
box packed and despatched to “Taska” before the Princess should again
have a chance of asking. That was on the Friday at 11 +a.m.+

Accordingly, when the Princess then left her, Eulalia obtained paper
from her maid, made up the box, and placed it on the shelf of the
alabaster hearthplace of her central apartment, till the collector
should pass.

Meantime, the Princess, in love now with loneliness, clung to her own
apartments on the floor below, where she sat a staring stone, bitterly
regretting her brag, a limp and guilty rag at the going, going of the
moments, yet smitten with motionlessness.

But at four when the Queen, who was restlessly wandering, visited
her some moments, the Princess pricked herself to sprightliness and
careless smiles—knowing well all the time what the Queen had come to
hear; and though Her Majesty did not directly refer to the promised
“help,” she did say with a sigh: “Heaven knows what this night will
bring forth for mankind.”

And since the charlatan is in every extremity and fix a charlatan, and
in the last ditch dies a charlatan, the Princess now, with a bound of
her rash heart, found herself in the thick of saying: “I think, Your
Majesty, that, if Teddy will come to me at, say, six o’clock, I shall
have something of value to put into his hands.”

But _how to get it_? From then to half-past five she sat the most
agonised girl, probably, in all the agonised world.

At half-past five a Queen’s-page requested the Prince to visit Her
Majesty in the Newmarket Parlour; and there for half-an-hour they sat,
mother and son, hand in hand, with hardly the murmur of a word, and
heard windy wet weather yearning in the Park.

At twenty to six Elizabeth sped like a spectre past Her Majesty’s door
to enter Eulalia’s apartments, pallid, concentrated; resolved at all
costs to have the box.

She saw the box packed, directed; knew that soon after the stroke of
six it would be gone; but still she put off action, dallied, palely
paced, dallied, declaring across the lump of aching in her throat
that Eulalia looked lovely in the blue-festooned muslin, sole specimen
from the loom, with the miniature at her throat of the Prince in
Eton-jacket—a miniature which the Queen, to the scandal and whispering
of several, had daringly presented to Eulalia in her daring way.

But at last when the clock was about to strike six, Elizabeth miserably
found herself in the act of saying: “Oh, well, I am going to have the
box, after all”—and had it.

But Eulalia stopped her. “Your Imperial Highness—please—put yourself in
my place”—and laid hold of it.

“No, it is no good, you must.”

“I must _not_”—and now a struggle of several seconds, which only the
Princess’s terror of an explosion ended; though, as she let go, she
viciously tore the wrapping across, rendering it useless for the post,
and Eulalia then petulantly tore the whole off, in placing the box back
on the shelf.

They now stood confronted with rough sea-weather in their breasts, and
discomposed countenances; and in a tone loud with hysteric stress the
Princess said: “Your being here has made you insolent!”

Eulalia laughed!

And that laugh penetrated the still a little deaf ear of the Prince of
Wales.

He, bidden by the Queen to go to Elizabeth’s apartments “at six,” was
on the four steps outside the Newmarket Parlour, about to turn to the
right, when, to the left—that laugh....

He made some steps that way, could hear voices, and went like one in a
dream....

Meantime, the Queen, by some instinct or sense, seems to have gathered
that he was going left instead of right, and ran with stealthy
steps to see. He was then between the arch-draperies, walking like
a sleep-walker drenched in dream, and she, struck with sudden
apprehension, lifted up her voice at him: “Why that way?”

He took no notice, possibly did not even hear; and suddenly out of her
throat there broke a hoarse roar of horror and terror like a death-cry:
“_Teddy, not in there!_”—for his hand was on a door handle.

But in he went, and she, swiftly flitting, was in almost as soon as he.

There in the middle stood a muslin Eulalia, like a picture of tripping
Spring, and Flora picking roses, and there the Princess, and there the
Redlike Ray.

In the instant that the Prince saw Eulalia with one eye he saw the
ray tied with string, with the other; and lightning struck into his
consciousness the thought: “_She_ was ‘_the nurse_’....”

And for the tenth of a second he stood suspended, pulled toward her,
pulled toward the ray, but then flew to her to kneel an instant in a
scarlet passion, clasping her, with “My love! my luck! my star! my
lucky star! my love! my luck!” then was up, and he and the box vanished
together.

Within some minutes he had struck a dog blind, and was in an ulster in
the air with Sturge and Pilcher, a wet and windy air which threatened a
wild night; and before they dropped him at the Lord Warden, Dover, he
had handed them a note for Dunkirk:

    “To His Excellency, Li Ku Yu. If Your Excellency likes to
    meet the Prince of Wales, alone, at nine o’clock, behind the
    ruins of St Mary’s, N.E. of Dover, something of moment to His
    Excellency will be told. His Excellency’s safety is hereby
    guaranteed.”

“But,” said Pilcher, “is this thing safe, Sir? You go alone—suppose
_he_ doesn’t.”

“You have no reason to think him treacherous,” answered the Prince.

“Still, Sir, we pray——” said Sturge.

“I’ll see,” the Prince said: “you go on.”

He passed into the hotel, as darkness fell, and the two flew on over
a rough sea, sighting on the way five different air-boats apparently
making for Britain.

At seven-forty they were standing in the Casino dancinghall before Li
Ku Yu, who sat high, smiling down upon some rite, round about him being
the Chiam (High priest) and bouzis in hosts in a thronged hall all a
hotch-potch of hues, like boxes of coloured chalks, or that coloured
spectacle in prisms, or the coloured chemistry of iridium. The two were
led quite up to him, and saw his head dotted with sweat.

He, on casting his eye over the note, had the instant thought: “Either
he has the ray, or will pretend to”; then aloud: “You, Sturge? Glad to
see you. I keep you two prisoners two hours.”

“This is outrageous!” cried out Pilcher in a maze and rage.

“Seize these men, feed, keep two hours,” Li Ku Yu murmured to a
colonel, and was instantly off, soft-footed, swift, with swinging
pigtail swaggering, slanting a wee bit backward on his heels like the
Northern Chinese, down the bowed hall, and out.

In ten minutes he, too, was in an ulster in the air, and ten men in
ulsters in his boat’s hold. (Hence he had kept Pilcher and Sturge, lest
they should follow and watch his landing.)

The night, inclined to be foul, was almost without light, and in a
quarter of an hour the knot of men were darkly disembarking south of
St Margaret’s Bay, where they hid themselves and their boat, while one
alone, an agile young scout of the Choshus, darted up and southward to
ferret out St Mary’s ruins.

He was quickly back; and then, with elaborate stealths, crawling under
hedges, through marshy mid-fields, they all darkly marauded, with more
caution than haste, having forty minutes to spare. They were seven
pigtails, three Choshus, and Li Ku Yu.

He himself reconnoitred the ruins, noted which road the Prince must
come, then gathered his gang to lie in wait behind a row of broken
stones rankly grass-grown; and from one to the other he moved,
stooping, breathing a secret: “Seize, not shoot; shoot, if need be.”

But even as he breathed it to the ninth man, with a pang of the heart
he acquired the consciousness that there, lying in wait, were not ten
men, but eleven.

“_Hands up!_—quick, quick....”

“_Bright!_” cried Li Ku Yu recognising the cry of the Prince, who had
long since slipped into the rear of the band in the dark.

“Drop your pistol.”

Li Ku Yu dropped it.

The Prince, springing over the row of stones, his muzzle still at the
other’s bosom, said: “Right turn—walk”: and they went stepping toward
Dover, a pigtail not less long than Li Ku Yu’s swinging behind the
Prince’s back, his face not less yellow-brown.

After some hundreds of yards, he muttered sullenly: “_Immoral!_”

Li Ku Yu, smiling quite unmoved, said: “Why, Prince? _You_ guaranteed
safety; I—no!”

The Prince now pocketed his pistol, saying, “I think I am as quick as
Your Excellency”—a remark which brought a rush of blood to the other’s
forehead. He made no answer.

Then, “Is Your Excellency disposed to sit here?” asked the Prince, and
they sat on a mass of rock by the path under the shadow of a larch, but
still lashed by squalls of wind and water.

There was silence. Then Li Ku Yu: “Let us be quick.”

“What is it all about?” said the Prince: “may one express to Your
Excellency the surprise one feels that one is still ignorant of the
_casus belli_ of China against the white races? You declare no war; you
invade; you butcher.”

“No time! But stay—hear. What one thing is it that concerns living
beings—that living beings care about? Happiness? Agreed?”

“Yes.”

“Good! And happiness consists in worshipping God? say in ‘religion.’
Agreed?”

“Yes.”

“Good! Now, the scientist denies that apes, negroes, bishops,
bouzis, dervishes are religious; denies that anyone can possibly be
religious—but him; since no one can have any knowledge of God—but
him; denies that anyone knows what religion _is_—but him. And he is
right—necessarily! Agreed?”

“Yes.”

“Good! Now, at my birth I observe two masses of men, equal in
number—one white, one yellow; both having what they call ‘a
religion’; but the brain of the yellow much more disengaged from his
‘religion,’ equally superstitious, but less deformed and diseased with
superstition, less incapable of being led to look in a centric sane
mood at the universe, and to be truly religious. So said I to myself:
‘The European brain will take two hundred years to evolve out of the
notion that Christianity has some connection with religion, resemblance
to’; and if one answer, ‘but already France, Germany, England had
rejected Christianity,’ _I_ answer back: ‘they _think_ so!’ but for
many days their mentation will be infected by the fact that for ages
their fathers entertained the conceit that a mammal of their species,
with 300 rudimentary organs, was the Infinite Itself. Imagine the
astonishment of a zoologist of Mars to know that on some planet in
space there paces an animal into whose head the disease of a conceit
so _ec_-centric could creep and fester. Man? Comic! the laughing-stock
of the cosmos! So said I: ‘Save mankind two hundred years; abolish
Europe.’”

“Well said,” said the Prince—“provided Your Excellency is sure of what
you substitute. But what genius for discovering God’s truth have the
Chinese given proof of?”

“_Cluck!_ True!—none—little. But their brain older than the
European—not more evolved—less!—but more mature for evolution.”

“I did not know that. I wonder if that is an opinion? for Your
Excellency is aware that opinions have no value. Prove it, and I need
not say that Your Excellency shall have your way unresisted by me.”

“An opinion gathered from many things! But, as to strict proof—no.”

“And for a concept which Your Excellency cannot prove you butcher a
hundred million women and children.”

“_Cluck!_ Our grandmothers’ thoughts, Prince. Is it wrong to kill an
ox, a man?”

“You are said to ‘rob them of their life.’”

“Precisely! But it is wrong to rob of anything—why? Only because you
make to suffer! to suffer long! Agreed? Good! But suffering implies
consciousness! No wrong to rob, if the robbed-from is never conscious
of it, or only conscious one second, as when you rob of life.”

“But the killer may suffer,” said the Prince.

“Ah! then! wrong! Wrong for _me_ to kill a fly, for I suffer—so made!
But not wrong to kill a flea, to kill two hundred million fleas
or men for the least reason, for _I_ do not suffer, _they_ do not
suffer—especially when done for the benefit of one! two! two hundred
millions!”

“True,” said the Prince: “but I question ‘the benefit.’ That, you
have admitted, is an opinion; _I_ have the opposite—and Mr Chinnery’s
Redlike Ray.”

Li Ku Yu started in the dark, made a grimace, sprang up. “Not civilised
warfare, Prince!”—with a grin.

“No. Hence I asked Your Excellency to come, to tell you”—the Prince,
too, stood up—“for since the white race seems to _me_ a type capable
of higher evolution than the yellow, I will not see it wiped out, if I
can help. And you seem now to be in the hollow of my hand. Shall we not
come to terms? Save your people from this—take them back to China!”

Silence ten seconds. Then Li Ku Yu: “Could not!—if I wished. The die
cast! Had the ray from Chinnery, Prince?”

“No ... Chinnery, by the way, is dead.”

Li Ku Yu snatched off his cap, bowed his brow. “Brockweir’s greatest!”

Silence.

Then: “I go, Prince. If—since—you possess this ray, we meet never more:
for this night I invade England, I myself sharing the danger of my
regiments. In case I fail, I will take dispositions to make it easier
for you to deal with the Chinese, and resettle men. I wish you well.”

“Good-night.”

Li Ku Yu walked north in front of his fluttering ulster-skirts, while
the Prince dropped, as if shot, prostrate upon the rock, sob upon sob
of world-sorrow bursting from his breast like the night-winds’ volleys,
and water from his brain like the rain. And Li Ku Yu, who heard a sob
on the squall, stopped, turned, murmured some words, and moved on.

As soon as he was back at Dunkirk he had Oyone alone in the old
Cashier’s-office, to whisper her: “_Kill!_—to-night—your chance! An
Empire your reward!”

She had never beheld him pallid and agitated before, and catching
pallor and passion from his potent emotion, flashed a defiant eye at
him. “Why send _me_? I am afraid to be in the air in the dark over the
ocean——”

“Look at a woman afraid of something!”—he pointed her out with his
finger!—“yet dreaming of queenship! Be quick, lest I teach you fear!
Whom have I to send that well knows his face? he may be painted
yellow—he may be white——”

She seized his sleeve, kneeling, staring up into his face: “Marry me! I
can’t any more—marry me!”

On which he shrank in alarm as from a rat rushing up him, palms up,
with “_Woman!_” and she sprang up with a high and tragic cry: “You do
not want me?”

“To marry takes time!” he cried. “To-morrow! To-morrow! He is at
Dover——”

“To-morrow we may die blinded, though I will not mind, if to-night you
marry me, for the earth and skies heard you promise it, and I have
bitten you in every bit of my bread, and washed in you in my bath,
and——” she broke down, dashing water from her eyes.

“So unless I marry, you do not go?”

She passionately stamped at him. “I say no!”

A dangerous look of bale shot toward her before he stood up bustlingly
with, “Let us marry—come, come——”

But this, as he had foretold, took some time, so that she saw herself
forced to be off some moments after the furtive and hurried contract
in the Garden-kiosk; and when her eyes, that teemed with pleadings
and wifely meekness, implored for a moment alone with him before her
departure, he patted her back publicly, with, “You kiss Li Ku Yu
another time, Oyone. No failure! Farewell!”

She started off with a little Japanese scout, sharp as a spaniel’s
snout, using her own old boat in which alone she felt herself at home,
though half-way over to Dover she had a horrible shock, when the boat
unaccountably dropped a hundred feet down, leaving her heart above. She
had not been in it since Li Ku Yu had ransacked its mechanism, and her
apprehension lest he should have flung it too hurriedly together again
was very unpleasant, until she descended outside Dover.

There in a shed she dressed in male clothes, and as a boy in an ulster
entered Dover, her nerves aburn with her husband’s “No failure!”—she
every five minutes shocked afresh with astonishment at finding herself
a wife! his helper and high left hand! She laughed in the face of the
rain. The night was not wilder nor the winds raged wistfuller than the
strange and dangerous things that raged in her nature.

But she soon discovered that the Prince was no longer in Dover, was off
to London by train, taking the ray—to get an air-boat, in fact, after
waiting long in vain for Pilcher’s and Sturge’s return from Dunkirk;
and he had gone as glad as vexed, thinking to see Eulalia a minute.

But he did not see her: for, as his cab was dashing through the Palace
Park, there ran to meet him Pilcher and Sturge, who half drew revolvers
at him, seeing a Chinaman.

“Where on earth have you been?” the Prince asked; and Pilcher answered:
“Kept prisoners two hours, Sir—just come—missed you at Dover—invasion
commenced—Chinese have set fire to three pine-woods between Ashford and
Folkestone for signal-fires, and are at present alighting at the rate,
we reckon, of twenty-five a minute with some camp-equipment.”

“Let’s go,” the Prince said, springing down, and in another minute was
in the air.

By that time Oyone, following him to London, was flying north of
Croydon, and her boat and his passed within two hundred yards of each
other, though she did not spy it in the dusky air, for just then for
the second time that night she had a shock of fright at the dropping
two hundred feet of her boat. But, landing safe in St James’s Park amid
drenching rain, she hid her boat, resumed her woman’s clothes, and now
stood confronted with the task of discovering the Prince.

Reckoning that his train must by now have arrived in London, she was
away to Marlborough House....

There a foreign sentry informed her that the Prince was at Buckingham
Palace, whereupon she ran back to St James’s Park, and, taking her
scout now, went up, to descend a little west of the lake in Buckingham
Palace Park—an invasion of Royal rights based upon the fact that kings
were invented before aeroplanes and air-boats were foreseen.

A second after she touched ground a drenched black figure in an oilskin
cape came trotting, but dropped down dead with the scout’s kokotana in
his heart.

The two then stood in bush, looking at the palace which had a few
lights behind its blinds.

The problem still was to hit upon the Prince, the ray: for whereabouts
in the vastness of the palace he would probably be Oyone had no notion.

But now up yonder across the central blind of the Newmarket Parlour she
spied Her Majesty’s shadow pass diademed: and she started; her clasp
tightened on her knife.

“Kill _her_,” she instantly thought, dark-hearted: “then hide; then
_he_’ll run to her; then I’ll have _him_.”

“You see that window?” she now whispered her scout: “kill everything
you meet between that arch where the sentry is and the room-door behind
that window; stab, not shoot; hide the bodies; then be back to me.”

The little Jap, quick-wristed as a twisting squirrel, instantly
slipped off and vanished, until she saw him after a minute insinuate
his nimble being into a palace-portal.

Oyone then waited ten minutes, till he was suddenly there with her
anew, holding up four fingers close before her eyes—meaning two
sentries, a gentleman-at-arms, a page; and she herself then sped away
in front of her fluttering ulster-tail with a wet wan face, her hair
fallen half-lax under her hard man’s-hat.

But the hour of the Chinese invasion, which could not be postponed when
once fixed, was against her otherwise good ruse to get at the Prince,
since _he_ was now three thousand feet in the air near Folkestone,
leaving the Chinese signal-conflagrations glaring like eclipse and
the midnight sun on the night below and behind him, he making for
mid-channel; and, mixed with the hubbub of the wind blustering by the
boat’s bow, was now a troubled sound of moaning and lamenting in the
air.

Pilcher, steering, was grovelling at the hatchway, with violet-blue
goggles, got from Sturge, at his eyes, and a bandage over the goggles
which anon he lifted a little; Sturge, begoggled, was in the hold, and,
acting as watch-keeper, anon peeped up to see that no boat got above
them; and the Prince, begoggled, his eyes tight, lay on his face in
the bows under the ray-box, which was bound to the stem, its cap bent
somewhat downward.

And out of it for miles into the night, downward, skyward, to right, to
left, spread the rain of rays, invisible at a distance, but appearing
to one a little in front of the boat’s prow as a little sprout and
spray of rays reddening the night’s denseness for nine or ten yards;
nor was there any other light, only an Admiral Colomb lantern in the
hold; and anon Pilcher directed an electric ray upon the compass a
moment.

“We are over the sea, Sir,” he sang out presently; and the Prince
sang back: “I should go pretty slow now, zigzagging north-east and
south-east.”

Their voices noised in the dark like voices calling in song on some orb
where there’s no talking, but only song and moody emotion, the gale
making them musical, the gloom, the restless rain, that sang together
an anthem godlike sad. Though high aloft, they saw not a light in the
sky; vapours fared westward in haste on their way over their heads;
the blast ran brabbling past like the spattering breath of a benzoline
brazing-lamp braying; the midget engine pistoned and spittled, the
little carbons sparking a little anon like the anvil of Thor; and the
redlike spray of rays reigned steadily there in heaven like a Divine
Eye whose ire strikes sightless.

Presently the Prince sang out: “Hear anything odd?”

“No—what like?” Pilcher called.

“The wind too near in your ears perhaps,” the Prince sang out: “to me
distinct, a sound like distant towns. Ask Sturge.”

Pilcher asked down the hatchway, and Sturge sang up: “I know what the
Prince means—hear it every now and again—sort of universal murmur going
on. There may be a hundred thousand of them about.”

“How many do you see, Pilcher?” the Prince called.

Pilcher slipped up his bandage, turned his back to the ray, and,
standing on the steps, called back: “Three in sight for the moment,
Sir. Two astern fifty yards apart, one to starboard two hundred
feet down. I have seen as many as six—we should see hundreds, I
think, on another night. Everything is rather ghastly through the
glasses—livid-like—poor devils.”

A dumbness now among them some moments: until a thump and thud
somewhere was heard, and Sturge, then on the steps glancing abroad,
called out: “Two have bumped, and both gone tumbling, not forty yards
to starboard! I thought there’d be some bumps.”

“Can you see the sea?” sang out the Prince.

“No sign of it here, Sir.” He shut his eyes in trouble, and went down.

“It seems monstrous, sir,” called out Pilcher presently, “that your
warning was disregarded!”

“I doubt if Li Ku Yu fully believed,” the Prince sang back: “he said
once ‘_if_ you have the ray,’ then corrected to ‘_since_ you have’—to
be polite! He may have felt that my warning might possibly be a trick
and last resort. And he probably found himself compelled to make some
attempt with some proportion of the intended numbers. But he is not a
cruel mind.”

“_Hark!_” sang out Pilcher now, and, listening, they could catch a
song-sound like lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, babbled lamentably by some tongue
not far below; then immediately from the east there reached them a
screech which lasted a long while, and died away and away in a lalling
song; and presently after this a pistol-shot from the north-west.

“A suicide, I suppose,” called Pilcher—with probable truth, for very
many were found on the ground with gun-wounds in different districts of
England.

That night it was as if the skies rained a rain of flesh, as well as
wet, not in Eastern England merely, but in the Midlands and West: for
the air-boats still went on and on (until the engines were empty), when
their helmsmen were sightless.

Many of the squads in the boats’ holds appear to have been provided
beforehand with bandages, and been told to look out for the rays, but
were probably blinded before they saw any ray, or properly realised the
possibility of being stricken blind; and of those in holds who escaped
blindness by bandages few probably had any training in the handling of
the boats.

But many thousands (who began to fall high enough) came down without
accident, saved by the parachute-bottom, some of them not blinded; and
with the morning’s dawn in many a home of Southern England was lodged a
Chinaman, sightless or seeing.

The rest crashed shrieking into street or field or river, or, landing
on roofs, slanted and crashed, or stuck in trees.

By midnight England was agaze at this rain, amazed, with a suspicion
of hallelujah and strange new hope springing in its breast, and the
name of a man panting on its breath. In the London window was a face
upturned, spurting feet in her streets. A throng on London Bridge
saw through the rain one air-boat drop upon another, and both drop
upon the gold cross of St Paul’s, and go cracking. Some dropped upon
cabs, carts, and men. Seven in a boat came down safe in the middle of
Southampton Row, and were pounced upon to be roughly handled, until the
astounded crowd found them to be blind, and guided them by the hand
into houses.

Before this, at about ten o’clock, Sir Robert Barrington, on his way
to an interview with Her Majesty, saw, as he stepped out of his house,
a light sinking in the air, waited, watching, and saw it gently sink
to an area rail opposite, on which it tilted, spilling five shrieking
blind Chinamen into the street; and the Queen herself, seated with
screened lights in her Newmarket Parlour, started, hearing their
screams....

And there was yellow still nearer her than they! She did not know all
that was in that room....

She was waiting there by her pear-wood fireplace that had a Lambert
landscape in its carving for Eulalia, whom she had summoned—the
fireplace (in which was a fire that chilly night), being south, the
corridor-door to the Queen’s left, the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s
chest a little within the lobby north.

And as Eulalia came to the top of the four steps outside, she seemed
to see on the corridor-door’s rose curtains the firelight shadow of
someone five feet behind the Queen, keenly leaning, stealing toward the
Queen, a knife in hand.

As in she dashed, the shadow vanished; and Her Majesty glanced round,
astonished at her irruption.

“Is Your Majesty alone?” she sharply asked.

“Yes, Miss Bayley. Why?”

Now, the shadow had not been distinct, so, suddenly feeling unsure, and
reluctant to alarm, Eulalia merely answered that she had “seemed to
see” a shadow behind Her Majesty....

“No,” said the Queen. “Sit here.... Now, what is to be done? Ah! you
wear the miniature I gave you! Let me see it?”

Eulalia took it from her neck; handed it to the Queen; the Queen tossed
it into the fire.

“Now, what is to be done? Here we are in the gravest scrape, with
eight or ten indelible disgraces threatening a Throne—You see, do you,
into what a mess of mud many men may be sunk by one young woman’s
unseemly mutiny and misdemeanour? The Prince’s ‘love’ you are! his
‘lucky star’!—_un_lucky. Where he got the audacity—in my—in _my_
presence——What did His Royal Highness mean by calling you his ‘luck’?”

“I think the Prince referred to the black box, Ma’am. I seem to have
brought to His Royal Highness no other luck.” Eulalia was staring
straight into the flame, aware of the raids of wind and rain upon the
window.

“And this black box which you say that you digged up—is it this that
blows people to pieces?”

“I have no knowledge of its properties, Ma’am.”

“It must be this! in which case it is the Princess Elizabeth apparently
who discovered its properties, and it is she who is his luck. She,
poor lady, has been made quite ill by the disgraceful scene, and can
scarcely speak—whether she will continue in the palace now I can’t
say; and, as for me—what _can_ I do? I put it to you. If I send you
away, the Prince seems to have a craving for you—What, by the way,
made you withdraw yourself and hide from him? You have volunteered no
statement——”

“It would be long to explain, Ma’am.”

“It is short to say it would be long.”

“I am like that, Ma’am, I’m afraid: pray forgive me.”

The Queen’s eyes dwelt on her weighingly. Then: “Well, if I send you
away, this very fiery young man calls fire from heaven upon me; if you
stay, no lady in the palace can—_I_ couldn’t, anyway. So what to do?”

“I can fly and hide without your sending me, Ma’am. That is the way
out.”

“_Will_ you do this?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“Oh, but you are not bad! You are not bad!”

“_Hark!_”

“What is it?”

“Didn’t Your Majesty hear anything?”

“No. It is the wind.”

“Perhaps.”

“Don’t be nervous. Listen—you shall have another of the miniatures,
though they are precious to me—that one in the sailor-shirt when he was
eighteen—And afterwards we can meet, you and I—and you will think you
see him when you see me——”

“Your Majesty is gracious. I will fly this night, the Prince won’t
find me, and on Wednesday I can use the ticket for America. But on one
condition.”

“Oh, now, that spoils it, a condition. What is the condition?”

“Your Majesty must come to my apartments with me.”

“_I_ must?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“What for?”

“You will see, Ma’am.”

“_Well!_”—the Queen stood up. “But where is—everybody?” she said with
wonder at the door, seeing the corridor desert as death. A small bunch
of lamps above the hangings of the arch beshone its long forlornness.

But as they were going toward the arch, there was someone—a golden
big being from below who bore a card on a salver. The Queen read “Sir
Robert Barrington.”

The next minute Eulalia was saying in her bedroom: “I have dreamt of
being a Queen—and will be one a little. Your Majesty will give me your
diadem and clothes to put on.”

The Queen had a tweak of fun. “While I descend to receive a certain man
who awaits me in a state of—nature? An intensely proper man, too.” She
appealed to heaven.

“I meant that we should change places,” said Eulalia, pale, pale. “I a
Queen, you a nurse.”

“Now, the odd request!”

“It is the condition precedent of my flying.”

“But your real motive?”

“That is my affair, Ma’am.”

The Queen stared. “And if your sleeves are too short for me?”

“Not much, Ma’am.”

“I’ll do it.”

The transformations were made. But now the hairs gave a new air to the
gowns, Eulalia’s a glow of gold and bulky club-head, Her Majesty a
dusky mosque.

Eulalia followed to the door to say: “I—Your Majesty—feel that Your
Majesty should keep your eyes open to-night.... I can’t help thinking
that I saw some shadow.... The Prince of Wales has enemies—perhaps Your
Majesty has, too....”

On this Her Majesty started at some thought, looking into Eulalia’s
face, which of late had flushed at the palace fare, but now afresh was
utterly bereft of colour. She did not say anything, but held out her
hand; Eulalia kissed it; and that was quaint to see the diadem curtsey
and kiss the nurse’s fingers.

And now the Queen went hurriedly, turned back to say hurriedly: “I will
come back: stay in there till someone comes,” and went hurriedly down
the North Stair.

In fact, the shadow caught by Eulalia, though faint, had somehow
brought Oyone into her memory, and also the remembrance of Oyone’s
bitter face cut at the Queen at the cab-door in Chapel Street, East.

She peeped out, saw the corridor still a solitary street, and went
creeping toward the Newmarket Parlour, taking care at the arch to peer
and push the draperies.

Nothing there: but at the top of the four steps her heart started into
her mouth when once more she chanced to catch the vanishing of a shadow.

But she had not been through the war, and through the Chinese, without
learning audacity, so with a dash she was through the curtains, and a
poker was in her hand, she searching the curtains, the furniture, all
eyes and whiteness: for though she had said to herself in changing
clothes with Her Majesty that she didn’t mind dying, her life of no
value, when it came to the point she was inclined to make a fight for
life; and she explored the whole room, the obscure lobby beyond, a
dark apartment beyond that: but did not think of the Chancellor of the
Exchequer’s chest.

Meantime, Her Majesty in a bijou drawing-room below had asked Sir
Robert how she pleased him as a nurse, and why he appeared elated,
to which he had answered: “At this moment, Ma’am, the mastery of the
West over the East is being for ever settled. I believe—if it is not
yet over—that yellow men are now being struck blind by hundreds of
thousands in the air. I have just seen five——”

“_Blind?_” breathed the Queen.

“Am I to take it, Ma’am, that you are not aware that the Prince of
Wales has Mr Chinnery’s Redlike Ray?”

“No.... He is striking them _blind_?”

“I take it that he is.”

“Now, how horrible!”—her eyes shut—“His poor hand is already thicker
than itself with brothers’ blood....”

“Forgive me,” said Sir Robert: “I assumed that Your Majesty would know.”

“No.... I know that he has a black box which blows to pieces.... The
Princess Elizabeth apparently discovered that it had some property
of explosion, then the Prince found it—Can this be the same? No! And
yet—Of course, this ray has no explosive property?”

“Why, no.”

“Is the ray contained in a black box?”

“Yes, Ma’am. You may know that the Prince has long been seeking it,
lately attempted to make one like it, failed....”

“Then, it _is_ the same. How, then, could Elizabeth pretend——?” The
Queen paused, pondering.

Silence. Then Sir Robert, frowning at the floor: “I have besought this
interview of you, Ma’am, under the pressure of a necessity to be frank
as to the Princess Elizabeth. It appears that Her Imperial Highness has
pretended more things than one, and this to the detriment of others. It
has lately, for instance, come to my ears, that Her Imperial Highness
is generally credited at Court with being the donor of the German Six
Millions. Now, I have already had the honour of writing to Your Majesty
the address of that donor; she is poor; I hoped that Your Majesty would
deign——”

“The Princess Elizabeth,” answered Her Majesty emphatically,
“virtually—yes, admitted—that she was the donor. Do you say that you
doubt her?”

“I say so, Ma’am. The fact was not so, believe me. And my reason for
being here is this: that the donor has recently disappeared from her
lodging—I cannot trace her—she treats me ill—but I desire to say
to-night to Your Majesty that it is a matter of national honour and
concern that that royal person should be searched for, and comforted,
Ma’am, for her many adversities.”

At the strong vibration of his voice, Her Majesty’s eyes sprang water
by contagion, her face agitated, pale with indignation—against him, or
against Elizabeth.

“I will see to it,” she said; “and I only hope that you are perfectly
certain of your facts, Sir Robert Barrington, or your tone in referring
to the Prince’s betrothed will be thought improper. Pray tell me afresh
the name and address of the lady in question.”

“I did not tell Your Majesty her name in my letter. As for the address,
she is gone—impossible to guess why or whither—gone—leaving her few
little linens behind—in a soap-box, Ma’am—in a third-floor back-room—in
a slum, Ma’am——”

“Soap-box? _Third floor?_”—wonder was dawning, dawning in her
eyes—“what address?”

“It is 19 Chapel Street, East, Ma’am.”

“Chapel? Yes—19——” She remembered that that was the address whence she
had taken Eulalia; and now there burst from her lips the question: “Is
this donor a nurse?”

“She is, Ma’am.”

“Her name!”

“Eulalia Bayley, Ma’am.”

Her Majesty’s head rested on her chair-back, her lids shut down, and
there was no speech there during some minutes.

“It occurs to me to add,” observed Sir Robert suddenly, “that it was
this same lady who discovered the Prince’s prison. It was not the
Princess Elizabeth at all, as was said. Miss Bayley, having discovered,
came to tell me the address, and the Princess, who was at my place,
certainly heard her. I have to be frank—these are facts. I say that
the Prince of Wales owes his life, the nation at this moment owes its
existence, you your life, Ma’am, I my life, to that young lady of
the slum. I dare to say that, if she were an Aspasia—and she is the
chastest of the angels—still her royal soul would merit to share this
Throne.”

The Queen opened her eyes to say: “I agree as to the ‘royal’; the
‘angel’ I leave to your serener reflection; but I agree, I agree, as to
the royal. She is here, by the way. You shall see her, _looking_ royal,
in my diadem.”

Sir Robert was all astare. “Miss Bayley—_here_?”

“This is her nurse’s costume! I left her—I’ll fetch her to Sir Robert
Barrington’s parental embrace.” She bent her head with an underlook, as
she stood up.

“One word, Ma’am! Does the Prince of Wales know——?”

“Yes, he discovered her, and she had this Redlike Ray: he called her
‘his luck’—no wonder!”

“So all will now be well?—one word!”

“Sir Robert Barrington, take it from me that the Princess of Wales
cannot be a thing of spots and patches so long as I am Queen of
England!” Her Majesty stood at her mighty height smiling at the
universe beneath her chin; and up Sir Robert threw his eyes, as she
moved on and out, bound for Eulalia.

But in the corridor just outside the door she found the Princess
Elizabeth lingering—meek, and ill, and cringing.

“Mother——”

“_Judge!_”

Under that withering look the Princess stood a shrunken thing; but
then, suddenly looking up, said: “I am not ignorant that I have been
maligned to Your Majesty, for ‘quod est mihi suspirat’! but since
ten minutes’ talk would completely clear Your Majesty’s mind of every
misconception——”

“Stay: did you not declare that you had discovered that that box of
Miss Bayley’s had the property of shattering men?”

Pinched now with shame, pain, apprehension, perplexity, the Princess
stood pale, a sinner in the day of his calamity, an irked nerve, like
worms of the deep sea squirming beneath burning beams.

“Yes,” she admitted, “I said that it shatters men.”

“But it strikes blind!”

“Precisely. It shatters the eye.”

“I see!—for it has not shattered mine. But tell me: did not Your
Imperial Highness hear the address of the Prince’s prison from Miss
Bayley at Sir Robert Barrington’s?”

“Yes—I did. I went there foreknowing that I should hear it: as I did.”

“Foreknowing.... And _you_, Elizabeth, were the giver of the Six
Millions, were you? _You_ were that adored donor, complacently
accepting the adoration of men?”

“No. I was _not_ the donor of the Six Millions. I said so! But though I
was _not_ the donor, I _was_, so to say, the donator——”

“The donator.... Oh, Elizabeth, you are a charlatan”—in a voice low and
cold.

Now, desperate, detected, the Princess’s lip whitened with spite. “If
I am a charlatan, is not the world one mass of charlatanism? Hasn’t
society been built upon charlatanism—archbishops, emperors—queens——?”

“What has that to do with _you_? _You_ repent, girl, and strive to make
yourself worthy to be the wife of some pettier man than the Prince of
Wales.”

Blood rushed now to the Princess’s brow, and she was about to vent
something venomous against her love, the Prince, when he himself came
rocking along the corridor in haste, causing the ladies to start at
the Chinaman they thought they saw, at the pigtail swinging behind his
dripping ulster, the hairless skull of paste....

“It is only I,” he called out.... “Well, it’s all over, Mother,
invasion stopped, a new sun to-morrow morning.... I am pretty sick of
it, and sad, God knows, yet glad.... Turned nurse, Mother?... Eulalia
upstairs?”

Her Majesty started! “Let not the Prince of Wales forget that he is in
the presence of ladies!”

“Scott, Mother, let us keep cool,” the Prince wearily said: “to-morrow
morning I start a rational world, so help me, God. But, as you like
rites, Mother, let me tell you to comfort you that that lady has been
Princess of Wales since she was sixteen.”

One looking close would have seen the Queen dodge a little from it; she
then stepped back to stand against the panelling, and suddenly covered
her face with her hands, uttering a sound; the Prince, meantime,
saying: “Elizabeth, forgive.... She ran away on learning that her
husband was the Prince of Wales—public grounds, I suppose, for she’s
very noble-minded—and then I heard that she was dead—had reasons to
believe—forgive! She upstairs?”

Before he could receive an answer, a series of shrieks reached their
ears from afar, screams of one _in extremis_ that seemed to say “_help!
help!_” screams that affected some vein in the Prince to a piteous
sympathy, his face instantly taking on an expression of intense pain,
like one ready to cry. He flew. And, promptly as he flew, the Queen
flew more promptly still ... heart-smitten....

He soon passed her, however; and, on coming near the North Stair, could
hear a press of feet pelting down the second-floor stair above him; one
moment more and Oyone broke white into his sight, a narrow bright knife
in her right hand, bright yet reddened, and three men impending upon
her heels.

He, on dashing to that landing, was just in time to see that one of
the men had caught her up on a landing below, dashing a little past
her: upon which she dodged back sharp, and jumped the balusters to the
bottom, some twenty feet, landing like elastic on her feet; the next
instant she had slipped out of the palace, the men after, the Prince
after them.

But they were still twenty feet off her when she was twenty feet in
air. The Prince saw her boat’s shape rising across the rain, caught a
cry of “_Cranes!_” screamed down from the air, and immediately was away
back into the palace.

But to the other three, lingering a little, a sudden thud sounded
somewhere: for the boat could hardly have been forty feet aloft when it
dropped like a stone; then all was still....

Meantime, the Queen had reached Eulalia through a throng of ladies and
men, to find her still with the diadem on her brow, and with smudges of
blood about her breast, stretched on a couch. Her Majesty stopped short
a yard from the unconscious form, gazing, then, extending her arms,
called out lamentably: “Oh, but greater love hath no man than this!”
and a second later had Eulalia raised in her strong arms, and was away
with her.

Without a sound now, her lips fixed in a vindictive way, she trotted,
brushed past her son in the corridor, did not take Eulalia into
Eulalia’s apartments, but down the North Stair, step by step, heavy
laden like a cat carrying her kitten, down and away to her own
apartments, her own bed.

Feet, meantime, were speeding for the physician, but long ere he got
there Sir Robert and the Prince, who were as good as doctors, had
examined the breast-wound; and then, looking into one another’s eyes,
had smiled.

“Fought like two cats!” said the Prince.

The cuts in Eulalia’s fingers were, indeed, the worst, so that by
midnight she was convalescent, Her Majesty then alone with her in
darkness, their arms enfolded close, culling one another’s roses,
roaming in one another’s country, discovering one another, chuckling at
their delicious riches of love and kissing kinship, the clicking of the
clock not more constant than their talk that lasted on and on into the
dawn of morning.

The Queen, discovering the ring hung round the neck, said: “So this is
the wedding-ring!”

“That’s where I’ve always kept it!”—Eulalia laughed.

“But what a pair of pirates! Who could divine...? You were only
sixteen?”

“Hardly more. Before I knew anything he had me off my feet.”

“Say crushingly defeated.”

“_Yes!_ Ah, if I could only say those sorts of flashing swift things
like you!—you’d think more of me.”

Her Majesty held her hot and close. “Could I, sweetheart? I doubt it.”

“Tell me the _truth_: do you love me _a lot_?”

“Couldn’t you _see_—from the first? Sweet as honey! I have longed for a
daughter-sister, and to think it should be you, you!... You’ll make the
fairiest, silver-slipperedest, finest, whitest Princess of Wales that
ever yet was! I’ll be like an air-boat bathing in the sunlight of your
hair and flying about in the sky of your eyes! But I do abhor a woman
who throws away the severity and thorn without which there’s no rose of
womanhood, or preservation of a nation. So I had to try to dislike you,
feeling you sweet in my liver, but never dreaming half your sweetness
and high royalty—forgive—I humble myself—kiss.”

“You make love something like him!” said Eulalia.

“Do I? Is he nice as a lover?”

“Aha—electric-like. But it is said that you are fickle: if ever you
leave off loving me, I shall just die, or if you regret that I am not
royal, or about Germany.”

“I sha’n’t. The Prince of Wales has authority and prestige enough now
to marry Sally-in-the-alley—if she be vestal. He can make Germany an
English Crown-colony, if he likes. Don’t be afraid of that. If I am
fickle, it is only to pretty dummies, not to real people. Ah! where you
got the audacity this night—if you had got yourself killed for me——”

“Oh, I was wide awake! I seemed to recognise the shadow’s face—She was
wonderfully lovely——”

No longer!—as the morning then dawning into the apartment revealed
to three men in the Palace Park, who found the little scout dead on
the ground, and Oyone still sitting, stiff and cold, at the boat’s
hatchway, her hand on the ratchet-lever, her right eye, at the shock,
having shot half out of the socket, her hard hat cocked awry....




                               CHAPTER XXV

                           IN THE COMET’S TAIL


That next (Sunday) night, the night before the comet crossed our orbit,
Her Majesty and His Royal Highness argued long together, wrestling
together, alone in that Newmarket Parlour, on whose Last Supper table
lay a document drawn up by him, she at one moment almost going on her
knees, entreating, holding him, with “Don’t do it, my son—don’t do it.”

But he, pacing short about, his hands behind him, said again and again:
“It is no use, Mother....”

“You depose your poor father, you see,” she said with water in her eyes
that hung on him.

“Mother, you talk.... ‘Depose.’... What does it matter? Only for some
weeks.”

“Oh, I’m afraid! afraid!... It will profoundly offend the British
people, I know!”

“Mother, as if that mattered. I am the light of the world, Mother—for
the moment. In fifty years’ time men will smile—I hope—at my little say
as obvious baby-talk; but, for the moment, it is what _I_ say that is
wit, if they have the wit and grace to recognise my face and my voice,
and the oil that anoints my appointed pate. And they will, I think—some
time. My anticipation is that most of them will jump for joy. Anyway,
it doesn’t matter. I have the whim and the power to do them good, and I
will.”

The Queen, seated at the table, made of her hand a bed for her heavy
head, saying wearily: “Isn’t it a Morrison Pill? I begin to doubt if
the sorrows of men can be cured by any Morrison Pill.”

“But why do you, Mother? Oh, now, that seems rather unscientific of
you. The question is: Who is Morrison? Can he see facts? If so, his
pill is Divine, and nothing in the universe is the slightest use except
just his pill. Do, do, let’s shun catchwords like death, shall we?
Everything that’s done is done by a pill, Mother: to every effect its
special effecter: that light there was not lit by vague exhortations to
be good, but by a pill, by special measures; the sun shifts its mass
600 miles a minute, not more, not less, by a pill. And in the case of a
man who catches cold, then from the skin the kidneys sicken, then from
the kidneys the heart has it, the artery-walls, the circulation, the
stomach, the nerve-centres, and the man pants a complex discordance—in
such a case Morrison has to be rather a shrewd man to adapt his pill
to the original root of all that; but, as to the root of the complex
discordance of society, no such acumen is required: for it is known,
it must be obvious to blockheads, that if a nation has no country—if
Israel live in Egypt—if Englishmen live on a foreign England, making
bricks and paying toll to foreign Pharaohs from Normandy, who own
England—then in England you must have national discordance; and if Man
has no planet, then you must have international discordance. What is
amusing is, that war is regarded as the greater evil of the two! But
war is not a great evil, or not a deep, because it is God’s penalty
for a small wrong—for the wrong of the seizure by peoples of land that
belongs to all; the monstrous wrong, bringing the monstrous penalty,
is the seizure by only one individual of what belongs to all—and this
is that simple catching cold, pitching into complex discordances, that
needs no seer to heal it with a pill. And it is not because it was not
_seen_ that it has not been healed, but because our England has been
governed by lubbers and, blunted pundits.”

“Yes, I agree,” breathed the Queen—“I know, I agree”—reading the
document—“but still—oh, listen to me. Some of these things—Tell me
frankly, Teddy, does this clause here mean that you intend doctors to
murder infants?”

“What else, Mother?”

“Ah!”

“Mother—really—that sigh does not touch me. Mother, is it wrong to kill
a man? We kill a German, or a man who kills a man; but, of course, one
filthy infant kills many. Only last night Li Ku Yu was proving to me
that it is not wrong to kill two hundred million men.”

“Oh, the bloodthirsty—— And, Teddy, you believed him?”

“Mother, I said ‘proved’: perhaps you did not catch.... Oh, Mother,
how we distrust truth!—our only friend—our Blessed Saviour from all
our sorrows and wrongs—how we dread Her Heavenly face in our barbarian
brainlessness and irreligion——”

“Yes—I see that, too—that’s all right—but just think, Teddy—think of
the shock to the moral sense of England——”

“Yes, but, Mother, the moral sense of England is not a fixed thing! It
mayn’t be very high at present, but in six months I’ll have it raised——”

“Oh, Heaven, what shall I say to him?”—the Queen shook her bowed
brow—“This about doctors is an interference with evolution—Oh, I’m
afraid!—We mayn’t have the right——”

“‘Interference’”—the Prince stopped in his pacing—“Really, Mother, you
bring out things now that I’m sure would never have passed your lips
when I was ten! I suppose the brain ‘tires’ like steel-temper——”

“Meaning that I am getting old?”—with a dwelling underlook.

“Scott, Mother, no, of course—old, no—God forbid. But ‘interfering’
with evolution, Mother. How supremely——! They reckon ill, Mother, who
leave God out: when we fly from Him. He is the wings; when we interfere
with evolution, that, of course, is evolution interfering with
itself—as you know.”

The Queen did not answer; but presently was muttering: “Well, it is all
over now—no more little Teddy—the fledgling flown—the Spring-time over
and gone—Oh, my God, I must be satisfied——”

As she broke into tears, with tears the Prince threw himself at her
mother’s knees.

All that night and the next forenoon he spent in interviews; and in
the afternoon, as Mr Mackay, the Prime Minister, was making an oration
in the Commons, intended to be impressive, in praise of the Prince
of Wales’s services to the world, the Prince with fifty blue-jackets
stepped into the House, and, standing by the Speaker’s Chair, said:
“Gentlemen, this Parliament is dissolved; force at hand; my regrets for
breaking in upon your grave deliberations.”

When they were gone, he locked up the House.

His Edict was in the evening papers:

    “Men of Great Britain and Ireland.

    “You know me, as I think I know you.

    “I undertake (without prejudice to the Majesty of my Royal
    Father and Mother) the direction of our country, until the
    following sociological experiments be in the way of being made:—

    “1. That Great Britain and Ireland be considered my private
         property by right of conquest.

    “2. That navies be now abolished.

    “3. That rates and taxes (except ‘death-duties’) be abolished;
         and ‘customs.’

    “4. That citizens be liable to daily drill, including running
         and breathing, between the ages of five and fifty-five.

    “5. That it be made a privilege to be British, citizens to
         receive a citizen-salary of 8s. a week from the age of
         seventeen in the case of males, of 15s. in the case of
         females, and of 35s. in the case of married couples
         between the ages of thirteen and nineteen. Old Age
         Pensions to be abolished.

    “6. That such nervous diseases as insanity, epilepsy,
         drunkenness, paralysis and idleness be considered
         incorrigible.

    “7. That the sale of love be made a felony.

    “8. That our nation devote itself (_A_) to getting knowledge
         of God, and (_B_) to teaching it: these two activities,
         Research and Education, to be its two main activities, and
         to cost it dear, each one, in millions per annum.

    “9. That each boy and girl learn at least five handicrafts, or
         ‘trades,’ three of them to be (_A_) Working in wood, (_B_)
         Working in iron, (_C_) Working in land.

    “10. That the following be Government monopolies: (_A_)
         Education, (_B_) Milk-supply, (_C_) Electric-power supply,
         (_D_) Doctoring, (_E_) Publishing, (_F_) Amalgamation and
         Distribution of Businesses.

    “11. That Members of Parliament be paid three thousand pounds
         per annum; and be Doctors of Science; and be workmen,
         having educated hands and eyes, personally acquainted with
         God; and be not bald nor toothless.

    “12. That Doctors be twice consecrated (_A_) by a Bishop, (_B_)
         by an Archbishop; and be Bachelors of Science; and be
         State-servants; and be taught in Consecration that ‘to the
         pure all things are pure.’

    “13. That every species of clergyman now leave off uttering in
         public for money whatever has come to seem childish or
         savage to ordinary centric people, and begin to behave
         themselves like grown white men and good patriots.

    “14. That the idea of ‘punishment’ be abolished. Animals are
         (apparently) electro-chemical, or V-chemical, machines,
         and the idea of ‘punishing’ a machine is senseless.
         Therefore let the mood of penalties be more impersonal,
         purposeful and sociological, imprisonments to be lifelong,
         in general, and prisons pleasant places; and other
         penalties to be by fine, pain, shame, and death.

    “Writs to be issued for a new Parliament within six weeks....

    “Edward....”

Silence followed all that afternoon.

That a tempest was mustering its thunders to empty itself everyone
felt: but whether of anger or gladness was the question.

As for the foreign population of Britain, they little cared: for to
them, already thinking of packing their trunk for the Continent once
more, whatever the Prince might do was wondrously done: but it is
certain that some nerve in every Englishman winced at his action,
dazzling angel as he might be in the nation’s eye.

There was silence and musing behind closed doors....

Then wire-messages commenced to fly, men to collect in eddies working
into whirlpools, and, near five, feet to steer toward the palace; then,
as at the turn and uncertain time of tides boats on the surface lie any
way, but suddenly determine to stem all one way, and men say, “_that’s_
the way things are,” so before six the national answer to the Edict was
known—by a tendency—by a current’s rush—by an ocean’s roaring. At seven
South-west London was one welter and howl of heads.

A vociferation of “Teddy!” entered the palace, pervading it from bottom
to top like a hot and restless presence unrelentingly, the King, Queen,
Princesses, everyone, praying the Prince to present himself; but he
would not.

It turned out that, just as when a lad outgrows his Eton-jacket,
or a larva takes to wings, or a tadpole to the solid land, so the
people now were perfectly sick and tired of the garrulous old gang,
child-playing and play-acting with the lives of generations, quoting
from one another’s “_speeches_,” scoring points (loud cheers), “voting
censures”; and now, suddenly, it was done, the Age of Sham, and let’s
pretend, and baby babble; suddenly, in a day, the Age of Business was
born; and now was the hour for joy-bells to jargon and jangle together,
and hearts to join in being glad.

But the Prince said: “I am not obliged to go when someone says
‘Teddy’”; and was glad to get out of it when, at eight-twenty, a letter
from Li Ku Yu was placed in his hand:

    “Prince, I write by the hand of a woman who received me
    Friday night into her house at Forest Hill—13 Bread Street—I
    blind-struck before being well in air, left leg broken, suicide
    to be at nine. It pleases me to think that you, Prince, will
    trouble yourself to cremate my body.

    “I enclose scheme of the Europe by me conceived. What is good
    adopt, as God inspires. Blessed be His name.

    “Li Hsi Hung and Yoshio Kanin have instructions that you,
    Prince, are next the guide of China. These will write you.

    “If Chinese show reluctance to evacuate, strike one blind,
    here, there. Deal leniently.

    “I, in your place, should keep at least one million in Europe,
    and mix. Meditate this. Great at the wood-lathe, land-culture.
    Or give Russia to Japan, China itself will respond to
    scientific institutions. Behead opponents.

    “I have loved you well. Farewell.

    “Your Younger Brother,
                                                   “+Li Ku Yu+.”

It was then eight-twenty, and the Prince had a will to get to that
address in Forest Hill before nine. But since the Princess could not
now part from him, nor the Queen part from the Princess, they set out
together.

It soon appeared, however, that it was hopeless to make way through the
Strand.

The fact that that was the night of the comet’s crossing—a thing long
regarded with an exaggerated interest—packed the throng thicker; not
a vehicle but the royal one was anywhere visible; advance was step by
step; the Prince fretted and vexed; but still the car crawled, the
crowd growled.

The night being very mistily dim, for some time they were not
recognised, but in Kingsway it came, and then the situation became
dreadfully distressing. Backward now nor forward they could not budge,
and would soon have been exhausted, if they had not been rescued by
a posse of police into the so-called Opera-house, where they were
accommodated with seats at the stage-back, and there sat salved but
wretched, hearing the speech of a Socialist on the Edict to a hall
packed chiefly with working men—a meeting convened by the S.D.F.—the
stage almost as thronged as the hall.

And there on prickles sat the Prince, resentment on his lips, very
vexed with Her Majesty and the Princess, who had influenced him against
going through the air.

It was only after some minutes that it dawned upon the consciousness
of the hall that _he_ was sitting there within it, and all at once
the oratory stopped short at a call of “_Teddy!_”—then call upon
call—negligible to begin, but growing great, and then big, august, like
gales, and the guns of nature.

“Speech!” someone uttered, and then it was “_Teddy! Speech!_” shrieked
with the ceaselessness of some machine urgently at work which shrieks:
“_Speech! Speech!_”

The Prince’s teeth siffled his “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” his lids
disdainfully lowered.

“Just to humour them, then, a little,” shouted the Queen, leaning
near his ear which a clamour now filled thick as masses of javelins
flashed in battle; “Yes, Teddy,” the Princess said with her head and
eyes; “_Speech!_” shrieked the machine; and presently he, impelled,
compelled, went stepping in a dove-coloured dust-coat with that quick
little sway of his shoulders to the front, siffling, spinning a little
stick pretty trickily quickly round his fingers.

Clamour! Hush! Silence!

“I confess, men, you rather astonish me clamouring _Speech_ at me
like this. Suppose I have nothing new to say? will you still want ‘_a
speech_’? (“_Teddy! Yes!_”) That’s odd! That what you’re accustomed to?
(“_That’s it, Ted!_”) I see! The right honourable gentleman sat down
amid loud cheers after having been on his poor old feet two hours—that
the style? (“_You’ve got it, Teddy!_”) And if he had been on his poor
old headpiece, no person on earth would have been one penny——” (_Uproar
of joy._)

“But from _me_ you look for solider stuff, do you? (“_We do! Teddy!_”)
Hunks of bread and beef, do you? and honeycomb? (“_Right you are!_”)
Well, I’ll see, you, on your side, trying to sympathise with me,
remembering that if I live a little generation or so ahead of you, a
leader _should_, and that if in anything you ‘differ from’ me, you are
‘differing from’ your sons, and your own future selves.

“Which I say so confidently, for the reason that I foresee that ‘_the
speech_’ won’t have any of my opinions in. No opinions. You have heard
that it has been said by them of old time ‘Every Briton has a right to
his opinion,’ but I say to you that no Briton has, least of all I, I
think, since it has been proved that opinions are wrong—two opposite
opinions both wrong—and we can’t have a right to a wrong. And again it
has been said by them of old time, ‘Don’t believe everything that you
hear,’ but I say to you, ‘Don’t believe anything that you hear,’ if it
is the least bit abstruse: distrust, if you desire to foster strong
minds; until truth is proved: and then believe vitally deep.

“Do you feel like me, I wonder, when I find that I have been believing
something that’s not true? as if some thing or other a little behind
and above me had been smiling all along at me, not unkindly, but
very disdainfully—rather offensive. Hence ‘_the speech_’ will be
pretty brief. I think—no opinions, only ascertained facts; and then
all practical politics, I think, touching the spot of your private
lives and minds and happiness closer home than the fantastic politics
you’re accustomed to; and then plain, I think—no foreign long words.
Possibly I may want to use the foreign word ‘phenomena’—is there some
workman who does not know what ‘_phenomena_’ are? (A voice: “_Want
of sleep, Teddy!_”) Nonsense! that’s insomnia! No! ‘phenomena’ are
whatever you experience, as when you sneeze; yes, or feel sleepless;
or are conscious of the bliss of eating when hungry, of drinking after
ripping long wood with the saw; or are conscious of being conscious,
and of the oddity of such a thing; or conscious of loveliness—for this
globe is only a bit of drift-log gadding down the river of being with
meteor-stones and other streaming drift-log, and yet, see, she teams
with gleams of beauty, tones of music, in blue eyes, in Geissler tubes,
in the salmon satin of copper flushing in flame, in shavings, in that
song of strong winds in forests which no tongue can sing, in the moon
on wild white nights winging away among Switzerlands of cloud, like
some white wildfowl with a tail all colours, and your heart’s enticed
in you, and suddenly you find that your mouth has kissed your hand—aye,
and afresh the next night when it is calm she’ll ravish you afresh,
since age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety; or
are conscious of sexes among animals—some sorts have more than two—and
of their tumid moods and enthusiasms; or of the twenty million suns
which you see over you at night—another twenty millions over you by
day, which you see without feeling that you see; or of your own sun
when clouds seem clustering round him, he looking some illustrious
sultan-priest of the sultry countries, strutting in such stuffs as
you cannot peer at without tears: dark then with excessive bright his
skirts appear.

“Such are ‘phenomena’: all our impressions of the manners and customs
of this panorama of lamps and Arab tabernacle of the Most High God,
which we with our dog’s-eyes blink at a little, which twenty million
years hence the sons of men will see better, and love more, but will
never see well, nor love enough.

“Or possibly in ‘_the speech_’ I may use the word ‘philosopher’—is
there one man who doesn’t know what a _philosopher_ is? (A voice: “_Man
who bears pain, Sir!_”) That again is nonsense. No! a philosopher is a
man who habitually sees things a little (a _very_ little) as they are,
and other people as they seem. Here we are in Kingsway, for instance,
and someone may imagine that a minute hence we shall still be here:
well, a philosopher is a man who laughs at such a fancy, seeing and
feeling that a minute hence we’ll be away out where the North Sea is—if
the North Sea itself, meantime, had not vaulted a thousand miles. (A
voice: “_What about a scientist, Sir?_”) Well, a scientist laughs,
too, when he thinks of it, but not so heartily as a philosopher, who
has not merely swallowed truth, like the scientist, but truth is
become the substance of his blood. A philosopher must, of course, be a
scientist, but some quite distinguished scientists that I could name
have been laughably far from being philosophers, just as a national
economist must be a business-man, but not every excellent business-man
is an economist. Every living thing, in fact, is a scientist—that is,
_knows_ something—but here below only men are philosophers; so that the
‘scientist,’ the ‘expert,’ is the mere raw material of a man, and any
studious goose can be a ‘scientist’: it is the philosopher who is the
man, not a Bachelor of truth, but a married man to truth, a Master and
Doctor of truth. And the inventor is a philosopher: for he not only
acquires two truths, like the scientist, but uses them intimately like
his tools, sees a relation between them, _i.e._, a new truth: becomes a
wielder and foreman of truth.

“Is this, then, to be henceforth our national aim—to be philosophers,
inventors, real men? And shall not this be the subject of ‘_the
speech_’—of all future ‘_speeches_’? In which case, shall not my
text be those words so associated now with my respected ancestor,
His Majesty King George V.—‘Wake up, England!’ It is to be assumed,
of course, that His Majesty understood what it is _to wake up_—well,
everyone knows: it is to become conscious that there’s a picture on the
wall, a basin on the washstand, a sun, clouds—conscious of facts; and
the more facts we become actively conscious of—the laws of tension in
the picture’s string, the chemistry of the basin, the sun’s mass, age,
speed—the more awake we are; the more we are philosophers.

“To wake up, then, is to become philosophers? cognisant of God? (A
voice: “_But, Teddy, we don’t much believe in no God, most of us!_”)
No? Well, I didn’t know that workmen still spoke in that way; though
I know that one day when I was fourteen a ship’s-captain smuggled
me—_stole_ me—behind a shed at Hayling Island, and begged me with
intense agitations never to believe if my teachers told me that there’s
‘a God,’ since, as a matter of fact, there isn’t one—a most amusing
man—his furtive earnestness! his leering secrecies!—and for three
minutes I wouldn’t let him rush away from me, until I had made him
admit what rubbish he had hissed. Not that I had any quarrel with his
belief—I knew that his _belief_ was true—but I did think little of his
English. He simply did not know what the word ‘_God_’ means, or it
never would have entered his head to say that there’s ‘_no God_’—_i.e._
no beyond of sense-impressions, no cause of phenomena, no maker at
every instant of heaven and earth. What he _believed_ was that that
cause is nothing at all like what horses, or Mrs Jones next door, or
Mrs Bobmbobm on Mars, imagines it to be; but he did not say what he
believed, and he said what he did _not_ believe, that there’s no cause
at all, which was hardly very glittering English. In fact, strictly
speaking, these are the only three things of which every living being
is perfectly certain, that there are phenomena, and a cause for
them—‘I,’ a world, and God. (A voice: “_What sort of being can God
be, Teddy? And whatever caused Him?_”) Well! But why stop me with
impossible questions? Is it possible that you bother to ask yourself
and me a thing like that? Cats ask that, when you see them looking
at the moon; cats ask, bishops and witch-doctors answer; ancient
(so-called) ‘philosophers’ asked (they were not really philosophers);
but modern philosophers don’t bother, knowing that what Life is for is
more and more to enjoy and love God, not to guess at and comprehend
Him, as priests and negroes pretend to do, since God is _infinite_,
_i.e._ infinitely inconceivable, _x_ for ever—not, of course, meaning
inconceivable to _men_, to whom everything is inconceivable, but I am
speaking of creatures on spheres older than this, with their cocoanuts
roomy as cathedrals, through which unceasingly streams of adoring music
roll their roarings. And if someone wonders how I can know that to
them, too, God is _x_ for ever, I answer that this is known; but to
explain how might make ‘_the speech_’ tedious.

“You won’t bother, then, any more about what God is: you know that
He is amiable, producing wheat to make man brisk and European, and
fruit to make man amorous and romantic, and milk within the weasel’s
teat for her weans. How fresh is the ocean of March-wind! Oh, how
well after all is it then with men, and with the birds of the air
that laugh aloft with the blasts that whirl them! And suppose your
tongue was a hint too big for your mouth? or was fitted in with the
littlest list and lee-way, as when novices saw box-wood? How irritating
to frenzy the friction of the teeth on one side! But it is a nice,
true fit, like a rotor spinning in its stator-tunnel with scarce a
millimetre clearance-space: He is good, He has compasses, and calipers
with verniers, and decimal micrometers, to build with His bricks the
multiple eye of the fly. And you know that He is worshipful: that
Expanse is His knapsack, and Eternity is His journey; and you know many
things that He is _not_—nothing like what He has been conceived—not
a steed with wings of wind, nor a plant with stars for apples; not
short, not long, not middle-sized; neither masculine, nor feminine,
nor neuter; not living, not dead; no saint, though He has no failings;
does not know anything, though He more-than-knows everything; cannot
see, though in each billionth bit of a minute in each billionth bit
of a millimetre He busies a billion billion fingers. (A voice: “_But
how do you know He’s not a horse or a tree, Sir?_”) Because _you_ are
a horse and a tree (very like), and hardly look the kind of agent
that can nudge an atom with your elbow to do its duty, or sprint
foot-and-foot with electricity in a foot-race. (A voice: “_Yes, but
how do you know He’s not dead?_”) Who? I haven’t the faintest idea
what you mean. Have you yourself? How can anything ‘be dead’ unless it
die? Only syntheses—_i.e._ souls—can ‘be dead’; a tree can ‘be dead,’
_i.e._ its soul, but wood and stone can’t ‘be dead.’ Or you may stretch
and say a clock or a chisel can ‘be dead,’ but not brass and steel.
Really, it is time for workmen to begin to use words with a little more
’cuteness and gumption. (A voice: “_But it was you yourself, Sir, who
first said ‘He’s not dead.’_”) _I_ did? When?... Oh, well, yes, that’s
true: I was saying He’s not this and not that, and, happening to say
‘He’s not living,’ I added, ‘He’s not dead.’ But it was absurd to add
that, for if He never lived, He can’t be dead. ‘God’ ‘dead’? Queer
meeting of words!—make a cat laugh! Some say _the devil’s_ dead; some
say he’s not dead; and that’s a quite legitimate controversy, since
all things that we know with hoofs do sooner or later die. (“Kick the
bucket,” the Queen whispered quick to the Princess.) But God’s above
the devil, don’t you know. Stay: I’ll tell you something I know about
God, something new to you, and pretty wondrous: listen: God everywhere
at this instant is acting as He never anywhere acted before. Got that?
I say _never_—a long time. He ‘acts by law,’ you think, He’s ‘the same
yesterday, to-day and for ever’: well, no, those statements squint:
we should say ‘He acts like Himself,’ and in two like cases would,
_no doubt_, act in a like way, but has never had, will never have,
the chance to. For you know, do you, that if nine of you light pipes
to-night, you will do nine things that never were done before? That if
you braze brass on Monday and brass on Tuesday, if you make chloral
on Wednesday and chloral on Thursday, between all the four will be a
million million differences? A few days ago I was filing a piece of tin
for a tenon template, and it must have cut my finger, for on looking
at it through a glass, I saw some blood corpuscles; now, I guessed
that, besides blood, there were very likely on it traces of several
things—naphtha, tetrachlorinated ether, bichromate of potash—and I felt
sure then that never in time and space had there been that particular
meeting, or any precedent for that particular myriad of actions there
taking place. And so in every case. Why, the right eye of the fly Y is
a curio unique in the universe, dealing with light in a style quite new
and unique. If you draw two circles with a compass, or rule two lines,
do you suppose they are alike? Eye them through a microscope, and one
will be a drawing of the Andes, the other of the Balkans; glare at them
through God’s goggles close-gloating, and the pair of pencil-lines
will be spacious like planets, with collapsing palaces, Persepolis and
Serapis, precipices, Saharas, and sand-storms oversweeping teeming
peoples—alike in nothing save in their uniqueness. Even in so confirmed
a thing as an earth’s journey each year has its own course and story,
and on high-roads of ice between England and France the gorilla has
strangled the sabre-toothed tigress. If I step up Piccadilly, at
my every step trillions upon trillions of events occur in eternity,
each medley of events unique in eternity—electrical events between
my body and clothes, my boots and the pavement, electro-magnetic
events as each boot-nail moves, magneto-luminous events, events of
capillarity, of osmosis, of friction, of pressure, of surface-tension,
of moment-of-inertia, of molecular vibration, of chemistry, of heat,
of sound in Australia (for I shake the globe), events of a thousand
forces, no doubt, whose name men will never name. How comes God to
‘know’ how to juggle with the emergency of this eternal diversity?
What twisting Proteus is His foreman, swift-whispering wisdom at his
tympanum? He is never at a loss, look, nor stops to con His law-book,
but pat as pat He acts with spinning spontaneity. ‘Spontaneity’:—as
living things _seem_ to act: for you know—unless some one of you
is awfully thoughtless—that living things only _seem_ to act
spontaneously, one going on four legs, one on two, one behaving as a
baby, a Bavarian, a curate, a eunuch, a lunatic, a woman, a man, a
martin, a Mozart, a Martian, strictly in the strain of his make and
nature at any instant. What shall we say, then? That God actually is
what living beings seem to be—spontaneous? that God is _living_? We
may say so, if we like; and then we will divide things into three
kinds—God living; things like us lifelike, doll-like, dream-living, or
dream-life-positive; and things like iron dream-life-negative. But that
would be rather a queer way of putting it, since ‘living’ already has
a definite meaning, meaning things like us; so you had better divide
things into—iron life-negative; we life-positive, or ‘living’; and
God more-than-living, or _x_-being. God, anyway, you see, is not very
‘dead.’

“I hope I so express myself that you see what I mean, though it is
a little difficult in English of two syllables. By ‘life-positive’
and ‘life-negative’ I mean to suggest that _every_thing is living—as
I have long thought, and _said_—just as (we know) everything is
electrified, things that contain more electricity than a certain
stock or neutral amount being called ‘electro-positive,’ things that
contain less ‘electro-negative.’ So I call men, trees, life-positive,
iron life-negative, crystals life-neutral—in which case, of course,
a moon is much more living than a man, the difference being that
between heat and temperature, between momentum and speed, an ounce of
boiling oil having much less heat than a ton of ice, though a higher
temperature, and a bullet much less motion than the Severn, though
more velocity; so a man less life than a mountain, though at higher
‘potential’ or pressure; and _death_ is doubtless an ‘earthing’ (as
electricians say), that is, a flowing back to the common earth-stock of
the excess of life-fluid in life-positive bodies, through some break
or short-circuiting of the vital dynamo. But now I am saying more than
I know, so am certain to be wrong somewhere: though this, or something
like it, you are likely to hear frequently repeated during the next
fifty years.

“Well, but though God is _x_ for ever, we must have some conception of
God, though wrong: and civilisation consists in nothing but this—the
getting of an ever higher conception of God through a broadening
consciousness of His ways—through science—through being philosophers
and inventors—through ‘waking up.’

“And isn’t this desirable? Yes, for waking up, or becoming conscious,
means happiness. Or is it necessary for me to prove that? It is easily
proved. For happiness is a property of life, isn’t it? ‘_Life is
sweet._’ You know that every insect or plant that has not had some
mishap is happy, and, with one apparent exception, does not want
to die. Well, but the trait of life is consciousness; so the more
conscious, the more living: but happiness is a property of living;
therefore the more conscious, the happier; and he was the most foolish
of the foolish ancients who said, ‘he that increaseth knowledge
increaseth sorrow’: for knowledge, if it be _real_ knowledge, and not
the Chinese ‘knowledge’ of ‘scholars,’ is knowledge of God; and the
more we know of God, the more we adore Him, and are happy.

“Yes, but mark this: that life with very little consciousness is
still happy, if without mishap, if healthy. Does some one of you by
chance know what health is? a singing hiccup of religion in your
inwards? One March morning when I was a boy I saw from behind a hedge
in the Highlands a girl come running, her hair and plaid fluttering
on the winds; and when she chanced to pull up, half breathless, half
laughing, not far from me, I think I never saw man so affected and
sick with bliss. Up to God she threw her eye, gasping with a sort of
fond reproach: ‘My health! Oh, I accuse You of love’; and when the
mixed wind and water whistled and swamped the willow-whips sweetly
by the water-brook, I saw her lover’s-glance go languishing and gush
toward tears, she groaning ‘beloved,’ and then ‘beloved.’ Another day a
Scotch meenister put into my hand a tract: and it was about a cobbler
who sat singing in the sunlight; so someone asked, ‘Why are you always
singing, Jamie?’ and what did the cobbler say? ‘It is Jesus singing,
singing in my heart.’ There, again, was a happy life, though, of
course, the ancient Asiatic whom he, a modern Scotchman, so familiarly
mentioned had nothing to do with the matter, as is proved by—But, by
the way, talking of proof, are we going henceforth to be sensitive
to proofs? For it is suasibleness that distinguishes high types from
low, it being difficult to persuade a negro, for if you din into him
a series of known truths, the deduction from which is an axiom, he’ll
say, ‘That may be all true enough, but I think I’ll still stick to
my own way of thinking.’ Apes are worse! Whereas scientists stand
ever ready to cast for ever behind them at the breath of a proof the
convictions of their lifetime. We must be attentive, then, to proofs,
if we desire to be high types. Of course, if one’s brain is degenerate
with age, that mayn’t be easy ... but I, personally, address myself
to the young: I am pretty nimble myself, and have, I confess, little
interest in stiff knees and intellects. In some lands a son will say to
his father: ‘Climb me this tree,’ and if the father is too decrepit,
the son will hang him on that tree. (“Old Age Suspensions,” the Queen
whispered quick.) The Chinese, on the other hand, worship their aged
and ancients; but we here are hardly just now in a mood to adore the
Chinese, and their oddities (“_Wipe them out, Teddy!_”); nor must we
hang our aged; but support them with gentleness and patience.

“But I was saying that one of many proofs that that ever-charming adept
whom the cobbler mentioned was never the cause of his singing is that
blackbirds, singing-apes, Hindoos, sing in that same happy manner: so
the cobbler was not happy because he was pious, but was pious because
he was happy, knowing Who made him happy, and made life without mishap
to be happy.

“Of course, he would have been happier if he had had _more_ life,
_i.e._ more consciousness—if, by a consciousness of anatomy, he had
understood what an adorable miracle it was that he sat there without
one ache in any one of his myriad bits; if, by a consciousness of
geology, he had got into his nerves a sense of Eternity, and of the
exquisite preciousness and romance of those days of his happy lifetime,
to last not one millionth part of one click of the clock of God,
while Saturn gads with whinings for life to arise on her, nightly to
eye those fires that light her flying sky; if he had understood that
his sky had not always been blue, nor his brook bright, but were the
triumph of æons for him to sit and sing a little at, and still were
becoming bluer, lovelier, for his sons’ sons to tumble dumb and blub
their bliss at; if he had felt himself, not the peasant of a village,
but a civilian of that Infinite down whose bowels he was bounding with
a thousand wings a thousand miles a minute that blessed day; then, you
will say, the tone of his singing would have deepened, and from the
pewit of penny-whistles and wren-twitterings would have grown to the
roaring of oratorios and the vaunt of organs.

“Then, too, he would have been richer in pocket: for if, while he
was making such music in his soul, some crude Jew of a duke had come
saying, ‘Please pay me some rent—give me half the boots you cobble, and
you’ll go to heaven,’ the cobbler would have answered, ‘What, old Rip,
you about in this region of space? Sit down and let’s discuss it with
some singing between.’ (“_Teddy! Hurrah! Teddy!_”)

“And suppose the cobbler had been freed of all fear? fear of to-morrow,
of death, and hell?

“Suppose he had known that, so far from being an everlasting being,
he was a being who could not last two seconds? that, beside those
flights of spheres sweeping him on a heyday through the heaven of
heavens, there was _another_ scamper—of atoms—equally sweeping,
inconceivably fleet, wheeling within him; that he was like a sand-form
of the sand-storm, a rain of the gayest grains gyrating into such
fugitive unions and dissolutions, that in four months he would be a
totally different man—his ribs brand-new, his brain, his hair—and
in four seconds by no means the same man: so that whatever calamity
might befall him to-morrow would not be befalling _him_, but somebody
else—which only sounds fantastic since truth is in that strain, fairily
romantic, Divinely wild.

“For the cobbler’s feeling that he was always the same being from the
time when he was a quadruped, ‘crawling’ as a baby, then was a triped
holding on to things, then was a biped, then in bent old age again
became a triped with a stick, again tending to be a quadruped—this
feeling was a pure illusion, due to the steady fleetness with which
millions of cobblers succeeded each other like the flitting films of
the cinematograph, each very like the last, yet different, whose steady
swiftness causes us to suppose that we are watching one photograph of a
horse jumping, when we are watching a hundred photographs; or like that
steady swiftness of the globe which gave the cobbler the illusion of
staying in the same place, when he was millions of leagues removed from
where he had been a week before, and still with the swift’s wing was
flitting through infinity: for the child is not the man; nor the father
of the man; but the man’s ape-like ancestor.

“Suppose he had known this: that every stitch which he commenced some
other cobbler finished, by an exquisite ‘division of labour’; that when
he went to bed it was never to wake; and that what was true of him was
true of his awl also, since at all instants all things are altering
in a dreamland where all reels, and the dreamer is a dream, where
everything is just freshly created, and there is no such thing as an
old oak-tree, where an atom in this palm of mine may be from farther
than the Pleiades, and ancienter than the suns whose colliding belched
this earth (for we are made of eternity, and have been at the ends of
infinity), where the vast fallacy is to be flat and dull, and dull are
you, and oh, dull am I, if we see this thing that we see, and are dull.

“But the man knew none of these truths: his nut was one vat of fatuous
fancies: he was all in the revel and fairyland of Heaven, and thought
himself in common cobblerland.

“If he had been conscious of some of this—as I once said to a Scotch
girl when I was a boy: she came up to London to see an aunt, and in
church on the Sunday her aunt whispered her in a confidential way:
‘_That’s_ the clergyman who married your uncle and me.’ The next
year she came up again, and again in church her aunt whispered her:
‘_That’s_ the clergyman who married your uncle and me’—causing the
girl to wonder! for it was quite a different type of clergyman. And
again the next summer she came, and again was whispered in confidence:
‘_That’s_ the clergyman who married your uncle and me’—another
clergyman! ‘Hallo,’ thought the girl, ‘the wish must be father to the
thought here, and the thought illegitimate’; and I remember saying
to her, ‘What did it matter? whichever of the three had married her,
she would still have been unmarried the day after, since he, the
husband, would have been a different he, she a different she’ (“And the
clergyman a different it,” whispered the Queen quick): for plasm, the
stuff that palpitates and suffers, _rages_ into alteration.

“This consciousness, then, you will say, would have lessened the
cobbler’s laughable vast egoism, giving him that humility and Nirvana
which goes with adoring and true religion, would have freed him from
fears, and enlarged his happiness.

“Yes, but don’t forget the main fact here: that _the cobbler was
still happy_—without all this consciousness; and, _with_ all this
consciousness, the philosopher, Herbert Spencer, was _not_ happy. Why?
Because he had indigestion. (“_Teddy! Right there!_”)

“Shall we not say, then, that this healthy cobbler with Sankey and
Moody singing in his heart was a better man than ten Spencers? more
‘_right with God_’ somehow? since happier? and a dog barking for
gladness of heart a better being than ten Spencers? more right with
God? Let us say this! as Spencer would have said: and then you will
better sympathise with some bits of my Edict. (“_Teddy! You are our
man!_”)

“Are we not at present made of trumpery stuff? grumpy ugly stuff?—so
many druggist-shops! hospitals! Nor is it difficult, I think, so
to change it, that every lid shall lower with love in resting on
every face, and that a pain shall be a strangeness. Let us try
this, then: for it has already been successfully tried by barbarian
tribes—Spartans—tribes of quite tiny brain-power compared with yours,
but brains undrenched with quixotic dreads and crotchets of Laputa,
seeing things level-headedly in daylight, not through mists and comic
convex-mirrors.” (“_Teddy! Don’t stop!_”)

The Prince was glancing at his watch; and he said: “This minute the
earth has entered the comet, men, and, you see, we are not poisoned, or
anything. Oh, we are still infested with many dreads, like children and
savages shrinking from things in the dark—let’s cast them off to-night,
to confront with bright eyes this new era whose sunrise-beams stream on
us.

“What must be the aims of that new age we have discovered by analysing
our cobbler:—first, health high to heaven; and next, waking up into
philosophers and inventors: for, surely, the respected sayer of my text
never meant: ‘Wake up _a little_, England! but for goodness’ sake keep
one eye still shut awhile’?

“To be philosophers and inventors, then: for which you must have
leisure, and you should have wealth. To have leisure I see that you
need only one thing—a country of your own: to have wealth you need, I
think, two things—a country of your own, and some new tools, by which
you will make in an hour what you now make in two. A country of your
own I will give you (“_Teddy! Hurrah! Teddy!_”); the tools you must
invent for yourselves: I undertaking that whoever of you produces a
really good new tool I will make of him a strutting duke.

“A little quickening of our wits’ activity will do it all; and we
have it in us, I think. When they were digging the Simplon tunnel,
they could make no headway, the rock was so tough, until some genius
engineer suggested ‘Try English labour’; and then the tunnel was soon
digged. Well, that’s your Englishman all over. Say to him, ‘Work like
a serf with your hands, and I’ll give you three pounds,’ and he’ll
answer: ‘Right you are, mister’; but tell him, ‘Work a little with
your head, and you’ll see heaven coming down out of heaven,’ and he’ll
answer, ‘Go on, what do you take me for?’ Yet I think that that grit
and grimness which digged the tunnel will bring us out top-boy when
it is forced into the direction of the discovery of truth. (“_Right!
Teddy!_”)

“Wake up, then! Why is there already dissent at my suggestion that
every child shall acquire five trades? There’s no difficulty. I myself
know ten or twelve. I wonder if you men and women understand that
those of you who can’t work in iron are uncivilised? this being the
stock definition of civilised man—‘man of the iron age.’ Or do you
suppose that rolling in a motor-car has any tendency to civilise a
countess, any more than to civilise the poodle rolling on her knee?
The question is, Can she make a motor-car? if she can’t, she is ‘out
of it’ as regards motor-cars, though she roll till she’s a rolly-poly.
For surely, if a man or woman can’t make castings, can’t even soften,
harden or temper steel, can’t anneal, case-harden, upset, weld or
braze iron, doesn’t even know how to make a chisel, a reamer, or a
countersinker, has no kind of truck with iron but when he cuts his
crust, how can he be said to belong to the iron age? he belongs to the
stone age, and is essentially hairy, as he would admit with horror
on a desert island, seeing there his face in the glass of God, and
himself rapidly lapsing to frank savagery. And there are many thousands
of men and women who consider themselves cultured—like a young man
whom I knew, who in a beautiful poignant voice would repeat from some
old Greek or Negro minstrel named Homer the Farewell of one Hickson
to his wife Anne (“He has forgotten her maiden-name of ‘Dromache,’”
the Queen whispered quick to the Princess), of which young man I
discovered that, to the delight of the solar system, he did not know
how to cut a screw, or tap a drill-hole—not even a suspicion of what
education _means_ having ever entered the heads of these essentially
Chinese—Korean—Laputan—and profoundly uneducated Simple-Simons. Nor can
I myself boast of culture, for, never having learned to work in land,
I am in that respect nothing more than a nomad of the days of Abraham.
However, mankind from Japan round to America and back is now about to
ponder the sense of this word ‘educate,’ and to relearn its ABC in a
new mood.

“Be quick, then! Wake! Why already is not every man, woman and youth
among you an electrical engineer, say? (A voice: “_Tall order,
Teddy!_”) Apparently, you know little of the matter! There’s no
difficulty—a little semi-voluntary quickening of yourselves. Anyone who
will give up novels for three years can be that. As to novels, that,
I think you will admit, is all nonsense, and I undertake that novels
go under in England, if I do not. Anyway, you get not one out of me
for ten years, by which time, I expect, your tastes will have changed:
for, if I delight to spend my time in making an experiment, and you in
mooning over George Meredith or Jules Verne, that’s not because I am
the nobler born, but because I have been subjected to noble influences,
and you to low. Subject you to the same, and you, too, will soon choose
the infinitely romantic truth rather than the more or less ninny,
sham-romantic myth. And just imagine that instead of every English man,
woman, and schoolgirl writing a “novel,” as at present, each began to
regard it as disgraceful to pass through life and die like a sheep
without having, for his part, invented something, seen something really
_novel_ and peculiar to his existence—what a giddy gay England _then_!

“For consciousness of truth, I say, since it is consciousness of God,
is joy: and to make a joyful noise in our hearts to Him, not because
of any hotch-potch of Hindoo, Hebrew, Chinese and African fancies in
us, but because of facts ascertained by white toilers—to make a joyful
noise to Him—we can’t perhaps chant yet for a century or two, but
already can kick up a sort of joyful shindy in us—and that’s life,
mind, that’s delight, that’s civilisation, that’s cultivation, _that’s_
waking up—blessed be His Name, faithful is He in all His ways. To this,
then, men, I call you, and come tapping at your doors. The midnight
time is past, or passing, for man, some spray and prickles of the
dayspring already surprise the night: be up to witness the thing that
the sunrise will be.

“I’m afraid the midnight and sunrise metaphor doesn’t quite run on
all fours. Never mind, you understand. Good-night. ‘_The speech_’ is
speechified.”

For some moments after this all the hall sat mute; but soon after he
had moved, in one corner of the stalls a chanting, low and slow and
moody, started in which the words were discerned:

    “He has saved us from harm”;

and it ran like alcohol on fire, rose and rose, from droning to
roaring, and suddenly screamed, every creature present leaping to his
feet, as a tempest like Pentecost seemed to seize and possess the
place, inflaming every breast, blazing in every brain, wrapping the
platform, too, in its rapture, catching in its passion Her Majesty,
too, who sprang and sang, catching in its rhapsody the Princess, who,
spitting fire from her eyes, sprang and sang.

And once more, when it was over, it rose low, to be luxuriously rolled
in the throat with rocking bodies, solemnly like a nocturne droned, and
rose, and rose, and roared, and suddenly screamed:

    “He has saved us from harm
       With his dreadful flails,
     With his stretched-out arm...”

The Prince alone was sitting, his lids lowered, thinking of Li Ku Yu.

                        ————————————————————————
            PRINTED BY THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED, EDINBURGH


                               Footnotes:

  [1] Meaning “first and last” son of his mother.




                          Transcriber’s Notes:

  • Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
  • Text enclosed by pluses is in small caps (+small caps+).
  • Text enclosed by equals is in bold (=bold=).
  • Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77957 ***