Thursday's Serial: "The Thirty-Nine Steps" by John Buchan (in English) - I

 

CHAPTER I - THE MAN WHO DIED

I returned from the City about three o'clock on that May afternoon pretty well disgusted with life. I had been three months in the old country, and was fed up with it. If anyone had told me a year ago that I would have been feeling like that I should have laughed at him, but there was the fact. The weather made me liverish, the talk of the ordinary Englishman made me sick, I couldn't get enough exercise, and the amusements of London seemed as flat as soda-water that has been standing in the sun. "Richard Hannay," I kept telling myself, "you have got into the wrong ditch, my friend, and you had better climb out."

It made me bite my lips to think of the plans I had been building up those last years in Buluwayo. I had got my pile—not one of the big ones, but good enough for me; and I had figured out all kinds of ways of enjoying myself. My father had brought me out from Scotland at the age of six, and I had never been home since; so England was a sort of Arabian Nights to me, and I counted on stopping there for the rest of my days. But from the first I was disappointed with it. In about a week I was tired of seeing sights, and in less than a month I had had enough of restaurants and theatres and race meetings. I had no real pal to go about with, which probably explains things. Plenty of people invited me to their houses, but they didn't seem much interested in me. They would fling me a question or two about South Africa, and then get on their own affairs. A lot of Imperialist ladies asked me to tea to meet schoolmasters from New Zealand and editors from Vancouver, and that was the dismalest business of all.

Here was I, thirty-seven years old, sound in wind and limb, with enough money to have a good time, yawning my head off all day. I had just about settled to clear out and get back to the veld, for I was the best-bored man in the United Kingdom.

That afternoon I had been worrying my brokers about investments to give my mind something to work on, and on my way home I turned into my club—rather a pot-house, which took in Colonial members. I had a long drink, and read the evening papers. They were full of the row in the Near East, and there was an article about Karolides, the Greek Premier. I rather fancied the chap. From all accounts he seemed the one big man in the show, and he played a straight game too, which was more than could be said for most of them. I gathered that they hated him pretty blackly in Berlin and Vienna, but that we were going to stick by him, and one paper said that he was the only barrier between Europe and Armageddon. I remember wondering if I could get a job in those parts. It struck me that Albania was the sort of place that might keep a man from yawning.

About six o'clock I went home, dressed, dined at the Café Royal, and turned into a music-hall. It was a silly show, all capering women and monkey-faced men, and I did not stay long. The night was fine and clear as I walked back to the flat I had hired near Portland Place. The crowd surged past me on the pavements, busy and chattering, and I envied the people for having something to do. These shop-girls and clerks and dandies and policemen had some interest in life that kept them going. I gave half-a-crown to a beggar because I saw him yawn; he was a fellow sufferer. At Oxford Circus I looked up into the spring sky and I made a vow. I would give the Old Country another day to fit me into something; if nothing happened, I would take the next boat for the Cape.

My flat was the first floor in a new block behind Langham Place. There was a common staircase, with a porter and a lift-man at the entrance, but there was no restaurant or anything of that sort, and each flat was quite shut off from the others. I hate servants on the premises, so I had a fellow to look after me who came in by the day. He arrived before eight o'clock every morning and used to depart at seven, for I never dined at home.

I was just fitting my key into the door when I noticed a man at my elbow. I had not seen him approach, and the sudden appearance made me start. He was a slim man, with a short brown beard and small, gimlety blue eyes. I recognized him as the occupant of a flat on the top floor, with whom I had passed the time of day on the stairs.

"Can I speak to you?" he said. "May I come in for a minute?" He was steadying his voice with an effort, and his hand was pawing my arm.

I got my door open and motioned him in. No sooner was he over the threshold than he made a dash for my back room, where I used to smoke and write my letters. Then he bolted back.

"Is the door locked?" he asked feverishly, and he fastened the chain with his own hand.

"I'm very sorry," he said humbly. "It's a mighty liberty, but you looked the kind of man who would understand. I've had you in my mind all this week when things got troublesome. Say, will you do me a good turn?"

"I'll listen to you," I said. "That's all I'll promise." I was getting worried by the antics of this nervous little chap.

There was a tray of drinks on a table beside him, from which he filled himself a stiff whisky and soda. He drank it off in three gulps, and cracked the glass as he set it down.

"Pardon," he said, "I'm a bit rattled tonight. You see, I happen at this moment to be dead."

I sat down in an armchair and lit my pipe.

"What does it feel like?" I asked. I was pretty certain that I had to deal with a madman.

A smile flickered over his drawn face. "I'm not mad—yet. Say, sir, I've been watching you, and I reckon you're a cool customer. I reckon, too, you're an honest man, and not afraid of playing a bold hand. I'm going to confide in you. I need help worse than any man ever needed it, and I want to know if I can count you in."

"Get on with your yarn," I said, "and then I'll tell you."

He seemed to brace himself for a great effort, and then started on the queerest rigmarole. I didn't get hold of it at first, and I had to stop and ask him questions. But here is the gist of it:—

He was an American, from Kentucky, and after college, being pretty well off, he had started out to see the world. He wrote a bit, and acted as war correspondent for a Chicago paper, and spent a year or two in southeastern Europe. I gathered that he was a fine linguist, and had got to know pretty well the society in those parts. He spoke familiarly of many names that I remembered to have seen in the newspapers.

He had played about with politics, he told me, at first for the interest of them, and then because he couldn't help himself. I read him as a sharp, restless fellow, who always wanted to get down to the roots of things. He got a little further down than he wanted.

I am giving you what he told me as well as I could make it out. Away behind all the governments and the armies there was a big subterranean movement going on, engineered by very dangerous people. He had come on it by accident; it fascinated him; he went further, and then he got caught. I gathered that most of the people in it were the sort of educated anarchists that make revolutions, but that beside them there were financiers who were playing for money. A clever man can make big profits on a falling market, and it suited the book of both classes to set Europe by the ears. He told me some queer things that explained a lot that had puzzled me—things that happened in the Balkan War, how one state suddenly came out on top, why alliances were made and broken, why certain men disappeared, and where the sinews of war came from. The aim of the whole conspiracy was to get Russia and Germany at loggerheads.

When I asked why, he said that the anarchist lot thought it would give them their chance. Everything would be in the melting-pot, and they looked to see a new world emerge. The capitalists would rake in the shekels, and make fortunes by buying up wreckage.

Capital, he said, had no conscience and no fatherland. Besides, the Jew was behind it, and the Jew hated Russia worse than hell.

"Do you wonder?" he cried. "For three hundred years they have been persecuted, and this is the return match for the pogroms. The Jew is everywhere, but you have to go far down the back stairs to find him.

"Take any big Teutonic business concern. If you have dealings with it the first man you meet is Prince von Und zu Something, an elegant young man who talks Eton-and-Harrow English. But he cuts no ice. If your business is big, you get behind him and find a prognathous Westphalian with a retreating brow and the manners of a hog.

"He is the German business man that gives your English papers the shakes. But if you're on the biggest kind of job and are bound to get to the real boss, ten to one you are brought up against a little white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a rattlesnake. Yes, Sir, he is the man who is ruling the world just now, and he has his knife in the empire of the Tzar, because his aunt was outraged and his father flogged in some one-horse location on the Volga."

I could not help saying that his Jew-anarchists seemed to have got left behind a little.

"Yes and no," he said. "They won up to a point, but they struck a bigger thing than money, a thing that couldn't be bought, the old elemental fighting instincts of man. If you're going to be killed you invent some kind of flag and country to fight for, and if you survive you get to love the thing. Those foolish devils of soldiers have found something they care for, and that has upset the pretty plan laid in Berlin and Vienna. But my friends haven't played their last card by a long sight. They've gotten the ace up their sleeves, and unless I can keep alive for a month they are going to play it and win."

"But I thought you were dead,' I put in.

"Mors janua vitæ," he smiled. (I recognized the quotation: it was about all the Latin I knew.) "I'm coming to that, but I've got to put you wise about a lot of things first. If you read your newspaper, I guess you know the name of Constantine Karolides?"

I sat up at that, for I had been reading about him that very afternoon.

"He is the man that has wrecked all their games. He is the one big brain in the whole show, and he happens also to be an honest man. Therefore he has been marked down these twelve months past. I found that out—not that it was difficult, for any fool could guess as much. But I found out the way they were going to get him, and that knowledge was deadly. That's why I have had to decease."

He had another drink, and I mixed it for him myself, for I was getting interested in the beggar.

"They can't get him in his own land, for he has a bodyguard of Epirotes that would skin their grandmothers. But on the 15th day of June he is coming to this city. The British Foreign Office has taken to having international tea-parties, and the biggest of them is due on that date. Now Karolides is reckoned the principal guest, and if my friends have their way he will never return to his admiring countrymen."

"That's simple enough, anyhow," I said. "You can warn him and keep him at home."

"And play their game?" he asked sharply. "If he does not come they win, for he's the only man that can straighten out the tangle. And if his guvernment is warned he won't come, for he does not know how big the stakes will be on June the 15th."

"What about the British Government?" I asked. "They're not going to let their guests be murdered. Tip them the wink, and they'll take extra precautions."

"No good. They might stuff your city with plain-clothes detectives and double the police and Constantine would still be a doomed man. My friends are not playing this game for candy. They want a big occasion for the taking off, with the eyes of all Europe on it. He'll be murdered by an Austrian, and there'll be plenty of evidence to show the connivance of the big folk in Vienna and Berlin. It will all be an infernal lie, of course, but the case will look black enough to the world. I'm not talking hot air, my friend. I happen to know every detail of the hellish contrivance, and I can tell you it will be the most finished piece of blackguardism since the Borgias. But it's not going to come off if there's a certain man who knows the wheels of the business alive right here in London on the 15th day of June. And that man is going to be your servant, Franklin P. Scudder."

I was getting to like the little chap. His jaw had shut like a rat-trap, and there was the fire of battle in his gimlety eyes. If he was spinning me a yarn he could act up to it.

"Where did you find out this story?" I asked.

"I got the first hint in an inn on the Achensee in Tyrol. That set me inquiring, and I collected my other clues in a fur-shop in the Galician quarter of Buda, in a Strangers' Club in Vienna, and in a little book-shop off the Racknitzstrasse in Leipsic. I completed my evidence ten days ago in Paris. I can't tell you the details now, for it's something of a history. When I was quite sure in my own mind I judged it my business to disappear, and I reached this city by a mighty queer circuit. I left Paris a dandified young French-American, and I sailed from Hamburg a Jew diamond merchant. In Norway I was an English student of Ibsen collecting materials for lectures, but when I left Bergen I was a cinema-man with special ski films. And I came here from Leith with a lot of pulp-wood propositions in my pocket to put before the London newspapers. Till yesterday I thought I had muddied my trail some, and was feeling pretty happy. Then . . ."

The recollection seemed to upset him, and he gulped down some more whisky.

"Then I saw a man standing in the street outside this block. I used to stay close in my room all day, and only slip out after dark for an hour or two. I watched him for a bit from my window, and I thought I recognized him. . . . He came in and spoke to the porter. . . . When I came back from my walk last night I found a card in my letter-box. It bore the name of the man I want least to meet on God's earth."

I think that the look in my companion's eyes, the sheer naked scare on his face, completed my conviction of his honesty. My own voice sharpened a bit as I asked him what he did next.

"I realized that I was bottled as sure as a pickled herring, and that there was only one way out. I had to die. If my pursuers knew I was dead they would go to sleep again."

"How did you manage it?"

"I told the man that valets me that I was feeling pretty bad, and I got myself up to look like death. That wasn't difficult, for I'm no slouch at disguises. Then I got a corpse—you can always get a body in London if you know where to go for it. I fetched it back in a trunk on the top of a four-wheeler, and I had to be assisted upstairs to my room. You see I had to pile up some evidence for the inquest. I went to bed and got my man to mix me a sleeping-draught, and then told him to clear out. He wanted to fetch a doctor, but I swore some and said I couldn't abide leeches. When I was left alone I started in to fake up that corpse. He was my size, and I judged had perished from too much alcohol, so I put some spirits handy about the place. The jaw was the weak point in the likeness, so I blew it away with a revolver. I daresay there will be somebody to-morrow to swear to having heard a shot, but there are no neighbours on my floor, and I guessed I could risk it. So I left the body in bed dressed up in my pyjamas, with a revolver lying on the bed-clothes and a considerable mess around. Then I got into a suit of clothes I had kept waiting for emergencies. I didn't dare to shave for fear of leaving tracks, and besides it wasn't any kind of use my trying to get into the streets. I had had you in my mind all day, and there seemed nothing to do but to make an appeal to you. I watched from my window till I saw you come home, and then slipped down the stair to meet you. . . . There, sir, I guess you know about as much as me of this business."

He sat blinking like an owl, fluttering with nerves and yet desperately determined.

By this time I was pretty well convinced that he was going straight with me. It was the wildest sort of narrative, but I had heard in my time many steep tales which had turned out to be true, and I had made a practice of judging the man rather than the story. If he had wanted to get a location in my flat, and then cut my throat, he would have pitched a milder yarn.

"Hand me your key," I said, "and I'll take a look at the corpse. Excuse my caution, but I'm bound to verify a bit if I can."

He shook his head mournfully. "I reckoned you'd ask for that, but I haven't got it. It's on my chain on the dressing-table. I had to leave it behind, for I couldn't leave any clues to breed suspicions. The gentry who are after me are pretty bright-eyed citizens. You'll have to take me on trust for the night, and tomorrow you'll get proof of the corpse business right enough."

I thought for an instant or two.

"Right. I'll trust you for the night. I'll lock you into this room and keep the key. Just one word, Mr Scudder. I believe you're straight, but if so be you are not I should warn you that I'm a handy man with a gun."

"Sure," he said, jumping up with some briskness. "I haven't the privilege of your name, sir, but let me tell you that you're a white man. I'll thank you to lend me a razor."

I took him into my bedroom and turned him loose. In half an hour's time a figure came out that I scarcely recognized. Only his gimlety, hungry eyes were the same. He was shaved clean, his hair was parted in the middle, and he had cut his eyebrows.

Further, he carried himself as if he had been drilled, and was the very model, even to the brown complexion, of some British officer who had had a long spell in India. He had a monocle, too, which he stuck in his eye, and every trace of the American had gone out of his speech.

"My hat! Mr Scudder—" I stammered.

"Not Mr Scudder," he corrected; "Captain Theophilus Digby, of the Seventh Gurkhas, presently home on leave. I'll thank you to remember that, sir."

I made him up a bed in my smoking-room and sought my own couch, more cheerful than I had been for the past month. Things did happen occasionally, even in this God-forgotten metropolis!

 

I woke next morning to hear my man, Paddock, making the deuce of a row at the smoking-room door.

Paddock was a fellow I had done a good turn to out on the Selakwi, and I had inspanned him as my servant as soon as I got to England. He had about as much gift of the gab as a hippopotamus, and was not a great hand at valeting, but I knew I could count on his loyalty.

"Stop that row, Paddock," I said. "There's a friend of mine, Captain—Captain—" (I couldn't remember the name) "dossing down in there. Get breakfast for two and then come and speak to me."

I told Paddock a fine story about how my friend was a great swell, with his nerves pretty bad from over-work, who wanted absolute rest and stillness. Nobody had got to know he was here, or he would be besieged by communications from the India Office and the Prime Minister and his cure would be ruined.

I am bound to say Scudder played up splendidly when he came to breakfast.

He fixed Paddock with his eyeglass, just like a British officer, asked him about the Boer War, and slung out at me a lot of stuff about imaginary pals. Paddock couldn't learn to call me "sir", but he 'sirred' Scudder as if his life depended on it.

I left him with the newspaper and a box of cigars, and went down to the city till luncheon. When I got back the lift-man had a weighty face.

"Nawsty business 'ere this morning, sir. Gent in No. 15 been and shot 'isself. They've just took 'im to the mortuary. The police are up there now."

I ascended to No. 15, and found a couple of bobbies and an inspector busy making an examination. I asked a few idiotic questions, and they soon kicked me out. Then I found the man that had valeted Scudder, and pumped him, but I could see he suspected nothing.

He was a whining fellow with a churchyard face, and half a crown went far to console him.

I attended the inquest next day. A partner of some publishing firm gave evidence that the deceased had brought him wood-pulp propositions, and had been, he believed, an agent of an American business. The jury found it a case of suicide while of unsound mind, and the few effects were handed over to the American Consul to deal with. I gave Scudder a full account of the affair, and it interested him greatly. He said he wished he could have attended the inquest, for he reckoned it would be about as spicy as to read one's own obituary notice.

The first two days he stayed with me in that back room he was very peaceful. He read and smoked a bit, and made a heap of jottings in a note-book, and every night we had a game of chess, at which he beat me hollow. I think he was nursing his nerves back to health, for he had had a pretty trying time. But on the third day I could see he was beginning to get restless. He fixed up a list of the days till June 15th, and ticked each off with a red pencil, making remarks in shorthand against them. I would find him sunk in a brown study, with his sharp eyes abstracted, and after those spells of meditation he was apt to be very despondent.

Then I could see that he began to get edgy again. He listened for little noises, and was always asking me if Paddock could be trusted. Once or twice he got very peevish, and apologized for it. I didn't blame him. I made every allowance, for he had taken on a fairly stiff job.

It was not the safety of his own skin that troubled him, but the success of the scheme he had planned. That little man was clean grit all through, without a soft spot in him. One night he was very solemn.

"Say, Hannay," he said, "I judge I should let you a bit deeper into this business. I should hate to go out without leaving somebody else to put up a fight." And he began to tell me in detail what I had only heard from him vaguely.

I did not give him very close attention. The fact is, I was more interested in his own adventures than in his high politics. I reckoned that Karolides and his affairs were not my business, leaving all that to him. So a lot that he said slipped clean out of my memory. I remember that he was very clear that the danger to Karolides would not begin till he had got to London, and would come from the very highest quarters, where there would be no thought of suspicion. He mentioned the name of a woman—Julia Czechenyi—as having something to do with the danger. She would be the decoy, I gathered, to get Karolides out of the care of his guards. He talked, too, about a Black Stone and a man that lisped in his speech, and he described very particularly somebody that he never referred to without a shudder—an old man with a young voice who could hood his eyes like a hawk.

He spoke a good deal about death, too. He was mortally anxious about winning through with his job, but he didn't care a rush for his life.

"I reckon it's like going to sleep when you are pretty well tired out, and waking to find a summer day with the scent of hay coming in at the window. I used to thank God for such mornings 'way back in the blue-Grass country, and I guess I'll thank Him when I wake up on the other side of Jordan."

Next day he was much more cheerful, and read the life of Stonewall Jackson most of the time. I went out to dinner with a mining engineer I had got to see on business, and came back about half past ten in time for our game of chess before turning in.

I had a cigar in my mouth, I remember, as I pushed open the smoking-room door. The lights were not lit, which struck me as odd. I wondered if Scudder had turned in already.

I snapped the switch, but there was nobody there. Then I saw something in the far corner which made me drop my cigar and fall into a cold sweat.

My guest was lying sprawled on his back. There was a long knife through his heart which skewered him to the floor.

Wednesday's Good Reading: "Yolanda!" by Noel Rosa (in Portuguese).

 Lyrics and music by Noel Rosa in 1935; unfortunately the melody is lost.

 

 

- Yolanda! Yolanda!

- Yolanda! Yolanda!

 

Yolanda! Eu chamo, você não vem

E o eco só responde

"Yolanda... Yolanda..."

Se eu canto pro meu bem

Ele canta também...

 

Não se pode improvisar

Ele vem incomodar

Yolanda! Ele responde:

"Yolanda... Yolanda..."

 

Se me viro pro norte

Lá no sul ele está

Se me viro de frente

Lá nas costas vai ficar

 

Já estou até doente

Não consigo decifrar

Yolanda! Ele responde:

"Yolanda... Yolanda..."

Tuesday's Serial: “The Messiah of the Cylinder” by Victor Rousseau (in Englsih) - X

 

CHAPTER XV - THE AIRSCOUTS’ FORTRESS

So I told them my story from the beginning. I spoke of the days of the Institute and Lazaroff’s experiment, of my awakening within the cylinder at the end of a century of sleep, my flight from the cellar and my discovery by Jones. I continued, telling of my first bewilderment in London, of David’s kindness which had saved my reason, described my summons that morning and the relays of spies who had led me to the Temple. When I narrated my discovery of the cylinder containing Esther’s living body I raised my eyes to David’s and perceived that I was no longer in the position of a prisoner awaiting death.

David’s aspect had changed; he was trembling violently and struggling to speak. He looked fearfully at me, and Jones was hardly less moved. Then Elizabeth slipped her hand into mine.

“We believe you, Arnold,” she said.

Three times David attempted to speak while I was sketching briefly the remainder of my story up to the point of my encounter with Elizabeth, and each time his voice failed him.

“Arnold, forgive me,” he managed to say at last. “We know that every word you have told us is true, if only you had told me before! But I see how incredible you must have thought your story. Now listen to me!

“The horrors of this government will not last much longer. Plans are well under way to make an end of democracy and restore liberty to the world. You have unwittingly placed a wonderful weapon in our hands. No man can be neutral in such times. Now, Arnold, you have to make a decision which will affect not yourself only, but all of us, Britain, the Federation, and the race of men. You must choose your party.” He turned to Jones. “He must be told nothing until the time arrives,” he continued, assuming a tone of authority. “You will say nothing—nor you, Elizabeth.”

He turned to me again.

“Arnold,” he said, “you must make your choice now. Lembken needs you for reasons which are patent to us, thanks to your statement. If you go back to him he can give you power and liberty to lord it over the people until the quick day of reckoning arrives. If you join us you must become an outlaw and an associate in the most desperate endeavor, play a leading part and share our dangers.”

“How can you doubt me?” I asked. “I am with you, now, and at all times.”

David held up his hand. “Wait!” he said. “You must first understand our situation, and why we are here tonight.”

“It is not necessary, David,” I answered.

“Yes, it is necessary. Because you do not know the depth of our intolerable bondage. I am going to tell you of my own life, that you may judge.

“I begin with my father. As I told you, he was epileptic in youth. He outgrew the attacks, and because the Liberal government never dared to enforce the Defectives’ Law which it passed in 1930, he was able to marry, much later, a girl to whom he had been engaged for many years. They had lived quietly in what was then called Wales, in a rural community that had somehow managed to escape the excesses which began in 1945.

“But my father was a marked man, because he was on the secret defectives’ list, and a Conservative. A few weeks after his marriage the storm of revolution burst over Dolgelly. The army of clerks and civil officers that followed the troops of the victorious democracy raked the country fine for victims. With his young bride my father fled to the mountains, where I was born, and they existed there, heaven knows how, till an opportunity arrived for flight abroad. When the restoration came he returned, and rebuilt his ruined home.

“My father was a student of history, and he knew that the peace which had descended over the distracted country was only a lull in the storm of violence. He resolved to teach me all the old knowledge, which had fallen into decay. He wanted me to play a leading part in political life, as his forebears had done. But the second revolution was upon us when I was a youth of nineteen. Fortunately, my parents were both dead.

“The mob started burning defectives then. For many there was the chance of submission to the new government, nominally under Boss Rose, which Sanson was constructing; but there was none for me, since epilepsy was then, owing to the ephemeral theory of some forgotten scientist, regarded as the unpardonable sin. I managed to escape to Denmark, and spent the next sixteen years upon the Continent, wandering from place to place as the Federation came into being. I married a Swiss lady at Lausanne, where Elizabeth was born. We had to fly by night, when the child was a week old. My wife could not survive the journey over the mountain passes in the middle of winter. She died in what was called Austria, two days after our arrival there. With Elizabeth I continued my flight eastward, and found refuge in Greece.

“I said that the mob had begun to burn defectives. But the Council changed that. The word ‘productivity’ was the new fetish, and, seeing that the murder of half the population would decrease the output, the Council resolved to imprison defectives in the workshops for life instead. But even this did not work. In 1999 Boss Rose became alarmed at the depopulation caused by the universal terror. Men denounced their brothers for small rewards, and wives their husbands, when they grew tired of them. Men and women were crossing the North Sea in tiny skiffs, or perishing in the waves, flying into the glens of Scotland, organizing in bands and living a hunted life within the forests that had begun to cover the country. Boss Rose issued an amnesty decree. Defectives who returned and were able to produce a hektone and a quarter monthly were not to be proscribed. I returned to Britain and secured employment in the Strangers’ Bureau, which had just been established, a post for which my education and experiences abroad qualified me.

“Ten years ago Boss Rose fell under an assassin’s dagger. The Council, under the influence of Sanson, issued a decree that no faith was to be kept with defectives. Sanson, then supreme behind the mask of Lembken, began to harry the people. It was then he introduced his system of mating under Council supervision.”

“It is abominable!” I cried.

“Yet, like all our institutions, it has its roots far back in the past,” said David, “and only needed the abandonment of the Christian ethic to spring full-fledged into existence. The Prophet Wells foreshadowed it, as did also Ellen Key; and on this point the followers of Galton joined the Socialist government in a concerted attack upon monogamy. This, in fact, has been the crux of the old battle between Socialism and the Church: on the one hand the old ideal of the family as the unit of society, and marriage an indissoluble bond; on the other the individual, free from responsibility and seeking his own fancied freedom. Even in the Prophet’s time America had practically abandoned monogamy, while the anti-social propaganda was being secretly carried on by the teaching of what was called sex hygiene in the schools. When the churches compromised with divorce, Protestantism finally collapsed, and flung half the civilized world back into paganism.”

“It was said that the children—” I began.

“The answer was State rearing, Arnold, as had been urged by many men and some women of liberal and progressive minds. We tried that in 2002. Elizabeth was torn from me. For six months we had public crèches in every city. There was much public dissatisfaction, though the children were not taken from their mothers till they had been weaned. That was the time when the Guard was formed, consisting of Janissaries trained from youth by the Council and pledged to them. However, what caused the bandonment of the crèche system was a quite unexpected happening. Despite the utmost care, despite a process of automatic feeding in germ-proof incubators, which made it impossible for any of the little inmates to lack the advantages of the latest hygienic theories, the children died.

“This phenomenon was never explained satisfactorily, and the mortality, which ranged from eighty to ninety per cent, shocked the Province profoundly, for it meant an intolerable lessening in the productivity of the next generation. The children were returned to their parents. Elizabeth, who was above the age curve of maximum mortality, came back to me, and, in spite of rigorous inspection by the officials of the Children’s Bureau, I have managed to keep her.

“But I must be brief, Arnold. I have told you that it was decreed no faith was to be kept with defectives. The net was cast over all who, trusting to the proclamation, had returned from the forests and waste places, and from abroad. Gradually they were sorted out and ascribed. Many records of heredity had disappeared during the Revolution, but they had my father’s in the Bureau of Pedigrees and Relationships. Since then I have waited in suspense daily. They know it, and, if I have not been condemned to the workshops, it is through Lembken’s favor, for he was head of the Strangers’ Bureau before the assassination of Boss Rose, and I worked under him.”

“But is there no law?” I cried. “Is there no charter of liberty at all?”

“Why, yes, Arnold. We still have Magna Charta, and Habeas Corpus, and many other documents, and occasionally these are invoked. There is an old man in the paper shops who has appealed against imprisonment and carried his case through twenty or thirty courts since he was shut up as a boy, and if he lives long enough his appeal will come before the Council. But you see, Arnold, one of the first acts of the victorious democracy was to institute the election and the recall of judges.

“They think I fear for my own liberty,” he continued, beginning to pace the floor. “They do not know—happily they do not know.”

Then he went on to tell me that which concerned the girl’s arrest that afternoon.

It appeared that Elizabeth was one of those very few who were physically almost perfect, and, as such, she had been in danger of being placed on the list of those who were to enter the harems of the whites. David’s sole hope of saving her lay in the fact that she was penalized six points because her grandfather had had epileptic seizures. But she approximated so closely to the Sanson norm—and the child had been innocent enough to head the district list of those qualifying in mentality by examination upon the Binet board—that there had been little hope for her. This fear had been increased by the fact that Lembken had seen Elizabeth, and had recently summoned her and her father to the Council Hall, under the pretext of wishing to confer some favor upon an old subordinate.

Now I gathered in the last threads of the skein. David had returned from the Strangers’ Bureau that afternoon to find the apartment empty. Jones had conveyed the news to him, and had secreted him in the Airscouts’ Fortress, pending a plan of rescue, a task which was only rendered possible through the disaffection of Lembken’s airscouts. Jones had seen me in my priest’s robes, and the two had come to the natural conclusion that I had been a spy, playing one of the romantic parts in fashion among the whites, and approved in the Council’s novels, in order to see Elizabeth before selecting her. We had been discovered at the window, the position of the little house had given Jones the opportunity of rescuing the girl with his scoutplane, and, but for my return while the rope still dangled before the aperture, I should never have known the secret of Elizabeth’s disappearance. No wonder David had flown at my throat.

“Now, we must act at once,” said David. “We are going to seek refuge in the forests where our friends are hiding. Jones will carry us there tonight when he starts in his scoutplane on patrol duty. It is a difficult problem to pass the night patrol. But Jones can get us through. And now, Arnold, what is your decision?”

“I made it long ago,” I answered.

“You are with us?”

“Indeed, I am.”

David wrung my hand hard. “You have decided wisely,” he said, “and by your decision you have taken the only means possible to save the woman you love. For the Sanson régime is crumbling, and your presence means, what you cannot yet imagine, to the cause of liberty. We have five thousand outlaws and fugitives from the defectives’ shops, scattered in secret hiding places about London. We have made Ray rods in the shops and have secreted provisions. Tonight the heads of the movement are to assemble—”

“In the cellar where I lay so long!” I exclaimed, with sudden intuition. “And Jones had been there with Ray rods when he found me!”

“Correct,” answered Jones, in his laconic manner.

“We remain here until midnight,” said David. “Then Jones will take us when he starts to relieve the first patrol.”

“Be assured that I am with you to the end,” I said. And I swore that I would do all in my power, so long as I had life and liberty, to fight for human freedom. And as I swore I had a vision of the girl, mangled and crushed upon the stones beneath that tropical, aerial hell beneath the noble dome of England’s shameful temple.

I think the resolution in my manner must have enkindled David’s hopes, for he put out his hand and caught mine again, and wrung and held it.

“You do not know, Arnold, how necessary you are to us,” he said. “But tonight you shall be told. I am old, Arnold, and I have little courage. I have lived through too many changes and frustrated hopes. I had grown used and resigned to things that had come to seem unchangeable. The freedom of my youth was only a dream to me. Sometimes I doubted whether men had ever been free. It was your surprise, your ignorance, then the indignation which you thought I did not see that made me begin to understand my own degradation. And it was today’s events that gave me heart to work with all my might for the cause to which I had only languidly adhered. I have been one of the revolutionary committee for months, and now I shall fight whole-heartedly, and you with me.”

“David,” I said with sudden conviction, “you are a Christian.”

His eyes suddenly seemed to blaze. “I am!” he cried. “As we all are. I have temporized with evil all these years, but now I cannot do so any more. The hope of the world can never be crushed out; it is spreading everywhere. All of us are enlisted under that flag that was raised on the Mount two thousand years ago. We see that without Christ, life is intolerable. I knew your faith from the first, Arnold, although I dared not speak, I knew it at the beginning because I thought you were a Russian. That was why I befriended you. We know our own!” he cried triumphantly.

Elizabeth put one arm about her father’s neck and extended her free hand to me. I clasped it, and then the airscout’s; and so we pledged ourselves.

 

 

CHAPTER XVI - THE MESSIAH’S ANNUNCIATION

Jones left us and came back with some food. Upon his arm he carried a stranger’s uniform, which he handed to me.

“You cannot wear those robes,” he said. “Take this. It should fit you; it belonged to one of our recruits who was ascribed last week and has not yet returned it to the Wool Stores.”

I was glad to see the last of the priest’s robes. He carried them away, promising to return for us in an hour. Elizabeth made us eat, but we had little heart to do so. At her insistence, however, we made the best display of appetite that was possible.

The room was only faintly illumined by the reflected solar light that issued up the elevator shaft. With it there mounted the sound of the voices of the airscouts in their barracks below. Sometimes the elevator rushed by, arousing a thrill of fear in each of us.

David drew me toward him and began speaking softly.

“You know nothing of Paul,” he said. “His name is Paul Llewellyn—for we observe Sanson’s laws no longer. He was to have mated Elizabeth.”

“Married?”

“Yes, married, before the Cold Solstice. His grandfather was my father’s steward at Dolgelly. Our families remained in touch through all the civil turmoil, and he is the last of his, as Elizabeth is the last of mine. He was given the name Paul, the father retaining the family name, which was to alternate in each generation, as is the custom nowadays. That law of Sanson’s must be one of the first to go. It aimed, of course, to destroy the vestiges of the family that remained.

“Paul was a Grade 1 defective, and we felt sure that Elizabeth would come under the same classification, so that they would be free to mate. They were waiting for the lists to be published, but Elizabeth had not been ascribed when the last list went up, and meanwhile Paul was sent to the defectives’ shops. Arnold, did you ever hear of the doctrine called Apostolic Succession?”

“Of course, David.”

“That the functions of the priesthood are transmitted by the laying on of hands? The English Church possessed the tradition, and it has never been lost, though most of our people attach, I am afraid, some magical idea to the ancient rite. Our bishop is a poor, illiterate old man, a machinist by trade, but Bonham laid his hands on him before he was burned in Westminster Hall. Bishop Alfred was to have blessed the union. A week before Fruit Equinox, Paul was taken in the bishop’s home by Sanson’s spies. Both were condemned to life imprisonment in the defectives’ shops as Christians. Both escaped among the last batch of fugitives. Elizabeth hopes to meet Paul tonight.”

“And I hope so, with all my heart,” I answered.

The cage stopped at the door and Jones came in.

“We can go now. The last of the scoutplanes has gone,” he said.

We went up to the roof. Deep night was over and about us. The phosphorescent fronts of the glow-painted buildings gave London the aspect of long lines of parallel and intersecting palisades of ghostly light; but the glow paint illumined nothing, and the deep canyons of the streets were of velvety blackness. The white circle of the fortress wall surrounded us. Outside the region of the glow, London was an indistinguishable blurred shadow, save where the searchlights from the departing scoutplanes illumined it. They hovered in a long line above the city, their position only discernible from the white searchrays that emanated from them as they swept the city below. Slowly they made their way into the southern distance.

I groped for reality in this succession of bewildering scenes, and hardly found it. Rain began to fall, spattering on the crystal walls of the adjacent gardens, in which the flickering colored lights still twinkled. My face was wet with it. I was thinking of the old days, when life was free: Sir Spofforth’s rain-swept garden, the scent of Esther’s tea-roses, and the hum of the ungainly, noisy town of Croydon that last evening. I saw Esther’s face vividly upon the velvet screen of the night.

Elizabeth’s hand stole into mine.

“You are our hope, Arnold. You can inspire us to victory,” she whispered.

Jones had gotten the scoutplane ready, and the vessel now rested on the flat roof, as a bird on its perching place. It was a little craft, even smaller than my memory of it had been, and it carried no Ray shield to betray its presence. Jones drew David aside and held a whispered colloquy with him.

“We are about ready,” he said, as they came back to us. “I’ve shifted the searchlight to the rear socket to balance the extra weight. She’ll carry us. I’ll have time to take you to your destination and report for scout duty when Hancock comes the round. But if I fly with the searchlight showing, any of the planes may signal me to stop—”

He rubbed his chin, and the old irresolution came upon his face.

“If I fly dark it’s a leather vat offense,” he added. “And the battleplanes would fire on us.”

He paused and rubbed his chin again.

“I’ll fly dark,” he said, and so settled the matter firmly in his own mind. And, his mind thus made up, I knew nothing would change it.

There was some difficulty in disposing of us. Finally Jones placed us three in the double seat, Elizabeth in the center and David and I on either side of her. He himself squatted upon the chassis before us, the wheel in his hands. He touched the starting lever with his right foot, and the craft rose heavily into the air, straining beneath her burden. In spite of the counterbalance of the searchlight behind, the nose of the plane dipped constantly, so that our flight was a succession of abrupt ascents and declinations.

It was freezing cold up in the air. Gradually we ascended, till I felt the fresh wind from the Thames estuary beat on my face. Presently the south was cleft by flaming serpents, with eyes of fire.

“The food airvans from France,” said David, pointing.

Now we soared over the outlying factories and warehouses. A huge, glow-painted building sprang into view out of the shadows below.

“The defectives’ workshops for this district,” David continued. “Yonder is the Council’s art factory.”

The darkness in front of us began to be studded with long parallelograms of dazzling glow, set at wide intervals, each capped with the conical Ray guns. From these, extending fanwise toward the ground, appearing pink in contrast with the glow’s intensely purple white, the searchlights wavered.

Jones halted the scoutplane. “The battleplanes,” he said, pointing. “They are posted nightly around London now. You know the reason, David?”

David started and placed his hand in inquiry upon the airscout’s shoulder. Jones’s voice sank to a whisper.

“It is the merest rumor among our men,” he said. “One reads it in their faces rather than hears it spoken, for we are afraid of one another. One can be sure that Sanson has his spies among us. But the scoutplanes are sufficient to patrol London and detect fugitives, and if the battleplanes are sent out there is hope the rumor may be true. If the Tsar has broken out from Tula—”

“Thank God!” said David in a tense whisper.

“He will overrun Skandogermania in a week, for it is as disaffected as Britain. The airscouts there will go over to him. There is no force to stop him, except our planes and the Guard.”

I saw the joy on David’s face. Could barbarous Russia indeed bring freedom to the Western World?

“It is only a rumor,” continued Jones. “A rumor, you understand, David, backed by the presence of the battleplane squadron around the city nightly, words let fall in the People’s House, retailed by gossiping servants, the sudden summons last night of Air-Admiral Hancock—”

“But the Russians have been slaughtered in thousands!” I exclaimed. “I saw the picture upon the screen.”

Jones laughed and David smiled.

“Those pictures are for the people,” said the airscout. “They were taken by night inside the fortress here. The Guard dressed for the part.”

“Still, how could the Russians win without the Ray?” asked David doubtfully.

“I can answer that,” I said. “All history shows that no weapon is strong enough to conquer men who are ready to die for a right idea against an evil one. Ideas are stronger than the deadliest arm man has contrived. That has always been so and always will be so.”

Again Elizabeth’s hand crept into mine. “You must tell our people that, Arnold,” she said. “You know the secret of stirring them.”

“But Hancock will stand by Lembken?” inquired David.

“Yap, and will hold at least a quarter of our men to him,” said Jones. “He will serve Lembken through Sanson, so long as Sanson remains loyal. If Sanson turns against Lembken to seize the supreme power, Hancock will fight him to the death. Sanson sent the Air-Admiral’s son to the Rest Cure as a moron, years ago, when Hancock was unknown. Sanson doesn’t remember it, but Hancock remembers.”

I shuddered. “Why, then, is not Hancock with us?” I asked.

“There are traditions of loyalty in his family,” answered Jones. “Hancock is queer. Now we go up. Hold fast.”

The scoutplane creaked and rocked and plunged like a ship in a gale as, foot by foot, he jerked her head into the higher air. The gleaming glow parallelograms of the battleplanes seemed to shoot downward as we soared above them. We had passed them when, like some black air monster, a large, dark plane glided beneath us. I felt our scoutplane thrill as she shot upward, so suddenly that she rose almost to the perpendicular, jerking us back against the uprights.

Jones was straining madly at the wheel, and I realized that the dark plane was in pursuit of us. I saw her swoop out of the night, missing us by a yard. She disappeared. I heard the divided air hiss as she approached again, and the next instant the blinding searchlight enveloped us, and a voice hailed us, piping thin through the frosty night. Then the light was astern, and groping impotently beneath us as we rose to a higher level. Jones strained at the vertical rudder, pushing the plane’s nose up and still upward, battling like a weather-beaten bird against the wind.

Again the searchlight found us, and then, out of the heart of it, turning the keen white glare to a baby pink that fringed it, there hissed a light ten times more brilliant, snapping and crackling, into the void. Jones veered, still mounting. The dazzling light flared out again. The upright that I held snapped in my hand. I slipped in my seat, but David reached out and held me.

Once more the Ray flash came, but under us. The darkness and our pilot’s courage had saved us. The searchlight groped far underneath. Our scoutplane dipped, soared, dipped, caught the wind, and we volplaned at furious speed for miles down a gradient of cushiony air.

I felt Elizabeth tremble, and placed my arms around her to hold her. Jones stayed the plane and clapped his numbed hands together, whistling through his teeth. He jerked his head around. The moon was beginning to rise; it was a little lighter, and I saw that his face was dripping wet.

“A thread of an escape!” he said. “If she had struck us fair with the Ray we’d have buckled up like paper. Snapped one upright, didn’t it?”

There was a cut of two inches in the steel—a clean cut, and the edges fused as if from fire.

“That was Hancock’s dispatchplane,” said Jones. “He carries no light. But—the voice didn’t sound like Hancock’s.”

“Are we safe now?” asked David, looking back to where the shrunken figures of the battleplanes were ranged behind us on the horizon.

“Safe long ago,” said Jones. “But it was touch-and-go while I was trying to top that southeaster. He lost us at the summit, though, and he couldn’t have caught us on that down-grade.”

We started again, traveling more slowly, at a lower altitude, and planing downward until I heard the wind in the tree boughs and saw the glistening snow beneath. We brushed the top-most twigs. The scoutplane flitted backward and forward, seeking the old road.

“I ought to know it in the dark,” said Jones. “I don’t want to turn on the searchlight if I can help it.”

To and fro we went like a fluttering bird, until the cleft of the road appeared among the trees. Then we dropped softly to the ground. I was almost too cramped and cold to move. With difficulty I descended and helped Elizabeth out. David followed, and we three stood chafing our hands and stamping until the circulation was restored.

Jones leaned forward from the airplane. “I’ll run her into the trees in case anyone comes along and sees her,” he said.

“We shall not see you until—?” asked David.

“I’m not going back,” answered the airscout. “Not after this night’s work. You’ll see me in ten minutes.”

“You are going to join us?” inquired David, joyfully. “Is it—do you mean Hancock knew you?”

“No. That wasn’t Hancock, either. I know who it was—at least, I think I know. No, I’ve had enough of the Twin Bosses, after Elizabeth’s adventures. Put me down as the first airscout who went over.”

David grasped him by the hand and shook it warmly. Jones whistled again, drew back, and the scoutplane rose to the tops of the trees, beat about, and vanished.

David turned to me. “Arnold, are you prepared for a great and stunning revelation?” he asked.

“Yes, he is prepared,” answered Elizabeth for me.

We set off through the trees along a small, well-worn trail, until the crumbling bricks beneath us heaped themselves into a mound, and I saw the ruined foundations of the Institute before me, and the hole in the cellar roof. A sentinel leaped out at us.

“For man?” he asked, leveling a Ray rod.

“And freedom,” answered David.

The sentinel called, and in a moment a crowd came rushing up a short ladder, wild-looking men with beards and hanging hair, all dressed in tatters and rags, a woman or two, and a youth who ran forward with a cry and caught Elizabeth in his arms. I saw the happiness they shared.

David led me to a tall old man with bowed shoulders and a ragged white beard that spread fanwise across his breast. His hands were seared and twisted like those of one who has lived years of hardest toil, and the staff on which he leaned had a crooked handle.

“Bishop Alfred,” he said, “this is the Messiah who was to come.”