CHAPTER XXVI - THE ADMIRAL OF THE AIR
I saw defeat written upon his face, but there was no sign of fear. He stood alone, unarmed, confronting me, and if he had fled when he saw that his cause was lost I do him the justice to believe it was his undaunted will which drove him to flight, that he might plan new havoc for the world.
No chance remained for him. By the glare of the searchlights I saw the last vestige of rout end at the Temple doors. Trapped and surrounded, the Guard begged for quarter. This was accorded them; but instantly the prisoners were lost to sight in the presence of the enormous multitudes that came from London, swarming into the courts.
Sanson’s gaze shifted from my face to Esther’s, and, as if she felt the man’s presence, she stirred, and her eyelids unclosed.
“Arnold!” she whispered.
“Yes, dear,” I answered, bending over her.
“I dreamed that—they had run up the annex thirty stories, Arnold, and painted it shining white.”
“You must sleep and dream no more,” I told her. She murmured and her eyelids closed. Again the kindly unconsciousness of sleep held her.
I placed her against the anchored airplane and turned to Sanson. He was facing me with that strange and half-quizzical look that I remembered so well. It had in it more of humanity than the expression of any other of his moods.
“Arnold,” he said softly, “if I were an ignorant man I might be tempted to believe that there is a God, sometimes.”
And that was his way also, to speak of other things in moments of imminent alarm.
“Why?” I inquired.
“Because He is so merciful to His defectives, Arnold. To think that you, with your missing five centimeters, should have defeated me!
“Come,” he continued, clapping his hand on my shoulder. “A truce for a few minutes. A truce, for the sake of our old friendship. You are not to blame for your share in this night’s ruin of civilization. You were the victim of circumstances. And then—you are a defective and could not understand. Arnold, I have never had any friend but you. And sometimes I feel the need of one. Even the gods felt that, and I am far from a god, though, later, perhaps....”
He broke off and resumed, after a short pause:
“Join me. Here is my frank proposal: join me, and, since indeed I would not hold any woman against her will, if Esther chooses you she shall be yours. This night has undone the labor of many years, but those that are past are but as a drop of water in an ocean to those which are to come. I have the secret of immortal life at last—not ghostly life in some gold-decorated heaven, but life in the flesh. I will bestow the gift on you—”
“Let it die with you,” I answered passionately.
He laughed.
“This night’s work, which seems so wonderful to you, is but an episode,” he said. “Come with me to America, Arnold. In six months I can build up my world anew. I shall be less scrupulous and humane in the future with this miserable mob. No moron shall live, no defective go free. I have resolved that. Man can rise only by crushing out weakness and setting himself upon the necks of those who were born to serve. In six months America will be mine; in twelve, the world. From this time onward it is a battle to the death against all that retards the human race.”
His features flushed with the energy of his voice. I looked at him, almost in admiration. I was dumfounded at the audacity of his designs. Trapped here, a prisoner upon the fortress roof, his life already gone when he was found, this man of sixty years planned his universal empire. He was mad, beyond doubt, mad enough to dream impossible things and make them his in his brain’s fertile kingdom; and it was such madness as moves mountains.
“Sanson, I will do this much for you,” I said. “I will hide you from the mob’s fury in a little room near this roof, so that you may not be torn in pieces. I will assure you a fair trial at the hands of the new government. That is all I can promise.”
Would this dream vanish in the realization of fact? I saw his face fall, as if he had come to understand his position at last.
“Where is it?” he said presently. He spoke slowly, and in a bewildered manner, as if he were still struggling with his dreams.
I took him by the arm and led him to the elevator entrance. “It is a little room under the roof,” I said. “The elevator passes it, but it is hardly more than a hole in the wall. One would not look for you there.”
I pressed the button, but of course the elevator did not ascend, since the solar power was cut off.
Sanson withdrew his arm from mine. I saw him assume a listening attitude. “Arnold!” he cried weakly, “they are coming! Listen!”
As I relaxed my guard, he dealt me a buffet that sent me flying down the empty shaft.
I had a confused consciousness of falling through space, of clutching at the shaft walls; and then I was upon my knees, bruised and staring up at the light overhead.
Fortunately the elevator had stopped a few feet from the top. Still dazed, I sprang to my feet and began scrambling up the ironwork. At last I staggered out upon the roof once more. I saw a dozen Sansons, each of whom carried Esther in his arms.
I tried to force reality into these visions, to snatch the living Sanson from among that crowd of ghosts. But they had sprung into the dozen airplanes that lay upon the swaying roof top. A touch of the starting lever, a half turn of the wheel, and as my power of vision came back to me I saw Sanson rise with Esther into the air. He held her on the seat against him, the arm that encircled her controlling the wheel, and he was gone into the heart of the giant moon that was just rising in the east, blood-red behind her veil of clouds.
I stared after him. The airplane was rapidly diminishing in size. He had outwitted me at the last, by one of those clumsy tricks he loved, such as a schoolboy plays.
I staggered toward the edge. I was minded to fling myself down on the stones below. One more victim of the day’s work would mean nothing, and doubtless David and Elizabeth believed that I had died long ago. I tottered upon the brink; but then a shadow glided toward me, and a small airplane stopped at my side. It was unshielded, and at the prow was a pair of the elongated jaws. Air-Admiral Hancock leaned out of it toward me.
“Where is Sanson?” he asked quietly. “He was here. He was seen here.”
I pointed into the west, where the parallelogram of light was diminishing to an irregular star. I leaped into the plane beside him. “Take me with you!” I cried. “He has stolen Esther—the goddess of the cylinder.”
Hancock said nothing but touched the lever. Instantly we shot upward and raced like a swallow across the void, skimming and dipping as the wind caught us and the heavy prow plunged through the unequal air-banks.
The buildings drew together beneath us. The shouts of the multitude grew faint and died. The luminous point in the west grew larger, and against the sky, now whitened by the rising moon, I saw the dark body between the glow lines, as one sees a ship at sea from a mountain top. Sanson was heading southward, perhaps with the intent of reaching France and rallying the forces of the Federation there. We mounted higher. The forests stretched beneath us. Always we mounted. I cast a glance at Hancock’s face. There was a look on it that boded ill for Sanson. I was trying to remember something that Jones had told me about him, but my own anxious thoughts beat down the elusive memory. I, too, felt that there would be no mercy for Sanson when the accounts were squared.
Would anyone have mercy? I saw the answer to that question swiftly, for, looking back, I saw two lanes of airships, strung out behind, like flying geese, converging toward our leadership. Battleplanes, scoutplanes, dark against the brightening heaven, came hot on the chase. They were in pursuit of the common enemy of the human race, and there was none among them, no man in London but had some outrage to avenge.
We mounted higher through the bitter cold. My hands were numb, but Hancock kept his wheel, seated there, a grim, immovable, resolute figure. Now we burst into the heart of a fierce, rocking snowstorm, which blotted out the fugitive; but by some instinct Hancock seemed to know his course, and he held it surely till we rose above the storm and saw the glow parallelogram nearer.
Sanson rose too. He must have sighted us and resolved to test his endurance against ours. We were in air so rarefied that I was choking for breath. The moon rode high; dawn was not far away. We were rushing toward the sea, which lay, a blur of inky blackness, underneath, edged by the white line of the chalk cliffs of the south shore. We were gaining steadily.
The giant jaws upon our aircraft gaped. I saw steel teeth within them
But Sanson did not mean to cross the Channel. I do not know what new scheme he had conceived; perhaps he meant to turn and seek some English city where he could defy the new order and reorganize the old. He wheeled; and the long line of the pursuing planes, struggling upward, wheeled together, trying to cut off his flight. He mounted still and struck out eastward. But, with a furious downward swoop Hancock drove in toward him. I could see Sanson sitting at the wheel, his arm still clasping Esther. He stopped in the air and waited for our approach.
“What do you want?” he shouted.
The tone of Hancock’s voice was implacable. “My son, Sanson,” he answered.
He wheeled away, and, as he turned placed his hand on a lever. The giant jaws upon our aircraft gaped. I saw steel teeth within them. We dashed for Sanson with terrific force. I shouted in horror, laying my fingers upon Hancock’s sleeve and pointing to Esther. But Hancock did not seem to hear or feel me, perhaps he had never known that I was there; all his mind seemed intent on the accomplishment of his deadly purpose. He drove home before his enemy could evade his course, and like a hawk we plunged, struck Sanson’s vessel amidships, and smashed through steel and glow shield.
One instant, in the dead interval of the stopped momentum, we rested motionless together, the gaping jaws choked with their meal and fast within the heart of Sanson’s plane. I flung myself across the side, grasped Esther, held her in my arms, and dragged her across our bows. Then Hancock leaped at Sanson’s throat.
Our airplane tipped, righted herself, and drifted away. I did not know how to steer or guide, but Hancock must automatically have locked the mechanism to the halt, for we drifted idly, balancing upon the wind. Watching, I saw the two struggling in Sanson’s plane.
She shuddered as she hung poised there, mortally gashed, yet fighting still for her dominion of the air. She quivered from prow to stern, and then, of her own accord, shot upward. Up she went till she was but a dark blot in the sky. Then from above something came falling toward the earth, plunged like a projectile, and disappeared.
I saw a tiny figure standing on the doomed airplane alone, and, infinitely small though it appeared, I knew that it was Sanson. I fancied I could see the man’s proud bearing; I thought his arms were folded across his breast. The moonlight gilded him, and others have told me that he seemed to ride through the air resplendent, as if transfigured by some demoniac power.
He stood like Lucifer, high above all the world, over his wrecked dominion. I picture his disdain, and the contempt for man with which he shrouded himself in that last moment. The world had broken him in the end, but his colossal spirit could never be quenched.
Then the air vessel plunged into the moon’s heart and vanished.
CHAPTER XXVII - THE NEW ORDER
Three months have passed. It is Easter Day, and we have only begun to struggle with the difficulties before us.
But we are working with a faith that will overcome all obstacles. All the world is at work, for the same impulse was felt simultaneously in every land. The Mormon airplanes never arrived, because, practically at the same hour, America rose in revolt against her masters. And the Sanson régime has been swept away forever.
We were rescued from our airplane by the airscouts who had followed us, and brought back to London. Our friends, who had thought us dead, were overjoyed at our return. It was a wonderful reunion, with not a shadow to mar it, for Paul had passed uninjured through the fighting and was there to welcome us. And gradually, when she awoke, we broke the news of everything to Esther.
The amazing thing about it was that she was much more calm in learning the truth than we were in telling it. She accepted our statements almost as commonplaces of history.
I call to mind the second huge public gathering on the day after the Revolution, when the dread of massacre had proved unfounded. The populace had been taught to believe that the Russians were blood-thirsty savages, instead of which we discovered child-like enthusiasts. It was a shock to most of us to discover that they considered themselves Crusaders, upon a mission to restore Christ to the world. I recall vividly the great red crosses on the breasts of their white uniforms, the icon banners that are still flapping everywhere; then the people’s wonder and terror at the horses; lastly the young Tsar’s entrance into the capital, to attend the reconsecration of the Temple, and the amazing influence of kingship upon a crowd that had never known reverence or loyalty, except through fear.
Then the universal joy at the release of all the inmates of the defectives and moron shops, the tears and shouts that accompanied the restoration to their families, of those who had been believed lost forever; husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters, friends and friends. No one was afraid to be glad. It was as if a dark cloud had rolled away and disclosed the sun.
And the astonishment and enthusiasm as the people listened to the teachings of Christianity. After three months there are still crowds at all the street corners, hearing the doctrines and the story of Christ from priests and missionaries.
And Bishop Alfred: at the consecration, when, stepping forward to declare himself, he found, to his surprise and dismay, that the secret of his surname, which he had vowed never to reveal until that day, had passed forever from his own memory. And how proudly he redeemed himself with his ancient title, Alfred London.
There is so much to do, and only a tithe of it has been begun. Indeed, it would have been impossible, but for the agreement that the old national boundaries should be restored, and each State work out its problems independently. Then there was the question as to the composition of the new government, and it was resolved that the committee should avail themselves to the utmost of the established order, eliminating all cruelties. Thus, for the present, because no better scheme can come forth, ready-made, from human brains, the socialized State will continue. It would be impossible to go back to the old days of competition, and we shall never return to those days of squalor, poverty, and destitution, recognizing that, if ever revolution was justified, our fathers’ was against the commercial greed of a materialistic world.
The hardest part of this problem will be to steer a course between the corruption of Social Democracy and the tyranny of Social Autocracy. But we have an ideal in the separation of wealth from power, the latter to be the attribute of the few who are born and fit to rule, the former the possession of the bulk of the nation. Whatever our judges, their office will be for life, and they will be appointed and not elected.
In time custom will crystallize into laws again; but, since the existing laws were too cruel to survive, and the old are too arbitrary and antiquated to be renewed, we choose to exist law-free rather than live by paper schemes.
But if we are tolerant and lax, so that we resemble more a benevolent anarchy than an organized State, we have set our faces like flint against two things. First of these comes divorce. It will be recognized under no circumstances whatever; and so far is this from being considered tyrannous that the vast bulk of the people never desired it. In the old days it was the shameful privilege of a small caste alone—that same caste that, by abandoning its duties and responsibilities and cutting free from the Catholic conception of civilization, brought down the old order. We are convinced that the permanence of the marriage bond is the foundation of every society of free people.
The second is eugenics. Looking back, we see how this madness over-ran the world until, within a century from the time of its inception, it had enslaved humanity. The theory of Galton, that because the university-trained son of a distinguished man became distinguished, while the illiterate son of a burglar died unknown, ability is inherited, may have appealed powerfully to our ancestors, but to us it is symptomatic of that inability to reason which we think characterized the twentieth century. Eugenics was the natural product of a time which, steeped in materialism, laughed at the belief in a human soul, or its concomitant, that each soul needed to work out its earthly pilgrimage in a body adapted to its abilities. But even from the material viewpoint we see that the movement was fallacious. We know that the proportion of those afflicted with inherited maladaptations has remained constant through history; moreover, since there was no human norm, the demands of the eugenists increased continually, till they had bound nine-tenths of the world to their hideous Juggernaut car.
So the first act after our victory was to burn the Bureaux of Prints and Indexes and Pedigrees and Relationships. That was our only vandalism.
But more than everything we hold to Christianity as the foundation of our State. We see now that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were the worst since pagan times. Our ancestors read, without qualms, of negroes burned at the stake, of equatorial nations massacred, not in excess of misplaced zeal, as heretics, but only for—rubber! We know that without Christian ethics human nature is back in the days of Rome, Bagdad, and Carthage. We hope that there will be established, as in the olden days, Christian orders of young men, who shall serve three years in them before they come of age, bound by the triple vow, to fight these renascent wrongs wherever they can be found.
Having found truth once more, we are not greatly troubled by doctrines. The critical investigation which destroyed the Protestant theory of the Bible’s literal inspiration has only strengthened the older claim of the universal Church to be herself the repository of truth. Not rejecting the claims of criticism, we feel the living truth of Christianity so far to transcend its theological garb that, if the formula has been misstated, many would revise it. The consensus of opinion is, however, that the minds which drew up the Apostles’ and Nicene creeds arrived as nearly as possible at a correct formula.
But the Visible Church is humble in her hour of success. She feels no triumph. Reverently, penitently, at the huge consecration meeting in the Temple her leaders asked for guidance and inspiration. At present sectarianism inspires in us the same horror that schism inspired centuries ago. The first act was to reunite the ancient Greek and English churches by omitting from the Creed that clause beginning “proceeding from,” which had, it was felt, no significance that was essential. The next will be to negotiate with the Vatican for union. But the stupendous difficulties of this reconciliation are acknowledged.
The Age of Faith is coming back to the world, and, as in that splendid twelfth century, when it was in its zenith, there is a sense of youth in us. We feel that we are upon the threshold of a new epoch, uniting the triumphs of every preceding age. It is an age of joy, and will be vitalized by that art which, since the Reformation, has been sundered from human life. Its first achievement will be the magnificent cathedral that is to rise upon the site of the old Ant Temple. It will be a new world indeed. We know each age has its own cruelties and wrongs: the Inquisition of the sixteenth century; religious massacres in the seventeenth; in the nineteenth factory slavery and the prisons with their silent cells. We do not hope greatly to lessen this sum of suffering. There will be injustice always, new wrongs will arise, new evils that must be fought; but we believe the Christian norm will always remain with us as a corrective.
Tomorrow bands of axemen are to leave London to settle Kent and Surrey. Paul and Elizabeth are to go, and later Esther and I intend to follow them. David will join us when he can be spared from his work in the government.
It is Easter Day, and in the consecrated Temple I hear the anthem rise:
“Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us; therefore let us keep the feast:
“Not with the old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness: but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
“Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more: death hath no more dominion over him.”
The crowds in the great courts are kneeling. I kneel with Esther among them. We know that the sacrifice has leavened the world with truth that shall never pass away.
No comments:
Post a Comment