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.”

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

CHAPTER XIII - THE PALACE OF PALMS

The sun dipped behind the western buildings, and the glare of the glow on fort and Temple and encircling wall was like phosphorescent fire. I saw the guards stirring in their enclosure. The Airscouts’ Fortress shone, hard and brilliant, against the sky.

I gathered my wits together. I had seen the hidden things, and, because I knew of none other to whom to turn, I resolved to appeal to David. Esther, the prey of these insane degenerates when she awakened ... David’s own secret troubles ... could we not aid each other? Might not two men accomplish something in these evil days?

I turned to the right across the bridge that led to the Airscouts’ Fortress. The sentinel stood still, watching me. He raised his Ray rod, not to threaten me, but to salute, and I remembered that the airscouts had no love for the Guard, and hence must be under Lembken’s control. He took me for a priest. But the weapon shook in his hand, and the astonishment upon his face matched that on mine. I recognized the man Jones, who had brought me to London.

“I want to leave this hell!” I cried. “Which way? Which way?”

“You want—you want—?” he stammered.

“The Strangers’ House. I am lost here—”

He looked at me in utter perplexity.

“Help me!” I pleaded. “Show me the way!”

The door behind him opened, and there stepped out a man of about fifty years, dressed in white, with a golden swan on each shoulder. Jones stepped aside and saluted him. The newcomer approached me. His hard, clean-shaven face was impenetrable, and his eyes burned with a dull fire. Behind him crept a second figure; it was the old priest.

“There he is! Seize him!” he shrieked.

The first man laid his hand on my shoulder. “I am Air-Admiral Hancock,” he said. “You are to accompany me to Boss Lembken.”

I went with him across the bridge into a doorway set in the west side of the Temple building. I expected again to see the vast interior beneath me, but we entered a narrow corridor and stepped into a small automatic elevator. In a moment we had shot up and halted inside the Palace entrance. Hancock opened the door of the cage.

We were standing in a spacious hall, bare, save for the hanging tapestries and heavy Persian rugs on the mosaic floor. It was half dark, and there was a perfume that made my head swim. Before the curtained aperture opposite us stood a negro boy, with a Ray rod in his hand. As we approached he threw the curtain aside and saluted us.

There were soft solar lights in the next room, which was rose-red, and decorated and furnished in the style of Louis Quatorze. Another negro stood in the doorway opposite; he, too, saluted and threw the curtain back.

The third room was enameled in blue. The blue lights gave it an unearthly aspect, which was increased by the baroque style of its ornamentation. The perfume was stronger.

The negro at the door of the fourth room was a giant. He wore the uniform of an eighteenth century grenadier. His scarlet coat and white pigtail formed vivid spots against the dull-gold curtain. The room within was dark. We waited on the threshold.

At first I could see nothing. Then, gradually, the outlines of the room came into sight. There were low divans and rugs, and mirrors on every wall multiplied them. I heard a rasping sound, and a blotch of crimson and green became a brilliant macaw that scraped its way with its sharp claws from end to end of a horizontal perch. Behind it I now saw the white gleam of Lembken’s robe; then the couch on which he lay; then the girl who crouched, fanning him, at his feet; then the rotund form of the old man, the sharp eyes and the heavy jowl with the pendulous cheeks.

“I have executed your orders, Boss,” said the Air-Admiral.

The old man rose upon his feet heavily and came puffing up to us. His heavy soft hands wandered about my robes, patting me here and there, while he puffed and snorted like some sea monster.

“You haven’t a knife or a Ray rod?” he inquired suspiciously. “You haven’t anything to harm me? I am an old, weak man. I am the people’s friend, and yet many want to kill me.”

He seemed to satisfy himself with the result of his inspection, and withdrew to his couch, picking up a Ray rod and resting it across his knee.

He dismissed Hancock and the girl. She rose to her feet briskly, with a mechanical smile. She was about twenty years old, it seemed to me, but there was a hardness and cruelty about her mouth that shocked me, and the soul behind the mask of youth seemed centuries old.

“Amaranth wanted to stay, to hear what I was going to say to you,” said Lembken, “but I make everybody mind his own business in the People’s House. Besides, she might have fallen in love with you. I like to have good-looking people about me.” He looked at me and at the Ray rod, and then at me again; then, with a petulant gesture, he sent the weapon flying across the room.

“There! You see I trust you!” he said, smiling. “Sit down beside me. We understand each other, so we will be frank. Men such as we are above deceptions. You ought to be about a hundred and twenty-eight years old!”

He spoke jocularly, and yet I could see that he wished to be sure I was the man he sought. Evidently he knew my history. He heaved a sigh of immense satisfaction when I acquiesced.

“I was not sure it was you,” he said. “One has to be cautious when so much depends on it. And Sanson was beginning to suspect, but he does not know that I discovered Lazaroff’s papers. Sanson does not know everything, you see, Arnold. What do you think of his Rest Cure, as the people term it? It is his, not mine, you know.”

“I think he is Satan himself,” I answered quickly. Yet I was not sure that I preferred this perfumed degenerate to Sanson, with his maniac cruelty.

A smile crept over the flabby face. Lembken looked pleased. He placed his hand upon my shoulder.

“A classical scholar,” he said. “You refer to the mythical ruler of the infernal realms. Assuredly we shall soon understand each other. Sanson is a strong man. When I meet strong men I let them be as strong as they want to be. They break themselves to pieces. In a democracy like ours there is no room for strong men. Sanson doesn’t understand that. He thinks the Mayor of the Palace is going to step into the shoes of the Roi Fainéant. But the Roi Fainéant always wins—if he sits still. I am the Roi Fainéant.”

I was so amazed at the strange psychology he was disclosing that I found no answer ready. I knew he was dissembling some deep-laid purpose, but why he had need of me I could not imagine. And the man’s affectation of good-will almost began to delude me.

“Do you like David’s daughter?” he began, so suddenly that I started. “Ah!” he continued, shaking his finger waggishly, “one seldom sees a woman approximating so closely to the Sanson norm. There is an attachment, if I know young men. How would you like her for your own? I hit the mark, then?”

Before I could reply he was on another tack.

“Now, there is Hancock,” he resumed. “He is a Christian, and ought to go to the defectives’ shops, according to the law Sanson made. But I don’t care. I would just as soon have Christianity as the Ant, or Mormonism, as they have in America. I don’t like tyranny. If I had my way everyone would be perfectly free. Sanson doesn’t see that he has embittered the people. He is harrying them with his laws, and they blame me. I am the people’s friend.”

With a sudden, hoarse scream the macaw flew from the bar and perched on Lembken’s shoulder, where she sat, preening her plumage and croaking at me. “The people’s friend,” she screamed, and broke into choking laughter.

“So you see it is entirely to your interest to help me and not Sanson,” Lembken continued. “Reasonable men cement their friendships with self-interest. Come, let me look at you.”

He touched some switch near him, and the room was illuminated with a blaze of solar light. The golden ants upon his robes leaped into view. He turned on the divan heavily and stared into my face.

“Yes, I can trust you,” he said in approbation. “Well, Sanson will learn his error in four days’ time. You shall live here with me and have a life of pleasure. You need never think about the world below. We do exactly what we please; that is my rule in the People’s House.”

“The People’s House!” screamed the macaw, leaving his shoulder and fluttering back to her perch, from which she surveyed us coldly, head on one side. “The People’s House! The people’s friend!” she alternated, in a muttering diminuendo.

“My head aches today,” said Lembken petulantly. “That is why I am sitting here. There has been an accident: one of our ladies fell down through an open door. It made my head ache.”

I knew he lied when he spoke of an accident. I knew that she had thrown herself down. The lie brought back my mind to its focus; and in that instant my lips were sealed, and my half-formed intent to throw myself on Lembken’s mercy, pleading for Esther and our love, died.

“So we shall talk tomorrow,” Lembken continued. “For the present you are one of us. You see your interest lies in joining us, and the part you have to play in return will be short and not difficult for a man of your discernment. That small part will be paid, four days hence—”

I was sure that it concerned Esther now. “And will be all, and afterward your life will be free from all laws and bonds. You never need leave the People’s House unless you want to. Here everyone does as he pleases. Come, Arnold, I will show you the gardens.”

He stood up, puffing, and gave me his arm like an old friend. The man’s manners were fascinating. I could well understand how he had worked his way to power. There was the good-fellowship of the twentieth-century demagogue, but there was more; there was discernment and culture; and there was more still; there was a corrupting influence about his candor that seemed to strike its deadly roots down into my moral nature and shrivel it.

We passed out through the empty rooms. The Palace was level with the Temple roof; there were no steps. There was no stairway at all, for the whole structure, which seemed to extend from side to side of the vast roof, consisted of a single story. We passed out between two giant negroes, who stood like ebony statues. And now I saw that the four rooms in which I had been, comprised only the smallest portion of the building, which was set out irregularly, receding here to leave space for a little lawn, projecting there, evidently to enclose a garden. And I discovered why the interior was so dark; there were no windows—at least, on this side of the Palace.

It was a fairyland. I thought of the old palaces at Capri. Here, high above the swarming streets, a man might take his pleasure in ease indeed. The crystal walls must have been sound-proof, for not a murmur from below reached us. I heard the music of bubbling brooks, the cries of birds among the trees, the faint tinkle of a guitar or mandolin struck somewhere in the recesses of the ramified buildings.

We were traversing a graveled path that ran between the Palace and the crystal wall. Looking down, I could see the glow circle of the fortress. It had grown dark; the lights which lit our way, that I had thought daylight, were from the solar vents, concealed so skilfully that they shed a soft, diffused radiance everywhere, as of afternoon. We turned the angle of the building, and I stopped short and looked in involuntary admiration at the scene before me.

We might have stepped into the heart of some Amazonian forest, for we were in a tangled wilderness of palms and other tropical trees. The air was filled with the scent of orange flowers, and in a grove near me clusters of the bright fruit hung from the weighted boughs. From the dank earth sprang clusters of exotic, flaming flowers, and ferns. Huge vines knotted themselves about the trunks of trees, through whose recesses flew flocks of brilliantly plumaged birds. The path became a trail, meandering between the trees and crossing rushing brooklets. The vast concavity of the dome above was like an arched heaven of blue, studded with golden stars.

“What do you think of the People’s House, Arnold?” Lembken inquired, turning heavily upon me.

“It is a paradise,” I answered.

I was amazed to see two tears roll down his cheeks. It was the same strange yielding to emotional impulse that I had discerned before. So might Nero have wept over his fiddle.

“It is the reward of those who are the chosen of the people,” he answered. “It will be your reward, Arnold. You must dream over this tonight, and tomorrow we will make our compact. I have reserved quarters for you. You will meet nobody you do not wish to meet. That is the chief charm of the People’s House; we meet only for our festivities; otherwise we are quite free. Come, Arnold!”

The scene, the atmosphere, the fearful personality of Lembken seemed to appeal to some being in me whose hideous presence I had never suspected. A deadly inertia of the spirit was conquering me. Esther, my love of a hundred years, became in memory elusive as a dream to me. The sensuous appeal of this wonderland swept over me.

We had threaded the recesses of the groves, passing secluded arbors of twisted vines, pergolas and rustic cottages about which clung the scarlet trumpets of pomegranate flowers; now the crystal walls came into sight again, and, as we approached, a gust of wind blew the door open. Instantly, to divert my senses from that soul-destroying dominance, there rushed in, the murmurs of the city, the voices of the multitude below, and, above all, clear and distinct, the wild accents of the whitebeard, who had denounced the pleasure-palace that afternoon.

“Woe to you, London, when your whitecoats sit with their harlots in the high places! Woe! Woe!”

I could not see him; through the door I saw only the circle of the enclosing walls, a luminous orb beneath, and the glare of the huge Ray guns; beyond were the mighty buildings. Lembken put out his hand and closed the door. The voices were cut off into silence. I glanced at him, but his brow was untroubled and serene.

He led me across a little, shelving lawn, through a small gateway. There was nobody in the tiny close, surrounded by a high marble wall. There were no windows in the little house before me. It might have held two rooms.

“Three rooms,” said Lembken, as if he had read my thoughts. “Good night, Arnold. Remember, we do what we like to do in the People’s House. There are no laws, no bonds. Dream of this paradise that shall be yours, and open the third door softly.”

He left me. I pushed the first door open and entered.

It was a bedroom, furnished in the conventional style which had not changed appreciably during the century, but all in ebony or teak, and luxurious almost beyond conception. The floor was covered with a thick-piled Bokhara rug, of red and ivory, and exquisite texture.

I passed through the inevitable swing door. The second room was fitted as a combination library and dining-room. There was an ebony bookcase, filled with magnificently bound books, a sideboard on which stood wines and distilled liquors, a heavy dining-table, armchairs.

This room had a window, and, looking out, I was surprised to see beneath me the bridge that led to the Airscouts’ Fortress, and, at the end of it, a figure in blue, the white swan on his breast brilliant in the glare of the solar light over his head.

I passed on. But instead of the swing door the further wall contained a door of heavy, iron-bound wood, with bolts of steel. Then I remembered Lembken’s words: “Open the third door softly.”

The bolts moved in their sockets with hardly a sound. I drew them; I opened the door and passed into a tiny chamber.

A girl in white, with the palm badge upon her shoulder, was standing there. The room had been dark; the sudden influx of the solar light from the library showed me the pallid face and blazing eyes of her whom I had least thought to see before me—Elizabeth!

 

CHAPTER XIV - THE HOUSE ON THE WALL

She stared at me with eyes that seemed to see nothing; and then a look of recognition came into them, and a twitching smile upon her lips. She put her arms out and came unsteadily toward me. She threw her right arm back. I caught her hand as it swung downward, and the dagger’s razor edge grazed my shoulder.

The next moment she was fighting like a trapped panther. I could not have imagined that such strength and fierceness existed in any woman. She twisted her wrists out of my grasp time and again, and we wrestled for the dagger till the blood from my slashed fingers fouled my priest’s robe. Each of the stabbing blows she dealt so wildly would have driven the dagger in to the hilt.

I grappled with her, caught her right arm at last, and forced it upward, but we swayed to and fro for nearly a minute before I mastered her. Even then she had one last surprise in store, for, when she saw that she was beaten, she drew her dagger hand quickly backward, and I seized the point of the blade within an inch of her breast. I forced her fingers open brutally, and the steel fell to the floor. Then she wrested herself away, and crouched in the corner, watching me, motionless, but still ready to leap. Her gasping breaths were the only sound in the room.

“Elizabeth!” I cried. “I am not here to harm you. Look at me; listen to me!”

Her eyes were fixed on my face in terror that precluded speech. How she watched me! Only once did her glance waver, and that was toward the dagger on the floor. I kicked it backward with my heel.

“Elizabeth, listen to me!” I implored her. “I did not know that you were here, and I do not know how you came here. I want to help you. I want to take you home to David!”

“Ah!” she said, shuddering. “This is what you whites call a romance in the style of the first century B.C., a fashionable pastime, to dress yourselves as blues or grays and worm your way into the homes of your prospective victims, in order to study them, and see whether they suit your taste and are worth adding to your collection. I have read of that in the Council factory novels. But there was never any romance in it to me. So I appeared to suit you, after my father had taken you into his home so trustingly? You deceived him; but you never deceived me.”

I saw her glance turn to the dagger again.

“Elizabeth, you are talking nonsense,” I said, with an affectation of brusqueness. “Let us sit down in the next room, and I propose a compact. You shall take the dagger, provided you do not attempt to harm yourself with it till you have heard me. Is that agreed?”

She scrutinized me for half a minute. Then she nodded. I preceded her into the library with an affectation of indifference which I was far from feeling, for I heard her stoop to pick the dagger up, and wondered each instant whether I was about to feel the point between my shoulders. However, my faith appeared to inspire her with a measure of confidence, for she followed me into the middle room and consented to sit down.

But when I faced her, toying with the blade and all aquiver with the reaction from the terrific nerve-tension, I could hardly find words to utter. Whatever purpose Lembken might have in using me, I had the full measure of his mind. He had thought that my three weeks spent in David’s house had inspired me with a passion for the girl; and he had brought her here, to leave her helpless in my power, a lure to bind me to his interests beyond the possibility of double-dealing.

Before I could begin, Elizabeth collapsed. She began to weep without restraint. I could only wait till she grew more composed. I stared out through the window, looking down toward the Airscouts’ Fortress, whose roof rose perhaps twenty feet beneath me.

I saw the sentry with the swan badge, pacing below. Above him was the luminous wall of the fortress, and over it, floating in the air, was a host of ghostly shapes, airplanes encased in their phosphorescent glow armor, which, as I watched them, rose one by one into the air, circled, and flitted noiselessly away toward the south, like bubbles blown by children.

It could not have been late, for curfew had not come into operation, and London was ablaze with the solar light; but the crowds had gone home and everything was quite still. As I withdrew from the window Elizabeth rose and came timidly toward me.

“Arnold, have I done you a wrong?” she whispered.

“You misunderstood me,” I answered. “But you could not have thought otherwise. If we understand each other now we can help each other—isn’t that so?”

She seized me by both arms and gazed into my face with an imploring, pitiful appeal that wrung my heart.

“Then I thank God,” she said, “for that impulse which held me from self-destruction. Arnold, do you remember that promise I made to you one day? I remembered it; I remembered it, and it was that alone which stayed my hand this afternoon, when the emissary from Lembken came, and there was only the one barred door between us, and I stood behind it, with the knife at my breast. Then I resolved to keep my promise to you, and to let them bring me here, and—to kill Lembken—but it was you! When you disappeared from the Strangers’ House this morning we feared for your safety. We thought you had been seized or lured away. Then my father was summoned on some pretext back to the Strangers’ Bureau, and the airscout came—Lembken’s man. I thought I was for Lembken—”

She broke off, and I took her hands in mine.

“Elizabeth,” I said, “my dear, I do not understand anything of what you tell me. How could they bring you here against your will?”

She looked at me in amazement.

“No, I see you do not understand,” she answered. “And yet you are dressed as a priest. I cannot tell you now. But the airscout who had been sent for me was sorry when he saw that I was not willing, like most women. He took the knife from me, but afterward he let me keep it; he was kind and promised to carry the news to Jones, our friend. The airscouts are disloyal to Lembken, and hate his cruelty, but he dared not disobey. We went by scoutplane from the roof, and Lembken’s women took me and clothed me in this dress of palms, and carried me here, laughing at me. They did not find the knife. I hid that; I meant to serve the Province and the world by killing Lembken. But then I saw you, Arnold, and—and—”

She burst into a new storm of weeping. I drew her to me and placed her head on my shoulder. I felt a cold, burning fire of resolution in my heart which never disappeared. Something, some spiritual door was opened in me. I became part of the wretchedness of the world and suffered its sorrows; pleasure seemed the worst part of life then. I think, too, I loved Esther the better because of that compassion.

When at last Elizabeth raised her head I was struck by the transformation in her appearance. It seemed the reflection of my own determination. I had put forth my will and conquered, and her own seemed one with mine.

“I am going to save you, Elizabeth,” I said. “You are not destined for this earthly hell.”

“Arnold, are you yourself in danger here?” she asked.

“Only of hell-fire,” I answered.

“You must save yourself and not think of me,” she said.

I bade her sit down, and went back to the entrance of the little house. I had half expected that the door would have been locked, but it stood open, having become unhasped, and the sickly odor of the pervading perfume clung to the warm, stale air. I crossed the close to the gate that led into the garden of palms, and stood there in hesitation.

The solar lights had been turned off, and all was dark, except for varicolored lanterns twinkling among the trees. Yet I was aware of souls peopling that darkness. I heard the tinkle of stringed instruments; I had the sense of hidden beings in the undergrowth. If hell can wear the mask of beauty, surely it did that night.

I crossed the lawn and began to skirt the graveled path that extended before me, working my way toward the front of the Palace. The squat, white building glittered against the darkness. Nobody stirred at the entrance; there were no lights, but always I had the sense of something watching me.

At last I saw the crystal walls on the west side, and, beyond them, the phosphorescence of the glow buildings. I stood in hesitancy. On my right stood the thickets; on my left the crystal ended in a stone wall. There was no egress except through the Palace itself. Lembken left nothing to surprise.

As I turned I heard the rustle of stealthy footsteps near me. A red spark drew my eyes along the vista of the orange trees, whose perfumed flowers dispelled the cloying odor of the scented night. I saw a Mænad’s face, framed in a leopard skin, peering at me above a bank of hibiscus. I thought I recognized the girl Amaranth; but it vanished with the dying of the spark, and subdued laughter followed it.

All that was evil in the world seemed to have its focus there. I felt it, breathed it, once more its psychic dominance oppressed me heavily. I saw with sudden intuition why, in a world less stable, witches were burned, how passionately the souls of simple men fought for their heritage of truth and law. This was the negation of life, of all that struggling life that aspired upward, and set its heel upon the serpent’s head. Old myths, made real in this new light, flashed into memory.

I hurried back to the close and fastened the gate behind me. The sweat was dripping from my forehead when I regained the safety of the little house. I burst from the first room into the second.

Elizabeth was not there.

I ran into the third room. She was not there, either. Terror gripped me. Had she been lured away during the few minutes of my absence? It seemed impossible. She would have died there.

Then my eyes fell on something that hung outside the window, dangling, as it seemed, from a fixed point above. It was a rope ladder, and moving outward. As I watched, I saw it begin to rise in a succession of short jerks.

I grasped it with my hands. It pulled me from the floor. I clung to it, striving to get my feet upon the rungs. It drew me to the level of the window, but I would not let go. It pulled me through the window-gap, and I swung far out above the Airscouts’ Fortress. Over me I saw the dark outlines of an unshielded scoutplane, high in the air.

I swung by my hands at the rope’s end, like the weight of a pendulum, making great transverse sweeps that carried me high above the bridge, from end to end of the fortress roof. I saw the courts revolve beneath me. I swept from the crystal wall out into nothingness, and London was a reeling dance of phosphorescent maze. Then the ladder began to descend. I felt the roof of the fortress touch my feet, wrenched my numbed hands away, and fell. A moment later the airplane dropped beside me as noiselessly as an alighting bird, and two men sprang from it and seized me.

One was the airscout Jones. He caught me by both arms and forced me backward. But the other leaped at my throat. It was David; and he would have strangled me, had not Jones pulled him away.

Then, to my vast relief, Elizabeth ran forward, interposing herself between us. “Arnold is not to blame!” she cried. “He tried to save me!”

It pulled me through the window-gap, and I swung far out above the Airscouts’ Fortress

David’s hands fell to his sides. The airscout caught me by the arms and pulled me toward an elevator entrance. He forced me into the cage, the others following, and we descended a few feet, emerging into a small, bare room with walls of unsquared stone.

Jones sent the elevator up and pulled the door of the shaft to.

“Now you can speak. You have five minutes to explain yourself,” he said. He pulled a Ray rod from his tunic and looked at David, who nodded.