by H. G. Wells
CHAPTER III. THE BALLOON
I
Bert Smallways was a vulgar little creature, the sort of pert, limitedsoul that the old civilisation of the early twentieth century producedby the million in every country of the world. He had lived all his lifein narrow streets, and between mean houses he could not look over, andin a narrow circle of ideas from which there was no escape. He thoughtthe whole duty of man was to be smarter than his fellows, get his hands,as he put it, "on the dibs," and have a good time. He was, in fact, thesort of man who had made England and America what they were. The luckhad been against him so far, but that was by the way. He was a mereaggressive and acquisitive individual with no sense of the State,no habitual loyalty, no devotion, no code of honour, no code even ofcourage. Now by a curious accident he found himself lifted out of hismarvellous modern world for a time, out of all the rush and confusedappeals of it, and floating like a thing dead and disembodied betweensea and sky. It was as if Heaven was experimenting with him, had pickedhim out as a sample from the English millions, to look at him morenearly, and to see what was happening to the soul of man. But whatHeaven made of him in that case I cannot profess to imagine, for I havelong since abandoned all theories about the ideals and satisfactions ofHeaven.
To be alone in a balloon at a height of fourteen or fifteen thousandfeet--and to that height Bert Smallways presently rose is like nothingelse in human experience. It is one of the supreme things possible toman. No flying machine can ever better it. It is to pass extraordinarilyout of human things. It is to be still and alone to an unprecedenteddegree. It is solitude without the suggestion of intervention; it iscalm without a single irrelevant murmur. It is to see the sky. No soundreaches one of all the roar and jar of humanity, the air is clear andsweet beyond the thought of defilement. No bird, no insect comes sohigh. No wind blows ever in a balloon, no breeze rustles, for it moveswith the wind and is itself a part of the atmosphere. Once started, itdoes not rock nor sway; you cannot feel whether it rises or falls. Bertfelt acutely cold, but he wasn't mountain-sick; he put on the coat andovercoat and gloves Butteridge had discarded--put them over the "DesertDervish" sheet that covered his cheap best suit--and sat very still fora long, time, overawed by the new-found quiet of the world. Above himwas the light, translucent, billowing globe of shining brown oiled silkand the blazing sunlight and the great deep blue dome of the sky.
Below, far below, was a torn floor of sunlit cloud slashed by enormousrents through which he saw the sea.
If you had been watching him from below, you would have seen his head, amotionless little black knob, sticking out from the car first of all fora long time on one side, and then vanishing to reappear after a time atsome other point.
He wasn't in the least degree uncomfortable nor afraid. He did thinkthat as this uncontrollable thing had thus rushed up the sky with him itmight presently rush down again, but this consideration did not troublehim very much. Essentially his state was wonder. There is no fear nortrouble in balloons--until they descend.
"Gollys!" he said at last, feeling a need for talking; "it's better thana motor-bike."
"It's all right!"
"I suppose they're telegraphing about, about me."...
The second hour found him examining the equipment of the car with greatparticularity. Above him was the throat of the balloon bunched and tiedtogether, but with an open lumen through which Bert could peer up intoa vast, empty, quiet interior, and out of which descended two fine cordsof unknown import, one white, one crimson, to pockets below the ring.The netting about the balloon-ended in cords attached to the ring, a bigsteel-bound hoop to which the car was slung by ropes. From it dependedthe trail rope and grapnel, and over the sides of the car were a numberof canvas bags that Bert decided must be ballast to "chuck down" if theballoon fell. ("Not much falling just yet," said Bert.)
There were an aneroid and another box-shaped instrument hanging from thering. The latter had an ivory plate bearing "statoscope" and other wordsin French, and a little indicator quivered and waggled, between Monteeand Descente. "That's all right," said Bert. "That tells if you'regoing up or down." On the crimson padded seat of the balloon there lay acouple of rugs and a Kodak, and in opposite corners of the bottom ofthe car were an empty champagne bottle and a glass. "Refreshments," saidBert meditatively, tilting the empty bottle. Then he had a brilliantidea. The two padded bed-like seats, each with blankets and mattress, heperceived, were boxes, and within he found Mr. Butteridge's conceptionof an adequate equipment for a balloon ascent: a hamper which includeda game pie, a Roman pie, a cold fowl, tomatoes, lettuce, ham sandwiches,shrimp sandwiches, a large cake, knives and forks and paper plates,self-heating tins of coffee and cocoa, bread, butter, and marmalade,several carefully packed bottles of champagne, bottles of Perrier water,and a big jar of water for washing, a portfolio, maps, and a compass,a rucksack containing a number of conveniences, including curling-tongsand hair-pins, a cap with ear-flaps, and so forth.
"A 'ome from 'ome," said Bert, surveying this provision as he tied theear-flaps under his chin. He looked over the side of the car. Far belowwere the shining clouds. They had thickened so that the whole world washidden. Southward they were piled in great snowy masses, so that he washalf disposed to think them mountains; northward and eastward they werein wavelike levels, and blindingly sunlit.
"Wonder how long a balloon keeps up?" he said.
He imagined he was not moving, so insensibly did the monster drift withthe air about it. "No good coming down till we shift a bit," he said.
He consulted the statoscope.
"Still Monty," he said.
"Wonder what would happen if you pulled a cord?"
"No," he decided. "I ain't going to mess it about."
Afterwards he did pull both the ripping- and the valve-cords, but, asMr. Butteridge had already discovered, they had fouled a fold of silk inthe throat. Nothing happened. But for that little hitch the ripping-cordwould have torn the balloon open as though it had been slashed by asword, and hurled Mr. Smallways to eternity at the rate of some thousandfeet a second. "No go!" he said, giving it a final tug. Then he lunched.
He opened a bottle of champagne, which, as soon as he cut the wire, blewits cork out with incredible violence, and for the most part followedit into space. Bert, however, got about a tumblerful. "Atmosphericpressure," said Bert, finding a use at last for the elementaryphysiography of his seventh-standard days. "I'll have to be more carefulnext time. No good wastin' drink."
Then he routed about for matches to utilise Mr. Butteridge's cigars; buthere again luck was on his side, and he couldn't find any wherewithto set light to the gas above him. Or else he would have dropped in aflare, a splendid but transitory pyrotechnic display. "'Eng old Grubb!"said Bert, slapping unproductive pockets. "'E didn't ought to 'ave kep'my box. 'E's always sneaking matches."
He reposed for a time. Then he got up, paddled about, rearranged theballast bags on the floor, watched the clouds for a time, and turnedover the maps on the locker. Bert liked maps, and he spent some time intrying to find one of France or the Channel; but they were all Britishordnance maps of English counties. That set him thinking about languagesand trying to recall his seventh-standard French. "Je suis Anglais.C'est une meprise. Je suis arrive par accident ici," he decided uponas convenient phrases. Then it occurred to him that he would entertainhimself by reading Mr. Butteridge's letters and examining hispocket-book, and in this manner he whiled away the afternoon.
2
He sat upon the padded locker, wrapped about very carefully, for theair, though calm, was exhilaratingly cold and clear. He was wearingfirst a modest suit of blue serge and all the unpretending underwearof a suburban young man of fashion, with sandal-like cycling-shoes andbrown stockings drawn over his trouser ends; then the perforatedsheet proper to a Desert Dervish; then the coat and waistcoat and bigfur-trimmed overcoat of Mr. Butteridge; then a lady's large fur cloak,and round his knees a blanket. Over his head was a tow wig, surmountedby a large cap of
Mr. Butteridge's with the flaps down over his ears.And some fur sleeping-boots of Mr. Butteridge's warmed his feet. The carof the balloon was small and neat, some bags of ballast the untidiest ofits contents, and he had found a light folding-table and put it at hiselbow, and on that was a glass with champagne. And about him, above andbelow, was space--such a clear emptiness and silence of space as onlythe aeronaut can experience.
He did not know where he might be drifting, or what might happen next.He accepted this state of affairs with a serenity creditable to theSmallways' courage, which one might reasonably have expected to be of amore degenerate and contemptible quality altogether. His impression wasthat he was bound to come down somewhere, and that then, if he wasn'tsmashed, some one, some "society" perhaps, would probably pack him andthe balloon back to England. If not, he would ask very firmly for theBritish Consul.
"Le consuelo Britannique," he decided this would be. "Apportez moi a leconsuelo Britannique, s'il vous plait," he would say, for he was byno means ignorant of French. In the meanwhile, he found the intimateaspects of Mr. Butteridge an interesting study.
There were letters of an entirely private character addressed to Mr.Butteridge, and among others several love-letters of a devouring sortin a large feminine hand. These are no business of ours, and one remarkswith regret that Bert read them.
When he had read them he remarked, "Gollys!" in an awestricken tone, andthen, after a long interval, "I wonder if that was her?
"Lord!"
He mused for a time.
He resumed his exploration of the Butteridge interior. It includeda number of press cuttings of interviews and also several lettersin German, then some in the same German handwriting, but in English."Hul-LO!" said Bert.
One of the latter, the first he took, began with an apology toButteridge for not writing to him in English before, and for theinconvenience and delay that had been caused him by that, and went onto matter that Bert found exciting in, the highest degree. "We canunderstand entirely the difficulties of your position, and that youshall possibly be watched at the present juncture.--But, sir, we do notbelieve that any serious obstacles will be put in your way if you wishedto endeavour to leave the country and come to us with your plans by thecustomary routes--either via Dover, Ostend, Boulogne, or Dieppe. Wefind it difficult to think you are right in supposing yourself to be indanger of murder for your invaluable invention."
"Funny!" said Bert, and meditated.
Then he went through the other letters.
"They seem to want him to come," said Bert, "but they don't seem hurtingthemselves to get 'im. Or else they're shamming don't care to get hisprices down.
"They don't quite seem to be the gov'ment," he reflected, after aninterval. "It's more like some firm's paper. All this printed stuff atthe top. Drachenflieger. Drachenballons. Ballonstoffe. Kugelballons.Greek to me.
"But he was trying to sell his blessed secret abroad. That's all right.No Greek about that! Gollys! Here IS the secret!"
He tumbled off the seat, opened the locker, and had the portfolio openbefore him on the folding-table. It was full of drawings done in thepeculiar flat style and conventional colours engineers adopt. And, in,addition there were some rather under-exposed photographs, obviouslydone by an amateur, at close quarters, of the actual machine'smutterings had made, in its shed near the Crystal Palace. Bert found hewas trembling. "Lord" he said, "here am I and the whole blessed secretof flying--lost up here on the roof of everywhere.
"Let's see!" He fell to studying the drawings and comparing them withthe photographs. They puzzled him. Half of them seemed to be missing.He tried to imagine how they fitted together, and found the effort toogreat for his mind.
"It's tryin'," said Bert. "I wish I'd been brought up to theengineering. If I could only make it out!"
He went to the side of the car and remained for a time staring withunseeing eyes at a huge cluster of great clouds--a cluster of slowlydissolving Monte Rosas, sunlit below. His attention was arrested by astrange black spot that moved over them. It alarmed him. It was ablack spot moving slowly with him far below, following him down there,indefatigably, over the cloud mountains. Why should such a thing followhim? What could it be?...
He had an inspiration. "Uv course!" he said. It was the shadow of theballoon. But he still watched it dubiously for a time.
He returned to the plans on the table.
He spent a long afternoon between his struggles to understand them andfits of meditation. He evolved a remarkable new sentence in French.
"Voici, Mossoo!--Je suis un inventeur Anglais. Mon nom est Butteridge.Beh. oo. teh. teh. eh. arr. I. deh. geh. eh. J'avais ici pour vendre lesecret de le flying-machine. Comprenez? Vendre pour l'argent toutsuite, l'argent en main. Comprenez? C'est le machine a jouer dans l'air.Comprenez? C'est le machine a faire l'oiseau. Comprenez? Balancer? Oui,exactement! Battir l'oiseau en fait, a son propre jeu. Je desire devendre ceci a votre government national. Voulez vous me directer la?
"Bit rummy, I expect, from the point of view of grammar," said Bert,"but they ought to get the hang of it all right.
"But then, if they arst me to explain the blessed thing?"
He returned in a worried way to the plans. "I don't believe it's allhere!" he said....
He got more and more perplexed up there among the clouds as to what heshould do with this wonderful find of his. At any moment, so far as heknew he might descend among he knew not what foreign people.
"It's the chance of my life!" he said.
It became more and more manifest to him that it wasn't. "Directly I comedown they'll telegraph--put it in the papers. Butteridge'll know of itand come along--on my track."
Butteridge would be a terrible person to be on any one's track.Bert thought of the great black moustaches, the triangular nose, thesearching bellow and the glare. His afternoon's dream of a marvellousseizure and sale of the great Butteridge secret crumpled up in his mind,dissolved, and vanished. He awoke to sanity again.
"Wouldn't do. What's the good of thinking of it?" He proceeded slowlyand reluctantly to replace the Butteridge papers in pockets andportfolio as he had found them. He became aware of a splendid goldenlight upon the balloon above him, and of a new warmth in the blue domeof the sky. He stood up and beheld the sun, a great ball of blindinggold, setting upon a tumbled sea of gold-edged crimson and purpleclouds, strange and wonderful beyond imagining. Eastward cloud-landstretched for ever, darkling blue, and it seemed to Bert the whole roundhemisphere of the world was under his eyes.
Then far, away over the blue he caught sight of three long, dark shapeslike hurrying fish that drove one after the other, as porpoises followone another in the water. They were very fish-like indeed--with tails.It was an unconvincing impression in that light. He blinked his eyes,stared again, and they had vanished. For a long time he scrutinisedthose remote blue levels and saw no more....
"Wonder if I ever saw anything," he said, and then: "There ain't suchthings...."
Down went the sun and down, not diving steeply, but passing northward asit sank, and then suddenly daylight and the expansive warmth of daylighthad gone altogether, and the index of the statoscope quivered over toDescente.
3
"NOW what's going to 'appen?" said Bert.
He found the cold, grey cloud wilderness rising towards him with a wide,slow steadiness. As he sank down among them the clouds ceased to seemthe snowclad mountain-slopes they had resembled heretofore, becameunsubstantial, confessed an immense silent drift and eddy in theirsubstance. For a moment, when he was nearly among their twilight masses,his descent was checked. Then abruptly the sky was hidden, the lastvestiges of daylight gone, and he was falling rapidly in an eveningtwilight through a whirl of fine snowflakes that streamed past himtowards the zenith, that drifted in upon the things about him andmelted, that touched his face with ghostly fingers. He shivered. Hisbreath came smoking from his lips, and everything was instantly bedewedand wet.
He had an impression of a snowstorm pouring wi
th unexampled andincreasing fury UPWARD; then he realised that he was falling faster andfaster.
Imperceptibly a sound grew upon his ears. The great silence of the worldwas at an end. What was this confused sound?
He craned his head over the side, concerned, perplexed.
First he seemed to see, and then not to see. Then he saw clearly littleedges of foam pursuing each other, and a wide waste of weltering watersbelow him. Far away was a pilot boat with a big sail bearing dim blackletters, and a little pinkish-yellow light, and it was rolling andpitching, rolling and pitching in a gale, while he could feel no windat, all. Soon the sound of waters was loud and near. He was dropping,dropping--into the sea!
He became convulsively active.
"Ballast!" he cried, and seized a little sack from the floor, and heavedit overboard. He did not wait for the effect of that, but sent anotherafter it. He looked over in time to see a minute white splash in the dimwaters below him, and then he was back in the snow and clouds again.
He sent out quite needlessly a third sack of ballast and a fourth, andpresently had the immense satisfaction of soaring up out of the damp andchill into the clear, cold, upper air in which the day still lingered."Thang-God!" he said, with all his heart.
A few stars now had pierced the blue, and in the east there shonebrightly a prolate moon.
4
That first downward plunge filled Bert with a haunting sense ofboundless waters below. It was a summer's night, but it seemed to him,nevertheless, extraordinarily long. He had a feeling of insecurity thathe fancied quite irrationally the sunrise would dispel. Also he washungry. He felt, in the dark, in the locker, put his fingers inthe Roman pie, and got some sandwiches, and he also opened rathersuccessfully a half-bottle of champagne. That warmed and restored him,he grumbled at Grubb about the matches, wrapped himself up warmly on thelocker, and dozed for a time. He got up once or twice to make sure thathe was still securely high above the sea. The first time the moonlitclouds were white and dense, and the shadow of the balloon ran athwartthem like a dog that followed; afterwards they seemed thinner. As he laystill, staring up at the huge dark balloon above, he made a discovery.His--or rather Mr. Butteridge's--waistcoat rustled as he breathed. Itwas lined with papers. But Bert could not see to get them out or examinethem, much as he wished to do so....
He was awakened by the crowing of cocks, the barking of dogs, and aclamour of birds. He was driving slowly at a low level over a broad landlit golden by sunrise under a clear sky. He stared out upon hedgeless,well-cultivated fields intersected by roads, each lined withcable-bearing red poles. He had just passed over a compact, whitewashed,village with a straight church tower and steep red-tiled roofs. A numberof peasants, men and women, in shiny blouses and lumpish footwear, stoodregarding him, arrested on their way to work. He was so low that the endof his rope was trailing.
He stared out at these people. "I wonder how you land," he thought.
"S'pose I OUGHT to land?"
He found himself drifting down towards a mono-rail line, and hastilyflung out two or three handfuls of ballast to clear it.
"Lemme see! One might say just 'Pre'nez'! Wish I knew the French fortake hold of the rope!... I suppose they are French?"
He surveyed the country again. "Might be Holland. Or Luxembourg. OrLorraine 's far as _I_ know. Wonder what those big affairs over thereare? Some sort of kiln. Prosperous-looking country..."
The respectability of the country's appearance awakened answering chordsin his nature.
"Make myself a bit ship-shape first," he said.
He resolved to rise a little and get rid of his wig (which now felthot on his head), and so forth. He threw out a bag of ballast, and wasastonished to find himself careering up through the air very rapidly.
"Blow!" said Mr. Smallways. "I've over-done the ballast trick.... Wonderwhen I shall get down again?... brekfus' on board, anyhow."
He removed his cap and wig, for the air was warm, and an improvidentimpulse made him cast the latter object overboard. The statoscoperesponded with a vigorous swing to Monte.
"The blessed thing goes up if you only LOOK overboard," he remarked, andassailed the locker. He found among other items several tins of liquidcocoa containing explicit directions for opening that he followed withminute care. He pierced the bottom with the key provided in the holesindicated, and forthwith the can grew from cold to hotter and hotter,until at last he could scarcely touch it, and then he opened the can atthe other end, and there was his cocoa smoking, without the use of matchor flame of any sort. It was an old invention, but new to Bert. Therewas also ham and marmalade and bread, so that he had a really verytolerable breakfast indeed.
Then he took off his overcoat, for the sunshine was now inclined to behot, and that reminded him of the rustling he had heard in the night.He took off the waistcoat and examined it. "Old Butteridge won't likeme unpicking this." He hesitated, and finally proceeded to unpick it. Hefound the missing drawings of the lateral rotating planes, on which thewhole stability of the flying machine depended.
An observant angel would have seen Bert sitting for a long time afterthis discovery in a state of intense meditation. Then at last he rosewith an air of inspiration, took Mr. Butteridge's ripped, demolished,and ransacked waistcoat, and hurled it from the balloon whence itfluttered down slowly and eddyingly until at last it came to rest witha contented flop upon the face of German tourist sleeping peacefullybeside the Hohenweg near Wildbad. Also this sent the balloon higher,and so into a position still more convenient for observation by ourimaginary angel who would next have seen Mr. Smallways tear open his ownjacket and waistcoat, remove his collar, open his shirt, thrust his handinto his bosom, and tear his heart out--or at least, if not his heart,some large bright scarlet object. If the observer, overcoming a thrillof celestial horror, had scrutinised this scarlet object more narrowly,one of Bert's most cherished secrets, one of his essential weaknesses,would have been laid bare. It was a red-flannel chest-protector, one ofthose large quasi-hygienic objects that with pills and medicines takethe place of beneficial relics and images among the Protestant peoplesof Christendom. Always Bert wore this thing; it was his cherisheddelusion, based on the advice of a shilling fortune-teller at Margate,that he was weak in the lungs.
He now proceeded to unbutton his fetish, to attack it with a penknife,and to thrust the new-found plans between the two layers of imitationSaxony flannel of which it was made. Then with the help of Mr.Butteridge's small shaving mirror and his folding canvas basin hereadjusted his costume with the gravity of a man who has taken anirrevocable step in life, buttoned up his jacket, cast the white sheetof the Desert Dervish on one side, washed temperately, shaved,resumed the big cap and the fur overcoat, and, much refreshed by theseexercises, surveyed the country below him.
It was indeed a spectacle of incredible magnificence. If perhaps it wasnot so strange and magnificent as the sunlit cloudland of the previousday, it was at any rate infinitely more interesting.
The air was at its utmost clearness and except to the south andsouth-west there was not a cloud in the sky. The country was hilly,with occasional fir plantations and bleak upland spaces, but also withnumerous farms, and the hills were deeply intersected by the gorges ofseveral winding rivers interrupted at intervals by the banked-upponds and weirs of electric generating wheels. It was dotted withbright-looking, steep-roofed, villages, and each showed a distinctiveand interesting church beside its wireless telegraph steeple; here andthere were large chateaux and parks and white roads, and paths linedwith red and white cable posts were extremely conspicuous in thelandscape. There were walled enclosures like gardens and rickyards andgreat roofs of barns and many electric dairy centres. The uplands weremottled with cattle. At places he would see the track of one of theold railroads (converted now to mono-rails) dodging through tunnelsand crossing embankments, and a rushing hum would mark the passing of atrain. Everything was extraordinarily clear as well as minute. Once ortwice he saw guns and soldiers, and was reminded
of the stir of militarypreparations he had witnessed on the Bank Holiday in England; but therewas nothing to tell him that these military preparations were abnormalor to explain an occasional faint irregular firing Of guns that driftedup to him....
"Wish I knew how to get down," said Bert, ten thousand feet or so aboveit all, and gave himself to much futile tugging at the red and whitecords. Afterwards he made a sort of inventory of the provisions. Life inthe high air was giving him an appalling appetite, and it seemed to himdiscreet at this stage to portion out his supply into rations. So far ashe could see he might pass a week in the air.
At first all the vast panorama below had been as silent as a paintedpicture. But as the day wore on and the gas diffused slowly from theballoon, it sank earthward again, details increased, men became morevisible, and he began to hear the whistle and moan of trains and cars,sounds of cattle, bugles and kettle drums, and presently even men'svoices. And at last his guide-rope was trailing again, and he found itpossible to attempt a landing. Once or twice as the rope dragged overcables he found his hair erect with electricity, and once he had aslight shock, and sparks snapped about the car. He took these thingsamong the chances of the voyage. He had one idea now very clear in hismind, and that was to drop the iron grapnel that hung from the ring.
From the first this attempt was unfortunate, perhaps because the placefor descent was ill-chosen. A balloon should come down in an empty openspace, and he chose a crowd. He made his decision suddenly, and withoutproper reflection. As he trailed, Bert saw ahead of him one of themost attractive little towns in the world--a cluster of steep gablessurmounted by a high church tower and diversified with trees, walled,and with a fine, large gateway opening out upon a tree-lined high road.All the wires and cables of the countryside converged upon it likeguests to entertainment. It had a most home-like and comfortablequality, and it was made gayer by abundant flags. Along the road aquantity of peasant folk, in big pair-wheeled carts and afoot, werecoming and going, besides an occasional mono-rail car; and at thecar-junction, under the trees outside the town, was a busy littlefair of booths. It seemed a warm, human, well-rooted, and altogetherdelightful place to Bert. He came low over the tree-tops, with hisgrapnel ready to throw and so anchor him--a curious, interested, andinteresting guest, so his imagination figured it, in the very middle ofit all.
He thought of himself performing feats with the sign language and chancelinguistics amidst a circle of admiring rustics....
And then the chapter of adverse accidents began.
The rope made itself unpopular long before the crowd had fully realisedhis advent over the trees. An elderly and apparently intoxicated peasantin a shiny black hat, and carrying a large crimson umbrella, caughtsight of it first as it trailed past him, and was seized with adiscreditable ambition to kill it. He pursued it, briskly withunpleasant cries. It crossed the road obliquely, splashed into a pail ofmilk upon a stall, and slapped its milky tail athwart a motor-car loadof factory girls halted outside the town gates. They screamed loudly.People looked up and saw Bert making what he meant to be genialsalutations, but what they considered, in view of the feminine outcry,to be insulting gestures. Then the car hit the roof of the gatehousesmartly, snapped a flag staff, played a tune upon some telegraph wires,and sent a broken wire like a whip-lash to do its share in accumulatingunpopularity. Bert, by clutching convulsively, just escaped beingpitched headlong. Two young soldiers and several peasants shouted thingsup to him and shook fists at him and began to run in pursuit as hedisappeared over the wall into the town.
Admiring rustics, indeed!
The balloon leapt at once, in the manner of balloons when part of theirweight is released by touching down, with a sort of flippancy, andin another moment Bert was over a street crowded with peasantsand soldiers, that opened into a busy market-square. The wave ofunfriendliness pursued him.
"Grapnel," said Bert, and then with an afterthought shouted, "TETESthere, you! I say! I say! TETES. 'Eng it!"
The grapnel smashed down a steeply sloping roof, followed by anavalanche of broken tiles, jumped the street amidst shrieks and cries,and smashed into a plate-glass window with an immense and sickeningimpact. The balloon rolled nauseatingly, and the car pitched. But thegrapnel had not held. It emerged at once bearing on one fluke, witha ridiculous air of fastidious selection, a small child's chair, andpursued by a maddened shopman. It lifted its catch, swung about with anappearance of painful indecision amidst a roar of wrath, and droppedit at last neatly, and as if by inspiration, over the head of a peasantwoman in charge of an assortment of cabbages in the market-place.
Everybody now was aware of the balloon. Everybody was either trying tododge the grapnel or catch the trail rope. With a pendulum-like swoopthrough the crowd, that sent people flying right and left the grapnelcame to earth again, tried for and missed a stout gentleman in a bluesuit and a straw hat, smacked away a trestle from under a stall ofhaberdashery, made a cyclist soldier in knickerbockers leap likea chamois, and secured itself uncertainly among the hind-legs of asheep--which made convulsive, ungenerous efforts to free itself, and wasdragged into a position of rest against a stone cross in the middle ofthe place. The balloon pulled up with a jerk. In another moment a scoreof willing hands were tugging it earthward. At the same instant Bertbecame aware for the first time of a fresh breeze blowing about him.
For some seconds he stood staggering in the car, which now swayedsickeningly, surveying the exasperated crowd below him and trying tocollect his mind. He was extraordinarily astonished at this run ofmishaps. Were the people really so annoyed? Everybody seemed angrywith him. No one seemed interested or amused by his arrival.A disproportionate amount of the outcry had the flavour ofimprecation--had, indeed a strong flavour of riot. Several greatlyuniformed officials in cocked hats struggled in vain to control thecrowd. Fists and sticks were shaken. And when Bert saw a man on theoutskirts of the crowd run to a haycart and get a brightly prongedpitch-fork, and a blue-clad soldier unbuckle his belt, his rising doubtwhether this little town was after all such a good place for a landingbecame a certainty.
He had clung to the fancy that they would make something of a hero ofhim. Now he knew that he was mistaken.
He was perhaps ten feet above the people when he made his decision.His paralysis ceased. He leapt up on the seat, and, at imminent risk offalling headlong, released the grapnel-rope from the toggle that heldit, sprang on to the trail rope and disengaged that also. A hoarse shoutof disgust greeted the descent of the grapnel-rope and the swift leapof the balloon, and something--he fancied afterwards it was aturnip--whizzed by his head. The trail-rope followed its fellow. Thecrowd seemed to jump away from him. With an immense and horrifyingrustle the balloon brushed against a telephone pole, and for a tenseinstant he anticipated either an electric explosion or a bursting of theoiled silk, or both. But fortune was with him.
In another second he was cowering in the bottom of the car, and releasedfrom the weight of the grapnel and the two ropes, rushing up once morethrough the air. For a time he remained crouching, and when at last helooked out again the little town was very small and travelling, with therest of lower Germany, in a circular orbit round and round the car--orat least it appeared to be doing that. When he got used to it, he foundthis rotation of the balloon rather convenient; it saved moving about inthe car.
5
Late in the afternoon of a pleasant summer day in the year 191-, if onemay borrow a mode of phrasing that once found favour with the readers ofthe late G. P. R. James, a solitary balloonist--replacing the solitaryhorseman of the classic romances--might have been observed wending hisway across Franconia in a north-easterly direction, and at a height ofabout eleven thousand feet above the sea and still spindling slowly. Hishead was craned over the side of the car, and he surveyed the countrybelow with an expression of profound perplexity; ever and again his lipsshaped inaudible words. "Shootin' at a chap," for example, and "I'llcome down right enough soon as I find out 'ow." Over the side ofthe basket the robe of th
e Desert Dervish was hanging, an appeal forconsideration, an ineffectual white flag.
He was now very distinctly aware that the world below him, so far frombeing the naive countryside of his earlier imaginings that day, sleepilyunconscious of him and capable of being amazed and nearly reverentialat his descent, was acutely irritated by his career, and extremelyimpatient with the course he was taking.--But indeed it was not hewho took that course, but his masters, the winds of heaven. Mysteriousvoices spoke to him in his ear, jerking the words up to him by meansof megaphones, in a weird and startling manner, in a great variety oflanguages. Official-looking persons had signalled to him by means offlag flapping and arm waving. On the whole a guttural variant of Englishprevailed in the sentences that alighted upon the balloon; chiefly hewas told to "gome down or you will be shot."
"All very well," said Bert, "but 'ow?"
Then they shot a little wide of the car. Latterly he had been shot atsix or seven times, and once the bullet had gone by with a sound sopersuasively like the tearing of silk that he had resigned himself tothe prospect of a headlong fall. But either they were aiming near him orthey had missed, and as yet nothing was torn but the air about him--andhis anxious soul.
He was now enjoying a respite from these attentions, but he felt it wasat best an interlude, and he was doing what he could to appreciatehis position. Incidentally he was having some hot coffee and pie in anuntidy inadvertent manner, with an eye fluttering nervously over theside of the car. At first he had ascribed the growing interest in hiscareer to his ill-conceived attempt to land in the bright little uplandtown, but now he was beginning to realise that the military rather thanthe civil arm was concerned about him.
He was quite involuntarily playing that weird mysterious part--the partof an International Spy. He was seeing secret things. He had, in fact,crossed the designs of no less a power than the German Empire, he hadblundered into the hot focus of Welt-Politik, he was drifting helplesslytowards the great Imperial secret, the immense aeronautic park that hadbeen established at a headlong pace in Franconia to develop silently,swiftly, and on an immense scale the great discoveries of Hunstedt andStossel, and so to give Germany before all other nations a fleet ofairships, the air power and the Empire of the world.
Later, just before they shot him down altogether, Bert saw that greatarea of passionate work, warm lit in the evening light, a great areaof upland on which the airships lay like a herd of grazing monsters attheir feed. It was a vast busy space stretching away northward as far ashe could see, methodically cut up into numbered sheds, gasometers, squadencampments, storage areas, interlaced with the omnipresent mono-raillines, and altogether free from overhead wires or cables. Everywhere wasthe white, black and yellow of Imperial Germany, everywhere the blackeagles spread their wings. Even without these indications, the largevigorous neatness of everything would have marked it German. Vastmultitudes of men went to and fro, many in white and drab fatigueuniforms busy about the balloons, others drilling in sensible drab. Hereand there a full uniform glittered. The airships chiefly engaged hisattention, and he knew at once it was three of these he had seen onthe previous night, taking advantage of the cloud welkin to manoeuvreunobserved. They were altogether fish-like. For the great airships withwhich Germany attacked New York in her last gigantic effort forworld supremacy--before humanity realized that world supremacy was adream--were the lineal descendants of the Zeppelin airship that flewover Lake Constance in 1906, and of the Lebaudy navigables that madetheir memorable excursions over Paris in 1907 and 1908.
These German airships were held together by rib-like skeletons of steeland aluminium and a stout inelastic canvas outer-skin, within which wasan impervious rubber gas-bag, cut up by transverse dissepiments intofrom fifty to a hundred compartments. These were all absolutely gastight and filled with hydrogen, and the entire aerostat was kept at anylevel by means of a long internal balloonette of oiled and toughenedsilk canvas, into which air could be forced and from which it could bepumped. So the airship could be made either heavier or lighter than air,and losses of weight through the consumption of fuel, the castingof bombs and so forth, could also be compensated by admitting air tosections of the general gas-bag. Ultimately that made a highly explosivemixture; but in all these matters risks must be taken and guardedagainst. There was a steel axis to the whole affair, a central backbonewhich terminated in the engine and propeller, and the men and magazineswere forward in a series of cabins under the expanded headlike forepart.The engine, which was of the extraordinarily powerful Pforzheim type,that supreme triumph of German invention, was worked by wires from thisforepart, which was indeed the only really habitable part of the ship.If anything went wrong, the engineers went aft along a rope ladderbeneath the frame. The tendency of the whole affair to roll was partlycorrected by a horizontal lateral fin on either side, and steering waschiefly effected by two vertical fins, which normally lay back likegill-flaps on either side of the head. It was indeed a most completeadaptation of the fish form to aerial conditions, the position ofswimming bladder, eyes, and brain being, however, below instead ofabove. A striking, and unfish-like feature was the apparatus forwireless telegraphy that dangled from the forward cabin--that is to say,under the chin of the fish.
These monsters were capable of ninety miles an hour in a calm, so thatthey could face and make headway against nearly everything exceptthe fiercest tornado. They varied in length from eight hundred to twothousand feet, and they had a carrying power of from seventy to twohundred tons. How many Germany possessed history does not record, butBert counted nearly eighty great bulks receding in perspective duringhis brief inspection. Such were the instruments on which she chieflyrelied to sustain her in her repudiation of the Monroe Doctrine and herbold bid for a share in the empire of the New World. But notaltogether did she rely on these; she had also a one-man bomb-throwingDrachenflieger of unknown value among the resources.
But the Drachenflieger were away in the second great aeronauticpark east of Hamburg, and Bert Smallways saw nothing of them in thebird's-eye view he took of the Franconian establishment before they shothim down very neatly. The bullet tore past him and made a sort of pop asit pierced his balloon--a pop that was followed by a rustling sigh anda steady downward movement. And when in the confusion of the moment hedropped a bag of ballast, the Germans, very politely but firmly overcamehis scruples by shooting his balloon again twice.
