Swords & Steam Short Stories

by S. T. Joshi

  Now the Cherbourg evolutions had proved three things. The submarines could sink and remain below the surface of the water. They could be steered vertically and laterally, but once ten feet or so below the water, they were as blind as bats in bright sunshine.

  Moreover, when their electric head-lights were turned on, a luminous haze through which it was impossible to see more than a few metres, spread out in front of them and this was reflected on the surface of the water in the form of a semi-phosphorescent patch which infallibly betrayed the whereabouts of the submarine to scouting destroyers and prowling gun-boats. The sinking of a couple of pounds of dynamite with a time-fuse into this patch would have consequences unspeakable for the crew of the submarine since no human power could save them from a horrible death.

  It was the fear of this discovery that had caused the rigid exclusion of all non-official spectators from the area of the experiments. Other trials conducted in daylight had further proved that the dim, hazy twilight of the lower waters was even worse than darkness. In short, the only chance of successful attack lay in coming to the surface, taking observations, probably under fire, and then sinking and discharging a torpedo at a venture. This, again, was an operation which could only be conducted with any chance of success in a smooth sea. In even moderately rough weather it would be absolutely impossible.

  It was these difficulties which joined to a thousand exasperatingly stubborn technical details had kept Captain Flaubert awake for three nights. For him everything depended upon the solution of them. He was admittedly the best submarine engineer in France. The submarines had been proved to be practically non-effective. France looked to him to make them effective.

  The troubles in the far East and, nearer home, in Morocco, had brought the Dual Alliance and the British Empire to the verge of war. At any moment something might happen which would shake a few sparks into the European powder magazine. Then the naval might of Britain would be let loose instantly. In a few hours her overwhelming fleets would be striking their swift and terrible blows at the nearest enemy – France – and yet, if he could only give the submarines eyes which could see through the water, France could send out an invisible squadron which would cripple the British fleets before they left port, destroy her mightiest battleships and her swiftest cruisers before they could fire a single shot, and so in a few days clear the Narrow Seas and make way for the invasion of England by the irresistible military might of France. Then the long spell would be broken, and the proudly boasted Isle Inviolate would be inviolate no longer.

  It was a splendid dream – but, until the submarines could be made to see as well as steer, it was as far away as aerial navigation itself.

  Day was just breaking on the third morning when a luminous ray of inspiration pierced the mists which hang over the border land of sleep and waking, of mingled dream and reality, amidst which Flaubert’s soul was just then wandering.

  He sat bolt upright in his little camp bed, clasped his hands across his close-cropped head, and, hardly knowing whether he was asleep or awake, heard himself say:

  “Nom de Dieu, it is that! What foolishness not to have thought of that before. If we cannot see we must feel. Electric threads, balanced so as to be the same weight as water – ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred metres long, all round the boat, ahead and astern, to port and to starboard! Steel ships are magnetic, that is why they must swing to adjust their compasses.”

  “The end of each thread shall be a tiny electro-magnet. In-board they will connect with indicators, delicately swung magnetic needles, four of them, ahead, astern, and on each side; and, as Le Vengeur – yes, I will call her that, for we have no more forgotten Trafalgar than we have Fashoda – as she approaches the ships of the enemy, deep hidden under the waters, these threads, like the tentacles of the octopus, shall spread towards her prey!”

  As she gets nearer and nearer they swing round and converge upon the ship that is nearest and biggest. As we dive under her they will point upwards. When they are perpendicular the overhead torpedo will be released. Its magnets will fasten it to the bottom of the doomed ship. Le Vengeur will sink deeper, obeying always the warning of the sounding indicator, and seek either a new victim or a safe place to rise in. In ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, as I please, the torpedo will explode, the battleship or the cruiser will break in two and go down, not knowing whose hand has struck her.

  “Ah, Albion, my enemy, you are already conquered! You are only mistress of the seas until Le Vengeur begins her work. When that is done there will be no more English navy. The soldiers of France will avenge Waterloo on the soil of England, and Leon Flaubert will be the greatest name in the world. Dieu Merci, it is done! I have thought the thought which conquers a world – and now let me sleep.”

  His clasped hands fell away from his head; his eyelids drooped over his aching, staring eyes; his body swayed a little from side to side, and then fell backwards. As his head rested on the pillow a long deep sigh left his half-parted lips, and in a few moments a contented snore was reverberating through the little, plainly-furnished bedroom.

  Chapter II

  A Dinner at Albert Gate

  Curiously enough, while Captain Leon Flaubert had been worrying himself to the verge of distraction over the problem of seeing under water, and had apparently solved it by substituting electric nerves of feeling for the sight-rays which had proved a failure, Mr. Wilfred Wallace Tyrrell had brought to a successful conclusion a long series of experiments bearing upon the self-same subject.

  Mr. Tyrrell was the son of Sir Wilfred Tyrrell, one of the Junior Lords of the Admiralty. He was a year under thirty. He had taken a respectable degree at Cambridge, then he had gone to Heidelberg and taken a better one, after which he had come home entered at London, and made his bow to the world as the youngest D.Sc. that Burlington Gardens had ever turned out.

  His Continental training had emancipated him from all the limitations under which his father, otherwise a man of very considerable intelligence, suffered. Like Captain Flaubert he was a firm believer in the possibility of submarine navigation, but, like his unknown French rival, he, too, had been confronted with that fatal problem of submarine blindness, and he had attacked it from a point of view so different to that of Captain Flaubert that the difference of method practically amounted to the difference between the genius of the two nations to which they belonged. Captain Flaubert had evaded the question and substituted electric feeling for sight. Wilfred Tyrrell had gone for sight and nothing less, and now he had every reason to believe that he had succeeded.

  The night before Captain Flaubert had fallen asleep in his quarters at Cherbourg there was a little dinner-party at Sir Wilfred Tyrrell’s house in Albert Gate. The most important of the guests from Wilfred’s point of view was Lady Ethel Rivers, the only daughter of the Earl of Kirlew. She was a most temptingly pretty brunette with hopelessly dazzling financial prospects. He had been admiring her from a despairing distance for the last five years, in fact ever since she had crossed the line between girlhood and young womanhood.

  Although it was quite within the bounds of possibility that she knew of his devotion, he had never yet ventured upon even the remotest approach to direct courtship. In every sense she seemed too far beyond him. Some day she would be a countess in her own right. Some day, too. she would inherit about half a million in London ground-rents, with much more to follow as the leases fell in, wherefore, as Wilfred Tyrrell reasoned, she would in due course marry a duke, or at least a European Prince.

  Lady Ethel’s opinions on the subject could only Ix gathered from the fact that she had already declined one Duke, two Viscounts, and a German Serene Highness, during her first season, and that she never seemed tired of listening when Wilfred Tyrrell was talking – which of itself was significant if his modesty had only permitted him to see it.

  But while he was sitting beside her at dinner on this momentous night he felt that the distance between the
m had suddenly decreased. So far his career had been brilliant but unprofitable. Many other men had done as much as he had and ended in mediocrity. But now he had done something; he had made a discovery with which the whole world might be ringing in a few weeks’ time. He had solved the problem of submarine navigation, and, as a preliminary method of defence, he had discovered a means of instantly detecting the presence of a submarine destroyer.

  He was one of those secretive persons who possess that gift of silence, when critical matters are pending, which has served many generations of diplomats on occasions when the fates of empires were hanging in the balance.

  Thus, having learnt to keep his love a secret for so many years, he knew how to mask that still greater secret, by the telling of which he could have astonished several of the distinguished guests round his father’s dinner table into a paralysis of official incredulity. But he, being the son of an official, knew that such a premature disclosure might result, not only in blank scepticism, for which he did not care, but in semi-official revelations to the Press, for which he did care a great deal. So when the farewells were being said, he whispered to his mother:

  “I want you and father and Lady Ethel and Lord Kirlew to come up to the laboratory after everyone has gone. I’ve got something to show you. You can manage that, can’t you, mother?”

  Lady Tyrrell nodded and managed it.

  Wilfred Tyrrell’s laboratory was away up at the top of the house in a long low attic, which had evidently been chosen for its seclusion.

  As they were going up the stairs Wilfred, sure of his triumph, took a liberty which, under other circumstances, would have been almost unthinkable to him. He and Lady Ethel happened to be the last on the stairs, and he was a step or two behind her. He quickened his pace a little, and then laying his hand lightly on her arm he whispered:

  “Lady Ethel.”

  “Oh, nonsense!” she whispered in reply, with a little tremble of her arm under his hand. “Lady Ethel, indeed! As if we hadn’t known each other long enough. Well, never mind what you want to say. What are you going to show us?”

  “Something that no human eyes except mine have ever seen before; something which I have even ventured to hope will make me worthy to ask you a question which a good many better men than I have asked –”

  “I know what you mean,” she replied in a whisper even lower than his own, and turning a pair of laughing eyes up to his. “You silly, couldn’t you see before? I didn’t want those Dukes and Serene Highnesses. Do something – so far I know you have only studied and dreamt, – and, much and all as I like you – Well, now?”

  “Now,” he answered, pulling her arm a little nearer to him, “I have done something. I quite see what you mean, and I believe it is something worthy even of winning your good opinion. Here we are; in a few minutes you will see for yourself.”

  Chapter III

  The Water-Ray

  The laboratory was littered with the usual disorderly-order of similar apartments. In the middle of it on a big, bare, acid-stained deal table there stood a glass tank full of water, something like an aquarium tank, but the glass walls were made of the best white plate. The water with which it was filled had a faint greenish hue and looked like seawater. At one end of it there was a curious looking apparatus. A couple of boxes, like electric storage batteries, stood on either side of a combination of glass tubes mounted on a wooden stand so that they all converged into the opening of a much larger tube of pale blue glass. Fitted to the other end of this was a thick double concave lens also of pale blue glass. This was placed so that its axis pointed down towards the surface of the water in the tank at an angle of about thirty degrees.

  “Well, Wallace,” said Sir Wilfred as his son locked the door behind them, “what’s this? Another of your wonderful inventions? Something else you want me to put before my lords of the Admiralty?”

  “That’s just it, father, and this time I really think that even the people at Whitehall will see that there’s something in it. At any rate I’m perfectly satisfied that if I had a French or Russian Admiral in this room, and he saw what you’re going to see, I could get a million sterling down for what there is on that table.”

  “But, of course you wouldn’t think of doing that,” said Lady Ethel, who was standing at the end of the table opposite the arrangement of glass tubes.

  “That, I think, goes without saying, Ethel,” said Lord Kirlew. “I am sure Mr. Tyrrell would be quite incapable of selling anything of service to his country to her possible enemies. At any rate, Tyrrell,” he went on, turning to Sir Wilfred, “if I see anything in it, and your people won’t take it up, I will. So now let us see what it is.”

  Tyrrell had meanwhile turned up a couple of gas-jets, one on either side of the room, and they saw that slender, twisted wires ran from the batteries to each of the tubes through the after end, which was sealed with glass. He came back to the table, and with a quick glance at Lady Ethel, he coughed slightly, after the fashion of a lecturer beginning to address an audience. Then he looked round at the inquiring faces, and said with a mock professional air:

  “This, my Lord, ladies, and gentlemen, is an apparatus which I have every reason to believe removes the last and only difficulty in the way of the complete solution of the problem of submarine navigation.”

  “Dear me,” said Lord Kirlew, adjusting his pince-nez and leaning over the arrangement of tubes, “I think I see now what you mean. You have found, if you will allow me to anticipate you, some sort of Roentgen Ray or other, which will enable you to see through water. Is that so?”

  “That is just what it is,” said Tyrrell. “Of course, you know that the great difficulty, in fact, the so far insuperable obstacle in the way of submarine navigation has been the fact that a submerged vessel is blind. She cannot see where she is going beyond a distance of a few yards at most.”

  “Now this apparatus will make it possible, not only for her to see where she is going up to a distance which is limited only by the power of her batteries, but it also makes it possible for those on a vessel on the surface of the water to sweep the bottom of the sea just as a search-light sweeps the surface, and therefore to find out anything underneath from a sunken mine to a submarine destroyer. I am going to show you, too, that it can be used either in daylight or in the dark, I’ll try first with the gas up.”

  He turned a couple of switches on the boxes as he said this. The batteries began to hum gently. The tubes began to glow with a strange intense light which had two very curious properties. It was just as distinctly visible in the gaslight as if the room had been dark, and it was absolutely confined to the tubes. Not a glimmer of it extended beyond their outer surfaces.

  Then the big blue tube began to glow, turning pale green the while. The next instant a blaze of greenish light shot in a direct ray from the lens down into the water. A moment later the astonished eyes of the spectators saw the water in the tank pierced by a spreading ray of intense and absolutely white light Some stones and sand and gravel that had been spread along the bottom of the tank stood out with magical distinctness wherever the ray touched them. The rest, lit up only by the gas, were dim and indistinct in comparison with them.

  “You see that what I call the water-ray is quite distinct from gaslight,” said Tyrrell in a tone which showed that the matter was now to him a commonplace. “It is just as distinct from daylight. Now we will try it in the dark. Lord Kirlew, would you mind turning out that light near you? Father, turn out the one on your side, will you?”

  The lights were turned out in silence. People of good intelligence are as a rule silent in the presence of a new revelation. Every eye looked through the darkness at the tank. The tubes glowed with their strange light, but they stood out against the darkness of the room just like so many pencils of light, and that was all. The room was just as dark as though they had not been there. The intense ray from the lens was now only visible as a
fan of light. Tank and water had vanished in the darkness. Nothing could be seen but the ray and the stones and sand which it fell on.

  “You see,” said Tyrrell, “that the ray does not diffuse itself. It is absolutely direct, and that is one of its most valuable qualities. The electric lights which they use on the French submarines throw a glow on the top of the water at night, and so it is pretty easy to locate them. The surface of the water there, you see, is perfectly dark. In fact the water has vanished altogether. Another advantage is that this ray is absolutely invisible in air. Look!”

  As he said this he tilted the arrangement of tubes backwards so that the ray left the water, and that moment the room was in utter darkness. He turned it down towards the tank and again the brilliant fan of light became visible in the water.

  “Now,” he continued, “that’s all. You can light the gas again, if you don’t mind.”

  “Well, Wallace,” said Lord Kirlew when they had got back to the library, “I think we can congratulate you upon having solved one of the greatest problems of the age, and if the Admiralty don’t take your invention up, as I don’t suppose they will, eh, Tyrrell? – You know them better than I do – I’ll tell you what I’ll do; I’ll buy or build you a thirty-five knot destroyer which shall be fitted up to your orders, and until we get into a naval war with someone you can take a scientific cruise and use your water-ray to find out uncharted reefs and that sort of thing, and perhaps you might come across an old sunken treasure-ship. I believe there are still some millions at the bottom of Vigo Bay.”