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story,” said Bert. “Look here!” he said abruptly, “I wish you’d lend me a pair of slippers, or something. I’m regular sick of these sandals. They’re rotten things. I’ve been trying them for a friend.”
“Right O!”
The ex-Rhodes scholar whisked out of the room and reappeared with a considerable choice of footwear — pumps, cloth bath-slippers, and a purple pair adorned with golden sunflowers.
But these he repented of at the last moment.
“I don’t even wear them myself,” he said. “Only brought ‘em in the zeal of the moment.” He laughed confidentially. “Had ‘em worked for me — in Oxford. By a friend. Take ‘em everywhere.”
So Bert chose the pumps.
The lieutenant broke into a cheerful snigger. “Here we are trying on slippers,” he said, “and the world going by like a panorama below. Rather a lark, eh? Look!”
Bert peeped with him out of the window, looking from the bright pettiness of the red-and-silver cabin into a dark immensity. The land below, except for a lake, was black and featureless, and the other airships were hidden. “See more outside, ” said the lieutenant. “Let’s go! There’s a sort of little gallery.”
He led the way into the long passage, which was lit by one small electric light, past some notices in German, to an open balcony and a light ladder and gallery of metal, lattice overhanging, empty space. Bert followed his leader down to the gallery slowly and cautiously. From it he was able to watch the wonderful spectacle of the first air-fleet flying through the night. They flew in a wedge-shaped formation, the Vaterland highest and leading, the tail receding into the corners of the sky. They flew in long, regular undulations, great dark fishlike shapes, showing hardly any light at all, the engines making a throb-throb-throbbing sound that was very audible out on the gallery. They were going at a level of five or six thousand feet, and rising steadily. Below, the country lay silent, a clear darkness dotted and lined out with clusters of furnaces, and the lit streets of a group of big towns. The world seemed to lie in a bowl; the overhanging bulk of the airship above hid all but the lowest levels of the sky.
They watched the landscape for a space.
“Jolly it must be to invent things,” said the lieutenant suddenly. “How did you come to think of your machine first?”
“Worked it out,” said Bert, after a pause. “Jest ground away at it.”
“Our people are frightfully keen on you. They thought the British had got you. Weren’t the British keen?”
“In a way,” said Bert. “Still — its a long story.”
“I think it’s an immense thing — to invent. I couldn’t invent a thing to save my life.”
They both fell silent, watching the darkened world and following their thoughts until a bugle summoned them to a belated dinner. Bert was suddenly alarmed. “Don’t you ‘ave to dress and things?” he said. “I’ve always been too hard at Science and things to go into Society and all that.”
“No fear,” said Kurt. “Nobody’s got more than the clothes they wear. We’re travelling light. You might perhaps take your overcoat off. They’ve an electric radiator each end of the room.”
And so presently Bert found himself sitting to eat in the presence of the “German Alexander” — that great and puissant Prince, Prince Karl Albert, the War Lord, the hero of two hemispheres. He was a handsome, blond man, with deep-set eyes, a snub nose, upturned moustache, and long white hands, a strange-looking man. He sat higher than the others, under a black eagle with widespread wings and the German Imperial flags; he was, as it were, enthroned, and it struck Bert greatly that as he ate he did not look at people, but over their heads like one who sees visions. Twenty officers of various ranks stood about the table — and Bert. They all seemed extremely curious to see the famous Butteridge, and their astonishment at his appearance was ill-controlled. The Prince gave him a dignified salutation, to which, by an inspiration, he bowed. Standing next the Prince was a brown-faced, wrinkled man with silver spectacles and fluffy, dingy-grey side-whiskers, who regarded Bert with a peculiar and disconcerting attention. The company sat after ceremonies Bert could not understand. At the other end of the table was the bird-faced officer Bert had dispossessed, still looking hostile and whispering about Bert to his neighbour. Two soldiers waited. The dinner was a plain one — a soup, some fresh mutton, and cheese — and there was very little talk.
A curious solemnity indeed brooded over every one. Partly this was reaction after the intense toil and restrained excitement of starting; partly it was the overwhelming sense of strange new experiences, of portentous adventure. The Prince was lost in thought. He roused himself to drink to the Emperor in champagne, and the company cried “Hoch!” like men repeating responses in church.
No smoking was permitted, but some of the officers went down to the little open gallery to chew tobacco. No lights whatever were safe amidst that bundle of inflammable things. Bert suddenly fell yawning and shivering. He was overwhelmed by a sense of his own insignificance amidst these great rushing monsters of the air. He felt life was’ too big for him — too much for him altogether.
He said something to Kurt about his head, went up the steep ladder from the swaying little gallery into the airship again, and so, as if it were a refuge, to bed.
5
Bert slept for a time, and then his sleep was broken by dreams. Mostly he was fleeing from formless terrors down an interminable passage in an airship — a passage paved at first with ravenous trapdoors, and then with openwork canvas of the most careless description.
“Gaw!” said Bert, turning over after his seventh fall through infinite space that night.
He sat up in the darkness and nursed his knees. The progress of the airship was not nearly so smooth as a balloon; he could feel a regular swaying up, up, up and then down, down, down, and the throbbing and tremulous quiver of the engines.
His mind began to teem with memories — more memories and more.
Through them, like a struggling swimmer in broken water, came the perplexing question, what am I to do tomorrow? Tomorrow, Kurt had told him, the Prince’s secretary, the Graf Von Winterfeld, would come to him and discuss his flying-machine, and then he would see the Prince. He would have to stick it out now that he was Butteridge, and sell his invention. And then, if they found him out! He had a vision of infuriated Butteridges…. Suppose after all he owned up? Pretended it was their misunderstanding? He began to scheme devices for selling the secret and circumventing Butteridge.
What should he ask for the thing? Somehow twenty thousand pounds struck him as about the sum indicated.
He fell into that despondency that lies in wait in the small hours. He had got too big a job on — too big a job….
Memories swamped his scheming.
“Where was I this time last night?”
He recapitulated his evenings tediously and lengthily. Last night he had been up above the clouds in Butteridge’s balloon. He thought of the moment when he dropped through them and saw the cold twilight sea close below. He still remembered that disagreeable incident with a nightmare vividness. And the night before he and Grubb had been looking for cheap lodgings at Littlestone in Kent. How remote that seemed now. It might be years ago. For the first time he thought of his fellow Desert Dervish, left with the two red-painted bicycles on Dymchurch sands. “‘E won’t make much of a show of it, not without me. Any’ow ‘e did ‘ave the treasury — such as it was — in his pocket!” …The night before that was Bank Holiday night and they had sat discussing their minstrel enterprise, drawing up a programme and rehearsing steps. And the night before was Whit Sunday. “Lord!” cried Bert, “what a doing that motor-bicycle give me!” He recalled the empty flapping of the eviscerated cushion, the feeling of impotence as the flames rose again. From among the confused memories of that tragic flare one little