Chapter IX: Part 9

The floor of the cockpit suddenly altered its angle. It had tilted upwards. Now it tilted all to one side. Sick and dizzy, but secure, the boy hung in his straps as she lay over, and saw on his left hand a wing of the Bird rising and blotting out the heavens, while on his right hand the earth reared up so horribly that Bawne could only shut his eyes tight and hold on to the arms-straps of his seat, and gasp out a little prayer. Then the cockpit floor became more level, and the wind buffeted less. The roar of the tractor and the twanging drone of the wires made one's bones hum and tingle to the very ends of one's teeth and finger-tips. But nothing had happened. Perhaps nothing would!

He drew a great breath of relief, and his heart left off bumping. His mouth was cold inside and his tongue felt dry and stiff. Only Our Lord and Our Lady and his guardian Angel had seen him funky, and for this Bawne was grateful. They understood, and--people--would not.

He guessed it about a quarter to six o'clock. By the genial warmth on one cheek and shoulder, and the way his shadow stretched over the pale grained ash-wood that lined the cock-pit, he knew the west must be upon the left.

He raised himself, craning his neck, and through the low wind screen behind him, against the background of a sky all flaming and boiling with molten gold and liquid amber, he saw the wide square shoulders and tall helmeted head of von Herrnung, the hard eyes staring unflinchingly through their round glass goggles, the mouth set in a straight inflexible line under the tight red roll of the moustache.

The red-moustached mouth opened, and von Herrnung shouted something. Nothing reached the boy but a sort of muffled roar. He shook his head vigorously, and then--one does not wear the Signaller's Badge for nothing!--released a stiff little gloved hand from its grip on the arm-rest, and rapped out with his clenched right fist on the edge of the fuselage:

"_I--can't--hear!_"

The Code was understood. The helmeted head, some four feet distant, nodded. One of von Herrnung's gauntleted hands freed itself from the steering-bar. Its knuckles drubbed out the question:

"Have you the brown satchel?"

Bawne had quite forgotten the brown satchel. He screwed back his head and looked down and there it was, lying on the numb knees of him, buckled to him by the tough strap of pigskin that held him in his seat. He nodded assent, and signalled:

"All right!"

"Good!" von Herrnung signalled back through the hurly-burly of the Bird's transit. Bawne mustered courage to knock out:

"Where are we? When shall we go down?"

Von Herrnung's right hand lifted itself, and described a sweeping half-circle. The brusque gesture answered Bawne's first question, bidding him look and see.

The boy, impeded in his view by reason of his small proportions, wriggled in his straps so as to get his chin well over the gunwale of the Bird's fuselage and the buffetting wind that was dug up and spaded over her bows by the dizzying revolutions of the tractor, got hold of him and pummelled and buffetted him again. Her course was still north, the sun was setting in great smoking lakes of gold and sulphur on her left as she flew. Thick patches of dark green bushes that probably were woods, reddish-green blotches that might be heathy commons, shiny, square patches that he guessed at as reservoirs, toybox villages that were thriving suburban boroughs, specks that were villas, glittering ribbons that suggested canals, and one broad shiny stripe that was a river with tiny boats upon it, were swirling from right to left, sweeping along in the opposite direction, under the rushing body of the winged thing that bore him, ruled by the hand of von Herrnung upon the steering-wheel.

Behind her a chaotic, formless greyness brooded on the horizon, innumerable spires rose out of it and a glittering haze hung over all. That was London, the great grimy Mother of Cities tearing away from her little son at eighty miles an hour. The shriek of an engine and the rumble of a train reduced by distance to infinite tenuity pulled the boy's eyes downwards. A weeny mechanical toy that meant one of the double-humped colossi of steam traction, dragging a string of match-box goods trucks, raced another locomotive, towing a crowded passenger-train neck and neck along the spider-fine perspective of gossamers that meant the Great Eastern Railway. Now fear was swamped in the sheer joy of the experience. This thin air that kept you perpetually gulping and swallowing saliva, made you feel more than ever how good it is to be alive.

Billows and billows of green, interspersed with patches of purple heather, meant Epping Forest, though he did not know it. A great aggregation of grey walls and housetops, looking like a section of an old wasp's nest, stood for Waltham Abbey as the Bird drove on. Quite a tangle of the shiny grey-blue streaks that were rivers meant Lea and Orwell, Ouse, and their trouty tributaries. East England rolled away underneath like an endless carpet woven in irregular patches of many hues. Green and brown, grey and yellow, and innumerable shades of these, so tempting in their suggestions of good things to eat that a most unheroic hunger reminded the schoolboy of tea-time, hours and hours gone by.

He looked round in search of von Herrnung, who maintained unchanged the same attitude, his shoulders level, his unseen hands steady as rock upon the wheel of the steering-pillar, his mouth shut tightly, his hard eyes ranging ahead or lowered, as he conned his course in masterly fashion by aid of the roller-map, protected by its transparent, rainproof casing, or the compass, clock, altimeter, and other instruments gimballed in the wooden frame in front of the pilot's seat.

"How long?" the small fist rapped out. Von Herrnung detached a hand and signalled in answer:

"One hour!"

"When do we go home?"

"We go home now!" the hand signalled, and the boy settled down in his seat to wait.

Between hunger and weariness he dozed, and soon slept soundly, his hands hanging laxly over the leather arm-rests and his head nodding over the brown satchel lying on his knees. It figured in his dreams as something huge, oppressive and uncanny, that suddenly took to itself malevolent life, spread a pair of wide leathery bat-wings, and would have flown away but that he gripped it fast.

"No, no! You shan't! I promised!" he heard himself crying, and suddenly the thing collapsed limply in his grasp and became nothing but a satchel, and he was awake. Awake and very stiff and rather sick and sleepy, and with the salt smell in his nostrils and the salt taste in his mouth that meant--that could only mean the Sea.

He looked over the gunwale and cried out in astonishment. For a vast carpet of rounded woolly-grey-white clouds lay spread beneath. The carpet beginning to rise and the cockpit floor to incline downwards, a thin clammy fog suddenly blotted out everything. The Bird had dived through a field of woolpack mixed with ground-fog. Now flying some hundred feet beneath it, she regained her level, in the clear light stained by the sunset as water in which a dash of red wine is mingled, the light that is the aftermath of a radiant summer's day. And, with the smell of the sea sharper in his nostrils, the boy became aware of moving, muddy-grey water, with ships and boats and steamers on it, far down below.

Now the southerly breeze that had steadily tagged on some twenty-three miles an hour to the Bird's eighty odd, began to veer and come in strengthening puffs and gusts from the north-west. Swirling eddies of air came upwards from the water, rocking the machine as a swell takes a boat at sea, and splashed upon the frail, silk-covered wings of the aeroplane in deluges of invisible spray.

On the right hand and the left were wide stretches of muddy grey salt water, banks of sand, and drain-piped foreshore merging in patches of potato and swede and yellow squares of unripe corn. Clusters of white dots, where shingle and sea-walls bordered the drab, restless water, were fishing hamlets, villages and little coal-port towns. Upon the north bank, rapidly receding in distance, could be dimly sensed, beyond a dense fringe of masts standing close as pins in rows upon a pincushion, the oblongs and squares and rectilinears of docks and shipyards, stone quays, and piers and tide-basins, mixed up with blocks and streets of sheds and warehouses, stations and goods-yards, and huge, many windowed factories, whose towering chimneys yet belched forth thick black smoke-gouts, licked by red tongues of flame. Though even if the Saturday noon steam-siren had not silenced the throbbing of pneumatic rivetting-hammers and the roaring of steam coal-shoots, hydraulic grain dischargers and oil-pumps, and all the hellish hubbub accompanying the huge export and import trade of Yorkshire and Lancashire with North Europe and the Continent, these sounds would not have reached the ears of the boy in the aeroplane save as a dull and muffled murmur, vaguely sensed, through the musical moaning of the stay-wires and the racket of the tractor-screw.

Now the sunset was behind. The land was rushing back upon the right and left-hand. The two-mile-wide river was broadening to a great estuary, vaster than the Thames, between Fort Victoria and Shoeburyness.

Long crawling strings of linked-up barges, sailing vessels of the old windjammer type and yachts of the latest rig, battered tramp and collier steamers, high-sided rusty looking oil-tankers, pilot-cutters, coastguard motor-launches, whole fleets of steam-trawlers, thrashed up and down its broad south side fairways or cannily negotiated the treacherous channels of the north bank. Ocean-going giants of the Merchant Service, flaunting the White Bordered Jack, or the Red Duster, or under Admiralty Warrant, displaying the Blue Ensign. Behemoths of the North Sea passenger-service showing the three-striped merchant-flag of Germany--or the tricolour of the Netherlands, or the Crosses of Norway, Sweden and Denmark--with more rarely some big grey armoured cruiser upon harbour and Coastal Defence Service, or a brace of stumpy, square-ended patrol-boats, or a trio of the stinging black hornets we have learnt to call torpedo-boat destroyers, ranging in company upon some business of the Powers that order Britannia's naval affairs.

Fascinating, wonderful to look down upon. Alike, however diverse in size, shape or uses, in the impression of flat unsubstantiality conveyed to you--together with the doubt that the emmets crawling upon them could possibly be life-sized men. A drifting daisy-petal meant a smart private steam-yacht. You looked down from two thousand feet above, on the open-lidded snuffboxes that signified the fire-control and signalling-stations of some Leviathan of the Home Fleet, and a string of black holes jabbed in an oval of floating white millboard represented her funnels, black discs or white alternately stood for her ventilators; and her imposing deckworks, her turrets or barbettes, her gun-houses and casemates, and the terrible monsters bloodthirstily nosing out of them, were reduced to a more or less symmetrical arrangement in thick or thin black lines.

The rosy light was greying. The gusts came more fitfully. To the south, upon the right hand, were stone-built fortifications with black muzzles of big guns poking from the ramparts, over stretches of salty marsh, drab-coloured mud-flats, and slimy rocks covered with blackened seaweed, sticking up from pale silvery sand-shoals, licked by the restless white tongues of the outgoing tide, and bumped by stranding buoys. Black dots and grey dots wheeled and scurried and settled. Crows and gulls were feeding ravenously as the tide drew off the flats and sand-shoals. And by the queer sensation in his empty stomach, Bawne knew that he too was ravenous.

From the beaconed north shore of the vast estuary basin, edged now by low rambling cliffs, and belts of shingle and sand, a long curving headland with two lighthouses at the crook-end, rushed now towards the Bird at what seemed the speed of an express train. Bawne winced as the tall granite towers, topped with helmet-shaped domes of rust-red iron, rose up like twin giants threatening to destroy. An iron balcony with a flagstaff and signal-mast ringed the base of each dome-top, a stairway spiralled round each shaft to a railed stone platform well above high-water mark. And a shrimp-sized man in a red guernsey waved a speck of blue handkerchief, and bellowed a disproportionately loud greeting through what was presumably a megaphone. In reality the lighthouse-keeper was indicating the M. O. cone storm-signal which hung point downwards from the west end of the yard-arm, presaging a south-west or north-westerly gale. Whether or no this warning was lost upon von Herrnung, proof of its value followed. For a great upleaping billow of brine-tasting wind caught the Bird as she flashed past the twin lighthouses upon the headland, tossing her upwards like a withered leaf. And a curved iron shutter in the nearer of the two rust-red dome-tops rolled down exactly as the nictitating membrane of a bird's eye does--and with a wink of glass from the prismatic reflector, a broad triple beam of blinding-white acetylene light leaped north, east and south. In the same instant upon each side of the flashing tractor, the boy sensed a vast, shimmering, liquid restlessness. Here was the Sea, the very Sea.

*CHAPTER XXXIII*

*BAWNE LEARNS THE TRUTH*

Something in the blood of the child answered to the call of the Ancient Mother. He cried out, half in terror, half in delight, and the cockpit tilted so suddenly that he was violently jerked against the seat-back and the canvas bulkhead behind him. Looking up he saw a large old moon of luminous yellow, sailing away overhead through a sky all shot with pink and grey as though hollowed out of a fire-opal. The Bird was rushing through space at ninety miles an hour, and great lumps of cold salt wind splashed over Bawne and took his breath away, and his hands were numbed with bitter cold and his legs were legs of ice.

So brave a spirit dwelt in his little breast, that the sob that heaved it and the tears that stung his eyelids and dimmed his goggles, were swallowed and blinked away as soon as shed. The cockpit became level, and there was an imperious rapping behind him, on the upper canvas deck. He turned his head and met the hard unflinching stare of von Herrnung, who held in the hand with which he had rapped a bitten piece of chocolate. Still munching he signalled:

"Hungry?"

He smiled grimly as the boy nodded in the affirmative, stuffed the bit of sweetstuff into his mouth, produced from its cache below the level of the upper deck another square of chocolate, tore off the silver foil with his teeth, and crunched it greedily.

He smiled, because of a queer tickling pleasure he felt as he did this, akin to the sensation experienced when his taunts had tortured Patrine. "Take care of my dearest!" he fancied he could hear her saying.... Not until she had committed herself to that incautious utterance, had he, von Herrnung, realised what rich vengeance on the desired, hated woman might be wreaked by the simple act of carrying off the boy, whom he had regarded until then as a mere bag of ballast; less useful, but certain to prove less troublesome, than the Cockney-tongued Welshman, who might or might not carry a cheap revolver in the hip-picket under his overalls with which to enforce his protest against being taken away.

Von Herrnung was himself armed with a Browning automatic pistol. A deadly shot, he would have been capable of dealing with half a dozen Davises upon the solid ground. But, no lover of avoidable risks, he saw himself steering with one hand and shooting with the other, while Davis sat astride the chair in the observer's cockpit, and argued with an eighteen-and-sixpenny Birmingham four-chamber, loaded with the cheap little cordite cartridges, whose pea-sized bullet can kill a fine big man.

"What is this? You are sick?"

Even while keeping his ears open and his eyes skinned, as he negotiated the Bird through a choppy cross-current, conning his course between the compass and the roller-chart-map, now illuminated by an electric bulb, his great shoulders shook with merriment as he saw the boy's head sink helplessly against the side of the fuselage, and his small body convulsed by throes of the sickness that is indistinguishable from the dismal malady of the sea. He had shut off the engine to shout to him. And in the sudden cessation of the tractor's racket, the deep organ note of the waters rolled in upon the hearing, mingled with the shrill piping of the wires and the ruffle of the freshening wind. As he switched on power once more, the broad white ray from the Bull Light leaped forth again and caught them as it ran eastwards over the tumbling white-crested billows, flinging a huge shadow of von Herrnung over the canvas-covered space of deck before him and showing him to the white-faced boy who had twisted round once more to look at him, as a featureless human torso shaped out of solid ebony with diamond specks for eyes and gleams of grinning ivory teeth.

"When are we going home? Why are we over the sea now?"

Von Herrnung shut off again for the luxury of hearing and answering:

"I have told you because we are going home. Our home is--Germany. You will not be an English boy but German, once I have got you there!"

The shrill cry of anger that came from the open mouth of the white face was lost to him in the necessity of switching on the engine. He nodded pleasantly to the white face and, in the darkness of his own shadowy visage, there was the glimmer of a laugh. Then he applied himself to other business, for the tide would turn in an hour, and then the wind might blow hellishly from the nor'-west. Flying lower, he knew his course the true one, for the white headlight and green starboard-lights of a big steamer pricked twinkling holes in the thick grey dusk to northward on his port beam. He told himself she was one of the Elbe Company's big bluff-bowed liners making from Newcastle for Hamburg Docks. The stern-lights of a sister-ship hailing from Grimsby, by her steerings, were also discernible in the mirk ahead, while the lights from her tiers of cabins made her look like a black water-beetle with golden legs, hurriedly scuttling over the sea. Following the course of the Hamburg-bound liners, even if one failed to make connection with one's accredited pilot, it would not be long before one picked up Borkum Riff Lightship and in due course, spiring silver grey against the pink-and-golden sunrise--the twin towers of Nordeich Wireless--marking the journey's end.

*CHAPTER XXXIV*

*THE BROWN SATCHEL*

The journey's end. A gust, tearing the mist that veiled the livid waters, showed the shadowy shapes of a procession of battleships, steaming southwards in single line.

You see the German assailed by the wind, now hard on the aeroplane's port beam, craning over, counting the speedlights passing diagonally underneath. Eight steel Leviathans, stabbing bright points of electric light through fog and funnel-smoke, with an effect of diamonds seen against a background of dull grey plush.

Eight rushing, neutral-tinted shapes--conveying a formidable impression of grim power, and force, and ruthlessness. A Squadron of Battle Cruisers of the British Home Fleet, new from the brine of Lerwick Waters, or the fierce green surges of Scapa Flow. Bound for Harwich Roads or Sheerness, or the Solent, to figure in the huge pageant of steel and steam, electricity, and man-power that would be called the King's Review.

What a chance, supposing _Der Tag_ were come already, for the delivery of a consignment of bombs! It warmed like a draught of wine, to think of the devastating effect of a couple of such German love-gifts, exploded in the bowels of one of those steel monsters, packed with complex machinery, high explosives, and inflammable oil. True, there might be a reverse to the medal, damping even to the spirits of a Superman. Wireless signals would go forth at the order of one amongst a little knot of dark figures on the forebridge of the Flagship, warning each of those grey monsters of its danger. Not an armoured cruiser scouting for them on the horizon, not one of all the torpedo-boat destroyers in their vicinity, not a submarine nosing in the thick cold darkness below the restless white crests, but would join in the man-hunt that must ensue.

How the dusk would spring alive with the eyes of foes, and long rays of searchlight would go probing, and the mobile noses of guns great and lesser would be thrust from their hoods of proof-armour, sniffing bloodthirstily for the enemy up in the sky. While from the Flagship's mothering side, a Navy seaplane, armed with a Vickers' machine-gun, might swing out and plop upon the water, rise from the white snarl of waves with a vicious scream of her propeller, and, keen as a gull-hunting sea-hawk, launch herself in chase.

_Pfui_! The thought made one sick at the stomach. Cold, isolation, and darkness tried a man, no matter how courageous. Buffeted by the bitter wind, aching and stiff with weariness, lonely with the loneliness of some small bird of the migratory order, outstripped by its companions on the wild journey over the North Sea, the Kaiser's messenger drew energy and cheer from the conviction that the dispatches entrusted to him by Imperial favour were such as would hasten the arrival of The Day.

The Day, to which all good German officers devoted the second toast on Mess nights. When the Black Eagle would swoop, and the nodding witch-hag Britannia would awaken from her whisky-dreams of World-Dominion to find her armour obsolete, her sword rusted in its scabbard, the trident of Sea Power stolen from her hand.

Hurrah! for The Day when the programme arranged by the All Highest War Lord and his War Chiefs should be carried out in the complete overthrow of British Supremacy, the seizure and domination of British territory, the solution of the Great German Race Problem, in the transformation of the United Kingdom into a German dependency,--the annexation of India and the British Colonies--and the forcible Teutonisation of the hated race.

Aha! Much to be locked in an Imperial messenger's letter-bag, thought von Herrnung, greedily. What in the way of guerdon might not be lavished by a gratified All Highest upon the danger-braving and to-duty-fearlessly-devoted Flying Officer who should accomplish the Secret Mission, and lay the brown satchel at the Imperial feet.

Probably the Second--tchah!--the First Class of the Iron Cross--with military promotion, and a handsome sum in hard cash. Laudatory articles in the State-inspired Press organs and Service Gazettes presently. Meanwhile, was it fitting that the future of von Herrnung should lie, not upon the knees of the gods, but on the lap of a little, seasick English boy?

True, the brown satchel was firmly strapped to the boy, now lying in an attitude of complete exhaustion, with one arm thrown over the gunwale, and his small round head feebly nodding to and fro. The child knew nothing of the Imperial dispatches. And yet--one would have been wiser to keep the bag about one, in spite of the danger of fouling the controls.

It will be gathered that a chilly premonition of imminent disaster crawled in the veins of the Kaiser's messenger. Hunger and fatigue were spurring von Herrnung to imaginativeness unworthy of a Superman.

Now he knew his frail winged craft beset by cunning, treacherous enemies; the invisible air that cradled and supported her, only waiting to destroy. Other elemental forces, Gale, Lightning, Hail, Waterspout--in collusion to bring about her swift and speedy ruin. The Sea, no less than these, was an implacable adversary, reaching up innumerable greedy hands to drag her down and drown. The hawk-hoverer would have been a help at this juncture if one had had some previous experience in the use of it. As things were, it was wiser to leave the Englishman's invention alone. A labouring beat admonished the man's quick ear of impending engine-trouble. Ah, if the motor, that was the living heart in the aeroplane, should break down at this juncture, or the human intelligence perched behind the roaring tractor falter, the game was up. Kaput for von Herrnung, he very well knew.

As though the very fear had brought on the catastrophe, the revolutions dropped. Below 1000, said the indicator's trembling finger, and there was a miss. The bang!--bang! of a back-fire followed. If one had believed in God, now, this would have been the time to pray to Him.

But now the aviator's keen eye, peering downwards through Sherbrand's binoculars, picked up something that had emerged with a sudden yeasty swirl among the white-crested waves. No handsomer nor bigger than an under-sized steam-trawler, the casual observer might as such have accepted her. But a moment more, and fore and aft of the stocky little pseudo-steamer, stretched the long snaky, whitey-brown hull of a submarine.

U-18, on observation-service off Spurn Head, or a Britisher? An Evans signalling-pistol, loaded, and with a supply of spare rockets, was fixed in a cleat beside the instrument-board, within reach of the pilot's hand. The altimeter, illuminated by the electric bulb, gave an altitude of six hundred, as von Herrnung snatched the pistol, and fired, aiming towards the sky.

The shot was followed by a second detonation, and a brilliant crimson light illuminated the grey welter, throwing up orange balls of fire as it ascended, to burst in showers of incandescent sparks. Switching off, von Herrnung strained both ears and eyes for an answer to his signal. With the cessation of the motor the diapason of the North Sea rolled upwards through the twilight with a threatening of storm. As the weather-cone had presaged, a gale was coming. It blew strongly from the north-west. The engine back-fired again, and von Herrnung swore at it, trying to make out the nationality of the submarine running on the surface six hundred feet below. There were half-a-dozen tallish figures on the narrow man-railed catwalk running along her hull forward, and one upon the screened-in platform of her humpy conning-tower.

Then the blue-white ray of a searchlight leaped forth illuminating her bows and forward torpedo-tubes--revealing the long neutral-coloured hull with the Wireless mast raised for use and soapy seas hissing off the armour-plate. A backwash of brilliance picked out the black-white-and-red Jack of Germany, fluttering from a short pole-mast sternwards. Signal-lights of white and two colours broke out upon another slender mast aft of her conning-tower, and winked and jabbered. U-18 was in touch with her man.

It was quite time, for the Bird's engine hiccupped more and more disastrously, and her pilot's frozen hands could only guess the steering-wheel. He grunted relief. _Sapperlot_! One's star had not deserted one. Once more the Prussian Field-Flying Service would, with reason, quote von Herrnung's hellish good-luck.

Meanwhile the submarine's three lights chattered volubly in German Navy Code. Do Not Attempt Make Harbour. Heavy Weather Coming. Original Orders Cancelled. Heave To. Will Stand By To Take You Aboard. To which von Herrnung, keeping pace with U-18, replied with long and short flashes of an electric signalling-torch. Understood! What Is the Sea Like? Keep Off and On. Am Coming Down!

And he came forthwith. The Commander of U-18, standing on the little platform over which furious seas were slashing, watched him critically through a pair of Zeiss binoculars. You, too, are asked to see him; pulling round the Bird's head into the teeth of the nor'wester; shutting off her hiccupping engine, implacably thrusting her nose seawards, and diving with a splendid swoop into the widening paths of spirals that ended amidst the angry surges below.

Hitting the North Sea with so shattering a slap that the Bird's landing-carriage crumpled and buckled, and the frail spars of her wings crunched like the bones of a small bird in the jaws of a hungry cat.

A fierce green sea leaped, towered, and broke, dumping a ton of water on von Herrnung, and knocking the breath out of the man. He tore open the safety-belt as consciousness left him, and recovered in the warm benzine-flavoured stuffiness of the officer's cabin aboard the U-18, to the stinging of schnapps in his mouth and gullet, and the cheer of German words in his ear.

"Hey now, hey now, we are coming about. That is well! Drink another draught, comrade! You have had a hellishly narrow squeak. Another time, when flying oversea with dispatches, start early, pick your weather, and ship a life-belt, if you are wise!"

Thus Lieutenant Commander Luttha of Undersea-boat No. 18. You see him as a spare, weather-bitten, black-bearded officer in a full panoply of yellow oilies, and a sou'wester shading little eyes, sharp as lancet-points and now twinkling with his bit of fun.

But the word "dispatches," coupled with the jest about the life-belt, volted through von Herrnung like the discharge from an electric battery. He gulped and choked, collecting enough tinned air to talk with, and at last got out:

"The boy--the boy, with the satchel! Where is he, in the devil's name?"

Thus adjured the Commander answered pithily:

"If you mean the half-drowned little English rat Petty Officer Stoll found washing about in the bows of your aviatik, he's alive. Don't worry about that!"

Through the churning foam upon his lips, von Herrnung spluttered furiously:

"_Himmelkreuezbombenelement_! What is the _verdammt_ boy to me? It is the satchel that was strapped about the boy's middle I am asking for--the Emperor's--_Herr Gott!_--I shall go mad!"

He staggered to his feet, hitting his head a stunning crack against the low white painted overdeck. The incautious reference to the Emperor electrified those who heard, squatting on the little folding bunks, or kneeling on the palpitating deck of the little officer's cabin, into desperate activity. Von Herrnung found himself boosted up a ladder and through a manhole, guided along a narrow slippery catwalk, washed by the surges of the North Sea, to where a collapsible boat was being emptied of a lot of shipped salt water, and the battered wreck of the Bird of War, lashed to the U-18's forward man-rail, was waiting the Commander's order to be finally abandoned to her fate.

*CHAPTER XXXV*

*NUMBER EIGHTEEN*

They launched the collapsible, and ransacked every cranny of the Bird's waterlogged fuselage. Not the ghost of a brown leather satchel rewarded their feverish search. In the forward cockpit the belt swung loose, the patent fastening had been opened by pulling the pin out. Clearly the boy had released himself when the Bird hit the sea.

"Let us go look at this boy!" suggested the Commander, on receiving the news that the Kind had breathed, and vomited sea-water. Luttha promptly led the way to the men's cabin, where Petty Officer Stoll and an earringed first-class seaman were working over a little limp naked body, outspread on the jiggetting deck-plates, in the raucous glare of the electric light.

Bawne was questioned, but nothing could be got out of him just then, except North Sea, so they wrapped him in a blue Navy blanket, and left him in charge of Petty Officer Stoll.

"This is hellishly unfortunate, you must know, Count," said the Commander, alone with von Herrnung in the vibrating steel box over the upper accumulators, called the officers' cabin, and separated from the men's quarters by a paper-thin sliding bulkhead of painted steel. You are asked to consider it furnished with seven narrow folding bunks, a trestle-table about as wide and long as a coffin-lid, some folding chairs, a marvellous array of charts on spring-rollers, fixed against the steel walls, a row of wooden lockers, a chronometer and auxiliary gyro-compass, several cylinders of oxylithe for respiratory emergencies, an electric stove of small size, a log-book and writing materials, a shelf of German literature, chiefly nautical reference-books; sets of dominoes, a violin and a cornet, speaking-tubes and a telephone, a gramophone and a giant cuspidor.

Von Herrnung, having swapped his water-logged flying-kit and soaked underclothes for dry flannels lent by the Second-in-Command, topped off with a pair of the Commander's spare trousers, and a guernsey frock belonging to the biggest man on board. You can see him supplementing the shortness of the trousers with a pair of long sea-boots: thrusting his huge arms into the guernsey, beginning already to be superior to his rescuers upon the strength of his family rank and wealth and his flying-record, his bulk and handsomeness, and his magpie pearl. He was of the Prussian top-dog breed and let others know it, even whilst smarting under his loss. That he felt it was shown by the livid pallor testifying to mental disquiet and physical exhaustion. But he judged it wisest to bluff, and did.

"The cursed machine would have drowned me if you had not arrived in the nick of time," he said suggestively, smiling under the red moustache that hung uncurled over his full sensual lips: "Suppose you say you found me swimming in the water--the aeroplane having foundered--it is merely rewording a report!"

"So many thanks!" ... returned the Commander, chewing hard at an unlighted cigar, sending a jet of saliva into the cuspidor, and smiling in a wry and dubious fashion. "But when I said things were hellishly unfortunate, I meant unfortunate for you!"

He moved to the green baize-covered plank that served as a cabin table, and took from a weighted document-file a pencilled paper-slip.

"As far as they concern you I will read you them as taken down by our Wireless operator. 'To Undersea-boat No. 18, on observation-duty off Spurn Head. Stand by to get in touch with, act pilot, and render aid if necessary to German Imperial Secret Service Messenger, crossing to Nordeich in British aeroplane.' The message comes from the German Embassy in London and the sender is Grand Admiral Prinz Heinrich. I have carried out my instructions to the letter. There is only _one_ man going to be broken over this affair!"

Von Herrnung knew who the man was. The Commander chewed some more of his cigar, picked his oozing yellow oilskins off the deck, thrust himself into them, crowned himself with his sou'wester, and said, taking a farewell shot at the cuspidor:

"And to brew more thunder-beer for you is not my desire! I am sorry for you, _bei Gott_! But to make game of those who command me is not the purpose for which I am commissioned, Herr Count. Nor have I any experience in doctoring reports. I rate only as Lieutenant in the Imperial German Navy--a man born of plain people--without fortune or even _von_ before my family name!"

Von Herrnung sensed that he had bitterly offended the only human being who could help him. He apologised subserviently, and catching at the straw afforded him by the Commander's admission of poverty, offered him the pickings of the wrecked aeroplane.

"For her instruments and signalling outfit--the seats and vacuum flasks even--are well worth the having, and her engine and tractor will sell for----" he named the sum in marks. "There is a patent stabiliser under her belly that I reserve for Majesty--the French have bought it or think they have!"

The speaker rubbed his hands. The hoverer might yet prove a sop for the All Highest. Imperial displeasure thus averted, all would go well. He added, feeling that he might actually afford the luxury of grumbling:

"As for me, I am what the English call 'fed up' with special missions. Conceive it. I am at a Hendon Flying School,--chatting with a handsome Englishwoman who has taken me for her lover--as I am waiting to get an inkling of the sort of invention the French War Ministry think worth buying for use in their Service Aeronautique. I am summoned by a groom of our Embassy to speak to some Excellencies--I follow and find myself clicking my heels before Prinz Heinrich, von Moltke, and Krupp von Bohlen in an Embassy auto-car--to be sent off at a moment's notice in a little cranky devil of an English monoplane--with secret dispatches for the All Highest--on a journey over the North Sea. With the barometer falling and the hour past five meridian. That's my luck!" The speaker paused for breath.

Luttha said, pulling his black beard through his fingers with a crisp sound, a trick of his when in meditation:

"There was no time to lose. And you have a wonderful record for long-distance flying. And luck it was!--if you had been of my mind. Tell me, did not _they_ give you plain instructions?"

"Do 'they' ever speak plainly?" von Herrnung scoffed; and Luttha answered calmly:

"Yes, to an ordinary man, who does not understand obscure language, they would have said: 'Lieutenant Commander Luttha, here is a brown leather satchel, with something inside it belonging to the Emperor. You will convey the satchel to Nordeich and deliver it to His Majesty's hands. And from the moment I entrust it to yours, it shall be close as your very skin to you. If you meet Death upon your errand, die with it next your heart!'"

The speaker added with a wounding accent of irony:

"Perhaps that marks the difference between a plebeian and a nobleman! I would have lashed it to my body, under my clothing. You strapped it about the boy! By the way, what is the boy?"

"The boy! ... Nothing! ... A piece of ballast, merely!"

Von Herrnung, warmed by dry clothes and exhibitions of schnapps, was fast recovering his characteristic arrogance. He added, with a shrug and a wave of the hand:

"As for the lost satchel, it may well be that duplicates of the dispatches contained in it have been sent to the Emperor by another messenger. That is the usual method, perhaps you are not aware?"

"Duplicates exist, but in only one place on earth will you find them, and that place is the London War Office!"

The Commander pitched his cigar-butt into the cuspidor, snapped the three stud-clips that secured his yellow oilskin storm-coat, and dug his piercing little eyes into von Herrnung's as he asked:

"Have you never heard of the War-engine of Robert Foulis, the Scottish sea-captain who first suggested to the British the use of steam as applied to battle-ships, and invented the screw-propeller and the big devil knows how many other things besides the mysterious, secret weapon that Great Britain has kept hidden up her sleeve a hundred and twenty-six years! It was offered by Foulis, then Earl of Clanronald, in 1812, to the British Government, and it frightened people like the drunken Regent and the Duke of York and Lord Mulgrave into refusing it. It was offered again to their War Office at the time of their Crimean War,--taken into consideration by the Duke of Newcastle and again ejected,--because--_Grosse Gott!_--it was too inhuman! As though a weapon that could end a War in a twinkling by sheer deadly effectiveness could be anything but a boon to mankind. _Pfui_! Such hypocrisy makes me vomit worse than thirty hours of submergence. Not because of its inhumanity has Britain stored up the old man's war-engine. Out of diplomacy, to brutalise the great Germanic nation into subservience under the rod of Fear!"

Luttha and von Herrnung, otherwise antagonistic, were alike in their rabid hatred of Great Britain. Luttha had talked himself plum-coloured and hoarse by now, but he went on, pounding the air with a knotty, clenched fist:

"Thus it was well done on the part of the Kaiser's secret agents to steal Clanronald's War Plan, on the brink of The Day to which we have drunk so long! Not the duplicates buried in the Whitehall strong-vaults, see you!--but the originals from the muniment-room of the Welsh castle, the country-seat of the present Earl. Less than an hour after you took flight from Hendon, London was alive and buzzing with the tale! ... How do I know? ... Does not a man know everything with Wireless? And you, with no inkling that you carried for Germany--Victory in the World-War that is coming--you who have lost Clanronald's secret, are a ruined man, _bei Gott_!"

He added, as von Herrnung broke out cursing and raving:

"As I have said, I pity you!--though you have tried to bribe me!--but it will not do to talk of suicide, for I shall prevent that! Your cartridges are wetted--your revolver will not serve you. And you will not get a chance to drown yourself, for I am going to submerge. My fellows have got the flying-motor out of the stirrups and stowed it away, with the auto-hoverer and the other things for the Emperor, whose property they are! Then we run, only periscopes showing, for the Gat of Norderney. There is a clear-dredged channel to Nordeich Harbour, navigable in any tide. You have to account there to the All Highest for the satchel, or I, _bei Gott!_ must account to him for it and you!"

And Luttha slid back the steel door, passed through the narrow gangway and shot up the narrow steel ladder to attend to affairs on deck. Two of his subordinates instantly replaced him. On no account was von Herrnung, the living proof of the Commander's fidelity to his instructions, to be left alone, you understand.

One would have said the Superman believed in God, he blasphemed Him so industriously. When he was quite spent and voiceless, the lieutenants offered him practical sympathy in the shape of gingerbread and lager beer. He accepted the beer, and sat on one of the sofas drinking it and brooding lividly, while Undersea-boat No. 18, with hermetically-sealed hatches, folded down her signal and Wireless masts, shut off her 2000 h.p. Diesel oil engines, sucked water into her ballast-tanks, and with only her periscopes showing above the surface, ran under her electric-motor power for Norderney Gat and Nordeich quay.

Behind her as she sped, a red stain upon the angry waters gave back the last rays of stormy sunset, smouldering out behind bars of drift-wrack, beyond the bleak east-country beaches and the long blue-black, desolate worlds.

Von Herrnung's private, personal sun was setting somewhat after the same fashion, amidst sable clouds of Imperial wrath. It was to sink below the horizon in deepest disfavour, rise again in The Day's gory dawning, and fall, its evil fires quenched in a drenching rain of blood.

*CHAPTER XXXVI*

*HUE AND CRY*

Even as petrol and air mingled in the Bird's cylinders, and Davis rotated the tractor and nimbly leaped out of the way of sudden death, the buff broadsheets of the _Evening Wire_ edged the kerbs of Fleet Street and ran up Kingsway to High Holborn. And from Ludgate Hill to Charing Cross, Pall Mall, and Piccadilly Circus, the raucous voices of newsboys yelled through a pelting hail of pence:

AMAZING THEFT OF A FAMILY SECRET.
STOLEN FROM GWYLL CASTLE
THE CLANRONALD WAR-PLAN.
AN ECHO OF CRIMEAN DAYS.
THIEF KNOWN. POLICE SANGUINE.
"COMMON CRACKSMAN'S ENTERPRISE OR DIPLOMATIC
STROKE?"

Strings of news-carts laden with bundles of papers were rattling east, north, south, and west. Trains were taking in the story by bales of thousands and disgorging it at every stoppage, as Von Herrnung opened the throttle, and the Bird raced a hundred yards or so, bumping like a taxi going over a bad road, then rose into the air, as gracefully as a mallard, and launched upon the first wide spirals of the aerial ascent.

The small audience interested in the aeroplane, her freight, and her behaviour, watched her as she dwindled in the sight and died upon the ear. The spectators in the enclosure had departed in dribbles, the last three-seater air-bus had rounded the aerodrome, landed and deposited the last passengers. Two or three over-enthusiastic students lingered, but the rest had shed their grimy overalls and betaken themselves home.

The mellow light of late afternoon lay sweetly on the wide expanse of treeless greensward and on the woods that tufted the horizon-line. Rooks and starlings were wheeling over distant tree-clumps, the bands no longer brayed or tootled, the mechanics were leaving the sheds and hangars, the waitresses were hastening to other employments, such as programme-vending at suburban music-halls and picture-theatres, the selling of stale _boutonnieres_ about the entrances of restaurants, the serving of drinks and suppers at night-clubs and so on.

On the verge of the white-marked oval from which the Bird had taken her departure, Saxham was standing with Patrine. Their faces were lifted to the sky as they talked together, and Sherbrand's eyes were irresistibly drawn to them, so heroic in mould, and so curiously alike.

There was a puzzled line between the Instructor's thick, fair eyebrows. He was ready to swear it was the same girl. But the face that had looked into his that night in Paris was somehow softer, younger.... It was not only the alteration in the colour of the hair.... If you had taken the big, hearty, smiling young woman of the Milles Plaisirs, and dipped her into a vat of hydrogen peroxide, so that not only her hair but her whole body had been bleached, you would not have accomplished such a transformation--unless the chemical had possessed the power to change the colour of her mind and soul.

The girl of the Milles Plaisirs had looked at you frankly, and spoken to you like a pal. In that atmosphere of sexual excitement, amongst those crowds of men and women, flushed with meat and wine and the desire of sensual pleasure, she had appealed to Sherbrand like a heather-scented breeze from the North.

Beautiful and big and sisterly, she had seemed to him who had no sisters. He had often wondered how she came to be in that place. But it had never occurred to him to lump her with the ordinary pleasure-seeker. He had read--more correctly than von Herrnung, who believed her from the first to have bitten deep into the Fruit of Knowledge--Purity if not ignorance, in her wide curving smile, and honesty in her clear unshadowed eyes.

What eyes they were, long, brilliant, blackly-lashed, browny-green as agate. What a wonderful voice came out of the depths of her splendid chest. The arch of her breastbone reminded you of a violoncello. How splendidly her head was set upon its column of warm, living ivory! Her firm round chin had a dint in it that the old Greek sculptor had failed to bestow upon the glorious Venus de Melos, the Lady of the Isle of Music. Everything about her was planned on the scale of magnificence. Six feet tall, she walked the earth like a goddess, or as women must have walked when the Sons of Light mated with the daughters of men.

Thus Sherbrand, meditating on his Fate to be, while Destiny limped towards him in the person of an undersized telegraph-clerk whose complexion, previously pallid, had deteriorated to dirty green. He began, extending a shaky hand, from which dangled a slip of limp paper:

"For you, sir. Rumball 'adn't got a picklock among his tools, so 'e burst in the door with a No. 10 spanner. They rung us up about twenty times while he was at the job. And the message is important, sir!"

"I'll see! Thank you, Burgin!"

Sherbrand took the telegram from the jerky hand and read:

"_Your--German--acquaintance--suspected--agent-- robbery--documents--national--importance. At--all-- costs--keep--him--until--I--come._"

The Chief's name at the end was the nail that clinched the thing. But the cry of Macrombie's undersized assistant was the hammer-blow that drove the nail to the quick. His sharp eye, following the climbing aeroplane, had seen her flatten and swing about and leap forwards, exactly as the carrier-pigeon strikes out its line of flight for home.

"My Gawd," he yelped out. "See there! Blimy, if the --'s not done us! Bunked it by air to Kaiserland while I was spellin' out the screed. Gone with the Bird--the Bird and the 'overing gear. My Gawd! Wot's to be done?"

"Shut your head on what you know!" said Sherbrand's voice in the pale clerk's ear as Sherbrand's hand fell ungently on his shoulder. "You've done your best! It's not your fault if luck was on the other side! But--" His eyes went to the Doctor's great figure standing beside the tall white shape with the hat of twinkling silver. "But the boy!" A sickness swirled up in him and a dizziness overtopped it. He caught at and gripped the clerk's thin shoulder to keep himself upright. "My God! How shall I break it to the Doctor," Sherbrand asked himself, "if that German fellow has carried off the boy?"

"Steady-O! Ketch on to me, sir.... Nobody's looking!" said the telegraph clerk. He was a hero-worshipper on a robust scale and Sherbrand his chosen deity. "This ain't our young Boss givin' in, but just his empty inside playin' tricks on him," he assured himself. To Sherbrand he said humbly: "If you'd come over to the cabin there's hot cocoa and toke there. Grub'll steady you, if you'll excuse me taking the liberty of saying so--and you can't do nothing till he comes!"

The person to whom Burgin referred had passed the entrance-gates, almost before the sentence left the lips of the clerk. Now his alert, upright figure came in sight, briskly turning the corner of the restaurant, and wrought to the point of ironic merriment by the greatness of the blow that had fallen on him, Sherbrand shook off his dizziness and faintness, straightened his tall body, clapped both hands to his mouth, and gave the huntsman's view-halloo:

"_Stole away! Stole--awa-aay!_"

Small cause for mirth, and yet he laughed, pointing to the dwindling speck high upon the north horizon that represented the worldly prospects of Sherbrand, and a handsome sum in cash. The Bird, just then entering a broad belt of gold-white mackerel-cloud, was lost to view in another instant. But the Chief had wheeled upon the pointing gesture, and seen, and understood.

Then he was upon them, saying in accents jarred with anger:

"How was this allowed to happen? You were warned. You had my wire?"

Sherbrand's mouth was wrung awry with another spasm of mirthless laughter. He fought it back and held out the crumpled slip of paper, saying:

"I did, but luck was on _his_ side. Thanks to a relapse on Macrombie's part, I got this after the Bird had flown."

"The Bird..."

The blue-grey eyes and the keen hazel met, and struck a spark between them.

"'The Bird.' He has taken French leave--or, more appropriately, German--by the help of your machine?"

Sherbrand nodded, setting his teeth grimly. The wailing voice of the pallid clerk came in like a refrain:

"'Ooked it. Bunked--so 'elp me Jimmy Johnson! With our young guv'nor's mono', and the gyro 'overer!"

Said the Chief, moving sharply towards where the Wireless mast straddled over the telegraph-cabin:

"He has adopted the only means of exit by which it was possible for him to escape. All railways stations are being watched, all highways patrolled by our agents, travelling in high-powered motor-cars. We are on the look-out for him at every ocean shipping-port. One road we left open, not having the means to block it--and that is the road of the stork and the swan! Decidedly, I might have guessed that he would play Young Lochinvar after this fashion. But until I left the ground an hour ago I did not know of the theft of the Clanronald Plan."

"The Clanronald--" Sherbrand was beginning, when the Chief cut him short.

"I had forgotten that you are as little wise as I was an hour back. Better glance at this paragraph while I make use of your O. T. installation and Wireless, and put the fear of Heaven into Macrombie, incidentally and by the way."

He thrust a tightly-folded copy of the _Evening Wire_ upon Sherbrand and vanished into the rum-flavoured stuffiness of the cabin, with the pallid telegraph clerk close upon his heels. And upon Sherbrand, in the act of unfolding the newspaper, rushed his Fate, in a hat of silver spangles: challenging the knowledge in him with blazing eyes well upon the level of his own.

"Mr. Sherbrand.... Tell me what has happened? Why do you look so--queer and--white?"

She herself was whiter than her narrow dress, and the mouth the eager rush of words poured from was pale under its rose-tinted salve. She hurried on breathlessly:

"They show no signs of coming back--it fidgets me horribly. And--I was looking--from over there, where I was with Uncle Owen,--when you called out, 'Stole away!' and waved your arm." She glanced at the sky, shuddered and looked back at him. "Am I silly? But all the same, the General told you something! I don't ask what! But I funk--I don't know why, but it's beastly--the sensation! Tell me I've nothing to be afraid of--I swear I'll take your word!"

That she was just then a creature full of fears was written large upon her. She might have quoted Queen Constance, who I think was also a galumpher, meaning a woman of big build and sweeping gestures, and an imperious temper withal. Sherbrand feared also, and the pang of solicitude for the pretty boy so unexpectedly dragged into the vortex of a diplomatic and political felony was, to do him credit, quite as sharp as the pang caused him by the rape of the Bird.

He answered: