Chapter XX: The Sea and the Air

A preoccupation that was “a rage”: for the next day was necessarily a day of battle, and it was a case of the telephone, the telegraph, and quick spinning-round.

Britain, meantime, and her added population, saw in the darkness hardly any ray; perhaps the Prince himself saw none.

Of forty-three super-Dreadnoughts docked to be overhauled, twenty-three only were ready, _plus_ ten American just come, three Brazilian, two Argentine, one Austrian, three Spanish; beside which, a tangle of Continental small-fry thronged Portsmouth Harbour, Swedish, Netherlands, German, French, Russian, together with five great greyhounds armed with six-inchers; these, and mosquitoes, were what white man had left to show.

On the other hand, it was known that fifty-five Japanese and Chinese, all over 16,000 tons, were patrolling the French coast from Havre to Calais; and that that day a forward movement of yellow man was due.

Twenty-five thousand red-coats massed upon the south coast—the guns of Dover—stood ready to make a row; and most Englishmen had quietly laid by some gun, or club, or old sword, to die game with—wind against the sea-drift.

Leaden, then, in that day were the spirits of men. The circumstance that the earth was to traverse Tempel’s comet in three nights’ time, though there was said to be no kind of peril in the meeting, seems to have deepened the blackness of humanity’s bile. Some black rain that fell during a period of midday gloom (due to fog), sent streams of people about the Italian Quarter careering with piercing screams through the streets, screaming “God’s comet is upon us!” All along the edges of pavements the sight of lines of men was to be seen, men seated with their heads bent to their knees, done for, dumbly waiting. During which, a certain deranged curate rapidly became a known personage, journeying the streets in surplice and hood, preaching with his finger the finish of things. And Life began to be a stagnant thing, and to gangrene in that dark.

It was, then, with hearts draped in crape that men attempted to conduct services in churches at that afternoon hour of the navy’s weighing; and it was in such spirits that the Prince himself left Spithead with his following of ships, manned mainly by the nucleus crews of old Fourth Division ships, by the residues of the Royal Fleet Reserve marine ratings, and by the Volunteer Reserve, consisting, this last, of men of the middle classes.

In a conference with captains and admirals the Prince had said: “Let us go and see: a sailors’ grave is the sea; and it is sweeter to be eaten by a fish than by a worm.”

So they set out: and, as if destiny intended that as little loss as possible should attend the landing of the millions of yellow men, a milky mist dimmed the sea.

They moved, then, close in single line ahead, pouring smokes sternwards which searchlights burning beneath the controls rolled in lurid beams, the ships’ shapes fretted round with sprays—a spectral procession to the Prince looking poopwards from the _Colossus_ bridge, they seeming as broad as they were long, dominant masses of majesty moving mutely to some mysterious deed or doom in the mood of some mysterious dream.

In succession a motor-pinnace, a hydroplane, and a destroyer came hastily in with news that the forefront of a floating locust-host was already four or five miles from the French coast, from St Valéry to Dunkirk, and that the Oriental navy was at present pacing the sea with its rear in the longitude of Hastings, and its front on Pevensey.

Then a mysterious wireless was received from a tiny cruiser-scout that the enemy were more numerous by five Dreadnoughts than had been estimated—a crushing message, incredible, until it was suggested that they might be the ships once hypocritically proffered to German purchase, and then asserted to be wrecked.

Then arrived the wireless that at the back of the enemy’s line of battle was a 2000-ton yacht flying the Dragon-flag, to which the enemy’s Admiral Commanding had been called to a conference—she probably bearing Li Ku Yu.

The floating host in junks, flats, and barges were said to be moving very slowly on, most with the help of oars, some with an elementary paddle-wheel astern in the fashion of Rouen river-barges. A ration of some green mess was being given out, and peals of laughter screaming across the sea from some of the craft.

A shadowy shape or two soon after this began to show ahead, the Prince at that moment up a control, gazing through marine glasses. His lips muttered. He span to order nine knots, and was glass-gazing again.

Immediately afterwards the shadows ahead vanished.

Now, it was evident that the enemy had no reason to be eager for an engagement. The few troops and coast-guns ranged against the locust-host, the few scores of submersibles lurking inshore, could not exclude the innumerable: so that, if the yellow fleet merely interposed itself between the white fleet and the locust-host until the landing should be accomplished, it had no other military object. Hence when the shadows vanished, the supposition that they shrank from a pitched battle was established.

So did the white fleet shrink: for even if the whole yellow fleet was sunk at the expense of the destruction of the white, nothing was gained: the locust-host would land.

Destruction, then, somehow, for life, but not mutual destruction, was the white man’s captain’s ticket; and destruction, somehow, for fun, but not mutual destruction was Li Ku Yu’s ticket. They shunned each other.

And as the shadows vanished in mist the Prince had his plan. A hiss of “the mist!” was on his breath now. It was a white mist, for white men. When he span round, there was that in his eyes which was startling, and he looked taller. From nine knots he ordered five, and dropped down the tripod-steps.

At about the same time, however, Li Ku Yu, fourteen miles eastward, was in a yacht’s crow’s-nest, watching the execution by his Admiral of a stroke of strategy which he had inspired; and he, too, dropped his spy-glass from eyes that had lights of guile and triumph in them—he, too, in a glee at the mist, that from minute to minute thickened. It was a white mist, like white men dead.

As for the Prince, astern of his file of titans came an array of eighty-three small-craft of every sort, British and foreign, old ram-monitors, sloops, torpedo-gunboats, old Scotch coastguards, unarmoured cruisers, mother-ships, R.N. Reserve Merchant-cruisers, destroyers, torpilleurs, following for following’s sake: all which by trumpet call running down nineteen miles of ocean he got rapidly mobilised into a stationary line abreast lying east-and-west, mixing with them twenty-five picket-boats fitted with dropping-gear for 14-inch torpedoes, and thirty-two hydroplanes with hundred-pound bombs; and he steamed thence leaving them heaving in serried series on the swell which gently heaved, secreted in haze, teeming with many hundreds of torpedoes, prepared for whoever might come rushing that way—prepared in perishing to perish amid a tremor of western Europe.

They were not, indeed, destined so to do, and end: for, far eastward, the trap which the Prince laid had been laid for _him_—still more effectively perhaps: but, if it had happened so, maybe they would have left a memory among men.

The Flag-ship signalled eighteen knots, her bow now south-east.

When next in contact with the enemy an hour later, the white ships were steaming west upon the yellow ships which were steaming east, both in single column line ahead.

The _Colossus_, still at the head of her line, opened upon the shadow which the _Ibuki_ was two miles away: opened in ghostly gong-shouts at which the white fog shivered; and a gun of the _Ibuki’s_ forward 12-inch battery cracked. But she did not answer; put her helm hard to starboard, and immediately was the rearward of a line flying under forced draught westward.

On which the Prince, like an omnipresent spirit flitting and filling the _Colossus_ conning-tower, said to himself: “It isn’t fighting they’re after! I have them dead—Unless——” he sent his eyes out over the sea.

At that instant he was entering a region of sea where a twelve-mile line of submersibles lay submerged, to end him in one belch.

They did not depend upon periscopes to see, lest they should torpedo their own fleet, but had out telephone-buoys, awaiting a megaphone signal when the moment of action should come, the buoys being just awash—with slight chance that the white line-of-battle should spy them through the hazy air five hundred yards to starboard.

Br. small-fry.
● ● ● ● ● ●

Subs. 12 miles.
● ● ● ● ● ● ●

○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
Jap. 10 miles. Br. 9 miles.

But in one of the submarines near the east end of the series the unforeseen was being transacted—a big boat of 800 tons with a 2000-mile surface-range, whose name had once been “_E3_” she having been British. She had once sunk, been resurrected, captured by the Japanese in the East; and something extraordinary that had happened in respect of her in a raid upon Melbourne Harbour had once caused her to be called “haunted.”

At any rate, the fog that day of battle apparently gave up all its ghosts to go into this boat. Five minutes after her sinking in the waiting line an accident had happened—the sea beginning to pour into the engine-room by the ventilation-mast valve—unaccountably!—the indicator pointing to the “shut” position.

This had been remedied—the stern ballast-tank half emptied, the inflow more than kept down by the bilge-pump—and the crew, under strict orders not to emerge to the surface, retreated into the midships section after closing the bulkhead.

But now they were shattered men all—from commander to artificer, the very spirit of panic rattling their teeth, blanching their cheeks. They could not speak—sat astare, waiting for what would happen next there in the lap of the sea.

Nothing happened—for five and twenty minutes: but then with wild hearts they were aware of vapours pouring, fumes of chloride; and now they were flying about like lunatics immured in a fire.

It is believed that the heeling may have upset acids in the accumulators, causing short-circuiting and the smouldering of vulcanite fittings; anyway, the lieutenant, himself a ghost, gave the order of retreat into the fourth (torpedo) section, determined not to emerge to the surface: and this was done.

But they had not been in there six minutes by the clock when, like a flock of mice, their hairs on end, they were fleeing out in a squealing squeeze; and now, wildly silent, but decided, they took matters into their own hands: and before long the boat was bobbing up to the top.

The Prince from the _Colossus_ saw them madly springing from her at random into the sea about three points on his starboard bow.

Steering a point nearer to starboard, he spied a little of the line of telephone-buoys—with a baleful harsh heart which danced in him. And, looking now for it, his eyes descried, or divined, north of the buoys the shadow of the shadow of a ship—waiting to give the megaphone signal to the submarines.

He then pricked off four points to port. So did the enemy. And he pursued their rearmost ship two miles westward of the west end of the submarines; but in his attempt to push them still farther upon his trap, they turned upon him, and now heavy battle began—their aim being to turn _him_ back upon _their_ trap.

For fifteen minutes he showed fight, both lines breaking up to present broadsides in a hotch-potch of horrible brawling at hardly three thousand yards between near ships, he washing himself in hundreds of tons of sudden thunderings like ducks fluttering in puddle, for he loved the dreadful drench, watching the _Ibuki_ cock her poop up a little more each moment, until she stood bow downward, and now her bowels rumbled with tumbling bum-lumber like Stromboli across the waters solemnly, and she sank; and the _Kashima_ not far; and his own foremast with all its tackle lashed the water.

Now he fled east-by-south, leaving his _Rio de Janeiro_, his _Odin_, his _Orion_ behind....

During this fighting, he had ordered twelve of his rear invisible ships to proceed north of the submarine row by its east end, in order to blow out of the water quickly, at withering close-quarters, before the hubbub of the main battle should lull, whatever enemy-ships were waiting there to give the megaphone signal to the submarines. And this had been duly done within the dim rooms of the mist—four of the enemy and five of the twelve being now foundering wrecks.

He, for his part, after reforming his line, started at his fullest speed east-by-south, with the yellow fleet in his wake.

And when the _Colossus_, now the rearmost of her line, was three miles east of the east end of the submarine row, he again turned west; engaged one enemy vessel in an almost momentary gush of gunshot; again threw their line westward; and they went leading him, always with a northward leaning, toward the submarine row.

In their former passage across the ambush of submarines, the ill-starred men had apparently dropped buoys which with disastrous accuracy now led their helms within a hundred yards of the submarine row; and when the sun was a blotch just above the horizon, and a shadow of night had already fallen, they lay stretched, a line ten to eleven miles long, along a twelve-mile line of submarines.

At the same time the Prince, coming west, two miles east, turned east with his line, to fly from the face of the immensity that impended. In those moments the dumbness of sun and sea and mist seemed a dumbness of shock and stound that such a thing should be about to be.

The British, in fleeing, could hear the megaphone of at least one of the six British which, appearing now at top speed out of the northern mist, went with obstreperous trumps of resurrection bawling along the row of telephone-buoys. “_Come forth!_” And twenty seconds later the air commenced to be in a dangerous state of wave-agitation, apparatus and plate to break, the plain of the sea to quaver and quake, rain to drip, and tremendous terrors to menace men.

And then that which the ear feared was suddenly come upon it; suddenly that which the tongue cannot utter was: mountains of overpowering sound that drowned men’s senses profounder down “than ever plummet sounded,” Alp-masses packed upon Cotopaxis of distracted clattering, like Arctic trumpeting rantings to Atlantic in the rumpus and rush of Jurassic dramas of disruption, terrorising rhetoric, reigning, long lasting....

For at least three Japanese torpedoes had pitched upon each of the Japanese ships—all at once; and on the farthest of the British ships eleven miles away every man dropped flat, slapped down by the blast.

Even to the floating locust-host far on the Normandy coast it suddenly seemed to be midnight bleak and stormy, their barges and flats wobbling on the water’s wash, while every English shop-window and window-pane between Deal and the Needles darted from its fastenings.

In London the Queen was seated alone in the gloaming over a gold brooch which she was making, when she noticed that the tools jumped and shook; and a minute later there came to her a muttering like thunder, then some kind of thump, then rougher thundering that kept on, like a truck running a rough road.

Away in the East End Eulalia was attending to her canary, when the cage-glass began to shake, to be followed by the same sounds; and Oyone in her prison was washing her hands when the water rocked, and soon thunder was moaning, then a thump, then rougher thundering....

It was said to exercise a doleful effect on the soul like the tolling of a knell.

Oyone moved to her pigmy grate where she sat musing in the gathering gloom.

There was no fire, for it was warm, and, being better treated than she had treated the Prince, she had a lamp, and no need of the firelight.

So she sat in shadow, first wondering if there had been an earthquake, and then wondering how the battle had gone: for her wardress had gossiped to her that this was the day of days.

Presently she became aware of bells ringing carillons; and then, when she had been seated so about an hour, suddenly there reached her from somewhere a shriek, brief and muffled; then, near the stair-foot, a scuffling and shuffling of feet which cut short her breathing, and sent her peering through the hole in the door. In another minute six men in masks came running, one tried the lock with several keys of a bunch, and soon they were with her in the room.

“You are free,” said one.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Don’t mind that. A motor waits you at the gate, and a boat at Dover. Be off.”

Her hands were at her hair, fast patting like her panting heart. In three minutes she was ready and running from her liberators, lest they should change—emissaries of the Landowners’ Protection League, to whom Oyone’s prison had been revealed by the Princess Elizabeth.

At the gate Oyone asked “Are you under my orders?” of her chauffeur, a man manifestly agitated, who said “yes,” and laughed to himself. She said: “Drive fast to Chingford”; and, as he started, asked: “What is the matter with you? What are the bells for?”

“Don’t know?” said he, amazed: “didn’t feel the thunder? Yellow fleet wiped out, yellow swarm gone back, hundreds of thousands of them caught, gunned, run down—wireless—it’s over—it’s done—we’ll scrape through all right now.”

In an impulse she half lifted her parasol to hit him; then pinned her veil with agitated fingers, muttering: “He has the air—he will sleep on your skins this day week.”

Now it was night, they passing—where alone it was possible—through by-streets, though, even there advance was not easy, the world wondrously astir as with new birth, such a trump had summoned it from the old centuries to the new to come. It took her two hours to penetrate to the outskirts of Epping Forest.

All the way she had a boding of trouble; and there what she had dreaded ever since her imprisonment fell upon her: her cottage all dark—Chinnery gone.

It was not astonishing, since she, intending to come back, had left him with hardly any money. Anyway, he was vanished, the cottage haunted with the absence of his feet; where to seek him she could not conceive; and the possibilities of that vanishing planted her a stunned stone on her doorstep.

Then she dressed herself in reds and splendours, and leapt into the motor for Dover; and now her thought was: “Before all else I will quaff wine, I will be a wife.”

But the turbulence of Li Ku Yu’s bustle and momentum whirled her as in a whirlwind’s urgency the moment she entered his presence at Dunkirk. She had meant to sell the air-boat, now tenfold precious, for marriage, casting off bashfulness and delicacy; but the moment he asked her: “Where is the air-boat?” she, as if mesmerised, told him.

“It is on the dunes!”

“No.”

“It is”—she laughed—“come, you will find it.”

It was really there, quietly lying on the sands near the spot where so many men had sought it.

For she, when lassoed by Commander Pilcher, had been in the act of springing into it, but, dragged back, had just had the chance to dash down the ratchet-lever; and Pilcher’s fall upon his face had prevented him from seeing, what distance had prevented the others from seeing, the going up of the boat into the gloomy air.

Moreover, since the night had been quite motionless, Oyone had known that the boat would parachute down to about the same spot, after rising beyond the atmosphere probably, and exhausting the petrol in the little engine.

To fall like a famished man upon the boat Li Ku Yu banished all from round about him and his screw-drivers, spanners and wrenches: and in twenty minutes knew its whole simple truth. Now it was his for ever.

But he could find no time to thank the giver, who glanced in vain into his eyes for a glint of gratitude. The Channel tragedy had slapped him with a blast of shattering wind and glass which had gashed his chin, as he lay off Dunkirk, and he had said: “My signature!” but it had been another’s signature; and this had pestered and tenfold energised him. Thenceforth he gave man or woman no rest, in one second living two.

So at that morning hour of seven, after her night of travel, he had Oyone off by train to take men to the wood of the Six Millions; and at the Casino des Dunes door told her: “Make haste come—to go back to England.”

For the news of the vanishing of Chinnery from the cottage had much irritated him, especially as he had no news yet of the Redlike Ray and “Taska” from the ship despatched to America for it.

As for the Six Millions, though England had rung with its discovery and presentation to the nation, he had no knowledge of this, for between England and France was now a great gulf fixed; and the Landowners’ League ambassadors had, of course, been careful to tell nothing of it, since the English Chancellor’s lack of gold was their only basis of negotiation.

Nor had Oyone in her imprisonment heard one word of the Six Millions to-do: so that she bent her steps to the old wood with the old assurance that the gold was there, thinking: “When I give him this, he will have to marry me.”

But “her” gold was gone! and now she was an aristocrat without “his” land, a thing of shreds and patches, wretched, devilish, addicted to killing.

She went back humble that night to Li Ku Yu; and he said to her, very ungratefully: “You see! you fail”—judging her with his eye where he sat cross-legged in apricot on tiger-skins, encompassed with adjutants and aides.

Her head bent before him.

“Your boat is ready,” he then said in English: “and first—the ray! make certain whether the lady, Bayley, has it, has it not; then—Mr Chinnery: seek! Farewell.”

She, very tired, eyed him lingeringly under her eyes, before she said: “Farewell.”