Eva's apples

“Come, Chris. Don’t make us all look asses in the eyes of your Maker.”

“Asses?”

“Asses.”

“I’m going,” said de Jones, “not to my Maker—no: he is an usurper—but to my Unmaker! He is the true God.”

Lord Ottercove sat down dejectedly and stretched out his legs by the electric radiator. “The world,” he began, “is a heritage which has been committed into our keeping. It was not, I take it, put there to be unmade at will. It is not ours, Chris, to dispose of.”

“Oh, isn’t it?”

“It isn’t, Chris.”

“Whose is it, then?”

“Well, a considerable portion of it, measured in terms of property and money, happens to be mine.”

“Ah!”

“You smile at my alleged materialism. Unnecessarily, Chris! For it is only in the banks and company offices that this wealth—and it is much—is recorded in my name. I hold it as it were in custody for ... Providence (call it the Deity, Fate, Destiny, the Supreme Being, or the First Cause). We are but the stewards, the servants, as in the Parable of the Talents, from whom account of stewardship will be exacted by the Master. I have increased my five talents by ... I can’t tell you how much. As for you, Chris, you’ve absconded with the one talent entrusted to you. Which is worse than in the parable. You wonder at my prosperity. It’s faith, Chris, faith. Faith in money. ‘For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.’ Wish I was a preacher, like my father. I’d be the Archbishop of Canterbury now. For I like the sound of my own voice. The first condition of good preaching, Chris.” Lord Ottercove sat still, wrapped in thought.

Then he roused himself from his reverie. “Chris,” he said, “how much do you want for it?”

“What for?”

“The visible world. I will buy it from you at your own price.”

“Do you care for it so much?”

“Not a damn!”

“What do you want it for?”

“For my friend Vernon Sprott. Like Gautier, he is one for whom the visible world exists. I take it that you could ensure its existence.”

“I might. I don’t know.”

“How, Chris?”

“By reversing the process. By crippling the mechanism of the atom and reducing the electronic revolutions to a condition of slow decay in which alone life for us is possible.”

“Name your price.”

De Jones considered. “It will be,” he said in the tone of a solicitor calculating costs, “including all dues and charges, eighty million pounds sterling. Guineas, I mean.”

“Nothing doing. Good-bye to you.”

Lord de Jones turned round on the threshold. “What will you do about it, Rex?”

“Have you arrested.”

“On what charge? There is no law against introducing the Kingdom of God into this country.”

“Sedition. Instigation of atoms to mutiny. Under Dora.”

“But why, Rex? Tell me why.”

Lord Ottercove was a long time in replying.

“I will not have humanity let down,” he said at last.

“You and your humanity!” Anger had made de Jones inarticulate. “Running your secretaries off their feet. Putting the fear of God into your butlers. That last man you had has taken to drink, and is now in the last stage of delirium tremens. Gilbert has developed the St. Vitus’ dance, waiting on you and your follies. What respect have you ever shown to the atom? When you look at a man you make all the atoms in him jump the wrong way. Then about this war. You’ve gone right back on your pacific scheme. Oh, these business brains! Oh, these strong, silent men! Curse and damn your breed!”

Lord Ottercove had walked over to the sideboard and was pouring himself some Perrier water into a glass. “When you have done, please tell me,” he said, drinking.

De Jones was foaming at the mouth. “You and your confrère across the road—newspaper proprietors! Bags of money! That’s all you are!”

“And you’re an empty bag of money!”

“Give the public what it wants. That’s your line—the line of least resistance. But to write regeneratively is beyond your scope.”

“Regenerative degenerates!” bawled Ottercove. He bawled so loud that Gilbert came in to ask if his lordship wanted anything.

“Nothing from you.”

“Yes, m’lord.”

“Leave us alone.”

“Yes, m’lord.” Gilbert’s eyes danced. His face twitched. His hands trembled.

“Get out! I mean both of you. I’ve had enough of you all! Twitching drivelling imbeciles! Atom mongers! Flea trainers!” Lord Ottercove seized one of the eight chairs placed round the octangular table and flung it at Viscount de Jones. When the Editor of The Evening Ensign came in a moment later, Lord Ottercove flung the second chair at him. Outside his door a queue of secretaries, marshalled by Mrs. Hannibal and each nervously scanning at her file of papers, awaited the Chief’s summons. Time was when Mrs. Hannibal alone centralised all Lord Ottercove’s activities. The traffick proved too much for a single channel, and was accordingly decentralised, carried by a dozen streams. A dozen secretarial maidens were always in attendance in the ante-room, waiting for the signal to appear before the Chief, who shouted from his chair: “Forward, Miss Davis!” and hurried her: “Come on, come on!” And Miss Davis reported in a flutter: “We purchased 16 bottles of Apollinaris, of which you drank 3; that leaves us 13.”

“Carry them forward. Forward, Miss Badmington!”

“The franc account shows a balance of 7 francs which I have changed into pounds at the rate of 126 francs to the pound, making a total of 1s. 3d.”

“Forward, Miss Harrison!” And so forth.

And now as they appeared in the doorway, Lord Ottercove flung a chair at them, and they retired in disorder. This left him with five chairs, including the one he was sitting on. He flung the fourth chair at a literary aspirant whose dream was to contribute humorous articles to The Daily Runner, and the fifth chair at a lady who wished to sell him tickets for a charity concert in the Albert Hall, and, having flung the sixth and the seventh chair at some nondescripts who peeped through the door to see what was happening, he remained seated in the eighth and only chair in the room. Mrs. Hannibal came in with a fearless smile on her face, the practised smile of a lion trainer whose first rule is to show no fear of the lion for fear of encouraging the lion to behave in a manner compatible with his nature.

Lord Ottercove looked at her affectionately. “Do you admire my moderation?”

She admired him, and this physical symbolism of his political power, and the sincerity of his self-expression, and his freedom from sham convention.

Lord Ottercove seized the receiver—Mrs. Hannibal thought, to speak to Scotland Yard. She was wrong. Lord Ottercove was telephoning to his editors. Here was real news! The end of all things: something not to be missed.

News, he thought, such as Lord Northcliffe would have appreciated at its true value! There was no jealousy in Lord Ottercove. He admired Lord Northcliffe, and though secretly he thought he himself had no peers among living newspaper proprietors, he suffered from an inferiority complex in the presence of Lord Beaverbrook. And so he was glad of the exclusive news. In the beginning there was the Word. And in the end, too. He was proud that it befell to The Daily Runner to write the Omega. “I, Baron Ottercove of Ottercove, hereby announce the end of the world.”

His principal editor, he was informed, was dining out. “As ever! Just like him!” he muttered. “Dining, while the paper—not to say the world—can go to hell.” For some minutes he sat alone in his vast roof office, full of a strange wonder at the imminence of the fate which confronted mankind. At last, he had to believe it. He sat very still, while below the printing presses, with accustomed celerity, manufactured the tidings. Then a sudden foreboding overcame him. It was not so much that he feared the end for himself and his race: it was the uncertainty of it that gnawed at his nerves. The uncertainty of when and under what circumstances he might disintegrate. He stood by the enormous window with a wide view of London roofs, including that of St. Paul’s, and sadness filled his soul. An indescribable sorrow for all mankind descended upon him. But as the minutes passed, the need for action braced his nerves. Hatless he stepped into the lift, and passing the solitary commissionaire, dashed into the busy streets.

XXXIX.

Where he went, he did not know. He walked on and on, his straggling hair blown by the wind, and feeling a little like King Lear on the heath, till, cutting across the Park to the Marble Arch, several open-air meetings beckoned to him as a sign and a portent.

Two hostile meetings, of Free Thinkers and devout Christians, were held side by side, the speakers abusing each other at intervals, as though, Lord Ottercove thought, God and the Day were not in sight! The Christian protagonist, pointing at the blackboard on which a hen and an egg had been sketched by him, questioned his audience: “They talk of science, but what do they know? Can any of them tell me—can any of you here tell me who came first? The hen or the egg? Did the hen first make the egg, or did the egg first make the hen? Now, then, can any one here tell me, I ask ye? Can any of the science students tell me? Ye can’t. Well, I can tell yer!—God made them both!” And he looked round triumphantly.

“They tell us—these Christian fellows,” shouted the Free Thinker, “that Adam and Eve was sent to hell because Eve ‘ad eaten an apple. Now here is an apple.” He held up an apple for all to see. “Now, Ladies and Gentlemen, I ask ye: What is there in an apple? ‘Ere! And yet they tell us—the Bible tells us—that Adam and Eve was sent to ‘ell ‘cause Eve’d eaten an apple! Now I ask ye, Ladies and Gentlemen, can ye believe such a silly thing?”

“Free Thinkers!” shouted the Christian protagonist, pointing derisively at his antagonist not five yards away. “Free Thinkers!—Free Stinkers I call them!”

“Because they’d eaten an apple. Now here! Just look at it. Look at it! What is there, I ask, in an apple? And yet they tell us—”

Suddenly the urge to impart to this large gaping audience the momentous message came over Ottercove. It was the end of the visible world. In a few hours, perhaps in a few moments—at most in a week—they would have to face the Judgment. It was for him to break the news. What consolation had he to offer them? Call on their national pride in facing disaster calmly and stoically? Recall the serene joys of eternity? Dwell on the ultimate mercy of God? Or prophesy that there will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Biblical language came readily to his lips: Lord Ottercove, though few knew it, was the greatest living authority on biblical texts. He knew the Bible from cover to cover and backwards: indeed, he could, at a pinch, recite it by heart under an anesthetic.

“What does it profit a man,” he began in a loud robust voice, the crowds gathering round him, “if he gain the whole world (he paused as if to prolong the tension of the ‘poser’; then added quietly:) and lose his own soul? And why should it sadden a man if he lose the whole world (Lord Ottercove paused), never having gained it?” He had the pleasurable sensation of discovering (alas, as the world was about to let him down) that he had the gift of a preacher and prophet, a gift that could hold and sway multitudes. “Before I came here,” he went on, “I sat in the dim light of my study and I dreamed and meditated by the fire; and there came one of the seven angels, and he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and showed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, having the glory of God: and her light was like unto a stone most precious, even”—Lord Ottercove stopped as if seeking the mot juste—“like a jasper stone,” he said, “clear as crystal.”

The audience was writhing with excitement, but he stopped them with a movement of his hand, leaning forward over the stand and speaking almost in a whisper: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.”

Once indeed he was taken aback by an interpellation: “Why the dickens didn’t you stop the man, man?” yelled a dingy figure from the crowd, when he had spoken of the adventist-scientist.

“He wouldn’t stop!” returned Lord Ottercove. There was indeed no sort of good in stopping him, he hastened to add. Did they not know that an invention or discovery was at no time the monopoly of a single brain? What use indeed having this scientist arrested when his successor, whose hiding-place they could not know, was waiting to spring the mine?

But suddenly as he spoke a sort of mental cramp seized upon his brain, and he could not bring himself to utter another word. The harder he tried, the more did thought and words elude him. He stood gazing at them with what seemed to him an inane smile, but so magnetic, so masterful was his personality to the people around him that they stood fascinated, with their eyes glued on him, while he gazed back at them, in silence. Three minutes elapsed.

“Come on!” shouted a man from the crowd.

“Sir,” Lord Ottercove turned to him, “will you be good enough to allow me to complete my prayer?”

At which the interlocutor relapsed into the obscurity whence he had emerged.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” said Lord Ottercove: “I thank you for your kind attention.”

As he walked home, posters of his own newspapers informed him of the imminent dissolution of our planet. He groaned as he saw them. How bad! How unimaginative! Posters depressed him. Never a day, never an hour but that they would trot out some fresh disaster. A train derailed, liners colliding in the Channel, a steamer run aground in the fog, a bus toppled over, an airman lost in the Atlantic. Disaster, disaster, disaster! “Disaster mongers!” he called them. How the public must be getting sick of it. Never good news. He’d have to change all that. And suddenly, he remembered that he could not change it: disaster mongers had for ever triumphed.

At a street corner he bought a newspaper. “End of the World” meetings, he read, were being held in various parts of London. People began to close their shops, and the excitement increased to such an extent that later troops were called out, and large forces of police appeared at the street corners, and the approach to Downing-street was barricaded, the Prime Minister having refused to receive deputations who, resenting his wait-and-see policy, were eager to compel him to do something and do it now. Riots broke out in the east end of London, led by persons of an irreligious disposition desiring to have a last good run for their money, and men and women were committing suicide and going insane. There was a vast crowd in Trafalgar Square. The Bishop of London, it seemed, was addressing it. “Nearer my God to Thee, nearer to Thee....” Voices, out of time and tune, soared to the skies. A score of elderly virgins, earnest, spectacled ladies in white, sang with transport, invoking speedy transportation to the Seat of Judgment to be first among the Brides of the Lamb. “A scramble,” thought Ottercove. “A queue before a first-night. Wish I could be sure of my dramatic critic. Bright lad, Allan Scoffer, might manage to get in.”

The Brides’ white stood out luminously against the drab crowd. “What a chance to make a corner in muslin,” Ottercove thought to himself, “to meet the sure demand for Ascension robes!” The untimeliness of such an enterprise, in the face of timelessness, which would rob him of the fruits, damped his speculative ardour. He had long since lost interest in making money, though the habit persisted into middle life, and whenever now he sold a yacht or a Venetian palace or a country house in Scotland, he would pride himself on a minimum profit of £5, as a private reassurance that his old cunning had not left him. He was like a veteran golfer who suddenly, during a quiet walk in the country, borrows a club to show his friends the stuff he is made of. “Not lost the knack yet,” they say tonelessly.

He walked all the way home to Stonedge House and, unnoticed by his servants, sauntered sombrely into his ground-floor sitting-room. His mood was sombre. He stood at the wide French windows and looked out at the darkling park which stretched before him, melting away into the mist, stood there, a little weary and disenchanted. So this was the end. Good! He felt sorry for the world, and for himself, and for the race robbed of the promise of fulfilment. The imminent end of human life and, with it, of his career on earth, threw him back upon a reminiscent mood. He saw himself a boy way back in Ottercove, bright-eyed, eager, wide awake, the visible world a glittering prize, a pear waiting to be plucked. Well, he had plucked it. It had proved, however, more than he really cared to chew; his appetite had waned as he partook of it. He had had his fill; and, perhaps—he had always kept an open mind about these things, had always been awake to other worldly possibilities—perhaps there was room for his versatile talents beyond. He had always been keen, modest, ready to learn the rules of the game—any game—to appreciate the change in the nature of things, and always successful. Those oft-quoted words with which his father once adorned his dreary sermons, words whose beauty had arrested his attention, now stood before him, cavernous with meaning: “We shall not all sleep: but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump.”

Probably. His father—a curious man. No pliability of mind. No disinterested curiosity. Only a rigid belief in heaven and hell. Wrong! Life was pliable, generous and miraculous to a degree we could not even guess; it opened out suddenly, wondrously, as a flower overnight. To-day a caterpillar—to-morrow a butterfly. But we, dull, sodden ruffians ruminating over our existence, like cows chewing the cud, could not imagine a heaven other than of grass and water—greener grass and clearer water. Fools!

He paced up and down. A series of articles on the nature of immortality, for The Sunday Runner, commended themselves to his mind. A fitting counter-blast to the precocious spiritualism exploited by a rival group of newspapers. He would write them himself. It was wonderful how his mind was opening out, like a bed of flowers, all looking, straining to the sun. Intuitive orientation. Knew where the sun was, in fact had always had a place in it. And God was just there, too, behind the sun. He felt that he would get on well with God, owing to his reasonableness, modesty, and readiness for transfiguration at short notice. He would not ask questions, but watch every movement of God’s brow and anticipate His every mood.

Ah, well! he had faith. He would go on believing in a personal immortality till, with a poker, from behind, Providence would knock him dead.... A sinister afterthought; he brushed it aside. He stretched out his hands to the unseen: “I am reasonable. Will not the reasonable from beyond the grave claim me?” Half forgotten feelings flooded his heart. He remembered his arrival in England back from his New Zealand tour, as the train rolled noisily over the bridge into the great metropolis, the witness of his crowning triumphs. He remembered a thrush outside his bedroom window way back in Ottercove in early boyhood. The trees seemed to stand still, as if waiting for something. These feelings, eternal essences of things, were they to be wasted? These anticipations, were they not to be fulfilled? They were pledges of something that was to be, had always been, existed now, as if round the corner but somehow out of reach. The quickness with which people disposed of dead bodies, the rapidity with which they resigned themselves to their loss, suggested that, at bottom, they thought it was all right. It was all right. How all right, he could not say, but all right it was.

“Time for bed.” He stretched out his arms to the ceiling and yawned. “I am,” he said aloud, “such as I am, and what I am—neither more nor less—for the universe to chew and digest and assign to the requisite uses.”

XL.

Lord de Jones had been in a hurry to cross over to the Continent, for there was no means at all of knowing how much of it had disintegrated to date. The uncertainty of the whole business appalled him. The stationmaster at Victoria might not be able to cummunicate with the chef de la gare du Nord. Yet he had no means of knowing whether this was because Paris-Nord (or, for that matter, Paris) had disintegrated, or whether it was because the number was engaged.

There was of course an aeroplane service for abroad, but people still clung to the terra firma, Lord de Jones thought, without good cause. Moreover, they were travelling with luggage—a good deal of luggage. It was indeed difficult to know how much luggage to take with one—Eva could not take enough—to last one to the end of one’s days in time. The sight of passengers reclining in the easy luxury of the Pullmans, looking trim and hard, appalled him. They would not come back, he mused. Never come back from this last journey into space whither they were travelling de luxe, over viaducts, away, away, urbane materialists melting into air....

And on the French side, against all the easy felicity of the language, the sinuous tones of the restaurant-car attendant who sang out as he squeezed himself along the swaying corridors: “Prière de prendre place pour le premier déjeuner!” contrasting favourably with the brisk “First luncheon!” of the British dining-car attendant, the incorrigible insularity of the English passengers who said they wanted to shut out, if possible, French passengers from the coupé (forgetting that they were travelling across France in a French train), stood out a black and reeking ghost of shame which made him think the world was doomed because it lacked all manners. In the night the train stood still, emitting long sighs at intervals; and his heart beat loud within him with foreboding.

Images passed through his mind, of a life à la Jean Jacques Rousseau, in which he must rely on his dexterity of arm and on nature’s bounty. A hardened hunter he is, building her a hut. Eva with only furs from furry animals which he had hunted down for her to hide her nudeness. Primeval love and lust. Long days of bliss. But what is this? The roar of a lion. Bother! He must get up and see about it. He had been dozing, and opening his eyes, she was there indeed, not in the wilderness as yet, but facing him in the coupé, and smiling at him.

But what if it fail him? She, the child,—no more than she could understand how, having undone one atom, he had automatically undone the world,—had not the remotest comprehension of how he could now isolate a specific portion of it from destruction. Yet when he had, to illustrate the process, said to her that all he had to do was to vaccinate the hill they had selected as their future world, she said: “Of course! How silly of me not to think of it myself!”

But even if it fail, then death. And what was death? A change of outlook. He remembered once crossing a wide river somewhere, and as he landed on the other side, straying into a bathing place where lots of naked people sat about on benches in the garden and on chairs in the adjoining restaurant, smoking, eating, chatting, listening to music—but with nothing on them. It was uncanny. And he thought that landing on the other side of death must be as strange: for everything seemed different, yet everything the same.

Dusk fell as the train raced across Austria, and sheaves of corn in the vast whirling fields looked like humans stealing away one by one in the twilight. “Escaping,” he thought.

And, waking in the morning suddenly, they saw the mountains.

In the station square at Innsbruck, a fat German who looked like a pig waved his whip at his dog and threatened it: “Ach, du Schweinhund!”

“Disgraceful!” said Eva, and as she passed him she gave him an icy look over her slim shoulder. It was a beautiful day in June. They hired a victoria and drove, at first through the old mellow town with its cloistered streets, domes, turrets, and pinnacles; then by the side of the river, angry and turbulent. A faint hazy summer afternoon was drawing to its close, and as, at sundown, they came to a hanging bridge chained between rocks and the foaming green river rushing angrily under the horse’s hoofs, Christopher’s eyes filled with tears: the beauty of it all was more than he could bear.

And when, at the Pension Kogl, they came out on to their balconies, they were stunned with rapture by the view which opened out on to the mountain scenery. Below was the river, the passionate Inn, and the bridges, the funicular slowly climbing the mountain slope, and all around were pine trees, birches, roses, villas hidden in lanes lined with foliage; and at night when they walked by the river, where lanterns shone forth from between secretive trees, it was as if a wonderful secret, long dreamt and forgotten, awaited one round the corner.

XLI.

That night Lord Ottercove slept at The Cottage, and the following night he spent in the country. It was not till he had got into bed on the third night and turned over on his left side that he was aware of the sound of rustling paper in his pyjama coat pocket, which, on inspection, proved to be a letter, a billet doux from his Eva. She was, she wrote, with Christopher de Jones, who, as Rex probably knew, had gone off his chump and had disintegrated the world, which was unravelling rapidly of its own accord (“like a piece of crochet-work,” she wrote, “if you know what I mean, whose first stitch he has undone,”) and she had with difficulty persuaded him to isolate the top of a hill, which he said he could do by vaccinating it, so to speak, against the spreading corruption, to save her and himself, and she was now secretly indicating the exact location of that hill in the Austrian Alps whither he, Rex, should fly at once. He must not, however, bring anyone with him, as there would be very little to eat. “I told Him I’d like to have you saved, but He won’t hear of it. I am furious. I told him all the Truth that I have written to you. And He is Furious. Never mind, darling, if I flirt with him perhaps He will not kill you. Your loving wife

Eva.”

Lord Ottercove never weighed or reflected: he knew. Light came to him without intermediaries, direct from the Holy Ghost. He must save himself and Vernon Sprott. Vernon Sprott was, since the death of a late Prime Minister, his oldest friend, and friendship was to Ottercove a pure and sacred thing. In other departments of life he had displayed a versatile ability, but in friendship he was a genius. No coldness, lack of response, animosity, or even treachery could dull his friendship. If he once liked a man, nothing that that man might do to him would stop his liking him. Equally, he would stop at nothing if he could render even the smallest service to a friend. Lord Ottercove was said to have made the war in order to oblige a friend whose special gifts, he thought, would find their happiest expression in a war cabinet. His tenderness in the cause of friendship knew no bounds. And so, entering hatless into his chariot, he muttered the address of Mr. Vernon Sprott.

But when, his heart thumping within him, he dragged himself up to Vernon’s study at the top of his house in Berkeley-square, Vernon Sprott was writing a novel. Vernon Sprott was invariably writing a novel. That was, according to the more esoteric critics, the special trouble with him. And the special trouble to-night was that Vernon Sprott would not stop writing the novel, hoping to finish, print, sell it, and retire on the proceeds before the world came to its final dissolution. Lord Ottercove beheld the broad industrious back of his friend, who made a slave of himself to keep afloat a large yacht, and said: “Vernon, you’re a writer of talent: but a merchant of genius.”

Vernon Sprott turned round on his chair. “You, Rex,” he said, looking at him with critical thoughtfulness, “who have cut such a figure in the visible world, why don’t you now turn your mind to the invisible mystery of things and solve, say, the Riddle of the Universe?”

Lord Ottercove pondered silently awhile. “I cannot solve it,” he said.

Mr. Vernon Sprott turned back to his desk.

Lord Ottercove looked at his friend with grave significance. He loved Vernon Sprott. All the music, all the poetry in the world was not so strong nor yet so pure as this devotion of the younger for the elder friend, and when he spoke of him his voice grew tender and tears came to his eyes. “Vernon!” he said at last. “I am going to save your life! For, you know, there’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we may. My chariot is at the door and” (looking at his watch) “we must fly.”

“Let me put the last stroke to my novel.”

“I advise you against it.”

“Why?”

“Vernon: it would do you no good.”

“But I must. No first-class artist—”

“Vernon: we must fly.”

Vernon Sprott, smoking a long fat cigar, followed Lord Ottercove critically into the chariot which, cutting sharply round the corner, took wing, and clearing the roofs of the Berkeley-square houses, soared into the sky. Lord Ottercove and Mr. Vernon Sprott beheld for the last time the great city of London which, viewed from this imposing height, looked as though it had been inadvertently dropped out of the back of a cart. An architectural effect that, though it was not premeditated, could hardly be called happy, thought Mr. Sprott. However. He puffed at his cigar. “Your secretary and telephone operator gone ahead, I expect?”

“Yuh. Can’t get on without them.”

They were now flying right into the dawn.

XLII.

CASTOR AND POLLUX

Herr Kogl was in charge of the telephone and telegrams. He would come up and say to you with oracular pride: “A—telegram—is—on—the—way—to—you.” He articulated slowly, as if appreciating the necessity of talking distinctly to foreigners.

“How do you know?” Lord de Jones asked him.

“I know,” said Herr Kogl, turning to go. But he came back at once and explained:

“They—have—telephoned—from—the—post—office—to—say—so.”

The telegram arrived an hour later. De Jones opened it and read:

In the afternoon while everybody was at tea—“Jause,” in the vernacular—Mrs. Hannibal and the telephone operator arrived in an aeroplane and installed themselves with the efficiency and celerity of a quartermaster. Mrs. Hannibal occupied the little reception room; the telephone operator, a graduate of the Royal College of Science, commandeered the telephone. Then, there being nothing for them to do till evening, they strolled down the hill into town to inspect the sights.

And Baby?

She was not at the gate, nor at the bandstand, nor in the by-ways of the park. Since his demise from the Pension Kogl, Frank lived in town, often meeting Baby when she came down to Innsbruck. And here she was, as fresh as May, beckoning to him from across the flower-bespangled field. That laughing, slanting look in her eyes stirred something in his frame as though a bird had suddenly flown into him. He was joy, his body the cage. Soon joy would fly out; and he fretted and flurried trying to lock the door of the cage, losing his happiness in the anxiety of losing it. That piquant blend of childish innocence on her face with a suggestion of ripening womanhood about her form, so irresistible to men, was no less irresistible to Frank. They took the funicular up the mountain slope and continued the acclivious ascent by foot, stopping now and then to look down at the town in the valley, when he would feel her lovely weight against him. They wound their way up the Schillerweg and stopped at a Gasthaus in the precincts of the Pension Kogl and had coffee and cakes amidst the beer and wine drinking peasants with goat beards like shaving brushes stuck in their coloured hats, and the women in Tyrolese peasant dress taken in tightly at the waist and showing off their figures to advantage, and sat still and looked down into the green folds of the valley and up at the jagged summits of naked rock. She gave him a look that came straight from the soul. Her eyes were as if they had just been sad, had understood all, and now chose to see only the heavenly, sunny side of your being. And looking at her eyes, you, too, felt but the sunny side of yourself, and wanted to dance and prance in the sunshine that emanated from those eyes. Fowls, chickens, strutted all over the place, jumped on the chairs. The little serving maid, bare-legged, would call them: “Chuck-chuck-chuck!”

They were screened from sight by a tree. He put his hand on her arm. Her look moistened. The sun, as if making a last effort, shone with a tragic brightness; then, unable to sustain the effort, diminished its light. The bare-legged maid had gone in. They kissed. When she came out she wore a pair of brown stockings: and they stopped kissing.

“Hello, hello!”

They turned round and saw Eva and Christopher de Jones. “Wherever have you been?” Eva turned on to her cousin. “We’ve been looking for you everywhere. Chris is anxious to begin.”

“There isn’t any time to waste. It’s coming our way now, spreading fast,” de Jones confirmed.

“Like creeping paralysis,” said Eva, “and Chris is going to vaccinate this hill.” Then, turning to Frank: “Let me see! Have you any hair left?” He quickly removed his hat. “Oh, lots and lots!” she exclaimed.

“It’s about the only thing I have.”

“It’s time I did it,” said de Jones. “Herr Kogl, can you oblige me with a little gasoline?”

“Yes, yes. We’ll see if we can get any,” said Herr Kogl politely. “Kindly follow me to the garage, and we shall see if we are lucky.”

Then in another tone: “Hey there! Herbert! Any gasoline! Any gasoline, I said! Come on and get about it, quick! I’m waiting. I said: waiting!”

Christopher de Jones returned with a mysterious air. “I have timed,” he said, “the explosion for 5:15.”

“What explosion is this?” Frank said with enquiring charm.

“Oh, perfectly harmless in itself. But it will frighten away all the rest, and leave this mountain top for our little party.”

“Is this discrimination not perhaps a little heartless?”

“Surplus, surplus. One must always get rid of the surplus.”

He took out his watch and held it in his palm. Three minutes elapsed.

There was a mild crash. Then several faces were thrust enquiringly out of the windows of the Pension Kogl. Next, the word “earthquake” passed from mouth to mouth, and a thin stream of visitors trickled down the narrow mountain path into Innsbruck which stretched below them, sunning itself in the valley. Herr Kogl, Frau Kogl, the policeman and the Frau Policeman with her quicksilver of a little boy, the apoplectic Baron, and some others, made light of Lord de Jones’s warning and refused to budge.

They stood with Frank and Eva and Baby and de Jones in a group on the terrace and watched the other visitors trot down the hill: the Grand Duke, the Frau Professor with the dachshund, the Herr Pastor, the Frau Pastor, Herr and Frau Nikulitsch, the two Scottish old maids, Herr Spatz, Frau Spatz, and their son Willy, the Frau Doktor Wirt, the Frau Direktor Bödingen, the Frau Oberst von Kaisar, and Frau von Endte. There lived among others in the annexe of the Pension Kogl an effeminate-looking young artist from Vienna who was kept by a poor, pale consumptive German girl who paid for him and cooked his meals, whereas he, tired of her love, powdered his face and, adjusting his tie before the mirror, went to town every day to distract himself with her money. On the fatal day he, adjusting his tie, went to town and did not come back. And she, going down the hill to the grocer’s to get him his supper, did likewise.

Frank remembered this afterwards. Now he stood between Eva and de Jones and watched his erstwhile enemies from the pension go down, never to return. It was a warm Sunday afternoon. Far away, a train whistled and then coiled below, like a serpent, on its long journey to Vienna. It will not reach Vienna, Frank thought, not in eternity! All the peasants, save for one old man, had already vanished down the hill. He drank his big mug to the bottom, smacking his lips. Having paid for the beer and lighted his pipe, he rose, and at once there came the sounds of his jolly accordion, as, with twinkling eye, he strode to his own happy tune out of the courtyard. Fresh and alert, he went down the road making his own music, till his long curved pipe, and his knapsack, and the plume in his hat ducked by the hill, and only the jolly tune spoke of his fresh onward strides.

The sun had long ago set behind the hills. It was very still: the empty spell which hangs over the world before twilight.

“And what’s that?” Baby exclaimed, pointing to an approaching dot in the sky. Eva peered at the clouds. An airplane was speeding towards them.

“It’s the chariot,” said Frank.

“It’s Rex! It’s Rex!” she cried. “Hurrah! it’s Rex!”

They could see them now with the naked eye, Lord Ottercove and Mr. Vernon Sprott, seated side by side, puffing at their cigars.

One moment it seemed as if Lord Ottercove’s winged chariot would land safely and gracefully in the courtyard of the Pension Kogl. The next, it looked as though it would do no such thing.

The two occupants of the chariot suddenly looked at each other. They were both, in their different ways, strong men, and said nothing. They were, they knew it, subject to immediate dissolution. And there was method in it. First, Mr. Vernon Sprott began to disintegrate (his eighty-five volumes of fiction and belles-lettres in the British Museum having already preceded him). Mr. Sprott realised with his usual imperturbable objectivity that he, who had always been one for whom the visible world existed, was on the point of no longer existing for the visible world. Now Lord Ottercove also began to get diffuse. He was not aware of any pain or discomfort: he only felt that he was becoming less and less homogeneous. This master of a million voices yielded inaudibly to extinction, his last conscious feeling, one of sorrow not of anger, being a profound regret that Lord de Jones had not remained a Genius of the Untried. Soon their fabric melted into air, into thin air. Their insubstantial pageant faded and left no rack behind.

But in the growing twilight the tips of their cigars, fiery particles immune from dissolution, two beacons of light, two golden stars in the sky, twin brothers, Castor and Pollux, shone for ever and ever.

XLIII.

THE COCK CROWS TWICE

There was no sound at all, and nothing to see: something that had hitherto been ceased to be, like a dream on waking. Nothing crashed, nothing fell: no mist, not a whiff of steam. No gossamer. Things rolled up into nothing, as if they had vanished up their own sleeves.... The world around seemed to be burning, silently, quickly, invisibly.

They stood round and watched intently. Would the vaccination prove adequate in neutralizing the creeping disease? Or would it overtake their little hill, reach them and consume them all? By the answer to this question Christopher de Jones will stand or fall. If he succeed, how will they reward him? Foolish associations intrude their minds. “Payment by results.” How long, how long! Will this ever end? Has it ended? Are they dead, and, in a sense, as good as before? “Come, now,” said Christopher impatiently.

Gradually the hill detached itself, and as Baby and Herbert ran down the slope hand in hand to ascertain if they were clear of the contamination, floated away into space.

“A clean piece of work, what?” said de Jones, looking round at everybody for approbation. “We’re clear of the old earth.”

They all looked admiringly at the wizard.

“We’ve peeled right off the rotten crust of the world; the old planet’s gone off to die by itself.”

“The whole of her fabric vanished by now?” asked Frank.

“Well, there may still be a piece of Asia left as we are talking. But it need concern us no longer.”

“I should hate to think, Chris,” Eva said, “that you have not quite killed the earth and that she is suffering.”

“A matter of a day or so, that’s all. The wound is mortal.”

They stared away into space. “Look out!” he cried. “We are floating away. No need for alarm. Merely changing our bearings in the firmament. The stars are looking at us inquisitively; that is because we are newcomers.”

They could not recognise their Chris, their gloomy, silent Chris. He was gay, excited, communicative; like a Cook’s tourists’ guide. “Hold on!” he cried presently. “We seem to be getting away somewhere, I don’t quite know where.”

Away, away, away! To the sun, Frank thought, to be consumed in its light!

The movement increased in velocity. It seemed they were falling. Falling, falling, still falling; but falling upwards, not downwards. With indrawn breath they awaited the final impact which was to shatter them into space. Now, with a crash, they would fall on the moon.

Trembling, Eva came into Frank’s arms. He held her close that he might drink her breath, commit her kiss into the keeping of his soul, forever lost in hers. For his identity, as it dissolved in the encroaching dusk, clung to his own self’s dream in her soul mirrored. Was it the end? Shut in that vision! Now, Doom, devour them!... “Ever, and again, and forever, thine.”

Yet the minutes passed and no blow came. When they had stood tensely and motionlessly for what seemed to them a decade, the velocity of their fall decreased perceptibly, and they came to a halt. The sky gradually cleared, and the sun flickered through the clouds. It looked as though it might be over.

Lord de Jones looked as nonplussed as the others. “Apparently,” said he, “the law of gravity is no object to God.”

“Yes,” Frank agreed, releasing Eva from his protective grasp, “we are saved—if unscientifically saved.”

“God has shown,” remarked Herr Kogl, “that whatever else He may be, He is no doctrinaire.”

“Apparently,” replied de Jones, still looking worried, “our knowledge of astronomy is incomplete—if this sort of thing can happen.”

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, etcetera,” said Frank.

Herr Kogl looked at Frau Kogl. They smiled faintly at each other. They were pale, yet happy. But where was Herbert?

“Never mind Herbert. Where was Baby?” The question flashed through Eva’s mind.

Steps were taken accordingly to satisfy the curiosity on both sides. Herbert and Baby had, it was remembered, run down the slope hand in hand to ascertain whether the hill was clear of the dissolving earth, before the hill had shot, like a bolt, into space; and neither Herbert nor Baby could be traced any more. Lord de Jones advanced an interesting and plausible theory that Herbert and Baby, having thoughtlessly overstepped the line of demarcation, had rendered themselves subject to the chemical laws operating outside the area he had thoughtfully isolated by means of vaccination, and thus had shared the fate of all matter. While they were discussing the sensational disappearance of two of their number who should have been saved, the ground beneath them gave a jerk and then began to revolve, at first slowly, then faster and faster.

“Hold tight!” cried de Jones. The new globe was whirling with incredible rapidity on its own axis and, what was even more distressing, round the sun; which made it doubly difficult to keep one’s feet. They were, thank God, for the most part of them, Londoners, accustomed to roughing it on the tops of omnibuses, and this sort of thing held no real peril for them. But twenty Austrian citizens, mountain folk who had lived away from urban surroundings, failed to keep their poise and were hurled into infinity to ascertain, but never to report, whether Einsteinian infinity was indeed finite (even though some of the victims had no scientific bias at all).

But all things come to an end sooner or later, as was remarked by some keen observer. Gradually the revolutions slowed down and then almost subsided: and there they were—behold! the new Jerusalem descending out of heaven from God, having the glory of God: and her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal. And they saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.

“By God, John, you’re right!” Frank exclaimed: “as right as sixpence!”

“That was a narrow escape,” said Herr Kogl.

Lord de Jones sat down on the ground and stretched out his limbs and yawned. “Ha!” he laughed.

“What is the joke, if I may ask?” Frank smiled enquiringly.

“Fifty years ago,” said de Jones, “when the laws of science were absolute, this would have been impossible. But in this age of Relativity, nothing, thank God, is absolutely impossible!”

“Relatively speaking,” said Frank.

“I have always put God above mathematics,” said Herr Kogl.

“Either nature lacked science,” Frank said, “or God knew a lot more. Our experience is decidedly novel and interesting.”

“As a matter of fact,” rejoined Lord de Jones, “it all happened according to plan. Just as I thought. Nothing surprises me.”

He hadn’t thought so. He was like a captain who in a storm mislaid his chart and instruments and, when the storm was over, pretended to take his bearings and said that they tallied with his intended course.

They were miraculously saved; and there was still a world. But what a world! A rounded mountain top, peeled away and revolving very slowly by itself round the old sun.

And there, as before, stood the Pension Kogl. Nothing seemed to have happened to it; all the windows were whole. Here was the garden, the courtyard, the stables; and there the fields with the cows and sheep and horses grazing imperturbably as before. Was it a dream? Where was it? When was it?

And here was Herr Kogl standing on the doorstep puffing at his pipe; and there was Frau Kogl, agitated, throwing out her hands, probably saying, Frank thought, “I don’t know what to do!” to the policeman who was mystified, though not disagreeably, by the disappearance of the young shrew who had been his wife. And in her agitation Frau Kogl seemed to be forgetting her own grief.

“The matter is simple,” de Jones was explaining. “When our new little planet began to whirl like a merry-go-round, the Frau Policeman, having failed to clutch at a solid object, or clutching an object that was not solid (possibly her husband), was hurled like a stone outside the now negligible gravitation zone of this little earth of ours, and was attracted by the superior gravitation of the moon.”

“For one who has always whined for the moon,” said Herr Kogl, “the transference must have its attraction.”

“The bump,” retorted de Jones, “will have been fatal. But that is neither here nor there. All I ask you to note is that her death was due to natural causes.”

“Lucid, admirable,” said Frank, “and entirely convincing!”

The apoplectic old Baron came up to say that he had just stumbled over the body of little Hans, the policeman’s boy, and the company, sobered by recent apocalyptic events, slowly made for the spot. De Jones again assumed the initiative.

“Observe,” he said, “an interesting phenomenon. The boy, too small and not used to transit either by omnibus or the Metropolitan Railways, had not developed the instinct of a strap-hanger, and if his ancestors had indeed ever had this instinct, it had been atrophied in him through long disuse. And thus he failed to clutch instinctively at the small bush that might have saved him, and was hurled instead into space. But being light in body he was not hurled far enough to reach the gravitation zone of the moon, but remained within the gravitation halo of this little planet whose power of attraction, as you are aware, is so weak that when we raise our legs in walking we have some difficulty in touching ground again. We might be penny balloons on the day after their purchase when, no longer able to rise in the air, they do the next best thing. And so, observe, this infant’s fall was not heavy: it did not maim or deform him: only knocked the life out of him. All in the natural order of phenomena.”

“Most interesting and instructive,” said Frank.

“Poor child,” said Eva. “Poor Baby! Poor Herbert! I wish now, Christopher, you had never begun it.”

“You can’t have,” retorted Christopher, “a worldwide cataclysm like this without a victim here and there, which is all in the day’s work.”

“The number of your victims,” interjected Frank, “is in the neighbourhood of 1,600,000,000.”

“What!” Frau Kogl was appalled. “That is not allowed! Das gibt es nicht! Herr Wachmann!” she called out to the policeman, “will you have this gentleman arrested. He is the biggest murderer that ever lived!”

The policeman, a tin sword trailing at his side, looked from one to the other with an irresolute air.

“Come, come!” said Lord de Jones, patting him on the shoulder, “this is no longer your old Austria.”

“Now don’t be a funk,” Frau Kogl egged him on, “assert your authority, show what you can do.”

“I am the only policeman in the world, a poor, lonely man. How can I arrest anybody?”

“Come, come, don’t you bother them,” Herr Kogl intervened. “What is done is done and cannot be undone.”

But she would not listen to him. And even when he bawled at her she did not quail, this time, before the man with the strong will; and he turned into the house with a shrug. “Women,” he said tenderly.

“You’re a fine policeman and no mistake,” Frau Kogl jeered, till even Lord de Jones himself felt sorry for the man.

“Leave the poor man alone, can’t you?” he said. “What has he done to you?”

“It’s not what he, but what you’ve done, sir. Killed Herbert, killed everybody. Everybody, everybody ... absolutely everybody one can think of. And now with this funk of a policeman there will be no justice, no authority left in the world; no one to bring you to book!”

“That will do, Frau Kogl.”

“No, it won’t do, sir. This is my pension, bought on my mother’s hard savings she made in Alsace-Lorraine from where we spring, and as an Alsacian I am too proud to tolerate the presence of the murderer of the human race in my house.”

“Stop!” cried de Jones. “Don’t try my patience too far, woman! My nerves are on edge. I’ve had a very exceptional day. Do you know what you are saying? This is the New Jerusalem that you see, the home of pacifism. None of your Alsace-Lorraine now, I beg of you.”

“I came from there—”

“And you’ll go that way, if you are not careful.”

“All this is mine.”

“Oh, is it? Let heaven be my judge.” He snatched the sword from the policeman and struck her on the head.

She collapsed in a heap.

The policeman walked away into the hills with a look which implied: “I haven’t seen it.”

Lord de Jones lit his pipe. Frank and Eva stood by, aghast. De Jones looked at them with a propitiating smile. “I have slain,” he said, removing his pipe, “this dragon of contention, this symbol of war and nationalism, I hope, for ever.”

“Cain!”

A cock crowed twice.

He started; then relaxed again. If the cock crowed twice to remind him that he had betrayed his ideal at least once, he was nevertheless mighty glad to know that there was a cock on the premises. He hoped there were hens, too.

“I have released,” he said, “the spirit imprisoned in a foul house.”

“You’re blaspheming.”

“It had to be done.”

“Oh, had it?”

“A hard thing, I admit, for a pacifist. But we must not sentimentalise if we are to survive; we must fight the peace as we fought the war!” There was silence.

“Even the cock is too sick with you to crow again,” said Frank.

The light sank: there was a long drop of rain, then another. It began to hail. The three of them turned in and stood at the window blurred with rain. The old woman’s body lay out in the wet. Neither the hail nor rain could waken her. The earth was wrapped in a wet mist. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And Lord de Jones said, “Let there be light”: and there was no light. So he switched on the electric light: and he saw that it was quite good.

“You blooming fool, Christopher! You’ve upset all the seasons!” cried Eva. “You’ve made a mess of the weather! It’s neither day nor night, but heaven knows what! It should be summer now, and it is winter.”

“O Wind! If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

He sank into a chair and picked up a periodical, a copy of The New Statesman, the last number. The very last! Eva opened the Illustrated London News full of pictures of the concours hippique at the Olympia, and Frank strolled over to the piano and tried his hand at the Symphony of the New World, when Herr Kogl came in from the dining-room.

“Bad weather, Herr Kogl, what?”

“Das ist kein Wetter, sondern ein Skandal,” and he adjusted the electric stove. “Everyone can switch it out—I mean switch it on—whenever he likes, but you must on no account switch it out without telling Herbert....” He stopped, blubbered; then continued with a catch in his voice: “because I mean then you release so much current that the dynamo goes off like mad and may go phut, and then anything may happen. Though I don’t care what happens now that Herbert....” He gulped and turned away to the window. “What’s that?”

Next, he was in the courtyard by her side. He stood still, petrified. “Anna!” he said. “Anna!”

Lord de Jones rose with The New Statesman still in his hand, and went upstairs, “To spare his feelings,” he said. “Though I wish these people would realise that a certain modicum of suffering is unavoidable even in this New Jerusalem. However, we don’t want scenes.”

Herr Kogl placed the body on chairs in the dining-room and came back into the lounge. Eva eyed him compassionately. “What will you do to him?”

“Nothing,” he said, “nothing. It is between him and his God, and I can do nothing.” Tears streamed down his cheeks. “There are laws, delicately adjusted spiritual laws. We must not meddle, must not touch God’s scales. If I did, what would happen? ‘Leave off!’ God would say. ‘Away with your clumsy hands, you bull in a china shop! By taking the law into your own hands you have upset the delicate adjustment of my spiritual world. You have disturbed the balance, disarranged the symmetry. Now, instead of letting him, who has wrongfully taken, put it back by his own exertion of soul, I must let him off lest I upset the scales of my world by the wrong you have heaped on him. And who will square the original sin? It falls back on the whole of mankind, don’t you see, young feller-me-lad?’ That’s how God would speak to me if, in my great ignorance, I presumed to take things into my own foolish hands.”

For a minute they said nothing, but looked out of doors, where the rain had stopped, at the dripping trees flooded with light.

“And she was a clever woman,” he said; “she knew languages. Brought up in a convent on the border of France....” His face puckered: he sobbed.

When the others had gone, he stood alone in the doorway, gazed at the clouds and listened to the pines in the wind. He looked with despair for the night to cover his grief: and it was perpetual day.