The ships had gone forth in two lines ahead at ten knots, Admiral Sir Henry Yerburgh, K.C.B., being in the flagship Queen Mary, with the capital-ships being nearly all of the five mosquito flotillas, and half the Home submarine; though what was the object of the torpedo craft (unless they were to go within 2,000 yards of the Boodah's guns) was not very evident.
At that news, Hogarth, putting on a wide-awake, and lighting a cigar with rough perfunctory puffs, ran along a corridor to call Loveday, whereupon the two went out to the ledge and up to the roof.
There, at the south edge, stood a marine trumpeting something at Hogarth's yacht; and, just landing at the Boodah from his gig, a fretful Yankee skipper, register in hand with a bag of £900 sea-rent in gold, while twenty yards yonder rode his smoking ship loaded with grain for Rouen; and on the eastern horizon the armada, in crescent at present, moving with fires banked at two knots, a glare hiding them from the naked eye, but the glass revealing them like toys in the abstract, ethereally hazy.
And now the yacht's cones shewed steam, three of her boats making toward the Boodah; soon at the landing-place stood Wanda, some interpreters, Mons. Roche (the chef), women, engineers, paymasters, civil servants, waiters, etc.; and Hogarth, seeing them, approached, questioned them, and, hearing that they had been ordered a day's pleasure-trip round the Solon, with lifting hat shook hands all round.
By this time some fifty officers and blue-jackets were about the roof and ledge, some discussing, others unfixing lanterns and festoons, with shouted directions. Leaving which, Hogarth and Loveday descended to an office of Loveday's, and Hogarth was just saying: “Quilter-Beckett could destroy a quarter of those warships yonder—now, if he chose—without firing a gun—” when in, with flushed face and stretched stalk, hurried Quilter-Beckett, crying: “My Lord King, I thought you would be here—just look—!”
He held out a Sea telegraph-form-from O'Hara:
“F. 39241. Begins. Almost certainty of war: Germany, France, Russia against England. Three corps massing between Harfleur and Rouen, two upon Petersburg, transports at Havre. England undefended on sea. Ministry fallen. Toulon outfitting. Donald, Admiral. Ends.
Hogarth, with an all-gone gesture, handed the telegram to Loveday.
But with lightning energy he was at a desk, scribbling:
“F. 39242. Begins. To Donald, Admiral, Mahomet. Be in half-hourly communication with Beech's Bank, Paris and Petersburg branches. Send hourly bulletins of news. War to be averted by every means. Let Beech threaten. Warn Cattegat. Richard. Ends.”
And “Quick, Quilter-Beckett”, he cried, “send that! What is the speed of your quickest picket—?”
“Fifteen knots—”
“Then, go yourself to the British Admiral. Make him fly back: he has years to attack me in, tell him—I'll write a dispatch—”
On which Quilter-Beckett telephoned up for a picket, took the dispatch, and was soon away, while Hogarth watched his flight over the Sea.
An anxious hour passed, and by then a line of ships had been sighted to the west—the Americans at last; ten minutes later, the picket, too, was seen returning.
“Well, now”, said Hogarth, watching her, “I wonder. The ships seem to be coming on just the same. You have no idea, John, how the mind of people in office becomes fixed, like hardened putty in a hole: I am sorry now I didn't go myself”.
Some minutes more and Quilter-Beckett was pelting up the steps, his face pink as prickly-heat, blurting out: “My Lord King! I have been grossly insulted...!”
“Ha!” went Hogarth.
“I met a dispatch-boat coming to make summons of surrender, and, in spite of my white flag, they took me prisoner! How I restrained myself—and these people in the hollow of my hand! When I got at last to the Admiral—it is Yerburgh on the Queen Mary—he 'pirated' me—but I have no time Yonder, you see, are the Americans. British won't go back: I doubt if they believe—'under orders', and so on. By the way, you shouldn't stay there—no longer safe—”
He was away: for the moment was near, the Boodah now surrounded with a series of floating squares hanging deep torpedo-nets against submarines, on both horizons effusions of smoke, the ships no more visions, but middle-sized sea-things, seeming fixed in the thick of the sea, though steaming quickly. Hogarth watched them through a hand-glass, while Loveday, ghastly pallid, whispered: “Come, Richard, come”, but still lingered a little, seeing them grow up—like the infant, the lad, the hairy man—toiling at the bigness of the sea, looking stripped, prepared for tempest They were six miles away—five.
Mute lay the Boodah; and, surrounding her, perniciously moved the ships at forty-eight revolutions a minute, hardly a cable's interval between the host of them, they seeming no more the playthings of the sea, but its masters, each a travelling throne of power; and as they pared so taciturn, with baleful aspect they trained their cannon upon the sea-fort in their midst: not a soul visible on fort or ships.
A long while it seems to last, that noonday stillness, a noonday breezy and oceanic, the sea sharp-edged, hard-looking, dark-blue, tossing spray along its ridges, not rough, but restless, shewing against the ships white foams a moment, which silently glide away.
But their Admiral is signalling: Let her have it! and in some moments more yonder to the far north the Florida breaks into quick-flashing ecstasy, like quick-winking Gorgon glances; and the north-east catches it in a single boom; and in ten seconds more it is as if Nature, with sudden yell, feels to her womb the birth-hour come and rueful throes: and where ships had been appears in one minute nothing but a ring of stagnant smoke, tugged into rays and out-sticking clouds, flushed with glares and rouges.
And no question of missing: the Boodah stationary and huge; every shell told. But, the deluge over, that thunder-marred visage again looked grimly forth, a face new-risen from smallpox, an apparition, roof-houses gone, lighthouse tops, one of her great 19.5 inchers in fragments, in her casemates seventeen dead.
But where now is the one-masted Hercules, which but a moment since went trembling at the bale of her own bellowing barbettes? The Hercules is in a Nessus-shirt of flame. And whither the Hercules is going, thither is the Idaho going, and the Dante gone, and gone the elongated length of the Invincible, and twenty destroyers, and the bow-works of the old Powerful, which stoops woefully there, screws in air, as the camel of the desert kneels and waits, while into her beam comes crashing the ram of the poopless Deutschland.
Yet the Boodah has not fired a gun!
But now she fires: as the broadsides drench her anew, she fires, the hulk—all round the horizon—lowing in travail: and as there is no question of missing on the one side, so on the other is assurance, the Boodah's broad-sides of 19.5-inchers and 9.5-inchers, ninety-two in all, being fired by the hand of Quilter-Beckett, who sits at a table grim with knobs, buttons, dial-faces, in a cabinet near a saloon where Hogarth, Loveday, and five lieutenants are lunching; and where he sits he can hear the band in an alcove rendering for the eaters Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: hear, not heed: for two gunners in each casemate have sighted a ship through pivoted glasses, whose fixing, disturbing an electrical circuit, prints the ship's distance on an indicator before the Admiral: whereupon he touches a button—many buttons—in intense succession: the Boodah bawls: and the thrust-back of her resentment becomes intolerable, the ships just like fawns under the paws of an old lion whose grisly jaws drip gore; the sharks that infest her will fare well of her hand.
Of forty-three ships fixed, thirty-nine are hit, eleven founder: wreckage so vast and swift, that the Admiral, still afloat in a Queen Mary pierced above-belt, is like a man stung by the tarantulas of distraction: tries to signal flight—flags cannot be seen; fires coloured pistol-lights: “Retire!”—and soon, all round, the circle is in flight.
But hapless flight: the Boodah is an octopus whose feelers reach far, and they, within her toils, cannot escape her omnipresence. She sends after them no guns: yet they are blown to atoms; the sea becomes a death-trap thick with pitfalls and shipwreck; one by one they are caught, they fly aloft like startled fowl, or they succumb, and lean, and stoop, and sink: the sea, for mile on mile, proving a hell of torpedoes-dirigible, automobile, mine.
For in the matter of mines the Boodah had all the advantages of a shore, and as to dirigible torpedoes more than all.
Her mines, whose weight was adjusted to the specific gravity of salt water, sank till the pressure at ten fathoms arrested them, they, electrically connected with the forts, reaching out twenty miles; and the whole network, charted to an inch, was coordinated with the range-tables.
The ordinary l8-inch Whiteheads, moreover, were replaced by a longer design running 6,000 yards, the added length being occupied by the flask, whose compressed air runs the engine, they not sinking on finishing their course: so, if they missed, there they lay, a trap of 380 pounds of gun-cotton in the course of the numerous moving foe.
With these three forms of the same plague the Boodah hunted the fleeing ships, and drove them stumbling through complicated miseries, amazed and thunderstruck: so that seventy-three only, several of them half-wrecks, reached her twenty-five mile limit; and, there, over the mines of the Solon, reassembled.
Amid the throng on his ruined roof Hogarth watched their flight and the ever-coming boatloads of blue-jackets through a mist of smoke and the after-smell of war, while under the sea wide eyes in hosts were a-gaze at a windfall of 2,400 bodies.
About half-past four captains and commanders of the survivors were in the ward-room of the Second-in-Command on the Orion—the Queen Mary gone—when he, with splendid infatuation, proposed a return to the attack, with a change of tactics to concentration upon one side only of the Boodah; but the foreigners pointed out the obvious added dangers; and in the midst of a wrangle a dispatch-boat from the Solon, eleven miles south, arrived, demanding the usual sea-rent, by draft, if not in gold; so out, at this unlooked-for incident, broke a new quarrel, the British for a whole hour resisting the inexorable; till the Solon Lieutenant, his eyes moist with pleading, explained their helplessness, adding that war between the four Powers had been declared that day at noon from the Stock Exchange steps: and only then the Vice-Admiral, breaking into tears, yielded to destiny.
Hogarth, meanwhile, was like a wild man, imprisoned, till his yacht returned at dusk with her excursionists; and without delay he was on her, and away for England.
In England, meantime, was nothing but dismay.
The Government, whose defeat was accidental, on being hurriedly patched up, threw itself passionately into the work of defence, calling up every enrolled man, while at regimental centres the enlistment of volunteers went forward, Weedon alone turning out 7,000 rifles a day.
But on the night of the Declaration the Under-secretary announced in the House that the Russians were moving down the Baltic, the French toward the Straits: and the next morning dawned with the dreariness of last mornings and days. However, soon after 1 P.M., the Lord of the Sea landed at Bristol, his yacht being one of the swiftest things afloat; there heard the known facts; and thence wired to Beech's London house, to the London Foreign Office, to Cadiz and to Frederikshavn, where he had wireless for the Mahomet at the Straits, and for the Truth in the Cattegat.
His wire to the Foreign Office was as follows:
“I have come to England hoping to avert European war by fiscal means, not knowing that the passage of ships into open water was of first importance. Since this is so, accept my assurance, there will be no war, except on the part of Britain, which I should much resent. British Government, I suggest, should forthwith allay national anxiety.
“RICHARD”.
But the Foreign Office did not publish this telegram, not knowing what to make of it—unless Hogarth were vehemently the friend of England, while every British being regarded him not so much as the enemy of man, as the special Anti-Christ of England. And how came he to be in England, when he should be at the bottom of the Atlantic? The telegram was passed through the agitated departments, but kept dark....
So the afternoon passed without news: and tension grew to agony.
Hogarth spent the evening in his Berkeley Square house with the Manager of Beech's, examining office-books and specimens of some new Sea-coins, till near eleven, when, being alone, he put on a mackintosh, shaded his face well with hat and collar-flap, and went out into the drizzling night.
Even his Berkeley Square was peopled, and, as he strolled toward Pall Mall, he found it ever harder to advance, till he became jammed. Never had he seen such a crowd, all in the air a sound, vague and general, which was like a steam of thought-made-audible; till presently, while trying in vain to get away, he was startled by a tumult that travelled, a rumour of woe that noised and swelled, terrifying, the voice of the people, the voice of God: and though he did not know its meaning, it keenly afflicted him.
The fastest of the survivors from the battle with the Boodah had wirelessed: on that commonplace bulletin at the War Office the news stood written...
But the rumour of that despair had not yet attained its culmination, when another rumour roared after and over it, roar upon roar, like tempest poured through the multitudinous forest, joyance now overtaking sorrow, and a noise of roistering overwhelming lamentation. And all at once a great magnetic hysteria seized them all, and the many became as one, and the bursting bosom burst: men weeping like infants, laughing foolishly, grasping each other's hand, and one cried “Hurrah!”, and another, catching it, cried “Hurrah!”
For the French, German, and Russian fleets, in attempting to pass the two narrows north and south of Europe, had been stopped by the two sea-forts there; and though they had been so eager to pass, that they had even offered to pay sea-rent, this, too, had been refused. They had then, at five and at five-thirty in the afternoon, offered battle to the islands: with the result that half their weight had been annihilated before they took to flight. So said the bulletin....
And Hogarth in the midst of the jubilee saw the man who jammed his left shoulder, a broker in spectacles, grip the hand of the man on his right, a ragamuffin, to cry out: “That scoundrel Hogarth! Isn't there good in the damned thief, after all?”
And the other: “Aye, he knows how to give it 'em 'ot, don't 'e, after all! Thank God for that!”
Three weeks later peace was proclaimed by a procession at Temple Bar between England, Austro-Germany, France, Russia, and the Sea.
The last effort of Europe to resist the Sea was made on the afternoon of the 14th of October, when the British Prime Minister refused to conclude a treaty of peace.
“Your master is only a pirate—on a large scale”, he said to a Minister of the Sea.
That was on the 14th.
On the 15th there was a stoppage of British trade nearly all the world over.
On the 20th England was in a state of émeute resembling revolution.
On the 28th the Treaty of Peace was signed.
Its principal conditions were: (1) The undertaking by the Sea not to raise sea-rent on British ships without certain formalities of notice; and (2) The undertaking by Britain not to engage in the making of any railway or overland trade-route, or of any marine engine of war, without the consent of the Sea. And similar treaties were signed by the Sea with the other nations.
Then followed the rush of the Ambassadors to the Boodah, and the frivolous round of Court-life revolved, levée, audience, dinner, drawing-room, investiture; the Lord of the Sea descended from the throne before the Court to pin a cross upon the humble breast of his best shot and give him the title of Præceps, gave fanciful honours to emperors, received them of them—wore when throned a brow-band of gold with only one stone, the biggest of the meteor octahedrons, that glanced about his brow like an icicle in whose glass gallivanted a fairy clad in rags of the rainbow.
Now the old gaieties recommenced, but more Olympian in tone, as befitted the ruler of rulers, terrible now being the lifting of Hogarth's brows at the least lapse in ritual; and only the chastest-nurtured of the earth ever now stalked through gavotte or pavane in those halls of the sea.
The world now lay at his feet. The dependence upon him of England, of France, of that part of Austro-Germany called Germany, was obvious: he could starve them. But over Austria proper, Russia, Italy, his sway was no less omnipotent: for the panic cheapness of scrip which followed the destruction of the Kaiser had, of course, been foreseen, and used by him; Beech had bought up, easily ousting the Rothschilds from their old financial kingship: by tens of millions the process had gone on; and still it continued increasingly, for the wealth of Hogarth now, as compared with that of other rich men, was like a ship to a skiff. If he threw upon the market, the bankruptcy of several nations might follow: it was doubtful if the United States could survive; certainly, Austria, Russia, South America must go under.
Nor was the East less his slave: Japan a mercantile nation, China and Turkey in his fiscal net. So, looking round the globe toward the middle of November, he could observe scarcely a nation which he could not, by scribbling a telegram, crush out of recognition.
It was precisely then that Richard Hogarth revealed himself.
On the 15th of November appeared his Manifesto.
This Charter, which everlastingly must remain one of the Scriptures of our planet, simple as a baby's syllables, yet large like the arch of Heaven, has left its mark on the human soul.
On the morning of the 16th its twenty clauses occupied in pica a page of every newspaper, and it was posted up big in the streets of cities.
The document ran:
Richard, by the Will of God....I do hereby discern, declare, and lay down: That:
1. What is no good cannot be owned: only goods can be owned.
2. “Good” is well, or pleasant; goods is wellth (wealth) or pleasures: thus, a coal-mine, being no pleasure, cannot be owned.
3. Coal becomes goods after being moved, or taken. Moving does not make it good; its nature does not make it good: moving-plus-Nature makes it good, ownable. At the pit-head, already, it is a pleasure, fewer pains being now needed to move it to a fireplace. Thus, Nature apart from motion cannot be owned, being no good, as a cave is no good to a caveman outside it: rain is wetting him; if he takes it, moves in, it is good.
Animals and plants, by taking things from the planets presented to them, by moving things, raise Nature into wealth, and own things.
4. For Jack to own, have a thing for Jack's own, Jack must by his own force have subdued Nature, must have taken the thing by moving the thing's atoms, or moving something relatively to the thing, or, negatively, by not evading, but accepting, the thing in motion—a wind, tide, light-wave; else Jack must have taken something (by as much work) to purchase the thing from its (true) owner, or accepted it as a favour from Nature in motion, or from its (true) owner. To say “own” is to say “take”; to say “take” is to say “motion”, i.e., the doing of work: “work done” being FD, i.e., Force used into Distance moved-over. I cannot own the air: it is no good; I own the air in my lungs, having taken, moved, it, done FD on it: it is very good; and I own the air which, doing FD, moving to my face, I do not evade, but accept, take: it is very good.
I say to Jack “take a cigar”; he loudly says “yes!”, but does not move it to his mouth, nor moves his mouth to it; instead, he moves a pen to his mouth; this makes me laugh: he has not taken a cigar.
Jack is catching fish in a boat; Tom owns the boat: so Jack gives fish to Tom, until Jack's FD done on the fish is equivalent to Tom's FD done on the boat; and now Jack owns the boat. If “the law” says that Tom still owns the boat, this makes me laugh: for how can Tom come to own two boats' good by the FD done on one only?
Jack is ploughing the sea with a ship: just there he owns the sea, has taken, is moving, it for his good. He does not own the sea before, nor the sea behind, him: for the motions behind made by him have ceased to do good.
Jack is ploughing soil: he owns the soil ploughed, has taken it, and will own it while the motions he has made do good: so that, if Tom who has not moved it says “I own the soil, for 'the law' declares that I have taken it by moving a pen two inches”, this makes me laugh. Or, if Jack says “I own it for ever”, this makes me laugh. Or, if anyone says “I own both the soil and the site” (relative position), this makes me laugh: for what can one man move to make a relative position good? He can neither move a field toward anything nor move much toward a field. If many men move railways that way, or move things to rear towns round the field, this makes the site good, moving it from outside a community to inside a community; and the many who make it good own it.
5. The site is the field's chief good: so the plougher owes something to those who, making it good, own it, This something is named “rent”.
6. Suppose that the plougher, or dweller-on, is an Englishman: he owes rent to the English. And, since the site of England is made good by movements made in America, he owes rent to the Americans.
7. This the mind readily descries to be true: it is a “truism”, and is necessarily the Fundamental Principle of Society throughout the universe. So that, summing up, we may define: “Rent” is “right”, based on truth when paid to those by whose movements a site is made good.
8. One might readily guess (if there were no example of it) that any violation of a Principle so fundamental would be avenged by Nature upon the planet which violated it.
9. Our planet is such an example: for here Two Separate Violations of the Principle appear; each great in itself; but one small in comparison.
10. Accordingly, for the small violation Nature has not failed to send upon Man a small penalty; and for the great violation great penalties.
11. The small violation consists in the claim by nations to have taken, without having moved, sites called “countries”.
12. For this Nature has sent upon man the small penalty of War.
13. To abolish War men must remove its cause.
Therefore let the site-rental of England (i.e., the excess of English goods over what English goods would be, if no other country existed) be handed over to a World Council; and the site-rental of America to the same; and the World Council shall disburse such funds for the majesty and joy of Man: and War shall terminate.
14. This way the Lord of the Sea indicates to the world, though with its initiation he is not personally concerned.
15. Beside the small violation of the Fundamental Principle of Society, there is a great on the earth.
16. The Great Violation consists in the claim by individuals to have taken, without having moved, sites and soils called “estates”, “domains”, “plots”: for, as rent tends to rightness when paid to the fifty millions of a nation, fifty-millionfold is its wrongness when paid to one; and as rent is right when paid to the thousand million inhabitants of a planet, a thousand-millionfold is its wrongness when paid to one.
17. For this Great Violation of the Fundamental Principle of Society Nature has sent upon Man great penalties: poverties, frenzies, depravities, horrors, sorrows, lowness, dulness.
18. Lowness, dulness: for by far the greatest of these penalties is a restraint on Man's development. Man is an animal, Man is a mind: and since the wing of mind is Pride, Assurance, or Self-esteem, and since the home of an animal is a Planet, and an animal without a home is a thing without Assurance or Pride, so Man without Earth is a mind without wing. Even so, a few, having Assurance, make what we call “Progress”, i.e., the discovering of truth—a crawling which might become flight, had all minds but the wing of Pride to co-operate in discovering truth. But Man lacks assurance and foothold, founded home and domain: his sole heritage, though he is neither fish nor fowl, being sea and air.
19. This is a great violation.
20. And with this great violation of the Fundamental Principle of Society the Lord of the Sea is personally concerned. In the name of Heaven and of Earth he urges upon the nations of men to amend it in the month of the promulgation of this Manifesto: and this summons he strengthens with a threat of his resentment.
As the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth, I will see to it.
RICHARD.
Three days after the Manifesto the marriage of Miss Stickney of New York with Lord Alfred Cowern was to take place, this having been put off owing to the Kaiser tragedy; and so, on the day of the Manifesto, Baruch Frankl, the Jew, was crossing to a wedding which, even in the midst of great events, had stirred up a considerable rumour and sensation, since the American guests were to consist of the coterie known as the “Thirty-four”, all millionaires, while “the cake” was to weigh three-quarters of a ton, each guest's grub to cost $500, and for that breakfast the Neva had been ravished for fish and Siamese crags for nests.
Frankl, however, was never destined to taste those five hundred dollar mouthfuls. It happened in this way: as the Boodah's searchlights, destroyed in the battle, were not yet repaired, in the interval some lawless ships took the chance on dark nights to skulk past with extinguished lights; now, the captain of Frankl's chartered steamer had that bright idea (being of adventurous turn), when night fell forty knots east of the Boodah, so he came to Frankl, and broached the scheme.
“Not for Joe”, was Frankl's answer: “pay the Pirate his taxes and be done”.
“It could be worked as sweet as a nut, sir!” persisted the skipper, with a watering mind.
“Well, so long us you take the risk, perhaps—but no, sir, I'd rather not”.
On which the skipper winked self-willed to himself, and, putting out nine miles from the Boodah his three lights, went dashing past.
And the attempt would have succeeded, had it not been for the fact that the night was pitch-dark, and that another ship was trying that very venture with extinguished lights. And these two ships met, bow to bow, with such an energy of adventurous smartness, that both sharply sank.
The sea, however, being smooth, all hands were saved; and now, since the boats lay forlorn on the vast, with nothing but the Boodah's swarm of moons to move to, for the Boodah they started, while Frankl cast twinkling fingers to the sky, and cursed that night, as the oars with slow wash journeyed through turgid murk toward the very den of the devil.
When they reached the Boodah they were conducted down to a police-court, and there shivered an hour in a dreary light, till three officials in peaked caps and frock-coats came, sat on a Bench, and, after hearing evidence, pronounced sentence of seven months against the captains, and one against Frankl.
These were led away by police blue-jackets, and Frankl groaned through the night in a box as cold as the cells of Colmoor.
The next morning Quilter-Beckett, making a report in Hogarth's salon, mentioned the incident, saying: “Here are the names, with the sentences; I shall send the sailors home...” and Hogarth's eyes, resting on the document, chanced to catch that name of Frankl.
At once he turned pale, for his first thought was: “Frankl must have been going to the wedding, in which case Someone Else may be with him”.
But her name was not there....
He rose and paced; and he said low: “No one else on either of the ships?”
“No, my Lord King”.
Then up lifted Hogarth's brow, alight with fun, and he muttered: “All right, Caps-and-tassels”.
He said aloud: “Quilter-Beckett, this Frankl I know. Did you never hear anything about Caps-and-tassels at Westring? He is Caps-and-tassels. Now tell me, which is your biggest blue-jacket?”
“Man called Young, my Lord King”.
“Then, have a suit of Young's sea-clothes put upon this Frankl, and let him be brought before me in the Throne Room this morning after the Audience. He was fond of liveries....”
Accordingly, by half-past eleven Frankl entered the Throne Room, where, as soon as its rosy translucency broke upon his gaze, an “Oh!” of admiration groaned from him, in spite of his weight of misery, he not walking, but being lifted forward in successive swings by his armpits—up the first steps to the outer circle of balustrade, forward to the second steps and the inner balustrade, within which shone the throne, and Hogarth, crowned and large in robes, on it.
The two warders, intent upon portering Frankl, and not noticing the cap which still covered his eyebrows, one now in sudden scare whispered: “Off with your cap, you...!” on which Frankl snatched it off, grasping through superabundant sleeves, he at the same moment a fury and a dazzled man, the throne before him incredible, like a dream which one knows to be a dream, in structure not unlike the Peacock Throne of Akbar, its length fourteen feet, seating thirteen persons in recesses, standing on a gold platform with three concave steps set with rings of sapphire, and consisting of a central part and two wings, the wings being supported on twisted legs (one had been broken), and made of fretted ivory mosaicked with cabochon emerald, ruby, topaz, turquoise, chrysoberyl, diamond, opal, the large central part, with its recesses, being also of ivory, gold-arabesqued, its mosque-shape canopy (of Hindoo enamel-work on the outside) being supported by eleven pillars of emerald; at the top of each pillar a dolphin (hence the name “Dolphin Throne”) made of turquoise, jasper, pearl, sardius, and at the bottom of each pillar a guldusta, or bouquet, of gems; the concave ceiling one mass of stones, representing a sea in which sailed three Dutch galleons, and seven dolphins sported.
But all that Frankl saw of it was its opulence: for his terror lest the warders should let him go occupied his mind.
And precisely the thing which he feared came upon him, for Hogarth said: “Warders, retire”.
And now Frankl, all unsupported, stood in unstable equilibrium, anon stooping to his finger-tips, then straining doubtfully forward with struggling arms from a too backward poise: for not only did the trousers lie a twisted emptiness far below his feet, but the feet themselves were lost in Young's boots, so he stood like Scaramouch, a mere sack, a working of his chin wobbling down his beard, and there was a blaze in his stare which Hogarth, unfortunately, did not well estimate.
They faced each other, alone, save for the body-guard at the circumference of the room.
“Was it you that sent me to Colmoor?” Hogarth suddenly asked in a low voice, stooping forward.
“Me!” shrieked Baruch Frankl, pointing a hanging sleeve-end to his breast: “as Jehovah is my witness—”
“Were you about to swear? For ever the same?—tyrant and worm? It was you. Now tell it me right out: you have nothing to fear: for you cannot be vain enough to imagine that I would harbour enmity against you”.
“It wasn't me, I say again, my Lord King!”—Frankl trampled a little backward, then stooped over-poised to his finger-tips: “with what motive? Oh, that's hard—to be accused. They have already given me a month—my God! a month! And only because I am a Jew. But it wasn't me—that I'll swear to God—”
Hogarth rose to his height, descended, put his hand upon Frankl's shoulder. “Well, leave that. But—my sister!”
His hand felt the shoulder beneath it start like fits.
“Your sister!” Frankl screamed with a face of scare: “Why, what of her now?”
“Frankl, you are frightened: you know, Frankl, where she is!”
“Me? O, my Good God, what is this! Me, poor sinner, know where your sister is, my Lord King? Why, spare me! spare me, God of Hosts! Why, you've only got to ask yourself the question—”
“Listen to me, Frankl”, said Hogarth, bending his blazing brow low over the Jew: “I have searched for that woman through the world, and have not found her. All the time, mind you, I felt convinced that you know where she is; and you may wonder why—years ago—I did not have you seized. I will tell you why: it was because I had a sort of instinct that God, whom I serve continually with tears and prayers, would not fail in His day to show me her face: and to-day you are here. Do you suppose, Frankl, that you will go away without telling me where she is? And in order to hurry you, listen to what I say to your warders—”
He touched a button in the balustrade, and to the warders said: “If at any time this man should demand pencil and paper, supply them, and take to your Admiral what he writes. To-day his food shall be fare from your own table; to-morrow three loaves and water; from the third day one loaf and water; till further orders”.
Up shot Frankl's shivering arms, while Hogarth, training his ermines and purples, paced away.
That was on the day following the Manifesto.
By the time Frankl's three loaves had become one, that amazement with which men received the Manifesto had commenced to give place to more coherent impressions.
He was not a “Monster”! that was the first realization—no pirate, nor lurid Anti-Christ, nor vainglorious Caesar! And in two days, the first astonishment over, there arose a noise in the world: for the Lord of the Sea had given to the nations one month only in which to do that thing: and the peoples took passionately to meetings.
In England Land Leagues, Chambers of Agriculture, Restoration Leagues, Nationalization Leagues, many Leagues, were organizing furiously, stretching the right arm of oratory; deputations, petitions in wagons, demonstrations en bloc, party cannonades, racket heaven-high. Sir Moses Cohen, the Jew-Liberal Leader, appealing to the strongest prejudice in Englishmen, spoke one night at Newcastle of “the interference of a foreign prince in the affairs of Britain”; used the word: “Never!”, and on this cry secured an enormous following: so that, within a week, he was instrumental in forming the formidable League of Resistance—destined to prove so tragic for Hogarth, and for England.
It was in the midst of this world-turmoil that—on the third day—the marriage-morning of Miss Cecil Stickney dawned; and that same evening Rebekah Frankl, convalescent from influenza, was seated over a bedroom fire in Hanover Square, a cashmire round her shoulders, her sickness cured by herbs, her physician then hobbling with a stick down the stairs—Estrella of Lisbon—her back almost horizontal now with age.
And as Rebekah mused there, two newsboys below, whose shouts pursued each other, went proclaiming through November gloom as it were the day of doom, crying, even in that uproar of Europe, a private event:
MARRIAGE OF
LORD ALFRED COWERN
AND MISS CECIL STICKNEY
APPALLING TRAGEDY
And soon a girl ran in, gasping: “Miss Frankl!—this is too awful—your father—”
The news, having been flashed to Paris by Mackay-Bennett cable, now appeared in detail after the New York Herald's French edition, and Rebekah's eyes ran wildly over details as to the “bevy of beauty”, daughters of “the Thirty-four”, and the church of waiting ladies, the carpeted path between palms and exotics, and how the ticket-holders heard the organ tell the Cantilenet Nuptiale and Bennett's Minuet; and then the multitudinous stir: behold the bridegroom cometh!—the little necessary bridegroom of no importance, and then the white entry of bride and bridal train, while the choir knelt to sing “O Perfect Love”.
Perfect love, however, was hardly the order of that day, but rather perfect hate: for in Madison Square—the church being at the upper end of Fifth Avenue—a mob was being harangued on the subject of this very wedding: and when they heard and realized the thing that was being done before their eyes they were swept as by a wind of fire, and under its impulse set out like some swollen Rhone with a rushing sound to pounce upon the church, full of perfect hate: and the choir sang “O perfect love”.
What happened now was described as a nightmare. The same elemental instincts of the Stone Age which had exhibited themselves in the $500-worth of food wrought in another form, but with no less savagery, in assassins as in victims: and a massacre ensued, bride and bridegroom passing away like bubbles, of “the Thirty-four” five only escaping. The report ended with the words: “The ringleaders have been arrested; quiet reigns through the city”; then a list of the guests, with asterisks indicating those killed.
Rebekah searched for her father's name, and when she became certain that it was not there, her lips moved in thanksgiving.
But since Frankl was not at the wedding, where, then, was Frankl? She counted the days on her fingers: he could not have been late.
Unless there had been an accident to his ship....
Her brows knit a little; she peered into the fire: and thought of the Boodah....
It was possible that when her father's steamer stopped to pay sea-rent, Hogarth might have heard, and seized him. That notion occurred to her.
And at once it threw her into an extraordinary fever, her bosom swelling like elastic in her heavings to catch breath, though she did not realize the wild thought that was working up to birth within her. She rose and paced, furiously fast.
If he was in the hands of Hogarth?
“He is a British subject”, she muttered: “Hogarth has not the right...Oh, he has not the right...!”
She was fearfully agitated! something fighting up and up within her, stifling her, working to burst into birth; she flung the cashmire from her shoulders, her bosom rowing like two oarsmen. “Because we are Jews...!” she went.
“If he dared do that—!”
What then? Say! Rebekah!
“I would go to him myself—”
All at once that thought was born, and she stood shockingly naked to her own eyes, her hands rushing to cover a face washed in shame. “But, surely”, she whispered, “I could never be so bold, good Heavens? Why, Never! Never—!”
However, an hour later, with flaming eyes, she was writing a letter to Frankl's manager.