War in the Air — 26 -- Ch 11, Parts 4 & 5

4 Across this sombre spectacle of disaster goes a minute and insignificant person for whom perhaps the readers of this story have now some slight solicitude.

Of him there remains to be told just one single and miraculous thing.

Through a world darkened and lost, through a civilisation in its death agony, our little Cockney errant went and found his Edna!

He found his Edna!

He got back across the Atlantic partly by means of an order from the President and partly through his own good luck.

He contrived to get himself aboard a British brig in the timber trade that put out from Boston without cargo, chiefly, it would seem, because its captain had a vague idea of “getting home” to South Shields.

Bert was able to ship himself upon her mainly because of the seamanlike appearance of his rubber boots.

They had a long, eventful voyage; they were chased, or imagined themselves to be chased, for some hours by an Asiatic ironclad, which was presently engaged by a British cruiser.

The two ships fought for three hours, circling and driving southward as they fought, until the twilight and the cloud-drift of a rising gale swallowed them up.

A

few days later Bert's ship lost her rudder and mainmast in a gale.

The crew ran out of food and subsisted on fish.

They saw strange air-ships going eastward near the Azores and landed to get provisions and repair the rudder at Teneriffe.

There they found the town destroyed and two big liners, with dead still aboard, sunken in the harbour.

From there they got canned food and material for repairs, but their operations were greatly impeded by the hostility of a band of men amidst the ruins of the town, who sniped them and tried to drive them away.

At Mogador, they stayed and sent a boat ashore for water, and were nearly captured by an Arab ruse.

Here too they got the Purple Death aboard, and sailed with it incubating in their blood.

The cook sickened first, and then the mate, and presently every one was down and three in the forecastle were dead.

It chanced to be calm weather, and they drifted helplessly and indeed careless of their fate backwards towards the Equator.

The captain doctored them all with rum.

Nine died all together, and of the four survivors none understood navigation; when at last they took heart again and could handle a sail, they made a course by the stars roughly northward and were already short of food once more when they fell in with a petrol-driven ship from Rio to Cardiff, shorthanded by reason of the Purple Death and glad to take them aboard.

So at last, after a year of wandering Bert reached England.

He landed in bright June weather, and found the Purple Death was there just beginning its ravages.

The people were in a state of panic in Cardiff and many had fled to the hills, and directly the steamer came to the harbour she was boarded and her residue of food impounded by some unauthenticated Provisional Committee.

Bert tramped through a country disorganised by pestilence, foodless, and shaken to the very base of its immemorial order.

He came near death and starvation many times, and once he was drawn into scenes of violence that might have ended his career.

But the Bert Smallways who tramped from Cardiff to London vaguely “going home,” vaguely seeking something of his own that had no tangible form but Edna, was a very different person from the Desert Dervish who was swept out of England in Mr. Butteridge's balloon a year before.

He was brown and lean and enduring, steady-eyed and pestilence-salted, and his mouth, which had once hung open, shut now like a steel trap.

Across his brow ran a white scar that he had got in a fight on the brig.

In Cardiff he had felt the need of new clothes and a weapon, and had, by means that would have shocked him a year ago, secured a flannel shirt, a corduroy suit, and a revolver and fifty cartridges from an abandoned pawnbroker's. He also got some soap and had his first real wash for thirteen months in a stream outside the town.

The Vigilance bands that had at first shot plunderers very freely were now either entirely dispersed by the plague, or busy between town and cemetery in a vain attempt to keep pace with it.

He prowled on the outskirts of the town for three or four days, starving, and then went back to join the Hospital Corps for a week, and so fortified himself with a few square meals before he started eastward.

The Welsh and English countryside at that time presented the strangest mingling of the assurance and wealth of the opening twentieth century with a sort of Dureresque mediaevalism.

All the gear, the houses and mono-rails, the farm hedges and power cables, the roads and pavements, the sign-posts and advertisements of the former order were still for the most part intact.

Bankruptcy, social collapse, famine, and pestilence had done nothing to damage these, and it was only to the great capitals and ganglionic centres, as it were, of this State, that positive destruction had come.

Any one dropped suddenly into the country would have noticed very little difference.

He would have remarked first, perhaps, that all the hedges needed clipping, that the roadside grass grew rank, that the road-tracks were unusually rainworn, and that the cottages by the wayside seemed in many cases shut up, that a telephone wire had dropped here, and that a cart stood abandoned by the wayside.

But he would still find his hunger whetted by the bright assurance that Wilder's Canned Peaches were excellent, or that there was nothing so good for the breakfast table as Gobble's Sausages.

And then suddenly would come the Dureresque element; the skeleton of a horse, or some crumpled mass of rags in the ditch, with gaunt extended feet and a yellow, purple-blotched skin and face, or what had been a face, gaunt and glaring and devastated.

Then here would be a field that had been ploughed and not sown, and here a field of corn carelessly trampled by beasts, and here a hoarding torn down across the road to make a fire.

Then presently he would meet a man or a woman, yellow-faced and probably negligently dressed and armed--prowling for food.

These people would have the complexions and eyes and expressions of tramps or criminals, and often the clothing of prosperous middle-class or upper-class people.

Many of these would be eager for news, and willing to give help and even scraps of queer meat, or crusts of grey and doughy bread, in return for it.

They would listen to Bert's story with avidity, and attempt to keep him with them for a day or so.

The virtual cessation of postal distribution and the collapse of all newspaper enterprise had left an immense and aching gap in the mental life of this time.

Men had suddenly lost sight of the ends of the earth and had still to recover the rumour-spreading habits of the Middle Ages.

In their eyes, in their bearing, in their talk, was the quality of lost and deoriented souls.

As Bert travelled from parish to parish, and from district to district, avoiding as far as possible those festering centres of violence and despair, the larger towns, he found the condition of affairs varying widely.

In one parish he would find the large house burnt, the vicarage wrecked, evidently in violent conflict for some suspected and perhaps imaginary store of food, unburied dead everywhere, and the whole mechanism of the community at a standstill.

In another he would find organising forces stoutly at work, newly-painted notice boards warning off vagrants, the roads and still cultivated fields policed by armed men, the pestilence under control, even nursing going on, a store of food husbanded, the cattle and sheep well guarded, and a group of two or three justices, the village doctor or a farmer, dominating the whole place; a reversion, in fact, to the autonomous community of the fifteenth century.

But at any time such a village would be liable to a raid of Asiatics or Africans or such-like air-pirates, demanding petrol and alcohol or provisions.

The price of its order was an almost intolerable watchfulness and tension.

Then the approach to the confused problems of some larger centre of population and the presence of a more intricate conflict would be marked by roughly smeared notices of “Quarantine” or “Strangers Shot,” or by a string of decaying plunderers dangling from the telephone poles at the roadside.

About Oxford big boards were put on the roofs warning all air wanderers off with the single word, “Guns.

” Taking their risks amidst these things, cyclists still kept abroad, and once or twice during Bert's long tramp powerful motor cars containing masked and goggled figures went tearing past him.

There were few police in evidence, but ever and again squads of gaunt and tattered soldier-cyclists would come drifting along, and such encounters became more frequent as he got out of Wales into England.

Amidst all this wreckage they were still campaigning.

He had had some idea of resorting to the workhouses for the night if hunger pressed him too closely, but some of these were closed and others converted into temporary hospitals, and one he came up to at twilight near a village in Gloucestershire stood with all its doors and windows open, silent as the grave, and, as he found to his horror by stumbling along evil-smelling corridors, full of unburied dead.

From Gloucestershire Bert went northward to the British aeronautic park outside Birmingham, in the hope that he might be taken on and given food, for there the Government, or at any rate the War Office, still existed as an energetic fact, concentrated amidst collapse and social disaster upon the effort to keep the British flag still flying in the air, and trying to brisk up mayor and mayor and magistrate and magistrate in a new effort of organisation.

They had brought together all the best of the surviving artisans from that region, they had provisioned the park for a siege, and they were urgently building a larger type of Butteridge machine.

Bert could get no footing at this work: he was not sufficiently skilled, and he had drifted to Oxford when the great fight occurred in which these works were finally wrecked.

He saw something, but not very much, of the battle from a place called Boar Hill.

He saw the Asiatic squadron coming up across the hills to the south-west, and he saw one of their airships circling southward again chased by two aeroplanes, the one that was ultimately overtaken, wrecked and burnt at Edge Hill.

But he never learnt the issue of the combat as a whole.

He crossed the Thames from Eton to Windsor and made his way round the south of London to Bun Hill, and there he found his brother Tom, looking like some dark, defensive animal in the old shop, just recovering from the Purple Death, and Jessica upstairs delirious, and, as it seemed to him, dying grimly.

She raved of sending out orders to customers, and scolded Tom perpetually lest he should be late with Mrs. Thompson's potatoes and Mrs. Hopkins' cauliflower, though all business had long since ceased and Tom had developed a quite uncanny skill in the snaring of rats and sparrows and the concealment of certain stores of cereals and biscuits from plundered grocers' shops.

Tom received his brother with a sort of guarded warmth.

“Lor!

” he said, “it's Bert.

I thought you'd be coming back some day, and I'm glad to see you.

But I carn't arst you to eat anything, because I 'aven't got anything to eat....

Where you been, Bert, all this time?

” Bert reassured his brother by a glimpse of a partly eaten swede, and was still telling his story in fragments and parentheses, when he discovered behind the counter a yellow and forgotten note addressed to himself.

“What's this?

” he said, and found it was a year-old note from Edna.

“She came 'ere,” said Tom, like one who recalls a trivial thing, “arstin' for you and arstin' us to take 'er in.

That was after the battle and settin' Clapham Rise afire.

I was for takin' 'er in, but Jessica wouldn't 'ave it--and so she borrowed five shillings of me quiet like and went on.

I

dessay she's tole you--” She had, Bert found.

She had gone on, she said in her note, to an aunt and uncle who had a brickfield near Horsham.

And there at last, after another fortnight of adventurous journeying, Bert found her.

5 When Bert and Edna set eyes on one another, they stared and laughed foolishly, so changed they were, and so ragged and surprised.

And then they both fell weeping.

“Oh!

Bertie, boy!

” she cried.

“You've come--you've come!

” and put out her arms and staggered.

“I told 'im.

He said he'd kill me if I didn't marry him.

” But Edna was not married, and when presently Bert could get talk from her, she explained the task before him.

That little patch of lonely agricultural country had fallen under the power of a band of bullies led by a chief called Bill Gore who had begun life as a butcher boy and developed into a prize-fighter and a professional sport.

They had been organised by a local nobleman of former eminence upon the turf, but after a time he had disappeared, no one quite knew how and Bill had succeeded to the leadership of the countryside, and had developed his teacher's methods with considerable vigour.

There had been a strain of advanced philosophy about the local nobleman, and his mind ran to “improving the race” and producing the Over-Man, which in practice took the form of himself especially and his little band in moderation marrying with some frequency.

Bill followed up the idea with an enthusiasm that even trenched upon his popularity with his followers.

One day he had happened upon Edna tending her pigs, and had at once fallen a-wooing with great urgency among the troughs of slush.

Edna had made a gallant resistance, but he was still vigorously about and extraordinarily impatient.

He might, she said, come at any time, and she looked Bert in the eyes.

They were back already in the barbaric stage when a man must fight for his love.

And here one deplores the conflicts of truth with the chivalrous tradition.

One would like to tell of Bert sallying forth to challenge his rival, of a ring formed and a spirited encounter, and Bert by some miracle of pluck and love and good fortune winning.

But indeed nothing of the sort occurred.

Instead, he reloaded his revolver very carefully, and then sat in the best room of the cottage by the derelict brickfield, looking anxious and perplexed, and listening to talk about Bill and his ways, and thinking, thinking.

Then suddenly Edna's aunt, with a thrill in her voice, announced the appearance of that individual.

He was coming with two others of his gang through the garden gate.

Bert got up, put the woman aside, and looked out.

They presented remarkable figures.

They wore a sort of uniform of red golfing jackets and white sweaters, football singlet, and stockings and boots and each had let his fancy play about his head-dress.

Bill had a woman's hat full of cock's feathers, and all had wild, slouching cowboy brims.

Bert sighed and stood up, deeply thoughtful, and Edna watched him, marvelling.

The women stood quite still.

He left the window, and went out into the passage rather slowly, and with the careworn expression of a man who gives his mind to a complex and uncertain business.

“Edna!

” he called, and when she came he opened the front door.

He asked very simply, and pointing to the foremost of the three, “That 'im?...

Sure?

”...

and being told that it was, shot his rival instantly and very accurately through the chest.

He then shot Bill's best man much less tidily in the head, and then shot at and winged the third man as he fled.

The third gentleman yelped, and continued running with a comical end-on twist.

Then Bert stood still meditating, with the pistol in his hand, and quite regardless of the women behind him.

So far things had gone well.

It became evident to him that if he did not go into politics at once, he would be hanged as an assassin and accordingly, and without a word to the women, he went down to the village public-house he had passed an hour before on his way to Edna, entered it from the rear, and confronted the little band of ambiguous roughs, who were drinking in the tap-room and discussing matrimony and Bill's affection in a facetious but envious manner, with a casually held but carefully reloaded revolver, and an invitation to join what he called, I regret to say, a “Vigilance Committee” under his direction.

“It's wanted about 'ere, and some of us are gettin' it up.

” He presented himself as one having friends outside, though indeed, he had no friends at all in the world but Edna and her aunt and two female cousins.

There was a quick but entirely respectful discussion of the situation.

They thought him a lunatic who had tramped into, this neighbourhood ignorant of Bill.

They desired to temporise until their leader came.

Bill would settle him.

Some one spoke of Bill.

“Bill's dead, I jest shot '_im_,” said Bert.

“We don't need reckon with 'IM.

'_e's_ shot, and a red-'aired chap with a squint, 'E'S shot.

We've settled up all that.

There ain't going to be no more Bill, ever.

'E'd got wrong ideas about marriage and things.

It's 'is sort of chap we're after.

” That carried the meeting.

Bill was perfunctorily buried, and Bert's Vigilance Committee (for so it continued to be called) reigned in his stead.

That is the end of this story so far as Bert Smallways is concerned.

We leave him with his Edna to become squatters among the clay and oak thickets of the Weald, far away from the stream of events.

From that time forth life became a succession of peasant encounters, an affair of pigs and hens and small needs and little economies and children, until Clapham and Bun Hill and all the life of the Scientific Age became to Bert no more than the fading memory of a dream.

He never knew how the War in the Air went on, nor whether it still went on.

There were rumours of airships going and coming, and of happenings Londonward.

Once or twice their shadows fell on him as he worked, but whence they came or whither they went he could not tell.

Even his desire to tell died out for want of food.

At times came robbers and thieves, at times came diseases among the beasts and shortness of food, once the country was worried by a pack of boar-hounds he helped to kill; he went through many inconsecutive, irrelevant adventures.

He survived them all.

Accident and death came near them both ever and again and passed them by, and they loved and suffered and were happy, and she bore him many children--eleven children--one after the other, of whom only four succumbed to the necessary hardships of their simple life.

They lived and did well, as well was understood in those days.

They went the way of all flesh, year by year.