Aliens Part 26

"Sure," I said, putting down a cent and taking up the _Manhattan Mail_, an evening journal of modest headlines. "I suppose you are coming out, too?"

"Yes," he said, as we turned away, "I've come up from the ship. We only got in this morning."

"You are late," I agreed. "Mrs. Carville said you might be in on Sat.u.r.day, and here it is Wednesday."

He gave me a quick glance.

"Oh! Did she tell you? Yes, we had several bad days after pa.s.sing Fastnet. The Western ocean is bad all over just now."

"I suppose you were sorry to leave the Mediterranean."

"It was Bremerhaven this time," he replied, striking a match. "Near Hamburg, you know. They change us about now and again."

"What is your cargo?" I asked.

"I thought you knew," he said, surprised. "I'm on the _Raritan_, an oil-tank. Standard Oil, you know. I quite thought you knew."

"I had intended to ask you," I said, "but it is a delicate subject.

One cannot very well ferret for details of a stranger's business."

"That's the genteel view, I know," he said, smiling. "There's something to be said for it, too."

"You will come in and finish your story?" I ventured.

"Well, I did think of looking in some time...."

"After dinner to-night?"

"Much obliged. It pa.s.ses the time."

We went out and climbed into the Paterson express. We are rather proud of this train in a way, for it is the only one of the day which confines itself to stations when contemplating a stop. I narrated to Mr. Carville an incident of the preceding winter when a commuter of Hawthorne, on our line, stepping out one snowy night, found himself clinging to the trestles of the bridge over the Pasayack River, and the train vanishing into the darkness. Mr.

Carville laughed at this, and remarked jocosely that he was "safer at sea." We discussed for some time the comparative merits of English and American railroads, Mr. Carville expressing the fairly shrewd opinion that "conditions so different made any comparison out of the question."

"After all," he remarked, "leaving out London, which has more people in it than Canada and Venezuela put together, what _is_ England? From an American point of view, I mean. Simply Maryland!"

I appreciated this. Often during my sojourn in America, I had pored over maps and vainly endeavoured to form some conception of so gigantic a territory. I had failed. I had come to the conclusion that minds nurtured in the insular atmosphere were forever incapable of visualizing a continent. In my fugitive letters to friends at home I had been reduced to the astronomer's facile ill.u.s.trations. "Just as," I had written in despair--"just as a railway train, travelling at a mile a minute, takes nearly 180 years to reach the sun, so we, travelling in a tourist car at rather less than a mile a minute, took an apparently interminable period to reach the sun of California!" It was a poor jest, but excusable one whose clothes, ears, mouth, eyes and nose were full of cinder-dust, excusable in a disdainful Britisher so far from home. To Englishmen, who had never seen a grade-crossing, a desert, or a mountain, and for whom a short night-journey on smooth rock-ballasted lines suffices to take them from one end of their country to the other, my figure was vague enough, no doubt. Some day, when I go back, I shall try to explain.

"Yes," I said, "exactly--Maryland."

I was more than ever reinforced in my already-expressed opinion that Mr. Carville was a man of more ability than ambition. There was to me something bizarre in his deliberate abstention from any contact, save books, with the larger intellectual sphere to which he by right belonged. His nave confession of culture showed that he was aware of his latent power, but I was not sure whether he had ever realized the stern law by which organs become atrophied by disuse. We had reached our station and were struggling up Pine Street through rain and wind before I ventured to hint at my concern.

"Ah!" he said. "I daresay you're right in a way. But----" The wind blew his voice away, so that he seemed to be speaking through the telephone, "----I've a family to think of."

We parted at the door, and I hurried to tell the news to my friends. They smiled when I spoke of Mr. Carville.

"We've had news, too," said Bill, helping me to spinach. "A paper from Cecil."

"Copy of _The Morning_," added Mac. It is a rule of the house that there be no papers on the table, so I possessed my soul in patience until after dinner. My cigar going well, and Mac thundering the "Soldiers' Chorus," from _Faust_, on the piano, I opened the paper which Bill handed to me. To be honest, I was a little startled. The chief item on the news page was headed:

AEROPHONE MESSAGE FROM CARVILLE; OVER HELIGOLAND; ALARM IN GERMANY.

_Copyright by The London "Morning."_

The special article of the day was headed: "The Napoleon of the Air; a Character Sketch," and the leader, signed by Lord Cholme himself, was a paean, in stilted journalese, in praise of the _Morning's_ enterprise in encouraging invention.

"The Empire," wrote Lord Cholme, "can no longer afford to pa.s.s by one of her most brilliant sons. In the light of his magnificent achievement, the daring of a Peary, the nerve of a Shackleton, the indomitable persistence of a Marconi, dwindle and fade. We do not hesitate to say that since the capture of Gibraltar, the Empire has secured no such chance for consolidating her paramountcy in Europe. The present is no time for hesitation or delay. Mr. Carville is master of the situation.

By his message from the air, three thousand feet above Heligoland, in full view of German territory, to the office of _The Morning_, he has demonstrated the efficiency of his machine. If that is not sufficient, Mr. Carville's next journey will convince Europe, if not England. If the pettifogging Radical Government turn a deaf ear to our brilliant correspondent, if they ignore his claims and chaffer in any commercial spirit with his accredited agents, their days are numbered. It is hardly too much to say that the days of the Empire are also numbered...."

Apart from our own private interest in the affair, the news did not thrill. In America one's withers are unwrung by such scares. The "exclusiveness" of Lord Cholme's information, indeed, defeated his object. Lord Cholme, I knew, was loved neither in Fleet Street nor in Park Place. His ruthless compet.i.tion with the news agencies, his capture of numerous cable-routes, had gradually divided England into two cla.s.ses: those who read _The Morning_ and those who didn't. Everyone remembers the exclusive description of the destruction of Constantinople in _The Morning_. No one was surprised to find that the following day Constantinople was still alive and well. Clever young Oxford men who had not succeeded in getting a post on _The Morning_, satirized the paper in other journals who never paid more than two guineas a column. No doubt, having been a newspaper man myself, I discounted the effect of the scare upon the public. I could imagine the delicate raillery of the other papers, if indeed they deigned to notice Lord Cholme's exclusive information at all.

The special biography was as accurate as such biographies usually are.

It was written in a fair imitation of Mr. Kipling's racy colloquial style and contained numerous references to the Empire, the White Man's Burden and our "far-flung battle line." I suspected that Monsieur D'Aubigne had supplied the basic "facts" which had been edited by Lord Cholme before being handed on to "Vol-Plane," as the biographer called himself.

I set the paper down and resumed my cigar. The drums and tramplings of Lord Cholme's organ had revealed nothing fresh. I understand now why my friends had merely mentioned the fact of its arrival and made no comment. After all, our real interest lay in the man, not in his aeroplane. We had never seen an aeroplane except in the cinema films, but we were familiar enough with current events to feel no surprise that a man had flown over the North Sea. I think I expressed our mutual sentiment when I observed that Cecil's story of how Frank Carville won his bet, and Mr. Carville's own account of the voyage from the Argentine to Genoa, told us far more about the man than "Vol-Plane's" highly-paid hack-work.

We had been but a few minutes in the studio before Mr. Carville knocked and Mac ran down to admit him. We heard the rumble of voices while our visitor discarded his coat; comments on "the change," and then footsteps on the stairs. I went to the door to welcome him.

He was standing on the landing, appraising with a quick eye the Kakemonos and prints that covered the distempered walls. We are rather proud of our "j.a.ps," as Bill calls them. I even tried to learn something of the language from the "boy" who was our servant in San Francisco. He was not a scholarly boy, and he told lies in English, so that it is possible his tuition was of no value. I remember Bill was ironic because, when Nakamura was dismissed in ignominy, and wrote on the kitchen wall for the benefit of his successor, I was unable to decipher the message.

"Do you care for this sort of thing?" said Mac. "That's original,"

pointing to a fine Hiroshige.

"I used to," replied Carville, feeling for his pipe. "I was a good while in that trade--coal from Moji to Singapore. I think they're best at a distance though--the people, I mean."

Mac protested against this "narrow" view.

"Yes, yes, I know," said Mr. Carville, coming into the studio. "I read Lafcadio Hearn when I was younger; read him again out in j.a.pan. Humph!"

Whether his characteristic e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n referred to Hearn or the studio I cannot determine. His interest was obvious, but it was interest, not of a connoisseur, but of a man looking round another man's workshop. Von Roon used to say in Chelsea, "There is hope for him who looks with attention upon his neighbour's tools." Mr. Carville sank slowly into a chair, his eyes fixed upon a recent nude study.

"We haven't any Scotch, but if you care for Rye----" said Mac, reaching for a tray on the throne.

Mr. Carville's eye lost its vague, reflective expression as it fell upon the tray.

"Ah?" he said, "I'd rather have good Rye than--than--well, you know what most of the Scotch is here. No--no water, thanks. I take it as I find it."

It was a new facet of his character, this. We watched him swallow the neat spirit at a gulp and place the empty gla.s.s on the tray without emotion. Mac and I sipped gently and waited for Mr. Carville to begin.

"I've been rather worried just lately, with one thing and another," he observed, putting away his little bra.s.s tobacco-box. "Second went home to get married last trip, and the Third, promoted, you understand, needs an eye. Very willing and all that, but he's been in these big hotel-ships, Western ocean all his life, and as I say, he needs an eye.

I was telling you about my brother, if I remember."

We murmured that he had, and watched Mr. Carville's obvious enjoyment of his pipe.

"Ah!" he said, "the Brignole station in Genoa. Humph!"

"You see, my brother has something in his make-up that appeals to a woman. I was going to say, all women. There's something spectacular, you might say, in the way he carries on. I've never been able to decide whether it's intentional or just fate. Anyhow, there it is; and if you look at it in that light, it isn't so very wonderful after all that a girl like Rosa was then should have been dazzled and carried away. When she jumped up and stood staring at me, I hardly knew what to do. 'Rosa!'