The Lord of the Sea Part 31

"Yes".

"Who?"

For a moment Loveday's answer hesitated: and in that moment, O'Hara, with lightning decision, had his mouth at Hogarth's ear: "Come with me quick--then fall down and worship me for a month! _Someone is in the Malachite Hall!_"

Like sudden death Hogarth's colour fled his face; in another instant he was a blind, oblivious wight...had known that she was in Petersburg; but not that she was at the masque.

In a moment shrubbery, lights, all life, rushed into transformation for him: and with an excitement of the eyes, the bloodshot left looking bloodier, he went after O'Hara, tossing back at Loveday that fatal saying: "_To-morrow_...."

A little previously O'Hara, having got from Frankl details of Rebekah's dress, had spotted her in primrose silk, black mask and domino, and soon with Hogarth refound her in the crush: whereas Hogarth went about prospecting over the crowd, with that excitement of his red-veined eyeb.a.l.l.s, once even entered into talk with a group of four diplomatists, but all the time with eyeb.a.l.l.s absent in hankering tracking, out prowling after one morbid form, as the stallion's prowls after his Sally.

After an hour she said in French over her shoulder: "Why follow me?"

And as he bowed compliance, she added: "Are you well?"

He said: "Yes", and bowed, and she nodded twice, smiling a little, as they parted.

He, on the wings of exaltation, made haste to salute the Throne and leave the palace, rushing toward solitude to brood upon that smile, those familiar nods, and the gentle "Are you well?"--in his landau with him O'Hara, who persecuted him even to his bedroom; and when, after an hour, the priest at last reappeared in a corridor, the night-lights there shone upon an exultant visage, like a climber's who, after long clamberings, at last stamps on the Matterhorn, and looks abroad.

When he entered his own room, he stood with a hung head, till, sharply looking up, he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed with amazed, realization and opening arms: "Well, it's done!--I've got it!" Now he put forefinger to nose, and cut a beastly face at himself in the mirror-wall.

The next day Hogarth rather guiltily said to Loveday: "Well, I have promised old O'Hara the _Mahomet_ for the Straits. Don't frown--I owe him something, and the clever beast got over me in crazy moment".

"Quite so", Loveday coldly said: and thenceforth, the thing being done, was mum as to the name of the lady connected with O'Hara's crime.

He returned immediately to England, having there many occupations, which multiplied as the islands everywhere neared completion, the first of the launches taking place at Spezzia on the 7th of February.

A fortnight before this event the Beech-fever had revived, the coming launch being no secret, and the doubt whether "Beech's Folly" might be no folly, and the question what, on the whole, Beech's Folly might really bode, filled once more the consciousness of the Western world. By the 1st of February a drop was recorded in many general securities, in "governments", rentes, and consols; in Berlin the bank-rate rose one per cent.; it was stated that specie was acc.u.mulating in European vaults; while up leapt futures-cotton in the Liverpool market. At last the First Lord of the Treasury, in a speech at Manchester, gave sign of the Government's consciousness of the new fact, saying that he could only repeat the answer given by the First Lord of the Admiralty to the recent Deputations of the Chamber of Shipping and of Merchant Shippers, that Britain and the other maritime nations would know how to protect the seas from any nuisance. He antic.i.p.ated no nuisance. The structures popularly known as "Beech's Folly" (prolonged laughter) would be provided with lighthouses: and until they proved a nuisance on the ocean's fairways, the Governments must permit to private enterprise that free hand which was the characteristic of our age; moreover, a recognized Government had avowed its a.s.sociation with these structures.

Nevertheless, the fever heightened. The light-system of the _Boodah_, now included in the usual alphabetical lists of derelicts, was conned by thousands of mariners, while in the crowded captains', underwriters', and committee rooms at Lloyd's discussion buzzed and speechified in every tone of gravity. Suddenly in the F. G. and S. clause marine insurance underwent a profound modification; and it was then that the millionaire, Schroeder, at that time a German clerk in the City, managed to borrow five thousand pounds, and quickly cleared his pile by underwriting on larger F. C. and S. terms. And again raged the sale of the islands as penny salt-cellars, finger-basins, etc.; in broker's and sub-editor's office the tape-machine clicked the hourly progress of preparations at Spezzia; while every by-street was dreadful with that music-hall chorus:

"To Spezzia runs the Pullman train; The Follies soon their sense will teach; We've Beech, O dear, upon the brain, He brains upon the beach".

Meantime, the question of the drawing-room was "Are you going to Spezzia?" and by the 7th so great a pilgrimage of tourists--experts, idlers, cinematographers, special correspondents, ministers of state, Yankees, officers, social stars--had flocked to the scene, that accommodation failed in the town and surrounding hill-country, from Le Grazie on the west, to Lerici on the east of the Gulf.

The morning dawned bright--Italian sky, tranquil Italian sea--and by nine the harbour was alive with small-craft and Portovenere steamboats, all gala with flags; on the land side, too, over the hills, up the old road called Giro della Foce, and before the villages commanding the town, spread a cloud of witnesses; while the mult.i.tude in possession of _permessos_ for the dock-region stretched across a hundred and sixty acres, perched on every coign, and murmuring like the sea.

And all in the air a fluttered consciousness of the to-come, the present nothing, an hour hence everything--like the suspense of nature before gales, and that greatness and novelty of marriage-mornings: for such a bride that day would rush to the brine as it had never embraced.

There lay the hulk, all nuptial in colours, her roof looking like a _plaza_ of Lima or La Paz at Carnival, flags in mountain-ridges round her edges, flags in festoons, in slanting clothes-lines, in trophy-groups, on bandroled poles, bedecking her; some scaffolding still round her; and three running derricks, capable of wielding guns and boilers of 140 tons, craned their shears about her. A temporary stair under flags ran right up to a ledge above the waterline: from which ledge little steel steps led here and there to the roof; round the edge of roof and ledge running two bal.u.s.trades, surrounding the hulk; and over that upper portion, four times repeated in white letters ten feet high, the name _BOODAH_ boomed itself.

By eleven some seven hundred people stood and sat on the roof--the _elite_ of Europe, invited to the luncheon after the launch, seeming to the tract of on-lookers quite dainty and visionary there, like objects mirrored in an eye. And they formed groups, of which some chatted, and were elegant, and some spoke the gravest words uttered for centuries.

"What, really, is the _Boodah_?" asked a Servian Minister of a French: "is she a whim, a threat, or a tool?"

"She is too heavy for a whim", answered the French, "too dear for a threat, and too fantastic for a tool. Time will show".

But this was no answer at all: something more to the point came from a mult.i.tudinous tumult of sledges below--the workmen "wedging-up".

At last, soon after noon, Hogarth, with a considerable following, was seen ascending the steps, on his arm the Queen of the Ceremony--a little Bavarian Grafin, famous for her face: he, princely now with that cosmopolitan polish picked up in Courts, bending above her with laughter, making her laugh also, as they paced up. And at once the invited, including the Board of Verification, entered the hull upon a tour of sight-seeing, conducted by a manager of the contractors.

Already the set-up wedges had raised the _Boodah_ from her keel-block, and left her resting on the great braced ground-ways; and now down to the sea's brink the greasers were busy, prodigals in tallow, while, within, the seven hundred trooped from spectacle to spectacle, like a tourist group guided through the Louvre.

An hour, and they anew appeared on the roof, trooping toward that bal.u.s.trade that faced the sea: upon which the throngs felt the impending of the event, and intently watched. But there seemed no hurry, Hogarth all gay chatter, anon lowering the lids a moment, as he looked over the water; till suddenly hundreds of gla.s.ses detected a champagne-bottle with ribbons in the christener's hand; and the consciousness of the moment come moved the hosts when Hogarth, even as he chatted, disengaged a flag, and let it fall: it was a signal; down it fluttered; and instantly, down there, bustle broke loose, as the call "Saw-off!" went forth, and the saws set flurriedly to fret through the timbers which bind groundways to slidingways.

"_Now?_" whispered Hogarth at the christener's ear: and, even as he spoke, the voice of a noising arose and droned from Spezzia, its hills, its villages, and its sea; the _Boodah_, only half-liberated, strained in travail; crashed from her bands; slipped down the greased gradient--plunged--and, gathering momentous way, went wading deep, deeper--like Behemoth run mad--amid a wrath of froths and a brawling of waters, into the sea.

There, deep-planted, she stretched: on the surface appeared a reef of steel; and the stirred-up water slapped vapidly upon those flanks, like waters upon the Norway wall.

x.x.xIII

REEFS OF STEEL

Nothing was ever so scrutinized as the movements of the _Boodah_ during the next two months.

One morning three weeks after her launch three steamers took her in tow, with progress so slow, that at nightfall they were still visible from land; but the next morning had vanished.

Two days later they were met on the Genoa-Leghorn _route_, six steamers then towing the _Boodah_, their course S. by W.

Again and again it was met, that funeral of the sea: the p.r.o.ne, tearing steamers, the reluctant bulk. Sometimes a captain's gla.s.s might make out a few men lost on the roof like men on a raft, smoking, seated, leaning over a bal.u.s.trade.

Southward and westward it swam. On the seventh day there arrived at Ajaccio from Ma.r.s.eilles twenty-five bluejackets; and these, in a hired _speronare_, put to sea, and joined the _Boodah_ twenty miles from the coast.

Thenceforth, a smoke would be seen at a point of the roof, indicating that she, too, was steaming: for it was known that she had a screw and a rudder; and so closely was she observed, that her now added rate could be fixed--two to three knots a day.

She must therefore have some small engines about 4,000 H. P.: and since their _motif_ could only be one thing, resistance to ocean currents, this meant that the _Boodah_ was intended to rest always in one spot: a startling conclusion.

Occasionally a Surveying Service warship would peep above the horizon, watching her.

As she pa.s.sed through the Straits, seventy-five English blue-jackets put out from Trafalgar, and joined her.

With such reports pa.s.sed the weeks. Occasionally five or six coal-ships would be seen about the _Boodah_; her number of tug-ships might be as low as two; sometimes nine, ten.

At night she made a fine display, and homeward-bound boats from Cape Horn, from Pernambuco, Para, Madeira, spoke highly of her two revolving-drum lighthouses: for these, from opposite corners of the roof, at the rate of a revolution per minute, poured into s.p.a.ce two shimmering comets, like Calais and the Eddystone--rapt spinning-dervishes of the sea that hold far converse with the dark, till morning. And between these two ran a festoon of electric lanterns, j.a.panese and Moorish, cut in ogives; and festoons of coloured moons drooped round the bal.u.s.trades, so that the blaze and complexity of it presented to ships a spectacle of speckled mystery, fresh to the sea.

After five weeks a hundred and seventeen blue-jackets put out from Portsmouth in a chartered barque and joined her, she still in tow, making now about N. by W.

But by the time this news reached Europe the eyes of Europe were no longer given up to the _Boodah_: for _another Boodah_, called the _Truth_, was a-tow through the North Channel from Belfast; and she had not reached the Mull of Cantire, when a third was launched at San Francisco, so that the interest of the islands became complicated.

What would they do? What could they? Compared with this question, the riddle of the Sphinx was simple, the supposition that they were going to batter coast-walls in the S. Pacific being hardly now tenable. The _Boodah_ finally came to rest some miles North of lat. 50 and East of long. 20: and there--just on the northern rim of the Gulf Stream where it divides, part toward Ireland, and part toward Africa--she remained, precisely in the middle of the trade-route between Europe and Boston, New York, Halifax: a _route_ covered for fifty miles--twenty-five north, twenty-five south--by her 19.5-inch guns.

It is impossible to describe with how wild a heart, or thrilling a boding, the world heard this thing: eight days later the International Conference of Maritime Nations met at The Hague.

But nothing happened--or the opposite of what was feared: for, as months pa.s.sed, the _Boodah_, planted there in the ocean, rapidly became the recognized gathering-point of the fashion and gaiety of Europe, thither flocking the socially ambitious and the "arrived" together, and to have been invited to those revels of taste and elegance became a superiority.