The Secret Of The League Part 32

It was not the time for words, written or spoken, beyond those of the sheerest necessity. Half an hour pa.s.sed before Orr-Evelyn had an opportunity of glancing through the letter that had called Salt from his post. When he had finished it he took it down, and read it aloud to the headquarter staff amidst the profoundest silence, in pa.s.sionate vindication of his friend and leader. This was what they heard:

"UNITY LEAGUE, TRAFALGAR CHAMBERS.

"The building is surrounded by mob. Seaton Street, Pantile Pa.s.sage, and Pall Mall and the Haymarket, as far as I can see, densely packed with frantic men. All others in building had left earlier. _I shall remain._ Wires cut, and fear that you may not receive this, as other telescribe messages for help unanswered. Mob howling continuously for Sir John Hampden and Mr Salt; dare not look out again, stoned. Shall delay advance, doors and stairs, as long as possible, and burn all important League books and papers last resource.

"Good-bye all, my dear friends.

"IRENE LISLE."

CHAPTER XIX

THE "FINIS" MESSAGE

The storm had not decreased its violence when, three minutes later, Salt stood unperceived on the broad coping outside an upper storey of the tower, and, sinking forward into the teeth of the gale, was borne upwards with rigid wings as a kite ascends.

In accordance with his instructions the two searchlights had turned their beams steadily earthward for the time, and in the absolute blackness of the upper air he could pa.s.s over the firing lines of friends and foes in comparative safety. As he rose higher and higher before turning to scud before the wind, he saw, as on a plan, the whole field of operations, just distinguishable in its ma.s.ses of grey and black, with the points of interest revealing themselves by an occasional flash. Immediately beneath him, beneath him at first, but every second drawing away to the south-west as he drifted in the gale he breasted, lay Hanwood, with its three outer lines of defence. From above it seemed as though a very bright needle was every now and then thrust out from the walls into the dark night and drawn back again. On each of the platforms D and E two 4.7-inch quick-firing guns appeared to be rocking slightly in the wind. By all the indication there was of smoke or noise, or even flame, the gunners might have been standing idly behind their shields; but over the steep scarp of the little hill, a mile and a half away, sh.e.l.ls were being planted every ten yards or so, with the methodical regularity of a farmer dropping potatoes along a furrow.

Salt might not have quite expected that there would be the necessity to fire those guns when, a year before, he had obtained for Hanwood its complement of the finest artillery that the world produced, but when the necessity did arise, there was no need for the League gunners to use black powder.

When he had reached the height he required, simply leaning against the wind, Salt moved a pinion slightly and bore heavily towards the right.

It was the supreme moment for the trial of skill, as the long flight that followed it was the trial of endurance. If his nerve had failed, if a limb had lost its tension for the fraction of a second, his brain reeled amidst that tearing fury of the element, or a single ring or swivel not answered to its work, he would have been crumpled up hopelessly, beyond the chance of recovery, and flung headlong to the earth. As it was, the wind swept him round in a great half circle, but it was the wind his servant, not his master, and he turned its l.u.s.ty violence to serve his ends. He caught a pa.s.sing glimpse of the coppice whence the attack had first been opened; he saw beneath him the line of guns ensconced behind the hill, one already overturned and centred in confusion; and then the sweeping arc reached its limit, and he came, as it seemed, to anchor in mid-air, with the earth slipping away beneath him as the banks glide past a smoothly-moving train, and a thousand weights and forces dragging at his aching arms.

He had nothing to do but to maintain a perfect balance among the conflicting cross winds that shot in from above and below, and from north and south, and to point his course towards the glow in the sky that marked the Capital. A dozen words could express it, but it required the skill of the practised wingman, the highest development of every virile quality, and the spur of a necessity not less than life and death, to dignify the attempt above the foolhardy. Whether beyond all that the accomplishment lay within the bounds of human endurance was a further step. It would at that time have been impossible to p.r.o.nounce either way with any authority, for not only had the attempt never been made, but nothing approaching the attempt had been made. A breeze that ran five miles an hour was considered enough for any purpose; to take to the air when the anemometer indicated fifteen miles an hour was not allowed at the practice grounds, and the record in this direction lay with an expert who had accomplished a straight flight in a wind that travelled a little less than thirty miles an hour. The storm on the night of the 15th of January tore across the face of the land with a general velocity of fifty or sixty miles an hour, rising at times even higher.

Under the racking agony of every straining tendon and the heady pressure of the wind, a sense of mundane unreality began to settle upon the flier. He saw the earth and its landmarks being drawn smoothly and swiftly from beneath him with the detachment of a half-conscious dream.

He saw--for he remembered afterwards--the Thames lying before him like a whip flicked carelessly across the plain. A town loomed up, black and inchoate, on his right, developed into streets and terraces, and slid away into the past. It was Richmond. The river, never far away, now slipped beneath him at right angles, reappeared to hold a parallel course upon his left, and flung a horse-shoe coil two miles ahead. A colony of strange shining roofs and domes next challenged recognition.

They were the conservatories at Kew, looking little more than garden frames, and they were scarcely lost to view before he was over the winding line of Brentford's quaint old High Street, now, as it appeared, packed with a dense, moving crowd. The irresistible pounding of the gale was edging the glow of London further and further to his right.

Instinctively he threw more weight into the lighter scale, and slowly and certainly the point of his destination swung round before his face again.

Thenceforward it was all town. Gunnersbury became Chiswick, Chiswick merged into Hammersmith, Kensington succeeded, in ceaseless waves of houses that ran north and south, and long vistas of roofs that stretched east and west. It was a kaleidoscope of contrasts. Scenes of saturnalian gaiety, where ant-like beings danced in mad abandonment round fires that blocked the road, or seemed to gyrate by companies in meaningless confusion, bounded districts plunged into an unnatural gloom and solitude, where for street after street neither the footstep of a wayfarer nor the light of a public lamp broke the uncanny spell.

Immediately beyond, by the glare of the flambeaux which they carried, an orderly concourse might be marching eastward, and fringing on their route a garish gutter mart, where busy costermongers drove their roaring trade and frugal housewives did their marketing with less outward concern than if the crisis in the State had been a crisis in the price of b.u.t.ter.

The mult.i.tudinous sounds beat on his ears through the plunging gale like a babel of revelry heard between the intermittent swinging of an unlatched door. The sights in their grotesque perspective began to melt together lazily. The upper air grew very cold. The weights hung heavier every mile, the contending forces pulled more resistlessly. Strange fancies began to a.s.sail him as the brain shrank beneath the strain; doubts and despairs to gather round like dark birds of the night with hopeless foreboding in the dull measure of their funereal wings. In that moment mind and body almost failed to contend against the crushing odds; nothing but his unconquerable heart flogged on his dying limbs.

It was scarcely more than half an hour after she had written her despairing message that from her post at the head of the broad stone staircase Irene Lisle heard a noise in the garret storey above that sent her flying back to her stronghold. It was the last point from which she had expected an attack. Through the keyhole of the door behind which she had taken refuge, she saw a strangely outlined figure groping his way c.u.mbrously down the stairs, and then, without a word or cry, but with a face whiter than the paper that had summoned him, she threw open the door to admit Salt.

He walked heavily along the corridor and turned into his own room, while she relocked the door and followed him. There was mute enquiry in her eyes, but she did not speak.

A powerful oil-stove stood upon the hearth-stone, throwing its beams across the room. He stood over it while the beaded ice melted from his hair and fell hissing on the iron. He opened his mouth, and the sound of his voice was like the thin piping of a reed. She caught a word, and began to unbuckle the frozen straps of his gear. When he was free he tried to raise his hand to a pocket of his coat, but the effort was beyond the power of the cramped limb. Irene interpreted the action, and, finding there a flask, filled the cup and held it to his lips.

She got a blue, half-frozen smile of thanks over the edge of the cup.

"Ah," he said, beginning to find his voice again, and stamping about the room, "we owe Wynchley Slocombe a monument, you and I, Miss Lisle. Now you must write a telescript for me, please; for I cannot."

"If you will remain here, where it is warmer, I will bring the materials," she suggested.

He thanked her and allowed her to go, watching her with thoughtful eyes that were coming back to life. She paused a moment at the top of the stairs to listen down the shaft, and then sped quickly through the smoke to the instrument room on the floor beneath.

Salt glanced round the office. On and about his desk all the books and papers that might be turned to a hostile purpose had been stacked in readiness, and by them stood the can of oil that was to ensure their complete destruction. He stepped up to the window and looked out cautiously. Every pane of gla.s.s was broken--every pane of gla.s.s in Trafalgar Chambers was broken, for that matter--but it was not easy for an unprepared mob to force an entrance. When the Unity League had taken over the whole block of building in its expansion many alterations had been carried out, and among these had been to fix railings that sprang from the street and formed an arch, not only over the bas.e.m.e.nt, but over the ground floor windows also. If the shutters on the windows had been closed in time, the a.s.sailants would have been baffled at another point, but the shutters had been overlooked, and the mob, after lighting great fires in the street, was now flinging the blazing billets through the lower windows.

In a very brief minute Irene was back again with the telescribe accessories. She seated herself at a table, dipped her pen into the ink, and looked up without a word.

"TRAFALGAR CHAMBERS.

"6.25 P.M.," dictated Salt. "Most of the miners drawn off and pa.s.sing through Brentford. Over Barfold Rise half battery of 18-pounders, one out of action. In Spring Coppice and Welland Wood about four companies regulars each. Reconnoitre third position a.s.suming same proportion. Act."

He stood considering whether there was anything more to add usefully.

The sound of Irene's agate pen tapping persistently against the table caught his ear.

"You are not very much afraid?" he asked with kindly rea.s.surance in his voice as he looked at her hand.

"No, not now," she replied; but as she wrote she had to still the violent trembling of her right hand with the left.

"All going well here. Send messenger Hampden with report immediately after engagement," he concluded.

"I will try to sign it myself." He succeeded in sprawling a recognisable "George Salt" across the paper, and after it wrote "Finis," which happened to be the pa.s.s-word for the day.

"Your message came through; this may possibly do the same," he remarked.

He turned off the radiator as orderly as though he had reached the close of a working day, and they went out together, locking the doors behind them.

"They were attacking Hanwood when you left?" she asked with the tensest interest. They had sent off the telescript, and it seemed to Irene that they had reached the end of things.

"Yes," he replied. "But all the same," he added, as a fresh outburst of cries rose from the street, and the light through the shattered window attracted a renewed fusillade of missiles, "I think that we have kept our promise to let you be in the thick of it."

She shook her head with the very faintest smile. "That seems a very long time ago. But you, how could _you_ come? When I sent I never thought ...

I never dreamed----"

"It was possible to leave," he said. "My work is done. Yes," in reply to her startled glance, "it has all happened!"

"You mean----?" she asked eagerly.

He took a paper from his pocket-book. It was, as she saw immediately, a telescript from Sir John Hampden. It had reached him at Hanwood an hour before he left.

"I have this afternoon received a deputation of Ministerialists who have the adherence of a majority in the House without taking the Opposition into account," she read. "The Parliamentary Representation Committees throughout the country are frantically insisting upon members accepting _any terms_, if we will give an undertaking that the normal balance of trade and labour shall be restored at once. The Cabinet is going to pieces every hour, and the situation can no longer either be faced or ignored by the Government. There will be a great scene in the House to-night. The deputation will see me again to-morrow morning with a formal decision. I have confidential a.s.surances that a complete acceptance is a foregone conclusion.

The arrival of the Midland colliers to-night, if not of those from Monmouth, will precipitate matters."

Tears she could not hold back stood in her eyes as she returned to him the paper. "Then it has not been in vain," she said softly.

"No," he replied. "Nothing has been in vain."

They stood silently for a minute, looking back over life. So might two shipwrecked pa.s.sengers have stood on a frail raft waiting for the end, resigned but not unhopeful of a larger destiny beyond, while the elements boiled and roared around them.

"It was very weak of me to send that message," said Irene presently; "the message that brought you. I suppose," she added, "that it _was_ the message that brought you?"

"Yes, thank G.o.d!" he replied.