The Tremendous Event Part 11

"It really is; and it's quite natural, since we live at Battle, a mile away. The catastrophe has spared the house but we came to Hastings to help the sufferers and in that way heard of your arrival . . . of your triumph, Simon."

Lord Bakefield did not budge. He pretended to be looking in another direction. Simon addressed him.

"May I take it, Lord Bakefield, that you will regard this day's work as a first step towards the goal for which I am making?"

The old n.o.bleman, stiff with pride and resentment, vouchsafed no reply.

"Of course," Simon continued, "I haven't conquered England. But all the same there seem to be a series of circ.u.mstances in my favour which permit me at least to ask you whether you consider that the first of your conditions has been fulfilled."

This time Lord Bakefield seemed to be making up his mind. But, just as he was going to reply--and his features expressed no great amount of good-will--Isabel intervened:

"Don't ask my father any questions, Simon . . . He appreciates the wonderful thing that you have done at its true value. But you and I have offended him too seriously for him to be able to forgive you just yet. We must let time wipe out the unpleasant memory."

"Time!" echoed Simon, with a laugh. "Time! The trouble is that I have only twelve days left in which to triumph over all the labours put upon me. After conquering England, I have still to win the laurels of Hercules . . . or of Don Quixote."

"Well," she said, "in the meantime hurry off and go to bed. That's the best thing you can do for the moment."

And she drew Lord Bakefield away with her.

CHAPTER VII

LYNX-EYE

"What do you say to this, my boy? Did I prophesy it all, or did I not?

Read my pamphlet on _The Channel in the Year 2000_ and you'll see. And then remember all I told you the other morning, at Newhaven station.

Well, there you are: the two countries are joined together as they were once before, in the Eocene epoch."

Awakened with a start by Old Sandstone, Simon, with eyes still heavy with slumber, gazed vacantly at the hotel bed-room in which he had been sleeping, at his old professor, walking to and fro, and at another person, who was sitting in the dark and who seemed to be an acquaintance of Old Sandstone's.

"Ah!" yawned Simon. "But what's the time?"

"Seven o'clock in the evening, my son."

"What? Seven o'clock? Have I been sleeping since last night's meeting at the Casino?"

"Rather! I was strolling about this morning, when I heard of your adventure. 'Simon Dubosc! I know him.' said I. I ran like mad. I rapped on the door. I came in. Nothing would wake you. I went away, came back again and so on, until I decided to sit down by your bedside and wait."

Simon leapt out of bed. New clothes and clean linen had been laid out in the bathroom; and he saw, hanging on the wall, his jacket, the same with which he had covered the bare shoulders of the young woman whom he had released.

"Who brought that?" he asked.

"That? What?" asked Old Sandstone.

Simon turned to him.

"Tell me, professor, did any one come to this room while you were here?"

"Yes, lots of people. They came in as they liked: admirers, idle sightseers. . . ."

"Did a woman come in?"

"Upon my word, I didn't notice. . . . Why?"

"Why?" replied Simon, explaining. "Because last night, while I was asleep, I several times had the impression that a woman came up to me and bent over me. . . ."

Old Sandstone shrugged his shoulders:

"You've been dreaming, my boy. When one's badly overtired, one's likely to have those nightmares. . . ."

"But it wasn't in the very least a nightmare!" said Simon, laughing.

"It's stuff and nonsense, in any case!" cried Old Sandstone. "What does it matter? There's only one thing that matters: this sudden joining up of the two coasts . . . ! It's fairly tremendous, what?

What do you think of it? It's more than a bridge thrown from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e. It's more than a tunnel. It's a flesh-and-blood tie, a permanent junction, an isthmus, what? The Suss.e.x Isthmus, the Isthmus of Normandy, they've already christened it."

Simon jested:

"Oh, an isthmus! . . . A mere causeway, at most!"

"You're drivelling!" cried Old Sandstone. "Don't you know what happened last night? Why, of course not, the fellow knows nothing! He was asleep! . . . Then you didn't realize that there was another earthquake? Quite a slight one, but still . . . an earthquake? No? You didn't wake up? In that case, my boy, listen to the incredible truth, which surpa.s.ses what any one could have foreseen. It's no longer a question of the strip of earth which you crossed from Dieppe to Hastings. That was the first attempt, just a little trial phenomenon.

But since then . . . oh, since then, my boy . . . you're listening, aren't you? Well, there, from Fecamp to Cape Gris-nez in France and from the west of Brighton to Folkestone in England: all that part, my boy, is now one solid ma.s.s. Yes, it forms a permanent junction, seventy to ninety miles wide, a bit of exposed ground equivalent at least to two large French departments or two fair-sized English counties. Nature hasn't done badly . . . for a few hours' work! What say you?"

Simon listened in amazement:

"Is it possible? Are you sure? But then it will be the cause of unspeakable losses. Think: all the coast-towns ruined . . . and trade . . . navigation. . . ."

And Simon, thinking of his father and the vessels locked up in Dieppe harbour, repeated:

"Are you quite sure?"

"Why, of course I am!" said Old Sandstone, to whom all these considerations were utterly devoid of interest. "Of course I'm sure! A hundred telegrams, from all sides, vouch for the fact. What's more, read the evening papers. Oh, I give you my word, it's a blessed revolution! . . . The earthquake? The victims? We hardly mention them!

. . . Your Franco-English raid? An old story! No, there's only one thing that matters to-day, on this side of the Channel: England is no longer an Island; she forms part of the European continent; she is riveted on to France!"

"This," said Simon, "is one of the greatest facts in history!"

"It's _the_ greatest, my son. Since the world has been a world and since men have been gathered into nations, there has been no physical phenomenon of greater importance than this. And to think that I predicted the whole thing, the causes and the effects, the causes which I am the only one to know!"

"And what are they?" asked Simon. "How is it that I was able to pa.s.s?

How is it. . . ."

Old Sandstone checked him with a gesture which reminded Simon of the way in which his former lecturer used to begin his explanations at college; and the old codger, taking a pen and a sheet of paper, proceeded:

"Do you know what a fault is? Of course not! Or a horst? Ditto! Oh, a geology-lesson at Dieppe college was so many hours wasted! Well, lend me your ears, young Dubosc! I will be brief and to the point. The terrestrial rind--that is, the crust which surrounds the internal fire-ball, of solidified elements and eruptive or sedimentary rocks--consists throughout of layers superposed like the pages of a book. Imagine forces of some kind, acting laterally, to compress those layers. There will be corrugations, sometimes actual fractures, the two sides of which, sliding one against the other, will be either raised or depressed. Faults is the name which we give to the fractures that penetrate the terrestrial sh.e.l.l and separate two ma.s.ses of rock, one of which slides over the plane of fracture. The fault, therefore, reveals an edge, a lower lip produced by the subsidence of the soil, and an upper lip produced by an elevation. Now it happens that suddenly, after thousands and thousands of years, this upper lip, under the action of irresistible tangential forces, will rise, shoot upwards, and form considerable outthrows, to which we give the name of horsts. This is what has just taken place. . . . There exists in France, marked on the geological charts, a fault known as the Rouen fault, which is an important dislocation of the Paris basin. Parallel to the corrugations of the soil, which have wrinkled the cretaceous and tertiary deposits in this region from north-east to north-west, it runs from Versailles to seventy-five miles beyond Rouen. At Maromme, we lose it. But I, Simon, have found it again in the quarries above Longueville and also not far from Dieppe. And lastly I have found it . . . where do you think? In England, at Eastbourne, between Hastings and Newhaven! Same composition, same disposition. There was no question of a mistake. It ran from France to England! It ran under the Channel. . . . Ah, how I have studied it, my fault, Old Sandstone's fault, as I used to call it! How I have sounded it, deciphered its meanings, questioned it, a.n.a.lysed it! And then, suddenly in 1912, some seismic shocks affected the table-lands of the Seine-Inferieure and the Somme and acted in an abnormal manner as I was able to prove--on the tides! Shocks in Normandy! In the Somme! Right out at sea! Do you grasp the strangeness of such a phenomenon and how, on the other hand, it acquired a significant value from the very fact that it took place along a fault? Might we not suppose that there were stresses along this fault, that captive forces were seeking to escape through the earth's crust and attacking the points of least resistance, which happened to lie precisely along the lines of the faults? . . . You may call it an improbable theory. Perhaps so; but at any rate it seemed worth verifying. And I did verify it. I made diving-experiments within sight of the French coast. At my fourth descent, in the Ridin de Dieppe, where the depth is only thirty feet, I discovered traces of an eruption in the two blocks of a fault all of whose elements tallied with those of the Anglo-Norman fault . . . That was all I wanted to know. There was nothing more to do but wait . . . a century or two . . . or else a few hours. . . . Meanwhile it was patent to me that sooner or later the fragile obstacle opposed to the internal energies would break down and the great upheaval would come to pa.s.s. It has come to pa.s.s."

Simon listened with growing interest. Old Sandstone ill.u.s.trated his lecture with diagrams drawn with broad strokes of the pen and smeared with blots which his sleeve or fingers generously spread all over the paper. Drops of sweat also played their part, falling from his forehead, for Old Sandstone was always given to perspiring copiously.