The Lord of the Sea Part 29

"Your loving

"Margaret".

And at sight of these words such a whirlwind transacted itself in the brain of Hogarth, that he hardly awoke to sense till he found himself in a railway compartment, going northward. It was only then that, reading the letter again, he started.

The handwriting was hers! he was sure. But the words...?

"I, alas, am _just the other way about_"--"better not come to me perhaps, but _send me something_". There was a tone here not in character. But her handwriting! This was no forgery. If she had written _from dictation_ that might explain it.

In this uncertainty he left the train, and took cab, scenting trouble ahead.

The difficulty was to find Wylie Street, which was a half-built street of five cottages in a new neighbourhood of brick, and when what was supposed to be Wylie Street was discovered, the cab had to stop, for across it lay bricks, hods and barrows in mud. So Hogarth alighted, and, peering, stumbled forward: no lamp; above, a labouring half-moon riding a sky of clouds, like a poor s.h.i.+p riding the bleak morning after a hurricane, her masts all gone by the board: and Hogarth could just see that three of the five cottages were roofless brick, the fourth unfinished, so the fifth, alone on the other side, must be--"Woodfield."

"Woodfield" was unlighted: and the moment he ascertained this, he felt himself the victim of a plot; but not all the whispers of prudence could hold him now from seeing the adventure through. Loudly he flung back the little gate, with rash precipitancy entered: and as he sprang up the three steps to ring, he was seized.

They were five, three being big fellows, two masked.

His main sensation was gladness that none, apparently, was a policeman; and he set hilariously to work with his knuckles. This, however, could not save, soon he was on his back, striking his head; but when he saw that the object was to rifle his pockets, letting be, he managed to steal out the _punal_ from his breast, and presently with a sudden upheaving and scattering rage, was staggering to his legs. Before he could be stopped, he was making for the gate, but close upon him ran one of the five--a slim man, masked--who fired Hogarth's own pistol at his legs, but missed: whereupon, Hogarth, with a backward twist, struck at random with the dagger, which entered the man's breast. But at the same time a whistle shrilled, and from an opposite cottage rushed out at last what he dreaded--three policemen.

These had been placed there on the understanding that it was thither that Hogarth would go, the object of the plot being to rifle his pockets before he was officially taken; and it succeeded to the extent that his pockets _were_ rifled: but he knocked down one officer, and dodged the other two, reaching his taxi; and, having previously arranged with the cabman, got off racing.

But the masked man whom he had struck down was Harris, who for weeks lay raving in fever--an ill-fated stroke, for Harris had a memory.

As for Hogarth, he rushed home to Keppel Street, hurried down the trunk, and was off to Cheyne Gardens.

"Well", he cried, breaking in upon Loveday, "this phase of our life is up! Look at my clothes: I have had a fight--Frankl, I suppose. I wanted to live a simple life for two years: but they won't let me, you see.

Ha!--then the other thing. From this night we bury our ident.i.ty under mountains of splendour. It is disgusting to me, this life, skulking, thinking to bribe honest men. Meantime, you must find me some room to hide in with the trunk--mustn't stay here to-night. And to-morrow you buy me a boat to take us off from some point of the coast--Come--"

x.x.xI

THE HAMMERS

Within six months Hogarth, as distinct from "Beech", had risen upon the consciousness of Europe, say like the morning sun: and the wearied worker, borne at evening through crowded undergrounds, might read his name with a listless incomprehension.

He impressed the popular fancy, especially in Paris, where he was best known, as erratic: as once when, by a stroke of financial sleight-of-hand, he got the young Government of Russia into a tight place, then refused them a loan, except on condition of the lease to him of the Kremlin: and for three months squalid old Moscow was the most cometary Court anywhere--acts savouring of a meteorite waywardness which impressed him, more than anything, upon the everyday world; and he won a tolerant wonder.

However, an outcry, led by the _Intransigeant_, denounced his acquisition of the site of royal St. Cloud for his Paris residence on the ground that he was a Jew, betrayed by his face--an accusation which caused the buying up of hundreds of thousands of his photographs--and on the ground that his design was to familiarize the people with the idea of his sovereignty, and by a _coup_ to seize the Government; at which Paris was in a ferment, and a midnight mob traversed the _Bois_ and demolished some of his mason-work. The next day, however, the Minister of the Interior announced from the Tribune that Hogarth was no Jew, but an Englishman _pur sang_; and, on the whole, Hogarth had his way: the noise died down; and where parterres and avenues had stood on the old palace site, there arose one of those enchanting fabrics, which, from the Bosphorus to London, bore the name of "The Beeches".

At this time he had dependent upon him a retinue, serving him in multifarious ways from electrical adviser to spy, and from chancellor to recruiter, numbering many hundreds. He knew five thousand faces by sight; in England had two armies--a small one collecting data as to acreages, tenures, trades, scales, wages, prices, crimes, mines, and a large one, numbering five thousand, doing gun-practice in Westring Vale: for, England being for sale, he had bought at thrice its market value that part of it called Westring; and on the sea also he kept a little army of a thousand, borne in old cruiser-hulks bought from the English Admiralty, hulks whose crews, in rotation, changed places with drafts from the Westring barracks.

Once he disappeared from Europe, and when he returned the President of the Republic of Ecuador, thenceforth one of his closest friends, was with him; whereupon, through newspapers in the pay of Beech's, the rumour commenced to appear that the Ecuador Government was giving orders for coast-defence on an unparalleled scale, in view of probable hostilities with Peru.

In the midst of which activities O'Hara said to him one morning: "You can now be called a mathematician".

"I have many admirers, and but one teacher, O'Hara", Hogarth answered: "teach me".

O'Hara cut a secret grimace.

After the failure of the Finchley Road plot he had had another repentance, and had set himself earnestly to the cultivation of Hogarth's mind; but the priest's spirit was not "erect"; he had "falls"; maintained a correspondence with the Jew, whose eye of malice never slept; and once at Cairo, twice in Paris, Hogarth had to use words like these: "I must tell you, O'Hara, that I have heard of your recent behaviour. Naturally, there are those that see for me, and I do not mean to be compromised by your low revels".

"Wretch that I am!" broke out O'Hara with smitten brow, and for half a day was on his knees in an affliction of self-reproach. Yet the same night he wrote a letter to Frankl containing the words: "You do not know, _you cannot dream_, the high and slippery road which H. has chosen for his feet: the future is _big_ with events. Wait: his sublime path is not without pitfalls...."

Study with O'Hara was in the morning; at night, when possible, that other study of the working world: and often then Hogarth would withdraw from opera in the St. Cloud palace, or from some "crush", to give an hour to the river of statistics with which he was inundated.

Till these years he had never seen into the sea of things as it is: his life so isolated--had not even read newspapers.

Now he saw and knew. There below him blazed some masque of beauty and majesty, moving under a moonlight of blue-darting jets of electric light all among colossal columns of alabaster robed in vine and rose; or there below some Melba voice, all trembles and maze of wobbly trebles, warbling: and the thronged hall sat tranced; but before _him_--figures: parents killed their children for insurance-money--keeping children in cellars till their flesh grew green, keeping sore the stumps of children's legs; with some trades certain comic-sounding names had got to be a.s.sociated, "potter's rot", "phossy jaw",--enormous horror; each day in England one million people had to seek pauper-relief, many perished; of aged persons 40 per cent were permanent paupers; children were paid 2-1/2d. for making 144 match-boxes; pretty girls (though pretty girls were detestably rare) were allowed to work, nay _forced_ to--far harder than any ten savages ever dreamt of working; in Glasgow 41 of every 100 families lived in one room: fathers, for weeks, did not see their children, except asleep; girls took emetics to vomit up cotton-dust--enormous horror, comic-opera in h.e.l.l: and below in the "crush" the voice of the warbler, cooing, shook.

Sometimes he would mutter: "But that can't be true!" There, though, the figures lay; and presently he would take heart, and say: "Well, not for long now, G.o.d help me...."

Whether G.o.d helped him or not, certainly Man was helping him: ten thousand and ten thousand hammers--from Spezzia to Belfast--in model-office and mould-loft and rolling-mill--in foundry and yard and roaring forge--were ringing upon metal for him, their clamorous industry clattering over Europe and America carillons of his name.

x.x.xII

WONDER

Almost suddenly that noise of chiming hammers reached the general ear.

First in the German Admiralty was wonder when a spy, engaged as a workman at Birkenhead, sent to his Government information that the British Government was up to something: something of a novelty so extraordinary, that as yet he could form no conception as to its object.

That it was intended for the sea one must suppose: yet it was evident that nothing of such odd draughtsmans.h.i.+p--of such mastodon proportions--had ever yet taken the water.

He had been clever: had penetrated even the model-office, peered at detailed draughtsman's-plans, developed from the original specifications, as well as at orders for Krupp plates, frames, etc.; had listened in the yard to the talk of four naval men acting as a Board of Inspection; was able to give details of the machining of enormous processed plates to sizes determined by templates, the length of pan-headed rivets, the specific gravity of an average cubic foot, the scarfing of edges, the acc.u.mulation of prepared material. The wooden half-model, he said, was a one-ninety-sixth, instead of the usual one-forty-eighth; yet, even so, it was 5 ft. 7-1/2 ins. long, as much broad, and 1 ft. 3/4 in. high. This meant that the structure would measure 180 yards square--over one-tenth of a mile--with a depth of 34 yards. Already the far-reaching chaos of scaffolding had run up eight yards, with stringers and frames to a like level. There were no keel-blocks, for there was no keel--or rather, the keel was a circular plate a yard in diameter, resting on a single block, the shape of the structure to be a perfect square, along the sides of which four battles.h.i.+ps might lie like toy-boats: the bottom, from circular keel to upward bend, having the same shape as a battles.h.i.+p's seen in mids.h.i.+p section, only with four faces instead of two. From the knee-bend the sides ran up perpendicular; but at the level evidently intended to be the water-line they struck inward, so that the flat roof was smaller than the area below; the position of this water-line giving a definite clue to the intended displacement; and this again showing that the whole--roof, sides, bottom, and all--would be one wall of Simmons armour--steeling and backing--layer on layer--no less than 4ft. 9-1/4 ins. thick.

Yet this stupendous ark, or citadel--so simple was its plan--would be turned out in less time than a second-cla.s.s cruiser; and its cost, apart from yard-modifications and groundways, small in proportion.

This, and much else, the spy reported: but the new fact was obvious as the sun; the British and French Intelligence Departments, too, were soon conning it; and a week later it was established that, not one, but at least eleven, such structures were a-building in the world.

There went the rumour: "It is the Government of Ecuador's order...."

This was at the end of April; Hogarth, obeying some instinct which continually drew him toward Asia, then loitering alone in Trebizond tea-gardens and bazaars, buying a braid-bag, mule-trapping, or silver sword of the Khurdish cavaliers; while Trinity House gave the alarm that if ever the steel monsters, whatever their object, were launched, "they would const.i.tute, in the absence of proper precautions, a serious danger by night to the world's mercantile marine ", and while Lloyd's, the Maritime Exchanges, the Hydrographic Offices, lived in a species of amazement, and were already putting the steel islands into the gazetteers and manuals; the newspapers, too, inundated with the views of the public, took sides, maintaining, some of them, that it was the part of Governments to ascertain the objects of the new works, others that any tampering with their progress at this late stage might even mean revolution, so profound was their intimacy with industry. Hogarth, meanwhile, having come to El Khiff, the camp of the Bedouin pilgrims, there spent some days, and then, pa.s.sing between Jerusalem and Jericho in a caravan of Moabite sheiks, went visiting the holy places of Israel, everywhere examining the country, especially its agriculture, with great minuteness. It was only on his return to Jerusalem that he heard of the agitation in Europe: and at once set off Westward from Joppa.

From his arrival at Paris toward the end of May the wildest legends, originated by him, began to be printed, the most persistent relating to the diamond and banking House of Beech, which, it was given out, had discovered diamonds within the crust of a Pacific rock-island: the new structures, ordered by them, being designed to blast the coast-wall with dynamite guns. Cavillers pointed out that diamonds never occur in nature in this fas.h.i.+on, and that, even so, it did not need a fort made of armour five feet thick to fire off dynamite guns; but so continuously was the thing repeated, explained, and puffed, that when the London manager of Beech partially admitted it, the most incredulous acquiesced; though at the very same period it was proclaimed that the President of the Ecuador Republic, Hogarth's friend, had admitted to the Great Powers that the forts were to his order (as, in fact, they nominally were); and anti-climax was reached when a naval expert, asked to do a hurried article for the Times, made some error in calculation, and came out with the statement that the fort-things would sink of their own weight.

This article was headed "Beech's Folly"; and even when the error was detected, the roar of merriment retained its momentum and rolled: so that, to the hour of the first launch, the enterprise was commonly referred to as "Beech's Folly", and scarf-pins, ink-stands, etc., in the shape of the forts, were sold with that superscription: "Beech's Folly".

This, translated into French, became that horrible gallicism: _la betise b.i.+.c.he_.

Gradually, however, the Ecuador-Beech rage died down the hammers, heard for nine days through the turmoil of the world, were again drowned in it. The scarf-pins ceased to sell. The 'buses rolled, the Bank cashed notes, the long street roared--and all was as usual.

Only, in the valley of Westring there was drill and target-practice and barrack-life routine, the Westring-eccentricity being a.s.sociated with the millionaire, Hogarth, the island-eccentricity with the House of Beech: and in the popular mind Beech and Hogarth were two notions.

Islands were building in Italy, France, Germany, Russia; in England, Scotland, Ireland; at Maine, Baltimore, Newport News: but the Governments, lacking the machinery, and also the initiative, and judging to-morrow by yesterday, gave no sign from their Olympus.