Part 31 (2/2)

”Well,” said the proprietor, and turned with a puzzled smile to the others. ”Well!”

They asked various questions simultaneously.

Bert selected one or two for reply. ”You see,” he said, ”I been with the German air-fleet. I got caught up by them, sort of by accident, and brought over here.”

”From England?”

”Yes--from England. Way of Germany. I was in a great battle with them Asiatics, and I got lef' on a little island between the Falls.”

”Goat Island?”

”I don' know what it was called. But any'ow I found a flying-machine and made a sort of fly with it and got here.”

Two men stood up with incredulous eyes on him. ”Where's the flying-machine?” they asked; ”outside?”

”It's back in the woods here--'bout arf a mile away.”

”Is it good?” said a thick-lipped man with a scar.

”I come down rather a smash--.”

Everybody got up and stood about him and talked confusingly. They wanted him to take them to the flying-machine at once.

”Look 'ere,” said Bert, ”I'll show you--only I 'aven't 'ad anything to eat since yestiday--except mineral water.”

A gaunt soldierly-looking young man with long lean legs in riding gaiters and a bandolier, who had hitherto not spoken, intervened now on his behalf in a note of confident authority. ”That's aw right,” he said.

”Give him a feed, Mr. Logan--from me. I want to hear more of that story of his. We'll see his machine afterwards. If you ask me, I should say it's a remarkably interesting accident had dropped this gentleman here.

I guess we requisition that flying-machine--if we find it--for local defence.”

3

So Bert fell on his feet again, and sat eating cold meat and good bread and mustard and drinking very good beer, and telling in the roughest outline and with the omissions and inaccuracies of statement natural to his type of mind, the simple story of his adventures. He told how he and a ”gentleman friend” had been visiting the seaside for their health, how a ”chep” came along in a balloon and fell out as he fell in, how he had drifted to Franconia, how the Germans had seemed to mistake him for some one and had ”took him prisoner” and brought him to New York, how he had been to Labrador and back, how he had got to Goat Island and found himself there alone. He omitted the matter of the Prince and the b.u.t.teridge aspect of the affair, not out of any deep deceitfulness, but because he felt the inadequacy of his narrative powers. He wanted everything to seem easy and natural and correct, to present himself as a trustworthy and understandable Englishman in a sound mediocre position, to whom refreshment and accommodation might be given with freedom and confidence. When his fragmentary story came to New York and the battle of Niagara, they suddenly produced newspapers which had been lying about on the table, and began to check him and question him by these vehement accounts. It became evident to him that his descent had revived and roused to flames again a discussion, a topic, that had been burning continuously, that had smouldered only through sheer exhaustion of material during the temporary diversion of the gramophone, a discussion that had drawn these men together, rifle in hand, the one supreme topic of the whole world, the War and the methods of the War. He found any question of his personality and his personal adventures falling into the background, found himself taken for granted, and no more than a source of information. The ordinary affairs of life, the buying and selling of everyday necessities, the cultivation of the ground, the tending of beasts, was going on as it were by force of routine, as the common duties of life go on in a house whose master lies under the knife of some supreme operation. The overruling interest was furnished by those great Asiatic airs.h.i.+ps that went upon incalculable missions across the sky, the crimson-clad swordsmen who might come fluttering down demanding petrol, or food, or news. These men were asking, all the continent was asking, ”What are we to do? What can we try? How can we get at them?”

Bert fell into his place as an item, ceased even in his own thoughts to be a central and independent thing.

After he had eaten and drunken his fill and sighed and stretched and told them how good the food seemed to him, he lit a cigarette they gave him and led the way, with some doubts and trouble, to the flying-machine amidst the larches. It became manifest that the gaunt young man, whose name, it seemed, was Laurier, was a leader both by position and natural apt.i.tude. He knew the names and characters and capabilities of all the men who were with him, and he set them to work at once with vigour and effect to secure this precious instrument of war. They got the thing down to the ground deliberately and carefully, felling a couple of trees in the process, and they built a wide flat roof of timbers and tree boughs to guard their precious find against its chance discovery by any pa.s.sing Asiatics. Long before evening they had an engineer from the next towns.h.i.+p at work upon it, and they were casting lots among the seventeen picked men who wanted to take it for its first flight. And Bert found his kitten and carried it back to Logan's store and handed it with earnest admonition to Mrs. Logan. And it was rea.s.suringly clear to him that in Mrs. Logan both he and the kitten had found a congenial soul.

Laurier was not only a masterful person and a wealthy property owner and employer--he was president, Bert learnt with awe, of the Tanooda Canning Corporation--but he was popular and skilful in the arts of popularity.

In the evening quite a crowd of men gathered in the store and talked of the flying-machine and of the war that was tearing the world to pieces.

And presently came a man on a bicycle with an ill-printed newspaper of a single sheet which acted like fuel in a blazing furnace of talk. It was nearly all American news; the old-fas.h.i.+oned cables had fallen into disuse for some years, and the Marconi stations across the ocean and along the Atlantic coastline seemed to have furnished particularly tempting points of attack.

But such news it was.

Bert sat in the background--for by this time they had gauged his personal quality pretty completely--listening. Before his staggering mind pa.s.sed strange vast images as they talked, of great issues at a crisis, of nations in tumultuous march, of continents overthrown, of famine and destruction beyond measure. Ever and again, in spite of his efforts to suppress them, certain personal impressions would scamper across the weltering confusion, the horrible mess of the exploded Prince, the Chinese aeronaut upside down, the limping and bandaged bird-faced officer blundering along in miserable and hopeless flight....

They spoke of fire and ma.s.sacre, of cruelties and counter cruelties, of things that had been done to harmless Asiatics by race-mad men, of the wholesale burning and smas.h.i.+ng up of towns, railway junctions, bridges, of whole populations in hiding and exodus. ”Every s.h.i.+p they've got is in the Pacific,” he heard one man exclaim. ”Since the fighting began they can't have landed on the Pacific slope less than a million men. They've come to stay in these States, and they will--living or dead.”

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