Part 35 (1/2)

Mute lay the _Boodah_; and, surrounding her, perniciously moved the s.h.i.+ps at forty-eight revolutions a minute, hardly a cable's interval between the host of them, they seeming no more the playthings of the sea, but its masters, each a travelling throne of power; and as they pared so taciturn, with baleful aspect they trained their cannon upon the sea-fort in their midst: not a soul visible on fort or s.h.i.+ps.

A long while it seems to last, that noonday stillness, a noonday breezy and oceanic, the sea sharp-edged, hard-looking, dark-blue, tossing spray along its ridges, not rough, but restless, shewing against the s.h.i.+ps white foams a moment, which silently glide away.

But their Admiral is signalling: _Let her have it!_ and in some moments more yonder to the far north the _Florida_ breaks into quick-flas.h.i.+ng ecstasy, like quick-winking Gorgon glances; and the north-east catches it in a single boom; and in ten seconds more it is as if Nature, with sudden yell, feels to her womb the birth-hour come and rueful throes: and where s.h.i.+ps had been appears in one minute nothing but a ring of stagnant smoke, tugged into rays and out-sticking clouds, flushed with glares and rouges.

And no question of missing: the _Boodah_ stationary and huge; every sh.e.l.l told. But, the deluge over, that thunder-marred visage again looked grimly forth, a face new-risen from smallpox, an apparition, roof-houses gone, lighthouse tops, one of her great 19.5 inchers in fragments, in her casemates seventeen dead.

But where now is the one-masted _Hercules_, which but a moment since went trembling at the bale of her own bellowing barbettes? The _Hercules_ is in a Nessus-s.h.i.+rt of flame. And whither the _Hercules_ is going, thither is the _Idaho_ going, and the _Dante_ gone, and gone the elongated length of the _Invincible_, and twenty destroyers, and the bow-works of the old _Powerful_, which stoops woefully there, screws in air, as the camel of the desert kneels and waits, while into her beam comes cras.h.i.+ng the ram of the p.o.o.pless _Deutschland_.

Yet the _Boodah_ has not fired a gun!

But now she fires: as the broadsides drench her anew, she fires, the hulk--all round the horizon--lowing in travail: and as there is no question of missing on the one side, so on the other is a.s.surance, the _Boodah's_ broad-sides of 19.5-inchers and 9.5-inchers, ninety-two in all, being fired by the hand of Quilter-Beckett, who sits at a table grim with k.n.o.bs, b.u.t.tons, dial-faces, in a cabinet near a saloon where Hogarth, Loveday, and five lieutenants are lunching; and where he sits he can hear the band in an alcove rendering for the eaters Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: hear, not heed: for two gunners in each casemate have sighted a s.h.i.+p through pivoted gla.s.ses, whose fixing, disturbing an electrical circuit, prints the s.h.i.+p's distance on an indicator before the Admiral: whereupon he touches a b.u.t.ton--many b.u.t.tons--in intense succession: the _Boodah bawls_: and the thrust-back of her resentment becomes intolerable, the s.h.i.+ps just like fawns under the paws of an old lion whose grisly jaws drip gore; the sharks that infest her will fare well of her hand.

Of forty-three s.h.i.+ps fixed, thirty-nine are hit, eleven founder: wreckage so vast and swift, that the Admiral, still afloat in a _Queen Mary_ pierced above-belt, is like a man stung by the tarantulas of distraction: tries to signal flight--flags cannot be seen; fires coloured pistol-lights: ”Retire!”--and soon, all round, the circle is in flight.

But hapless flight: the _Boodah_ is an octopus whose feelers reach far, and they, within her toils, cannot escape her omnipresence. She sends after them no guns: yet they are blown to atoms; the sea becomes a death-trap thick with pitfalls and s.h.i.+pwreck; one by one they are caught, they fly aloft like startled fowl, or they succ.u.mb, and lean, and stoop, and sink: the sea, for mile on mile, proving a h.e.l.l of torpedoes-dirigible, automobile, mine.

For in the matter of mines the _Boodah_ had all the advantages of a sh.o.r.e, and as to dirigible torpedoes more than all.

Her mines, whose weight was adjusted to the specific gravity of salt water, sank till the pressure at ten fathoms arrested them, they, electrically connected with the forts, reaching out twenty miles; and the whole network, charted to an inch, was coordinated with the range-tables.

The ordinary l8-inch Whiteheads, moreover, were replaced by a longer design running 6,000 yards, the added length being occupied by the flask, whose compressed air runs the engine, they not sinking on finis.h.i.+ng their course: so, if they missed, there they lay, a trap of 380 pounds of gun-cotton in the course of the numerous moving foe.

With these three forms of the same plague the _Boodah_ hunted the fleeing s.h.i.+ps, and drove them stumbling through complicated miseries, amazed and thunderstruck: so that seventy-three only, several of them half-wrecks, reached her twenty-five mile limit; and, there, over the mines of the _Solon_, rea.s.sembled.

Amid the throng on his ruined roof Hogarth watched their flight and the ever-coming boatloads of blue-jackets through a mist of smoke and the after-smell of war, while under the sea wide eyes in hosts were a-gaze at a windfall of 2,400 bodies.

About half-past four captains and commanders of the survivors were in the ward-room of the Second-in-Command on the _Orion_--the _Queen Mary_ gone--when he, with splendid infatuation, proposed a return to the attack, with a change of tactics to concentration upon one side only of the _Boodah_; but the foreigners pointed out the obvious added dangers; and in the midst of a wrangle a dispatch-boat from the _Solon_, eleven miles south, arrived, demanding the usual sea-rent, by draft, if not in gold; so out, at this unlooked-for incident, broke a new quarrel, the British for a whole hour resisting the inexorable; till the _Solon_ Lieutenant, his eyes moist with pleading, explained their helplessness, adding that war between the four Powers had been declared that day at noon from the Stock Exchange steps: and only then the Vice-Admiral, breaking into tears, yielded to destiny.

Hogarth, meanwhile, was like a wild man, imprisoned, till his yacht returned at dusk with her excursionists; and without delay he was on her, and away for England.

x.x.xVII

THE STRAITS

In England, meantime, was nothing but dismay.

The Government, whose defeat was accidental, on being hurriedly patched up, threw itself pa.s.sionately into the work of defence, calling up every enrolled man, while at regimental centres the enlistment of volunteers went forward, Weedon alone turning out 7,000 rifles a day.

But on the night of the Declaration the Under-secretary announced in the House that the Russians were moving down the Baltic, the French toward the Straits: and the next morning dawned with the dreariness of last mornings and days. However, soon after 1 P.M., the Lord of the Sea landed at Bristol, his yacht being one of the swiftest things afloat; there heard the known facts; and thence wired to Beech's London house, to the London Foreign Office, to Cadiz and to Frederikshavn, where he had wireless for the _Mahomet_ at the Straits, and for the _Truth_ in the Cattegat.

His wire to the Foreign Office was as follows:

”I have come to England hoping to avert European war by fiscal means, not knowing that the pa.s.sage of s.h.i.+ps into open water was of first importance. Since this is so, accept my a.s.surance, there will be no war, except on the part of Britain, which I should much resent. British Government, I suggest, should forthwith allay national anxiety.

”RICHARD”.