XXI MR. BEDFORD AT LITTLESTONE
My line of flight was about parallel with the surface as I came intothe upper air. The temperature of the sphere began to rise forthwith.I knew it behoved me to drop at once. Far below me, in a darklingtwilight, stretched a great expanse of sea. I opened every window Icould, and fell--out of sunshine into evening, and out of evening intonight. Vaster grew the earth and vaster, swallowing up the stars, andthe silvery translucent starlit veil of cloud it wore spread out tocatch me. At last the world seemed no longer a sphere but flat, andthen concave. It was no longer a planet in the sky, but the world ofMan. I shut all but an inch or so of earthward window, and dropped witha slackening velocity. The broadening water, now so near that I couldsee the dark glitter of the waves, rushed up to meet me. The spherebecame very hot. I snapped the last strip of window, and sat scowlingand biting my knuckles, waiting for the impact....
The sphere hit the water with a huge splash: it must have sent itfathoms high. At the splash I flung the Cavorite shutters open. DownI went, but slower and slower, and then I felt the sphere pressingagainst my feet, and so drove up again as a bubble drives. And at thelast I was floating and rocking upon the surface of the sea, and myjourney in space was at an end.
The night was dark and overcast. Two yellow pin-points far away showedthe passing of a ship, and nearer was a red glare that came and went.Had not the electricity of my glow-lamp exhausted itself, I could havegot picked up that night. In spite of the inordinate fatigue I wasbeginning to feel, I was excited now, and for a time hopeful, in afeverish, impatient way, that so my travelling might end.
But at last I ceased to move about, and sat, wrists on knees, staringat a distant red light. It swayed up and down, rocking, rocking. Myexcitement passed. I realised I had yet to spend another night at leastin the sphere. I perceived myself infinitely heavy and fatigued. And soI fell asleep.
A change in my rhythmic motion awakened me. I peered through therefracting glass, and saw that I had come aground upon a huge shallowof sand. Far away I seemed to see houses and trees, and seaward acurved, vague distortion of a ship hung between sea and sky.
I stood up and staggered. My one desire was to emerge. The manhole wasupward, and I wrestled with the screw. Slowly I opened the manhole. Atlast the air was singing in again as once it had sung out. But thistime I did not wait until the pressure was adjusted. In another momentI had the weight of the window on my hands, and I was open, wide open,to the old familiar sky of earth.
The air hit me on the chest so that I gasped. I dropped the glassscrew. I cried out, put my hands to my chest, and sat down. For a timeI was in pain. Then I took deep breaths. At last I could rise and moveabout again.
I tried to thrust my head through the manhole, and the sphere rolledover. It was as though something had lugged my head down directly itemerged. I ducked back sharply, or I should have been pinned face underwater. After some wriggling and shoving I managed to crawl out uponsand, over which the retreating waves still came and went.
I did not attempt to stand up. It seemed to me that my body must besuddenly changed to lead. Mother Earth had her grip on me now--noCavorite intervening. I sat down heedless of the water that came overmy feet.
It was dawn, a grey dawn, rather overcast, but showing here and there along patch of greenish grey. Some way out a ship was lying at anchor,a pale silhouette of a ship with one yellow light. The water camerippling in in long shallow waves. Away to the right curved the land,a shingle bank with little hovels, and at last a lighthouse, a sailingmark and a point. Inland stretched a space of level sand, broken hereand there by pools of water, and ending a mile away perhaps in a lowshore of scrub. To the north-east some isolated watering-place wasvisible, a row of gaunt lodging-houses, the tallest things that I couldsee on earth, dull dabs against the brightening sky. What strange mencan have reared these vertical piles in such an amplitude of space I donot know. There they are, like pieces of Brighton lost in the waste.
For a long time I sat there, yawning and rubbing my face. At last Istruggled to rise. It made me feel that I was lifting a weight. I stoodup.
I stared at the distant houses. For the first time since ourstarvation in the crater I thought of earthly food. “Bacon,” Iwhispered, “eggs. Good toast and good coffee.... And how the devil am Igoing to get all this stuff to Lympne?” I wondered where I was. It wasan east shore anyhow, and I had seen Europe before I dropped.
I heard footsteps scrunching in the sand, and a little round-faced,friendly-looking man in flannels, with a bathing towel wrapped abouthis shoulders, and his bathing dress over his arm, appeared up thebeach. I knew instantly that I must be in England. He was staringalmost intently at the sphere and me. He advanced staring. I daresay Ilooked a ferocious savage enough--dirty, unkempt, to an indescribabledegree; but it did not occur to me at the time. He stopped at adistance of twenty yards. “Hul-lo, my man!” he said doubtfully.
“Hullo yourself!” said I.
He advanced, reassured by that. “What on earth is that thing?” he asked.
“Can you tell me where I am?” I asked.
“That’s Littlestone,” he said, pointing to the houses; “and that’sDungeness! Have you just landed? What’s that thing you’ve got? Somesort of machine?”
“Yes.”
“Have you floated ashore? Have you been wrecked or something? What isit?”
I meditated swiftly. I made an estimate of the little man’s appearanceas he drew nearer. “By Jove!” he said, “you’ve had a time of it! Ithought you--Well--Where were you cast away? Is that thing a sort offloating thing for saving life?”
I decided to take that line for the present. I made a few vagueaffirmatives. “I want help,” I said hoarsely. “I want to get some stuffup the beach--stuff I can’t very well leave about.” I became aware ofthree other pleasant-looking young men with towels, blazers, and strawhats, coming down the sands towards me. Evidently the early bathingsection of this Littlestone!
“Help!” said the young man; “rather!” He became vaguely active. “Whatparticularly do you want done?” He turned round and gesticulated. Thethree young men accelerated their pace. In a minute they were about me,plying me with questions I was indisposed to answer. “I’ll tell allthat later,” I said. “I’m dead beat. I’m a rag.”
“Come up to the hotel,” said the foremost little man. “We’ll look afterthat thing there.”
I hesitated. “I can’t,” I said. “In that sphere there’s two big bars ofgold.”
They looked incredulously at one another, then at me with a newinquiry. I went to the sphere, stooped, crept in, and presently theyhad the Selenites’ crowbars and the broken chain before them. If I hadnot been so horribly fagged I could have laughed at them. It was likekittens round a beetle. They didn’t know what to do with the stuff. Thefat little man stooped and lifted the end of one of the bars, and thendropped it with a grunt. Then they all did.
“It’s lead, or gold!” said one.
“Oh, it’s _gold_!” said another.
“Gold, right enough,” said the third.
Then they all stared at me, and then they all stared at the ship lyingat anchor.
“I say!” cried the little man. “But where did you get that?”
I was too tired to keep up a lie. “I got it in the moon.”
I saw them stare at one another.
“Look here!” said I, “I’m not going to argue now. Help me carry theselumps of gold up to the hotel--I guess, with rests, two of you canmanage one, and I’ll trail this chain thing--and I’ll tell you morewhen I’ve had some food.”
“And how about that thing?”
“It won’t hurt there,” I said. “Anyhow--confound it!--it must stopthere now. If the tide comes up, it will float all right.”
And in a state of enormous wonderment, these young men most obedientlyhoisted my treasures on their shoulders, and with limbs that felt likelead I headed a sort of procession towards that distant fragment of“sea-front.?
?? Half-way there we were reinforced by two awe-strickenlittle girls with spades, and later a lean little boy, with apenetrating sniff, appeared. He was, I remember, wheeling a bicycle,and he accompanied us at a distance of about a hundred yards on ourright flank, and then, I suppose, gave us up as uninteresting, mountedhis bicycle, and rode off over the level sands in the direction of thesphere.
I glanced back after him.
“_He_ won’t touch it,” said the stout young man reassuringly, and I wasonly too willing to be reassured.
At first something of the grey of the morning was in my mind, butpresently the sun disengaged itself from the level clouds of thehorizon and lit the world, and turned the leaden sea to glitteringwaters. My spirits rose. A sense of the vast importance of the thingsI had done and had yet to do came with the sunlight into my mind. Ilaughed aloud as the foremost man staggered under my gold. When indeedI took my place in the world, how amazed the world would be!
If it had not been for my inordinate fatigue, the landlord of theLittlestone hotel would have been amusing, as he hesitated betweenmy gold and my respectable company on the one hand, and my filthyappearance on the other. But at last I found myself in a terrestrialbathroom once more with warm water to wash myself with, and a change ofraiment, preposterously small indeed, but anyhow clean, that the geniallittle man had lent me. He lent me a razor too, but I could not screwup my resolution to attack even the outposts of the bristling beardthat covered my face.
I sat down to an English breakfast and ate with a sort of languidappetite--an appetite many weeks old, and very decrepit--and stirredmyself to answer the questions of the four young men. And I told themthe truth.
“Well,” said I, “as you press me--I got it in the moon.”
“The moon?”
“Yes, the moon in the sky.”
“But how do you mean?”
“What I say, confound it!”
“That you have just come from the moon?”
“Exactly! through space--in that ball.” And I took a delicious mouthfulof egg. I made a private note that when I went back to the moon I wouldtake a box of eggs.
I could see clearly that they did not believe one word of what I toldthem, but evidently they considered me the most respectable liar theyhad ever met. They glanced at one another, and then concentrated thefire of their eyes on me. I fancy they expected a clue to me in theway I helped myself to salt. They seemed to find something significantin my peppering my egg. These strangely shaped masses of gold theyhad staggered under held their minds. There the lumps lay in front ofme, each worth thousands of pounds, and as impossible for any one tosteal as a house or a piece of land. As I looked at their curious facesover my coffee-cup, I realised something of the enormous wildernessof explanations into which I should have to wander to render myselfcomprehensible again.
“You don’t _really_ mean--” began the youngest young man, in the toneof one who speaks to an obstinate child.
“Just pass me that toast-rack,” I said, and shut him up completely.
“But look here, I say,” began one of the others. “We’re not going tobelieve that, you know.”
“Ah, well,” said I, and shrugged my shoulders.
“He doesn’t want to tell us,” said the youngest young man in a stageaside; and then, with an appearance of great _sang-froid_, “You don’tmind if I take a cigarette?”
I waved him a cordial assent, and proceeded with my breakfast. Twoof the others went and looked out of the farther window and talkedinaudibly. I was struck by a thought. “The tide,” I said, “is runningout?”
There was a pause, a doubt who should answer me. “It’s near the ebb,”said the fat little man.
“Well, anyhow,” I said, “it won’t float far.”
I decapitated my third egg, and began a little speech. “Look here,”I said. “Please don’t imagine I’m surly or telling you uncivil lies,or anything of that sort. I’m forced almost, to be a little short andmysterious. I can quite understand this is as queer as it can be, andthat your imaginations must be going it. I can assure you, you’rein at a memorable time. But I can’t make it clear to you now--it’simpossible. I give you my word of honour I’ve come from the moon, andthat’s all I can tell you.... All the same I’m tremendously obliged toyou, you know, tremendously. I hope that my manner hasn’t in any waygiven you offence.”
“Oh, not in the least!” said the youngest young man affably. “We canquite understand,” and staring hard at me all the time, he heeledhis chair back until it very nearly upset, and recovered with someexertion. “Not a bit of it,” said the fat young man. “Don’t you imagine_that_!” and they all got up and dispersed, and walked about and litcigarettes, and generally tried to show they were perfectly amiable anddisengaged, and entirely free from the slightest curiosity about meand the sphere. “I’m going to keep an eye on that ship out there allthe same,” I heard one of them remarking in an undertone. If only theycould have forced themselves to it, they would, I believe, even havegone out and left me. I went on with my third egg.
“The weather,” the fat little man remarked presently, “has beenimmense, has it not? I don’t know _when_ we have had such a summer....”
Phoo--whizz! Like a tremendous rocket!
And somewhere a window was broken....
“What’s that?” said I.
“It isn’t--?” cried the little man, and rushed to the corner window.
All the others rushed to the window likewise. I sat staring at them.
Suddenly I leapt up, knocked over my third egg, and rushed for thewindow also. I had just thought of something. “Nothing to be seenthere,” cried the little man, rushing for the door.
“It’s that boy!” I cried, bawling in hoarse fury; “it’s that accursedboy!” and turning about I pushed the waiter aside--he was just bringingme some more toast--and rushed violently out of the room and down andout upon the queer little esplanade in front of the hotel.
The sea, which had been smooth, was rough now with hurrying cat’s-paws,and all about where the sphere had been was tumbled water like thewake of a ship. Above, a little puff of cloud whirled like dispersingsmoke, and the three or four people on the beach were staring up withinterrogative faces towards the point of that unexpected report. Andthat was all! Boots and waiter and the four young men in blazers camerushing out behind me. Shouts came from windows and doors, and allsorts of worrying people came into sight--agape.
For a time I stood there, too overwhelmed by this new development tothink of the people.
At first I was too stunned to see the thing as any definite disaster--Iwas just stunned, as a man is by some accidental violent blow. It isonly afterwards he begins to appreciate his specific injury.
“Good Lord!”
I felt as though somebody was pouring funk out of a can down the backof my neck. My legs became feeble. I had got the first intimation ofwhat the disaster meant for me. There was that confounded boy--skyhigh! I was utterly “left.” There was the gold in the coffee-room--myonly possession on earth. How would it all work out? The general effectwas of a gigantic unmanageable confusion.
“I say,” said the voice of the little man behind. “I _say_, you know.”
I wheeled about, and there were twenty or thirty people, a sortof irregular investment of people, all bombarding me with dumbinterrogation, with infinite doubt and suspicion. I felt the compulsionof their eyes intolerably. I groaned aloud.
“I _can’t_!” I shouted. “I tell you I can’t! I’m not equal to it! Youmust puzzle and--and be damned to you!”
I gesticulated convulsively. He receded a step as though I hadthreatened him. I made a bolt through them into the hotel. I chargedback into the coffee-room, rang the bell furiously. I gripped thewaiter as he entered. “D’ye hear?” I shouted. “Get help and carry thesebars up to my room right away.”
He failed to understand me, and I shouted and raved at him. Ascared-looking little old man in a green apron appeared, andfurther two of the young m
en in flannels. I made a dash at them andcommandeered their services. As soon as the gold was in my room I feltfree to quarrel. “Now get out,” I shouted; “all of you get out if youdon’t want to see a man go mad before your eyes!” And I helped thewaiter by the shoulder as he hesitated in the doorway. And then, assoon as I had the door locked on them all, I tore off the little man’sclothes again, shied them right and left, and got into bed forthwith.And there I lay swearing and panting and cooling for a very long time.
At last I was calm enough to get out of bed and ring up the round-eyedwaiter for a flannel nightshirt, a soda and whisky, and some goodcigars. And these things being procured me, after an exasperating delaythat drove me several times to the bell, I locked the door again andproceeded very deliberately to look the entire situation in the face.
The net result of the great experiment presented itself as an absolutefailure. It was a rout, and I was the sole survivor. It was anabsolute collapse, and this was the final disaster. There was nothingfor it but to save myself, and as much as I could in the way ofprospects from our _débâcle_. At one fatal crowning blow all my vagueresolutions of return and recovery had vanished. My intention of goingback to the moon, of getting a sphereful of gold, and afterwards ofhaving a fragment of Cavorite analysed and so recovering the greatsecret--perhaps, finally, even of recovering Cavor’s body--all theseideas vanished altogether.
I was the sole survivor, and that was all.
* * * * *
I think that going to bed was one of the luckiest ideas I have ever hadin an emergency. I really believe I should either have got loose-headedor done some fatal, indiscreet thing. But there, locked in and securefrom all interruption, I could think out the position in all itsbearings and make my arrangements at leisure.
Of course it was quite clear to me what had happened to the boy. Hehad crawled into the sphere, meddled with the studs, shut the Cavoritewindows, and gone up. It was highly improbable he had screwed in themanhole stopper, and, even if he had, the chances were a thousand toone against his getting back. It was fairly evident that he wouldgravitate with my bales to somewhere near the middle of the sphere andremain there, and so cease to be a legitimate terrestrial interest,however remarkable he might seem to the inhabitants of some remotequarter of space. I very speedily convinced myself on that point.And as for any responsibility I might have in the matter, the more Ireflected upon that, the clearer it became that if only I kept quietabout things, I need not trouble myself about that. If I was faced bysorrowing parents demanding their lost boy, I had merely to demand mylost sphere--or ask them what they meant. At first I had had a visionof weeping parents and guardians, and all sorts of complications; butnow I saw that I simply had to keep my mouth shut, and nothing in thatway could arise. And, indeed, the more I lay and smoked and thought,the more evident became the wisdom of impenetrability.
It is within the right of every British citizen, provided he does notcommit damage nor indecorum, to appear suddenly wherever he pleases,and as ragged and filthy as he pleases, and with whatever amount ofvirgin gold he sees fit to encumber himself, and no one has any rightat all to hinder and detain him in this procedure. I formulated that atlast to myself, and repeated it over as a sort of private Magna Chartaof my liberty.
Once I had put that issue on one side, I could take up and considerin an equable manner certain considerations I had scarcely dared tothink of before, namely, those arising out of the circumstances of mybankruptcy. But now, looking at this matter calmly and at leisure,I could see that if only I suppressed my identity by a temporaryassumption of some less well-known name, and if I retained the twomonths’ beard that had grown upon me, the risks of any annoyance fromthe spiteful creditor to whom I have already alluded became very smallindeed. From that to a definite course of rational worldly action wasplain sailing. It was all amazingly petty, no doubt, but what wasthere remaining for me to do?
Whatever I did I was resolved that I would keep myself level and rightside up.
I ordered up writing materials, and addressed a letter to the NewRomney Bank--the nearest, the waiter informed me--telling the managerI wished to open an account with him, and requesting him to sendtwo trustworthy persons properly authenticated in a cab with a goodhorse to fetch some hundredweight of gold with which I happened tobe encumbered. I signed the letter “Blake,” which seemed to me to bea thoroughly respectable sort of name. This done, I got a FolkestoneBlue Book, picked out an outfitter, and asked him to send a cutter tomeasure me for a drab tweed suit, ordering at the same time a valise,dressing bag, brown boots, shirts, hats (to fit), and so forth; andfrom a watchmaker I also ordered a watch. And these letters beingdespatched, I had up as good a lunch as the hotel could give, andthen lay smoking a cigar, as calm and ordinary as possible, until inaccordance with my instructions two duly authenticated clerks came fromthe bank and weighed and took away my gold. After which I pulled theclothes over my ears in order to drown any knocking, and went verycomfortably to sleep.
I went to sleep. No doubt it was a prosaic thing for the first man backfrom the moon to do, and I can imagine that the young and imaginativereader will find my behaviour disappointing. But I was horriblyfatigued and bothered, and, confound it! what else was there to do?There certainly was not the remotest chance of my being believed, ifI had told my story then, and it would certainly have subjected me tointolerable annoyances. I went to sleep. When at last I woke up again Iwas ready to face the world, as I have always been accustomed to faceit since I came to years of discretion. And so I got away to Italy, andthere it is I am writing this story. If the world will not have it asfact, then the world may take it as fiction. It is no concern of mine.
And now that the account is finished, I am amazed to think howcompletely this adventure is gone and done with. Everybody believesthat Cavor was a not very brilliant scientific experimenter who blewup his house and himself at Lympne, and they explain the bang thatfollowed my arrival at Littlestone by a reference to the experimentswith explosives that are going on continually at the governmentestablishment of Lydd, two miles away. I must confess that hitherto Ihave not acknowledged my share in the disappearance of Master TommySimmons, which was that little boy’s name. That, perhaps, may provea difficult item of corroboration to explain away. They account formy appearance in rags with two bars of indisputable gold upon theLittlestone beach in various ingenious ways--it doesn’t worry me whatthey think of me. They say I have strung all these things togetherto avoid being questioned too closely as to the source of my wealth.I would like to see the man who could invent a story that would holdtogether like this one. Well, they must take it as fiction--there it is.
I have told my story--and now I suppose I have to take up the worriesof this terrestrial life again. Even if one has been to the moon, onehas still to earn a living. So I am working here at Amalfi, on thescenario of that play I sketched before Cavor came walking into myworld, and I am trying to piece my life together as it was before everI saw him. I must confess that I find it hard to keep my mind on theplay when the moonshine comes into my room. It is full moon here, andlast night I was out on the pergola for hours, staring away at thatshining blankness that hides so much. Imagine it! tables and chairs,and trestles and bars of gold! Confound it!--if only one could hit onthat Cavorite again! But a thing like that doesn’t come twice in alife. Here I am, a little better off than I was at Lympne, and thatis all. And Cavor has committed suicide in a more elaborate way thanany human being ever did before. So the story closes as finally andcompletely as a dream. It fits in so little with all the other thingsof life, so much of it is so utterly remote from all human experience,the leaping, the eating, the breathing, and these weightless times,that indeed there are moments when, in spite of my moon gold, I do morethan half believe myself that the whole thing was a dream....