CHAPTER IV
_The Spread of the Terror_
It is time, I think, for me to make one point clear. I began thishistory with certain references to an extraordinary accident to anairman whose machine fell to the ground after collision with a hugeflock of pigeons; and then to an explosion in a northern munitionfactory, an explosion, as I noted, of a very singular kind. Then Ideserted the neighborhood of London, and the northern district, anddwelt on a mysterious and terrible series of events which occurred inthe summer of 1915 in a Welsh county, which I have named, forconvenience, Meirion.
Well, let it be understood at once that all this detail that I havegiven about the occurrences in Meirion does not imply that the countyin the far west was alone or especially afflicted by the terror that wasover the land. They tell me that in the villages about Dartmoor thestout Devonshire hearts sank as men's hearts used to sink in the time ofplague and pestilence. There was horror, too, about the Norfolk Broads,and far up by Perth no one would venture on the path that leads by Sconeto the wooded heights above the Tay. And in the industrial districts: Imet a man by chance one day in an odd London corner who spoke withhorror of what a friend had told him.
"'Ask no questions, Ned,' he says to me, 'but I tell yow a' was inBairnigan t'other day, and a' met a pal who'd seen three hundred coffinsgoing out of a works not far from there.'"
And then the ship that hovered outside the mouth of the Thames with allsails set and beat to and fro in the wind, and never answered any hail,and showed no light! The forts shot at her and brought down one of themasts, but she went suddenly about with a change of wind under what sailstill stood, and then veered down Channel, and drove ashore at last onthe sandbanks and pinewoods of Arcachon, and not a man alive on her, butonly rattling heaps of bones! That last voyage of the _Semiramis_ wouldbe something horribly worth telling; but I only heard it at a distanceas a yarn, and only believed it because it squared with other thingsthat I knew for certain.
This, then, is my point; I have written of the terror as it fell onMeirion, simply because I have had opportunities of getting close thereto what really happened. Third or fourth or fifth hand in the otherplaces; but round about Porth and Merthyr Tegveth I have spoken withpeople who have seen the tracks of the terror with their own eyes.
Well, I have said that the people of that far western county realized,not only that death was abroad in their quiet lanes and on theirpeaceful hills, but that for some reason it was to be kept all secret.Newspapers might not print any news of it, the very juries summoned toinvestigate it were allowed to investigate nothing. And so theyconcluded that this veil of secrecy must somehow be connected with thewar; and from this position it was not a long way to a furtherinference: that the murderers of innocent men and women and childrenwere either Germans or agents of Germany. It would be just like theHuns, everybody agreed, to think out such a devilish scheme as this; andthey always thought out their schemes beforehand. They hoped to seizeParis in a few weeks, but when they were beaten on the Marne they hadtheir trenches on the Aisne ready to fall back on: it had all beenprepared years before the war. And so, no doubt, they had devised thisterrible plan against England in case they could not beat us in openfight: there were people ready, very likely, all over the country, whowere prepared to murder and destroy everywhere as soon as they got theword. In this way the Germans intended to sow terror throughout Englandand fill our hearts with panic and dismay, hoping so to weaken theirenemy at home that he would lose all heart over the war abroad. It wasthe Zeppelin notion, in another form; they were committing thesehorrible and mysterious outrages thinking that we should be frightenedout of our wits.
It all seemed plausible enough; Germany had by this time perpetrated somany horrors and had so excelled in devilish ingenuities that noabomination seemed too abominable to be probable, or too ingeniouslywicked to be beyond the tortuous malice of the Hun. But then came thequestions as to who the agents of this terrible design were, as to wherethey lived, as to how they contrived to move unseen from field to field,from lane to lane. All sorts of fantastic attempts were made to answerthese questions; but it was felt that they remained unanswered. Somesuggested that the murderers landed from submarines, or flew from hidingplaces on the West Coast of Ireland, coming and going by night; butthere were seen to be flagrant impossibilities in both thesesuggestions. Everybody agreed that the evil work was no doubt the workof Germany; but nobody could begin to guess how it was done. Somebody atthe Club asked Remnant for his theory.
"My theory," said that ingenious person, "is that human progress issimply a long march from one inconceivable to another. Look at thatairship of ours that came over Porth yesterday: ten years ago that wouldhave been an inconceivable sight. Take the steam engine, stake printing,take the theory of gravitation: they were all inconceivable tillsomebody thought of them. So it is, no doubt, with this infernal dodgerythat we're talking about: the Huns have found it out, and we haven't;and there you are. We can't conceive how these poor people have beenmurdered, because the method's inconceivable to us."
The club listened with some awe to this high argument. After Remnant hadgone, one member said:
"Wonderful man, that." "Yes," said Dr. Lewis. "He was asked whether heknew something. And his reply really amounted to 'No, I don't,' But Ihave never heard it better put."
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It was, I suppose, at about this time when the people were puzzlingtheir heads as to the secret methods used by the Germans or their agentsto accomplish their crimes that a very singular circumstance becameknown to a few of the Porth people. It related to the murder of theWilliams family on the Highway in front of their cottage door. I do notknow that I have made it plain that the old Roman road called theHighway follows the course of a long, steep hill that goes steadilywestward till it slants down and droops towards the sea. On either sideof the road the ground falls away, here into deep shadowy woods, here tohigh pastures, now and again into a field of corn, but for the most partinto the wild and broken land that is characteristic of Arfon. Thefields are long and narrow, stretching up the steep hillside; they fallinto sudden dips and hollows, a well springs up in the midst of one anda grove of ash and thorn bends over it, shading it; and beneath it theground is thick with reeds and rushes. And then may come on either sideof such a field territories glistening with the deep growth of bracken,and rough with gorse and rugged with thickets of blackthorn, greenlichen hanging strangely from the branches; such are the lands on eitherside of the Highway.
Now on the lower slopes of it, beneath the Williams's cottage, somethree or four fields down the hill, there is a military camp. The placehas been used as a camp for many years, and lately the site has beenextended and huts have been erected. But a considerable number of themen were under canvas here in the summer of 1915.
On the night of the Highway murder this camp, as it appeared afterwards,was the scene of the extraordinary panic of the horses.
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A good many men in the camp were asleep in their tents soon after 9:30,when the Last Post was sounded. They woke up in panic. There was athundering sound on the steep hillside above them, and down upon thetents came half a dozen horses, mad with fright, trampling the canvas,trampling the men, bruising dozens of them and killing two.
Everything was in wild confusion, men groaning and screaming in thedarkness, struggling with the canvas and the twisted ropes, shoutingout, some of them, raw lads enough, that the Germans had landed, otherswiping the blood from their eyes, a few, roused suddenly from heavysleep, hitting out at one another, officers coming up at the doubleroaring out orders to the sergeants, a party of soldiers who were justreturning to camp from the village seized with fright at what they couldscarcely see or distinguish, at the wildness of the shouting and cursingand groaning that they could not understand, bolting out of the campagain and racing for their lives back to the village: everything in themaddest confusion of wild disorder.
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bsp; Some of the men had seen the horses galloping down the hill as if terroritself was driving them. They scattered off into the darkness, andsomehow or another found their way back in the night to their pastureabove the camp. They were grazing there peacefully in the morning, andthe only sign of the panic of the night before was the mud they hadscattered all over themselves as they pelted through a patch of wetground. The farmer said they were as quiet a lot as any in Meirion; hecould make nothing of it.
"Indeed," he said, "I believe they must have seen the devil himself tobe in such a fright as that: save the people!"
Now all this was kept as quiet as might be at the time when it happened;it became known to the men of the Porth Club in the days when they werediscussing the difficult question of the German outrages, as the murderswere commonly called. And this wild stampede of the farm horses was heldby some to be evidence of the extraordinary and unheard of character ofthe dreadful agency that was at work. One of the members of the club hadbeen told by an officer who was in the camp at the time of the panicthat the horses that came charging down were in a perfect fury offright, that he had never seen horses in such a state, and so there wasendless speculation as to the nature of the sight or the sound that haddriven half a dozen quiet beasts into raging madness.
Then, in the middle of this talk, two or three other incidents, quite asodd and incomprehensible, came to be known, borne on chance trickles ofgossip that came into the towns from outland farms, or were carried bycottagers tramping into Porth on market day with a fowl or two and eggsand garden stuff; scraps and fragments of talk gathered by servants fromthe country folk and repeated--to their mistresses. And in such ways itcame out that up at Plas Newydd there had been a terrible business overswarming the bees; they had turned as wild as wasps and much moresavage. They had come about the people who were taking the swarms like acloud. They settled on one man's face so that you could not see theflesh for the bees crawling all over it, and they had stung him so badlythat the doctor did not know whether he would get over it, and they hadchased a girl who had come out to see the swarming, and settled on herand stung her to death. Then they had gone off to a brake below thefarm and got into a hollow tree there, and it was not safe to go nearit, for they would come out at you by day or by night.
And much the same thing had happened, it seemed, at three or four farmsand cottages where bees were kept. And there were stories, hardly soclear or so credible, of sheep dogs, mild and trusted beasts, turning assavage as wolves and injuring the farm boys in a horrible manner--in onecase it was said with fatal results. It was certainly true that old Mrs.Owen's favorite Brahma-Dorking cock had gone mad; she came into Porthone Saturday morning with her face and her neck all bound up andplastered. She had gone out to her bit of a field to feed the poultrythe night before, and the bird had flown at her and attacked her mostsavagely, inflicting some very nasty wounds before she could beat itoff.
"There was a stake handy, lucky for me," she said, "and I did beat himand beat him till the life was out of him. But what is come to theworld, whatever?"
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Now Remnant, the man of theories, was also a man of extreme leisure. Itwas understood that he had succeeded to ample means when he was quite ayoung man, and after tasting the savors of the law, as it were, for halfa dozen terms at the board of the Middle Temple, he had decided that itwould be senseless to bother himself with passing examinations for aprofession which he had not the faintest intention of practising. So heturned a deaf ear to the call of "Manger" ringing through the TempleCourts, and set himself out to potter amiably through the world. He hadpottered all over Europe, he had looked at Africa, and had even put hishead in at the door of the East, on a trip which included the Greekisles and Constantinople. Now getting into the middle fifties, he hadsettled at Porth for the sake, as he said, of the Gulf Stream and thefuchsia hedges, and pottered over his books and his theories and thelocal gossip. He was no more brutal than the general public, whichrevels in the details of mysterious crime; but it must be said that theterror, black though it was, was a boon to him. He peered andinvestigated and poked about with the relish of a man to whose life anew zest has been added. He listened attentively to the strange tales ofbees and dogs and poultry that came into Porth with the country basketsof butter, rabbits, and green peas; and he evolved at last a mostextraordinary theory.
Full of this discovery, as he thought it, he went one night to see Dr.Lewis and take his view of the matter.
"I want to talk to you," said Remnant to the doctor, "about what I havecalled provisionally, the Z Ray."