Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (72 page)

There is some talk overhead of ‘coming round to tea on Friday,' a brief report of the derelict's fate, and Tim volunteers, as he descends: ‘For an ABC man, young Williams is less of a high-tension fool than some … Were you thinking of taking her, George? Then I'll just have a look round that port thrust – seems to me it's a trifle warm – and we'll fan along.'

The Mark Boat hums off joyously and hangs herself up in her appointed place in the skies. Here she will stay, a shutter-less observatory; a lifeboat station; a salvage tug; a court of ultimate appeal-cum-meteorological bureau for a thousandmiles round in all directions till Wednesday next, when her relief slides across the stars to take her buffeted place. Her black hull, double conning-tower, and ever-ready slings represent all that remains to this planet of effective authority. She is responsible only to the Aerial Board of Control – the ABC of which Tim speaks so flippantly. But that semi-elected, semi-nominated body of a few score persons of both sexes governs this planet. ‘Transportation is civilisation,' our motto runs. Theoretically we do what we please so long as we do not interfere with the traffic
and all it implies.
Practically, the ABC confirms or annuls most international arrangements, and, to judge by its last report, finds our tolerant, humorous, lazy little planet only too ready to lay the whole burden of private administration on its shoulder.

I discuss this with Tim sipping
maté
on the c.p., while George fans her along over the white blur of the Newfoundland Banks in beautiful upward curves of fifty miles each. The dip-dial translates them on the tape in flowing freehand.

Tim gathers up a skein of it and surveys the last few feet which record 162's path through the volt-flurry.

‘I haven't had a fever-chart like this to show up in five years,' he says ruefully.

A postal-packet's dip-dial records every yard of every run. The tapes then go to the ABC, which collates them and makes composite photographs of them for the instruction of skippers. Tim studies his irrevocable past shaking his head.

‘Hullo! Here's a fifteen-hundred-foot drop at eighty-five degrees! We must have been standing on our head then, George.'

‘You don't say so,' George answers. ‘I fancied I noticed a bit of a duck.'

George may not have Captain Purnall's catlike swiftness, but he is an artist to the tips of the broad fingers that play on the shunt-stops. The delicious flight-curves come away on the tape with never a waver. The Mark Boat's vertical spindle of light lies down to eastward setting in the face of the following stars. Westward, where no planet should rise, the triple white verticals of Trinity Bay (we keep still to the Southern route)makes a low-lifting haze. We seem the only things at rest under all the heavens; floating at ease till earth's revolution shall turn up our landing-towers.

And minute by minute our silent clock shows us a sixteen-second mile.

‘Some fine night,' says Tim, ‘we'll be even with that clock's master.'

‘He's coming now,' says George. ‘I'm chasing the night already.'

The stars ahead dim no more than if a film of mist had been drawn under unobserved, but the deep air-boom on our skin changes to a joyful shout.

‘The dawn-gust,' says Tim. ‘It'll go on to meet the sun. Look! Look! There's the night being crammed back over our bow! Come to the after-colloid. I'll show you something pretty.'

The engine-room is hot and stuffy; the clerks in the coach are asleep, and the Slave of the Ray is near to follow them. Tim slides open the after-colloid and reveals the curve of the world – the ocean's deepest purple – edged with fuming and intolerable gold. Then the sun rises and, through the colloid, strikes out our lamps. Tim scowls in his face.

‘Squirrels in a cage,' he mutters. ‘That's all we are. Squirrels in a cage! He's running twice as fast as us … Just you wait a few years, my shining friend, and we'll take steps that will amaze you. We'll Joshua you!'

Yes; that is our dream – to turn all earth to the Vale of Ajalon at our pleasure. So far we can drag out the dawn to twice its normal length in these latitudes. But some days – even on the Equator – we shall hold the sun level in his full stride!

Now we look down on a sea thronged with heavy traffic. A big submersible breaks water suddenly. Another and another follows with a swash and a suck and a savage bubbling of relieved pressures. The deep-sea freighters are rising to lung up after the long night, and the leisurely ocean is all patterned with peacock's eyes of foam.

‘We'll lung up, too,' says Tim, and when we return to the c.p., George shuts off, the colloids are opened, and the freshair sweeps her out. There is no hurry. The old contracts (they will be revised at the end of this year) allow twelve hours for a run which any packet can put behind her in ten. We breakfast in the arms of an easterly slant which pushes us along at a languid twenty.

To enjoy life, and tobacco, begin both on a sunny morning half a mile or so above the dappled Atlantic cloud-belts, and after a volt-flurry which has cleared and tempered your nerves. While we discussed the thickening traffic with the superiority that comes of having a high level to ourselves, we heard (and I for the first time) morning service on a Hospital boat.

She was cloaked by a skein of ravelled fluff beneath us, and we caught her chant before she rose into the sunlight: ‘
Oye Winds of God,
'sang the unseen voices, ‘
bless ye the Lord! Praise Him, and magnify Him for ever!
'

We slid off our caps and joined in. When our shadow fell across her great open platforms, they looked up and stretched out their hands neighbourly while they sang. We could see the doctors and the nurses and the white-button-like faces of the cot-patients. She passed slowly beneath us, heading northward, her hull, wet with the dews of night, all ablaze in the sunshine. So took she the shadow of a cloud and vanished; her song continuing –

‘O ye holy and humble men of heart, bless ye the Lord! Praise Him, and magnify Him for ever!
'

‘She's a lunger, or she wouldn't have been singing the
Benedicite;
and she's a Greenlander, or she wouldn't have snow-blinds over her colloids,' said George at last. ‘She'll be bound for Frederikshavn or one of the Glacier sanatoriums for a month. If she was an accident ward, she'd be hung up at the ten-thousand-foot level. Yes – consumptives.'

‘Funny how the new things are the old things. I've read in books,' Tim answered, ‘that savages used to haul their sick and wounded to the tops of the hills because microbes were fewer there. We hoist 'em into sterilised air for a while. Same thing, isn't it?'

‘Did you ever read about the epidemics we used to have in the old days – right
on
the ground?' said George, knocking outhis pipe. ‘It must have been bad. And we talked about Fresh Air, too! Fresh air – in a city – with horses and cows and pigs an' rats and people in direct contact! I wonder we didn't all the twice a week. We must have been an enamel-faced community.'

‘Dunno – we died at seventy or thereabouts (I've read), and a centenarian was a curio in those days. How much do the doctors say we've added to the average life of a man?'

‘Thirty years,' says George, with a twinkle in his eye. ‘Are you going to spend 'em all up here, Tim? Our letters'll be a trifle discharged.'

‘Flap along, then. Flap along. Who's hindering?' The senior captain laughed, as we went in.

We held a good lift to clear the coast and Continental shipping, and we had need of it. Though our route is in no sense a populated one, there is a steady trickle of traffic this way about. We met Hudson Bay furriers out of the Great Preserve hurrying to make their departures from Bonavista with sable and black fox for the insatiable markets; we over-crossed Keewahdin liners small and cramped; but their captains, who see no land between Trepassy and Blanco, know what gold they bring back from West Africa. Trans-Asiatic Directs we met soberly ringing the world round the Fiftieth Meridian, at an honest seventy knots; and white-painted Ackroyd and Hunt fruiters out of the South fled beneath us, their ventilated hulls whistling like Chinese kites. Their market is in the North, among the northern sanatoria, where you can smell their grape-fruit and bananas across the cold snows. Brazilian beef-boats we sighted of enormous capacity and Teutonic outline. They too feed the Northern health-stations in ice-bound ports where submersibles dare not rise. Yellow-bellied ore-flats and Ungava petrol-tanks punted down leisurely out of the North like strings of unfrightened wild-duck. It does not pay to ‘fly' minerals and oil a mile further than is necessary; but the risks of transhipping to submersibles in the ice-pack off Nain or Hebron are so great that these heavy freighters fly down to Halifax direct, and scent the air as they go. They are the biggest tramps aloft, except theAthabasca grain-tubs. But these, now that the wheat is moved, are busy over the planet's left shoulder, timber-lifting in Siberia.

We held to the St Lawrence (it is astonishing how the old waterways still pull us children of the air!) and followed his broad line of black between its drifting ice-blocks, all down the Park that the wisdom of our fathers has saved to the world.

But everyone knows the Quebec run.

We dropped to the Heights Receiving-Towers twenty minutes ahead of time, and there hung at ease till the Yokohama Intermediate Packet could pull out and give us our proper slip. It was curious to watch the action of the holding-down-clips all along the frosty river front as boats cleared or came to rest. A big Hamburger was leaving Pont Levis, and her crew, unshipping the platform railings, began to sing ‘Elsinore' – the oldest of our chanteys. You know it, of course?

Mother Rugen's tea-house on the Baltic –

Forty couple waltzing on the floor!

And you can mind my Ray,

For I must go away

And dance with Ella Sweyn at Elsinore!

Then, while they sweated home the covering-plate:

Nor–Nor–Nor–Nor –

West
from Sourabaya to the Baltic –

Ninety knot an hour to the Skaw!

Mother Rugen's tea-house on the Baltic,

And a dance with Ella Swcyn at Elsinore!

The clips parted with a gesture of indignant dismissal, as though Quebec, glittering under her snows, were casting out these light and unworthy lovers. Our signal came from the Heights. Tim turned and floated up, but surely it was with passionate appeal that the great arms flung open from our tower – or did I think so because on the upper staging a little hooded figure also stretched arms wide towards her father?

In ten seconds the coach with its clerks clashed down to the Receiving-caissons; the hostlers displaced the engineers at the cold turbines, and Tim, prouder of this than all, introduced me to the maiden of the photograph on the shelf. ‘And by the way,' said he, stepping forth in the sunshine under the hat of civil life, ‘I saw young Williams in the Mark Boat. I've asked him to tea on Friday.'

THE HOUSE SURGEON

On an evening after Easter Day, I sat at a table in a homeward bound steamer's smoking-room, where half a dozen of us told ghost stories. As our party broke up, a man, playing Patience in the next alcove, said to me: ‘I didn't quite catch the end of that last story about the Curse on the family's first-born.'

‘It turned out to be drains,' I explained. ‘As soon as new ones were put into the house the Curse was lifted, I believe. I never knew the people myself.'

‘Ah! I've had
my
drains up twice; I'm on gravel too.'

‘You don't mean to say you've a ghost in your house? Why didn't you join our party?'

‘Any more orders, gentlemen, before the bar closes?' the steward interrupted.

‘Sit down again and have one with me,' said the Patience player. ‘No, it isn't a ghost. Our trouble is more depression than anything else.'

‘How interesting! Then it's nothing any one can see?'

‘It's – it's nothing worse than a little depression. And the odd part is that there hasn't been a death in the house since it was built – in 1863. The lawyer said so. That decided me – my good lady, rather – and he made me pay an extra thousandfor it.'

‘How curious. Unusual, too!' I said.

‘Yes, ain't it? It was built for three sisters – Moultrie was the name – three old maids. They all lived together; the eldest owned it. I bought it from her lawyer a few years ago, and if I've spent a pound on the place first and last, I must have spent five thousand. Electric light, new servants' wing, garden – all that sort of thing. A man and his family ought to be happyafter so much expense, ain't it?' He looked at me through the bottom of his glass.

‘Does it affect your family much?'

‘My good lady – she's a Greek by the way – and myself are middle-aged. We can bear up against depression; but it's hard on my little girl. I say little; but she's twenty. We send her visiting to escape it. She almost lived at hotels and hydros last year, but that isn't pleasant for her. She used to be a canary – a perfect canary – always singing. You ought to hear her. She doesn't sing now. That sort of thing's unwholesome for the young, ain't it?'

‘Can't you get rid of the place?' I suggested.

‘Not except at a sacrifice, and we are fond of it. Just suits us three. We'd love it if we were allowed.'

‘What do you mean by not being allowed?'

‘I mean because of the depression. It spoils everything.'

‘What's it like exactly?'

‘I couldn't very well explain. It must be seen to be appreciated, as the auctioneers say. Now, I was much impressed by the story you were telling just now.'

‘It wasn't true,' I said.

‘My tale is true. If you would do me the pleasure to come down and spend a night at my little place, you'd learn more than you would if I talked till morning. Very likely 'twouldn't touch your good self at all. You might be – immune, ain't it? On the other hand, if this influenza-influence
does
happen to affect you, why, I think it will be an experience.'