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The “Vaterland” Is Disabled3
He awoke tranquil but very stuffy, and at the same time very cold, and quite unable to recollect where he could be. His head ached, and his breath was suffocated. He had been dreaming confusedly of Edna, and desert dervishes, and of riding bicycles in an extremely perilous manner through the upper air amidst a pyrotechnic display of crackers and Bengal lights--to the great annoyance of a sort of composite person made up of the Prince and Mr. Butteridge. Then for some reason Edna and he had begun to cry pitifully for each other, and he woke up with wet eye-lashes into this ill-ventilated darkness of thelocker. He would never see Edna any more, never see Edna any more.
He thought he must be back in the bedroom behind the cycle shop at the bottom of Bun Hill, and he was sure the vision he had had of the destruction of a magnificent city, a city quite incredibly great and splendid, by means of bombs, was no more than a particularly vivid dream.
"Grubb!" he called, anxious to tell him.
The answering silence, and the dull resonance of the locker to his voice, supplementing the stifling quality of the air, set going a new train of ideas. He lifted up his hands and feet, and met an inflexible resistance. He was in a coffin, he thought! He had been buried alive! He gave way at once to wild panic. "`Elp!" he screamed. "`Elp!" and drummed with his feet, and kicked and struggled. "Let me out! Let me out!"
For some seconds he struggled with this intolerable horror, and then the side of his imagined coffin gave way, and he was flying out into daylight. Then he was rolling about on what seemed to be a padded floor with Kurt, and being punched and sworn at lustily.
He sat up. His head bandage had become loose and got over one eye, and he whipped the whole thing off. Kurt was also sitting up, a yard away from him, pink as ever, wrapped in blankets, and with an aluminium diver`s helmet over his knee, staring at him with a severe expression, and rubbing his downy unshaven chin. They were both on a slanting floor of crimson padding, and above them was an opening like a long, low cellar flap that Bert by an effort perceived to be the cabin door in a half-inverted condition. The whole cabin had in fact turned on its side.
"What the deuce do you mean by it, Smallways?" said Kurt, "jumping out of that locker when I was certain you had gone overboard with the rest of them? Where have you been?"
"What`s up?" asked Bert.
"This end of the airship is up. Most other things are down."
"Was there a battle?"
"There was."
"Who won?"
"I haven`t seen the papers, Smallways. We left before the finish. We got disabled and unmanageable, and our colleagues--consorts I mean--were too busy most of them to trouble about us, and the wind blew us--Heaven knows where the wind IS blowing us. It blew us right out of action at the rate of eighty miles an hour or so. Gott! what a wind that was! What a fight! And here we are!"
"Where?"
"In the air, Smallways--in the air! When we get down on the earth again we shan`t know what to do with our legs."
"But what`s below us?"
"Canada, to the best of my knowledge--and a jolly bleak, empty, inhospitable country it looks."
"But why ain`t we right ways up?"
Kurt made no answer for a space.
"Last I remember was seeing a sort of flying-machine in a lightning flash," said Bert. "Gaw! that was `orrible. Guns going off ! Things explodin`! Clouds and `ail. Pitching and tossing. I got so scared and desperate--and sick. You don`t know how the fight came off?"
"Not a bit of it. I was up with my squad in those divers` dresses, inside the gas-chambers, with sheets of silk for caulking. We couldn`t see a thing outside except the lightning flashes. I never saw one of those American aeroplanes. Just saw the shots flicker through the chambers and sent off men for the tears. We caught fire a bit--not much, you know. We were too wet, so the fires spluttered out before we banged. And then one of their infernal things dropped out of the air on us and rammed. Didn`t you feel it?"
"I felt everything," said Bert. "I didn`t notice any particular smash--"
"They must have been pretty desperate if they meant it. They slashed down on us like a knife; simply ripped the after gas-chambers like gutting herrings, crumpled up the engines and screw. Most of the engines dropped off as they fell off us--or we`d have grounded--but the rest is sort of dangling. We just turned up our nose to the heavens and stayed there. Eleven men rolled off us from various points, and poor old Winterfeld fell through the door of the Prince`s cabin into the chart-room and broke his ankle. Also we got our electric gear shot or carried away--no one knows how. That`s the position, Smallways. We`re driving through the air like a common aerostat, at the mercy of the elements, almost due north--probably to the North Pole. We don`t know what aeroplanes the Americans have, or anything at all about it. Very likely we have finished `em up. One fouled us, one was struck by lightning, some of the men saw a third upset, apparently just for fun. They were going cheap anyhow. Also we`ve lost most of our drachenflieger. They just skated off into the night. No stability in `em. That`s all. We don`t know if we`ve won or lost. We don`t know if we`re at war with the British Empire yet or at peace. Consequently, we daren`t get down. We don`t know what we are up to or what we are going to do. Our Napoleon is alone, forward, and I suppose he`s rearranging his plans. Whether New York was our Moscow or not remains to be seen. We`ve had a high old time and murdered no end of people! War! Noble war! I`m sick of it this morning. I like sitting in rooms rightway up and not on slippery partitions. I`m a civilised man. I keep thinking of old Albrecht and the Barbarossa.... I feel I want a wash and kind words and a quiet home. When I look at you, I KNOW I want a wash. Gott!"--he stifled a vehement yawn--"What a Cockney tadpole of a ruffian you look!"
"Can we get any grub?" asked Bert.
"Heaven knows!" said Kurt.
He meditated upon Bert for a time. "So far as I can judge, Smallways," he said, "the Prince will probably want to throw you overboard--next time he thinks of you. He certainly will if he sees you.... After all, you know, you came als Ballast.... And we shall have to lighten ship extensively pretty soon. Unless I`m mistaken, the Prince will wake up presently and start doing things with tremendous vigour.... I`ve taken a fancy to you. It`s the English strain in me. You`re a rum little chap. I shan`t like seeing you whizz down the air.... You`d better make yourself useful, Smallways. I think I shall requisition you for my squad. You`ll have to work, you know, and be infernally intelligent and all that. And you`ll have to hang about upside down a bit. Still, it`s the best chance you have. We shan`t carry passengers much farther this trip, I fancy. Ballast goes over-board--if we don`t want to ground precious soon and be taken prisoners of war. The Prince won`t do that anyhow. He`ll be game to the last."
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