CHAPTER I.
AT THE ELEVENTH HOUR.
"Victory! It flies! I am master of the Powers of the Air at last!"
They were strange words to be uttered, as they were, by a pale,haggard, half-starved looking young fellow in a dingy, comfortlessroom on the top floor of a South London tenement-house; and yet therewas a triumphant ring in his voice, and a clear, bright flush on histhin cheeks that spoke at least for his own absolute belief in theirtruth.
Let us see how far he was justified in that belief.
* * * * *
To begin at the beginning, Richard Arnold was one of those men whomthe world is wont to call dreamers and enthusiasts before theysucceed, and heaven-born geniuses and benefactors of humanityafterwards.
He was twenty-six, and for nearly six years past he had devotedhimself, soul and body, to a single idea--to the so far unsolvedproblem of aerial navigation.
This idea had haunted him ever since he had been able to thinklogically at all--first dimly at school, and then more clearly atcollege, where he had carried everything before him in mathematicsand natural science, until it had at last become a ruling passionthat crowded everything else out of his life, and made him,commercially speaking, that most useless of social units--aone-idea'd man, whose idea could not be put into working form.
He was an orphan, with hardly a blood relation in the world. He hadstarted with plenty of friends, mostly made at college, who thoughthe had a brilliant future before him, and therefore looked upon himas a man whom it might be useful to know.
But as time went on, and no results came, these dropped off, and hegot to be looked upon as an amiable lunatic, who was wasting hisgreat talents and what money he had on impracticable fancies, when hemight have been earning a handsome income if he had stuck to thebeaten track, and gone in for practical work.
The distinctions that he had won at college, and the reputation hehad gained as a wonderfully clever chemist and mechanician, had ledto several offers of excellent positions in great engineering firms;but to the surprise and disgust of his friends he had declined themall. No one knew why, for he had kept his secret with the almostpassionate jealousy of the true enthusiast, and so his refusals wereput down to sheer foolishness, and he became numbered with thegeniuses who are failures because they are not practical.
When he came of age he had inherited a couple of thousand pounds,which had been left in trust to him by his father. Had it not beenfor that two thousand pounds he would have been forced to employ hisknowledge and his talents conventionally, and would probably havemade a fortune. But it was just enough to relieve him from thenecessity of earning his living for the time being, and to make itpossible for him to devote himself entirely to the realisation of hislife-dream--at any rate until the money was gone.
Of course he yielded to the temptation--nay, he never gave the othercourse a moment's thought. Two thousand pounds would last him foryears; and no one could have persuaded him that with completeleisure, freedom from all other concerns, and money for the necessaryexperiments, he would not have succeeded long before his capital wasexhausted.
So he put the money into a bank whence he could draw it out as hechose, and withdrew himself from the world to work out the ideal ofhis life.
Year after year passed, and still success did not come. He foundpractice very different from theory, and in a hundred details he metwith difficulties he had never seen on paper. Meanwhile his moneymelted away in costly experiments which only raised hopes that endedin bitter disappointment. His wonderful machine was a miracle ofingenuity, and was mechanically perfect in every detail save one--itwould do no practical work.
Like every other inventor who had grappled with the problem, he hadfound himself constantly faced with that fatal ratio of weight topower. No engine that he could devise would do more than lift itselfand the machine. Again and again he had made a toy that would fly, asothers had done before him, but a machine that would navigate the airas a steamer or an electric vessel navigated the waters, carryingcargo and passengers, was still an impossibility while that terribleproblem of weight and power remained unsolved.
In order to eke out his money to the uttermost, he had clothed andlodged himself meanly, and had denied himself everything but thebarest necessaries of life.
Thus he had prolonged the struggle for over five years of toil andprivation and hope deferred, and now, when his last sovereign hadbeen changed and nearly spent, success--real, tangible, practicalsuccess--had come to him, and the discovery that was to be to thetwentieth century what the steam-engine had been to the nineteenthwas accomplished.
He had discovered the true motive power at last.
Two liquefied gases--which, when united, exploded spontaneously--wereadmitted by a clockwork escapement in minute quantities into thecylinders of his engine, and worked the pistons by the expansiveforce of the gases generated by the explosion. There was no weightbut the engine itself and the cylinders containing the liquefiedgases. Furnaces, boilers, condensers, accumulators, dynamos--all theponderous apparatus of steam and electricity--were done away with,and he had a power at command greater than either of them.
There was no doubt about it. The moment that his trembling fingersset the escapement mechanism in motion, the model that embodied thethought and labour of years rose into the air as gracefully as a birdon the wing, and sailed round and round in obedience to its rudder,straining hard at the string which prevented it from striking theceiling. It was weighted in strict proportion to the load that thefull-sized air-ship would have to carry. To increase this was merelya matter of increasing the power of the engine and the size of thefloats and fans.
The room was a large one, for the house had been built for a betterfate than letting in tenements, and it ran from back to front with awindow at each end. Out of doors there was a strong breeze blowing,and as soon as Arnold was sure that his ship was able to hold its ownin still air, he threw both the windows open and let the wind blowstraight through the room. Then he drew the air-ship down,straightened the rudder, and set it against the breeze.
In almost agonised suspense he watched it rise from the floor, floatmotionless for a moment, and then slowly forge ahead in the teeth ofthe wind, gathering speed as it went. It was then that he had utteredthat triumphant cry of "Victory!" All the long years of privation andhope deferred vanished in that one supreme moment of innocent andbloodless conquest, and he saw himself master of a kingdom as wide asthe world itself.
He let the model fly the length of the room before he stopped theclockwork and cut off the motive power, allowing it to sink gently tothe floor. Then came the reaction. He looked steadfastly at hishandiwork for several moments in silence, and then he turned andthrew himself on to a shabby little bed that stood in one corner ofthe room and burst into a flood of tears.
Triumph had come, but had it not come too late? He knew the boundlesspossibilities of his invention--but they had still to be realised. Todo this would cost thousands of pounds, and he had just onehalf-crown and a few coppers. Even these were not really his own, forhe was already a week behind with his rent, and another payment felldue the next day. That would be twelve shillings in all, and if itwas not paid he would be turned into the street.
As he raised himself from the bed he looked despairingly round thebare, shabby room. No; there was nothing there that he could pawn orsell. Everything saleable had gone already to keep up the struggle ofhope against despair. The bed and wash-stand, the plain deal table,and the one chair that comprised the furniture of the room were nothis. A little carpenter's bench, a few worn tools and odds and endsof scientific apparatus, and a dozen well-used books--these were allthat he possessed in the world now, save the clothes on his back, anda plain painted sea-chest in which he was wont to lock up hisprecious model when he had to go out.
His model! No, he could not sell that. At best it would fetch but theprice of an ingenious toy, and without the secret of the two gases itwas useless. But was not that worth s
omething? Yes, if he did notstarve to death before he could persuade any one that there was moneyin it. Besides, the chest and its priceless contents would be seizedfor the rent next day, and then--
"God help me! What _am_ I to do?"
The words broke from him like a cry of physical pain, and ended in asob, and for all answer there was the silence of the room and theinarticulate murmur of the streets below coming up through the openwindows.
He was weak with hunger and sick with excitement, for he had livedfor days on bread and cheese, and that day he had eaten nothing sincethe crust that had served him for breakfast. His nerves, too, wereshattered by the intense strain of his final trial and triumph, andhis head was getting light.
With a desperate effort he recovered himself, and the heroicresolution that had sustained him through his long struggle came tohis aid again. He got up and poured some water from the ewer into acracked cup and drank it. It refreshed him for the moment, and hepoured the rest of the water over his head. That steadied his nervesand cleared his brain. He took up the model from the floor, laid ittenderly and lovingly in its usual resting-place in the chest. Thenhe locked the chest and sat down upon it to think the situation over.
Ten minutes later he rose to his feet and said aloud--
"It's no use. I can't think on an empty stomach. I'll go out and haveone more good meal if it's the last I ever have in the world, andthen perhaps some ideas will come."
So saying, he took down his hat, buttoned his shabby velveteen coatto conceal his lack of a waistcoat, and went out, locking the doorbehind him as he went.
Five minutes' walk brought him to the Blackfriars Road, and then heturned towards the river and crossed the bridge just as the motleystream of city workers was crossing it in the opposite direction ontheir homeward journey.
At Ludgate Circus he went into an eating-house and fared sumptuouslyon a plate of beef, some bread and butter, and a pint mug of coffee.As he was eating a paper-boy came in and laid an _Echo_ on the tableat which he was sitting. He took it up mechanically, and ran his eyecarelessly over the columns. He was in no humour to be interested bythe tattle of an evening paper, but in a paragraph under the headingof Foreign News a once familiar name caught his eye, and he read theparagraph through. It ran as follows:--
RAILWAY OUTRAGE IN RUSSIA.
When the Berlin-Petersburg express stopped last night at Kovno, the first stop after passing the Russian frontier, a shocking discovery was made in the smoking compartment of the palace car which has been on the train for the last few months. Colonel Dornovitch, of the Imperial Police, who is understood to have been on his return journey from a secret mission to Paris, was found stabbed to the heart and quite dead. In the centre of the forehead were two short straight cuts in the form of a *T* reaching to the bone. Not long ago Colonel Dornovitch was instrumental in unearthing a formidable Nihilist conspiracy, in connection with which over fifty men and women of various social ranks were exiled for life to Siberia. The whole affair is wrapped in the deepest mystery, the only clue in the hands of the police being the fact that the cross cut on the forehead of the victim indicates that the crime is the work, not of the Nihilists proper, but of that unknown and mysterious society usually alluded to as the Terrorists, not one of whom has ever been seen save in his crimes. How the assassin managed to enter and leave the car unperceived while the train was going at full speed is an apparently insoluble riddle. Saving the victim and the attendants, the only passengers in the car who had not retired to rest were another officer in the Russian service and Lord Alanmere, who was travelling to St. Petersburg to resume, after leave of absence, the duties of the Secretaryship to the British Embassy, to which he was appointed some two years ago.
"Why, that must be the Lord Alanmere who was at Trinity in my time,or rather Viscount Tremayne, as he was then," mused Arnold, as helaid the paper down. "We were very good friends in those days. Iwonder if he'd know me now, and lend me a ten-pound note to get meout of the infernal fix I'm in? I believe he would, for he was one ofthe few really good-hearted men I have so far met with.
"If he were in London I really think I should take courage from mydesperation, and put my case before him and ask his help. However,he's not in London, and so it's no use wishing. Well, I feel more ofa man for that shillingsworth of food and drink, and I'll go and windup my dissipation with a pipe and a quiet think on the Embankment."