第 二十一 章 · Mr. Bedford at Littlestone

. Mr. Bedford at Littlestone

My line of flight was about parallel with the surface as I came into

the 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 darkling

twilight, stretched a great expanse of sea. I opened every window I

could, and fell—out of sunshine into evening, and out of evening into

night. Vaster grew the earth and vaster, swallowing up the stars, and

the silvery translucent starlit veil of cloud it wore spread out to

catch me. At last the world seemed no longer a sphere but flat, and

then concave. It was no longer a planet in the sky, but the world of

Man. I shut all but an inch or so of earthward window, and dropped with

a slackening velocity. The broadening water, now so near that I could

see the dark glitter of the waves, rushed up to meet me. The sphere

became very hot. I snapped the last strip of window, and sat scowling

and biting my knuckles, waiting for the impact....

The sphere hit the water with a huge splash: it must have sent it

fathoms high. At the splash I flung the Cavorite shutters open. Down I

went, but slower and slower, and then I felt the sphere pressing

against my feet, and so drove up again as a bubble drives. And at the

last I was floating and rocking upon the surface of the sea, and my

journey in space was at an end.

The night was dark and overcast. Two yellow pinpoints far away showed

the 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 have

got picked up that night. In spite of the inordinate fatigue I was

beginning to feel, I was excited now, and for a time hopeful, in a

feverish, impatient way, that so my travelling might end.

But at last I ceased to move about, and sat, wrists on knees, staring

at a distant red light. It swayed up and down, rocking, rocking. My

excitement passed. I realised I had yet to spend another night at least

in the sphere. I perceived myself infinitely heavy and fatigued. And so

I fell asleep.

A change in my rhythmic motion awakened me. I peered through the

refracting glass, and saw that I had come aground upon a huge shallow

of sand. Far away I seemed to see houses and trees, and seaward a

curved, vague distortion of a ship hung between sea and sky.

I stood up and staggered. My one desire was to emerge. The manhole was

upward, and I wrestled with the screw. Slowly I opened the manhole. At

last the air was singing in again as once it had sung out. But this

time I did not wait until the pressure was adjusted. In another moment

I 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 glass

screw. I cried out, put my hands to my chest, and sat down. For a time

I was in pain. Then I took deep breaths. At last I could rise and move

about again.

I tried to thrust my head through the manhole, and the sphere rolled

over. It was as though something had lugged my head down directly it

emerged. I ducked back sharply, or I should have been pinned face under

water. After some wriggling and shoving I managed to crawl out upon

sand, over which the retreating waves still came and went.

I did not attempt to stand up. It seemed to me that my body must be

suddenly changed to lead. Mother Earth had her grip on me now—no

Cavorite intervening. I sat down heedless of the water that came over

my feet.

It was dawn, a grey dawn, rather overcast but showing here and there a

long 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 came

rippling in in long shallow waves. Away to the right curved the land, a

shingle bank with little hovels, and at last a lighthouse, a sailing

mark and a point. Inland stretched a space of level sand, broken here

and there by pools of water, and ending a mile away perhaps in a low

shore of scrub. To the north-east some isolated watering-place was

visible, a row of gaunt lodging-houses, the tallest things that I could

see on earth, dull dabs against the brightening sky. What strange men

can have reared these vertical piles in such an amplitude of space I do

not 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 I

struggled to rise. It made me feel that I was lifting a weight. I stood

up.

I stared at the distant houses. For the first time since our starvation

in the crater I thought of earthly food. “Bacon,” I whispered, “eggs.

Good toast and good coffee.... And how the devil am I going to get all

this stuff to Lympne?” I wondered where I was. It was an east shore

anyhow, and I had seen Europe before I dropped.

I heard footsteps crunching in the sand, and a little round-faced,

friendly-looking man in flannels, with a bathing towel wrapped about

his shoulders, and his bathing dress over his arm, appeared up the

beach. I knew instantly that I must be in England. He was staring most

intently at the sphere and me. He advanced staring. I dare say I looked

a ferocious savage enough—dirty, unkempt, to an indescribable degree;

but it did not occur to me at the time. He stopped at a distance 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’s

Dungeness! Have you just landed? What’s that thing you’ve got? Some

sort of machine?”

“Yes.”

“Have you floated ashore? Have you been wrecked or something? What is

it?”

I meditated swiftly. I made an estimate of the little man’s appearance

as he drew nearer. “By Jove!” he said, “you’ve had a time of it! I

thought you— Well— Where were you cast away? Is that thing a sort of

floating thing for saving life?”

I decided to take that line for the present. I made a few vague

affirmatives. “I want help,” I said hoarsely. “I want to get some stuff

up the beach—stuff I can’t very well leave about.” I became aware of

three other pleasant-looking young men with towels, blazers, and straw

hats, coming down the sands towards me. Evidently the early bathing

section of this Littlestone.

“Help!” said the young man: “rather!” He became vaguely active. “What

particularly do you want done?” He turned round and gesticulated. The

three young men accelerated their pace. In a minute they were about me,

plying me with questions I was indisposed to answer. “I’ll tell all

that later,” I said. “I’m dead beat. I’m a rag.”

“Come up to the hotel,” said the foremost little man. “We’ll look after

that thing there.”

I hesitated. “I can’t,” I said. “In that sphere there’s two big bars of

gold.”

They looked incredulously at one another, then at me with a new

inquiry. I went to the sphere, stooped, crept in, and presently they

had the Selenites’ crowbars and the broken chain before them. If I had

not been so horribly fagged I could have laughed at them. It was like

kittens round a beetle. They didn’t know what to do with the stuff. The

fat little man stooped and lifted the end of one of the bars, and then

dropped 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 lying

at 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 these

lumps of gold up to the hotel—I guess, with rests, two of you can

manage one, and I’ll trail this chain thing—and I’ll tell you more when

I’ve had some food.”

“And how about that thing?”

“It won’t hurt there,” I said. “Anyhow—confound it!—it must stop there

now. If the tide comes up, it will float all right.”

And in a state of enormous wonderment, these young men most obediently

hoisted my treasures on their shoulders, and with limbs that felt like

lead I headed a sort of procession towards that distant fragment of

“sea-front.” Half-way there we were reinforced by two awe-stricken

little girls with spades, and later a lean little boy, with a

penetrating sniff, appeared. He was, I remember, wheeling a bicycle,

and he accompanied us at a distance of about a hundred yards on our

right flank, and then I suppose, gave us up as uninteresting, mounted

his bicycle and rode off over the level sands in the direction of the

sphere.

I glanced back after him.

“_He_ won’t touch it,” said the stout young man reassuringly, and I was

only too willing to be reassured.

At first something of the grey of the morning was in my mind, but

presently the sun disengaged itself from the level clouds of the

horizon and lit the world, and turned the leaden sea to glittering

waters. My spirits rose. A sense of the vast importance of the things I

had done and had yet to do came with the sunlight into my mind. I

laughed aloud as the foremost man staggered under my gold. When indeed

I took my place in the world, how amazed the world would be!

If it had not been for my inordinate fatigue, the landlord of the

Littlestone hotel would have been amusing, as he hesitated between my

gold and my respectable company on the one and my filthy appearance on

the other. But at last I found myself in a terrestrial bathroom once

more with warm water to wash myself with, and a change of raiment,

preposterously small indeed, but anyhow clean, that the genial little

man had lent me. He lent me a razor too, but I could not screw up my

resolution to attack even the outposts of the bristling beard that

covered my face.

I sat down to an English breakfast and ate with a sort of languid

appetite—an appetite many weeks old and very decrepit—and stirred

myself to answer the questions of the four young men. And I told them

the 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!”

“Then you have just come from the moon?”

“Exactly! through space—in that ball.” And I took a delicious mouthful

of egg. I made a private note that when I went back to the moon I would

take a box of eggs.

I could see clearly that they did not believe one word of what I told

them, but evidently they considered me the most respectable liar they

had ever met. They glanced at one another, and then concentrated the

fire of their eyes on me. I fancy they expected a clue to me in the way

I helped myself to salt. They seemed to find something significant in

my peppering my egg. These strangely shaped masses of gold they had

staggered under held their minds. There the lumps lay in front of me,

each worth thousands of pounds, and as impossible for any one to steal

as a house or a piece of land. As I looked at their curious faces over

my coffee-cup, I realised something of the enormous wilderness of

explanations into which I should have to wander to render myself

comprehensible again.

“You don’t _really_ mean—” began the youngest young man, in the tone of

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 to

believe 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 stage

aside; and then, with an appearance of great _sang-froid_, “You don’t

mind if I take a cigarette?”

I waved him a cordial assent, and proceeded with my breakfast. Two of

the others went and looked out of the farther window and talked

inaudibly. I was struck by a thought. “The tide,” I said, “is running

out?”

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 and

mysterious. I can quite understand this is as queer as it can be, and

that your imaginations must be going it. I can assure you, you’re in at

a memorable time. But I can’t make it clear to you now—it’s impossible.

I give you my word of honour I’ve come from the moon, and that’s all I

can tell you.... All the same, I’m tremendously obliged to you, you

know, tremendously. I hope that my manner hasn’t in any way given you

offence.”

“Oh, not in the least!” said the youngest young man affably. “We can

quite understand,” and staring hard at me all the time, he heeled his

chair back until it very nearly upset, and recovered with some

exertion. “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 lit cigarettes, and generally tried to show they were

perfectly amiable and disengaged, and entirely free from the slightest

curiosity about me and the sphere. “I’m going to keep an eye on that

ship out there all the same,” I heard one of them remarking in an

undertone. If only they could have forced themselves to it, they would,

I believe, even have gone out and left me. I went on with my third egg.

“The weather,” the fat little man remarked presently, “has been

immense, 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, rushed for the window

also. I had just thought of something. “Nothing to be seen there,”

cried the little man, rushing for the door.

“It’s that boy!” I cried, bawling in hoarse fury; “it’s that accursed

boy!” and turning about I pushed the waiter aside—he was just bringing

me some more toast—and rushed violently out of the room and down and

out 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 the wake

of a ship. Above, a little puff of cloud whirled like dispersing smoke,

and the three or four people on the beach were staring up with

interrogative faces towards the point of that unexpected report. And

that was all! Boots and waiter and the four young men in blazers came

rushing out behind me. Shouts came from windows and doors, and all

sorts of worrying people came into sight—agape.

For a time I stood there, too overwhelmed by this new development to

think of the people.

At first I was too stunned to see the thing as any definite disaster—I

was just stunned, as a man is by some accidental violent blow. It is

only afterwards he begins to appreciate his specific injury.

“Good Lord!”

I felt as though somebody was pouring funk out of a can down the back

of my neck. My legs became feeble. I had got the first intimation of

what the disaster meant for me. There was that confounded boy—sky high!

I was utterly left. There was the gold in the coffee-room—my only

possession on earth. How would it all work out? The general effect was

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 sort of

irregular investment of people, all bombarding me with dumb

interrogation, with infinite doubt and suspicion. I felt the compulsion

of their eyes intolerably. I groaned aloud.

“I _can’t_,” I shouted. “I tell you I can’t! I’m not equal to it! You

must puzzle and—and be damned to you!”

I gesticulated convulsively. He receded a step as though I had

threatened him. I made a bolt through them into the hotel. I charged

back into the coffee-room, rang the bell furiously. I gripped the

waiter as he entered. “D’ye hear?” I shouted. “Get help and carry these

bars up to my room right away.”

He failed to understand me, and I shouted and raved at him. A

scared-looking little old man in a green apron appeared, and further

two of the young men in flannels. I made a dash at them and

commandeered their services. As soon as the gold was in my room I felt

free to quarrel. “Now get out,” I shouted; “all of you get out if you

don’t want to see a man go mad before your eyes!” And I helped the

waiter by the shoulder as he hesitated in the doorway. And then, as

soon as I had the door locked on them all, I tore off the little man’s

clothes 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-eyed

waiter for a flannel nightshirt, a soda and whisky, and some good

cigars. And these things being procured me, after an exasperating delay

that drove me several times to the bell, I locked the door again and

proceeded very deliberately to look the entire situation in the face.

The net result of the great experiment presented itself as an absolute

failure. It was a rout, and I was the sole survivor. It was an absolute

collapse, and this was the final disaster. There was nothing for it but

to save myself, and as much as I could in the way of prospects from our

_débâcle_. At one fatal crowning blow all my vague resolutions of

return and recovery had vanished. My intention of going back to the

moon, of getting a sphereful of gold, and afterwards of having a

fragment of Cavorite analysed and so recovering the great

secret—perhaps, finally, even of recovering Cavor’s body—all these

ideas 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 had

in an emergency. I really believe I should either have got loose-headed

or done some indiscreet thing. But there, locked in and secure from all

interruptions, I could think out the position in all its bearings and

make my arrangements at leisure.

Of course, it was quite clear to me what had happened to the boy. He

had crawled into the sphere, meddled with the studs, shut the Cavorite

windows, and gone up. It was highly improbable he had screwed the

manhole stopper, and, even if he had, the chances were a thousand to

one against his getting back. It was fairly evident that he would

gravitate with my bales to somewhere near the middle of the sphere and

remain there, and so cease to be a legitimate terrestrial interest,

however remarkable he might seem to the inhabitants of some remote

quarter of space. I very speedily convinced myself on that point. And

as for any responsibility I might have in the matter, the more I

reflected upon that, the clearer it became that if only I kept quiet

about things, I need not trouble myself about that. If I was faced by

sorrowing parents demanding their lost boy, I had merely to demand my

lost sphere—or ask them what they meant. At first I had had a vision of

weeping parents and guardians, and all sorts of complications; but now

I saw that I simply had to keep my mouth shut, and nothing in that way

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 not

commit damage nor indecorum, to appear suddenly wherever he pleases,

and as ragged and filthy as he pleases, and with whatever amount of

virgin gold he sees fit to encumber himself, and no one has any right

at all to hinder and detain him in this procedure. I formulated that at

last to myself, and repeated it over as a sort of private Magna Charta

of my liberty.

Once I had put that issue on one side, I could take up and consider in

an equable manner certain considerations I had scarcely dared to think

of before, namely, those arising out of the circumstances of my

bankruptcy. But now, looking at this matter calmly and at leisure, I

could see that if only I suppressed my identity by a temporary

assumption of some less well-known name, and if I retained the two

months’ beard that had grown upon me, the risks of any annoyance from

the spiteful creditor to whom I have already alluded became very small

indeed. From that to a definite course of rational worldly action was

plain sailing. It was all amazingly petty, no doubt, but what was there

remaining for me to do?

Whatever I did I was resolved that I would keep myself level and right

side up.

I ordered up writing materials, and addressed a letter to the New

Romney Bank—the nearest, the waiter informed me—telling the manager I

wished to open an account with him, and requesting him to send two

trustworthy persons properly authenticated in a cab with a good horse

to fetch some hundredweight of gold with which I happened to be

encumbered. I signed the letter “Blake,” which seemed to me to be a

thoroughly respectable sort of name. This done, I got a Folkstone Blue

Book, picked out an outfitter, and asked him to send a cutter to

measure me for a dark tweed suit, ordering at the same time a valise,

dressing bag, brown boots, shirts, hat (to fit), and so forth; and from

a watchmaker I also ordered a watch. And these letters being

despatched, I had up as good a lunch as the hotel could give, and then

lay smoking a cigar, as calm and ordinary as possible, until in

accordance with my instructions two duly authenticated clerks came from

the bank and weighed and took away my gold. After which I pulled the

clothes over my ears in order to drown any knocking, and went very

comfortably to sleep.

I went to sleep. No doubt it was a prosaic thing for the first man back

from the moon to do, and I can imagine that the young and imaginative

reader will find my behaviour disappointing. But I was horribly

fatigued and bothered, and, confound it! what else was there to do?

There certainly was not the remotest chance of my being believed, if I

had told my story then, and it would certainly have subjected me to

intolerable annoyances. I went to sleep. When at last I woke up again I

was ready to face the world as I have always been accustomed to face it

since I came to years of discretion. And so I got away to Italy, and

there it is I am writing this story. If the world will not have it as

fact, 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 how

completely this adventure is gone and done with. Everybody believes

that Cavor was a not very brilliant scientific experimenter who blew up

his house and himself at Lympne, and they explain the bang that

followed my arrival at Littlestone by a reference to the experiments

with explosives that are going on continually at the government

establishment of Lydd, two miles away. I must confess that hitherto I

have not acknowledged my share in the disappearance of Master Tommy

Simmons, which was that little boy’s name. That, perhaps, may prove a

difficult item of corroboration to explain away. They account for my

appearance in rags with two bars of indisputable gold upon the

Littlestone beach in various ingenious ways—it doesn’t worry me what

they think of me. They say I have strung all these things together to

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 hold

together 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 worries

of this terrestrial life again. Even if one has been to the moon, one

has still to earn a living. So I am working here at Amalfi, on the

scenario of that play I sketched before Cavor came walking into my

world, and I am trying to piece my life together as it was before ever

I saw him. I must confess that I find it hard to keep my mind on the

play when the moonshine comes into my room. It is full moon here, and

last night I was out on the pergola for hours, staring away at the

shining blankness that hides so much. Imagine it! tables and chairs,

and trestles and bars of gold! Confound it!—if only one could hit on

that Cavorite again! But a thing like that doesn’t come twice in a

life. Here I am, a little better off than I was at Lympne, and that is

all. And Cavor has committed suicide in a more elaborate way than any

human being ever did before. So the story closes as finally and

completely as a dream. It fits in so little with all the other things

of 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 more

than half believe myself that the whole thing was a dream....