Hollis Godfrey

“ Whereas war has too long devastated the earth and the time has now come for peace, I, the man destined to stop all war, hereby declare unto you that you shall, each and all, disarm; that your troops shall be disbanded, your navies sunk or turned to peaceful ends, your fortifications dismantled. One year from this date will I allow for disarmament and no more. At the end of that time, if no heed has been paid to my injunction, I will destroy, in rapid succession, every battleship in the world. ”

“ Tom was never more in his element than when assembling apparatus, or when controlling men. Here was his chance to do both. Like magic, the tall mast reared its height among the dunes, while coils, wires, and instruments fell swiftly into place. Acting chiefly as a burden bearer, I ran to and fro, while Tom and Dorothy, with their assistants, brought things to completion. As I came in from a final staying of the aerial, Tom turned to me, wiping the sweat of honest toil from his face. ”

“ The golden ribbons of the reflectoscopes once more stood stiffly separate and the moving belt stood still. The beam of light was just fluttering to rest almost on the zero.
“Out there! Right out there!” I shouted. “Come!” and throwing open the door, I rushed towards the beach, followed by the others. I pointed to the mass of wreckage rising and falling on the tide. “There! there!” I shouted. “He just destroyed that yacht.”
“There’s a survivor,” cried Tom, as we ran stumbling on over the rocks and sand towards a plank which bore a living man towards shore. ”

“ Maxwell,” said Dorothy anxiously, “is the right thing to do. Should this go straight to the paper, or ought it to go first to the English government? You see there’s probably no living man who saw this except Jim and his sailors, and we want to do right. We want to do right by the men that died, and the people that remain.”
Wise, able, thoughtful, a scholar and a gentleman, a great journalist, a man who counted among his friends the greatest men of two countries,—no man could be found who could decide such a question better than Maxwell. He looked at Dorothy. ”

“ Swenton, faithful and efficient follower, a man who would always be led, would never spring by any conceivable chance from the narrow channels where his lot had chained him; Dorothy, Maxima et Optima, now commanding by reason of her swift flying intellect, now yielding to her dreams as she had an hour or two ago in the hansom cab, and, when yielding, most womanly, most thoroughly feminine of her sex. ”

“ The crimps were in the leather of the strings, but the metal ends were gone. The lenses of his spectacles, without any mounting, were lying on the floor. The very filling of his teeth had gone. Why couldn’t a battleship disappear into its elemental parts the same way, all its living contents paralyzed by the shock, dying instantly and sinking below the waves. I’ve wondered more than once if the government sent down divers in Portsmouth harbor and if they did, what they found. ”

“ How little you could dream of all that has come when you left your office to look up some stupid transports,—or Dorothy imagine it when she went down to standardize that radium. But the end will never be complete till we find ‘the man.’ While he roams the earth with his secret the world is never wholly safe. ”

“ How are you planning to use your man Swenton?”
Dorothy answered for Tom and myself. “We are going straight to Dr. Heidenmuller’s laboratory, taking Swenton along. I want to have the whole scene before my eyes to see what can be made out of it. We should be very glad to have you come with us, Mr. Hamerly.”
Tom bent towards me with a look of mock anguish on his brow. “How I had hoped for a peaceful Sunday morning,” he said, in a low aside, “and now we’ve got to plunge out into a nasty fog, and chase all over this benighted city. Never mind, I might have known. I never can have my own way.” ”

“ I said, “and we’ll megaphone every fisherman and yacht. It’s the men on the coasters who will know, if any one does.”
Swift as her name, the Black Arrow ploughed her way through the summer sea. Pleasantest of all assignments to sit on her deck and watch Dorothy Haldane as she talked and speculated on the problem before us. Could one man have sunk so mighty a battleship? Was there any possibility that a single man could make war on the world? Tom came up to us in the midst of the discussion, and stood listening. ”

“ That night Regnier dined with us. I had never seen him so gay, so brilliant. He was full of his plans for an expedition to the Ural Mountains in search of some new deposits of platinum, for which he had obtained a grant from the Russian government. He was the life of our party, and we parted from him with regret. As he left, I walked out into the courtyard with him. He turned suddenly.
“Orrington,” he said, “you’ve got the finest girl in the world to be your wife. You’re not good enough for her. Nobody is, but I’m sure you’ll make her happy. I’ve loved her for five years. ”

“ Three weeks in Paris, hours when I sat and smoked outside big shops and little shops, afternoons in the Bois, little “diners à trois” at great restaurants, life, and light, and joy. Three weeks with Dorothy, then the day express to The Hague, and a week of watching the arrival of the envoys, while Tom, who had run across an old assistant of Carl Denckel’s, set up the wave-measuring machine, and spent his days working over it, in an attempt to widen its scope and bring it nearer to its ever present mission. It still remained our chief reliance for our search. ”

“ Nobody but an eternal boy like Tom would have conceived of a game of stick knife to while away the time of waiting before the mystery hidden by the blank face of the oaken door across the passage. Nobody but an eternal boy would have won so exasperatingly. Expert in all intricacies of the art, Tom had far outdistanced me as a knife juggler and I was lagging far in the rear, when we heard the quiet closing of the door five stories below. ”

“ Through quiet villages where red farmhouses stood framed in vivid green, by tower and manor house embowered in ancient oaks, through hedge-rowed land and city street we sped, till the rows of villas, each modelled from a single type, showed the outskirts of London. Then, at a slower pace, we passed through a smoky fog, across the river, by the Abbey, to the long front of Buckingham Palace. All the way we sat silent under the heavy burden of the news that brought the end of those long centuries of unconquerable British power. No enemy who could be conquered had they met. ”

“ Thrown hither and thither in the corners of warehouses, the missing parts and waving broken wires of the apparatus, as it first stood on the laboratory table, gave but little promise of final renovation. But the possibilities which it held entranced both Dorothy and Tom. Each day I came up to find them working. Each night they came back to the laboratory for a few more hours’ work. The minds of all of us were turning more and more to our one fixed purpose, the discovery of the man who was trying to stop all war. ”

“ We can run the launch along the coast twice as fast as a man can walk or run, and play the search-light of the yacht on the shore as we go.”
Though simplicity itself, it was the only plan that promised success, and it took but little time to put it into operation. The fisherman volunteered as pilot, and while Tom went back in the launch to give instructions to the captain, we waited in the darkness of the little bay, holding our lights as beacons. The night, without a single star, but darkly showed the lapping waves and sighing pines which made the background of our tiny, rocky amphitheatre. ”

“ The sailors shall be safe from his hand. This will he do, if peace be sure and disarmament [282] be complete. But, on the day that any nation violates its solemn oath and arms its citizens, on that day will he rise, and no ship, be it battleship or peaceful merchantman, bearing that country’s flag, shall be safe from destruction.’”
The sounder ceased its clamor. Tom spoke in a low voice, as if he feared to be overheard.
“How can we tell he is the man and not some one else, who is simply playing with us? We can’t afford to take risks. ”

“ He gazed long and intently, then rose, motioning Hamerly in silence to take his place. Dorothy followed Hamerly, and Swenton followed her. I ended, but I could distinguish nothing save some lines crossing a scale placed within the tube. As I rose from the stool, Tom reached up to throw on the lights. As he faced around, Hamerly met him with outstretched hand.
“It is only given to a handful of scientists in a century,” he said, “to find a new element, to discover one of those units from which the world is made. ”

“ His force, so powerful that it affects our reflectoscopes thousands of miles away, may be able to resolve the metal which makes up a battleship into its electrons, which would disappear as intangible gas.”
“What are electrons?” I persisted. “I’ve heard of them, of course, but I’m not quite sure what they are.”
“They’re the very smallest division of matter, the infinitely small particles that make up the atom. If a man could find a way to break matter down to them, it’s entirely possible that they would then go off as a gas. The waves the man sends out must be terrifically strong, anyway. ”

“ Dorothy and Tom sat reading. At last I brought my story down to the point where I wished to introduce the story of the man. There I stopped, and with idle pen sat and watched the beautiful head below the shaded light. If a man could only sit and see that “Picture of a woman reading” every night! I found myself figuring costs of living more zealously than ever before. A knock broke in on my thoughts.
“The patient has roused,” said the nurse, “and the doctor would like to have you come.”
Silently we passed through the bare corridors [39] and up the wide stairs. ”

“ There is some single point of generation. Now, with this machine, I ought to be able to find out just where the place is from which the wave starts, and not only within a hundred miles, but within a very brief space. Say, for instance, we had the machine in London, I could tell that ‘the man’ started his waves from Sandy Hook, and not from Hell Gate. That power of fixing the exact position of ‘the man’ gives us a tremendous step.”
[74]
“Absolutely tremendous,” I cried, and Tom chimed in, his eyes blazing with enthusiasm. “Here’s to the successful working out of the new clue.” ”

“ Again and again we changed the strength of the wave. We struggled with the insensate metal till our heads reeled. At last, about ten o’clock, we gave up for the day. Dorothy and Tom both were worn out, and both went to their rooms. My head felt too feverish to sleep, so I wandered out for a final pipe along the shore, struggling with the old problem which had been the theme of my thoughts for so long,—who was “the man,” and how could I find him? Again and again Regnier came to my mind, as I debated the pros and cons of the ever vexing question. ”

“ Along the sand, beside the black water, over dune, and through the long wiry grass of the hollows I tramped, till the lights of Scheveningen were just ahead. Neither moon nor stars shone forth, and my feet fell noiselessly on the yielding sand. As I crossed the summit of a dune, I stumbled on the prostrate body of a man lying there looking out to sea. I hastened to utter apologies in French, English and German, but [274] the unknown simply bowed courteously, and started back in the direction from which I had come. “Some smuggler, I presume,” I said to myself. ”

“ He reached the dry sand, rose and walked towards us. I looked at the man in amazement. I knew those features, yet they were so strangely drawn and fixed, so dominated by the dread-compelling power of the eyes that I paused. Then it came to me. “John King,” I cried in amazement. King came steadily onward. A lightning flash illumined my brain.
[301]
“Are you the man who stopped all war?” I cried eagerly. ”

“ Rapidly we ascended, the slower Jones following some way behind. In the laboratory the assistant turned to a littered desk and fumbled among a mass of papers. I could see that Dorothy was burning with impatience which I could not understand. Jones fumbled on, picking up paper after paper, peering at them blindly through his black-rimmed [51] spectacles. Tom seized my arm and walked me down the room impatiently.
“That man will drive me mad some day,” he exclaimed. “He’s the most accurate investigator and observer we ever had, but he keeps his desk in an unspeakable mess. ”

“ Bewilderment, complete bewilderment, is the only word which can express the appearance of our little group, as we stood in the bare room. Even Forrester temporarily forgot his professional attitude in the absorbing interest of the tale. But a sigh from Joslinn recalled him.
“That’s quite enough, Mr. Joslinn,” he said hurriedly, and, at his nod of dismissal, we turned and went down the stairs.
“Nothing real, with a vengeance,” remarked Tom, as we descended. “I can’t imagine a more unearthly spectacle than that noiseless fading away. ”

“ Fifth Avenue never seemed so gay. New York never seemed so full of the wine of life as on that drive. It needed only Dorothy to make it complete, and I was speeding towards her as rapidly as the speed regulations would allow. As we went on, Tom told me the story of his search for the President. How he had found him off shooting in Virginia and how gladly he had given the word for my release.
Once in the hall of the Haldanes’ house, Dorothy appeared at the head of the stairs. “Oh, Jim!” she cried. Thank Heaven she had forgotten all about Mr. Orrington now. “Oh, Jim, I’m so glad. ”

“ Our card of invitation worked wonders, however, and with that marvellous command of crowds which the London police possess, we finally came through and found ourselves at the reviewing stand, just as the band announced the coming of the troops. The Foot Guards first, with that strange downthrust of the foot, relic of the marching step of many decades ago, then the Scots, and then regiment after regiment, till the whole field was covered with the pride of Britain’s troops in their most gorgeous panoply of war. The King, in field marshal’s uniform, stood at the centre. ”

“ The crowd bore striking witness to the horde of unemployed seeking for even the slightest chance of employment. My friend’s clerks were in despair, but somehow they managed to evolve something like order from the mass, and one by one the applicants were admitted. After the first half dozen, we saw that they could be divided into three classes,—the men who knew nothing about science and nothing about any kind of ink, the men who knew something about ink but nothing about phosphorescent ink, and the men who had been laboratory assistants to various research followers. ”

“ It was but the work of a moment to embark, and the boat headed out of the cove towards the north, the side agreed upon with Tom. Up in the prow stood the officer at the wheel, the fisherman pilot beside him. The engineer bent over his small engine in the centre, and in the stern sat Dorothy and I, peering into the space of light on the shore, where played the search-light. Bravely the little launch found her way forward, with the slight chug-chug of her engine the only sound. I could not rid myself of a feeling of unreality. Constantly we moved in light, while all else was in shadow. ”

“ The battleship had disappeared. I dropped my glasses in utter amaze. I found myself once more repeating the words of Joslinn concerning the Alaska. “Vanished like a bursting soap-bubble.” I looked to right and left. I raised my glasses. Of all that company of men, of all those implements of war and of destruction, not one thing remained. Yes, there was a dark spot on a lifting wave. Eagerly I trained my lenses on it. Now it came up on a higher wave. A gleam of color. It was like cloth. [247] Again it rose. It was the flag of England. Alone it had survived.
“The man” was at work. ”

“ Dorothy stood for a moment in silent thought. “I think you are right, Tom,” she said quietly. “In this case I hope and believe the end will justify the means. We must find ‘the man.’ Go ahead.”
Stumbling through the darkness, we reached the top, where the flame of a match showed a strong oak door with two Yale locks upon it. Tom had the keys in immediately and threw the door open. Once within, Swenton passed with accustomed step to the wall, turned a switch, and incandescents lighted the whole place. ”

“ If we could find some place where iron disappeared, we might get a direct clue to the whereabouts of the man. It’s worth trying, anyway.”
“I’m sure it is,” I cried. “Tom, you old doubter, speak up and admit Dorothy knows twice as much about it as you and I put together.”
“I guess not,” said Tom firmly. “There may be something in this, if we could get track of everything that bore on disappearing iron, London over; but,” he went on, “talk about a needle in a hay stack. You went up against a hard enough proposition in running down Heidenmuller’s laboratory here, but this new deal is far worse. ”