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- Author: E. Douglas Fawcett
Book online «Hartmann, the Anarchist; Or, The Doom of the Great City by E. Douglas Fawcett (ebook reader online TXT) 📖». Author E. Douglas Fawcett
104Tuesday (Night).—Wrote my letter and telegram, and gave them to Hartmann for the delegate. We have stopped over a pine forest some five miles distant from Morges, on the shore of the lake. Switzerland, I am told, was selected as the rendezvous because of its central position. Many Russians, Poles, Austrians, and Italians, besides delegates from other nationalities, are expected. They are to arrange details of the forthcoming revolution. Had a friendly talk with Burnett, who once more tried to proselytize me. Told him if any one could shake my convictions it is Hartmann and not he. How bloodthirsty the men are getting! Query.—What if the lust for blood grows by what it feeds on? What if this crew gets out of hand? Happily, a strong man stands at the helm.
(Later.)—The convention is in full swing. What enthusiasm must inspire these “tourists,” for, of course, it is in this character that they travel. Most, I hear, are very badly off, their funds being supplied by their associations. A great deal of provisions and matériel has been brought aboard. How well this crusade is organized!
Hartmann remains on board, he has never left the vessel except on the occasion when he visited his mother. Burnett and Schwartz take his instructions to the delegates, and most of the crew escort them. We are floating very near the ground in a rude clearing on the mountain side, two rope-ladders and some 105cables link us with the soil. After several hours’ conference below, the delegates visit the Attila. Heavens! what desperadoes some look! Yet they control, so Burnett says, vast societies. Hartmann interviews each. He works patiently through the list, and finally addresses them en masse, launching terms of the most animated invective against modern civilization. Am, of course, excluded, but learn that everything has gone off admirably. Five of the delegates are to join the crew, the rest carry back their instructions. We start early in the morning. What a spectacle there is before us! However, two days’ breathing time is something. Trust that delegate, whoever he is, will not forget the telegram and letter to Lena.
IN AT THE DEATH.
During the return to England two incidents of note, both alike terrible, but terrible in widely different ways, chequered our voyage, and the first of these it will now be my task to detail.
Wealth of romance, witchery of mountain scenery, and panoramas of ever-varying landscapes in the plains—whatever happiness can be gleaned from these was mine in bounteous plenty. Hitherto, however, the Attila had met with gentle winds and fairly clear skies; she was a gay butterfly by day and a listless moth by night. She had shortly to display to me her prowess as a rider of the tempest. This experience, along with its sequel of grim incident, impressed me deeply. I shall try to awake in the reader some echo of the emotions which it stirred into fervour within me.
No one, at any rate, could charge Hartmann with 107boring his unsolicited guest. Feasted as I had been with pictures, I was destined to be swept through ever novel galleries of natural marvels. I had anticipated that we should return by a like route to that by which we had arrived, but a pleasant reversal of this view was in store for me. Leaving the slopes of the Jura behind her, the Attila sped in a southwesterly direction across the department of Aisne, over Lyons, westward across the extinct volcanoes of Auvergne, then curving slightly to the south she leapt the river Dordogne, and, finally, passing at a great height over Bordeaux, reached the ocean rim over the desolate Landes which span the coast-line betwixt the Garonne estuary and the Adour. Had I been exploring Central Africa in the interests of science, I should feel justified in presenting my observations at length. But the tracts beneath me being so familiar, such procedure would be both useless and troublesome. I must therefore leave the imaginative to put themselves in my place and picture these well-known districts as transfigured by the romance of air-travelling.
In looking down on such natural maps one is transported with a sense of power and exultation that renders even homely sights attractive. Burnett, it is true, assured me that even this luxury of travel palls 108on one after a time. Judging from the indifference of the crew, I should say that he had right on his side. But, whether my artistic appetite was abnormal, or the banquet provided was not of the proper duration, I can only say that this part of my residence on the Attila always wore the livery of a gorgeous dream.
It was becoming dark when the pine forests and sand wastes of the Landes gave place to the rim of Biscay surf. In accordance with custom we rapidly began to descend, and were soon coursing over the billows at a height of some 200 feet. It was one of those evenings which ordinarily favour melancholy and lassitude. Above us stretched inky layers of stratus or “fall” cloud, wrought of mists driven from the upper regions by the chills that hurried after the setting sun. The wind blew in gusts and preyed vampire-like on our energies—an electric tension of the atmosphere was becoming unmistakably manifest. Clouds were rising smoke-like from the ocean rim and mingling with the flatter masses overhead, and even as I gazed the waves seemed to flash whiter and whiter through the veil of the nether darkness. I was standing on the upper deck debating social problems with Brandt, greatly to the enjoyment of three of the crew who watched the contest. 109Some few yards in front of us the platform tapered off to a point at the convergence of the bow railings, and directly in front of this the hull sloped downwards and outwards to form the projecting ram. At the extremity of this, with crest barely visible from the spot where my listeners were reclining, rose the conning-tower like a horn on the snout of a rhinoceros. Amidships and astern hummed the forest of stays and props which hung us to the aëroplane, clustering thick over the rounded boss of the citadel, now half shrouded in gloom. It was a scene to inspire the painter—this weird vessel and its weird crew borne along between an angry welkin and the riotous surges of the ocean.
“Violent diseases often demand violent remedies,” said Brandt, as he developed his favourite topic. “The surgeon may be gentle at heart, but he spares not the gangrenous limb. In modern times he has anæsthetics to soothe his patient, but did he shrink from his task when such artifices as these were unknown? Regard us anarchists as excising the foul ulcers of Humanity and as forced to perform that duty with no anæsthetics to aid us. Could we throw all London, all Paris, all Berlin into a trance, how painless would be our surgery! But, unhappily, we 110have to confront struggling patients vividly sensitive to the knife. Nevertheless, for their own sakes, or rather the sake of Humanity, we must cut.”
“But you overlook one important contrast. The surgeon lops off a limb or roots up an ulcer to save his patient’s life or better his health. But you attack civilization not to reform it but to annihilate it.”
“That is true, but civilization—your industrial civilization—what is it? Not a system to be identified with the cause of human welfare, and hence worth preserving in some form or other at all costs, but a mere vicious outgrowth prejudicial to that welfare as we conceive it. The test of the worth of a civilization is its power to minister to human happiness. Judged by this standard your civilization has proved a failure. Mankind rushed to her embraces in hope, fought its way thither through long and weary centuries, and has for a reward the sneers of a mistress as exacting as she is icy:
THE STORM GATHERING.
112During the delivery of this harangue the wind had been steadily rising, and it now began to shriek through the stays in a fashion positively alarming. Foregoing further parley, I bent over the railing and 113strove to catch a glimpse of the angry sea-horses beneath us. But it was by this time too dark for the non-feline eye. Glancing upwards and around the horizon, I could see the awnings of the storm unrolling, with here and there a rift through which stole the feeble moonlight. A man came from the citadel and stepped up to us. It was Hartmann.
“Well,” he said, “we are in for it. The barometer is falling rapidly, and the storm is already gathering. Have a care for yourselves, comrades,” he added to his followers. “You, Stanley, follow me to the conning-tower. The log of the Attila may be worth writing to-night.”
I followed him gladly into the citadel, and down the stair leading to the narrow corridor which ran on to the bow. As we entered it the Attila seemed to reel with a violent shock that sent me spinning against the wall. The storm had burst. By the time I had picked myself up Hartmann had disappeared. I found my way after him into the tower, where he was standing, regulator in hand, with his eyes on the glass plate that looked forward into the night.
“We are rising,” he said, laconically. “Look!”
A fan of vivid glory cleft the darkness. Illumined by the electric search-light great masses of driving 114vapour were rushing by us; but other sight there was none. Suddenly a second squall struck us, and the Attila rolled like a liner in a cyclone; the lurch was horrible, and for a moment I thought we were capsizing—it must have been one of at least forty-five degrees followed by a very slow recovery. Hartmann was busy over a medley of wheels, levers, and regulators.
“We are passing through the cloud-belt at a very high speed,” he continued, as if the shock was a trifle. “My intention is, first, to let you see a storm from the quiet zone above it; secondly, to rush downwards into it that the Attila may show her mettle.”
I said nothing, for my feelings were in truth somewhat mixed. With the ascent portion of the programme I concurred heartily; the second I would gladly have abandoned, as it seemed to me so utterly foolhardy. But faint heart was not the commodity for Hartmann, and wishing to earn his favour through his respect, I suppressed my fears resolutely. Not noticing my silence he kept on throwing in his comments on the situation. As the minutes wore on I observed that the mist masses were blowing thinner and thinner against the bow of the Attila. Suddenly the electric light was turned off, and a gentle silvery glow took its place. And as we swept on I perceived 115that the wind had fallen also. Hartmann pressed a bell-knob, and the two men on watch reappeared.
AMONGST THE CLOUD-BATTALIONS.
117“Now to the deck again, and you shall see a fine picture.”
As we stepped into the court of the citadel I had reason to appreciate this remark. Down in the conning-tower I had stood behind the captain and seen little save the dawn of a gentle radiance among the thinning mists. But up here the vista was glorious. A brisk but by no means stinging wind swept the deck. Above shone the horned moon in unclouded majesty, casting a weird light on the rolling masses of cloud-battalions underneath us. From below came the roar of the strife of elements and the crooked gleam of the levin-bolt, while the echoes of the thunder leapt grimly across the halls and
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