Tono-Bungay - H. G. Wells (my reading book txt) 📗

to cross over the water in the night, set our airship adrift, and turn up as pedestrian tourists in Normandy or Brittany, and so get away. That, at any rate, was my ruling idea.

I sent off Cothope with a dummy note to Woking, because I did not want to implicate him, and took my uncle to the pavilion. I went down to my aunt, and made a clean breast of the situation. She became admirably competent. We went into his dressing-room and ruthlessly broke his locks. I got a pair of brown boots, a tweed suit and a cap of his, and indeed a plausible walking outfit, and a little game bag for his pedestrian gear; and, in addition, a big motoring overcoat and a supply of rugs to add to those I had at the pavilion. I also got a flask of brandy, and she made sandwiches. I don’t remember any servants appearing, and I forget where she got those sandwiches. Meanwhile we talked. Afterwards I thought with what a sure confidence we talked to each other.

“What’s he done?” she said.

“D’you mind knowing?”

“No conscience left, thank God!”

“I think⁠—forgery!”

There was just a little pause. “Can you carry this bundle?” she asked.

I lifted it.

“No woman ever has respected the law⁠—ever,” she said. “It’s too silly.⁠ ⁠… The things it lets you do! And then pulls you up⁠—like a mad nurse minding a child.”

She carried some rugs for me through the shrubbery in the darkling.

“They’ll think we’re going mooning,” she said, jerking her head at the household. “I wonder what they make of us⁠—criminals.”⁠ ⁠… An immense droning note came as if in answer to that. It startled us both for a moment. “The dears!” she said. “It’s the gong for dinner!⁠ ⁠… But I wish I could help little Teddy, George. It’s awful to think of him there with hot eyes, red and dry. And I know⁠—the sight of me makes him feel sore. Things I said, George. If I could have seen, I’d have let him have an omnibusful of Scrymgeours. I cut him up. He’d never thought I meant it before.⁠ ⁠… I’ll help all I can, anyhow.”

I turned at something in her voice, and got a moonlight gleam of tears upon her face.

“Could she have helped?” she asked abruptly.

“She?”

“That woman.”

“My God!” I cried, “Helped! Those⁠—things don’t help!”⁠ ⁠…

“Tell me again what I ought to do,” she said after a silence.

I went over the plans I had made for communicating, and the things I thought she might do. I had given her the address of a solicitor she might put some trust in.

“But you must act for yourself,” I insisted.

“Roughly,” I said, “it’s a scramble. You must get what you can for us, and follow as you can.”

She nodded.

She came right up to the pavilion and hovered for a time shyly, and then went away.

I found my uncle in my sitting-room in an armchair, with his feet upon the fender of the gas stove, which he had lit, and now he was feebly drunken with my whisky, and very weary in body and spirit, and inclined to be cowardly.

“I lef’ my drops,” he said.

He changed his clothes slowly and unwillingly. I had to bully him, I had almost to shove him to the airship and tuck him up upon its wicker flat. Single-handed I made but a clumsy start; we scraped along the roof of the shed and bent a van of the propeller, and for a time I hung underneath without his offering a hand to help me to clamber up. If it hadn’t been for a sort of anchoring trolley device of Cothope’s, a sort of slip anchor running on a rail, we should never have got clear at all.

V

The incidents of our flight in Lord Roberts β do not arrange themselves in any consecutive order. To think of that adventure is like dipping haphazard into an album of views. One is reminded first of this and then of that. We were both lying down on a horizontal plate of basketwork; for Lord Roberts β had none of the elegant accommodation of a balloon. I lay forward, and my uncle behind me in such a position that he could see hardly anything of our flight. We were protected from rolling over simply by netting between the steel stays. It was impossible for us to stand up at all; we had either to lie or crawl on all fours over the basket work. Amidships were lockers made of Watson’s Aulite material⁠—and between these it was that I had put my uncle, wrapped in rugs. I wore sealskin motoring boots and gloves, and a motoring fur coat over my tweeds, and I controlled the engine by Bowden wires and levers forward.

The early part of that night’s experience was made up of warmth, of moonlit Surrey and Sussex landscape, and of a rapid and successful flight, ascending and swooping, and then ascending again southward. I could not watch the clouds because the airship overhung me; I could not see the stars nor gauge the meteorological happening, but it was fairly clear to me that a wind shifting between north and northeast was gathering strength, and after I had satisfied myself by a series of entirely successful expansions and contractions of the real airworthiness of Lord Roberts β, I stopped the engine to save my petrol, and let the monster drift, checking its progress by the dim landscape below. My uncle lay quite still behind me, saying little and staring in front of him, and I was left to my own thoughts and sensations.

My thoughts, whatever they were, have long since faded out of memory, and my sensations have merged into one continuous memory of an countryside lying, as it seemed, under snow, with square patches of dimness, white phantoms of roads, rents and pools of velvety blackness, and lamp-jewelled houses. I remember a train boring its way like a hastening caterpillar of fire across the