A Vigil In The Night

: The World Peril Of 1910

Although Lennard had always recognised the possibility of such a

catastrophe as that which John Castellan threatened, and had even taken

such precautions as he could to prevent it, still this direct menace,

coming straight from the man himself, brought the danger home to him in

a peculiarly personal way.



The look which had passed between them as they were swimming their race

in Clifden Bay had just as muc
meaning for him as for the man who now

not openly professed himself his rival, but who threatened to proceed to

the last extremities in order to gain possession of the girl they both

loved. It was impossible for him not to believe that the man who had

been capable of such cold-blooded atrocities as he had perpetrated at

Portsmouth, London and other places, would hesitate for a moment in

carrying out such a threat, and if he did--No, the alternative was quite

too horrible to think of yet.



One thing, however, was absolutely certain. Although no word of love had

passed between Auriole and himself since the night when he had shown her

the comet and described the possible doom of the world to her, she had

in a hundred ways made it plain to him that she was perfectly well aware

that he loved her and that she did not resent it--and he knew quite

enough of human nature to be well aware that when a woman allows herself

to be loved by a man with whom she is in daily and hourly contact, she

is already half won; and from this it followed, according to his exact

mathematical reasoning, that, whatever the consequences, her reply to

John Castellan's letter would be in the negative, and equally, of

course, so would her father's be.



"I wonder what the Kaiser's Admiral of the Air would think if he knew

how matters really stand," he said to himself as he read the letter

through for a second time. "Quite certain of doing what he threatens, is

he? I'm not. Still, after all, I suppose I mustn't blame him too much,

for wasn't I in just the same mind myself once--to save the world if she

would make it heaven for me, to--well--turn it into the other place if

she wouldn't. But she very soon cured me of that madness.



"I wonder if she could cure this scoundrel if she condescended to try,

which I am pretty certain she would not. I wonder what she'll look like

when she reads this letter. I've never seen her angry yet, but I know

she would look magnificent. Well, I shall do nothing till Mr Parmenter

gets back. Still, it's a pity that I've got to gravitate between here

and Bolton for the next seven weeks. If I wasn't, I'd ask him for one of

those airships and I'd hunt John Castellan through all the oceans of air

till I ran him down and smashed him and his ship too!"



At this moment the butler came to him and informed him that his dinner

was ready and to ask him what wine he would drink.



"Thank you, Simmons," he replied. "A pint of that excellent Burgundy of

yours, please. By the way, have the papers come yet?"



"Just arrived, sir," said Mr Simmons, making the simple announcement

with all the dignity due to the butler to a millionaire.



He went at once into the dining-room and opened the second edition of



the Times, which was sent every day to Settle by train and thence by

motor-car to Whernside House.



Of course he turned first to the "Latest Intelligence" column. It was

headed, as he half expected it to be, "The Great Turning Movement: The

Enemy in Possession of Aldershot and advancing on Reading."



The account itself was one of those admirable combinations of brevity

and impartiality for which the leading journal of the world has always

been distinguished. What Lennard read ran as follows:



"Four months have now passed since the invading forces of the Allies,

after destroying the fortifications of Portsmouth and Dover by means

never yet employed in warfare, set foot on English soil. There have been

four months of almost incessant fighting, of heroic defence and

dearly-bought victory, but, although it is not too much to say in sober

language that the defending troops, regulars, militia, yeomanry and

volunteers, have accomplished what have seemed to be something like

miracles of valour and devotion, the tide of conquest has nevertheless

flowed steadily towards London.



"Considering the unanimous devotion with which the citizens of this

country, English, Scotch, Irish and Welsh, have taken up arms for the

defence of their Motherland, there can be no doubt but that, if the war

had been fought under ordinary conditions, the tide of invasion would by

this time have been rolled back to our coasts in spite of the admitted

superiority of the invaders in the technical operations of warfare, and

their enormous advantage in numbers to begin with. But the British

forces have had to fight under conditions which have never before been

known in warfare. Their enemies have not been only those of the land and

sea: they have had to fight foes capable of raining destruction upon

them from the air as well, and it may well be believed that the leaders

of the invading hosts would be the first to admit that without this

enormous advantage not even the progress that they have so far made

would have been possible.



"The glories of Albuera and Waterloo, of Inkermann and Balaklava, have

over and over again been eclipsed by the whole-souled devotion of the

British soldiery, fighting, as no doubt every man of them believes, with

their backs to the wall, not for ultimate victory perhaps but for the

preservation of those splendid traditions which have been maintained

untarnished for over a thousand years. It is no exaggeration to say that

of all the wars in the history of mankind this has been the deadliest

and the bloodiest. Never, perhaps, has so tremendous an attack been

delivered, and never has such an attack been met by so determined a

resistance. Still, having due regard to the information at our disposal,

it would be vain to deny that, tremendous as the cost must have been,

the victory so far lies with the invaders.



"After a battle which has lasted almost continuously for a fortnight; a

struggle in which battalion after battalion has fought itself to a

standstill and the last limits of human endurance have been reached, the

fact remains that the enemy have occupied the whole line of the North

Downs, Aldershot has ceased to be a British military camp, and is now

occupied by the legions of Germany, France and Austria.



"Russia, in spite of the disastrous defeat of the united German and

Russian expedition against Sheerness, Tilbury and Woolwich, is now

preparing a force for an attack on Harwich which, if it is not defeated

by the same means as that upon the Thames was defeated by, will have

what we may frankly call the deplorable effect of diverting a large

proportion of the defenders of London from the south to the north, and

this, unless some other force, at present unheard of, is brought into

play in aid of the defenders, can only result in the closing of the

attack round London--and after that must come the deluge.



"That this is part of a general plan of operations appears to be quite

clear from the desperate efforts which the French, German and Austrian

troops are making to turn the position of General French at Reading, to

outflank the British left which is resting on the hills beyond

Faversham, and, having thus got astride the Thames, occupy the

semicircle of the Chiltern Hills and so place the whole Thames valley

east of Reading at their mercy.



"In consequence of the ease with which the enemy's airships have

destroyed both telegraphic and railway communication, no definite

details are at present to hand. It is only known that since the attack

on Aldershot the fighting has not only been on a colossal scale, but

also of the most sanguinary description, with the advantage slowly but

surely turning in favour of the invaders. Such news as reaches us comes

entirely by despatch rider and aerogram. We greatly regret to learn,

through the former source, that yesterday evening Lord Westerham, the

last of the six special Service officers attached to General French's

staff, was either killed or captured in a gallant attempt to carry

despatches containing an accurate account of the situation up to date

from Reading to Windsor, whence it was to be transmitted by the

underground telephone cable to His Majesty at Buckingham Palace."



"That reads pretty bad," said Lennard, when Mr Simmons had left the

room, "especially Westerham being killed or taken prisoner; I don't like

that at all. I wish we'd been able to collar His Majesty of Germany on

that trip to Canterbury as Lord Kitchener suggested, and put him on

board the Ithuriel. He'd have made a very excellent hostage in a case

like this. I must say that, altogether, affairs do not look very

promising, and we've still two months all but a day or two. Well, if Mr

Parmenter doesn't get across with his aerial fleet pretty soon, I shall

certainly take steps to convince him and his Allies, who are fighting

for a few islands when the whole world is in peril, that my ultimatum

was anything but the joke he seemed to take it for."



He finished his wine, drank a cup of coffee and smoked a meditative

cigar in the library, and then went up to the observatory.



It was a lovely night from his point of view; clear, cool and almost

cloudless. The young moon was just rising to the eastward, and as he

looked up at that portion of the south-western sky from which the

Celestial Invader was approaching he could almost persuade himself that

he saw a dim ghostly shape of the Spectre from Space.



But when he got to the telescope the Spectre was no longer there. The

field of the great reflector was blank, save for the few far-away

star-mists, and here and there a dimly-distant star, already familiar to

him through many nights of watching.



What had happened? Had some catastrophe occurred in the outer realms of

Space in which some other world had been involved in fiery ruin, or had

the comet been dragged away from its orbit by the attraction of one of

those dead suns, those derelicts of Creation which, dark and silent,

drift for age after age through the trackless ocean of Immensity?



There was no cooler-headed man alive than Gilbert Lennard when it came

to a matter of his own profession and yet the world did not hold a more

frightened man than he was when he went to re-adjust the machinery which

regulated the movement of the great telescope, and so began his search

for the lost comet all over again. One thing only was certain--that the

slightest swerve from its course might make the comet harmless and send

it flying through Space millions of miles away from the earth, or bring

the threatening catastrophe nearer by an unknown number of days and

hours. And that was the problem, here, alone, and in the silence of the

night, he had to solve. The great gun at Bolton and the other at

Pittsburg might by this time be useless, or, worse still, they might not

be ready in time.



It was curious that, even face to face with such a terrific crisis, he

had enough human vanity left to shape a half regret that his

calculations would almost certainly be falsified.



That, however, was only the sensation of a moment. He ran rapidly over

his previous calculations, did about fifteen minutes very hard

thinking, and in thirty more he had found the comet. There it was: a few

degrees more to the northward, and more inclined to the plane of the

earth's orbit; brighter, and therefore nearer; and now the question was,

by how much?



Confronted with this problem, the man and the lover disappeared, and

only the mathematician and the calculating machine remained. He made his

notes and went to his desk. The next three hours passed without any

consciousness of existence save the slow ticking of the astronomical

clock which governed the mechanism of the telescope. The rest was merely

figures and formulae, which might amount to the death-sentence of the

human race or to an indefinite reprieve.



When he got up from his desk he had learnt that the time in which it

might be possible to save humanity from a still impending fate had been

shortened by twelve days, and that the contact of the comet with the

earth's atmosphere would take place precisely at twelve o'clock,

midnight, on the thirtieth of April.



Then he went back to the telescope and picked up the comet again. Just

as he had got its ominous shape into the centre of the field a score of

other shapes drifted swiftly across it, infinitely vaster--huge winged

forms, apparently heading straight for the end of the telescope, and

only two or three yards away.



His nerves were not perhaps as steady as they would have been without

the shock which he had already received, and he shrank back from the

eye-piece as though to avoid a coming blow. Then he got up from his

chair and laughed.



"What an ass I am! That's Mr Parmenter's fleet; but what monsters they

do look through a telescope like this!"



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