IN THE FOURTH DIMENSION
THE balloon ascended from the Chiswick Gasworks at twelve-thirty, amid the thin cheers of an outer fringe of Works employés and an inner circle composed of members of the Imperial Air Club, who had motored down expressly for the start. It was by courtesy a summer day, a June gale having blown itself out over night, a June frost having nipped vegetation over morn. Now there was not a breath of wind, and the sky vault arching over London and the suburbs was of purplish-gray, through which a broad ray of white-hot sunshine pierced slantingly with weird effect as the order “Hands off!� was given, and the Beata, of forty-five thousand cubic feet, owner Captain the Honorable H. Maudslay-Berrish, of the I. A. C., soared rapidly upward.
Hitherto Maudslay-Berrish, occupied with the thousand cares devolving on the aeronaut, had not looked directly at either of his traveling companions. These were his wife’s friend and his wife. We all remember the sumptuous Miss Fennis, of the Hyperion and other West End comedy theaters. Many of the masculine readers of this truthful record have laid offerings of hot-house flowers, jewelry, sweetmeats, and settlements, at those high-arched insteps in their pre-nuptial days, and not all have had cause to mourn the rejection of the same. But Maudslay-Berrish, son of a philanthropic Nonconformist peer, to whom the theater is the antechamber to the Pit, married her, and, as too far south is north, the men of his set thenceforth tacked on “Poor chap!� or “Poor beggar!� to the mention of his name, when another stage triumph of his gifted wife, who did not resign her profession, was recorded in the newspapers.
The friend of Mrs. Maudslay-Berrish, whom we may know as “Teddy,� gasped one or two private gasps as the Beata shot up to an altitude of three thousand feet, and Chiswick Gasworks fell away underneath her into a tinted relief map of West London, and then was buried under a sea of swirling dun-gray vapors. The hoot of a motor-car—the needle-sharp screech of a railway locomotive—were the last sounds to reach the ears of the Beata’s three passengers. Then the sounds of Earth sank into the silence of Eternity. And the soul of Mrs. Maudslay-Berrish’s friend felt very thin and small, knowing itself adrift upon that tideless sea. The wicker car seemed also small—small to unsafeness—and the ropes as frail as the strands of a spider web. Cautiously Teddy put forth his immaculately gloved hand and touched one. Madness, to have trusted limb and life to things like these. Madness, to have left the good solid ground, where there were clubs and comfort and other men to keep you from feeling alone—for Teddy realized with vivid clearness that in this particular moment and at this particular point Mrs. Maudslay-Berrish counted for nothing. He even forgot to look to see if she was there. But she was there, and looking at him across her husband’s back. For Maudslay-Berrish was in the middle of the oblong basket, and he was leaning over, peering down into the swirling gray sea below, his folded arms upon the wicker car edge, his chin upon them.
As matter of fact, he did not wish his wife and her friend to see how heartily he was laughing. When you have set a trap for two beings whom you hate with an intensity beyond all the range of human expression, and waited patiently for years—it had taken him, Maudslay-Berrish, just three years to qualify as a member of the Air Club—to see them fall into it, you laugh when it happens. And if they chance to see your face while you are doing it, it makes them feel uncomfortable.... And when they know!... The purple veins swelled upon his narrow forehead under the leather peak of his Club cap. His muscles cracked, his shoulders heaved with that hidden, terrible, convulsive laughter.
“Harwood,� cried his wife, her strong voice ringing loud in the thin, untainted air, “what is the matter? Is anything wrong?�
“The balloon is not leaking, the valve is in proper order, there is plenty of ballast on board, the car is sound, the ropes are new and have been tested,� said Maudslay-Berrish. “There is scarcely a breath of wind to move us, and yet something is wrong. What are you trying to ask me, Beryl ... whether we are in danger? At the risk of spoiling your evident enjoyment of your first ascent, I answer ‘Yes!’�
Then he straightened his bowed figure and turned so as to face the wife who had betrayed him so often, and Teddy, her friend. She, Beryl, looked at him with wild eyes set in a face suddenly grown sharp and thin. She clenched her gloved left hand upon a rope of the car, and the splitting of the glove back revealed her wedding ring and its keeper of sparkling diamonds. At the sight of that consecrated symbol another gust of mad laughter seized Maudslay-Berrish, and the tears poured down his purple face, and he roared and roared again, until every fiber of the car vibrated with his ugly merriment.
“For God’s sake, Berrish, don’t laugh like that!� shrieked Teddy, blue-white and gibbering. “Are you mad, or what?�
“Were you sane, you infernal fool—you two infernal fools—when you got into this car with the man whom you have outraged?� shrieked Maudslay-Berrish. “Haven’t you dragged my good name in the mud, made me a by-word and a laughing-stock, a mockery even to myself—even to myself, in the last five years! Why, you d—— ——� (he called Mrs. Maudslay-Berrish an unlovely name) “my very servants sneer at me, the people at the theater grin when I come loafin’ round behind the scenes. They’re quite aware of what I’ve swallowed without gaggin’. They know I’ve lived on your money when I’d got through my own, quite fly as to where most of it came from�—he pointed a shaking finger at the stricken Teddy—“and as downy as you pleased. Teddy, old chap, I’ve called that blue-gilled funker there, and half a dozen like him. Well, Teddy, old chap, say your prayers quick, for you’re going to die suddenly!�
The woman and her lover knew now what their late dupe and butt meant to do. He had the ripping cord half-hitched about his left wrist—the ripping cord, a sharp tug at which will, when a balloon is dangerously dragged during a descent, take an entire panel out of the envelope in two seconds, immediately deflating the bag. And in his right hand Maudslay-Berrish manipulated a neat little revolver.
Certainly he played the star part in the drama, and held the audience breathless. Half of the audience, that is, for Teddy, old chap, was at his prayers. Down on his knees at the bottom of the car, his gloved hands rigidly clasped, his handsome, weak face turned up to the sustaining ball of gas that hovered in its imprisoning net above, between him and the Illimitable Void, he cowered and slavered. In pleading for Heaven’s mercy upon a miserable sinner, he set forth that his Eve had tempted him; he asked for time to make up, another chance, a year, six months, a week only of sweet life. Hearing him, Eve herself grew sick with contempt of his infinite littleness, and even Maudslay-Berrish half turned away his eyes.
“Why don’t you pray?� he said, sneeringly, to his wife. “Why don’t you grovel like that thing you have kissed?�
Miss Fennis, of the Hyperion, would have held an audience mute and breathless by the quiet scorn conveyed in Mrs. Maudslay-Berrish’s look and tone.
“I dare say when you have done what you are going to do, I shall wake up in Hell,� she said; “and I believe I shall have earned it!�
Teddy, still spinning out the smeared records of his Past, was now prostrate and bathed in tears.
“If I doubted the existence of such a place before, I do not now. For I have loved that man�—she bit her white underlip sharply—“and I have seen and heard him. Henceforth there can be nothing worse to bear, here or hereafter. Why do you delay? Pull the cord and have done with it, or I shall say you are afraid!�
The Beata came sailing gently down upon a delightful green expanse of turf at Aldershot—the tennis ground, in fact, of a dandy Cavalry Regiment. The anchor dropped and caught in a pollard oak; a dozen delightfully pink lieutenants in correct flannels assisted the handsome Miss Fennis, of the West End theaters, to alight from the basket. Maudslay-Berrish, calm and imperturbable as usual, followed. In the midst of congratulations and offers of luncheon, a lieutenant exclaimed:
“Great Scott! Why didn’t you say you’d another passenger in the car? Here’s a man lying in a dead faint at the bottom of it!�
And they brought out Teddy, very white and limp, and gave him brandy.
“Heart weak, what?� said the lieutenant who had exclaimed.
“He has certainly had some—cardiac trouble,� returned Maudslay-Berrish placidly; “but I think he will be less liable to the—ahem!—the weakness after this little trip of ours together in the Fourth Dimension.�
And he smiled as he lighted a very large cigar.