CHAPTER IX.
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 boring 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 on 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. Some 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 have 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.”