I’ve often thought since, after seeing what they call a domestic drama, that what happened to Podge and Noel might have happened to the hero and heroine of one. Only, a hero never has gray hair and a stoop, and there never yet was a heroine who measured as much as thirty-eight inches round the waist. It’s impossible!
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?�