But shortly after eleven o'clock the whole place became suddenly and majestically still and black. People who go to their work at sunrise cannot afford the extravagance of midnight revelry, and there are few street-lamps alight after ten o'clock in any London suburb in these times of martial law. Walthamstow slept in heated but profound oblivion of its mean existence. Beyond the town lay, like a prostrate giant camel, the heat-blurred silhouette of the classic forest. Low over Walthamstow hung the festoons of flat, humid clouds, menacing storm, but motionless.
The rhythm of the Zeppelin.
The train to serve as pilot to London.
The Zeppelin forced to travel low.
If there was no disturbance in the clouds themselves there was among them something very active, something that drilled its way through them with a muffled whirring, something that was oblong and lean and light of texture, that was ominous and menacing for all its buoyancy. The sound it made was too high up, too thickly shrouded by clouds, to determine its precise position. It gave forth a breathing of persistent, definite rhythm. This was plainly not the wing-stroke of a nocturnal bird; for no bird, big or little, could advertise its flight in such perfect pulsation. And yet it was a bird, a Gargantuan, man-made bird with murder in its talons and hatred in its heart. From its steel nest in Germanized Belgium this whirring monster had soared eight thousand feet and crossed the Channel with little fear of discovery. It had penetrated the English Coast somewhere down Sheerness way and over Southend and then, dropping lower, had sought and found through the haze the tiny train whose locomotive had just fluted its brief salutation to Walthamstow. To the close-cropped men on the Zeppelin, the string of cars far down under their feet, with its side-flare from lighted windows, its engine's headlamp and its sparks, had proved a providential pilotage. They knew that this train was on the main line, and that it would lead them straight to the great Liverpool Street Station, and that was London, and it was London wharfs and ammunition works along the Thames that they had planned to obliterate with their cylinders of mechanical doom. But the moist clouds which aided so materially in hiding the Zeppelin's presence from below also worked for its defeat, in so far as its ultimate objective was concerned, for to keep the guiding train in view it was compelled to travel lower and yet lower—so low, indeed, as to make it a target for Kitchener's sentinels.
The switchman signals "danger."
The train stops at Walthamstow.
Somehow, by sight or intuition or the instant commingling of the two, old Tom Cumbers became aware of the danger above him; for he sprang to his switch, shut off all the cheery blue and white lights along "the line" and swung on with a mighty jerk the ruby signal of danger. The engineer in the on-rushing train jammed down his brakes and brought up his locomotive with a complaining, grinding moan, a hundred yards beyond Walthamstow station. Tom Cumbers had done a greater thing than any other in all his existence.
The German revenge.
That by his act the Germans in their speeding sky-craft were baffled there is no doubt. They had lost their trail of fire; their involuntary guide had disappeared in the gloom. The airmen's long journey had suddenly become fruitless; their peril from hidden British guns and flying scouts was increased tenfold. The heat of the night was as nothing to the hot surge of disappointment that must have swept the brains of the Zeppelin crew. Their commander, too, must have lost his judgment utterly, forgotten his sense of military effectiveness. Whatever happened, he sacrificed his soul when he turned his cloud-ship aside from the railway line, steered over the shabby roofs of Walthamstow and, at less than two thousand feet, unloosed his iron dogs of destruction.