CHAPTER V

As this narrative is the story of the personal adventures of Lord

Redgrave and his bride, and not an account of events at which all the

world has already wondered, there is no necessity to describe in any

detail the extraordinary sequence of circumstances which began when the

_Astronef_ dropped without warning from the clouds in front of the White

House at Washington, and his lordship, after paying his respects to the

President, proceeded to the British Embassy and placed the copy of the

Anglo-American agreement in Lord Pauncefote's hands.

Mrs. Van Stuyler's spirits had risen as the _Astronef_ descended towards

the lights of Washington, and when the President and Lord Pauncefote

paid a visit to the wonderful craft, the joint product of American

genius and English capital and constructive skill, she immediately

assumed, at Redgrave's request, the position of lady of the house _pro

tem._, and described the "change of plans," as she called it, which led

to their transfer from the _St. Louis_ to the _Astronef_ with an

imaginative fluency which would have done credit to the most

enterprising of American interviewers.

"You see, my dear," she said to Zaidie afterwards, "as everything turned

out so very happily, and as Lord Redgrave behaved in such a splendid

way, I thought it was my duty to make everything appear as pleasant to

the President and Lord Pauncefote as I could."

"It was real good of you, Mrs. Van," said Zaidie. "If I hadn't been

paralysed with admiration I believe I should have laughed. Now if you'll

just come with us on our trip, and write a book about it afterwards just

as you told--I mean as you described what happened between the _St.

Louis_ and Washington, to the President and Lord Pauncefote, you'd make

a million dollars out of it. Say now, won't you come?"

"My dear Zaidie," Mrs. Van Stuyler replied, "you know that I am very

fond of you. If I'd only had a daughter I should have wanted her to be

just like you, and I should have wanted her to marry a man just like

Lord Redgrave. But there's a limit to everything. You say that you are

going to the moon and the stars, and to see what the other planets are

like. Well, that's your affair. I hope God will forgive you for your

presumption, and let you come back safe, but I----No. Ten--twenty

millions wouldn't pay me to tempt Providence like that."

The _Astronef_ had landed in front of the White House, as everybody

knows, on the eve of the Presidential election. After dinner in the

deck-saloon, as the Space Navigator lay in the midst of a square of

troops, outside which a huge crowd surged and struggled to get a look at

the latest miracle of constructive science, the President and the

British Ambassador said goodbye, and as soon as the gangway ladder was

drawn in the _Astronef_, moved by no visible agency, rose from the

ground amidst a roar of cheers coming from a hundred thousand throats.

She stopped at a height of about a thousand feet, and then her forward

searchlight flashed out, swept the horizon, and vanished. Then it

flashed out again intermittently in the longs and shorts of the Morse

Code, and these, when translated, read:

"Vote for sound men and sound money!"

In five minutes the wires of the United States were alive with the

terse, pregnant message, and under the ocean in the dark depths of the

Atlantic ooze, vivid narratives of the coming of the miracle went

flashing to a hundred newspaper offices in England and on the Continent.

The New York correspondent of the London _Daily Express_ added the

following paragraph to his account of the strange occurrence:

"The secret of this amazing vessel, which has proved itself capable of

traversing the Atlantic in a day, and of soaring beyond the limits of

the atmosphere at will, is possessed by one man only, and that man is an

English nobleman. The air is full of rumours of universal war. One

vessel such as this could scatter terror over a continent in a few days,

demoralise armies and fleets, reduce Society to chaos, and establish a

one-man despotism on the ruins of all the Governments of the world. The

man who could build one ship like this could build fifty, and, if his

country asked him to do it, no doubt he would. Those who, as we are

almost forced to believe, are even now contemplating a serious attempt

to dethrone England from her supreme place among the nations of Europe,

will do well to take this latest potential factor in the warfare of the

immediate future into their most serious consideration."

This paragraph was not perhaps as absolutely correct as a proposition in

Euclid, but it stopped the war. The _Deutschland_ came in the next day,

and again the press was flooded, this time with personal narratives, and

brilliantly imaginative descriptions of the Vision which had descended

from the clouds, made rings round the great liner going at her best

speed, and then vanished in an instant beyond the range of field-glasses

and telescopes.

Thus did the creature of Professor Rennick's inventive genius play its

first part as the peacemaker of the world.

When the _Astronef's_ message had been duly given and recorded, her

propellers began to revolve, and her head swung round to the north-east.

So began, as all the world now knows, the most extraordinary

electioneering trip that ever was known. First Baltimore, then

Philadelphia, and then New York saw the flashes in the sky. There were

illuminations, torchlight processions, and all the machinery of American

electioneering going at full blast. But when people saw, far away up in

the starlit night, those swiftly-changing beams glittering down, as it

were, out of infinite Space, and when the telegraph operators caught on

to the fact that they were signals, a sort of awe seemed to come over

both Republicans and Democrats alike. Even Tammany's thoughts began to

lift above the sordid level of boodle. It was almost like a message from

another world. There was something supernatural about it, and when it

was translated and rushed out in extra editions of the evening papers:

"Vote for sound men and sound money" became the watchword of millions.

From New York to Boston, Boston to Albany, and then across country to

Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago, Omaha--then westward to St. Paul and

Minneapolis, and northward to Portland and Seattle, southward to San

Francisco and Monterey, then eastward again to Salt Lake City, and then,

after a leap across the Rockies which frightened Mrs. Van Stuyler almost

to fainting point and made Zaidie gasp for breath, away southward to

Santa Fé and New Orleans.

Then northward again up the Mississippi Valley to St. Louis, and thence

eastward across the Alleghanies back to Washington--such was the famous

night-voyage of the _Astronef_, and so by means of that long silver

tongue of light did she spread the message of common-sense and

commercial honesty throughout the length and breadth of the Great

Republic. The world knows how America received and interpreted it the

next day.

Meanwhile Mr. Russell Rennick had taken train to Washington, and the day

after the election he willingly took back all that he had intended with

regard to the Marquis of Byfleet, accepted Lord Redgrave in his stead,

and bestowed his avuncular blessing at the wedding breakfast held in the

deck-chamber of the _Astronef_ poised in mid-air, five hundred feet

above the dome of the Capitol, a week later. To this he added a cheque

for a million dollars--payable to the Countess of Redgrave on her return

from her wedding trip.

Breakfast over, the wedding party made an inspection of the wonderful

vessel under the guidance of her Commander. After this, while they were

drinking their coffee and liqueurs, and the men were smoking their

cigars in the deck-chamber, a score of the most distinguished men and

women in the United States experienced the novel sensation of sitting

quietly in deck-chairs while they were being hurled at the rate of a

hundred and fifty miles an hour through the atmosphere.

They ran up to Niagara, dropped to within a few feet of the surface of

the Falls, passed over them, fell to the Rapids, and drifted down them

within a couple of yards of the raging waters. Then in an instant they

leapt up into the clouds, dropped again, and took a slanting course for

Washington at a speed incredible, but to them quite imperceptible, save

for the blurred rush of the half-visible earth behind them.

That night the _Astronef_ rested again in front of the steps of the

White House, and Lord and Lady Redgrave were the guests at a

semi-official banquet given by the newly re-elected President. The

speech of the evening was made by the President himself in proposing the

health of the bride and bridegroom, and this is the way he ended:

"There is something more in the ceremony which we have been privileged

to witness than the union of a man and a woman in the bonds of holy

matrimony. Lord Redgrave, as you know, is the descendant of one of the

noblest and most ancient families in the Motherland of New Nations. Lady

Redgrave is the daughter of the oldest and, I hope I may be allowed to

say without offence, the greatest of those nations. It is, perhaps,

early days to talk about a formal federation of the Anglo-Saxon people,

but I think I am only voicing the sentiments of every good American when

I say that, if the rumours which have drifted over and under the

Atlantic, rumours of a determined attempt on the part of certain

European powers to assault and, if possible, destroy that magnificent

fortress of individual liberty and collective equity which we call the

British Empire should unhappily prove to be true, then it may be that

the rest of the world will find that America does not speak English for

nothing.

"But I must also remind you that a few yards from the doors of the White

House there lies the greatest marvel, I had almost said the greatest

miracle, that has ever been accomplished by human genius and human

industry. That wonderful vessel in which some of us have been privileged

to take the most marvellous journey in the history of mechanical

locomotion was thought out by an American man of science, the man whose

daughter sits on my right hand to-night. In her concrete material form

this vessel, destined to navigate the shoreless Ocean of Space, is

English. But she is also the result of the belief and the faith of an

Englishman in an American ideal.... So when she leaves this earth, as

she will do in an hour or so, to enter the confines of other worlds than

this--and, it may be, to make the acquaintance of peoples other than

those who inhabit the earth--she will have done infinitely more than she

has already done, incredible as that seems. She will not only have

convinced this world that the greatest triumph of human genius is of

Anglo-Saxon origin, but she will carry to other worlds than this the

truth which this world will have learnt before the nineteenth century

ends.

"England in the person of Lord Redgrave, and America in the person of

his Countess, leave this world to-night to tell the other worlds of our

system, if haply they may find some intelligible means of communication,

what this world, good and bad, is like. And it is within the bounds of

possibility that in doing so they may inaugurate a wider fellowship of

created beings than the limits of this world permit; a fellowship, a

friendship, and, as the _Astronef_ entitles us to believe, even a

physical communication of world with world which, in the dawn of the

twentieth century, may transcend in sober fact the wildest dreams of all

the philanthropists and the philosophers who have sought to educate

humanity from Socrates to Herbert Spencer."