The Man From the Clouds by J. Storer Clouston
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J. Storer Clouston >> The Man From the Clouds
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14 THE MAN FROM THE CLOUDS
BY
J. STORER CLOUSTON
1919
CONTENTS
PART I
CHAPTER
I In the Clouds
II The Man on the Shore
III Alone Again
IV The Suspicious Stranger
V The Doctor's House
VI A Petticoat
VII At the Mansion House
VIII Sunday
IX An Ally
X The Coast Patrol
XI A Near Thing
XII The Key Turned
XIII On the Drifter
XIV My Cousin's Letter
PART II
CHAPTER
I An Idea
II A Little Dinner
III The Alcoholic Patient
IV The Test
V Waiting
VI The Spectacled Man
VII A Reminiscence
VIII H.M.S. _Uruguay_
IX Bolton on the Track
X Where the Clue Led
XI An Eye-Opener
XII The Confidant
XIII Jean's Guesses
XIV The Pocket Book
XV Part of the Truth
XVI Tracked Down
XVII The Rest of the Truth
XVIII The Frosty Road
XIX Our Morning Call
THE MAN FROM THE CLOUDS
PART I
I
IN THE CLOUDS
"My God," said Rutherford, "the cable has broken!"
In an instant I was craning over the side of the basket. Five hundred
feet, 700 feet, 1000 feet, 2000 feet below us, the cruiser that had been
our only link with the world of man was diminishing so swiftly that, as
far as I remember, she had shrunk to the smallness of a tug and then
vanished into the haze before I even answered him.
"Anything to be done?" I asked.
"Nothing," said he.
It had been growing steadily more misty even down near the water, and now
as the released balloon shot up into an altitude of five, ten, and
presently twelve thousand feet, everything in Heaven and earth
disappeared except that white and clammy fog. By a simultaneous impulse
he lit a cigarette and I a pipe, and I remember very plainly wondering
whether he felt any touch of that self-conscious defiance of fate and
deliberate intention to do the coolest thing possible, which I am free to
confess I felt myself. Probably not; Rutherford was the real Navy and I
but a zig-zag ringed R.N.V.R. amateur. Still, the spirit of the Navy is
infectious and I made a fair attempt to keep his stout heart company.
"What _ought_ to happen to a thing like this?" I enquired.
"If this wind holds we might conceivably make a landing somewhere--with
extraordinary luck."
"On the other side?"
He nodded and I reflected.
It was towards the end of August, 1914. We were somewhere about the
middle of the North Sea when the observation balloon was sent up, and I
had persuaded Rutherford to take me up with him in the basket. Five
minutes ago I had been telling myself I was the luckiest R.N.V.R.
Sub-Lieutenant in the Navy; and then suddenly the appalling thing
happened. I may not give away any naval secrets, but everybody knows, I
presume, that towed balloons are sometimes used at sea, and it is pretty
obvious that certain accidents are liable to happen to them. In this case
the most obvious of all accidents happened; the cable snapped, and there
we were heading, as far as I could judge, for the stars that twinkle over
the German coast. At least, our aneroid showed that we were going upwards
faster than any bird could rise, and the west wind was blowing straight
for the mouth of the Elbe when we last felt it--for, of course, in a free
balloon one ceases to feel wind altogether.
Neither of us spoke for some time, and then a thought struck me suddenly
and I asked:--
"Did you notice what o'clock it was when we broke loose?"
Rutherford nodded.
"I'm taking the time," said he, "and assuming the twenty knot breeze
holds, we might risk a drop about six o'clock."
"A drop" meant jumping into space and trusting one's parachute to do its
business properly. I felt a sudden tightening inside me as I thought of
that dive into the void, but I asked calmly enough:
"And assuming the breeze doesn't hold?"
"Oh, it will hold all right; it will rise if anything," said he.
We had only been shipmates for a week (that being the extent of my
nautical experience), but I had learned enough about Rutherford in that
time to know that he was one of the most positive and self-confident men
breathing. One had to make allowance for this; still, that is the kind of
company one wants in an involuntary balloon expedition across the North
Sea through a dense fog.
"And where are we likely to come down?" I enquired.
"We might make the German coast as far south as Borkum or one of the
other islands, or we might land somewhere as far north as Holstein."
"Not Holland or Denmark?"
He shook his head positively, "No such luck."
Though this was a trifle depressing, it was comforting to feel that one
was with a man who knew his way about the air so thoroughly. I looked at
our map, judged the wind, and decided that he was probably right. The
chances of fetching a neutral country seemed very slender. Curiously
enough the chances of never reaching any country at all had passed out of
my calculations for the moment. Rutherford was so perfectly assured.
"And what's the programme when we do land?" I asked.
"Well, we've got to get out of the place as quickly as possible. That's
pretty evident."
"How?"
"You know the lingo, don't you?"
"Pretty well."
"Well enough not to be spotted as a foreigner?"
"I almost think so."
"First thing I ever heard to the credit of the diplomatic service!" he
laughed. "Well, you'll have to pitch a yarn of some kind if we fall in
with any of the natives. Of course we'll try and avoid 'em if we can, and
work across country either for Denmark or Holland by compass."
"Have you got a compass?" I asked.
"Damn!" he exclaimed, and for a few moments a frown settled on his bull
dog face. Then it cleared again and he said, "After all we'll have to
move about by night and the stars will do just as well."
He was never much of a talker and after this he fell absolutely silent
and I was left to my thoughts. Though I had fortunately put on plenty of
extra clothes for the ascent, I began to feel chilly up at that altitude
enshrouded in that cold white mist, and I don't mind admitting that my
thoughts gradually became a little more serious than (to be quite honest)
they usually are. I hardly think Rutherford, with all his virtues, had
much imagination. I have a good deal--a little too much at times--and
several other possible endings to our voyage besides a safe landing and
triumphant escape began to present themselves. Two especially I had to
steel my thoughts against continually--a descent with a parachute that
declined to open, whether on to German or any other soil, or else a
splash and then a brief struggle in the cold North Sea. I am no great
swimmer and it would be soon over.
And so the hours slowly passed; always the same mist and generally the
same silence. Occasionally we talked a little, and then for a long space
our voices would cease and there would be utter and absolute quiet,--not
the smallest sound of any sort or kind. We had been silent for a long,
long time and I had done quite as much thinking as was good for my
nerves, when Rutherford suddenly exclaimed,
"We are over land!"
He was looking over the edge of the basket, and instantly I was staring
into space on my side. There was certainly nothing to see but mist.
"I can smell land," said he, "and I heard something just now."
"At this height!" I exclaimed.
"We are down to well under six thousand feet," said he.
I wanted to be convinced, but this was more than I could believe.
"The smell must be devilish strong," I observed. "And I'm afraid I must
have a cold in my head. Besides, it's only five-thirty."
As I have said, poor Rutherford was the most positive fellow in the
world. He stuck to it that we were over land, but I managed to persuade
him to wait a little longer to make sure. He waited half an hour and
when he spoke then I could see that his mind was made up.
"We are falling pretty rapidly," said he, "and personally I'd sooner take
my chance in a parachute than stick in this basket till we bump. If one
is going to try a drop, the great thing is to see that it's a long drop.
Parachutes don't always open as quick as they're intended to. At any
moment we may begin to fall suddenly, so I'm going overboard now."
My own career has hitherto failed to convince my friends that prudence is
my besetting virtue, but whether it was the sobering effect of those long
hours of chilly thinking, or whether my good angel came to my rescue, I
know not; anyhow I shook my head as firmly as he nodded his.
"We have only been going the minimum time you allowed for making land," I
argued, "and quite possibly the breeze may have dropped a bit. Honestly I
haven't heard a sound or smelt a smell that faintly suggested land
underneath, and we can still drop a lot more and have room to take to the
parachutes. Let's wait till we get down to one thousand feet."
"You do as you please," said he. "I'm going over."
"And I'm not going yet," said I.
We looked at one another in silence for a moment, and then he held
out his hand.
"Well, good-bye and good luck!" said he.
"Wait a little bit longer!" I implored him.
"My dear Merton," he said, "I feel it in my bones that we've been going a
lot faster than we calculated. In fact I _know_ we have! One gets an
instinct for that sort of thing, and also one gets a sort of general idea
when to cut the basket and jump. I tell you we've been over land for the
last half hour. Come on, old chap, I honestly advise you to jump too."
I almost yielded, but some instinct seemed to hold me back. The thought
that he might think I was deserting him, the suspicion that he
suspected I was a little afraid of the drop, nearly drove me over the
edge of the basket with him. I felt a brute for hanging back, but in my
heart I felt just as certain he was jumping too soon as he felt that I
was waiting too long. So I shook his hand, and over he went; I had one
glimpse of something dark below me, and then the mist swallowed him up.
Rutherford was gone, and I may as well say now that not a sign of him
was ever seen again.
If you want to know what loneliness--real horrifying loneliness--is like,
I know no better recipe than drifting through a fog in a balloon, with
your only companion gone, and not the faintest belief in your heart that
you are within a hundred miles of any square inch of earth. I almost
think the fact that the balloon was steadily sinking and that sooner or
later I should have to leap from it too was the one thing that kept my
spirits anyways up to the mark. The prospect of even the most desperate
action was better than interminably facing that clammy void.
Though the chance of making land seemed to me infinitesimally remote by
this time, yet in case I had such almost inconceivable luck, it was well
to make some preparations for having a run for my money in an enemy
country. I took off my uniform coat, transferring everything I wanted to
keep from its pockets to those of my oilskin. I then put this on and
buttoned it up, and of course I took off my cap.
And then I smoked another pipe and watched the aneroid and tried not to
think at all, till with a start I realised we were considerably less than
a thousand feet above--the land or the sea? Heaven knew which, but we
were falling fast and there was no more time to lose. I hitched the
parachute on to my leg, got on the edge of the basket, and then--well, I
all but funked it. I remember my last thought was a horrible simile of a
man jumping off a tree with a rope round his neck, and then somehow or
other I forced myself to let go.
Concerning the next few seconds I can give no statistics, whether as to
height or pace. I only know that when I first became conscious of
anything, I was drifting like a snow flake down through the mist, and
that I could fill several pages with my thoughts in the course of that
drift. It seemed to me that there was hardly an incident in my life
which didn't fly through my brain like a cinema being worked at lightning
speed. Some of the most vivid incidents were the last three balls of the
over in which I topped the century in the 'Varsity match, my interview
with my poor dear uncle when I broke the news that I had to face the
official receiver and chuck the diplomatic service, and the first night
of "Bill's All Right" when I made my debut on the stage. A brilliant
career! And very swiftly reviewed, for just as I had reached the
theatrical episodes, there was an extraordinary change in the light, and
my thoughts very abruptly shifted from my past misdemeanours.
It had been evening when I dropped from the clouds, but the mist kept the
light very white though rather dim. Now a sudden blackness seemed to rise
up underneath my descending feet, and at the same moment the mist thinned
out till I could see for a space all round below me. This space was green
and almost before I realised what the greenness meant I was sitting in a
field of clover.
II
THE MAN ON THE SHORE
The breeze that had been driving the balloon along high overhead was
evidently an upper current only, for it was almost quite still in that
clover field. What between the falling of evening and the thin mist, my
vision was limited to a radius of about a quarter of a mile or so, but I
can assure you I studied that visible space more intently than I have
ever studied anything in my life. It seemed to be an almost flat country
I had landed in, all cultivated but very bare. I was within fifty yards
or so of a low rough stone wall, and on the further side of that lay a
field of corn. On every other side other fields faded into the evening
and the mist, and that was all there was to be seen. I saw no sign of a
house, or of a tree, or of a hedgerow, and I heard not a sound but the
cry of a distant sea bird.
In the gay days when I was attache at Berlin I had acquired a fair
general acquaintance with Germany, and I instantly put down the place I
had landed in as some part of the flat wind-swept country not far from
the North Sea coast. In fact the crying seagull suggested that the shore
was fairly close at hand. This so exactly fitted in with our calculations
that I made up my mind definitely and at once to start with it as a
working hypothesis and behave accordingly.
But how precisely was one to behave accordingly? In which direction
should I turn? What should I aim at? Should I look for a house or a
native and trust to my German still being up to its old high water mark,
or should I lie low for the night? I simply stood and wondered for some
minutes, and then I decided on one prompt and immediate deed. The
parachute must be hidden, so far as that countryside was capable of
hiding anything.
I packed it up as neatly as I could, and then started for the low wall.
My first steps on the firm ground with its soft mat of clover and grasses
gave me an extraordinary sensation of pleasure. Merely to be alive and on
the earth again seemed to leave nothing to wish for. Close to the wall a
peewee rose suddenly from my feet and flapped off into the dusk with one
melancholy cry after another. "Peewee! Peewee!" I shall never hear that
sound without thinking of that lonesome misty field. I stopped and looked
round me anxiously, but not a living thing besides had been disturbed,
and presently I was stowing the parachute away in a bed of high rank
grass and docken just under the wall.
Then I stood still and listened again. Once more a distant sea bird
cried and I decided to make for the sound on the chance of finding the
coast line and getting at least one bearing. I followed the line of the
wall, crossed another low wall and another field of thin rough grass, and
then I realised that I was almost on the brink of the sea. The wash of
the swell on rocks met my ear and the dull misty green of the land faded
into the misty grey of wide waters.
I stepped over yet another of those low tumbledown walls and now I was on
the crisp short grass that fringes coasts, with rocks before me and the
sea quite visible about thirty feet below. So I had just made land and no
more! Poor Rutherford; I guessed his fate at once.
A little aimlessly I set out to the left. Somehow or other I had got it
into my head that I was nearer the Dutch than the Danish border and my
idea was to head for a neutral country. The coast line swung inland round
a cove and at the same time dipped sharply, and hardly had I turned to
follow it when a figure seemed to spring up out of the dip.
Whether the man had been squatting down, or whether it was the slope of
the ground that suddenly revealed him, I know not, but there he was not
ten paces away. I could see that he wore an oilskin and sou'wester and
judged him at once as a fisherman.
"Good evening!" I cried genially in my best German. "It's a fine night!"
"Good evening!" said he, also in German and quite involuntarily it
seemed, for the next instant he spoke again in a very different key, and
_in English_.
"My God! Are you insane?" he said in a low intense voice and with a
distinct trace of guttural accent. "Don't speak German here! Have you no
other language? Don't you speak English?"
I don't know whether you could have literally knocked me down with a
feather, but a stout feather would certainly have come pretty near doing
it. I simply gaped at him.
Again he spoke; this time in German, but almost in a whisper.
"Do not speak German here so loudly! Do you not know any English?"
A dim perception of the almost incredible truth began to dawn on me
and I did my best to grapple with the situation. I had to account
for my astonished stare; that was the first thought that flashed
through my head.
"Of course I speak English," I said, and by the favour of Heaven I found
myself instinctively saying those words in the very accents of the German
waiter in "Bill's All Right" (my first offence on the professional
stage), "but I thought you were Hans Eckstein. I could hardly believe my
own eyes!"
"Hans Eckstein? Who is he?" demanded my new acquaintance, and I was
pleased to observe no suspicion in his voice, merely a little
astonishment.
"A friend," I answered glibly, "one of us."
He looked at me for a moment, very narrowly, and in those seconds of
silence I began to realise more exactly what must have happened. The
upper current of air had been blowing _westwards_--not eastwards as the
wind blew on the surface. The good land under my feet was assuredly not
Germany; almost certainly it must be part of my own blessed native
island, or why this insistence on my speaking English, rather than, say,
Dutch or Danish? And then the man I was speaking to, what must he
obviously be? There was only one answer possible.
I may add that I had the presence of mind not to stare blankly at him
while I thought these thoughts. I let him do the staring while I fished
my pipe out of my oilskin pocket and began to fill it.
"So!" he murmured, and I thought he seemed satisfied enough, especially
as he asked with manifest curiosity but without any apparent suspicion in
his voice, "And how did you get here?"
Yet when I looked up from my pipe-filling to answer him I could almost
swear that he had done something to make his features less
visible--pulled his sou'wester further down and sunk his chin into the
high collar of his oilskin, it certainly seemed to me. As I had gathered
a very insufficient impression of him before, this was a little
provoking. Still, I told myself that our acquaintance was only beginning.
How to ripen it--that was the problem. I tried the effect of merely
winking and saying with a cool, knowing air:
"The usual way. Do you have to ask?"
He looked sharply up and down the rocks and out to sea and I saw
instantly what was in his mind.
"Impossible! There was no signal. I have been looking out all the
time," said he.
I merely laughed.
"How else do you think I could have come?"
"So!" he murmured again, and then he asked a curious question.
"Do you know if there are many sheep on this island?"
So I had landed on an island! That was the first and chief deduction
I drew from this enquiry. The second was that the man's English must
be a little weak. Obviously he meant something rather different from
what he said.
"Sheep?" I said with a laugh. "No, my friend, I have something else to do
than count sheep."
Again he looked at me for a moment, his face now almost completely
hidden by the peak of his sou'wester. If by any chance he were still
doubting me the best thing seemed to be a touch of candour and an appeal
he could scarcely resist.
"See here," I said, lowering my voice, "I want to stop in this island
to-night. In fact those are my orders. Now where can you find me a
safe place?"
He lowered his voice too. In fact he seemed to reciprocate my confidence
very satisfactorily.
"We must be very careful. I must see that the coast is clear first. Just
you sit and wait here for ten minutes. I will be back."
He nodded at me to enforce his injunctions and added as he turned away,
"Keep sitting down. Mind that!"
I sat down, finished filling my pipe, lit it, and waited. And as I waited
I frankly confess I fairly hugged myself. Never before was there such a
bit of luck, thought I. That that vagabond balloon should actually bring
its passenger back to his native land instead of dropping him in the sea
or landing him in Germany was fortunate almost beyond belief, but that he
should then stumble on a German spy and actually convince the man that he
was a confederate and lead him straight into the net already spreading
for him, surely showed that after a considerable run of ill luck (and, I
must confess, ill guidance), the passenger had suddenly become Fortune's
prime favourite. Several very eligible and commodious castles were
constructed in the night air by that lonely shore as I sat and smoked.
And then I heard a cautious but distinct whistle, and up I jumped and
looked all round me. There was no one to be seen, but the sound came from
the right--the way I had come, and I set off through the thickening dusk
in that direction. But the odd thing was that I walked considerably
further than the sound of the whistle could have carried and never a sign
of human being or of house did I see--nothing but that desolate grassy
sea-board and the faintly gleaming waters.
I stopped and began to wonder, and then I heard the whistle again. It was
still ahead of me, so on I walked and once more the same thing occurred.
This time I paused for at least another ten minutes, but nobody appeared
and nothing whatever happened. There I was, utterly alone once more, with
the land growing black and the sea dim and not a sound now even from the
sea gulls.
III
ALONE AGAIN
"The man has suspected me!" I said to myself.
It was an unpleasant conclusion, but the more carefully I thought over
every little circumstance the more certain I felt it was the true one. To
begin with, there was the way in which he kept his face concealed after
the first few sentences we exchanged. Then there was that curious
question about the sheep. It must have been a password--I saw that now,
and I could have kicked myself for not seeing it sooner. Of course I had
no idea of the proper answer, but I might at least have replied with some
equally cryptic sentence and tried to bluff him into thinking I was using
a different code. As it was, I had made it perfectly obvious that I had
missed the point absolutely.
Finally there was his conduct in slipping away and leaving me stranded
like this. Surely it was the very last trick to play on an accomplice. In
fact it settled the matter. But why then did he whistle--and, moreover,
whistle twice?
For a few minutes I was utterly puzzled, and then an explanation flashed
upon me. He wished to lead me in this particular direction! And why?
Evidently because he himself was living or hiding in the other. I tried
to put myself in his shoes and think what I would do myself, and if I had
had the wit to think of it, that would obviously be the soundest thing.
So obvious did it seem to me that I decided to set to work on that
assumption.
First of all I walked a little further to see if I could test this
theory, and in a minute or two I saw dimly ahead of me houses near the
beach. I stopped and thought again. Could it possibly be that this was
the refuge he was providing and that he did not suspect me after all?
"In that case," I said to myself, "would any man in his senses use such
a vague and misleading method of conducting a friend, especially when a
mistake might be--and probably would be--fatal to his schemes?
Obviously not!"
On the other hand, these houses fitted excellently into the theory that
he wanted me to take shelter there simply because they were well removed
from his own lair.
"And then what's the fellow doing himself all this time?" I thought.
"Evidently scuttling back in the opposite direction!"
So back I turned and set out on a very cheerless and solitary walk. There
was no sense of immediate action ahead now, no anticipation of any
further excitement this night, and, the more I came to think of it, not
one chance in a thousand of stumbling upon the man again even though I
were really heading towards him.
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