Read Ebook: The Man from the Clouds by Clouston J Storer Joseph Storer

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Ebook has 1621 lines and 61553 words, and 33 pages

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."

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.

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 d?but 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.

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 attach? 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!"

"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" , "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."

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."

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