SOARING I
For nearly all the time that my uncle was incubating and hatching Crest¹ Hill I was busy in a little transverse valley between that great beginning and Lady Grove² with more and more costly³ and ambitious experiments in aerial navigation. This work was indeed the main substance of my life through all the great time of the Tono-Bungay symphony.
 
I have told already how I came to devote myself to this system of inquiries⁴, how in a sort of disgust with the common adventure of life I took up the dropped ends of my college studies, taking them up again with a man’s resolution instead of a boy’s ambition. From the first I did well at this work. It—was, I think, largely a case of special aptitude⁵, of a peculiar⁶ irrelevant⁷ vein⁸ of faculty⁹ running through my mind. It is one of those things men seem to have by chance, that has little or nothing to do with their general merit, and which it is ridiculous to be either conceited¹⁰ or modest about. I did get through a very big mass of work in those years, working for a time with a concentrated fierceness that left little of such energy or capacity as I possess unused. I worked out a series of problems connected with the stability of bodies pitching in the air and the internal movements of the wind, and I also revolutionised one leading part at last of the theory of explosive engines. These things are to be found in the Philosophical¹¹ Transactions, the Mathematical Journal, and less frequently in one or two other such publications, and they needn’t detain us here. Indeed, I doubt if I could write about them here. One acquires a sort of shorthand for one’s notes and mind in relation to such special work. I have never taught; nor lectured, that is to say, I have never had to express my thoughts about mechanical things in ordinary everyday language, and I doubt very much if I could do so now without extreme tedium¹².
 
My work was, to begin with, very largely theoretical. I was able to attack such early necessities of verification as arose with quite little models, using a turntable to get the motion through the air, and cane¹³, whalebone and silk as building material. But a time came when incalculable factors crept in, factors of human capacity and factors of insufficient¹⁴ experimental knowledge, when one must needs guess and try. Then I had to enlarge the scale of my operations, and soon I had enlarged them very greatly. I set to work almost concurrently¹⁵ on the balance and stability of gliders¹⁷ and upon the steering¹⁸ of inflated¹⁹ bags, the latter a particularly expensive branch of work. I was no doubt moved by something of the same spirit of lavish²⁰ expenditure²¹ that was running away with my uncle in these developments. Presently my establishment above Lady Grove had grown to a painted wood chalet big enough to accommodate six men, and in which I would sometimes live for three weeks together; to a gasometer, to a motor-house, to three big corrugated-roofed sheds and lock-up houses, to a stage from which to start gliders, to a workshop and so forth²². A rough road was made. We brought up gas from Cheaping and electricity from Woking, which place I found also afforded a friendly workshop for larger operations than I could manage. I had the luck also to find a man who seemed my heaven-sent second-in-command—Cothope his name was. He was a self-educated-man; he had formerly²³ been a sapper and he was one of the best and handiest working engineers alive. Without him I do not think I could have achieved half what I have done. At times he has been not so much my assistant as my collaborator²⁴, and has followed my fortunes to this day. Other men came and went as I needed them.
 
I do not know how far it is possible to convey to any one who has not experienced it, the peculiar interest, the peculiar satisfaction that lies in a sustained research when one is not hampered²⁵ by want of money. It is a different thing from any other sort of human effort. You are free from the exasperating²⁶ conflict with your fellow-creatures altogether—at least so far as the essential work goes; that for me is its peculiar merit. Scientific truth is the remotest of mistresses; she hides in strange places, she is attained²⁷ by tortuous²⁸ and laborious²⁹ roads, but she is always there! Win to her and she will not fail you; she is yours and mankind’s for ever. She is reality, the one reality I have found in this strange disorder³⁰ of existence. She will not sulk with you nor misunderstand you nor cheat you of your reward upon some petty doubt. You cannot change her by advertisement or clamour, nor stifle³¹ her in vulgarities. Things grow under your hands when you serve her, things that are permanent as nothing else is permanent in the whole life of man. That, I think, is the peculiar satisfaction of science and its enduring reward....
 
The taking up of experimental work produced a great change in my personal habits. I have told how already once in my life at Wimblehurst I had a period of discipline and continuous effort, and how, when I came to South Kensington, I became demoralised by the immense effect of London, by its innumerable imperative³² demands upon my attention and curiosity. And I parted with much of my personal pride when I gave up science for the development of Tono-Bungay. But my poverty kept me abstinent³³ and my youthful romanticism kept me chaste³⁴ until my married life was well under way. Then in all directions I relaxed. I did a large amount of work, but I never troubled to think whether it was my maximum nor whether the moods and indolences that came to me at times were avoidable things. With the coming of plenty I ate abundantly and foolishly, drank freely and followed my impulses more and more carelessly. I felt no reason why I should do anything else. Never at any point did I use myself to the edge of my capacity. The emotional crisis of my divorce did not produce any immediate³⁵ change in these matters of personal discipline. I found some difficulty at first in concentrating my mind upon scientific work, it was so much more exacting³⁶ than business, but I got over that difficulty by smoking. I became an inordinate³⁷ cigar smoker³⁸; it gave me moods of profound depression, but I treated these usually by the homeopathic method,—by lighting³⁹ another cigar. I didn’t realise at all how loose my moral and nervous fibre had become until I reached the practical side of my investigations⁴⁰ and was face to face with the necessity of finding out just how it felt to use a glider¹⁶ and just what a man could do with one.
 
I got into this relaxed habit of living in spite of very real tendencies in my nature towards discipline. I’ve never been in love with self-indulgence. That philosophy of the loose lip and the lax paunch is one for which I’ve always had an instinctive⁴¹ distrust. I like bare things, stripped things, plain, austere⁴² and continent things, fine lines and cold colours. But in these plethoric⁴³ times when there is too much coarse stuff for everybody and the struggle for life takes the form of competitive advertisement and the effort to fill your neighbour’s eye, when there is no urgent demand either for personal courage, sound nerves or stark⁴⁴ beauty, we find ourselves by accident. Always before these times the bulk of the people did not over-eat themselves, because they couldn’t, whether they wanted to do so or not, and all but a very few were kept “fit” by unavoidable exercise and personal danger. Now, if only he pitch his standard low enough and keep free from pride, almost any one can achieve a sort of excess. You can go through contemporary life fudging and evading⁴⁵, indulging and slacking, never really hungry nor frightened nor passionately⁴⁶ stirred, your highest moment a mere⁴⁸ sentimental⁴⁹ orgasm, and your first real contact with primary and elemental necessities, the sweat of your death-bed. So I think it was with my uncle; so, very nearly, it was with me.
 
But the glider brought me up smartly. I had to find out how these things went down the air, and the only way to find out is to go down with one. And for a time I wouldn’t face it.
 
There is something impersonal⁵⁰ about a book, I suppose. At any rate I find myself able to write down here just the confession⁵¹ I’ve never been able to make to any one face to face, the frightful⁵² trouble it was to me to bring myself to do what I suppose every other coloured boy in the West Indies could do without turning a hair, and that is to fling myself off for my first soar down the wind. The first trial was bound to be the worst; it was an experiment I made with life, and the chance of death or injury was, I supposed, about equal to the chance of success. I believed that with a dawn-like lucidity⁵³. I had begun with a glider that I imagined was on the lines of the Wright brothers’ aeroplane, but I could not be sure. It might turn over. I might upset it. It might burrow⁵⁴ its nose at the end and smash itself and me. The conditions of the flight necessitated⁵⁵ alert attention; it wasn’t a thing to be done by jumping off and shutting one’s eyes or getting angry or drunk to do it. One had to use one’s weight to balance. And when at last I did it it was horrible—for ten seconds. For ten seconds or so, as I swept down the air flattened⁵⁷ on my infernal framework and with the wind in my eyes, the rush of the ground beneath me filled me with sick and helpless terror; I felt as though some violent oscillatory current was throbbing⁵⁸ in brain and back bone, and I groaned⁵⁹ aloud. I set my teeth and groaned. It was a groan⁶⁰ wrung⁶¹ out of me in spite of myself. My sensations of terror swooped⁶³ to a climax⁶⁴. And then, you know, they ended!
 
Suddenly my terror was over and done with. I was soaring through the air right way up, steadily⁶⁵, and no mischance had happened. I felt intensely alive and my nerves were strung like a bow. I shifted a limb, swerved⁶⁶ and shouted between fear and triumph as I recovered from the swerve⁶⁷ and heeled the other way and steadied myself.
 
I thought I was going to hit a rook that was flying athwart me,—it was queer with what projectile⁶⁸ silence that jumped upon me out of nothingness, and I yelled helplessly, “Get out of the way!” The bird doubled itself up like a partly inverted⁶⁹ V, flapped, went up to the right abruptly⁷⁰ and vanished from my circle of interest. Then I saw the shadow of my aeroplane keeping a fixed⁷¹ distance before me and very steady, and the turf as it seemed streaming out behind it. The turf!—it wasn’t after all streaming so impossibly fast.
 
When I came gliding⁷² down to the safe spread of level green I had chosen, I was as cool and ready as a city clerk who drops off an omnibus in motion, and I had learnt much more than soaring. I tilted⁷³ up her nose at the right moment, levelled again and grounded like a snowflake on a windless day. I lay flat for an instant and then knelt up and got on my feet atremble, but very satisfied with myself. Cothope was running down the hill to me. ...
 
But from that day I went into training, and I kept myself in training for many months. I had delayed my experiments for very nearly six weeks on various excuses because of my dread⁷⁵ of this first flight, because of the slackness of body and spirit that had come to me with the business life. The shame of that cowardice⁷⁶ spurred me none the less because it was probably altogether my own secret. I felt that Cothope at any rate might suspect. Well,—he shouldn’t suspect again.
 
It is curious that I remember that shame and self accusation⁷⁷ and its consequences far more distinctly than I recall the weeks of vacillation⁷⁸ before I soared. For a time I went altogether without alcohol, I stopped smoking altogether and ate very sparingly, and every day I did something that called a little upon my nerves and muscles. I soared as frequently as I could. I substituted a motor-bicycle for the London train and took my chances in the southward traffic, and I even tried what thrills were to be got upon a horse. But they put me on made horses, and I conceived a perhaps unworthy contempt for the certitudes of equestrian⁷⁹ exercise in comparison with the adventures of mechanism⁸⁰. Also I walked along the high wall at the back of Lady Grove garden, and at last brought myself to stride the gap where the gate comes. If I didn’t altogether get rid of a certain giddy instinct by such exercises, at least I trained my will until it didn’t matter. And soon I no longer dreaded⁸¹ flight, but was eager to go higher into the air, and I came to esteem⁸² soaring upon a glider, that even over the deepest dip in the ground had barely forty feet of fall beneath it, a mere mockery of what flight might be. I began to dream of the keener freshness in the air high above the beechwoods, and it was rather to satisfy that desire than as any legitimate⁸³ development of my proper work that presently I turned a part of my energies and the bulk of my private income to the problem of the navigable balloon.
 
II
I had gone far beyond that initial stage; I had had two smashes and a broken rib⁵⁶ which my aunt nursed with great energy, and was getting some reputation in the aeronautic⁸⁴ world when, suddenly, as though she had never really left it, the Honourable⁸⁵ Beatrice Normandy, dark-eyed, and with the old disorderly wave of the hair from her brow, came back into my life. She came riding down a grass path in the thickets⁸⁶ below Lady Grove, perched up on a huge black horse, and the old Earl of Carnaby and Archie Garvell, her half-brother, were with her. My uncle had been bothering me about the Crest Hill hot-water pipes, and we were returning by a path transverse to theirs and came out upon them suddenly. Old Carnaby was trespassing⁸⁷ on our ground, and so he hailed us in a friendly fashion and pulled up to talk to us.
 
I didn’t note Beatrice at all at first. I was interested in Lord Carnaby, that remarkable⁸⁸ vestige⁸⁹ of his own brilliant youth. I had heard of him, but never seen him. For a man of sixty-five who had sinned all the sins, so they said, and laid waste the most magnificent political debut⁹⁰ of any man of his generation, he seemed to me to be looking remarkably⁹¹ fit and fresh. He was a lean little man with grey-blue eyes in his brown face, and his cracked voice was the worst thing in his effect.
 
“Hope you don’t mind us coming this way, Ponderevo,” he cried; and my uncle, who was sometimes a little too general and generous with titles, answered, “Not at all, my lord, not at all! Glad you make use of it!”
 
“You’re building a great place over the hill,” said Carnaby.
 
“Thought I’d make a show for once,” said my uncle. “It looks big because it’s spread out for the sun.”
 
“Air and sunlight,” said the earl. “You can’t have too much of them. But before our time they used to build for shelter and water and the high road.”
 
Then I discovered that the silent figure behind the earl was Beatrice.
 
I’d forgotten her sufficiently⁹² to think for a moment that she hadn’t changed at all since she had watched me from behind the skirts of Lady Drew. She was looking at me, and her dainty brow under her broad brimmed hat—she was wearing a grey hat and loose unbuttoned coat—was knit with perplexity, trying, I suppose, to remember where she had seen me before. Her shaded eyes met mine with that mute question....
 
It seemed incredible to me she didn’t remember.
 
“Well,” said the earl and touched his horse.
 
Garvell was patting the neck of his horse, which was inclined to fidget, and disregarding me. He nodded over his shoulder and followed. His movement seemed to release a train of memories in her. She glanced suddenly at him and then back at me with a flash of recognition that warmed instantly to a faint smile. She hesitated as if to speak to me, smiled broadly and understandingly and turned to follow the others. All three broke into a canter and she did not look back. I stood for a second or so at the crossing of the lanes, watching her recede⁹³, and then became aware that my uncle was already some paces off and talking over his shoulder in the belief that I was close behind. I turned about and strode to overtake him. My mind was full of Beatrice and this surprise. I remembered her simply as a Normandy. I’d clean forgotten that Garvell was the son and she the step-daughter of our neighbour, Lady Osprey. Indeed, I’d probably forgotten at that time that we had Lady Osprey as a neighbour. There was no reason at all for remembering it. It was amazing to find her in this Surrey countryside, when I’d never thought of her as living anywhere in the world but at Bladesover Park, near forty miles and twenty years away. She was so alive—so unchanged! The same quick warm blood was in her cheeks. It seemed only yesterday that we had kissed among the bracken stems....
 
“Eh?” I said.
 
“I say he’s good stuff,” said my uncle. “You can say what you like against the aristocracy, George; Lord Carnaby’s rattling⁹⁴ good stuff. There’s a sort of Savoir Faire, something—it’s an old-fashioned phrase, George, but a good one there’s a Bong-Tong.... It’s like the Oxford⁹⁵ turf, George, you can’t grow it in a year. I wonder how they do it. It’s living always on a Scale, George. It’s being there from the beginning.”...
 
“She might,” I said to myself, “be a picture by Romney come alive!”
 
“They tell all these stories about him,” said my uncle, “but what do they all amount to?”
 
“Gods!” I said to myself; “but why have I forgotten for so long? Those queer little brows of hers, the touch of mischief⁹⁶ in her eyes—the way she breaks into a smile!”
 
“I don’t blame him,” said my uncle. “Mostly it’s imagination. That and leisure, George. When I was a young man I was kept pretty busy. So were you. Even then—!”
 
What puzzled me more particularly was the queer trick of my memory that had never recalled anything vital of Beatrice whatever when I met Garvell again that had, indeed, recalled nothing except a boyish antagonism⁹⁷ and our fight. Now when my senses were full of her, it seemed incredible that I could ever have forgotten....
 
III
“Oh, Crikey!” said my aunt, reading a letter behind her coffee-machine. “Here’s a young woman, George!”
 
We were breakfasting together in the big window bay at Lady Grove that looks upon the iris⁹⁸ beds; my uncle was in London.
 
I sounded an interrogative note and decapitated an egg.
 
“Who’s Beatrice Normandy?” asked my aunt. “I’ve not heard of her before.”
 
“She the young woman?”
 
“Yes. Says she knows you. I’m no hand at old etiquette⁹⁹, George, but her line is a bit unusual. Practically she says she’s going to make her mother—”
 
“Eh? Step-mother, isn’t it?”
 
“You seem to know a lot about her. She says ‘mother’—Lady Osprey. They’re to call on me, anyhow, next Wednesday week at four, and there’s got to be you for tea.”
 
“Eh?”
 
“You—for tea.
 
“H’m. She had rather—force of character. When I knew her before.”
 
I became aware of my aunt’s head sticking out obliquely¹⁰⁰ from behind the coffee-machine and regarding me with wide blue curiosity. I met her gaze for a moment, flinched¹⁰¹, coloured, and laughed.
 
“I’ve known her longer than I’ve known you,” I said, and explained at length.
 
My aunt kept her eye on me over and round the coffee-machine as I did so. She was greatly interested, and asked several elucidatory¹⁰² questions.
 
“Why didn’t you tell me the day you saw her? You’ve had her on your mind for a week,” she said.
 
“It IS odd I didn’t tell you,” I admitted.
 
“You thought I’d get a Down on her,” said my aunt conclusively¹⁰³. “That’s what you thought” and opened the rest of her letters.
 
The two ladies came in a pony-carriage with conspicuous¹⁰⁴ punctuality, and I had the unusual experience of seeing my aunt entertaining callers. We had tea upon the terrace under the cedar¹⁰⁵, but old Lady Osprey, being an embittered¹⁰⁶ Protestant, had never before seen the inside of the house, and we made a sort of tour of inspection¹⁰⁷ that reminded me of my first visit to the place. In spite of my preoccupation with Beatrice, I stored a queer little memory of the contrast between the two other women; my aunt, tall, slender and awkward, in a simple blue homekeeping dress, an omnivorous¹⁰⁸ reader and a very authentic¹⁰⁹ wit, and the lady of pedigree, short and plump, dressed with Victorian fussiness¹¹⁰, living at the intellectual level of palmistry and genteel fiction, pink in the face and generally flustered¹¹¹ by a sense of my aunt’s social strangeness and disposed under the circumstances to behave rather like an imitation of the more queenly moments of her own cook. The one seemed made of whalebone, the other of dough¹¹². My aunt was nervous, partly through the intrinsic difficulty of handling the lady and partly because of her passionate⁴⁷ desire to watch Beatrice and me, and her nervousness took a common form with her, a wider clumsiness of gesture and an exacerbation¹¹³ of her habitual¹¹⁴ oddity of phrase which did much to deepen the pink perplexity of the lady of title. For instance, I heard my aunt admit that one of the Stuart Durgan ladies did look a bit “balmy on the crumpet”; she described the knights¹¹⁵ of the age of chivalry¹¹⁶ as “korvorting about on the off-chance of a dragon”; she explained she was “always old mucking about the garden,” and instead of offering me a Garibaldi biscuit, she asked me with that faint lisp of hers, to “have some squashed flies, George.” I felt convinced Lady Osprey would describe her as “a most eccentric person” on the very first opportunity;—“a most eccentric person.” One could see her, as people say, “shaping” for that.
 
Beatrice was dressed very quietly in brown, with a simple but courageous¹¹⁷ broad-brimmed hat, and an unexpected quality of being grown-up and responsible. She guided her step-mother through the first encounter, scrutinised my aunt, and got us all well in movement through the house, and then she turned her attention to me with a quick and half-confident smile.
 
“We haven’t met,” she said, “since—”
 
“It was in the Warren.”
 
“Of course,” she said, “the Warren! I remembered it all except just the name.... I was eight.”
 
Her smiling eyes insisted on my memories being thorough. I looked up and met them squarely, a little at a loss for what I should say.
 
“I gave you away pretty completely,” she said, meditating¹¹⁸ upon my face. “And afterwards I gave way Archie.”
 
She turned her face away from the others, and her voice fell ever so little.
 
“They gave him a licking for telling lies!” she said, as though that was a pleasant memory. “And when it was all over I went to our wigwam. You remember the wigwam?”
 
“Out in the West Wood?”
 
“Yes—and cried—for all the evil I had done you, I suppose.... I’ve often thought of it since.”...
 
Lady Osprey stopped for us to overtake her. “My dear!” she said to Beatrice. “Such a beautiful gallery!” Then she stared very hard at me, puzzled in the most naked fashion to understand who I might be.
 
“People say the oak staircase is rather good,” said my aunt, and led the way.
 
Lady Osprey, with her skirts gathered for the ascent¹¹⁹ to the gallery and her hand on the newel, turned and addressed a look full of meaning overflowing¹²¹ indeed with meanings—at her charge. The chief meaning no doubt was caution about myself, but much of it was just meaning at large. I chanced to catch the response in a mirror and detected Beatrice with her nose wrinkled into a swift and entirely¹²² diabolical¹²³ grimace¹²⁴. Lady Osprey became a deeper shade of pink and speechless with indignation—it was evident she disavowed all further responsibility, as she followed my aunt upstairs.
 
“It’s dark, but there’s a sort of dignity,” said Beatrice very distinctly, regarding the hall with serene¹²⁵ tranquillity¹²⁶, and allowing the unwilling¹²⁷ feet on the stairs to widen their distance from us. She stood a step up, so that she looked down a little upon me and over me at the old hall.
 
She turned upon me abruptly when she thought her step-mother was beyond ear-shot.
 
“But how did you get here?” she asked.
 
“Here?”
 
“All this.” She indicated space and leisure by a wave of the hand at hall and tall windows and sunlit terrace. “Weren’t you the housekeeper’s son?”
 
“I’ve adventured. My uncle has become—a great financier. He used to be a little chemist about twenty miles from Bladesover. We’re promoters now, amalgamators, big people on the new model.”
 
“I understand.” She regarded me with interested eyes, visibly thinking me out.
 
“And you recognised me?” I asked.
 
“After a second or so. I saw you recognised me. I couldn’t place you, but I knew I knew you. Then Archie being there helped me to remember.”
 
“I’m glad to meet again,” I ventured. “I’d never forgotten you.”
 
“One doesn’t forget those childish things.”
 
We regarded one another for a moment with a curiously¹²⁸ easy and confident satisfaction in coming together again. I can’t explain our ready zest¹²⁹ in one another. The thing was so. We pleased each other, we had no doubt in our minds that we pleased each other. From the first we were at our ease with one another. “So picturesque¹³⁰, so very picturesque,” came a voice from above, and then: “Bee-atrice!”
 
“I’ve a hundred things I want to know about you,” she said with an easy intimacy¹³¹, as we went up the winding¹³² steps....
 
As the four of us sat at tea together under the cedar on the terrace she asked questions about my aeronautics¹³³. My aunt helped with a word or so about my broken ribs¹³⁴. Lady Osprey evidently regarded flying as a most indesirable and improper¹³⁵ topic—a blasphemous¹³⁶ intrusion upon the angels. “It isn’t flying,” I explained. “We don’t fly yet.”
 
“You never will,” she said compactly. “You never will.”
 
“Well,” I said, “we do what we can.”
 
The little lady lifted a small gloved hand and indicated a height of about four feet from the ground. “Thus far,” she said, “thus far—and no farther! No!”
 
She became emphatically pink. “No,” she said again quite conclusively, and coughed shortly. “Thank you,” she said to her ninth or tenth cake. Beatrice burst into cheerful laughter with her eye on me. I was lying on the turf, and this perhaps caused a slight confusion about the primordial¹³⁷ curse in Lady Osprey’s mind.
 
“Upon his belly¹³⁸ shall he go,” she said with quiet distinctness, “all the days of his life.”
 
After which we talked no more of aeronautics.
 
Beatrice sat bunched together in a chair and regarded me with exactly the same scrutiny¹³⁹, I thought, the same adventurous¹⁴⁰ aggression¹⁴¹, that I had faced long ago at the tea-table in my mother’s room. She was amazingly like that little Princess of my Bladesover memories, the wilful¹⁴² misbehaviours of her hair seemed the same—her voice; things one would have expected to be changed altogether. She formed her plans in the same quick way, and acted with the same irresponsible decision.
 
She stood up abruptly.
 
“What is there beyond the terrace?” she said, and found me promptly¹⁴³ beside her.
 
I invented a view for her.
 
At the further corner from the cedar she perched herself up upon the parapet and achieved an air of comfort among the lichenous¹⁴⁴ stones. “Now tell me,” she said, “all about yourself. Tell me about yourself; I know such duffers of men! They all do the same things. How did you get—here? All my men were here. They couldn’t have got here if they hadn’t been here always. They wouldn’t have thought it right. You’ve climbed.”
 
“If it’s climbing,” I said.
 
She went off at a tangent. “It’s—I don’t know if you’ll understand—interesting to meet you again. I’ve remembered you. I don’t know why, but I have. I’ve used you as a sort of lay figure—when I’ve told myself stories. But you’ve always been rather stiff and difficult in my stories—in ready-made clothes—a Labour Member or a Bradlaugh, or something like that. You’re not like that a bit. And yet you are!”
 
She looked at me. “Was it much of a fight? They make out it is.”
 
“I don’t know why.”
 
“I was shot up here by an accident,” I said. “There was no fight at all. Except to keep honest, perhaps and I made no great figure in that. I and my uncle mixed a medicine and it blew us up. No merit in that! But you’ve been here all the time. Tell me what you have done first.”
 
“One thing we didn’t do.” She meditated¹⁴⁵ for a moment.
 
“What?” said I.
 
“Produce a little half-brother for Bladesover. So it went to the Phillbrick gang. And they let it! And I and my step-mother—we let, too. And live in a little house.”
 
She nodded her head vaguely¹⁴⁶ over her shoulder and turned to me again. “Well, suppose it was an accident. Here you are! Now you’re here, what are you going to do? You’re young. Is it to be Parliament? heard some men the other day talking about you. Before I knew you were you. They said that was what you ought to do.”...
 
She put me through my intentions with a close and vital curiosity. It was just as she had tried to imagine me a soldier and place me years ago. She made me feel more planless and incidental than ever. “You want to make a flying-machine,” she pursued, “and when you fly? What then? Would it be for fighting?”
 
I told her something of my experimental work. She had never heard of the soaring aeroplane, and was excited by the thought, and keen to hear about it. She had thought all the work so far had been a mere projecting of impossible machines. For her Pilcher and Lilienthal had died in vain. She did not know such men had lived in the world.
 
“But that’s dangerous!” she said, with a note of discovery.
 
“Oh!—it’s dangerous.”
 
“Bee-atrice!” Lady Osprey called.
 
Beatrice dropped from the wall to her feet.
 
“Where do you do this soaring?”
 
“Beyond the high Barrows. East of Crest Hill and the wood.”
 
“Do you mind people coming to see?”
 
“Whenever you please. Only let me know”
 
“I’ll take my chance some day. Some day soon.” She looked at me thoughtfully, smiled, and our talk was at an end.
 
IV
All my later work in aeronautics is associated in my memory with the quality of Beatrice, with her incidental presence, with things she said and did and things I thought of that had reference to her.
 
In the spring of that year I had got to a flying machine that lacked nothing but longitudinal stability. My model flew like a bird for fifty or a hundred yards or so, and then either dived and broke its nose or, what was commoner, reared up, slid back and smashed its propeller¹⁴⁷. The rhythm of the pitching puzzled me. I felt it must obey some laws not yet quite clearly stated. I became therefore a student of theory and literature for a time; I hit upon the string of considerations that led me to what is called Ponderevo’s Principle and my F.R.S., and I worked this out in three long papers. Meanwhile I made a lot of turn-table and glider models and started in upon an idea of combining gas-bags and gliders. Balloon work was new to me. I had made one or two ascents¹⁴⁸ in the balloons of the Aëro Club before I started my gasometer and the balloon shed and gave Cothope a couple of months with Sir Peter Rumchase. My uncle found part of the money for these developments; he was growing interested and competitive in this business because of Lord Boom’s prize and the amount of réclame involved, and it was at his request that I named my first navigable balloon Lord Roberts Alpha.
 
Lord Roberts A very nearly terminated all my investigations. My idea both in this and its more successful and famous younger brother, Lord Roberts β, was to utilise the idea of a contractile balloon with a rigid¹⁴⁹ flat base, a balloon shaped rather like an inverted boat that should almost support the apparatus¹⁵⁰, but not quite. The gas-bag was of the chambered sort used for these long forms, and not with an internal balloonette. The trouble was to make the thing contractile. This I sought to do by fixing a long, fine-meshed............