musical comedy witnessed overnight. It was no new revelation to Theydon that truth should prove stranger than fiction, but the trite phrase was fast assuming a fresh and sinister personal significance. He believed, and not without good reason, that no man living had ever undergone an experience comparable with his present adventure.
When he left that house he was going straight to two officers of the law whose bounden duty it would become to call upon Mr. Forbes for a full and true explanation of his visit to Mrs. Lester—provided, that is, he (Theydon) told them what he knew. Talk about a death's-head grinning at a feast! At that bright dinner-table he was a prey to keener emotion than ever shook a Borgia entertaining one whom he meant to poison.
In sheer self-defense he talked with an animation he seldom displayed. Evelyn was evidently much taken by him, and, fired by her manifest interest, he indulged in fantastic paradox and wild flights of fancy. Seemingly his exuberance stimulated Forbes, himself a well-informed and epigrammatic talker.
An hour sped all too soon. The girl rose with a sigh.
"It's too bad that I should have to go," she said. "I shall be bored stiff at Lady de Winton's. But I can't get out of it except by telling a positive fib over the telephone. Dad, next time you ask Mr. Theydon to dinner, please let me know in good time, and neither of you will be rid of me so easily."
She shook hands with Theydon. While she was giving her father a parting kiss the guest moved to the door and held it open. As she passed out she smiled and her eyes said plainly:
"I like you. Come again soon."
Then she was gone and the pleasant room lost some of its glow and color.
"Don't sit down again, Theydon," said Forbes, rising. "We'll have coffee brought to my den. What is your favorite liqueur—or shall we tell Tomlinson to send along that decanter of port? It's a first-rate wine. Another glass won't hurt you, or me, for that matter."
Theydon had hardly dared to touch the champagne supplied during the meal. Abstemious at all times, because he found that wine or spirits interfered with his capacity for work, he felt that a clear head and steady nerves were called for that night more than any other night in his life. Following the lead given by his host, therefore, he elected for the port.
"You are right, too," said Forbes. "You remember Dr. Johnson's dictum: 'Claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy'? Tonight, not aspiring to the heroic, we'll stick to port."
"It is a curious fact that on my return from Brooklands today I took a glass of brandy," confessed Theydon. "I seldom, if ever, drink any intoxicant before dining, but I needed a stimulant of a sort, and some unknown tissue in me cried aloud for brandy."
He hoped vaguely that the comment would lead to something more explicit, and thus bring him, without undue emphasis, so to speak, to the one topic on which he was now resolved to obtain a decisive statement from the man chiefly concerned before he faced the representatives of Scotland Yard.
But Forbes, motioning to an easy chair in a well-appointed library, and flinging himself into another, gave heed only to the one word—Brooklands.
"Did you fly?" he asked.
"No. I was soaking in theory, not practice."
"Ah, theory. It would, indeed, seem to be true that folded away in some convolution of our brain are the faculties of the fish and the bird. Those latent powers are expanding daily. The submarine has already gone far beyond the practical achievement of aerial craft. But why, in the name of humanity, should every such development of man's almost immeasurable resources be dedicated to warlike purposes? I am sick at heart when I hear the first question put in these days to each inventor: 'Can you enable us to kill more of our fellowmen than we can kill with existing appliances?' Is it a new engine, a new amalgam of metals, a new explosive, a new field of electrical energy, one hears the same vulture's cry—'How many, how far, how safely can we slay?' I regard this lust for destruction as contemptible. It is a strange and ignominious feature of modern life. Forgive me, Mr. Theydon, if I speak strongly on this matter. The men who spread the bounds of science today are, nominally, at any rate, Christians. They tell of peace and goodwill to all, yet prepare unceasingly for some awful Armageddon.[*] We teach Christ's gospel in pulpit and schoolhouse, strive to express it in our laws, obey it in our lives and social relations, yet we are armed to the teeth and ever arming, adding strength to the plates of our warships and distance to the range of our guns, constantly riveting and welding and forging monsters which shall shatter men and cities and States."
[*] This story was written before the outbreak of war in 1914.]
It was not the younger man now who talked brilliantly and forcibly. Theydon, frankly abandoning the effort to twist the conversation to that enigma which, the more he saw and heard of Forbes the more incredible it became, listened enthralled to one who spoke with the conviction and earnestness of a prophet.
"Don't imagine that I am framing an indictment against Christianity," went on Forbes passionately. "The Sermon on the Mount inspires all that is great and noble in our everyday existence, all that is eternally beautiful in our dreams of the future. But why this din of war, this smoke of arsenals, this marching and drilling of the world's youth? Nature's law appears to have two simple clauses. It enforces a principle in the struggle for existence, a test in the survival of the fittest. Great heavens, are not these enough, without having our ears deafened by powder and drumming? That is why I am devoting a good deal of time and no small amount of money to an international crusade against the warlike idea, and I see no reason why a beginning should not be made with the airship and the airplane. We are too late with the submarine, but, before the golden hour passes, let us stop the navigation of the air from forming part of the equipment of murder. Surely it can be done. England and the United States, Italy, France and the rest of Europe—the founts of civilization—can write the edict, with all the blazonry of their glorious histories to illuminate the page—There shall be no war in the air!'"
Theydon was carried away in spite of himself.
"You believe that the airship might develop along the unemotional lines of the parcel post?" he inquired.
Forbes laughed.
"Exactly," he said. "I like your simile. No one suggests that we Britons should endeavor to destroy our hated rivals by sending bombs through the mails. Why, then, in the name of common sense, should the first—I might almost say the only use of which the airship is commonly supposed capable—be that of destruction? Don't you see the instant result of a war-limiting ordinance of the kind I advocate? Suppose the peoples and the rulers declared in their wisdom that soldiers and war material should be contraband of the air—and suppose that airships do become vehicles of practical utility—what a farce would soon be all the grim fortresses, the guns, the giant steel structures now designed as floating hells! Humanity has yet time to declare that the flying machine shall be as harmless and serviceable as the penny post. I believe it can be done. Come now, Mr. Theydon, I think you've caught on to my scheme—will you help?"
Help! Here was a man expounding a new evangel, which might, indeed, be visionary and impracticable, but was none the less essentially noble and Christian in spirit, yet Theydon was debating whether or not he should give testimony which would bring to that very room a couple of detectives whose first questions would make clear to Forbes that he was suspected of blood-guiltiness!
The notion was so utterly repellent that Theydon sighed deeply; his host not unnaturally looked surprised.
"Of course, such a revolutionary idea strikes you as outside the pale of common sense," he began, but the younger man stayed him with a gesture. Here was an opportunity that must not be allowed to pass. No matter what the cost—if he never saw Evelyn Forbes or her father again—he must dispel the waking nightmare which held him in such an abnormal condition of uncertainty and foreboding.
"Now that your daughter is gone I may venture to speak plainly," he said. "I told you that, I felt the need of a brandy and soda at Waterloo. As a matter of fact, I did not leave the Brooklands track until six o'clock, and, as Innesmore Mansions, where I live, lie north, and I was due here at 7:30, I had my man meet me at the station with