The Man Who Ended War. Godfrey Hollis

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СКАЧАТЬ disappearance, and told of our search down the coast, and of the finding of the man upstairs. Hour after hour went by as I wrote, and no call came. Dorothy and Tom sat reading. At last I brought my story down to the point where I wished to introduce the story of the man. There I stopped, and with idle pen sat and watched the beautiful head below the shaded light. If a man could only sit and see that “Picture of a woman reading” every night! I found myself figuring costs of living more zealously than ever before. A knock broke in on my thoughts.

      “The patient has roused,” said the nurse, “and the doctor would like to have you come.”

      Silently we passed through the bare corridors and up the wide stairs. As we entered, the doctor sat beside the man on the narrow iron bed. I looked with eager inquiry at the face. It shone with normal intelligence. We had conquered again.

      “I have just been telling Mr. Joslinn of your finding him, and of his being here,” said Forrester. “Now he is ready to talk.”

      Dorothy greeted him and began the talk, while I wrote feverishly as Joslinn spoke in a low steady tone. Yes, he had gone out fishing. He had left a little shooting box, whither he had run down alone on Monday, and taken the knockabout out. The reason no one had known of his disappearance was that there was no one to care. He had no family and had retired from business, made little trips now and then, so his landlady and friends simply thought of him as away. I chafed at the time that he took in coming to the point. If he only reached it, his long description of his acts was all a part of the story. Then came the crisis:

      “I was out ten or twelve miles from shore, just about sunset,” said Joslinn, “when I saw a battleship coming up the coast. She was the only ship in sight, and she passed within a short distance of me, so near that I felt the last of her wake. I never saw a finer spectacle than that boat as she swept on.” He paused.

      “Go on, go on,” I said anxiously.

      “I knew it was the Alaska,” he resumed, “because I had seen her lying for weeks below my apartment house in Riverside Drive. I watched her as she went on triumphant. It was the time of evening colors. Out across the water came the bugle call, which I had heard so often as I hung over the parapet of the Drive at nightfall. The marine guard and the crew stood mustered and facing aft. The flag fell a fluttering inch, and at the moment of its fall the band crashed into the full strain of the Star Spangled Banner. I stood with bared head, and my eyes filled as the great ship bore proudly on. Just as the last note of ‘Oh long may it wave’ came to me, like a bursting soap bubble, like a light cloud scattered by the wind, she disappeared without a sound! Not so much as the splash of a pebble in the water could I hear.”

      “Do you mean to say,” cried Tom, in utter amazement, “that all those thousands of tons of armored steel, those great guns in their huge turrets, that terrific mass of metal, disappeared without a sound?”

      “Absolutely without a sound,” answered Joslinn gravely. “The Alaska disappeared with less commotion than a ring of tobacco smoke in the air. It utterly destroyed one’s belief in the reality of anything in this world!”

      Bewilderment, complete bewilderment, is the only word which can express the appearance of our little group, as we stood in the bare room. Even Forrester temporarily forgot his professional attitude in the absorbing interest of the tale. But a sigh from Joslinn recalled him.

      “That’s quite enough, Mr. Joslinn,” he said hurriedly, and, at his nod of dismissal, we turned and went down the stairs.

      “Nothing real, with a vengeance,” remarked Tom, as we descended. “I can’t imagine a more unearthly spectacle than that noiseless fading away. I’d have said mirage, if he hadn’t heard the music, and if the ship hadn’t actually disappeared. Hold on – if this is the work of man, is it possible that he has discovered some new substance which, placed in armored steel, causes it to disintegrate? If he got hold of such stuff, he might get it into armored steel, while it was making, and then after a certain time the whole thing might crumble away.”

      Tom had finished speaking as he stood in the door of the doctor’s pleasant library.

      Dorothy nodded as he closed. “That’s not a bad idea, Tom. If anything could be found that would make steel crumble into dust, as a puff ball crumbles, it might of course be timed. But the whole thing dazes me. I want plenty of time to think it over.”

      “And I must get to work on my story,” I said, trying to shake myself back into the world of reality again, and I rushed back to my desk.

      Word for word I wrote the story, drew Joslinn’s life history briefly, ran rapidly through the whole, and as Dorothy entered, “I know how I’ll end,” I exclaimed. “I’ll prophesy the sinking of a British battleship this week.”

      She clapped her hands. “Good! good!” she cried. “You couldn’t do better.”

      The last words of my story were the prophecy, and I hurried to the telephone. It was 1 a. m., but the chief himself answered. “I’ll be there with the whole story in half an hour,” I cried exultantly.

      “Did he see her go down?” asked the chief eagerly.

      “He did,” I answered, and a long whistle came over the wires.

      Through dark streets and light, through the roar of upper Broadway and the sombre silence of lower Broadway the motor ran, and I tried to calm my hurrying brain. The excitement which had possessed me every day of the week was still over me. The awful wonder of Joslinn’s tale possessed me, until my longed-for beat seemed but a minor accident in the great happenings of the world. Up the elevator and through the door at a bound I passed, to the chief’s office. He reached eagerly from his chair for my copy. Page by page he read silently, as I sat handing them to him, and passing them from his hands to the boys running back and forth to the tubes. I could hear the crash of the presses, and I thought, strangely enough, of Pendennis and Warrington standing in Fleet Street and talking of the mightiest engine in the world, – the press. And after all, it was my story that was enlightening the world through those great presses below. I had solved the mystery that filled the newspapers from the Atlantic to the Pacific, nay more, that was discussed in the clubs of London and of Tokio, and my story would go through them all. I had won. Twice only I stopped in giving the copy to the chief, once to light my pipe, and once to look up Joslinn. I found him easily in the directory and in Bradstreet’s. He was evidently a man of complete reliability.

      The last page had gone down the tube, and the chief leaned back and meditatively took up his pipe.

      “That’s the best stuff for some years, Orrington,” he said. “I guess you’d better take this as a permanent assignment. The prophecy was a long chance, but I guess we’ll take it. Now go to bed.”

      I slept till ten, but once up, I read my story with huge approval in my early paper, and saw everybody else reading it, as I went down town. My ears were filled with excited comment, and I examined with much glee the pained comments or total silence of our contemporaries. Especially did they condemn my prophecy. Reaching the office, I stopped on the first floor to get a late edition, among a general stare which I endeavored to bear modestly. At the elevator door, I paused. “Should I walk or ride? Walk it is,” I decided. I wanted to stop in the hall outside the big office to look over my story again. As I sat in the hall window, I looked down. I could see a multitude before our bulletin board. None of the other papers had any crowd at all. As I looked, the throng went wild. A great roar rose, and the mass seethed and swayed as they gazed at the bulletin below me, but out of my sight. “Something’s up,” I said to myself, and bolted for the office. The reporters and editors were all clustered in one corner. As they saw me, a shout went up.

      “Orrington, the British battleship СКАЧАТЬ