Sixty Days to Live (30 page)

‘It would in the ordinary way, but for the last few evenings Oliver has been experimenting with micas of various colours and he’s found one which will neutralise the rays. Yesterday afternoon he and Daddy covered the port-holes of the Ark with it and they think we won’t be affected if we sit in there all day.’

‘I
must
go up and see them,’ cried Lavina. ‘Where’s Sam?’

‘He’s in the nursery. They lured him in there by a trick and locked him up when he wanted to go back to London to try and find you.’

‘What, they locked him up with Finkie?’ Hemmingway laughed. ‘Poor old Sam! You might at least have put them in separate cells.’

‘Oh, but Mr. Fink-Drummond went days ago,’ Margery said quickly. ‘Didn’t Roy tell you?’

‘He said nothing about it when he arrived at St. James’s Square.’

‘Well, it was the evening before he left.’ Margery looked a little uncomfortable. ‘You know Roy drinks rather a lot, and I think he’d been at the bottle. Anyhow, he went up to have a chat with Fink-Drummond that evening and next morning he confessed to Daddy that he’d been sorry for our unwelcome guest and let him go.’

Hemmingway shrugged. ‘Well, as it was much too late for Finkie to have done any harm, it doesn’t really matter. In any case it wouldn’t have been fair to leave him a prisoner with the chance that an earthquake might bring down the house, so we’d have had to free him before taking to the Ark ourselves.’

Margery nodded. ‘You’d better run up and let Sam out yourselves. It’ll be a glorious surprise for him. I must hurry and get breakfast ready because the others’ll be down in a moment.’

Up in the nursery they found Sam. He was sitting, still fully dressed, hunched up in a chair with his head between his hands, and it was clear that he had not been to bed that night.

The second he saw Lavina he sprang up and, absolutely choking with relief, seized her in his arms; then, immediately his first excitement had subsided a little, he gripped and wrung Hemmingway’s hand as though he would never stop. For the last hour Lavina and Hemmingway had been dreading that meeting
but, when it came, Sam carried them both away by his intense, infectious joy at seeing them again. In a moment all three of them were talking at the same time; babbling out the hopes, fears and anguish through which they had passed during the last forty odd hours. As they went downstairs Gervaise and Oliver joined them. There were more kisses, embraces, handshakes. It was almost as though Hemmingway and Lavina had returned from a war or a journey to the North Pole.

Breakfast was a hurried meal as time was flying; but, as they ate, Lavina gave a carefully expurgated account of her adventures and Hemmingway helped her out when she was questioned about Derek and Roy.

On Sam’s asking about the private papers which Hemmingway was to have brought down he had to confess that, having dropped the satchel containing them behind the counter in the tea-shop at Burgh Heath when the fight started there, the ensuing earthquake had caused him to forget all about it.

The loss of the papers was such a little thing compared to Lavina’s safety that Sam only laughed about it; but the fact that they had been left behind reminded Lavina that the bags she had packed were still at St. James’s Square and she had little hope that if Derek did arrive he would bring them with him.

Fortunately, she had left many of her older garments at Stapleton when she had run away three years before, so, taking Sam with her, she dashed upstairs to her old room. Spreading the coverlet from the bed on the floor they hastily pulled any of her clothes that they could find out of drawers and cupboards, flung them on the coverlet and made it up into a big bundle. By the time they had done, the others were shouting to them from the hall to hurry.

Everything except last-minute articles had been loaded into the Ark already so apart from Lavina’s things there was little for them to carry down to it. After a last look round the house they crossed the lawn and walked along the edge of the lake to the landing stage beside the slips from which the Ark had been launched.

It was almost daylight and the sun was on the point of rising as they settled themselves in a big, flat-bottomed punt, and Gervaise and Sam began to pole them out to the centre of the lake where the Ark floated. The summit of the huge, steel sphere
stood over sixteen feet above the water, as it was ninety feet in circumference and a little less than half submerged, with the two-foot-wide landing stage, which ran round its equator just clear of the lake’s placid surface.

Ten minutes were occupied in poling the heavily laden punt out to the centre of the lake. Except for a few small fleecy clouds the sky was clear and they had covered only half the distance when the sun came up over the distant tree tops. As they reached the Ark the sinister pinkish light which heralded the rising of the terror of the heavens was already colouring the sky to the east.

Quietly but quickly Gervaise opened the steel door in the curved side of the Ark and, ducking their heads, they scrambled through into its interior. Having hitched the painter of the punt to the landing-platform, in case they might need it again later, he followed them inside and closed the steel door behind him. As he did so, the others were gazing from the port-holes of the Ark in silence and awe upon what was, perhaps, the dawning of the last day of the world.

Lavina and Hemmingway had seen the Ark when it had been nearing completion but not since it had been fully equipped and, on looking round them, they marvelled at the manner in which every spare inch of space had been made use of.

Its main deck was on the same level as the landing-stage that ran round its equator and its upper part was divided into five compartments.

One half of the upper part—a quarter of the whole sphere—was fitted up as a living-room, having a maximum length along its partition wall of 30 feet and a breadth, from the dead centre of the sphere to its rim, of 15 feet; which gave a semi-circular floor-space of approximately 350 square feet—roughly that of a rectangular room measuring 20 by 17½.

The other half of the upper part was divided into four segments, two large and two small. The larger each had approximately 105 square feet of floor space, and the smaller 62 square feet, being the equivalent of rectangular rooms measuring, roughly, 12 by 9 and 10 by 6 respectively. Where the segments met there was a tiny hallway, measuring 4 feet by 3 feet, cutting off their points but enabling separate doors to lead into each of them. The two biggest consisted of a men’s cabin and a kitchen; the two smallest, of a women’s cabin and a bathroom with the usual conveniences.

The height of the segment rooms at their inner ends was 14 feet, which, allowing for the ceilings curving gently down to the outer extremity of the sphere, still gave room in the men’s cabin for two sets of three bunks above one another on the partition walls; but the smaller, or women’s, cabin had one set of two bunks only. At eye level in the curved walls there were twelve thick port-holes, now covered with mica shades to neutralise the rays of the comet; six in the living-room, two each in the men’s
cabin and kitchen, and one each in the women’s cabin and bathroom.

A trap-door in the centre of the living-room led downwards to a lower deck which was also divided into segments. Below it, where the bilge of an ordinary ship would have been, the space was utilised as a fuel tank; as the Ark had a keel which could be lowered to give it direction and an engine which would propel it although, owing to its shape, only in a calm sea at a few knots an hour.

The lower deck housed the engine-room, the electric-light plant, the heating plant and a number of storerooms which at the moment were chock-full of supplies. In addition to food, which Hemmingway had estimated would last the passengers in the Ark for a couple of months, most of their purchases of seeds and implements and a collapsible canvas boat were packed away there; as well as a number of oxygen cylinders for use in the event of the Ark’s having to remain sealed for any considerable length of time and the air inside it becoming foul. Below decks there was also a baggage room for their spare clothes. Fortunately Hemmingway had had the fore-thought to send his down in advance and those of Derek and Roy had been stored there against their arrival.

Margery immediately took charge of the kitchen, Oliver began to potter among his scientific instruments, Gervaise busied himself adjusting the ventilators, while Sam went below to test the engines out once more. They had counted on Derek as their engineer but on his non-arrival Sam had spent several hours running over them, as his knowledge of engines was sufficient to enable him to take over at a pinch.

Now that they were on board the Ark, Lavina and Hemmingway felt the reaction from the strain of the previous days come suddenly upon them in all its strength. They were deadly tired and could hardly keep their heads up. There was nothing which required the urgent attention of either of them, so, at Gervaise’s suggestion, they retired to their cabins to go to bed.

‘Look! Look!’ exclaimed Oliver, and Gervaise joined him where he was staring through one of the living-room’s portholes. In the east the sun was now well up and below it, just above the distant trees, gleamed the red monster. It was bigger than the sun and flamed so fiercely that it would have been impossible
to have looked at it without some protection for the eyes, but the mica screens provided that; although, even allowing for their colour distortion, it could be seen that the whole park was now transfused with a horrid, unnatural light.

‘We shall find the suspense of the next sixteen hours very trying, I fear,’ Gervaise remarked.

His brother nodded. ‘I suppose you will but to me, of course, the whole thing is quite enthralling. Think of it, Gervaise, the millions of years that this world has been in existence; the æons of time it took to form the rocks. Even the life on our planet is a comparatively modern growth. Then, the great ages of the glacial periods and, coming nearer home to the sort of spans we can appreciate, the rise and fall of the great civilisations; Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Mexico, Peru, Greece, Rome—the Christian era—a mere flicker of the eyelid in time, but so long to us. This might have occurred at any moment during all those countless years, yet it just happens in our time and we are to have the privilege of witnessing the end of it all at 10.55 to-night.’

‘If it does come to that, I shan’t mind for myself.’ Gervaise shrugged. ‘There is very little left in this modern age of cheapjack bluster that appeals to me and, in spite of some difficulty in preserving my own standards, I have managed to have a not unpleasant time; but it’s hard on the younger people who are just beginning their lives and can accept change more readily. Yes, it’s hard on them and I’m hoping, still, that we may escape.’

Sam, who had just come up from the engine-room, remarked: ‘We wouldn’t stand an earthly if it were really coming slap at us as it appears to be at present; but since it’s not due to hit the earth until long after sunset I think we’ve got a sporting chance.’

‘I doubt it.’ Oliver lit one of his long, strong-smelling cheroots. ‘Even though the actual point of impact will be in the northeastern Pacific some hundreds of miles west of Southern California, the shock will be so terrific that I cannot see how the earth can fail to disintegrate.’

They turned away then and went about their work again; but Sam refused to be depressed. He had reached Stapleton himself, as he had promised Lavina, on the afternoon of the 22nd. When he had failed to find her there he had spent an evening of ever
increasing anxiety and sat up all night frantic with worry. To occupy his mind Gervaise had persuaded him to spend the morning of the 23rd overhauling the engines of the Ark, in case Derek failed them; but by midday Sam had been so distraught that he had declared his intention of returning to London. Feeling that if they allowed him to set off in search of Lavina his chances of finding her would be incredibly remote; and that if she arrived after all, as she still might at any time, she would become equally distraught at not finding him there; they had decided to lock him up for his own protection.

His fifteen hours’ imprisonment had seemed to him like fifteen days, for during them he had conjured up every sort of harrowing vision in which the most frightful calamities had overtaken her. But now that she had arrived, tired yet safe and well, to relieve him of the frightful mental torture he had been suffering for the best part of two days, he felt that the worst positively must be over; that whatever happened he could not suffer like that again and that it would be a rank injustice on the part of Fate to destroy them both within a few hours of their reunion. Yet with him, too, the reaction from strain was setting in and Gervaise persuaded him also to go to bed for a few hours.

As Sam left them Oliver tried out the wireless but the atmospherics were so bad that they could not get a coherent reception from any station.

At ten-past eight there was another violent earth tremor. From a placid sheet of water the lake was suddenly broken into a small choppy sea with wavelets swishing up on to its banks, while the Ark began to rock and pull upon its anchors.

As the Ark consisted of two spheres, one within the other, its inmates hardly felt the shock. The gyroscopes kept the deck steady but they could judge the violence of the tremor by the way the outer sphere gave to it and its portholes oscillated over those of the inner sphere, temporarily making it impossible to see out of the Ark because the two sets of port-holes were no longer directly opposite to each other.

From that time onward lesser quakes occurred with increasing frequency until eleven when there was the worst upheaval they had so far witnessed, but after it the earth became quiet again. The sun and comet were now blazing from a brazen sky. It was intolerably hot and stuffy so that, although the ventilators of the
Ark were fully open, Gervaise and Oliver sat perspiring in their shirt-sleeves and could breathe only with difficulty.

At Sam’s wish, and with the willing consent of the others, Gervaise had been elected captain of the Ark and at midday he decided to release oxygen in order to revitalise the atmosphere.