WHEN the fact of her brother’s death reached Greta Trensham she set about final preparations. Some hours needed to pass, for not until dusk was down and her plans became practical could she carry them out. She travelled round Cliff village during the morning, to find it strangely empty and deserted, for a great exodus had taken place to the amusement of the military guardians. Greta’s own warnings did not trouble the soldiers. They knew what had happened in London and the day brought forth for her, so judged that she might well be distraught.
Her own thoughts concentrated on the coming action and she marvelled that any hours could drag as these. She yearned for an approaching end, which caused her no more dread than death had wakened in Faraday. A thankful welcome awaited it; and she was cheered and supported to remember that revenge upon her brother and all his works would come from her own hand.
Cliff House lay within the guarded circuit, where stood the laboratory, and a straight path of three hundred yards united them. Few moved upon it now save the soldiers and Greta. The gardens were long emptied of regular workers and only Roger Horn and two old women continued to wait upon their mistress until she should depart. She had told them it would be on the morrow. Signs of neglect were everywhere visible and long had been so. Upon the great forecourt grass was spouting and the collections in the glass houses had died, or turned to jungle.
When twilight thickened Greta set forth upon her last journey to the laboratory with a clear run between her and the main entrance of it. Only barbed wires crossed the path at two points, but she would be travelling at fifty or sixty miles an hour and within twenty yards of her goal before she struck them, for her car was powerful and capable of great speed. A soldier on guard marked her spring out of the murk. He yelled, but was too late to stop her or save himself and died a moment later. Straight at the major door she headed and brought her car like a battering ram upon it. The impact created an instantaneous change and it could not be said that the car advanced or the door fallen after they collided, for both vanished almost instantly. A roar of sound bellowed upward and a blaze of orange light turned the gathering darkness brighter than noonday sunshine. Flames burst from every side of the building as it fell like a pack of cards. The metal receptacles that crowned it were turned to molten steel while the blast of the explosion tore up the earth on every side, cutting off the ancient trees that girdled the hollow as a scythe mows pasture and transforming the sandy soil of the glen to glass. A terrific din persisted and for a time the glare turned gathering night to day. Then slowly light and din diminished to a steady, earth-born glow of great timber trees burning like tinder and dying echoes of the explosion reverberating afar. Torrents of rain began to fall through the poisoned air and red-hot earth hissed under it. Clouds lumbered up, as though to hide this great wound, for where the laboratory had stood now there yawned a smoking hole like the mouth of a volcano, still exuding smoke and flame from its crater.
Time was never destined to fill that gash again and around the gulf, now swept clear of every stock and stone, a desert of shuddering ashes spread. With astounding speed was this destruction accomplished and presently, in the silence that followed, broken now only by the rush of rain, there began to move earth-born lights and squeak the little sound of human voices where crept a cautious force into that valley of dust and ashes.
Dawn indicated the nature, length and breadth of the disaster. Many cob-walled cottages of the hamlet had crumbled under the blast and three score lives were lost, mostly of the aged. Cliff church tower suffered and its battlements were brought to the churchyard. Gravestones had been broken and the modest mausoleum of Sir Hector and his partner suffered indignity. The western wing of Cliff House came down, but the mass still stood though gaping with a thousand rents. Every window was destroyed and the fabric riven, the great palm house transformed to molten glass and twisted steel. Both serving women escaped unhurt; old Roger Horn, seeking fruit for Greta’s dessert that night, died out-of-doors. A kitchen-garden wall fell upon him and not until many days had passed were his bones discovered. Of the soldiery seven men lost their lives and no more. The total mortality was not great, nor did the explosion take a form so prodigious as Faraday foretold, though the scars indeed were destined to remain for all time. By irony of chance the actual cause of the event none ever knew. Only a dead soldier, consumed by fire, shared the truth with a dead woman; but while many assumed hat fate had synchronized the time-bomb’s explosion with his own death day, others, taking note of her utter disappearance, suspected Faraday’s sister.
• • •
So fell the house of Heron and soon enough will their good and evil be forgotten, their story a page of history that only the curious turn. Time has already rebuilt their dwelling and transformed it into a guest house for those who need rest from their labours. A golf course stretches over those great gardens, a promenade threads the cliffs, a haven for little boats has been built below. But the gulf where the laboratory stood was left to Nature and the cavern adorned by her hands. Lady fern and hart’s tongue loll from the red sandstone; moss glimmers in great cushions to pillow the broken rock; seeds of brier and thorn and rowan brought by the birds have sprung to life in rift and ledge; the cavity, sinking down to regions of perpetual gloom where sunlight can never reach, is naked no more. Nor wholly silent, for a rill winds and murmurs through the depths of it.
Here and on the sea-facing precipices close at hand the first fiery harvest of nuclear fissure fell upon England and wakened a nation’s prayer that it might be the last; but whether that prodigious energy shall wound to the death a well-found planet and the cradle of Earth’s only reasoning creature remains for us to learn. Is it to be believed that human power exists to shorten the life of willing, helpless Mother Earth and batter her beauty and her glory back to primal chaos? Surely eternal hope may trust the Atomic Age and strengthen our faith in righteousness still beyond our reach, but not our ken. As the old judge affirmed, powers mightier than atomic lie hidden within the composition of man himself, only seeking liberation to reveal how not earth, sea nor air hold elements so great.
We need to think in grander terms — not astronomic or even geological — but pitched to a measure far ahead of our present standpoint on the great journey. As yet there is little to tell since man’s advent, in comparison with the pilgrimage and the record that yet lie ahead of him. We are the children of yesterday and probably short of our meridian altitude by unnumbered centuries; yet our stature and our progress in historic time indicate standards of intelligence ascending to starry flashes of genius which foretell where civilization may stand in ages yet to be. The duration of Earth is hidden beyond our calculation; but that her sole, conscious inhabitant should empty her dwelling-place in space and shorten his own brief flicker in time is the nightmare of an idiot. Consciousness, capable of malevolence so vast, becomes a mere poisonous exhalation, a virus to confound the heart-beat of a solar system, a plague-spot on the universe. The clown of this cosmic circus we may be, but not the arch-villain.
Though bankrupt for the moment of resources and suffering from exhaustion that will pass with the generation responsible for it, the hearts of those to come shall surely quicken in sight of promised lands denied ourselves; for, though years long and many have sped since mankind welcomed his Ages of Gold, the sunrise must surely dawn that shall herald another golden age before our tale is ended. Hope remains, and “unity,” “good willing,” “brotherhood” all promise to mean something some day, if we live to grow up.
THE END