While all this plotting and counter-plotting had been going on in England and Europe, and France, thanks to what some might call the patriotic treachery of Victor Fargeau, was rapidly preparing for an invasion of Germany, which a magnificently-equipped army of nearly four million men meant to make a very different affair to the last one; while Russia was swiftly and secretly massing her huge military and very formidable naval forces in the near and far east, and England had, as usual, been muddling along, chattering over reforms on land and sea without getting them done; and while Germany, for once about to be taken unawares, was quietly getting ready for the inevitable struggle, a quiet, broad-browed, deep-eyed man had been at the head of an army of workmen, building up what was intended to be the real capital and governing centre of the world. In the midst of a broad, barren plain, broken by great masses of rock, many of them snow-capped and ice-crowned even in the middle of the northern summer, there rose the walls and chimneys of what looked like a commonplace collection of factories, such as might be found in any of the manufacturing districts of Europe and America.
About four miles to the west, under a rocky promontory which the discoverer of this desolate land had named Cape Adelaide, little thinking what a connection it would have with another Adelaide, there was a small natural harbour, navigable for about five months in the year, constantly crowded with colliers. For over a year it had been packed with them. Before the previous winter set in they had been laden with coal and machinery and building materials, and throughout the long winter Doctor Lamson had relentlessly pushed the work on under rows of electric lights, which rivalled the Aurora itself.
The men were well housed and fed and lavishly paid, and so, in spite of the cold and darkness, they had worked well and cheerfully, well knowing that it was impossible for them to get back, save in the steamers that brought them. By the time the ice broke and the vessels were released another long line of them was already making its way up through the still half-frozen waters of Davis Strait and Lancaster Sound, laden with more coal, materials, and machinery. A telegraph line had been taken from Port Nelson across Hudson Bay over Rae Isthmus, and then through the Gulf of Boothia to the works, and this put Dr Lamson in direct communication with Winnipeg and the rest of the world.
At intervals of two hundred miles, across the icy desert of the north, groups of huge steel masts, three hundred feet high, had been erected, and these had been continued singly or in pairs over all the principal elevations of the North American Continent, and also over Greenland and Iceland to the north of Scotland, and thence to the rest of the British Islands. It was a miracle that could only have been wrought by millions, but the millions were spent without stint, in the full knowledge that they would be repaid in the days when it was possible to tax the world for the privilege of living.
The Storage Works were in the form of a square, measuring four hundred feet each way. In the exact centre of an interior square measuring fifty feet each way was that mysterious spot of earth where the needle of the compass points neither to north nor south nor east nor west, but straight down to the centre of the globe; and over it was built a great circular tower, forty feet in diameter and a hundred feet in height, which contained a gigantic reproduction of the instrument which had stood on Doctor Emil Fargeau's table in his laboratory at Strassburg on that memorable night when he had completed the work which was destined to lead to his own ruin and death and to the revolutionising of the world.
From this tower ran underground, in all directions, thousands of copper cables leading to the gigantic storage batteries with which the greater part of the buildings were filled. In the middle of each side of the great square a two thousand horse-power engine was ready to furnish the necessary electrical force in the absorber, as the great apparatus in the centre was called.
Everything was in order to commence work; in fact, Doctor Lamson had just decided that he would try his engines together for the first time, when Clifford Vandel's telegram reached him from Southampton.
His agent in Winnipeg had kept him well informed of the principal events going on in the world during his long isolation, and the sailing of the French and Russian Polar expeditions via Davis Straits had not escaped him. For a few minutes after he had read the dispatch he walked up and down the telegraph room, into which no one but himself and Austin Vandel, Clifford's nephew and his own general manager, could under any circumstances gain admission, since none but they knew the combinations of the lock which opened the steel door.
Austin was sitting at the table where he had received the message, and he broke the silence by saying:
"I guess, doctor, that looks a bit ugly. I suppose it's that Alsatian Frenchman and that pretty Frenchwoman you were telling me about that's fixed this up."
"There's not the slightest doubt about that," said Lamson, whose enthusiasm for the great scheme had quite overcome his earlier scruples. "If we had only known of that other set of specifications, and managed to get hold of them somehow—still that wouldn't have done much good, because even then the Frenchwoman, this beautiful daughter of the Bourbons as they call her, would have given it away as soon as she guessed what we were doing; and if she hadn't done so—well, Fargeau would have done so; so I suppose after all it's inevitable."
"Then you think we'll have to fight for it?" said Austin.
"If those expeditions are really armed forces, and their object is to take these works by hook or by crook, of course we must," replied Lamson. "Poor devils! I wonder what they'll feel like when we turn the disintegrators on them?"
"Don't talk about those," said Austin. "Time enough for that when we have to use them to save ourselves—which the Lord forbid. I sha'n't forget that experiment of yours on poor Hudson's body; but to see it turned on to a living man! Great Scott!"
"Yes; it won't be very pleasant," said Lamson, whose rather gentle and retiring nature had become completely transformed under the influence of the gigantic possibilities which were now at his disposal. "But suppose they get their ships up to Port Adelaide?—it's rather curious, by the way, that it should have the same name as that Frenchwoman, who, I suppose, is by this time about our most dangerous and determined enemy—but suppose they get them there, and begin knocking the works about with big guns. Suppose," he went on, with something like a shudder, "a shell bursts in the absorber, where are we? And, mind you, if they come they'll bring Fargeau with them; and if they took us prisoners or killed us, he would have material enough here to make another one—and he would know how to do it. No, no, Vandel; if I have to defend the works I'll do it. My whole life and soul are here now, and no Frenchman or Russian sets foot inside here while I'm alive, unless he comes as a prisoner."
"But look here," said Austin; "couldn't you paralyse 'em? Why not set the engines to work, and mop up this world's soul, or whatever you call it, right away, so that their engines should break down long before they got here, and just freeze them out."
"That, my dear Austin," replied the doctor, "is a rather more hasty remark than I should have expected you to make. Don't you see that if we were to start the engines, and cut off our American communications, as would be necessary, we should not only paralyse the expedition, we should also paralyse the whole of Canada and the United States, cut off our communications with England, and make it impossible for our friends to communicate with us, or for them to come here—as they are doing this month."
"Guess I spoke a bit too soon," said Austin. "That's so; and, of course, we couldn't do it."
The doctor continued his walk up and down the room for a few moments longer, then stopped and said suddenly, "No; but I'll tell you what we can and will do if there's going to be any of this sort of foul play about. The president and all our friends will be much safer here than in any other part of the world, for if we have to starve the world out they'll be all right here. Wire to your uncle; say that we have received his message and are acting upon it, and tell him to bring the whole party here with the utmost speed; call it a pleasure-trip or a tour of inspection, or what they please, but they must come at once, and, above all, they must get here before these so-called Polar expeditions."
"That's the talk, doctor," exclaimed Austin; "you've got right down on to it this time. I'll fix that up in the code and send it right away."
There is, of course, neither day nor night during June in Boothia Land, only a little deepening of the twilight towards midnight, but the message was despatched via Winnipeg a little after nine in the evening, according to conventional time, and so Clifford Vandel was able to decipher it in his sitting-room at Orrel Court before breakfast the next morning. The carriages were already waiting to take the party down to the Nadine's berth at Southampton Water as soon as possible after an early breakfast, for there was to be a race round the Isle of Wight for cruising yachts that day, and some of the finest yachts in the two hemispheres were going to compete, the Nadine and several other steam-yachts, including the Vlodova, belonging to the Grand Duke Ruric, were to follow the race, and the day was to wind up with supper at Clifford Vandel's bungalow at Cowes.
Therefore the moment he had finished translating the cipher, without waiting even for breakfast, he sent his man to ask Lord Orrel and his son for the favour of a few minutes' private conversation in his lordship's library. This man was the brother of the Countess Sophie's French maid—deaf, handy, silent, and wonderfully well up to his work. He had engaged him on the count's recommendation, after dismissing his English valet on the instant for, as he thought, trying to learn more than he ought to know from his correspondence. It is scarcely necessary to add that Ma'm'selle Sophie knew as much about the one as she did about the other; and, as a matter of fact, she had procured both appointments. This being so, it was only natural that within a very few minutes Count Valdemar and his daughter should have heard of the receipt of the telegram, and Clifford Vandel's request for an interview with Lord Orrel and his son. The immediate result was two interviews before breakfast instead of one.
"What can it mean, papa?" said Sophie, when she had softly locked her father's door. "Jules says that the dispatch was brought up from Southampton this morning. Before he gave it to Mr Vandel he, of course, steamed the envelope and looked at it. It was in cipher, as one might expect; but it came from Winnipeg, and Winnipeg is the one point of communication between Boothia and the rest of the world. Mr Vandel translated it at once, and immediately went to talk to Lord Orrel and the viscount about it. I wonder whether—but no, that's impossible. We couldn't have been overheard, and no one that knows anything of our plans could have any possible inducement to betray us. The marquise told me that she had a letter from Fargeau yesterday: I wonder if she has said anything."
"My dear Sophie," replied her father, "as I told you the night before last, a woman in love is a woman lost to all purposes of diplomacy, unless her interests and those of the man she is in love with are identical. Here they are diametrically opposed; a word from her to the viscount would ruin everything—at least, so far as the expeditions are concerned."
"All the more reason then," said Sophie, clenching her hands, "that we—I mean that the Vlodoya should capture the Nadine with all these people on board her. If we have them at our mercy we have everything. I would give a good deal to know what there was in that dispatch that Clifford Vandel had this morning."
"And so would I," replied her father; "a great deal. Do you think that if your maid were to promise her brother, say, £500, for the transcription which Vandel must have made of it, there would be any chance of getting it?"
"We can only try," replied Sophie. "The old gentleman is very careful about his papers, they tell me; still, we will try."
"Well, gentlemen," said Clifford Vandel, about the same moment in Lord Orrel's library, "I think you will agree with me that the doctor would not have sent a dispatch like this without pretty good reason; and if these people mean pushing matters to extremity, why, of course, it might be necessary for him to, as he says here, freeze them out, in which case they couldn't get there. And if they couldn't we couldn't; wherefore it seems good reasoning to say that we ought to be there first—if we're going to get there at all."
"My dear Vandel," replied his lordship, "it is the best of reasoning; and I am quite sure that Doctor Lamson would not have dreamt of sending such a dispatch without good reasons, and I think I am justified in telling you that this morning I received a confidential letter from an old colleague of mine in the Foreign Office, in which he says that, according to reports of our agents, both in France and Germany, an outbreak of hostilities may occur at any moment within the next few weeks, without warning—just as it did in 1870."
"Then," said Hardress, sharply, "if that is so, there simply must be some connection between that and the dispatch of these two expeditions. I don't often jump to conclusions, Mr Vandel, but I think now that Miss Chrysie was perfectly right. They're not going to try and get to the Pole at all. It's the Magnetic Pole they want, and they'll be there this summer if we don't find some way to stop them; and I quite agree that we ought to get there first. It may be necessary to show Europe that they can't get on without us, even in the matter of fighting."
"Very well, then," said Lord Orrel, "we'll call that settled; we'll make it a summer Arctic trip. How soon can you get us across the Atlantic, Hardress?"
"I can land you in Halifax in six days. We'll coal up there; and, if we're not too much crowded with ice, I'll get you to Rae Isthmus in six days more. Meanwhile I will telegraph to Lamson to have one of his steamers waiting for us on the other side of the Isthmus, and in another week, including the land travel, which may be difficult, we will be at the works. Or, if we find the sea fairly clear, we'll steam straight up to Fox Channel, Kury's Strait, and take you straight to Boothia Land. At any rate, the expeditions are only just starting, one from Havre and the other one from Riga, and, at that rate, we should certainly be there a clear month before them, even if they really are going."
"Then," said Clifford Vandel, slowly but gravely, "if that's so, I guess the best thing we can do is to get there as quickly as possible and start the circus as soon as we can. If Europe means fighting—well, we can't have a better way of proving our power, and showing France and Germany and the rest of them that it will pay them to deal with the Great Storage Trust, than by just making their own war impossible. When they find they can't even fight without our permission, I guess they'll pretty soon come to terms."
"I agree with you entirely, my dear Vandel," said Lord Orrel.