The War in the Air | Page 5

hindrance to his literary studies, which carried him up to the seventh
standard at an exceptionally early age. I mention these things so that you may have no
doubt at all concerning the sort of stuff Bert had in him.
He was six years younger than Tom, and for a time there was an attempt to utilise him in
the green-grocer's shop when Tom at twenty-one married Jessica--who was thirty, and
had saved a little money in service. But it was not Bert's forte to be utilised. He hated
digging, and when he was given a basket of stuff to deliver, a nomadic instinct arose
irresistibly, it became his pack and he did not seem to care how heavy it was nor where
he took it, so long as he did not take it to its destination. Glamour filled the world, and he
strayed after it, basket and all. So Tom took his goods out himself, and sought employers
for Bert who did not know of this strain of poetry in his nature. And Bert touched the
fringe of a number of trades in succession--draper's porter, chemist's boy, doctor's page,
junior assistant gas-fitter, envelope addresser, milk-cart assistant, golf caddie, and at last
helper in a bicycle shop. Here, apparently, he found the progressive quality his nature had
craved. His employer was a pirate-souled young man named Grubb, with a
black-smeared face by day, and a music-hall side in the evening, who dreamt of a patent

lever chain; and it seemed to Bert that he was the perfect model of a gentleman of spirit.
He hired out quite the dirtiest and unsafest bicycles in the whole south of England, and
conducted the subsequent discussions with astonishing verve. Bert and he settled down
very well together. Bert lived in, became almost a trick rider--he could ride bicycles for
miles that would have come to pieces instantly under you or me--took to washing his face
after business, and spent his surplus money upon remarkable ties and collars, cigarettes,
and shorthand classes at the Bun Hill Institute.
He would go round to Tom at times, and look and talk so brilliantly that Tom and Jessie,
who both had a natural tendency to be respectful to anybody or anything, looked up to
him immensely.
"He's a go-ahead chap, is Bert," said Tom. "He knows a thing or two."
"Let's hope he don't know too much," said Jessica, who had a fine sense of limitations.
"It's go-ahead Times," said Tom. "Noo petaters, and English at that; we'll be having 'em
in March if things go on as they do go.
I never see such Times. See his tie last night?"
"It wasn't suited to him, Tom. It was a gentleman's tie. He wasn't up to it--not the rest of
him, It wasn't becoming"...
Then presently Bert got a cyclist's suit, cap, badge, and all; and to see him and Grubb
going down to Brighton (and back)--heads down, handle-bars down, backbones
curved--was a revelation in the possibilities of the Smallways blood.
Go-ahead Times!
Old Smallways would sit over the fire mumbling of the greatness of other days, of old Sir
Peter, who drove his coach to Brighton and back in eight-and-twenty hours, of old Sir
Peter's white top-hats, of Lady Bone, who never set foot to ground except to walk in the
garden, of the great, prize-fights at Crawley. He talked of pink and pig-skin breeches, of
foxes at Ring's Bottom, where now the County Council pauper lunatics were enclosed, of
Lady Bone's chintzes and crinolines. Nobody heeded him. The world had thrown up a
new type of gentleman altogether--a gentleman of most ungentlemanly energy, a
gentleman in dusty oilskins and motor goggles and a wonderful cap, a stink-making
gentleman, a swift, high-class badger, who fled perpetually along high roads from the
dust and stink he perpetually made. And his lady, as they were able to see her at Bun Hill,
was a weather-bitten goddess, as free from refinement as a gipsy--not so much dressed as
packed for transit at a high velocity.
So Bert grew up, filled with ideals of speed and enterprise, and became, so far as he
became anything, a kind of bicycle engineer of the let's-have-a-look-at-it and enamel
chipping variety. Even a road-racer, geared to a hundred and twenty, failed to satisfy him,
and for a time he pined in vain at twenty miles an hour along roads that were continually
more dusty and more crowded with mechanical traffic. But at last his savings

accumulated, and his chance came. The hire-purchase system bridged a financial gap, and
one bright and memorable Sunday morning he wheeled his new possession through the
shop into the road, got on to it with the advice and assistance of Grubb, and teuf-teuffed
off into the haze of the traffic-tortured high