first one passed the shop...
All this gyroscopic and mono-rail development naturally absorbed a vast amount of
public attention, and there,was also a huge excitement consequent upon the amazing gold
discoveries off the coast of Anglesea made by a submarine prospector, Miss Patricia
Giddy. She had taken her degree in geology and mineralogy in the University of London,
and while working upon the auriferous rocks of North Wales, after a brief holiday spent
in agitating for women's suffrage, she had been struck by the possibility of these reefs
cropping up again under the water. She had set herself to verify this supposition by the
use of the submarine crawler invented by Doctor Alberto Cassini. By a happy mingling
of reasoning and intuition peculiar to her sex she found gold at her first descent, and
emerged after three hours' submersion with about two hundredweight of ore containing
gold in the unparalleled quantity of seventeen ounces to the ton. But the whole story of
her submarine mining, intensely interesting as it is, must be told at some other time;
suffice it now to remark simply that it was during the consequent great rise of prices,
confidence, and enterprise that the revival of interest in flying occurred.
It is curious how that revival began. It was like the coming of a breeze on a quiet day;
nothing started it, it came. People began to talk of flying with an air of never having for
one moment dropped the subject. Pictures of flying and flying machines returned to the
newspapers; articles and allusions increased and multiplied in the serious magazines.
People asked in mono-rail trains, "When are we going to fly?" A new crop of inventors
sprang up in a night or so like fungi. The Aero Club announced the project of a great
Flying Exhibition in a large area of ground that the removal of slums in Whitechapel had
rendered available.
The advancing wave soon produced a sympathetic ripple in the Bun Hill establishment.
Grubb routed out his flying-machine model again, tried it in the yard behind the shop, got
a kind of flight out of it, and broke seventeen panes of glass and nine flower-pots in the
greenhouse that occupied the next yard but one.
And then, springing from nowhere, sustained one knew not how, came a persistent,
disturbing rumour that the problem had been solved, that the secret was known. Bert met
it one early-closing afternoon as he refreshed himself in an inn near Nutfield, whither his
motor-bicycle had brought him. There smoked and meditated a person in khaki, an
engineer, who presently took an interest in Bert's machine. It was a sturdy piece of
apparatus, and it had acquired a kind of documentary value in these quick-changing times;
it was now nearly eight years old. Its points discussed, the soldier broke into a new topic
with, "My next's going to be an aeroplane, so far as I can see. I've had enough of roads
and ways."
"They TORK," said Bert.
"They talk--and they do," said the soldier.
"The thing's coming--"
"It keeps ON coming," said Bert; "I shall believe when I see it."
"That won't be long," said the soldier.
The conversation seemed degenerating into an amiable wrangle of contradiction.
"I tell you they ARE flying," the soldier insisted. "I see it myself."
"We've all seen it," said Bert.
"I don't mean flap up and smash up; I mean real, safe, steady, controlled flying, against
the wind, good and right."
"You ain't seen that!"
"I 'AVE! Aldershot. They try to keep it a secret. They got it right enough. You bet--our
War Office isn't going to be caught-napping this time."
Bert's incredulity was shaken. He asked questions- and the soldier expanded.
"I tell you they got nearly a square mile fenced in--a sort of valley. Fences of barbed wire
ten feet high, and inside that they do things. Chaps about the camp--now and then we get
a peep. It isn't only us neither. There's the Japanese; you bet they got, it too--and the
Germans!"
The soldier stood with his legs very wide apart, and filled his pipe thoughtfully. Bert sat
on the low wall against which his motor-bicycle was leaning.
"Funny thing fighting'll be," he said.
"Flying's going to break out," said the soldier. "When it DOES come, when the curtain
does go up, I tell you you'll find every one on the stage--busy.... Such fighting, too!... I
suppose you don't read the papers about this sort of thing?"
"I read 'em a bit," said Bert.
"Well, have you noticed what one might call the remarkable case of the disappearing
inventor--the inventor who turns up in a blaze of publicity, fires off a few successful
experiments, and vanishes?"
"Can't say I 'ave," said Bert.
"Well, I 'ave, anyhow. You get anybody
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