It was by the merest chance that Baruch Frankl and his daughter were not on the Kaiser : for Frankl was the half-nephew of Mrs. Charles P. Stickney, a New York Jewess, and as the marriage of Miss Stickney with Lord Alfred Cowern was only fifteen days off, Frankl had made arrangements to accompany the bridegroom across, but had been detained by stress of business; happily for him—for Lord Alfred, the bridegroom, was a dancing prisoner in the Boodah .

Early, then, on the third morning thence, Charles P. Stickney, the bride's father, a natty little Yankee, hurried a-foot to the Maritime Exchange: for, to his infinite surprise, the Kaiser's arrival had not been in the morning's paper: so the little arch- millionaire stepped toward Beaver Street, sure that the Kaiser had come in too late for the press.

Early as it was, he found the place as thickly a-buzz as though it was that feverish hour between eleven and twelve.

He pushed his way to the bulletin-board, inscribed with the hours at which ships are sighted and entered into dock: the Kaiser was not there: and with prone outlook he went seeking an assistant superintendent; but, sighting a fellow-operator, come, as usual, to digest the world, from barometer-reports to coffee-quotations at Rio, Charles P. Stickney cried to him: "Funny about the Kaiser ! Know anything?"

"It's the darndest thing…" mumbled the other, still star-gazing at a blackboard prices-current of American staples: "raise Hell this day, I guess"….

And on through the rooms Stickney shouldered: all in the air here an odour of the sea, and of them that go down to it in ships; pilot, captain, supercargo, purser; abstracts from logs, copies of manifests and clearances, marks and numbers of merchandise, with quantities, shippers, consignees; here peaked caps, and the jaw that chewed once, and paused long, and, lo, it moved anew; Black Books, massive volumes enshrining ancient wrecks; vast newspaper-files in every tongue; records of changes in lightships, lights, buoys, and beacons, from Shanghai to Cape Horn; reports, charts, atlases, globes; the progress of the rebellion in Shantung, and the earthquake last night in Quito; directories, and high-curved reference-books, and storm-maps; every minute the arrival of cipher cablegrams, breathless with the day's Amsterdam exchange on London, or with the quantities of tea in transitu via Suez or Pacific Railway; and the drift of ocean-currents, and the latest position of the Jane Richardson , derelict, and the arrival of the Ladybird at Bahia; and the probabilities of wind-circulation, atmospheric moisture, aberrations of audibility in fog; and in the middle of it the pulse of the sun, the thundering engines and shooting shuttles of this Loom; a tiptop briskness and bustle of action; a scramble of wits; a mêlée to the death; mixed with pea-jackets, and aromas of chewed pigtail, and a rolling in the gait.

Into this roar of life that word Kaiser stole: and it grew to a chorus.

Charles P. Stickney, butting upon a tearing clerk who was holding aloft a bulletin of icebergs and derelicts, tried to stop him: upon which the clerk, who would not be stopped, cried with a back-looking face of passionate haste: "London message just received— no intelligence of Kaiser —"

But he had hardly disappeared, when another man from an inner room rushed, waving something: the Navesink Highlands lookout had wired the Kaiser in sight! And while the Exchange rang with cheers, Stickney, a colour now in his sere cheeks, went boring his way outward.

The lookout had said it—those blue eyes that never failed there on his watch-tower, he knowing the ships that sail the sea as the Cyclops his sheep, in his heart so knowing them all, that as that sea-glass detected a speck on the horizon, those sea-wise nostrils sniffed its name: for between the Mary Jane and the Mary Anne , both off-shore schooners, is all the world of difference: if you would not see it, he knows. And he had wired the Kaiser! —so expectant his outlook: and that day wept like a ruined man.

Swift upon his first wire a second flashed: and one of those craped days of the tragedies of commerce followed, the boding, the loss, flashed everywhere, pervading Europe and America.

The next morning the Exchange, all the exchanges, the Lloyds', the bourses, were crowded from an early hour, but subdued: no news, not a word; but still—there was certainty: for had the Kaiser and her wireless been merely disabled, she would undoubtedly by now have been reported: she had foundered.

Foundered! —in the serenest weather in which ship ever crossed the water….

But at eleven the truth came: for the brig which had lain becalmed near the Boodah at the moment of the tragedy, and now was nearer England, had flashed the news: "many of the Kaiser's passengers mutilated, many drowned".

Death, then, was in the pottage of Life; the air tainted with specks of blood….

That day Man, as it were, rent his garments, sitting in ashes, and to Heaven sent up a howl of fear, of anguish, and of hissing hate.

Those who lacked the intelligence to feel the fear, felt the hate: every girl, the shirt-maker, the shopman, feeling himself robbed of his very own; the Duke in the centre of his oak-lands felt it; the burglar, the junk-dweller of the Yangtse, the pariah of the Hugli. Lamentation and a voice in Ramah, wail on wail. For God had given the sea to man, and it had been seized by a devil.

God had also given the shore; and it, too, had been seized: but, as that had been before their birth, they had not observed it—in such a numb somnambulism shambles humanity.

But the theft of the sea was new and flagrant, it, and the air, being all that had remained: and a roar for vengeance—sharp, and rolled in blood—rose from the throat of man.

Accordingly, when Mr. C. P. Stickney during the afternoon wired for information to the White House, he received the reply: "Encourage calm on 'Change. Government in touch with Europe. Great naval activity. Await good news, seven P.M."

It was about seven P.M. that what the White House would have considered specially good news occurred: for the Boodah then telegraphed through to O'Hara's Mahomet at the Straits:

"B. 7651. Begins. After to-morrow (Monday) you begin taxation, as per Order B., 7315, of 2nd inst. But if warships desire to pass out, (not in), permit, till further order. Richard. Ends".

Which meant that if any Power, or Powers, desired to concentrate force upon the attack of any island, the Lord of the Sea granted them facilities.

The Kaiser passengers had now been sent off to New York, the Boodah's halls seemed the home of desolation; and, as the night advanced, Hogarth and Loveday walked on the roof: for they could find no rest, the sky without moon or star, the sea making of three sides of the Boodah a roaring reef, the wind blowing cold, they two wrapped to the nose in oilskins with sou'-westers, lashed by rages of rain and spray.

Yonder, to the north-west, appeared a ghost, a thing, a derelict brig, driving downhill on the billows, like a blind man gadding aimless with a crazy down-look, the rags of her one sail drumming on the gusts; and near, nearer, within a stone's-throw of the Boodah , she swaggered wearily, drab Arab, doomed despondent Ahasuerus of the deep, nomad on the nomad sea; and on into the gloom of the south- west she roamed, to be again and again re-created by the rolling light-drum, while Hogarth with a groan said: "If I were only dead! I feel to-night like a man abandoned by the Almighty".

Loveday muttered those words so loved by Hogarth:

"….this is my favoured lot, My exaltation to afflictions high"….

And Hogarth: "Do you know what is burdening me tonight? It is the curses which the world is at this moment hurling upon me: as when one man, thinking evilly of another, sticks needles into wax, and needles of pain pierce the other…" a sense of evil which was deepened the next day by an ominous little accident, when one of his old gunpractice hulks arrived from Bombay, bearing the throne: for as this was being conveyed into the Boodah a front leg was broken.

Meantime, the world's trade went on as before: only, night and day, its ships lay-to, to pay rent with threat and curse: in all only thirteen ships being sunk ere sea and earth had learned the new conditions.

And from the very first day of this taxing a deeper sense of pain and hardship pervaded the world, the Lord of the Sea now taxing at 4s. per ton a world's tonnage of 29 millions, 7 1/2 millions in sailing-ships, 21 1/2 millions in steamships, once in a voyage—a little less than the revenue of Britain.

So one night he received message from O'Hara that "British
Mediterranean fleet has passed through the Straits, homeward".

It was not for nothing that the nations had allowed three weeks to pass before avenging the Kaiser: soon enough the Cabinets had been in intercommunication; but in the "Concert" had occurred—a hitch.

Britain had proposed the destruction of the islands in detail, the Powers to contribute weights of metal proportionate to their mercantile marines: as a basis for calculation she had offered her force in Home and Mediterranean waters; and, this having been accepted, by the 5th ships were under the pennant, and outfitting.

Now, all this time, things had been in a pretty whirl: oratory from pulpit, platform, stump, eyes on fire, mobs that went in haste, shrieks of newspaper passion, organized burglary, and a strange epidemic of fires: for the modern nations lived by the sea, and it was seized. Moreover, on the 6th, after a meeting at the Albert Hall, organized by the Associated Chambers of Commerce, our Government—"Liberal", under Sir Moses Cohen—suffered a defeat of thirty-four votes on a division.

And it was during the turmoil that ensued upon this that the German Foreign Office (on the 9th) sent to the new Russian the wireless " Bion "-meaning—"Let us meet to discuss the subject of-England".

That meeting took place at Konigsberg.

It was now that a fort-man—formerly a Nottingham shoemaker—landed from the Truth's yacht at Frederikshavn, and thence wrote to the Daily Chronicle, to say, briefly, this: That, supposing the European navies joined to batter away with l5-inch guns and torpedoes at five feet of steel, they might finally succeed in mining a hole in it; but if the thick steel happened to have still bigger guns, " and other things ", with which, meantime, to batter back at the thin ships, then it would be the ships, probably, which would get holes in them: it was a question of Time. Also he said that the islands were defended by devoted men, every one of intelligence and high principle, who knew what they wanted, and meant to have it—their shooting average being 97 per 100. He advised his country not to try it, especially in view of certain political rumours which he had picked up in the Cattegat.

This letter, although badly spelled, aroused a sensation The "high principle" of the fort-men, indeed, met with bitter laughter; but its hearty patriotism, simplicity, technical knowledge, were so remarkable, that now a doubt as to the battleship arose—and with it a gnashing of teeth. The service-clubs, the "experts", wrote this and that; the publics poured forth letters, schemes, plots, inventions—like the brain of the world versus the brain of Hogarth. " Starve Him Out ", was a title in the Contemporary: but the reply was bitterly obvious. And into the midst of this racket burst the news that the negotiations with Germany, Russia and France were at a deadlock.

These Powers had raised this question: "In case of the capture of the islands—what shall be done with those most powerful engines?"

Here was a riddle. For whichever nation took even one would score a vast advantage.

If, now, Britain had had the greatness of mind to declare for the sinking, in any case, of all the islands, the difficulty was solved, but the new-Government brooms would score a point and gain a trick, and they proposed the division of surviving forts in the proportion of fighting-power contributed.

The Continent objected: Britain was " firm "; whereupon the French
Ambassador sent to Downing Street his withdrawal from the crusade.

And so when—on the 22nd—the fleets assembled at Portland and Milford Haven before rendezvous at the Lizard, the whole original proposal had fallen through: for here was neither tricolour nor saltire, only three German ships, only five Italian; the "probability", moreover, of the capture of a sea-fort by England was imminent: and on the evening of the mobilisation of the squadrons feverish activity was reported from Toulon; a British Legation attaché, , seeing fit to stroll round the Caserne Pepinière, beheld in the yard an extraordinary crowd of limbers: and, pitching into a cab, from the nearest postes et télégraphes wired to London the word: "Angleterre".

Too late: the British fleets were gone, leaving the Channel and
Western Mediterranean desert.

Now the nation awoke to a consciousness of dark skies: cloud of the west rushing to meet a yet lurider eastern—with probability of lightning.

The fleet could hardly return in less than five days—if it returned! Would the hostile nations be good enough to await its return? The lightning would be "near".

A day of fear, in which flash tracked flash: till at 11.30 P.M. the rumour pervaded the crowd round St. Stephen's that the new Ministry had suffered defeat: and the drifting ship was captainless.

And early the next morning a number of Boodah boats, out running a regatta, came tearing back, all fluttered; soon after which Quilter- Beckett was hurrying into Hogarth's presence, who was at coffee, to say: "Well, my Lord King, here they come at last—and enough of them, I think". rVvZcHZktG7B8PqwbF35tWXlS/i7+OODTo0bohD3TRgHZzGf/GrdO85NaX4tpUWU