PREFACE
The Title story of this volume was written about eighteen
months before the outbreak of the war, and was intended to direct
public attention to the great danger which threatened this
country. It is a matter of history how fully this warning
has been justified and how, even down to the smallest details,
the prediction has been fulfilled. The writer must,
however, most thankfully admit that what he did not foresee was
the energy and ingenuity with which the navy has found means to
meet the new conditions. The great silent battle which has
been fought beneath the waves has ended in the repulse of an
armada far more dangerous than that of Spain.
It may be objected that the writer, feeling the danger so
strongly, should have taken other means than fiction to put his
views before the authorities. The answer to this criticism
is that he did indeed adopt every possible method, that he
personally approached leading naval men and powerful editors,
that he sent three separate minutes upon the danger to various
public bodies, notably to the Committee p. vifor National
Defence, and that he touched upon the matter in an article in
The Fortnightly Review. In some unfortunate way
subjects of national welfare are in this country continually
subordinated to party politics, so that a self-evident
proposition, such as the danger of a nation being fed from
without, is waved aside and ignored, because it will not fit in
with some general political shibboleth. It is against this
tendency that we have to guard in the future, and we have to bear
in mind that the danger may recur, and that the remedies in the
text (the only remedies ever proposed) have still to be
adopted. They are the sufficient encouragement of
agriculture, the making of adequate Channel tunnels, and the
provision of submarine merchantmen, which, on the estimate of Mr.
Lake, the American designer, could be made up to 7,000 ton burden
at an increased cost of about 25 per cent. It is true that
in this war the Channel tunnels would not have helped us much in
the matter of food, but were France a neutral and supplies at
liberty to come via Marseilles from the East, the difference
would have been enormous. ....
Arthur Conan
Doyle.
August 24th,
Crowborough.
IV. THE FALL OF LORD BARRYMORE
These are few social historians of those days who have not
told of the long and fierce struggle between those two famous
bucks, Sir Charles Tregellis and Lord Barrymore, for the Lordship
of the Kingdom of St. James, a struggle which divided the whole
of fashionable London into two opposing camps. It has been
chronicled also how the peer retired suddenly and the commoner
resumed his great career without a rival. Only here,
however, one can read the real and remarkable reason for this
sudden eclipse of a star.
It was one morning in the days of this famous struggle that
Sir Charles Tregellis was performing his very complicated toilet,
and Ambrose, his valet, was helping him to attain that pitch of
perfection which had long gained him the reputation of being the
best-dressed man in town. Suddenly Sir Charles paused, his
coup d’archet half-executed, the final beauty of his
neck-cloth half-achieved, while he listened with surprise and indignation upon his large, comely,
fresh-complexioned face. Below, the decorous hum of Jermyn
Street had been broken by the sharp, staccato, metallic beating
of a doorknocker.
X. THREE OF THEM
I—A CHAT ABOUT CHILDREN, SNAKES, AND ZEBUS
“That’s not a living noise. That’s an
all-the-same noise. Different to Roy, who barks and makes
different noises all the time. Fancy the roses all
barkin’ at you. Daddy, will you tell us about
animals?”
That is one of the child stages which takes us back to the old
tribe life—their inexhaustible interest in animals, some
distant echo of those long nights when wild men sat round the
fires and peered out into the darkness, and whispered about all
the strange and deadly creatures who fought with them for the
lordship of the earth. Children love caves, and they love
fires and meals out of doors, and they love animal talk—all
relics of the far distant past.
“What is the biggest animal in South America,
Daddy?”
Daddy, wearily: “Oh, I don’t know.”
“I s’pose an elephant would be the
biggest?”
“No, boy; there are none in South America.”
“Well, then, a rhinoceros?”
“No, there are none.”
“Well, what is there, Daddy?”
“Well, dear, there are jaguars. I suppose a jaguar
is the biggest.”
“Then it must be thirty-six feet long.”
“Oh, no, boy; about eight or nine feet with his
tail.”
“But there are boa-constrictors in South America
thirty-six feet long.”
“That’s different.”
“Do you fink,” asked Dimples, with his big,
solemn, grey eyes wide open, “there was ever a
boa-’strictor forty-five feet long?”
“No, dear; I never heard of one.”
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