up a huge hay fork and went forward softly.
'You load your hay at a very bad time and in a very bad light,'
said the man at the door, peering in. 'Have you no electric
light here?'
Then suddenly he turned on an electric torch, and as he did so
Pestovitch sprang forward. 'Get out of my barn!' he cried, and
drove the fork full at the intruder's chest. He had a vague idea
that so he might stab the man to silence. But the man shouted
loudly as the prongs pierced him and drove him backward, and
instantly there was a sound of feet running across the yard.
'Bombs,' cried the man upon the ground, struggling with the
prongs in his hand, and as Pestovitch staggered forward into view
with the force of his own thrust, he was shot through the body by
one of the two new-comers.
The man on the ground was badly hurt but plucky. 'Bombs,' he
repeated, and struggled up into a kneeling position and held his
electric torch full upon the face of the king. 'Shoot them,' he
cried, coughing and spitting blood, so that the halo of light
round the king's head danced about.
For a moment in that shivering circle of light the two men saw
the king kneeling up in the cart and Peter on the barn floor
beside him. The old fox looked at them sideways-snared, a
white-faced evil thing. And then, as with a faltering suicidal
heroism, he leant forward over the bomb before him, they fired
together and shot him through the head.
The upper part of his face seemed to vanish.
'Shoot them,' cried the man who had been stabbed. 'Shoot them
all!'
And then his light went out, and he rolled over with a groan at
the feet of his comrades.
But each carried a light of his own, and in another moment
everything in the barn was visible again. They shot Peter even
as he held up his hands in sign of surrender.
Kurt and Abel at the head of the ladder hesitated for a moment,
and then plunged backward into the pit. 'If we don't kill them,'
said one of the sharpshooters, 'they'll blow us to rags. They've
gone down that hatchway. Come!…
'Here they are. Hands up! I say. Hold your light while I
shoot…'
Section 8
It was still quite dark when his valet and Firmin came together
and told the ex-king Egbert that the business was settled.
He started up into a sitting position on the side of his bed.
'Did he go out?' asked the ex-king.
'He is dead,' said Firmin. 'He was shot.'
The ex-king reflected. 'That's about the best thing that could
have happened,' he said. 'Where are the bombs? In that
farm-house on the opposite hill-side! Why! the place is in sight!
Let us go. I'll dress. Is there any one in the place, Firmin, to
get us a cup of coffee?'
Through the hungry twilight of the dawn the ex-king's automobile
carried him to the farm-house where the last rebel king was lying
among his bombs. The rim of the sky flashed, the east grew
bright, and the sun was just rising over the hills when King
Egbert reached the farm-yard. There he found the hay lorries
drawn out from the barn with the dreadful bombs still packed upon
them. A couple of score of aviators held the yard, and outside a
few peasants stood in a little group and stared, ignorant as yet
of what had happened. Against the stone wall of the farm-yard
five bodies were lying neatly side by side, and Pestovitch had an
expression of surprise on his face and the king was chiefly
identifiable by his long white hands and his blonde moustache.
The wounded aeronaut had been carried down to the inn. And after
the ex-king had given directions in what manner the bombs were to
be taken to the new special laboratories above Zurich, where they
could be unpacked in an atmosphere of chlorine, he turned to
these five still shapes.
Their five pairs of feet stuck out with a curious stiff
unanimity…
'What else was there to do?' he said in answer to some internal
protest.
'I wonder, Firmin, if there are any more of them?'
'Bombs, sir?' asked Firmin.
'No, such kings…
'The pitiful folly of it!' said the ex-king, following his
thoughts. 'Firmin,' as an ex-professor of International Politics,
I think it falls to you to bury them. There?… No, don't put
them near the well. People will have to drink from that well.
Bury them over there, some way off in the field.'
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
THE NEW PHASE
Section 1
The task that lay before the Assembly of Brissago, viewed as we
may view it now from the clarifying standpoint of things
accomplished, was in its broad issues a simple one. Essentially
it was to place social organisation upon the new footing that the
swift, accelerated advance of human knowledge had rendered
necessary. The council was gathered together with the haste of a
salvage expedition, and it was confronted with wreckage; but the
wreckage was irreparable wreckage, and the only possibilities of
the case were either the relapse of mankind to the agricultural
barbarism from which it had emerged so painfully or the
acceptance of achieved science as the basis of a new social
order. The old tendencies of human nature, suspicion, jealousy,
particularism, and belligerency, were incompatible with the
monstrous destructive power of the new appliances the inhuman
logic of science had produced. The equilibrium could be restored
only by civilisation destroying itself down to a level at which
modern apparatus could no longer be produced, or by human nature
adapting itself in its institutions to the new conditions. It was
for the latter alternative that the assembly existed.
Sooner or later this choice would have confronted mankind. The
sudden development of atomic science did but precipitate and
render rapid and dramatic a clash between the new and the
customary that had been gathering since ever the first flint was
chipped or the first fire built together. From the day when man
contrived himself a tool and suffered another male to draw near
him, he ceased to be altogether a thing of instinct and