The Angel of the Revolution

MP3 Audio CD. The Angel of the Revolution

CHAPTER I.

AT THE ELEVENTH HOUR.


"Victory! It flies! I am master of the Powers of the Air at last!"

They were strange words to be uttered, as they were, by a pale,
haggard, half-starved looking young fellow in a dingy, comfortless
room on the top floor of a South London tenement-house; and yet there
was a triumphant ring in his voice, and a clear, bright flush on his
thin cheeks that spoke at least for his own absolute belief in their
truth.

Let us see how far he was justified in that belief.

To begin at the beginning, Richard Arnold was one of those men whom
the world is wont to call dreamers and enthusiasts before they
succeed, and heaven-born geniuses and benefactors of humanity
afterwards.

He was twenty-six, and for nearly six years past he had devoted
himself, soul and body, to a single idea--to the so far unsolved
problem of aërial navigation.

This idea had haunted him ever since he had been able to think
logically at all--first dimly at school, and then more clearly at
college, where he had carried everything before him in mathematics
and natural science, until it had at last become a ruling passion
that crowded everything else out of his life, and made him,
commercially speaking, that most useless of social units--a
one-idea'd man, whose idea could not be put into working form.