by Nevil Shute
Professor O’Leary was the man. He had been in Honolulu lecturing, probably more than once. He must have numerous contacts on the academic staff. Indeed, with his engineering hobby he might well know other modellers in Honolulu or members of the faculty of engineering at the University, to whom the name Keith Stewart would be known. In the professor the editor felt he had a sympathetic contact in the United States who would exert himself to the utmost to find out what had happened to Keith Stewart in Honolulu.
His staff were all departing or had gone by the time he reached that conclusion. He reached for the telephone and rang up his wife in Finchley to tell her that he would be a bit late, and went out into the deserted outer office. He sat down at his secretary’s typewriter, put an air-letter form and carbon into the machine, and began to type.
He wrote:
Dear Professor,
You will remember lunching with Keith Stewart and myself when you were last in London, when you showed us the photographs of your Case traction engine and your workshop. I am a bit concerned about Keith Stewart, who was recently in Honolulu, and I have wondered if you have a friend there who could assist me in an enquiry.
The circumstances are as follows …
He wrote on, putting the case clearly and concisely, explaining about Keith’s sister, about his financial inability to pay for his extensive journey, about his free flight to Honolulu, about Jack Donelly and the Mary Belle. He ended with a few words of apology:
I feel we are to blame in some degree in not assisting him with the expense of this journey in view of his long service with the magazine, but you will appreciate that we do not make great profits. We did not think that he would become involved in such difficulties, and we would assist him now if we could get in touch with him. Do you know anyone in Honolulu who could cable us, at my expense, to tell us what the position is? Or who could get in touch with him if he is still there, and ask him to cable us?
Yours sincerely,
James McNeil.
He folded the air letter and sealed it. He glanced at his watch; there was still time to catch the airmail to New York if he took it to the Charing Cross post office. He put on his hat and coat, turned out the lights and locked the door, and went out into the chilly January night to catch a bus to Charing Cross.
Cyrus Shawn O’Leary got that letter on the Friday morning at his home in Ann Arbor near Detroit. He had no formal lecture on that day though he had essays to correct. On Monday he was lecturing upon the debt owed by the Elizabethan lyric-writers to the early English mediaeval poets, and on that morning he was engaged in tracing a comparison between Piers Plowman and the work of John Donne. He had strayed a little from his line to consider Thomas Campion, the graceful reprobate, and the mail lay unnoticed at his elbow, and he smiled as he read, for he was still young at heart:
I care not for these ladies,
That must be woode and praide:
Give me kind Amarillis,
The wanton country maide.
Nature art disdaineth,
Her beauty is her owne.
Her when we court and kisse,
She cries, Forsooth, let go:
But when we come where comfort is
She never will say, No.
Perhaps there was enough of that in Ann Arbor; he had better not stress it to the sophomores. Better to stick to the religious angle, to the soul-searchings that had followed the Reformation. He laid Campion aside, and turned back to John Donne. Outside, the snow lay deep; the cars passing in the street made a whisper and a rustle. It was overcast outside with heavy, lowering clouds presaging more snow. Spring with flower-decked meadows was the time for Thomas Campion. Winter was the time for John Donne, and for the workshop …
He resolutely turned his mind away from his hobby. John Donne was his business, and he turned to him again, endeavouring to regain the train of thought from which he had been side-tracked. He read the passage again which seemed to him to reflect the Plowman:
Thou hast made me, and shall Thy work decay?
Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste;
I run to death, and Death meets me as fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday …
That echoed something, surely?
On your midnight pallet lying,
Listen, and undo the door:
Lads that waste the light in sighing
In the dark should sigh no more.
Night should ease a lover’s sorrow;
Therefore, since I go tomorrow,
Pity me before.
No, that was Housman, much, much later. His mind was wandering today; he could not concentrate. Pallets - he was worried about the method of machining the pallets of his clock — but then that was a different sort of pallet. He did not see how he could hold them in the four-taw chuck to bore and ream the axis hole, and Keith Stewart had not explained that in the serial. He must be being stupid; there must be some simple way to do that job which every modeller would know. Perhaps if he went down to the basement and had another look …
No. He never went down to the workshop in the morning. Get thee behind me, Satan — he must work. If the work would not flow, at least there was the mail to go through, and the essays to correct. He picked up the pile of letters and furtively looked through to see if the new issue of the Miniature Mechanic had arrived. It hadn’t, but there were two heavy-looking archaeological journals, three local letters, one air letter from his married daughter in Colorado Springs, and an air letter from London, England.
He opened the one from his daughter first and skimmed it through. It was all about the baby and not much else; his wife would be interested. He put it down and picked up the one from London. The back showed it to be from J. McNeil; the name rang a faint bell, but he could not place it.
He opened it, and sat riveted in his chair as he read. This was really serious, very serious indeed.
He read the letter again and then sat deep in thought, Piers Plowman and John Donne and the remainder of his correspondence unnoticed on the desk before him. The direct appeal stirred him deeply. He was an engineer at heart; if things had broken differently for him he might have been one. He had money; that was the trouble. His grandfather, Shawn O’Leary, had been a railway contractor in the palmy days of expansion; in reaction his father had become a minister in Boston, Massachusetts. Cyrus had been directed to the academic life and he had not resisted; a year at Oxford had followed four at Harvard. Research had come after that, and academic appointments. He did not regret his life, but the urge to make things had been strong in him all the time, inherited, perhaps, from his grandfather who had made the iron roads towards the West. His workshop meant a great deal to Cyrus O’Leary.
He enjoyed his literary work, but the high spot of his visit to Europe two years previously had been the lunch with Keith Stewart and his editor. He had subscribed to the Miniature Mechanic for nine years, and in that time he had come to have a deep regard for the design engineer whose lucid, modest, and well written articles had taught him so much. They did not seem to breed that sort of writer in the United States, and he had wondered why his country with so much engineering achievement did not throw up people of that sort. When he had met Keith Stewart he understood a little better. He had thought from the pleasure that the engineer had given to so many modellers that he would be in the twenty to thirty thousand dollars a year income bracket. When he had met him his regard for Keith was, if anything, increased, but he now realised that his income was three to four thousand, or even less. Few people of such ability in his own country would be content with so modest an income, and perhaps no engineers. The devotion to an art inherent in Keith Stewart’s circumstances flowered more prolifically in Europe.
He sat wondering how to deal with this appeal, how best he could help. He did know Honolulu; he bad lectured there three times, but the people that he knew there were all literary people. Mr McNeil had been in error when he had assumed that Professor O’Leary might kno
w members of the engineering faculty in Honolulu University. It was the professor’s habit to conceal his workshop hobby from his colleagues, even in Ann Arbor. He did not display his locomotive or his traction engine to his fellow professors, fearing that if he did so he would not be taken seriously when he spoke on mediaeval poetry. He would not have dreamed of talking about engineering matters when visiting another university. In consequence the only associates that he had in Honolulu were serious and somewhat unpractical students of mediaeval history. He did not know one person there to whom he could turn for an account of the movements of a fishing boat in the harbour.
He left his study and went down to the basement of his house, to the workshop. He had a special bookshelf down there for the copies of the Miniature Mechanic, not caring to display them in his study. The row of little magazines was now seven feet long, extending every week; presently he would have to put up another shelf.
He had abstracted from the series the issues of the magazine dealing with the construction of the Congreve clock, and these lay in a little pile upon the drawing bench. He turned them over thoughtfully; it was incredible that a man who could write stuff like that should be so short of money … He turned to the bench, deep in thought, and fingered the tilting platform of the clocks already assembled in a trial erection in its trunnions. He had made that first, thinking it to be the most difficult part; in fact, it had proved to be the easiest. Who could he turn to for help in this affair? Who else in the United States was an admirer of Keith Stewart? Who else was making a Congreve clock to his instructions?
There was that dairy farmer down in Maryland — he wouldn’t be much help. There was Dave Coulson in Indianapolis — he was an accountant. There was the chap that he had met at the Brotherhood of Live Steamers in Detroit, the stockbroker’s clerk in Toledo … Then - wait a minute, out on the West Coast … lumber and pulp mills … what was his name? Hirzhorn — Solly Hirzhorn. Solly Hirzhorn had attended a meeting of the Brotherhood last year, and nobody had realised who he was till after the meeting a week later. Solly Hirzhorn was building a Congreve clock, and he had all the money in the world, and all the contacts, too.
He picked up the tiny pallet that he could not think of how to hold for machining and stood fingering it absently. He should have bored and reamed it first before shaping it to that rather complicated form. Perhaps if he put it in a tin and melted lead all round it he could hold the lead — but then, how would you line it up? There must be a simpler way than that. He wondered if Solly Hirzhorn had been caught that way, or whether he hadn’t got as far as making the pallets.
As he stood there at the bench of his workshop it seemed to him that Solly Hirzhorn was the one person to whom he could turn. He did not know the lumber tycoon well. He had been introduced to him at the meeting of the model engineering society, the Brotherhood of Live Steamers, and they had talked enthusiastically together about the Congreve clock for nearly a quarter of an hour. Both had then been starting on the project and had been drawn to each other by their common interest, the fat, unwieldy magnate sixty-eight years old and the lean professor of fifty-two. In that quarter of an hour they had become friends, though it was only when they came to exchange addresses at the end of it that each learned who the other was. That was a year ago; they had exchanged cards at Christmas but they had not met again, nor were they very likely to do so.
He glanced at his watch. Half past eleven — that would be half past eight in Tacoma. Not a very good time to call a tycoon upon a personal matter, when he would just have arrived in his office perhaps. He went up to his study again, closed the door, lifted the telephone, and spoke to the long-distance operator. ‘I want to call Mr Solomon P. Hirzhorn, person to person,’ he said. ‘This is Professor O’Leary. I don’t know the number, but it’s in Tacoma, Washington. ‘It’s Hirzhorn Lumber Enterprises Inc., or something.’
It’s the Mr Solomon Hirzhorn, is it?’ she asked.
‘That’s right. If you get through to his secretary, tell her it’s about a clock. I’ll take the call at any time convenient to him.’
He hung up; five minutes later the operator called again with news from fifteen hundred miles away. ‘Mr Hirzhorn is dealing with his mail right now,’ she said, ‘and after that he has to fly to a conference at one of the plants. He could accept your call best at his home at five o’clock tonight. That would be eight in the evening of our time. I was to ring her back and tell her would that be okay.’
He said that would be fine, and put the receiver down. He could not work that day. Against all his rules of routine, he went down again to the workshop and stood turning over the work of Keith Stewart. So much pleasure given to so many people, in all walks of life … And yet the man was short of money - worse paid than a professor! It didn’t seem right, but that was evidently the way it was.
At eight o’clock he was speaking to the magnate on the telephone. ‘Say, professor, this is a real pleasure,’ said Mr Hirzhorn. ‘How are you making out with the clock?’
‘Not too bad,’ said the professor. ‘I got the tilting table and the escapement made all right, but now I’m finding the clock motion to be quite a job. However, I’ll get over it all right. What I wanted to talk to you about was Mr Keith Stewart.’
‘He’s a great guy,’ said Mr Hirzhorn. ‘Whenever I get in a difficulty I write to him and he comes right back with the answer.’
‘He’s in a little trouble. I thought you might like to know. He’s been in Honolulu, but he’s probably somewhere in the Pacific at present.’
‘In Honolulu? What’s he doing there? If I’d known I’d have flown across to meet him.’
‘I got a letter from his editor. Shall I read it out?’
‘Sure, professor. I’m sorry if he’s got in any trouble.’
Professor O’Leary started in to read the letter from Mr McNeil. When he was half way through, Mr Hirzhorn stopped him. ‘Say, professor,’ he said, ‘this is interesting, but I’d like to see a copy and consider it. Mind if we put it on the tape?’
‘By all means.’
Mr Hirzhorn laid down the receiver and called to the next room. ‘Julie! Say, Julie!’ A handsome Jewish-looking girl appeared at the door. ‘Get this on the tape, the letter that Professor O’Leary will be reading out. Get the conversation, too — all of the call.’ In a moment he spoke again. ‘We’re all set now, professor. If you wouldn’t mind starting the letter again.’
When that was over he said, ‘Well, professor, that’ll need some thought. I’ll have it copied and think about it, and call you again.’
‘Can you find out whether he’s left Honolulu?’
‘Oh, sure. I’ll call Honolulu right now. If I can contact him, I’d better speak to him myself and read him out this letter.’
‘That would be a good idea. His editor, this Mr McNeil, he’s evidently prepared to help him with the fares. He’d better cable his office. But I’m afraid that he’ll have started already.’
‘Well, we’ll find that out. Say, if we can locate him I’d be mighty glad to have him visit with me for a day or two on his way back to England. There’s one or two things on the clock that I’d like his advice on, and he might be interested to see some of the plants. Would you be able to come over and join us?’
Professor O’Leary said, ‘Not till the end of May. I’ve got things I must do here each day.’
‘Too bad. Well, anyway, professor, I’ll be calling you again.’
Mr Hirzhorn put down the receiver and called for Julie. When she came he said, ‘Give me all that in type, soon as you can. And say, what’s the name of the guy that runs our business in Honolulu, making monkey-pod wood bowls and dishes?’
‘Setches, Mr Hirzhorn. Setches and Byrne, Incorporated.’
‘That’s right. Paul Setches. Well, get that tape in type and let me have it. After that I may want to speak with Paul Setches.’
She went out, and he sat on alone in his study, a glass of rye and water with a little ice beside hi
m. He sat, as was his habit in the evening, in front of the great picture window facing to the west. He lived not far from Wauna on an inlet off the Puget Sound ten miles from his office in Tacoma. The east side of the house looked out over the inlet, his private airstrip, his boathouse, and his moored motor cruiser; the west side looked over many miles of forest to the snow-capped Olympic range. Here he would sit on the evenings when he had the leisure, and rest a little and watch the sunset light beyond the snowy forests. He had been born a lumberman, and he loved forests.
He lived very much alone, devoted to his business. His two sons lived in suburbs of Tacoma more convenient to schools and to the main Seattle-Tacoma airport where the executive aircraft of the corporation were housed and maintained. His wife liked Florida and was frequently away there in the winter. He liked Florida well enough and sometimes spent a day or two there with her in the sun, but he could not live for long away from his business and his forests. The girl Julie Perlberg lived in the house with him and managed the servants and worked as his secretary at home. She was an illegitimate daughter of his oldest son, Emmanuel, who had found a job for her in the office of the plant at Marblemount on the Skagit River when she was fifteen years old, conveniently tucked away in the mountains at a discreet distance from Tacoma. She had the Hirzhorn blood in her, however, and by the time she was eighteen she was virtually running the Marblemount plant. There had been little option but to transfer her to the head office in Tacoma if they wanted to keep a man as manager in Marblemount. There the old man had met her and had taken a fancy to his grand-daughter, largely because of her encyclopaedic knowledge of the business. As he found less room for detail in his mind he had taken her as his personal secretary; his sons approved of this, because they were a closely knit family and theirs was a family business.