A Brilliant Void: A Selection of Classic Irish Science Fiction

by Jack Fennell

  The consternation and dismay were indescribable. Pitsey, with a face like death, was gazing horror-struck at the base and stem of the vase which still kept their place on the malachite stand, the cup alone being shivered to fragments. The two footmen, who had been standing under the pedestal, looked as if they had been struck by an unseen hand. Pushing my way almost roughly through the crowded throng I reached the spot. Nothing remained but the stem and jewelled base of the goblet.

  Silent and gazing at the throng as one in a dream stood Mme Koluchy. Antonia had crept up close to her father; her face was as white as her dress.

  ‘“The Luck of Pitsey Hall”,’ she murmured, ‘and on this night of all nights!’

  As for me, I felt my brain almost reeling with excitement. For the moment the thoughts which surged through it numbed my capacity for speech. I saw a servant gathering up the fragments. The evening was ended, and the party gradually broke up. To go on dancing would have been impossible.

  It was not till some hours afterwards that the whole Satanic scheme burst upon me. The catastrophe admitted of but one explanation. The dominant note, repeated in two bars when all the instruments played together in harmony, must have been the note accordant with that of the cup of the goblet, and by the well-known laws of acoustics, when so played it shattered the goblet.

  Next day there was an effort made to piece together the shattered fragments, but some were missing – how removed, by whom taken, no one could ever tell. Beyond doubt the characters cunningly concealed by the openwork pattern contained the key to the cipher. But once again Madame had escaped. The ingenuity, the genius, of the woman placed her beyond the ordinary consequences of crime.

  Delacour’s murder still remains unavenged. Will the truth ever come to light?

  Lady Clanbevan’s Baby

  CLOTILDE GRAVES (1915)

  Devious misapplications of science

  abound once again, as this time the Mad

  Scientist falls prey to a woman who turns

  out to be much more ruthless than he

  realises. In this story, Clotilde Graves

  undermines the self-serving narrative of

  the brilliant inventor winning a woman’s

  heart with demonstrations of his genius,

  and it is up to the reader to decide

  whether Lady Clanbevan is a villain, or

  simply a woman playing the hand she’s

  been dealt in order to live independently.

  Either way, this piece showcases

  Graves’s wicked sense of humour.

  THERE WAS A GREY, woolly October fog over Hyde Park. The railings wept grimy tears, and the damp yellow leaves dropped soddenly from the soaked trees. Pedestrians looked chilled and sulky; camphor chests and cedar-presses had yielded up their treasures of sables and sealskin, chinchilla and silver fox. A double stream of fashionable traffic rolled west and east, and the rich clarets and vivid crimsons of the automobiles burned through the fog like genial, warming fires.

  A Baby-Bunting six horse-power petrol-car, in colour a chrysanthemum yellow, came jiggeting by. The driver stopped. He was a technical chemist and biologist of note and standing, and I had last heard him speak from the platform of the Royal Institution.

  ‘I haven’t seen you,’ said the Professor, ‘for years.’

  ‘That must be because you haven’t looked,’ said I, ‘for I have both seen and heard you quite recently. Only you were upon the platform and I was on the ground floor.’

  ‘You are too much upon the ground floor now,’ said the Professor, with a shudder of a Southern European at the dampness around and under foot, ‘and I advise you to accept a seat in my car.’

  And the Baby-Bunting, trembling with excitement at being in the company of so many highly varnished electric victorias and forty horse-power auto-cars, joined the steadily flowing stream going west.

  ‘I wonder that you stoop to petrol, Professor,’ I said, as the thin, skilful hand in the baggy chamois glove manipulated the driving-wheel, and the little car snaked in and out like a torpedo-boat picking her way between the giant warships of a Channel Squadron.

  The Professor’s black brows unbent under the cap peak, and his thin, tightly-gripped lips relaxed into a mirthless smile.

  ‘Ah, yes; you think that I should drive my car by radio-activity, is it not? And so I could and would, if the pure radium chloride were not three thousand times the price of gold. From eight tons of uranium ore residues about one gramme – that is fifteen grains – can be extracted by fusing the residue with carbonates of soda, dissolving in hydrochloric acid, precipitating the lead and other metals in solution by the aid of hydrogen sulphide, and separating from the chlorides that remain – polonium, actinium, barium, and so forth – the chloride of radium. With a single pound of this I could not only drive an auto-car, my friend’ – his olive cheek warmed, and his melancholy dark eyes grew oddly lustrous – ‘I could stop the world!’

  ‘And supposing it was necessary to make it go on again?’ I suggested.

  ‘When I speak of the world,’ exclaimed the Professor, ‘I do not refer to the planet upon which we revolve; I speak of the human race which inhabits it.’

  ‘Would the human race be obliged to you, Professor?’ I queried.

  The Professor turned upon me with so sudden a verbal riposte that the Baby-Bunting swerved violently.

  ‘You are not as young as you were when I met you first. To be plain, you are getting middle-aged. Do you like it?’

  ‘I hate it!’ I answered, with beautiful sincerity.

  ‘Would you thank the man who should arrest, not the beneficent passage of Time, which means progress, but the wear and tear of nerve and muscle, tissue, and bone, the slow deterioration of the blood by the microbes of old age, for Metchnikoff has shown that there is no difference between the atrophy of senility and the atrophy caused by microbe poison? Would you thank him – the man who should do that for you? Tell me, my friend.’

  I replied, briefly and succinctly: ‘Wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Ha!’ exclaimed the Professor, ‘I thought so!’

  ‘But I should have liked him to have begun earlier,’ I said. ‘Twenty-nine is a nice age, now … It is the age we all try to stop at, and can’t, however much we try. Look there!’

  A landau limousine, dark blue, beautifully varnished, nickel-plated, and upholstered in cream-white leather, came gliding gracefully through the press of vehicles. From the crest upon the panel to the sober workmanlike livery of the chauffeur, the turn-out was perfection. The pearl it contained was worthy of the setting.

  ‘Look there?’ I repeated, as the rose-cheeked, sapphire-eyed, smiling vision passed, wrapped in a voluminous coat of chinchilla and silver fox, with a toque of Parma violets under the shimmer of the silken veil that could only temper the burning glory of her wonderful Renaissance hair.

  ‘There’s the exception to the rule … There’s a woman who doesn’t need the aid of science or of Art to keep her at nine-and-twenty. There’s a woman in whom “the wear and tear of nerve and muscle, tissue and bone” goes on – if it does go on – imperceptibly. Her blood doesn’t seem to be much deteriorated by the microbe of old age, Professor, does it? And she’s forty-three! The alchemistical forty-three, that turns the gold of life back into lead! The gold remains gold in her case, for that hair, that complexion, that figure, are,’ I solemnly declared, ‘her own.’

  At that moment Lady Clanbevan gave a smiling, gracious nod to the Professor, and he responded with a cold, grave bow. The glow of her gorgeous hair, the liquid sapphire of her eyes, were wasted on this stony man of science. She passed, going home to Stanhope Gate, I suppose, in which neighbourhood she has a house; I had barely a moment to notice the white-bonneted, blue-cloaked nurse on the front of the landau, holding a bundle of laces and cashmeres, and to reflect that I have never yet seen Lady Clanbevan taking the air without the company of a baby, when the Professor spoke:

  ‘So Lady Clanbevan is
the one woman who has no need of the aid of art or science to preserve her beauty and maintain her appearance of youth? Supposing I could prove to you otherwise, my friend, what then?’

  ‘I should say,’ I returned, ‘that you had proved what everybody else denies. Even the enemies of that modern Ninon de l’Enclos, who has just passed—’

  ‘With the nurse and the baby?’ interpolated the Professor.

  ‘With the nurse and the baby,’ said I. ‘Even her enemies – and they are legion – admit the genuineness of the charms they detest. Mentioning the baby, do you know that for twenty years I have never seen Lady Clanbevan out without a baby? She must have quite a regiment of children – children of all ages, sizes, and sexes.’

  ‘Upon the contrary,’ said the Professor, ‘she has only one!’

  ‘The others have all died young, then?’ I asked sympathetically, and was rendered breathless by the rejoinder:

  ‘Lady Clanbevan is a widow.’

  ‘One never asks questions about the husband of a professional beauty,’ I said. ‘His individuality is merged in hers from the day upon which her latest photograph assumes a marketable value. Are you sure there isn’t a Lord Clanbevan alive somewhere?’

  ‘There is a Lord Clanbevan alive,’ said the Professor coldly. ‘You have just seen him, in his nurse’s arms. He is the only child of his mother, and she has been a widow for nearly twenty years! You do not credit what I assert, my friend?’

  ‘How can I, Professor?’ I asked, turning to meet his full face, and noticed that his dark, somewhat opaque brown irises had lights and gleams of carbuncle-crimson in them. ‘I have had Lady Clanbevan and her progeny under my occasional observation for years. The world grows older, if she doesn’t, and she has invariably a baby – toujours a new baby – to add to the charming illusion of young motherhood which she sustains so well. And now you tell me that she is a twenty-years’ widow with one child, who must be nearly of age – or it isn’t proper. You puzzle me painfully!’

  ‘Would you care,’ asked the Professor after a moment’s pause, ‘to drive back to Harley Street with me? I am, as you know, a vegetarian, so I will not tax your politeness by inviting you to lunch. But I have something in my laboratory I should wish to show you.’

  ‘Of all things, I should like to come,’ I said. ‘How many times haven’t I fished fruitlessly for an invitation to visit the famous laboratory where nearly twenty years ago—’

  ‘I traced,’ said the Professor, ‘the source of phenomena which heralded the evolution of the Rontgen Ray and the ultimate discovery of the radioactive salt they have christened radium. I called it “protium” twenty years ago, because of its various and protean qualities. Why did I not push on to perfect the discovery and anticipate Sir William C— and the X—’s? There was a reason. You will understand it before you leave my laboratory.’

  The Baby-Bunting stopped at the unfashionable end of Harley Street, in front of the dingy yellow house with the black front door, flanked by dusty boxes of mildewed dwarf evergreens, and the Professor, relieved of his fur-lined coat and cap, led the way upstairs as lightly as a boy. Two garret-rooms had been knocked together for a laboratory. There was a tiled furnace at the darker end of the long skylighted room thus made, and solid wooden tables much stained with spilt chemicals, were covered with scales, glasses, jars, and retorts – all the tools of chemistry. From one of the many shelves running round the walls, the Professor took down a circular glass flask and placed it in my hands. The flask contained a handful of decayed and mouldy-looking wheat, and a number of peculiarly offensive-looking little beetles with tapir-like proboscides.

  ‘The perfectly developed beetle of the Calandria granaria,’ said the Professor, as I cheerfully resigned the flask, ‘a common British weevil, whose larvae feed upon stored grain. Now look at this.’ He reached down and handed me a precisely similar flask, containing another handful of grain, cleaner and sounder in appearance, and a number of grubs, sharp-ended chrysalis-like things buried in the grain, inert and inactive.

  ‘The larvae of Calandria granaria,’ said the Professor, in his drawling monotone. ‘How long does it take to hatch the beetle from the grub? you ask. Less than a month. The perfect weevils that I have just shown you I placed in their flask a little more than three weeks back. The grubs you see in the flask you are holding, and which, as you will observe by their anxiety to bury themselves in the grain so as to avoid contact with the light, are still immature, I placed in the glass receptacle twenty years ago. Don’t drop the flask – I value it.’

  ‘Professor!’ I gasped.

  ‘Twenty years ago,’ repeated the Professor, delicately handling the venerable grubs, ‘I enclosed these grubs in this flask, with sufficient grain to fully nourish them and bring them to the perfect state. In another flask I placed a similar number of grubs in exactly the same quantity of wheat. Then for twenty-four hours I exposed flask number one to the rays emanating from what is now called radium. And as the electrons discharged from radium are obstructed by collision with air-atoms, I exhausted the air contained in the flask.’ He paused.

  ‘Then, when the grubs in flask number two hatched out,’ I anticipated, ‘and the larvae in flask number one remained stationary, you realised—’

  ‘I realised that the rays from the salt arrested growth, and at the same time prolonged to an almost incalculable extent,’ said the Professor, ‘for you will understand that the grubs in flask number one had lived as grubs half a dozen times as long as grubs usually do … And I said to myself that the discovery presented an immense, a tremendous field for future development. Suppose a young woman of, say, twenty-nine were enclosed in a glass receptacle of sufficient bulk to contain her, and exposed for a few hours to my protium rays, she would retain for many years to come – until she was a great-grandmother of ninety! – the same charming, youthful appearance—’

  ‘As Lady Clanbevan!’ I cried, as the truth rushed upon me and I grasped the meaning this astonishing man had intended to convey.

  ‘As Lady Clanbevan presents today,’ said the Professor, ‘thanks to the discovery of a—’

  ‘Of a great man,’ said I, looking admiringly at the lean worn figure in the closely-buttoned black frock-coat.

  ‘I loved her … It was a delight to her to drag a disciple of science at her chariot-wheels. People talked of me as a coming man. Perhaps I was … But I did not thirst for distinction, honours, fame … I thirsted for that woman’s love … I told her of my discovery – as I told her everything. Bah!’ His lean nostrils worked. ‘You know the game that is played when one is in earnest and the other at play. She promised nothing, she walked delicately among the passions she sowed and fostered in the souls of men, as a beautiful tigress walks among the poison-plants of the jungle. She saw that rightly used, or wrongly used, my great discovery might save her beauty, her angelic, dazzling beauty that had as yet but felt the first touch of Time. She planned the whole thing, and when she said, “You do not love me if you will not do this,” I did it. I was mad when I acceded to her wish, perhaps; but she is a woman to drive men frenzied. You have seen how coldly, how slightingly she looked at me when we encountered her in the Row? I tell you – you have guessed already – I went there to see her. I always go where she is to be encountered, when she is in town. And she bows, always; but her eyes are those of a stranger. Yet I have had her on her knees to me. She cried and begged and kissed my hands.’

  He knotted his thin hands, their fingers brown-tipped with the stains of acids, and wrung and twisted them ferociously.

  ‘And so I granted what she asked, carried out the experiment, and paid what you English call the piper. The giant glass bulb with the rubber-valve door was blown and finished in France. It involved an expense of three hundred pounds. The salt I used of – protium (christened radium now) – cost me all my savings – over two thousand pounds, for I had been a struggling man—’

  ‘But the experiment?’ I broke in. ‘Good Heavens, Professor! Ho
w could a living being remain for any time in an exhausted receiver? Agony unspeakable, convulsions, syncope, death! One knows what the result would be. The merest common sense—’

  ‘The merest common sense is not what one employs to make discoveries or carry out great experiments,’ said the Professor. ‘I will not disclose my method; I will only admit to you that the subjects were insensible; that I induced anaesthesia by the ordinary ether-pump apparatus, and that the strength of the ray obtained was concentrated to such a degree that the exposure was complete in three hours.’ He looked about him haggardly. ‘The experiment took place here nineteen years ago – nineteen years ago, and it seems to me as though it were yesterday.’

  ‘And it must seem like yesterday to Lady Clanbevan whenever she looks in the glass,’ I said. ‘But you have pricked my curiosity, Professor, by the use of the plural. Who was the other subject?’

  ‘Is it possible you don’t guess?’ The sad, hollow eyes questioned my face in surprise. Then they turned haggardly away. ‘My friend, the other subject associated with Lady Clanbevan in my great experiment was – Her Baby!’

  I could not speak. The dowdy little grubs in the flask became for me creatures imbued with dreadful potentialities … The tragedy and the sublime absurdity of the thing I realised caught at my throat, and my brain grew dizzy with its horror.

  ‘Oh! Professor!’ I gurgled, ‘how – how grimly, awfully, tragically ridiculous! To carry about with one wherever one goes a baby that never grows older – a baby—’

  ‘A baby nearly twenty years old? Yes, it is as you say, ridiculous and horrible,’ the Professor agreed.

  ‘What could have induced the woman!’ burst from me.