Directly afterwards he set to with the saw, working feverishly; but it was late on in the evening before they were able to get at the contents of the cylinder. When they did, they found a mass of slag and vitreous matter, which Harrison examined carefully, and afterwards broke cautiously to pieces.
Bit by bit they examined: but never a sign of a diamond could they see, and they were beginning to grow sick with disappointment; for they had built so many hopes upon the success of the great experiment. Then, just as they were making up their minds to utter disappointment, Harrison saw something, and gave out an excited little yell. Immediately he held up a three-cornered fragment of the slag, in which was embedded three fair-sized objects, which both he and Nell at once identified as diamonds.
They searched on; but found nothing more, though they reduced the whole of the contents to fine powder, to ensure that they missed nothing. After all, they had not done so badly; for the three diamonds later realised a total of £4,700, which, though not an enormously large sum, was yet sufficient to provide a very comfortable start in life to the two impecunious Americans.
There is little left to be told. The next day, Mr. Moss was invited in to the formal opening of the faked cylinder, which, of course, he imagined they supposed to be the genuine one. When it was finally opened, and nothing but a mixture of clinkers and coarse carbon discovered, he waxed somewhat sarcastic, and pointed out the very considerable expense to which he had been put. He suggested, with a great deal of rudeness, that Tony should pack up his traps and remove himself, for his acquaintanceship had been entirely a losing concern. Then he went out and left the two of them, staring at each other, both very angry.
“I must punch his head, before I say goodbye!” said Tony at last. “One good, comfortable punch!”
“Don’t,” said the girl. “Let’s get out of here after we’ve buried the real cylinder. We mustn’t leave that, it might tell him the truth.”
This they did, and meanwhile the Jew had gone off down the street metaphorically patting himself on the back with both hands. A little later, Harrison and Nell came out of the house in which they had spent so many hours of watching.
“Well, that’s over!” Tony said, as he locked the door.
Then he took the key across to the landlord, and said good-bye.
“He’ll open the dummy to-night,” said Harrison later that evening over their dinner at a good restaurant. “I vote, when I’ve got a room for to-night, that we go that way when I take you home. We’ll have a glance over the back wall, and find out whether he’s there. It would be lovely to see his face when he pulls the fireclay off that dummy and finds what sort of a diamond cartridge he’s got. It makes me feel virtuous to think that we’ve got the best of a brute like that!”
It was dark long before eight o’clock, so that Tony Harrison and Nell Gwynn had no difficulty in taking up a stand, unnoticed, which enabled them to see over the low wall, and across the tiny strip of yard into the back room where the furnace was erected.
The gas was lit, and they could see that the Jew was stooping over something on the floor, which he was tapping with the hammer.
“He’s at it! We’re just in time!” said Tony, with a thrill of delight in his voice. “He’s knocking off the fireclay.”
Abruptly there came a roar of blasphemy, muffled and vague, because of the intervening window, and they saw the Jew commence to beat the thing upon the floor, madly, with his hammer. Harrison leaned against the wall and shook with laughter.
“Crikey!” he gasped. “He’s got at it at last!”
The girl also was breathless with laughter. They stood for a minute longer, watching the frantic Jew, then Harrison drew Miss Gwynn’s arm within his.
“Come along, Nell,” he said. “He’s learning his lesson good!”
And the two of them turned and went towards the girl’s home, leaving a fat, furious Jew-man beating a two-foot lump of pig iron savagely with a hammer.
Eloi Eloi Lama Sabachthani
Dally, Whitlaw and I were discussing the recent stupendous explosion which had occurred in the vicinity of Berlin. We were marvelling concerning the extraordinary period of darkness that had followed, and which had aroused so much newspaper comment, with theories galore.
The papers had got hold of the fact that the War Authorities had been experimenting with a new explosive, invented by a certain chemist, named Baumoff, and they referred to it constantly as “The New Baumoff Explosive”.
We were in the Club, and the fourth man at our table was John Stafford, who was professionally a medical man, but privately in the Intelligence Department. Once or twice, as we talked, I had glanced at Stafford, wishing to fire a question at him; for he had been acquainted with Baumoff. But I managed to hold my tongue; for I knew that if I asked out pointblank, Stafford (who’s a good sort, but a bit of an ass as regards his almost ponderous code-of-silence) would be just as like as not to say that it was a subject upon which he felt he was not entitled to speak.
Oh, I know the old donkey’s way; and when he had once said that, we might just make up our minds never to get another word out of him on the matter, as long as we lived. Yet, I was satisfied to notice that he seemed a bit restless, as if he were on the itch to shove in his oar; by which I guessed that the papers we were quoting had got things very badly muddled indeed, in some way or other, at least as regarded his friend Baumoff. Suddenly, he spoke:
“What unmitigated, wicked piffle!” said Stafford, quite warm. “I tell you it is wicked, this associating of Baumoff’s name with war inventions and such horrors. He was the most intensely poetical and earnest follower of the Christ that I have ever met; and it is just the brutal Irony of Circumstance that has attempted to use one of the products of his genius for a purpose of Destruction. But you’ll find they won’t be able to use it, in spite of their having got hold of Baumoff’s formula. As an explosive it is not practicable. It is, shall I say, too impartial; there is no way of controlling it.
“I know more about it, perhaps, than any man alive; for I was Baumoff’s greatest friend, and when he died, I lost the best comrade a man ever had. I need make no secret about it to you chaps. I was ‘on duty’ in Berlin, and I was deputed to get in touch with Baumoff. The government had long had an eye on him; he was an Experimental Chemist, you know, and altogether too jolly clever to ignore. But there was no need to worry about him. I got to know him, and we became enormous friends; for I soon found that he would never turn his abilities towards any new war-contrivance; and so, you see, I was able to enjoy my friendship with him, with a comfy conscience—a thing our chaps are not always able to do in their friendships. Oh, I tell you, it’s a mean, sneaking, treacherous sort of business, ours; though it’s necessary; just as some odd man, or other, has to be a hangsman. There’s a number of unclean jobs to be done to keep the Social Machine running!
“I think Baumoff was the most enthusiastic intelligent believer in Christ that it will be ever possible to produce. I learned that he was compiling and evolving a treatise of most extraordinary and convincing proofs in support of the more inexplicable things concerning the life and death of Christ. He was, when I became acquainted with him, concentrating his attention particularly upon endeavouring to show that the Darkness of the Cross, between the sixth and the ninth hours, was a very real thing, possessing a tremendous significance. He intended at one sweep to smash utterly all talk of a timely thunderstorm or any of the other more or less inefficient theories which have been brought forward from time to time to explain the occurrence away as being a thing of no particular significance.
“Baumoff had a pet aversion, an atheistic Professor of Physics, named Hautch, who—using the ‘marvellous’ element of the life and death of Christ, as a fulcrum from which to attack Baumoff’s theories—smashed at him constantly, both in his lectures and in print. Particularly did he pour bitter unbelief upon Baumoff’s upholding that the Darkness of the Cross was anything more than a gloomy hour or two, magnified in
to blackness by the emotional inaccuracy of the Eastern mind and tongue.
“One evening, some time after our friendship had become very real, I called on Baumoff, and found him in a state of tremendous indignation over some article of the Professor’s which attacked him brutally; using his theory of the Significance of the ‘Darkness’, as a target. Poor Baumoff! It was certainly a marvellously clever attack; the attack of a thoroughly trained, well-balanced Logician. But Baumoff was something more; he was Genius. It is a title few have any rights to; but it was his!
“He talked to me about his theory, telling me that he wanted to show me a small experiment, presently, bearing out his opinions. In his talk, he told me several things that interested me extremely. Having first reminded me of the fundamental fact that light is conveyed to the eye through the means of that indefinable medium, named the Aether. He went a step further, and pointed out to me that, from an aspect which more approached the primary, Light was a vibration of the Aether, of a certain definite number of waves per second, which possessed the power of producing upon our retina the sensation which we term Light.
“To this, I nodded; being, as of course is everyone, acquainted with so well-known a statement. From this, he took a quick, mental stride, and told me that an ineffably vague, but measurable, darkening of the atmosphere (greater or smaller according to the personality-force of the individual) was always evoked in the immediate vicinity of the human, during any period of great emotional stress.
“Step by step, Baumoff showed me how his research had led him to the conclusion that this queer darkening (a million times too subtle to be apparent to the eye) could be produced only through something which had power to disturb or temporally interrupt or break up the Vibration of Light. In other words, there was, at any time of unusual emotional activity, some disturbance of the Aether in the immediate vicinity of the person suffering, which had some effect upon the Vibration of Light, interrupting it, and producing the aforementioned infinitely vague darkening.
“ ‘Yes?’ I said, as he paused, and looked at me, as if expecting me to have arrived at a certain definite deduction through his remarks. ‘Go on.’
“ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘don’t you see, the subtle darkening around the person suffering, is greater or less, according to the personality of the suffering human. Don’t you?’
“ ‘Oh!’ I said, with a little gasp of astounded comprehension, ‘I see what you mean. You—you mean that if the agony of a person of ordinary personality can produce a faint disturbance of the Aether, with a consequent faint darkening, then the Agony of Christ, possessed of the Enormous Personality of the Christ, would produce a terrific disturbance of the Aether, and therefore, it might chance, of the Vibration of Light, and that this is the true explanation of the Darkness of the Cross; and that the fact of such an extraordinary and apparently unnatural and improbable Darkness having been recorded is not a thing to weaken the Marvel of Christ. But one more unutterably wonderful, infallible proof of His God-like power? Is that it? Is it? Tell me?’
“Baumoff just rocked on his chair with delight, beating one fist into the palm of his other hand, and nodding all the time to my summary. How he loved to be understood; as the Searcher always craves to be understood.
“ ‘And now,’ he said, ‘I’m going to show you something.’
“He took a tiny, corked test-tube out of his waistcoat pocket, and emptied its contents (which consisted of a single, grey-white grain, about twice the size of an ordinary pin’s head) on to his dessert plate. He crushed it gently to powder with the ivory handle of a knife, then damped it gently, with a single minim of what I supposed to be water, and worked it up into a tiny patch of grey-white paste. He then took out his gold tooth-pick, and thrust it into the flame of a small chemist’s spirit lamp, which had been lit since dinner as a pipe-lighter. He held the gold tooth-pick in the flame, until the narrow, gold blade glowed white hot.
“ ‘Now look!’ he said, and touched the end of the tooth-pick against the infinitesimal patch upon the dessert plate. There came a swift little violet flash, and suddenly I found that I was staring at Baumoff through a sort of transparent darkness, which faded swiftly into a black opaqueness. I thought at first this must be the complementary effect of the flash upon the retina. But a minute passed, and we were still in that extraordinary darkness.
“ ‘My Gracious! Man! What is it?’ I asked, at last.
“His voice explained then, that he had produced, through the medium of chemistry, an exaggerated effect which simulated, to some extent, the disturbance in the Aether produced by waves thrown off by any person during an emotional crisis or agony. The waves, or vibrations, sent out by his experiment produced only a partial simulation of the effect he wished to show me—merely the temporary interruption of the Vibration of Light, with the resulting darkness in which we both now sat.
“ ‘That stuff,’ said Baumoff, ‘would be a tremendous explosive, under certain conditions.’
I heard him puffing at his pipe, as he spoke, but instead of the glow of the pipe shining out visible and red, there was only a faint glare that wavered and disappeared in the most extraordinary fashion.
“ ‘My Goodness!’ I said, ‘when’s this going away? And I stared across the room to where the big kerosene lamp showed only as a faintly glimmering patch in the gloom; a vague light that shivered and flashed oddly, as though I saw it through an immense gloomy depth of dark and disturbed water.
“ ‘It’s all right,’ Baumoff’s voice said from out of the darkness. ‘It’s going now; in five minutes the disturbance will have quieted, and the waves of light will flow off evenly from the lamp in their normal fashion. But, whilst we’re waiting, isn’t it immense, eh?’
“ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s wonderful; but it’s rather unearthly, you know.’
“ ‘Oh, but I’ve something much finer to show you,’ he said. ‘The real thing. Wait another minute. The darkness is going. See! You can see the light from the lamp now quite plainly. It looks as if it were submerged in a boil of waters, doesn’t it? that are growing clearer and clearer and quieter and quieter all the time.’
“It was as he said; and we watched the lamp, silently, until all signs of the disturbance of the light-carrying medium had ceased. Then Baumoff faced me once more.
“ ‘Now,’ he said. ‘You’ve seen the somewhat casual effects of just crude combustion of that stuff of mine. I’m going to show you the effects of combusting it in the human furnace, that is, in my own body; and then, you’ll see one of the great wonders of Christ’s death reproduced on a miniature scale.’
“He went across to the mantelpiece, and returned with a small, 120 minim glass and another of the tiny, corked test-tubes, containing a single grey-white grain of his chemical substance. He uncorked the test-tube, and shook the grain of substance into the minim glass, and then, with a glass stirring-rod, crushed it up in the bottom of the glass, adding water, drop by drop as he did so, until there were sixty minims in the glass.
“ ‘Now!’ he said, and lifting it, he drank the stuff. ‘We will give it thirty-five minutes,’ he continued; ‘then, as carbonization proceeds, you will find my pulse will increase, as also the respiration, and presently there will come the darkness again, in the subtlest, strangest fashion; but accompanied now by certain physical and psychic phenomena, which will be owing to the fact that the vibrations it will throw off, will be blent into what I might call the emotional-vibrations, which I shall give off in my distress. These will be enormously intensified, and you will possibly experience an extraordinarily interesting demonstration of the soundness of my more theoretical reasonings. I tested it by myself last week’ (He waved a bandaged finger at me), ‘and I read a paper to the Club on the results. They are very enthusiastic, and have promised their co-operation in the big demonstration I intend to give on next Good Friday—that’s seven weeks off, to-day.’
“He had ceased smoking; but continued to talk quietly in this fashion for the nex
t thirty-five minutes. The Club to which he had referred was a peculiar association of men, banded together under the presidentship of Baumoff himself, and having for their appellation the title of—so well as I can translate it —’The Believers And Provers Of Christ’. If I may say so, without any thought of irreverence, they were, many of them, men fanatically crazed to uphold the Christ. You will agree later, I think, that I have not used an incorrect term, in describing the bulk of the members of this extraordinary club, which was, in its way, well worthy of one of the religio-maniacal extrudences which have been forced into temporary being by certain of the more religiously-emotional minded of our cousins across the water.
“Baumoff looked at the clock; then held out his wrist to me. ‘Take my pulse,’ he said, ‘it’s rising fast. Interesting data, you know.’
“I nodded, and drew out my watch. I had noticed that his respirations were increasing; and I found his pulse running evenly and strongly at 105. Three minutes later, it had risen to 175, and his respirations to 41. In a further three minutes, I took his pulse again, and found it running at 203, but with the rhythm regular. His respirations were then 49. He had, as I knew, excellent lungs, and his heart was sound. His lungs, I may say, were of exceptional capacity, and there was at this stage no marked dyspnoea. Three minutes later I found the pulse to be 227, and the respiration 54.
‘You’ve plenty of red corpuscles, Baumoff!’ I said. ‘But I hope you’re not going to overdo things.’
“He nodded at me, and smiled; but said nothing. Three minutes later, when I took the last pulse, it was 233, and the two sides of the heart were sending out unequal quantities of blood, with an irregular rhythm. The respiration had risen to 67 and was becoming shallow and ineffectual, and dyspnoea was becoming very marked. The small amount of arterial blood leaving the left side of the heart betrayed itself in the curious bluish and white tinge of the face.
The Dream of X and Other Fantastic Visions Page 28