“Well, at least we have one with clean linen.” he said casually.
He listened to my lungs and heart, tapped my spine and chest with his fingers, sat me down and checked the reflexes of my knees, and finally said lazily:
“As fit as a fiddle. He hasn’t eaten too well recently, however. But that is nothing and all that is required is two weeks of good food. To his good fortune, I find no traces of exhaustion from over-indulgences in athletics as is common among our young men. In a word, Mr. Nideston, I present you a gentleman, a fortunate, almost perfect example of the healthy Anglo-Saxon race. May I assume that I am no longer needed?”
“You are free, doctor,” said the solicitor. “But can you, may I be assured, visit us tomorrow morning, if I require your professional advice?”
“Oh, Mr. Nideston, I am always at your service.”
When we were alone, the solicitor sat opposite me and peered intently into my face. He had little sharp eyes the color of a coffee bean with quite yellow whites. Every now and then when he looked directly at you, it seemed as though diminutive sharp and bright needles issued from those tiny blue pupils.
“Let us talk,” he said abruptly. “Your name, origins, and place of birth?”
I answered him in the same expressionless and laconic fashion.
“Education?”
“The Royal University.”
“Subject of study?”
“Department of Mathematics, in particular, Physics.”
“Foreign languages?”
“I know German comparatively well. I understand when French is not spoken too rapidly, I can put together a few score essential expressions, and I read it without difficulty.”
“Relatives and their social position?”
“Is that of any importance to you, Mr. Nideston?”
“To me? Of supreme unimportance. But I act in the interests of a third party.”
I described the situations of my two sisters. During my speech he attentively inspected his nails, and then threw two needles at me from his eyes, asking:
“Do you drink? And how much?”
“Sometimes at dinner I drink a half pint of beer.”
“A bachelor?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you have any intention of committing that blunder? Of marrying?”
“Oh, no.”
“Any present love affairs?”
“No, sir.”
“How do you support yourself?”
I answered that question briefly and fairly, omitting, for the sake of brevity five or six of my latest casual professions.
“So,” he said, when I had finished, “do you need money?”
“No. My stomach is full and I am adequately clothed. I always find work. So far as it is possible I follow recent developments in science. I am convinced that sooner or later I will find my opportunity.”
“Would you like money in advance? A loan?”
“No, that is not my practice. I don’t take money from anyone … But we’re not finished.”
“Your principles are commendable. Perhaps we can come to an agreement. Give me your address and I will inform you, and probably very soon, of our decision. Good-bye.”
“Excuse me. Mr. Nideston,” I responded. “I have answered all your questions, even the most delicate, with complete candor. May I ask you one question?”
“Please.”
“What is the purpose of the journey?”
“Oho! Are you concerned about that?”
“We may assume that I am.”
“The purpose of the journey is purely scientific.”
“That is not an adequate answer.”
“Not adequate?” Mr. Nideston abruptly shouted at me, and his coffee eyes poured out sheaves of needles. “Not adequate? Do you have the insolence to assume that the firm of Nideston and Son now in existence for one hundred and fifty years and respected by all of England’s commercial establishments would suggest anything dishonorable or which might compromise you? Or that we would undertake any enterprise without possessing reliable guarantees beforehand that it is unconditionally legal?”
“Oh, sir, I have no doubt of that,” I responded in confusion.
“Very well, then,” he interrupted me and immediately became tranquil, like a stormy sea spread with oil. “But you see, first of all I am bound by the proviso that you not be informed of any substantial details of the journey until you are aboard the steamship out of Southampton …”
“Bound where?” I asked suddenly.
“For the time being I cannot tell you. And secondly, the purpose of your journey (if indeed it comes to pass) is not completely clear even to me.”
“Strange,” said I.
“Passing strange.” the solicitor willingly agreed. “But I may also inform you, if you so desire, that it will be fantastic, grandiose, unprecedented, splendid, and audacious to the point of madness!”
Now it was my turn to say “Hmmm,” and this I did with a certain restraint.
“Wait,” Mr. Nideston exclaimed with sudden fervor. “You are young. I am twenty-five or thirty years older than you. You are not at all astonished by many of the greatest accomplishments of the human mind, but if, when I was your age, someone had predicted that I would work in the evenings by the light of invisible electricity which flowed through wires or that I would converse with an acquaintance at a distance of eighty miles, that I would see moving, laughing human figures on a screen, that I would send telegraph messages without the benefit of wires, and so on, and so on, then I would have waged my honor, my freedom, my career against one pint of bad London beer that I was confronted with a madman.”
“You mean the project involves some new invention or a great discovery?”
“If you wish, yes. But I ask you, do not view me with distrust or suspicion. What would you say, for example, if a great genius were to appeal to your young energy, strength, and knowledge, a genius who, we will assume, is engaged with a problem—to create a pleasing, nutritious, economical food out of the elements found in the air? If you were provided the opportunity to labor for the sake of the future organization and adornment of the earth? To dedicate your talents and spiritual energies to the happiness of future generations? What would you say? Here is an example at hand. Look out the window.”
Involuntarily I arose under the spell of his compelling, swift gesture and looked through the clouded glass. There, over the streets hung a black-rust-gray fog, like dirty cotton from heaven to earth. In it only dimly could be perceived the wavering glow from the street lights. It was eleven o’clock in the morning.
“Yes, yes, look,” said Mr. Nideston. “Look carefully. Now assume that a gifted, disinterested man is summoning you to a great project to ameliorate and beautify the earth. He tells you that everything that is on the earth depends on the mind, will, and hands of man. He tells you that if God in his righteous anger has turned his face away from man, then man’s measureless mind will come to his own aid. This man will tell you that fogs, disease, climatic extremes, winds, volcanic eruptions—they are all subject to the influence and control of the human will—and that finally the earth could become a paradise and its existence extended by several hundred thousand years. What would you say to that man?”
“But what if he who presents me with this radiant dream is wrong? What if I find myself a dumb plaything in the hands of a monomaniac? A capricious madman?”
Mr. Nideston rose, and. presenting me his hand as a sign of farewell, said firmly:
“No. Aboard the steamship in two or three months from now (if we can come to an agreement) I will inform you of the name of that scientist and the meaning of his great task, and you will remove your hat as a mark of your great reverence for the man and his ideas. But I, unfortunately, Mr. Dibble, am a layman. I am only a solicitor—the guardian and representative of others’ interests.”
After this interview I had almost no doubt that fate, finally, had grown tired of my fixed inspection of her unbe
nding spine and had decided to show me her mysterious face. Therefore, that same evening with the help of my small savings I produced a banquet of extraordinary luxury, which consisted of a roast, a punch, plum pudding and hot chocolate which was enjoyed in addition to myself by the worthy couple, the elder Johnsons, and, I do not remember exactly—six or seven of the younger Johnsons. My left shoulder was quite blue and out of joint from the friendly pounding of my good landlord who sat next to me on my left.
And I was not wrong. The next evening I received a telegram: “Call at noon tomorrow. 451 Regent Street, Nideston.”
I arrived punctually at the appointed time. He was not in his office, but a servant who had been forewarned led me to a small room in a restaurant located around the corner at a distance of two hundred paces. Mr. Nideston was there alone. At first he was not that ebullient, and perhaps even poetic man, who had spoken with me so fervently about the future happiness of mankind two days earlier. No, once more he was that dry and laconic solicitor who on the occasion of our first meeting that morning had so commandingly instructed me to remove my outer clothing and had questioned me like a police inspector.
“Good day. Sit down,” he said indicating a chair. “It is my lunch hour, a time I have at my disposal. Although my firm is called ‘Nideston and Son’ I am in fact a bachelor and a lonely man. And so—would you care to dine? To drink?”
I thanked him and asked for tea and toast. Mr. Nideston ate at leisure, sipped an old port and from time to time transfixed me with the bright needles of his eyes. Finally, he wiped his lips, threw down his napkin, and asked:
“Then, you are agreed?”
“To buy a pig in a poke?” I asked in turn.
“No,” he said loudly and angrily. “The previous conditions remain in force. Before your departure to the tropics you will receive as much information as I am empowered to give you. If this is not satisfactory, you may, on your part, refuse to sign the contract and I will pay you a recompense for the time which you have employed in fruitless conversations with me.”
I observed him carefully. At that moment he was engaged in an effort to crack two nuts, the right hand enveloping the knuckles of the left. The sharp needles of his eyes were concealed behind the curtain of his brows. And suddenly, as though in a moment of illumination, I perceived all the soul of that man—the strange soul of a formalist and a gambler, the narrow specialist and an extraordinarily expansive temperament, the slave of his counting house traditions and at the same time a secret searcher for adventures, a pettifogger, ready for two pennies to put his opponent in prison for a long sentence, and at the same time an eccentric capable of sacrificing the wealth acquired in dozens of years of unbroken labor for the sake of the shadow of a beautiful idea. This thought passed through me like lightning. And Nideston, suddenly, as though we had been united by some invisible current, opened his eyes, with a great effort crushed the nuts into tiny fragments and smiled at me with an open, childlike, almost mischievous smile.
“When all is said and done, you are risking little, my dear Mr. Dibble. Before you leave for the tropics I will give you several commissions on the continent. These commissions will not require from you any particular scientific knowledge, but they will demand great mechanical accuracy, precision, and foresight. You will need no more than about two months, perhaps a week more or less than that. You are to accept in various European locations certain expensive and very fragile optical glasses as well as several extremely delicate and sensitive physical instruments. I entrust to your care, agility, and skills their packing, delivery to the railroad, and sea and rail transport. You must agree that it would mean nothing to a drunken sailor or porter to throw a crate into the hold and smash into fragments a doubly convex lens over which dozens of men have worked for dozens of years …”
“An observatory!” I thought joyfully. “Of course, it’s an observatory! What happiness! At last I have my elusive fate by the forelock.”
I could see that he had guessed my thoughts and his eyes became yet merrier.
“We will not discuss the remuneration for this, your first, task. We will come to agreement on details, of course, as I can see from your expression. But,” and then he suddenly laughed heedlessly, like a child, “I want to turn your attention to a very curious fact. Look, through these fingers have passed ten or twenty thousand curious cases, some of them involving very large sums. Several times I have made a fool of myself, and that in spite of all our subtle casuistic precision and diligence. But, imagine, that every time that I have rejected all the tricks of my craft and looked a man straight in the eye, as I am now looking at you, I have never gone wrong and never had cause for repentance. And so?”
His eyes were clear, firm, trusting and affectionate. At that second this little swarthy, wrinkled, yellow-faced man indeed took my heart into his hands and conquered it.
“Good,” I said. “I believe you. From this time I am at your disposal.”
“Oh, why so fast?” Mr. Nideston said genially. “You have plenty of time. We still have time to drink a bottle of claret together.” He pulled the cord for the waiter. “But please put your personal affairs in order, and this evening at eight o’clock you will leave with the tide on board the steamship The Lion and the Magdalene to which I will in time deliver your itinerary, drafts on various banks, and money for your personal expenses. My dear young man, I drink to your health and your successes. If only,” he suddenly exclaimed with unexpected enthusiasm, “if only you knew how I envy you, my dear Mr. Dibble!”
In order to flatter him and in quite an innocent manner, I responded almost sincerely:
“What’s detaining you, my dear Mr. Nideston? I swear that in spirit you are as young as I.”
The swarthy solicitor lowered his long delicately modeled nose into his claret cup, was silent for a moment and suddenly said with a sigh of feeling:
“Oh, my dear Mr. Dibble! My office, which has existed nearly from the time of the Plantagenets, the honor of my firm, my ancestors, thousands of ties connecting me with my clients, associates, friends, and enemies … I couldn’t name it all … This means you have no doubts?”
“No.”
“Well, let us drink a toast and sing “Rule Britannia!”
And we drank a toast and sang—I almost a boy, yesterday a tramp, and that dry man of business, whose influence extended from the gloom of his dirty office to touch the fates of European powers and business magnates—we sang together in the most improbable and unsteady voices in all the world:
Rule, Britannia!
Britannia, rules the waves!
Britons never, never, never will be slaves!
A servant entered, and turning politely to Mr. Nideston, he said:
“Excuse me, sir. I listened to your singing with genuine pleasure. I have heard nothing more pleasing even in the Royal Opera, but next to you in the adjoining room is a meeting of lovers of French medieval music. Perhaps I should not refer them as gentlemen … but they all have very discriminating ears.”
“You are no doubt correct,” the solicitor answered gently. “And therefore I ask you to accept as a keepsake this round yellow object with the likeness of our good king.”
Here is a brief list of the cities and the laboratories which I visited after I crossed the Channel. I copy them out in entirety from my notebook: The Pragemow concern in Paris; Repsold in Hamburg; Zeiss, Schott Brothers, and Schlattf in Jena; in Munich the Frauenhof concern and the Wittschneider Optical Institute and also the Mertz laboratory there; Schick in Berlin, and also Bennech and Basserman. And also, not distant in Potsdam, the superb branch of the Pragemow concern which operates in conjunction with the essential and enlightened support of Dr. E. Hartnack.
The itinerary composed by Mr. Nideston was extraordinarily precise and included train schedules and the addresses of inexpensive but comfortable English hotels. He had drawn it up in his own hand. And here, too, one was aware of his strange and unpredictable character. On the corner of one
of the pages he had written in pencil in his angular, firm hand: “If Chance and Co. were real Englishmen they would have not abandoned their concern and it would not be necessary for us to obtain lenses and instruments from the French and Germans with names like Schnurbartbindhalter.”
I will admit, not in a spirit of boasting, that everywhere I bore myself with the requisite weight and dignity, because many times in critical moments in my ears I heard Mr. Nideston’s terrible goat’s voice singing “Britons never, never, never will be slaves.”
But, too, I must say that I cannot complain about any lack of attentiveness and courtesy on the part of the learned scientists and famous technicians whom I met. My letters of recom-mendation signed with large, black, completely illegible flourishes and reinforced below with Mr. Nideston’s precise signature served as a magic wand in my hands which opened all doors and all hearts for me. With unremitting and deep-felt concern I watched the manufacture and polishing of convex and curving lenses and the production of the most delicate, complex and beautiful instruments which gleamed with brass and steel, shining with all their screws, tubing, and machined metal. When in one of the most famous workshops of the globe I was shown an almost complete fifty-inch mirror which had required at least two or three years of final polishing—my heart stood still and my breath caught, so overcome was I with delight and awe at the power of the human mind.
I was rendered very uneasy by the persistent curiosity of these serious, learned men who in turn attempted to ascertain the mysterious purpose of my patron whose name I did not know. Sometimes subtly and artfully, sometimes crudely and directly, they attempted to extract from me the details and goal of my journey, the addresses of the firms with which I had business, the type and function of our orders to other workshops, etc., etc. But, firstly, I remembered well Mr. Nideston’s very serious warnings about indiscretions; secondly, what could I answer even if I wished to? I myself knew nothing and was feeling my way, as though at night in an unknown forest. I was accepting, after verifying drawings and calculations, some kind of strange optical glasses, metal tubing of various sizes, calculators, small-scale propellors, miniaturized cylinders, shutters, heavy glass retorts of a strange form, pressure gauges, hydraulic presses, a host of electrical devices which I had never seen before, several powerful microscopes, three chronometers and two underwater diving suits with helmets. One thing became obvious to me: the strange enterprise which I served had nothing to do with the construction of an observatory, and on the basis of the objects which I was accepting I found it absolutely impossible to guess the purpose which they were to serve. My only concern was to ensure that they were packed with great care and I constantly devised ingenious devices which protected them from vibrations, concussion, and deformation.
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