The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson: The Dream Of X & Other Fantastic Visions (37 page)

He stopped, breathless with anger and bitterness, and the girl nodded, with a little scornful laugh at the futility of the Jew’s mean schemes.

“The beauty of it is,” continued Harrison, “that I’ll let him do all that he’s meaning to do, only there’ll be one little alteration which will make just a slight difference. I’ll fake up a dummy cylinder, fireclay it, and put it in the top of the furnace, and have the genuine one right down out of sight at the bottom. “What do you think of the notion?”

“Splendid!” said the girl, delighted. “It’s just a splendid idea. We shall have him all along the line, sha’n’t we? And he won’t dare say a word afterwards, when he finds out how we’ve got back on him, as we say at home,”

“Yes, I think we’ve got him all right.” said Harrison. “He’ll take the visible, dummy cylinder, and leave his own in place of it. Then he’ll put the dummy to bed in his own furnace, believing that it contains the diamonds. Meanwhile we’ll remove his, and hide it until we need it, and bring the genuine one up to its proper place again. In a month from to-day we’ll open the real one; and get the diamonds, if there are any, without saying a word to Moss. Then we’ll shove the faked cylinder back into the furnace, and invite him to come in and see it opened, telling him we’ve been cooling down for days, and that it is now ready. As soon as we get it open, he’ll shake his head, and say that he feared the experiment could hardly come to anything—just a matter of chance and luck. Then he’ll go away hugging himself with the belief that he has the real cylinder safe in his own furnace—see?”

Harrison proved something of a prophet; for in no single thing was he wide of his mark. The Jew did offer to take his watch one day soon, whilst he took Miss Gwynn for an outing. When he returned, a very brief examination showed him that the Jew had effected the exchange. When the two lovers wore assured of the fact, they looked at each other, and laughed heartily. Afterwards they hoisted the faked cylinder out of the furnace, and hid it away at the bank.

“Three weeks later Harrison removed the genuine cylinder from the furnace and replaced it with the faked counterpart. Then he put the real one into hot sand to cool off. At the end of another week, he judged it would be safe to venture upon opening it.

Yet when they came to open it, they found that the screwed head was hopelessly fused solid with the remainder of the cylinder. Harrison, however, had foreseen this, and had provided himself with a suitable hacksaw and a plentiful supply of spare blades. Yet, before he attempted to do anything else, he drilled a small hole in the side of the steel case to let off the imprisoned gases. As the drill bit through the last fraction of steel, there came a sharp report and a shrill whistling of rushing gas. The drill was blown clean out of Harrison’s hand, and rang against the opposite wall; but, fortunately, neither he nor Nell was hurt.

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.

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Eloi Eloi Lama Sabachthani

D
ally, 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 into 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?’