CHAPTER I. Mr. Bedford Meets Mr. Cavor at Lympne

As I sit down to write here amidst the shadows of vine-leaves under the
blue sky of southern Italy, it comes to me with a certain quality of
astonishment that my participation in these amazing adventures of Mr.

Cavor was, after all, the outcome of the purest accident. It might have
been any one. I fell into these things at a time when I thought myself
removed from the slightest possibility of disturbing experiences. I had
gone to Lympne because I had imagined it the most uneventful place in
the world. “Here, at any rate,” said I, “I shall find peace and a
chance to work!”

And this book is the sequel. So utterly at variance is destiny with all
the little plans of men. I may perhaps mention here that very recently
I had come an ugly cropper in certain business enterprises. Sitting now
surrounded by all the circumstances of wealth, there is a luxury in
admitting my extremity. I can admit, even, that to a certain extent my
disasters were conceivably of my own making. It may be there are
directions in which I have some capacity, but the conduct of business
operations is not among these. But in those days I was young, and my
youth among other objectionable forms took that of a pride in my
capacity for affairs. I am young still in years, but the things that
have happened to me have rubbed something of the youth from my mind.

Whether they have brought any wisdom to light below it is a more
doubtful matter.

It is scarcely necessary to go into the details of the speculations
that landed me at Lympne, in Kent. Nowadays even about business
transactions there is a strong spice of adventure. I took risks. In
these things there is invariably a certain amount of give and take, and
it fell to me finally to do the giving reluctantly enough. Even when I
had got out of everything, one cantankerous creditor saw fit to be
malignant. Perhaps you have met that flaming sense of outraged virtue,
or perhaps you have only felt it. He ran me hard. It seemed to me, at
last, that there was nothing for it but to write a play, unless I
wanted to drudge for my living as a clerk. I have a certain
imagination, and luxurious tastes, and I meant to make a vigorous fight
for it before that fate overtook me. In addition to my belief in my
powers as a business man, I had always in those days had an idea that I
was equal to writing a very good play. It is not, I believe, a very
uncommon persuasion. I knew there is nothing a man can do outside
legitimate business transactions that has such opulent possibilities,
and very probably that biased my opinion. I had, indeed, got into the
habit of regarding this unwritten drama as a convenient little reserve
put by for a rainy day. That rainy day had come, and I set to work.

I soon discovered that writing a play was a longer business than I had
supposed; at first I had reckoned ten days for it, and it was to have a
_pied-à-terre_ while it was in hand that I came to Lympne. I reckoned
myself lucky in getting that little bungalow. I got it on a three
years’ agreement. I put in a few sticks of furniture, and while the
play was in hand I did my own cooking. My cooking would have shocked
Mrs. Bond. And yet, you know, it had flavour. I had a coffee-pot, a
sauce-pan for eggs, and one for potatoes, and a frying-pan for sausages
and bacon—such was the simple apparatus of my comfort. One cannot
always be magnificent, but simplicity is always a possible alternative.

For the rest I laid in an eighteen-gallon cask of beer on credit, and a
trustful baker came each day. It was not, perhaps, in the style of
Sybaris, but I have had worse times. I was a little sorry for the
baker, who was a very decent man indeed, but even for him I hoped.

Certainly if any one wants solitude, the place is Lympne. It is in the
clay part of Kent, and my bungalow stood on the edge of an old sea
cliff and stared across the flats of Romney Marsh at the sea. In very
wet weather the place is almost inaccessible, and I have heard that at
times the postman used to traverse the more succulent portions of his
route with boards upon his feet. I never saw him doing so, but I can
quite imagine it. Outside the doors of the few cottages and houses that
make up the present village big birch besoms are stuck, to wipe off the
worst of the clay, which will give some idea of the texture of the
district. I doubt if the place would be there at all, if it were not a
fading memory of things gone for ever. It was the big port of England
in Roman times, Portus Lemanis, and now the sea is four miles away. All
down the steep hill are boulders and masses of Roman brickwork, and
from it old Watling Street, still paved in places, starts like an arrow
to the north. I used to stand on the hill and think of it all, the
galleys and legions, the captives and officials, the women and traders,
the speculators like myself, all the swarm and tumult that came
clanking in and out of the harbour. And now just a few lumps of rubble
on a grassy slope, and a sheep or two—and I. And where the port had
been were the levels of the marsh, sweeping round in a broad curve to
distant Dungeness, and dotted here and there with tree clumps and the
church towers of old mediæval towns that are following Lemanis now
towards extinction.

That outlook on the marsh was, indeed, one of the finest views I have
ever seen. I suppose Dungeness was fifteen miles away; it lay like a
raft on the sea, and farther westward were the hills by Hastings under
the setting sun. Sometimes they hung close and clear, sometimes they
were faded and low, and often the drift of the weather took them clean
out of sight. And all the nearer parts of the marsh were laced and lit
by ditches and canals.

The window at which I worked looked over the skyline of this crest, and
it was from this window that I first set eyes on Cavor. It was just as
I was struggling with my scenario, holding down my mind to the sheer
hard work of it, and naturally enough he arrested my attention.

The sun had set, the sky was a vivid tranquillity of green and yellow,
and against that he came out black—the oddest little figure.

He was a short, round-bodied, thin-legged little man, with a jerky
quality in his motions; he had seen fit to clothe his extraordinary
mind in a cricket cap, an overcoat, and cycling knickerbockers and
stockings. Why he did so I do not know, for he never cycled and he
never played cricket. It was a fortuitous concurrence of garments,
arising I know not how. He gesticulated with his hands and arms, and
jerked his head about and buzzed. He buzzed like something electric.

You never heard such buzzing. And ever and again he cleared his throat
with a most extraordinary noise.

There had been rain, and that spasmodic walk of his was enhanced by the
extreme slipperiness of the footpath. Exactly as he came against the
sun he stopped, pulled out a watch, hesitated. Then with a sort of
convulsive gesture he turned and retreated with every manifestation of
haste, no longer gesticulating, but going with ample strides that
showed the relatively large size of his feet—they were, I remember,
grotesquely exaggerated in size by adhesive clay—to the best possible
advantage.

This occurred on the first day of my sojourn, when my play-writing
energy was at its height and I regarded the incident simply as an
annoying distraction—the waste of five minutes. I returned to my
scenario. But when next evening the apparition was repeated with
remarkable precision, and again the next evening, and indeed every
evening when rain was not falling, concentration upon the scenario
became a considerable effort. “Confound the man,” I said, “one would
think he was learning to be a marionette!” and for several evenings I
cursed him pretty heartily. Then my annoyance gave way to amazement and
curiosity. Why on earth should a man do this thing? On the fourteenth
evening I could stand it no longer, and so soon as he appeared I opened
the french window, crossed the verandah, and directed myself to the
point where he invariably stopped.

He had his watch out as I came up to him. He had a chubby, rubicund
face with reddish brown eyes—previously I had seen him only against the
light. “One moment, sir,” said I as he turned. He stared. “One moment,”
he said, “certainly. Or if you wish to speak to me for longer, and it
is not asking too much—your moment is up—would it trouble you to
accompany me?”

“Not in the least,” said I, placing myself beside him.

“My habits are regular. My time for intercourse—limited.”

“This, I presume, is your time for exercise?”

“It is. I come here to enjoy the sunset.”

“You don’t.”

“Sir?”

“You never look at it.”

“Never look at it?”

“No. I’ve watched you thirteen nights, and not once have you looked at
the sunset—not once.”

He knitted his brows like one who encounters a problem.

“Well, I enjoy the sunlight—the atmosphere—I go along this path,
through that gate”—he jerked his head over his shoulder—“and round—”

“You don’t. You never have been. It’s all nonsense. There isn’t a way.

To-night for instance—”

“Oh! to-night! Let me see. Ah! I just glanced at my watch, saw that I
had already been out just three minutes over the precise half-hour,
decided there was not time to go round, turned—”

“You always do.”

He looked at me—reflected. “Perhaps I do, now I come to think of it.

But what was it you wanted to speak to me about?”

“Why, this!”

“This?”

“Yes. Why do you do it? Every night you come making a noise—”

“Making a noise?”

“Like this.” I imitated his buzzing noise. He looked at me, and it was
evident the buzzing awakened distaste. “Do I do _that?_” he asked.

“Every blessed evening.”

“I had no idea.”

He stopped dead. He regarded me gravely. “Can it be,” he said, “that I
have formed a Habit?”

“Well, it looks like it. Doesn’t it?”

He pulled down his lower lip between finger and thumb. He regarded a
puddle at his feet.

“My mind is much occupied,” he said. “And you want to know _why!_ Well,
sir, I can assure you that not only do I not know why I do these
things, but I did not even know I did them. Come to think, it is just
as you say; I never _have_ been beyond that field.... And these things
annoy you?”

For some reason I was beginning to relent towards him. “Not _annoy_,” I
said. “But—imagine yourself writing a play!”

“I couldn’t.”

“Well, anything that needs concentration.”

“Ah!” he said, “of course,” and meditated. His expression became so
eloquent of distress, that I relented still more. After all, there is a
touch of aggression in demanding of a man you don’t know why he hums on
a public footpath.

“You see,” he said weakly, “it’s a habit.”

“Oh, I recognise that.”

“I must stop it.”

“But not if it puts you out. After all, I had no business—it’s
something of a liberty.”

“Not at all, sir,” he said, “not at all. I am greatly indebted to you.

I should guard myself against these things. In future I will. Could I
trouble you—once again? That noise?”

“Something like this,” I said. “Zuzzoo, zuzzoo. But really, you know—”

“I am greatly obliged to you. In fact, I know I am getting absurdly
absent-minded. You are quite justified, sir—perfectly justified.

Indeed, I am indebted to you. The thing shall end. And now, sir, I have
already brought you farther than I should have done.”

“I do hope my impertinence—”

“Not at all, sir, not at all.”

We regarded each other for a moment. I raised my hat and wished him a
good evening. He responded convulsively, and so we went our ways.

At the stile I looked back at his receding figure. His bearing had
changed remarkably, he seemed limp, shrunken. The contrast with his
former gesticulating, zuzzoing self took me in some absurd way as
pathetic. I watched him out of sight. Then wishing very heartily I had
kept to my own business, I returned to my bungalow and my play.

The next evening I saw nothing of him, nor the next. But he was very
much in my mind, and it had occurred to me that as a sentimental comic
character he might serve a useful purpose in the development of my
plot. The third day he called upon me.

For a time I was puzzled to think what had brought him. He made
indifferent conversation in the most formal way, then abruptly he came
to business. He wanted to buy me out of my bungalow.

“You see,” he said, “I don’t blame you in the least, but you’ve
destroyed a habit, and it disorganises my day. I’ve walked past here
for years—years. No doubt I’ve hummed.... You’ve made all that
impossible!”

I suggested he might try some other direction.

“No. There is no other direction. This is the only one. I’ve inquired.

And now—every afternoon at four—I come to a dead wall.”

“But, my dear sir, if the thing is so important to you—”

“It’s vital. You see, I’m—I’m an investigator—I am engaged in a
scientific research. I live—” he paused and seemed to think. “Just over
there,” he said, and pointed suddenly dangerously near my eye. “The
house with white chimneys you see just over the trees. And my
circumstances are abnormal—abnormal. I am on the point of completing
one of the most important—demonstrations—I can assure you one of _the
most important_ demonstrations that have ever been made. It requires
constant thought, constant mental ease and activity. And the afternoon
was my brightest time!—effervescing with new ideas—new points of view.”

“But why not come by still?”

“It would be all different. I should be self-conscious. I should think
of you at your play—watching me irritated—instead of thinking of my
work. No! I must have the bungalow.”

I meditated. Naturally, I wanted to think the matter over thoroughly
before anything decisive was said. I was generally ready enough for
business in those days, and selling always attracted me; but in the
first place it was not my bungalow, and even if I sold it to him at a
good price I might get inconvenienced in the delivery of goods if the
current owner got wind of the transaction, and in the second I was,
well—undischarged. It was clearly a business that required delicate
handling. Moreover, the possibility of his being in pursuit of some
valuable invention also interested me. It occurred to me that I would
like to know more of this research, not with any dishonest intention,
but simply with an idea that to know what it was would be a relief from
play-writing. I threw out feelers.

He was quite willing to supply information. Indeed, once he was fairly
under way the conversation became a monologue. He talked like a man
long pent up, who has had it over with himself again and again. He
talked for nearly an hour, and I must confess I found it a pretty stiff
bit of listening. But through it all there was the undertone of
satisfaction one feels when one is neglecting work one has set oneself.

During that first interview I gathered very little of the drift of his
work. Half his words were technicalities entirely strange to me, and he
illustrated one or two points with what he was pleased to call
elementary mathematics, computing on an envelope with a copying-ink
pencil, in a manner that made it hard even to seem to understand.

“Yes,” I said, “yes. Go on!” Nevertheless I made out enough to convince
me that he was no mere crank playing at discoveries. In spite of his
crank-like appearance there was a force about him that made that
impossible. Whatever it was, it was a thing with mechanical
possibilities. He told me of a work-shed he had, and of three
assistants—originally jobbing carpenters—whom he had trained. Now, from
the work-shed to the patent office is clearly only one step. He invited
me to see those things. I accepted readily, and took care, by a remark
or so, to underline that. The proposed transfer of the bungalow
remained very conveniently in suspense.

At last he rose to depart, with an apology for the length of his call.

Talking over his work was, he said, a pleasure enjoyed only too rarely.

It was not often he found such an intelligent listener as myself, he
mingled very little with professional scientific men.

“So much pettiness,” he explained; “so much intrigue! And really, when
one has an idea—a novel, fertilising idea—I don’t want to be
uncharitable, but—”

I am a man who believes in impulses. I made what was perhaps a rash
proposition. But you must remember, that I had been alone, play-writing
in Lympne, for fourteen days, and my compunction for his ruined walk
still hung about me. “Why not,” said I, “make this your new habit? In
the place of the one I spoilt? At least, until we can settle about the
bungalow. What you want is to turn over your work in your mind. That
you have always done during your afternoon walk. Unfortunately that’s
over—you can’t get things back as they were. But why not come and talk
about your work to me; use me as a sort of wall against which you may
throw your thoughts and catch them again? It’s certain I don’t know
enough to steal your ideas myself—and I know no scientific men—”

I stopped. He was considering. Evidently the thing attracted him. “But
I’m afraid I should bore you,” he said.

“You think I’m too dull?”

“Oh, no; but technicalities—”

“Anyhow, you’ve interested me immensely this afternoon.”

“Of course it _would_ be a great help to me. Nothing clears up one’s
ideas so much as explaining them. Hitherto—”

“My dear sir, say no more.”

“But really can you spare the time?”

“There is no rest like change of occupation,” I said, with profound
conviction.

The affair was over. On my verandah steps he turned. “I am already
greatly indebted to you,” he said.

I made an interrogative noise.

“You have completely cured me of that ridiculous habit of humming,” he
explained.

I think I said I was glad to be of any service to him, and he turned
away.

Immediately the train of thought that our conversation had suggested
must have resumed its sway. His arms began to wave in their former
fashion. The faint echo of “zuzzoo” came back to me on the breeze....

Well, after all, that was not my affair....

He came the next day, and again the next day after that, and delivered
two lectures on physics to our mutual satisfaction. He talked with an
air of being extremely lucid about the “ether” and “tubes of force,”
and “gravitational potential,” and things like that, and I sat in my
other folding-chair and said, “Yes,” “Go on,” “I follow you,” to keep
him going. It was tremendously difficult stuff, but I do not think he
ever suspected how much I did not understand him. There were moments
when I doubted whether I was well employed, but at any rate I was
resting from that confounded play. Now and then things gleamed on me
clearly for a space, only to vanish just when I thought I had hold of
them. Sometimes my attention failed altogether, and I would give it up
and sit and stare at him, wondering whether, after all, it would not be
better to use him as a central figure in a good farce and let all this
other stuff slide. And then, perhaps, I would catch on again for a bit.

At the earliest opportunity I went to see his house. It was large and
carelessly furnished; there were no servants other than his three
assistants, and his dietary and private life were characterised by a
philosophical simplicity. He was a water-drinker, a vegetarian, and all
those logical disciplinary things. But the sight of his equipment
settled many doubts. It looked like business from cellar to attic—an
amazing little place to find in an out-of-the-way village. The
ground-floor rooms contained benches and apparatus, the bakehouse and
scullery boiler had developed into respectable furnaces, dynamos
occupied the cellar, and there was a gasometer in the garden. He showed
it to me with all the confiding zest of a man who has been living too
much alone. His seclusion was overflowing now in an excess of
confidence, and I had the good luck to be the recipient.

The three assistants were creditable specimens of the class of
“handy-men” from which they came. Conscientious if unintelligent,
strong, civil, and willing. One, Spargus, who did the cooking and all
the metal work, had been a sailor; a second, Gibbs, was a joiner; and
the third was an ex-jobbing gardener, and now general assistant. They
were the merest labourers. All the intelligent work was done by Cavor.

Theirs was the darkest ignorance compared even with my muddled
impression.

And now, as to the nature of these inquiries. Here, unhappily, comes a
grave difficulty. I am no scientific expert, and if I were to attempt
to set forth in the highly scientific language of Mr. Cavor the aim to
which his experiments tended, I am afraid I should confuse not only the
reader but myself, and almost certainly I should make some blunder that
would bring upon me the mockery of every up-to-date student of
mathematical physics in the country. The best thing I can do therefore
is, I think to give my impressions in my own inexact language, without
any attempt to wear a garment of knowledge to which I have no claim.

The object of Mr. Cavor’s search was a substance that should be
“opaque”—he used some other word I have forgotten, but “opaque” conveys
the idea—to “all forms of radiant energy.” “Radiant energy,” he made me
understand, was anything like light or heat, or those Röntgen Rays
there was so much talk about a year or so ago, or the electric waves of
Marconi, or gravitation. All these things, he said, _radiate_ out from
centres, and act on bodies at a distance, whence comes the term
“radiant energy.” Now almost all substances are opaque to some form or
other of radiant energy. Glass, for example, is transparent to light,
but much less so to heat, so that it is useful as a fire-screen; and
alum is transparent to light, but blocks heat completely. A solution of
iodine in carbon bisulphide, on the other hand, completely blocks
light, but is quite transparent to heat. It will hide a fire from you,
but permit all its warmth to reach you. Metals are not only opaque to
light and heat, but also to electrical energy, which passes through
both iodine solution and glass almost as though they were not
interposed. And so on.

Now all known substances are “transparent” to gravitation. You can use
screens of various sorts to cut off the light or heat, or electrical
influence of the sun, or the warmth of the earth from anything; you can
screen things by sheets of metal from Marconi’s rays, but nothing will
cut off the gravitational attraction of the sun or the gravitational
attraction of the earth. Yet why there should be nothing is hard to
say. Cavor did not see why such a substance should not exist, and
certainly I could not tell him. I had never thought of such a
possibility before. He showed me by calculations on paper, which Lord
Kelvin, no doubt, or Professor Lodge, or Professor Karl Pearson, or any
of those great scientific people might have understood, but which
simply reduced me to a hopeless muddle, that not only was such a
substance possible, but that it must satisfy certain conditions. It was
an amazing piece of reasoning. Much as it amazed and exercised me at
the time, it would be impossible to reproduce it here. “Yes,” I said to
it all, “yes; go on!” Suffice it for this story that he believed he
might be able to manufacture this possible substance opaque to
gravitation out of a complicated alloy of metals and something new—a
new element, I fancy—called, I believe, _helium_, which was sent to him
from London in sealed stone jars. Doubt has been thrown upon this
detail, but I am almost certain it was _helium_ he had sent him in
sealed stone jars. It was certainly something very gaseous and thin. If
only I had taken notes...

But then, how was I to foresee the necessity of taking notes?

Any one with the merest germ of an imagination will understand the
extraordinary possibilities of such a substance, and will sympathise a
little with the emotion I felt as this understanding emerged from the
haze of abstruse phrases in which Cavor expressed himself. Comic relief
in a play indeed! It was some time before I would believe that I had
interpreted him aright, and I was very careful not to ask questions
that would have enabled him to gauge the profundity of misunderstanding
into which he dropped his daily exposition. But no one reading the
story of it here will sympathise fully, because from my barren
narrative it will be impossible to gather the strength of my conviction
that this astonishing substance was positively going to be made.

I do not recall that I gave my play an hour’s consecutive work at any
time after my visit to his house. My imagination had other things to
do. There seemed no limit to the possibilities of the stuff; whichever
way I tried I came on miracles and revolutions. For example, if one
wanted to lift a weight, however enormous, one had only to get a sheet
of this substance beneath it, and one might lift it with a straw. My
first natural impulse was to apply this principle to guns and
ironclads, and all the material and methods of war, and from that to
shipping, locomotion, building, every conceivable form of human
industry. The chance that had brought me into the very birth-chamber of
this new time—it was an epoch, no less—was one of those chances that
come once in a thousand years. The thing unrolled, it expanded and
expanded. Among other things I saw in it my redemption as a business
man. I saw a parent company, and daughter companies, applications to
right of us, applications to left, rings and trusts, privileges, and
concessions spreading and spreading, until one vast, stupendous
Cavorite company ran and ruled the world.

And I was in it!

I took my line straight away. I knew I was staking everything, but I
jumped there and then.

“We’re on absolutely the biggest thing that has ever been invented,” I
said, and put the accent on “we.” “If you want to keep me out of this,
you’ll have to do it with a gun. I’m coming down to be your fourth
labourer to-morrow.”

He seemed surprised at my enthusiasm, but not a bit suspicious or
hostile. Rather, he was self-depreciatory. He looked at me doubtfully.

“But do you really think—?” he said. “And your play! How about that
play?”

“It’s vanished!” I cried. “My dear sir, don’t you see what you’ve got?

Don’t you see what you’re going to do?”

That was merely a rhetorical turn, but positively, he didn’t. At first
I could not believe it. He had not had the beginning of the inkling of
an idea. This astonishing little man had been working on purely
theoretical grounds the whole time! When he said it was “the most
important” research the world had ever seen, he simply meant it squared
up so many theories, settled so much that was in doubt; he had troubled
no more about the application of the stuff he was going to turn out
than if he had been a machine that makes guns. This was a possible
substance, and he was going to make it! _V’la tout_, as the Frenchman
says.

Beyond that, he was childish! If he made it, it would go down to
posterity as Cavorite or Cavorine, and he would be made an F.R.S., and
his portrait given away as a scientific worthy with _Nature_, and
things like that. And that was all he saw! He would have dropped this
bombshell into the world as though he had discovered a new species of
gnat, if it had not happened that I had come along. And there it would
have lain and fizzled, like one or two other little things these
scientific people have lit and dropped about us.

When I realised this, it was I did the talking, and Cavor who said, “Go
on!” I jumped up. I paced the room, gesticulating like a boy of twenty.

I tried to make him understand his duties and responsibilities in the
matter—_our_ duties and responsibilities in the matter. I assured him
we might make wealth enough to work any sort of social revolution we
fancied, we might own and order the whole world. I told him of
companies and patents, and the case for secret processes. All these
things seemed to take him much as his mathematics had taken me. A look
of perplexity came into his ruddy little face. He stammered something
about indifference to wealth, but I brushed all that aside. He had got
to be rich, and it was no good his stammering. I gave him to understand
the sort of man I was, and that I had had very considerable business
experience. I did not tell him I was an undischarged bankrupt at the
time, because that was temporary, but I think I reconciled my evident
poverty with my financial claims. And quite insensibly, in the way such
projects grow, the understanding of a Cavorite monopoly grew up between
us. He was to make the stuff, and I was to make the boom.

I stuck like a leech to the “we”—“you” and “I” didn’t exist for me.

His idea was that the profits I spoke of might go to endow research,
but that, of course, was a matter we had to settle later. “That’s all
right,” I shouted, “that’s all right.” The great point, as I insisted,
was to get the thing done.

“Here is a substance,” I cried, “no home, no factory, no fortress, no
ship can dare to be without—more universally applicable even than a
patent medicine. There isn’t a solitary aspect of it, not one of its
ten thousand possible uses that will not make us rich, Cavor, beyond
the dreams of avarice!”

“No!” he said. “I begin to see. It’s extraordinary how one gets new
points of view by talking over things!”

“And as it happens you have just talked to the right man!”

“I suppose no one,” he said, “is absolutely _averse_ to enormous
wealth. Of course there is one thing—”

He paused. I stood still.

“It is just possible, you know, that we may not be able to make it
after all! It may be one of those things that are a theoretical
possibility, but a practical absurdity. Or when we make it, there may
be some little hitch!”

“We’ll tackle the hitch when it comes,” said I.