Drowned Gold/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X
WE got the Esperanza's anchors up, and as quietly as possible moved down the harbor. As we passed the big British tramp close astern a voice from the bridge, through a megaphone, wished me good luck, and I saw that Captain Roberts was aware of my departure. His little shout of encouragement seemed an offset, in a way, to the perturbation I had been caused by the sight of the discharged oiler on the dock. We swung to the eastward, laying our course close to the land-line until we came to the cove which Captain Roberts had suggested as a suitable place for me to mount my armament. It proved to be an ideal spot; for from the time we began our work until it was finished we were undisturbed. A native came off in a punt, rowed round us curiously, and then, as if accustomed to strange visitors, went back to his own affairs. My preparations had been so completely made before leaving Maracaibo that it was not a very difficult task to mount my guns, with the heaviest one aft. I superintended the work myself, even to the fastening of every stay and bolt, and when the guns were mounted, with my own hands tested the mechanism. It was in perfect order, and it was now that my long experience in the Navy came into good play. My second mate was, fortunately, a man who had done eight years' service in the United States Navy, wherein he had a gunner's rating. I discovered, also, that we had two other men aboard who had served on men-o'-war, and I proceeded, therefore, in that sequestered bay, to gun-drill. My first mate, Rogers, was a man thoroughly competent to take the ship in emergency, and I therefore decided to handle the heavy gun myself in case we were attacked. I was convinced from remarks that came to my ears that most of the members of my crew were rather eager to meet a submarine and try conclusions, when, at last, our work was done and we placed the tarpaulin covers over the guns, took steam, and started on our long voyage for Bordeaux.
We laid our course outside Curaçao to bring us between the Windward and Leeward Islands of Santa Lucia and Martinique; the former being British and the latter a French possession, both of which would prove friendly to us in case we wished anything. Before the first day had passed we had settled down to routine. The possession of the guns, squatted fore and aft, in their canvas suits, imbued us with a sense of protection and ability to defend ourselves. Somehow our long spell of freedom from worry seemed to have given all of us better nerve control than had been ours when returning from our last voyage of hazard. We seemed to have gathered ourselves together again and to face the forthcoming cruise with the utmost coolness and equanimity.
The night was exceptionally calm, and I was sitting in my cabin writing a letter, when I was disturbed by Jimmy, who came rushing unceremoniously up the bridge steps and into my door, and paused inside. Since the night when he told me that he proposed to stay aboard the Esperanza, I had scarcely had an opportunity to talk to him, for he seemed terribly engrossed with his own work. So, when I looked up at him, as he stood inside my cabin door, I welcomed his visit; but I checked the words of greeting that came to my lips and stared at him in surprise.
He was like a man suffering from a mental tremor. He was bareheaded, and stood running his fingers nervously through the fringes of his hair, and his eyes glittered so strangely as to suggest a highly unstrung condition, bordering on insanity. He suddenly came close to my desk, reached across, and, with an emphatic thump on my blotter, said hoarsely, "I've got it. By Heavens! I've got it!"
"Got what?" I said. "If I did not know that you were a teetotaller I should be tempted to say that you had the jim-jams."
As if this were a joke, he laughed in a high, unusual key, straightened up, and then, with a great air of triumph and secrecy, bent forward again until his face was close to mine, and declared: "The invention—my invention—is completed. My life-work, friend. Come to my cabin, come quickly!"
Without another word he turned and ran in that same excited fashion from my room, and I could hear his feet pattering down the bridge steps, taking them two at a time. I was forced to the belief that he had indeed achieved some sort of success, or else that he had gone mad from overwork and delayed hope. In either event it was my duty to follow after and calm him, which I did, deliberately thinking, meanwhile, what I could do in case it proved madness and he intractable.
Jimmy was waiting for me at the cabin door, and immediately led me back to his laboratory after taking great precautions to assure himself that no one could spy upon us. The intricate brass apparatus had been added to by another since I had last stood in the laboratory, and these two were standing close to the inner door, this giving for his experiments the full length of the room. Suspended from one of the ceiling girders was an iron plate, a full half-inch in thickness, and of such weight that I wondered how he had succeeded in hoisting it up alone, until I discovered that each side was equipped with a system of pulleys. At the farther end of the laboratory was a square of paper covered with print, quite large, but not of a size to permit my reading from where I stood. The iron plate was so close to the camera-like eyes of the two brass mechanisms as to shut off any view through them. The plate itself was nearly four feet square. Jimmy turned to a battery of switches on the wall behind him, over which was fixed a closely screened toy light, giving merely enough illumination to distinguish the switches after the main lights of the laboratory were turned off. He switched the lights on again, as if satisfied that everything was in working order, and bade me stand behind one of the machines with its eye-pieces, which in outward appearances were like binoculars with shields above them.
"Now keep your place and look through them," he said, as he again stepped back and switched off the lights, leaving the room in utter darkness. Naturally, I could see nothing. I heard the click of one switch after another behind me, and the room was filled with sharp spluttering sounds, not unlike those thrown out by Röntgen rays, but more vicious and reaching a pitch of sharpness somewhat higher than the rasping staccato given forth by wireless apparatus. It was of such piercing quality that my eardrums throbbed, and I cried at last:
"Hold on a moment; I shall be deaf if this keeps up."
Instantly he threw the switch, the noise ceased, and again the room was filled with light.
"Oh, I forgot that your ears are not attuned to such a note, although I suppose that mine are from having experimented so many years."
He went to one of his cupboards, took out some absorbent cotton, of which he made two pads, and slightly solidified them by an application of some plastic wax.
"Here, stuff these in your ears and it will deaden the sound," he said; and I obeyed, and again took my place in front of the eye-pieces.
This time, when he resumed his experiments, I heard nothing more distressing than a low buzzing noise, which impressed me as having the character of separate shocks repeated with such rapidity as to be almost prolonged into one note. For a time I saw nothing but a positive blackness in front of me, and then there came a definite change in the quality of the sound as if another and distinct note had been added to and blended with it. My utter amazement at all that followed can be imagined. I was not only looking through the iron screen in front of me, but saw, standing in the darkness and shining in a vivid green light, the piece of printed paper fastened at the end of the laboratory. Moreover, its letters had now, under intense magnification, leaped in size until they stood a full inch in height. I could read them as easily as one might read the letters on a hoarding across the street. The edges of the redly illuminated paper seemed writhing and twisting with some curious refraction of light, as if the vibration were being thrown from it and flowing over the borders. The somber blackness against which the card was fixed had taken on a curious and ghastly green. For but an instant I stared, and then jerked my head away from the eye-pieces and looked around me. The room was as black as ever. It seemed incredible, for again, when I looked through the same eye-pieces, the paper still stood out, an inexplicable phenomenon.
The buzzing ceased as abruptly as it had begun, save that it dropped in a whining crescendo, and I turned toward Jimmy just as he threw the last switch illuminating the laboratory. I saw that his lips were moving, and pulled the wads from my ears in time to catch the end of a sentence.
"—And another point is that you were looking through that iron plate, and that plate is actually a section taken out of the side of a ship. My invention is, therefore, just as startling as was Röntgen's. In fact, I have gone him one better in a more difficult direction. With these two machines, mostly made with my own hands"—and he shook both his hands, palms upwards in front of me, as if to impress upon me the work they had done—"I can look through the side of this ship into the water beyond. I can look through the water itself as easily and to as great a distance, I believe, as can a man on the deck of this ship see with the aid of a fairly powerful searchlight. That man could see only upon the surface of the water. I tell you, Tom Hale, I can see beneath it. Think of the possibilities. I can revolutionize a thousand undertakings that have hitherto been done by clumsy methods, and I can undertake a thousand others that have hitherto been impossible."
For a full three minutes he ran on volubly, singing a paean of exultation, and then his mind leaped forward imaginatively to possibilities that sounded absurd, and so wild and unbelievable that had I not witnessed his first step I should, more than ever, have questioned his sanity; but now, standing there in his workroom and eying that huge iron plate through which I had just read the print on that scrap of paper no longer within the power of my eyes, I could but believe that he was entitled to jubilate. I have but a layman's scientific knowledge and am not peculiarly endowed with imagination, but I could follow him to a vague degree, although mentally bewildered by the flow of his words. The man had suddenly become to me not only a rare inventor, but a prodigious dreamer, quite unlike the reticent, scowling, Twisted Jimmy of the engine-room. Whether any of his dreams could ever come true might prove another matter, but the fact was patent that he had at least accomplished a scientific achievement. I recalled that other great inventors had been laughed at, and that a great many of them had revolutionized old ideas and made their own commonplace knowledge the concomitants of civilization.
I was standing like a man half stunned when he concluded.
"Gets you, does it? I don't blame you. It will have the same effect on a lot of others some time. I shan't try to explain it to you to-night. In fact, I am a little bit too much upset myself to explain it lucidly; but I will tell you this, that some of my ideas have been proved, and, Tom Hale, if ever any of them succeed commercially, I am going to share with you, because you have stood by me more loyally than any man I have ever met. Others have derided me for more than twenty years—men that should have known better. You backed me up on blind faith, and as sure as there is a God in heaven your faith shall not be misplaced."
As if suddenly relaxing after such prodigious excitement, he leaned back wearily against the partition for a moment, and I was concerned by the drawn look of his face. I strove to divert his mind by getting him away from that mysterious room.
"It seems to me," I said, adopting a ruse, "that this is an occasion worthy of a small celebration, and that we might go to my cabin and at least drink a libation to success."
He turned off the lights, locked the laboratory door, and then the outer door, and followed me dumbly up the bridge steps, and back to my cabin abaft the chart-house, where I rang for my steward. All the inventor's loquacity seemed to have been expended in that one outburst of enthusiasm below; for he threw himself into a chair, sagged down, and for a long time stared absently as if engrossed in his own thoughts and forgetting where he was or my presence. Indeed, he scarcely spoke during the visit, save on the occasion when he lifted his glass in response to my toast for his success, and then said, as if reiterating his determination to make me a sharer in his enterprise: "What I said down there goes, you understand. You are in on this. It's bigger than you think. It will get both of us somewhere, some day. Take my word for it."
With that same abruptness that characterized all his actions, he turned immediately after that single speech and went below. I will confess that it was well toward dawn before I could calm myself to sleep.