Complete works of a e w.., p.600
Complete Works of a E W Mason, page 600
“Brent, you are the last of the Tories.”
“And that leaves us just where we were before,” Brent replied unconcernedly. “All these Utopias now, Colonel Crayle! I read about them. They clear your slums away, and they wash you, and they dress you in health-clothes, and they feed you, and they arrange your marriage and your children — but where’s your soul? It’s gone — like that!”
The morning had come. Brent was pointing towards the yellow glow above the sunlight which just at that moment had vanished.
“And there’s my relief.”
Brent tapped the bowl of his pipe against the log, stood up and stretched his arms above his head. Along a narrow path from the direction of the house a third man was approaching. But before he reached the semicircle of gravel, from within the laboratory was heard a loud knocking upon the door.
Derek Crayle turned back to it with a catch of his breath. Though it was just for this sound that he had been hoping, now that it was audible it startled him like a clap of thunder.
“At last!” he cried, and he sent Brent off at a run to the house. He stepped forward to the door and shouted cheerfully through the panels:
“All right, sir! A moment or two! I have sent for Hoyle and the key.”
* * * * *
The strange imprisonment of Mark Thewliss in his own laboratory was the outcome of that dramatic instinct in him which secured the advertisement and made others shoulder the advertising. He had dined six months before in the company of half a dozen manufacturers of cloth and silk from the North of England, and had there quietly announced that it needed only the perfection of a detail or two before he could produce the universal formula for fadeless dyes for all materials. One or two of the company had scoffed at the pretension of the man, one or two who knew him better plied him with questions, one or two, with their feet cemented in old routine and fearful of change, were silent and uneasy.
“You’ll patent your discovery, of course,” said Hoyle, who was one of the company, thrusting his keen face forward.
“I haven’t got as far as thinking about that yet,” Mark Thewliss replied.
The two uneasy men, Mr. Benfield and Sir James Copeland, shrugged their shoulders and grimaced at one another sourly. The old fox was going to keep his discovery to himself until he had made up his mind by which way he could squeeze the last penny out of it. But Hoyle kept his sharp eyes for a moment or two upon Mark Thewliss’ face and then leaned back in his chair, apparently not dissatisfied.
“Of course we should like to know when you are satisfied that you have the whole process complete,” he said.
“Yes. That’s fair enough,” Thewliss replied.
“And I should like to be satisfied at the same time that the process isn’t — well, it’s better to use blunt words even at the risk of offence — isn’t, to put it plainly, a fake,” said one of the scoffers.
He was a Mr. Wisberry from the cluster of cloth-mills in Somersetshire, and he was known for his pride in plain language as much as for the excellence of his cloth. Mark Thewliss took the affront with a smile.
“I can meet you there, too. When I am ready I’ll let you all know. You shall provide me, each of you, with a strip of material to be dyed. You shall choose the material. You shall choose the kind of dye. I shall have everything removed from my laboratory except what I want for the one process. You shall appoint one of you to make sure that there is nothing else there, that there are no pieces already dyed, and I will not know what pieces you are going to hand over to me to be dyed. Then, when you are satisfied I’ll go into the laboratory with enough food and drink to last me for a day or two. You shall lock me in. You shall set a guard upon the building night and day, and when I knock on the door I shall have finished. I’ll hand you over your strips of materials dyed as you wanted them, and you can submit them to what tests you like. I’ll guarantee they won’t fade.”
The challenge had been accepted, Hoyle had been selected to supervise the conditions under which the experiment was to be made; and now in this first week of June, six months afterwards, it had been made.
Hoyle had a very vivid recollection of that dinner party in a private room of the hotel at Leeds, as he slipped into his clothes and hurried across the park. His face wore a grave look of concern. Had Mark Thewliss failed? Had he succeeded? If the latter there would be a vast upset in this particular industry. One universal formula! Applicable to all fabrics and all dyes! It was gigantic in its conception — still more gigantic in its consequence. It would lead to mass production first of all — mass production on a scale quite unknown. There would have to be immense amalgamations. The little special divisions of the industry would be brought together under one roof. They would lose their identity. The men who ran them would go under. He himself, for all he knew, might be in danger. And sprawling over the top of them all, the black Genie from the bottle, Mark Thewliss — damn him! — yes, Mark Thewliss unless — yes, by the way, unless...Hoyle had had a glimmering notion of a counter-stroke so far back as that dinner party.
“I mustn’t forget that,” he said to himself, and thereupon ceased to hurry.
There was no need to hurry. He had the key of the laboratory in his pocket. The door couldn’t be opened until he reached it. He must be on the alert with all his wits about him when it was opened. Thewliss was a queer card in some ways. A good deal might be learnt by a man who had eyes wherewith to see — a good deal which might be very useful. Mr. Hoyle brought a genial and unruffled countenance to the small group before the door.
“So the great experiment is completed,” he said. “Now for the demonstration,” and setting the key in the lock he turned it.
The door swung inwards on its hinges and the four men looked into a small dark vestibule. For a moment their eyes, accustomed to the daylight, could distinguish nothing in the gloom of the little shuttered hall. Then they saw that it was empty. But an inner door opened at the side upon the big laboratory, and as they stood upon the threshold they heard a slow and dragging step begin and grow louder.
“What an actor the fellow is!” was Hoyle’s first admiring thought.
But he dismissed it as Thewliss came into view. For there was no affectation of fatigue in Thewliss’ bearing. He was white and drawn and utterly dispirited. He came forward with the merest ghost of a smile which suited well his ghostly face, and he leaned against the pillar of the door with the indifference men show when reaction from some great strain has turned the whole living world into a fantasy.
“By God!...he has failed,” said Derek Crayle under his breath.
In a silence so complete he was heard by everyone, even by Mark Thewliss, who turned his eyes towards him. But there was no reproach in them and no denial. They were the eyes of a man coming out of a coma, mystifying, expressionless. In a moment or two he spoke:
“I am very tired,” and as though the sound of his own voice had roused him to consciousness, he nodded to Hoyle. “You’ll find everything in there,” he said, with a jerk of his head towards the laboratory behind him.
“You are satisfied then?” Hoyle asked quietly, and his lips set in a straight, rather grim line.
“Quite! You can take away all the exhibits and test them as you like. We are at the beginning of June. You have four months of sunlight. In October I’ll ask you to agree with me.”
Thewliss moved away from the door. The movement was stiff and heavy. There was no spring in his step. He plodded disconsolately towards the house. On the other hand Hoyle sprang forward the instant the doorway was clear, and vanished into the laboratory.
“Quick, eh?” said Brent appreciatively. If any clue to Mark’s process had been left intelligible to a shrewd mind, the secret would assuredly not remain a secret long. Derek Crayle followed close upon Hoyle; and drew a breath of relief. Hoyle was standing in the centre of the great room, darting his eyes now into this corner now into that, and murmuring to himself:
“Ah! The old fox! Might ha’ been spring-cleaned! The old foxy one.”
Indeed, the great room looked ready for use rather than quitted after use. But for some utterly charred fragments of paper in the grate and a row of dyed strips of material pegged against a wall, there was no indication of the three nights and days during which Thewliss had worked there. The retorts, the Savalle columns, the dephlegmators stood in their accustomed places. Here was an iron vessel with its stirring gear; there another with a leaden cooling worm. A furnace and boiler, a reflux condenser, an earthenware apparatus for chlorination — all the paraphernalia of a perfectly equipped laboratory stood clean and orderly. In a corner by one of the shuttered windows a writing-table was placed with ink and writing-pad, pens and blotting paper upon it and a comfortable chair with arms in front of it. Hoyle ran to it and, flinging open the shutters of the window, held the pad to the light. There might have been the indentations of a pen or pencil writing figures and calculations on an upper sheet now removed. There was not a mark. If Thewliss had written upon one sheet, he had taken the precaution to tear off a good many others with it. Hoyle looked up and saw Derek Crayle watching his every movement.
“Good work, what?” he said with a laugh which had neither joy nor sincerity in it. “Tired, too, wasn’t he? But not too tired to do the housemaid’s work before he went home to bed.”
Derek left Mr. Hoyle to pack up the exhibits and went back to the house. He was considerably puzzled by Mark’s demeanour. That was not the way triumphant men behaved, however tired they might be; and certainly Mark had no doubt that he had triumphed. Derek felt that he must really look into this. The old boy might be sickening of a disease. When Derek reached the house, however, Mark had retired to his bath-room; and from his bath-room he retired to his bed and made no further appearance until dinner-time.
Even then he was more than ordinarily quiet and silent, though Olivia somehow seemed to understand him and to be sympathetic rather than disturbed. Hoyle had gone off to Bradford with his foremen and his samples, and there were only the three of them left. Derek waited until the port was set upon the table and then his curiosity broke through.
“I didn’t understand you this morning, sir,” he said. “You seemed to be sorry that you had brought it off.”
Mark Thewliss smiled.
“Well, in a way...to a degree, I was. I’m not quite sure that I’m not sorry now. You see, Derek, I have lived with this particular dream for the best part of thirty years. Whenever I’ve had a free moment, I’ve given it to it. I’ve been like a dog with a bone too big for him to crack. He buries it and the next day scratches it up and has another try and then buries it again; and he finds life very interesting. Well, do you see, I’ve cracked my bone, and for the moment I’m finding life pretty empty.”
Olivia dropped her eyes and then reaching out her hand took her husband’s, shook it affectionately and dropped it again.
“But you’ve got all the fun of marketing the thing to come,” Derek expostulated. “You’ve got all the fun of seeing it at work, of—”
“I know,” Mark interrupted, and he turned with a smile to his wife. “I delivered a long lecture to you on that very subject, didn’t I, Olivia, the day we first came over to look at this house? The invention was to do this and that. Make people happier, establish peace more surely by putting colour more easily within everybody’s reach, and the rest of it.” He spoke quizzing himself and his earlier ambitions. “Yes, I ought to be blown out like a balloon over it. But as a matter of fact I feel that I have lost more than I have gained. I’ve come to the end of a big, perhaps a foolishly big dream, and “ — he suddenly stretched out his arms on either side of him in a gesture very near to despair— “I’ve got nothing in the world to take its place.”
The poignant desolation, suddenly revealed in a man publicly so unemotional and publicly a very emblem of success, shocked Derek Crayle. He sat in an uncomfortable silence. With an almost violent movement, Mark tore from the breast-pocket of his dinner jacket six small sheets of a strong, greyish-blue notepaper and tossed them across the table.
“There’s the formula, Derek, every stage of it. Not quite the half-sheet of note-paper, but not so far from it.”
Derek took up the pages. They were covered on both sides with hieroglyphics and diamond-shaped figures and capital letters with tiny numbers against them and little sums in multiplication and addition; so that Derek’s head began to turn.
“I can’t make head nor tail of it,” he said.
“You aren’t meant to, Derek.”
Crayle turned the sheets over and over.
“Do you carry all this in your head?” he asked.
“A good deal of it. Some of it I expect I should have to work out again if I lost those papers.”
“Of course this is what Hoyle was looking for,” Derek continued, “or some part of it.” He looked suddenly at Mark Thewliss. “Could Hoyle understand all this?”
“No, but he employs a chemist. The chemist could.”
“Then you want to put this away in a very safe place,” said Derek Crayle emphatically.
Mark Thewliss laughed, and this time really laughed.
“You misjudge Hoyle. He’s not really a bad fellow.”
“Oh,” said Derek dryly. “Well, some day I shall have to tell you the story of the curate’s egg.”
“Yes, but I’ll choose the day,” Mark rejoined in alarm.
He stretched out his hand across the table and took the six sheets again into his keeping.
“I am not disposed to let Hoyle and the rest of them down over this,” he said. “It’ll mean scrapping a bit of machinery no doubt, and installing something new. But we might work an amalgamation on the big scale.” He sat and fingered the papers for a little while, conning them over and again over. “However, there’s no hurry. We have four months to think our plans over.”
“And meanwhile you’ll keep that formula safe and secret,” Derek urged earnestly.
Mark turned towards his wife.
“My dear, I think Derek takes me for a damnder fool than I am. Shall we move?”
Olivia Thewliss took Derek Crayle with her into the drawing-room. Mark Thewliss went away into his library and remained there. After an hour had passed Olivia began to look disturbed.
“What in the world can he be doing?” she said.
“I’ll go and see,” replied Derek, jumping up.
But Olivia held him back.
“No! Give him a little more time!”
At the end of another half-hour she gave in.
“Yes, I would like you to see.”
Derek Crayle hurried across the hall and tried a door. It was locked on the inside. He stood for a moment or two gravely troubled. Mark Thewliss had shown himself that evening possessed by a curiously disturbing and unfamiliar mood. Had the reaction following upon so violent a demand on his vigour thrown him off his balance? Derek turned back into the hall and, opening the front door, crept round to the library windows. The blinds were lowered, but the room behind the blinds blazed with light. Crayle examined the windows. He could not see an inch of the room, so completely the blinds covered the panes. He went back into the drawing-room.
“Well?” said Olivia.
There was actually fear in her eyes and in the upward intonation of her voice.
“The door’s locked. The blinds are drawn down. I could see nothing. I could hear nothing.”
“Listen!”
The command came sharply. They stood straining their ears to hear, both of them upon the very edge of panic. And then a key grated in a lock, and with a little sob of relief Olivia dropped back into her chair as though her knees had given under her.
They heard Mark’s step in the hall. Mark pushed open the door and stood smiling. The moment heavy with tragedy had passed.
“I’ve put the formula away where not even Hoyle could find it,” he said.
“Yes! I know!” Derek Crayle grumbled. “In the secret drawer in your bureau.”
Mark lit a cigar and sat down, now quite at his ease.
“So you knew about that secret drawer, did you?”
“Yes, I and everybody else in the house. You keep your postage stamps in it, don’t you?”
Mark Thewliss laughed aloud.
“I did. But I’m keeping the formula there now. And if anyone in the house opens it for Hoyle’s benefit, why Hoyle is welcome to all that he can make out of it.”
Derek, however, was not satisfied.
“Sometimes the best of servants can be bribed. You never know. I don’t trust Hoyle. If he could get hold of that formula and destroy it, he would.”
Mark did not answer for a moment. But he was quite unmoved by any fear of what Hoyle might or might not do in any contingency.
“Derek,” he said, “you must ask Olivia about me. She’ll tell you that however much of a fool I may seem to be, I generally have something up my sleeve.”
Olivia rose from her chair.
“We will renew this discussion to-morrow as we are going down Southampton Water,” she said.
“What in the world do you mean?” cried Mark; and suddenly something of his alert youth shone again in his eyes.
“I mean that while you have been fussing about your experiments and your formulas, and wearing yourself to skin and bones,” she said, “I have taken it upon myself to have the schooner put into commission. It’s at its mooring now.”
XVII. STARTLING NEWS
FOR SIX WEEKS the schooner cruised. She sailed westwards to the Scillies; her white sails gleamed like silver amongst the Hebrides. She turned south and anchored in the harbours of Brittany. It was a pleasant unadventurous voyage over smooth seas in sunlit weather, and a brown and reinvigorated Mark Thewliss returned to Upper Theign. On the morning after his arrival, he read through a letter and with a grimace tossed it across the breakfast table to his wife.
“A lecture from Gregory, my dear. The old man’s coming down this morning full of reproaches. We must send the Rolls to the station for him, give him the best lunch we can with a glass of the ‘96 port, and moderate the thunderbolts.”
