The Irrational Knot Part 29

added Conolly, glancing at Douglas, "as a motor of six-horsepower can be made to weigh less than thirty pounds, including fuel, flying is now perfectly feasible."

"What!" said Douglas, incredulously. "Does not all trustworthy evidence prove that flying is a dream?"

"So it did; because a combination of great power with little weight, such as an eagle, for instance, possesses, could not formerly be realized in a machine. The lightest known four-horse-power steam engine weighs nearly fifty pounds. With my motor, a machine weighing thirty pounds will give rather more than six-horse-power, or, in other words, will produce a wing power competent to overcome much more than its own gravity. If the Aeronautical Society does not, within the next few years, make a machine capable of carrying pa.s.sengers through the air to New York in less than two days, I will make one myself."

"Very wonderful, indeed," said Douglas, politely, looking askance at him.

"No more wonderful than the flight of a sparrow, I a.s.sure you. We shall presently be conveyed to the top of this building by my motor. Here you have a model locomotive, a model steam hammer, and a sewing machine: all of which, as you see, I can set to work. However, this is mere show. You must always bear in mind that the novelty is not in the working of these machines, but the smallness of the cost of working."

Douglas endured the rest of the exhibition in silence, understanding none of the contrivances until they were explained, and not always understanding them even then. It was disagreeable to be instructed by Conolly--to feel that there were matters of which Conolly knew everything and he nothing. If he could have but shaped a pertinent question or two, enough to prove that he was quite capable of the subject if he chose to turn his attention to it, he could have accepted Conolly's information on the machinery as indifferently as that of a policeman on the shortest way to some place that it was no part of a gentleman's routine to frequent. As it was, he took refuge in his habitual reserve, and, lest the exhibition should be prolonged on his account, took care to shew no more interest in it than was barely necessary to satisfy Mr. Lind. At last it was over; and they returned westward together in a hansom.

"He is a Yankee, I suppose,'" said Douglas, as if ingenuity were a low habit that must be tolerated in an American.

"Yes. They are a wonderful people for that sort of thing. Curious turn of mind the mechanical instinct is!"

"It is one with which I have no sympathy. It is generally subject to the delusion that it has a monopoly of utility. Your mechanic hates art; pelts it with lumps of iron; and strives to extinguish it beneath all the hard and ugly facts of existence. On the other hand, your artist instinctively hates machinery. I fear I am an artist."

"I dont think you are quite right there, Sholto. No. Look at the steam engine, the electric telegraph, the--the other inventions of the century. How could we get on without them?"

"Quite as well as Athens got on without them. Our mechanical contrivances seem to serve us; but they are really mastering us, crowding and crushing the beauty out of our lives, and making commerce the only G.o.d."

"I certainly admit that the coa.r.s.er forms of Radicalism have made alarming strides under the influence of our modern civilization. But the convenience of steam conveyance is so remarkable that I doubt if we could now dispense with it. Nor, as a consistent Liberal, a moderate Liberal, do I care to advocate any retrogression, even in the direction of ancient Greece."

Douglas was seized with a certain impatience of Mr. Lind, as of a well-mannered man who had never learned anything, and had forgotten all that he had been taught. He did not attempt to argue, but merely said, coldly: "I can only say that I wish Fate had made me an Athenian instead of an Englishman of the nineteenth century."

Mr. Lind smiled complacently: he knew Douglas, if not Athens, better, but was in too tolerant a humor to say so. Little more pa.s.sed between the two until they reached Westbourne Terrace, where Marian and her cousin were dressing for dinner. When Marian came down, her beauty so affected Douglas that his voice was low and his manner troubled as he greeted her. He took her in to dinner, and sat in silence beside her, heedless alike of his host's commonplaces and Miss McQuinch's acridities.

Mr. Lind unceremoniously took a nap after his wine that evening, and allowed his guest to go upstairs alone. Douglas hoped that Elinor would be equally considerate, but, to his disappointment, he found her by herself in the drawing-room. She hastened to explain.

"Marian is looking for some music. She will be back directly."

He sat down and took an alb.u.m from the table, saying: "Have you many new faces here?"

"Yes. But we never discard old faces for new ones. It is the old ones that are really interesting."

"I have not seen this one of Mr. Lind before. It is capital. Ah! this of you is an old friend."

"Yes. What do you think of the one of Constance on the opposite page?"

"She looks as if she were trying to be as lugubrious as possible. What dress is that? Is it a uniform?"

"Yes. She joined a nursing guild. Didnt Mrs. Douglas tell you?"

"I believe so. I forgot. She went into a cottage hospital or something of that kind, did she not?"

"She left it because one of the doctors offended her. He was rather dreadful. He said that in two months she had contributed more to the mortality among the patients than he had in two years, and told her flatly that she had been trained for the drawing-room and ought to stay there. She was glad enough to have an excuse for leaving; for she was heartily sick of making a fool of herself."

"Indeed! Where is she now?"

"Back at Towers Cottage, moping, I suppose. That's Mr. Conolly the inventor, there under Jasper."

"So I perceive. Clever head, rather! A plain, hard nature, with no depths in it. Is that his wife, with the Swiss bonnet?"

"His wife! Why, that is a Swiss girl, the daughter of a guide at Chamounix, who nursed Marian when she sprained her ankle. Mr. Conolly is not married."

"I thought men of his stamp always married early."

"No. He is engaged, and engaged to a lady of very good position."

"He owes that to the diseased craving of modern women for notoriety of any sort. What an admirable photograph of Marian! I never saw it before.

It is really most charming. When was it taken?"

"Last August, at Geneva. She does not like it--thinks it too coquettish."

"Then perhaps she will give it to me."

"She will be only too glad, I daresay. You have caught her at a soft moment to-night."

"I cannot find that duet anywhere," said Marian, entering. "What! up already, Sholto? Where is papa?"

"I left him asleep in the dining-room. I have just been asking Miss McQuinch whether she thought you would give me a copy of this carte."

"That Geneva one. It is most annoying how people persist in admiring it.

It always looks to me as if it belonged to an a.s.sortment of popular beauties at one shilling each. I dont think I have another. But you may take that if you wish."

"Thank you," said Douglas, drawing it from the book.

"I think you have a copy of every photograph I have had taken in my life," she said, sitting down near him, and taking the alb.u.m. "I have several of yours, too. You must get one taken soon for me; I have not got you with your beard yet. I have a little alb.u.m upstairs which Aunt Dora gave me on my eighth birthday; and the first picture in it is you, dressed in flannels, holding a bat, and looking very stern as captain of your eleven at Eton. I used to stand in great awe of you then. Do you remember telling me once that 'Zanoni' was a splendid book, and that I ought to read it?"

"Pshaw! No. I must have been a young fool. But it seems that I had the grace even then to desire your sympathy."

"I a.s.sure you I read it most reverently down in Wiltshire, where Nelly kept a select library of fiction concealed underneath her mattress; and I believed every word of it. Nelly and I agreed that you were exactly like Zanoni; but she was hardly to blame; for she had never seen you."

"Things like that make deep impressions on children," said Elinor, thoughtfully. "You were a Zanoni in my imagination for years before I saw you. When we first met you treated me insufferably. If you had known how my childish fancy had predisposed me to worship you, you might have vouchsafed me some more consideration, and I might have gone on believing you a demiG.o.d to the end of the chapter. I have hardly forgiven you yet for disenchanting me."

"I am sorry," said Douglas sarcastically. "I must have been sadly lacking in impressiveness. But on the other hand I recollect that you did not disappoint me in the least. You fully bore out the expectations I had been led to form of you."

"I have no doubt I did," said Elinor. "Yet I protest that my reputation was as unjust as yours. However, I have outlived my sensitiveness to this injustice, and have even contracted a bad habit of pretending to act up to it occasionally before foolish people. Marian: are you sure that duet is not on the sofa in my room?"

"Oh, the sofa! I looked only in the green case."

"I will go and hunt it out myself. Excuse me for a few minutes."

Douglas was glad to see her go. Yet he was confused when he was alone with Marian. He strolled to the window, outside which the roof of the porch had been converted into a summer retreat by a tent of pink-striped canva.s.s. "The tent is up already," he said. "I noticed it as we came in."

"Yes. Would you prefer to sit there? We can carry out this little table, and put the lamp on it. There is just room for three chairs."

"We need not crowd ourselves with the table," he said. "There will be light enough. We only want to talk."