Traffics and Discoveries Part 27

The door of the inner office behind the dispensary opened, and an energetic, spade-bearded man stepped forth, rubbing his hands.

"I want a bit of tin-foil, Shaynor," he said. "Good-evening. My uncle told me you might be coming." This to me, as I began the first of a hundred questions.

"I've everything in order," he replied. "We're only waiting until Poole calls us up. Excuse me a minute. You can come in whenever you like--but I'd better be with the instruments. Give me that tin-foil. Thanks."

While we were talking, a girl--evidently no customer--had come into the shop, and the face and bearing of Mr. Shaynor changed. She leaned confidently across the counter.

"But I can't," I heard him whisper uneasily--the flush on his cheek was dull red, and his eyes shone like a drugged moth's. "I can't. I tell you I'm alone in the place."

"No, you aren't. Who's _that_? Let him look after it for half an hour. A brisk walk will do you good. Ah, come now, John."

"But he isn't----"

"I don't care. I want you to; we'll only go round by St. Agnes. If you don't----"

He crossed to where I stood in the shadow of the dispensary counter, and began some sort of broken apology about a lady-friend.

"Yes," she interrupted. "You take the shop for half an hour--to oblige _me_, won't you?"

She had a singularly rich and promising voice that well matched her outline.

"All right," I said. "I'll do it--but you'd better wrap yourself up, Mr.

Shaynor."

"Oh, a brisk walk ought to help me. We're only going round by the church."

I heard him cough grievously as they went out together.

I refilled the stove, and, after reckless expenditure of Mr. Cash.e.l.l's coal, drove some warmth into the shop. I explored many of the gla.s.s- k.n.o.bbed drawers that lined the walls, tasted some disconcerting drugs, and, by the aid of a few cardamoms, ground ginger, chloric-ether, and dilute alcohol, manufactured a new and wildish drink, of which I bore a gla.s.sful to young Mr. Cash.e.l.l, busy in the back office. He laughed shortly when I told him that Mr. Shaynor had stepped out--but a frail coil of wire held all his attention, and he had no word for me bewildered among the batteries and rods. The noise of the sea on the beach began to make itself heard as the traffic in the street ceased. Then briefly, but very lucidly, he gave me the names and uses of the mechanism that crowded the tables and the floor.

"When do you expect to get the message from Poole?" I demanded, sipping my liquor out of a graduated gla.s.s.

"About midnight, if everything is in order. We've got our installation- pole fixed to the roof of the house. I shouldn't advise you to turn on a tap or anything tonight. We've connected up with the plumbing, and all the water will be electrified." He repeated to me the history of the agitated ladies at the hotel at the time of the first installation.

"But what _is_ it?" I asked. "Electricity is out of my beat altogether."

"Ah, if you knew _that_ you'd know something n.o.body knows. It's just It-- what we call Electricity, but the magic--the manifestations--the Hertzian waves--are all revealed by _this_. The coherer, we call it."

He picked up a gla.s.s tube not much thicker than a thermometer, in which, almost touching, were two tiny silver plugs, and between them an infinitesimal pinch of metallic dust. "That's all," he said, proudly, as though himself responsible for the wonder. "That is the thing that will reveal to us the Powers--whatever the Powers may be--at work--through s.p.a.ce--a long distance away."

Just then Mr. Shaynor returned alone and stood coughing his heart out on the mat.

"Serves you right for being such a fool," said young Mr. Cash.e.l.l, as annoyed as myself at the interruption. "Never mind--we've all the night before us to see wonders."

Shaynor clutched the counter, his handkerchief to his lips. When he brought it away I saw two bright red stains.

"I--I've got a bit of a rasped throat from smoking cigarettes," he panted.

"I think I'll try a cubeb."

"Better take some of this. I've been compounding while you've been away."

I handed him the brew.

"'Twon't make me drunk, will it? I'm almost a teetotaller. My word! That's grateful and comforting."

He sat down the empty gla.s.s to cough afresh.

"Brr! But it was cold out there! I shouldn't care to be lying in my grave a night like this. Don't _you_ ever have a sore throat from smoking?" He pocketed the handkerchief after a furtive peep.

"Oh, yes, sometimes," I replied, wondering, while I spoke, into what agonies of terror I should fall if ever I saw those bright-red danger- signals under my nose. Young Mr. Cash.e.l.l among the batteries coughed slightly to show that he was quite ready to continue his scientific explanations, but I was thinking still of the girl with the rich voice and the significantly cut mouth, at whose command I had taken charge of the shop. It flashed across me that she distantly resembled the seductive shape on a gold-framed toilet-water advertis.e.m.e.nt whose charms were unholily heightened by the glare from the red bottle in the window.

Turning to make sure, I saw Mr. Shaynor's eyes bent in the same direction, and by instinct recognised that the flamboyant thing was to him a shrine.

"What do you take for your--cough?" I asked.

"Well, I'm the wrong side of the counter to believe much in patent medicines. But there are asthma cigarettes and there are pastilles. To tell you the truth, if you don't object to the smell, which is very like incense, I believe, though I'm not a Roman Catholic, Blaudett's Cathedral Pastilles relieve me as much as anything."

"Let's try." I had never raided a chemist's shop before, so I was thorough. We unearthed the pastilles--brown, gummy cones of benzoin--and set them alight under the toilet-water advertis.e.m.e.nt, where they fumed in thin blue spirals.

"Of course," said Mr. Shaynor, to my question, "what one uses in the shop for one's self comes out of one's pocket. Why, stock-taking in our business is nearly the same as with jewellers--and I can't say more than that. But one gets them"--he pointed to the pastille-box--"at trade prices." Evidently the censing of the gay, seven-tinted wench with the teeth was an established ritual which cost something.

"And when do we shut up shop?"

"We stay like this all night. The gov--old Mr. Cash.e.l.l--doesn't believe in locks and shutters as compared with electric light. Besides it brings trade. I'll just sit here in the chair by the stove and write a letter, if you don't mind. Electricity isn't my prescription."

The energetic young Mr. Cash.e.l.l snorted within, and Shaynor settled himself up in his chair over which he had thrown a staring red, black, and yellow Austrian jute blanket, rather like a table-cover. I cast about, amid patent medicine pamphlets, for something to read, but finding little, returned to the manufacture of the new drink. The Italian warehouse took down its game and went to bed. Across the street blank shutters flung back the gaslight in cold smears; the dried pavement seemed to rough up in goose-flesh under the scouring of the savage wind, and we could hear, long ere he pa.s.sed, the policeman flapping his arms to keep himself warm.

Within, the flavours of cardamoms and chloric-ether disputed those of the pastilles and a score of drugs and perfume and soap scents. Our electric lights, set low down in the windows before the tunbellied Rosamund jars, flung inward three monstrous daubs of red, blue, and green, that broke into kaleidoscopic lights on the facetted k.n.o.bs of the drug-drawers, the cut-gla.s.s scent flagons, and the bulbs of the sparklet bottles. They flushed the white-tiled floor in gorgeous patches; splashed along the nickel-silver counter-rails, and turned the polished mahogany counter- panels to the likeness of intricate grained marbles--slabs of porphyry and malachite. Mr. Shaynor unlocked a drawer, and ere he began to write, took out a meagre bundle of letters. From my place by the stove, I could see the scalloped edges of the paper with a flaring monogram in the corner and could even smell the reek of chypre. At each page he turned toward the toilet-water lady of the advertis.e.m.e.nt and devoured her with over-luminous eyes. He had drawn the Austrian blanket over his shoulders, and among those warring lights he looked more than ever the incarnation of a drugged moth--a tiger-moth as I thought.

He put his letter into an envelope, stamped it with stiff mechanical movements, and dropped it in the drawer. Then I became aware of the silence of a great city asleep--the silence that underlaid the even voice of the breakers along the sea-front--a thick, tingling quiet of warm life stilled down for its appointed time, and unconsciously I moved about the glittering shop as one moves in a sick-room. Young Mr. Cash.e.l.l was adjusting some wire that crackled from time to time with the tense, knuckle-stretching sound of the electric spark. Upstairs, where a door shut and opened swiftly, I could hear his uncle coughing abed.

"Here," I said, when the drink was properly warmed, "take some of this, Mr. Shaynor."

He jerked in his chair with a start and a wrench, and held out his hand for the gla.s.s. The mixture, of a rich port-wine colour, frothed at the top.

"It looks," he said, suddenly, "it looks--those bubbles--like a string of pearls winking at you--rather like the pearls round that young lady's neck." He turned again to the advertis.e.m.e.nt where the female in the dove- coloured corset had seen fit to put on all her pearls before she cleaned her teeth.

"Not bad, is it?" I said.

"Eh?"

He rolled his eyes heavily full on me, and, as I stared, I beheld all meaning and consciousness die out of the swiftly dilating pupils. His figure lost its stark rigidity, softened into the chair, and, chin on chest, hands dropped before him, he rested open-eyed, absolutely still.

"I'm afraid I've rather cooked Shaynor's goose," I said, bearing the fresh drink to young Mr. Cash.e.l.l. "Perhaps it was the chloric-ether."

"Oh, he's all right." The spade-bearded man glanced at him pityingly.

"Consumptives go off in those sort of doses very often. It's exhaustion...

I don't wonder. I dare say the liquor will do him good. It's grand stuff,"

he finished his share appreciatively. "Well, as I was saying--before he interrupted--about this little coherer. The pinch of dust, you see, is nickel-filings. The Hertzian waves, you see, come out of s.p.a.ce from the station that despatches 'em, and all these little particles are attracted together--cohere, we call it--for just so long as the current pa.s.ses through them. Now, it's important to remember that the current is an induced current. There are a good many kinds of induction----"

"Yes, but what _is_ induction?"

"That's rather hard to explain untechnically. But the long and the short of it is that when a current of electricity pa.s.ses through a wire there's a lot of magnetism present round that wire; and if you put another wire parallel to, and within what we call its magnetic field--why then, the second wire will also become charged with electricity."