Success
of tools in racks and on shelves, but most damaged or obsolete, and
all red with rust. A few odd bits of metal work and turning lay
about, of amateur workmanship and no meaning or use now that even
the long-forgotten design of their making was gone. The place spoke
aloud of a dead hobby, a pastime that was outlived. To one who was an
engineer, in the first and last meaning of the elastic word, and who
was used to working on abstruse problems and seeing his theories put
into practice by the best appliances that could be evolved, it might
speak with a grimly pathetic voice.
Nan crossed the little untidy place to the cold stove.
“May I light a fire?” she asked.
“I’ll light it,” Michael said; “it’s a brute of a stove; half the time
it won’t light, and if there’s any wind it smokes furiously.”
There was no wind that day, and the stove lit comparatively easily; Nan
lighted it, Michael bringing coke from the stokehole.
“I don’t often have it,” he explained; “it hasn’t been very cold yet.
When it is, I expect I shall still do without. After all, the fire
isn’t much loss as a rule, and there would be trouble about the coke if
I had it often.”
Nan looked up with inquiry, and he explained. “The coke for the
hot-water boiler and the conservatory stove is allowanced; a load is
reckoned to last so many weeks; if I take it, it won’t.”
At Galhardy’s the directors had been induced to supply a private room
with an open grate for their genius, because a steam-heated atmosphere
tried his head. If Michael remembered this, he did not compare it with
the present situation. He accepted that as he accepted all the other
things just now.
Nan drew up to the stove when she had the fire alight. “What are you
going to do?” she asked again.
“You had better say, ‘What can I do?’” he answered. “Oh, yes, there are
other branches of engineering, I know that, and know something about
some of them. It was only by chance I stumbled into this one. I was not
trained to it specially.”
He spoke as if the astonishing ability, which showed rare proficiency
and original genius in several widely different branches of one of the
widest sciences, were an ordinary and not remarkable thing. It was not
remarkable to him, it was a matter-of-course fact of existence, and
one which he supposed, if he ever thought about it, he shared with
others—only, perhaps, most of those he had come across were too idle or
too stupid to use the powers which they, no doubt, possessed in common
with himself. That would have been his view had he ever evolved one.
But the fact, so far as it concerned himself, was of no particular
value now. “I have got no reputation in any but the one line,” he said;
“naturally, with the choice of applicants for any job there is, the
preference is given to a man with a reputation on that subject. That
militates against me for a post of any size in any but the now closed
branch; and for a small one, the circumstances that I have had a good
thing in one line, and am now offering for a small one in another,
tells quite as much. Not to mention that I have been at Galhardy’s,
and left for no explained reason, which would pretty well prevent me
getting anything anywhere.”
“Have you tried?”
He had, his experience, though small, had been bitter. “It is true I
have only been home three weeks,” he said, “and so you may say have not
had the chance of making many attempts. But one can learn a good deal
in a short time, especially of that sort of thing.”
They had taken much, these directors of Galhardy’s. They may have been
entitled to it, Nan did not know, and she did not concern herself to
think or concern herself to condone or to justify either them or the
sufferer; the bare facts were enough. And the facts, as they stood
now, were that they had the man’s invention and the results of some
years of his best work; and in taking them they had, incidentally,
also taken his reputation and his nerve, and, at one time it seemed,
possibly his balance of mind too. The last danger was past, but another
loss was made plainer than it had been before—they had, also no doubt
incidentally, taken his chance of earning a living in any other way.
They certainly had much and had left little.
“Surely,” she protested aloud, “surely there is something!”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” she was obliged to answer, and again sat staring into
the little open doorway of the stove. There must be something! He
was in collapse now: nerve gone, energy gone, ability in eclipse, the
whole immaterial man shattered; but there was still something there;
she felt it. She knew nothing of technical facts, little by practical
experience of him; but she knew, with the unerring knowledge of women
(some women), that there was still something there, and believed it
with that faith which not merely removes mountains, but sometimes makes
men. So long as there was something in him there was still something
which could be done, though it might take long to find out what it was,
and how to do it.
“They have not taken your brains,” she ventured at last.
“My brains are not much use,” he answered. But he spoke gently, his
brains were at a discount now, their existence as an asset and a
marketable commodity was even in some doubt; he was grateful for the
assumption of them and their value.
“They are not really of much value,” he told her. “Even if I could
still deal with problems—we’ll say I could, if you like, though I am
not at all sure of it myself, I don’t think I shall ever do anything
again. If I could, what better off am I, if no one wants their problems
dealt with by me? One can’t set up as a consulting engineer without
capital or reputation. My reputation would blast the best capitalised
concern, and my capital would not float the best reputation, for it is
non-existent.”
“Have you no money at all?” she asked.
“None. No doubt I ought to have saved, but I didn’t; it cost me a good
lot to live, and I didn’t bother; also, no doubt, I was a fool. I have
managed to clear up what was owing, but that is all, and I should not
have been able to do that, if I hadn’t had an offer for my car just
before—just before this all happened. At present, I have a five-pound
note and”—he put his hand in his pocket and took out some coins—“about
enough to pay my fare to town third class another six times. Those
are my assets, and my prospects—_nil_. I have hardly enough to buy a
plumber’s outfit or the wherewithal to start the hawking of tools in
the Whitechapel Road.”
The position did not show hopefully, Nan saw that; nevertheless, she
led him to talk of the work and chances of consulting engineers, and
other freelances of the profession.
But what he said did not show the prospect any brighter. For success
in such ways business ability of the highest order was the first and
last requisite: that and the capacity to live on little and wait, and,
incidentally, the little to live on while waiting. For a man to work
out his own inventions and profitably dispose of them much more was
needed: much capital, much space, much plant, and, if he was to make
even the barest margin of profit, the rare fortune to light upon a
moderate proportion of honest men.
“Unless one has enough money not to need to make more, one can hardly
make it by working out inventions or any of the problems which want
working out,” so he said.
Yet, either because of her silent attention, or because the thing was
so strong in him, in a little he began to talk of some of the problems.
They were always floating about at the back of his mind, complex and
simple, of practical importance and theoretical interest, equally dear
to him, and ready under normal conditions to come to the forefront
of consideration at the provocation of a word. Of late, they, like
everything else, had been in abeyance; it was only for a minute or two
the old passion reasserted itself now; in a little the interest was
gone.
“What I have to consider,” he said “is, not what might be worked out,
but how to get a living, and there doesn’t seem much prospect of my
being able to do that, for I can’t do anything but this one sort of
thing.”
“You can draw,” Nan suggested; “can’t you do something with that?”
“Be a draughtsman?”
The idea of following that branch of his profession had no more
occurred to him than the idea of being a plumber; his tone showed it,
but after a second he said quietly, “Yes, I suppose I could do that;
I could draw out other people’s designs, and work out things for
contractors—if I could get the work.”
“Would you do it? Would you, if you could get it?”
He considered a moment, and the pause more than words showed the gulf
for him between the past and the present. “Yes,” he said slowly, “I
think so; I think I would. After all, one thing is much the same as
another now. I could do that, I suppose I should, if I could get it. I
dare say it might come to it that I should be thankful to get it.”
“Could you?”
“I should say not.”
“Why?”
“Because after what has happened no one would trust me to work out
his design, for fear I should steal the idea. Oh, I don’t mean that
would be said exactly, or that anything definite will ever be reported
against me, nothing so clearly to be met as that; but there will be a
feeling, a sort of doubt, and that is enough, more than enough. Why
should confidential work be given to a man with a doubt about him, when
there are plenty without able to do it?”
Nan realised the difficulty. “And the other work you spoke of?” she
said. “The contractors; you said draughtsmen did things for them. Would
the doubt tell there?”
“Probably not; the work they want is not confidential; it is merely
drawings to meet technical difficulties in putting up plant on a large
scale. But most contractors have their own draughtsman, or the one to
whom they always go; it is difficult for an outsider to get the work.”
“Still, possible, I suppose?”
“Oh, yes, in time, quite possible.”
“And some, once got, would lead to more?”
“It might—probably would.”
“Would that eventually lead to the other kind—the better kind? I
suppose in that sort of work, as in everything else, there are degrees
of proficiency, and the man who can do the best in the best way is
rare. So rare that once found he must be employed in spite of his
drawbacks?”
Michael admitted it was so; he had had enough experience in employing
draughtsmen to know it true. It did not occur to him to deny that he
could do work of such quality; he could do it, it was the quality of
all his work. He did not himself think of it exactly as such; he had no
standard of best or worst in work; one did what one wanted, or what was
wanted; there was nothing less, nothing more. Some men, of course, did
not do what was wanted; again it was not a question of best or worst,
it was not anything; if it was not done, it was nothing. One did not
criticise it, one mentally called them wasters, and took the work away
and did it oneself. (It is possible to see that such an attitude of
mind might make more enemies than any realisation of superior personal
ability or human conceit about it.)
The afternoon was gloomy and overcast, the gleam of sunshine which
had brightened the garden when Nan first proposed going out had long
vanished. By mid-afternoon it was grey without and greyer still in the
small shed; the discarded tools and scraps of metal which littered
it, became mere lumps, with here and there one standing out with the
unnatural distinctness things assume in half lights. Nan noticed them;
she had an eye for such details even when preoccupied. Michael did
not, perhaps, because all, actual and spiritual, was, as it were, of a
piece to him. They drew up closer to the stove, talking fitfully now