Success
than an hour spent in the familiar atmosphere of machines, with the
smell of oil and the sound of wheels, the semi-living company of force
housed and harnessed in iron. But to Michael it was not only like
the smell of the sea to the sailor, and the sound of guns to the old
campaigner, but something more. It is something to be back again with
what you can do supremely well; with instant and complete mastery to
grip a problem and solve a difficulty, even if it is a small one; when
for months your meat and drink has been, and you have lain down and
risen up with one thought only—failure, complete failure, and a sense
of your own utter inadequacy. Such a thing is something. The visit
to the oil works stood out for Michael a peak in the grey level of
that time; and though he said nothing of it to Nan—such things do not
express themselves readily, even when one is fully conscious of them—it
is possible she understood. Though they said nothing, they celebrated
the occasion together, spending part of the fee he obtained in going
far enough into the country to see the first stirrings of spring under
the dun skin of winter.
It sometimes happens that one man’s difficulty satisfactorily dealt
with leads to other men offering others for solution. It may have been
the case with Michael; at all events, after a time a second piece of
consulting work was offered to him. It was merely to give an opinion on
a machine for heating houses by a process, and with substances hitherto
undreamed of—and entirely impracticable for that purpose. He went
into the matter carefully and exhaustively. He did not see a thing as
ridiculous or fraudulent nearly so quickly as many less well-informed:
there were such infinite possibilities in his universe that he always
began by regarding as possible what was seriously brought before him,
even if it at first sight transgressed laws as he knew them. This time
it took him some time to discover that the whole process and machine
for carrying it out were utterly ridiculous and impracticable. When
he did come to this conclusion, and proved it beyond doubt, he wrote
a report in accordance—for which he received nothing at all. It is
impossible to raise money or float a company on the report of an
expert who condemns the whole scheme as unsound; in such circumstances,
if he is of no very high standing, or not in the position to receive (a
much smaller) fee beforehand, he can hardly be surprised if payment is
a part of the affair overlooked.
The next consultation on which Michael was called was also
unremunerative. It was a “friendly” one. That is, he spent a Saturday
afternoon discussing technicalities and details with a man whom he had
met once before, and who suddenly revived, or discovered, a friendship
for him. The man in question learnt what he wanted to know, and was
able afterwards to put it into practice, at the slight cost of a whisky
and soda and a cigarette or two. Being naturally satisfied with such a
result, and feeling very friendly towards Michael, the active factor
in it, he shortly afterwards introduced another man. The second also
was “friendly”; but, as Michael was not inclined to give away another
Saturday afternoon, the second spent no more than ten minutes or so in
his company, and gained only one piece of information worth having for
nothing.
Towards the end of March, Michael received another application for
information, but of a different sort. This time it was a letter from
a General Wallaby (retired) requesting him to give an opinion on an
automatic brake for high-speed motor engines. The General did not
mention how he had come to hear of him, and Michael never knew whether
it was from some former acquaintance, or from one of the very few who
had employed him, or by some chance talk overheard. He rather inclined
to the latter view, for the letter, written in the third person, was
couched in terms rather suggestive of a communication to a firm of
house-decorators about the heating apparatus, or a summons to a good
mechanic to come and overhaul the car. But, as Nan pointed out, the
writer “concluded the fee would be the usual one of £2 2s. 0d. (two
guineas),” and that, at least, was something to the point.
“After all,” she said, “two guineas is two guineas; indeed, rather more
than less, these times.”
Michael did not agree; he disliked the idea of the guineas more
than the work. “I don’t mind overhauling the old fellow’s car,” he
said, “and putting his automatic brake idea in going order—if that’s
possible, which I rather expect it’s not. I have done that sort of
thing for different people lots of times when I was at Galhardy’s, but
I can’t exactly take a fee for it.”
“Why not?”
He did not seem able to quite say. “It’s rather like when one has set
the bathroom taps right for somebody, if he offered one eightpence an
hour, or whatever it is plumbers get.”
“I suppose it is,” Nan admitted. “Still, if the person thought you a
plumber, and would not have asked you to set the taps right otherwise?
It would be rather embarrassing for him if you didn’t take the
eightpence, and so showed he’d made that sort of mistake.”
“People have no business to make that sort of mistake,” Michael said,
“they would not, if they gave themselves the trouble to think. Why
should this General Wallaby think me a mechanic, in the first instance,
or go on thinking me one in the second?”
Nan could not tell him. “It never seems to me to much matter what
people think,” she owned. “I suppose it comes of being the kind of
person no one notices or really thinks about, anyway; but, to me, it
never seems important what one is thought, it does not alter what one
really is. Of course, for anyone to apply to you to give an opinion on
motor brakes and such is a little like sending for a great surgeon to
tie up a cut finger, an egregious waste. Though on the whole, perhaps,
hardly so much of a waste, so far as you are concerned, as copying
machine drawings for patent agents, if for no other reason than that it
is better paid.”
Michael laughed a little. “I wonder,” he said, “whether you judge very
much truer, or very much less true than most people? Certainly, you
don’t judge like them.”
But he took her advice and went to see General Wallaby and the brakes,
which had been made to his design.
He found them as impractical as he had expected, and quite beyond
any improving into usefulness. However, he was able to do something
for his money, for there were other home-invented adjuncts affixed
to the car; the General spent his retirement and the surplus of a
comfortable income on such things. Michael was able to make suggestions
and alterations by which some of the earlier ones might be rendered
serviceable. Gibbs, the chauffeur—no mean mechanic, it was necessary
for the safety of the General that he should be highly competent—looked
on, at first with distrust, for he immediately perceived that the
stranger was not of the fraternity, afterwards with puzzled interest,
and finally with awed admiration. General Wallaby also looked on and
offered remarks and explanations from time to time, all of which were
received with respectful attention and interest.
“Seemed to understand his business,” the General remarked to Gibbs
afterwards.
“Yes, sir,” said Gibbs, saluting.
“Quite an intelligent person; not so abominably conceited as most of
these engineers; able to take another man’s idea and allow there’s
something in it. He was quite struck with that last one of mine.”
“Yes, sir,” said Gibbs. “He might well be that, sir.”
The General walked round his car radiating approval. He stopped to
handle his last but one improvement. The recently departed expert had
done the same, and the General recalled his hands—wonderful, sensitive
hands with broad palms and curiously slim, alive fingers, very well
kept.
“Gibbs,” the General said, he sometimes unbent to Gibbs, who was a very
superior man as well as a good mechanic—“Gibbs, what class do those
sort of people belong to?”
“Couldn’t say, sir. You see, there isn’t many of them, sir, they’d
hardly be a class, they’re so very, very few.”
There are not few who call themselves consulting engineers, there are
a good many of them. But there are few men of great ability and inborn
comprehension in that or any other profession: genius is rare, and not
always to be classed when met. Still one—certainly not the General—need
not conclude that was what Gibbs meant. Though, it must be admitted,
when he let the expert out by the back gate, which was the nearest way
to the station, he did say with some eagerness, “Sir, if you ever want
a mechanic, if you ever want one for anything, will you think of me?
I’d be proud to work under you in any capacity!”
And it is possible that Michael, travelling back to town, thought more
of those words than of the two guineas which, enclosed in an envelope,
General Wallaby had put into his hand.
After General Wallaby no one asked his services for anything, not even
for a “friendly” conference.
It seemed as if he were back again where he was before the chance
meeting with Blake, no more than Barmister’s not very efficient clerk
and handy-man, and, in his spare time, occasional draughtsman to patent
agents, and curiously patient, almost apathetic, at being so.
But in the middle of April there came a touch from what had been
lost. He received a letter from an important steamship company who,
like others, were very interested in the problem of the application
of internal combustion engines to large ships. They had, it appeared,
a design for such an engine under consideration now; but, for some
reason, they had begun to doubt its real practicability. They wrote
asking Michael if he would examine and advise upon it, and, possibly,
undertake its perfecting.
It was a difficult subject, involving problems which one would hardly
expect to take to a man whose best work was done on aerial torpedoes
and steel. Michael guessed how it was that it had come to him.
“Blake’s father-in-law is one of the directors of the company,” he
said. “I remember his mentioning it one day at Galhardy’s; we had been
talking about internal combustion engines for big ships, a subject that
always interested me.”
Nan by this time knew something of the subjects that interested him.
Their name was legion, and any and every one introduced to his notice
was able to exclusively occupy his attention and give rise to whole
trains of new, and, to the initiated, illuminating ideas.
“I suppose,” she suggested, “those steamship people would not find it
easy to get a man to do what it is they want done?”
Michael admitted that possibility. “The ones best qualified are a bit
too big,” he said. “You see, it would probably entail six months’ or
so close work in the works. It wouldn’t be worth a big man’s while to
take it up, or worth the company’s while to pay the exorbitant price
they would have to, if one could be persuaded to do it.”
Nan nodded; it seemed that this time the circumstances, which
heretofore had told against him, now told in his favour; inasmuch as
they made him, a man in the first rank of ability, glad to accept work
beyond the attainments of most of those whose attention it was not
beneath.
“Will it take six months?” she asked.
“Very likely. Of course, one might not make a success of it in that
time, but it should be possible to find out, if one could. If one
could, it might mean a pretty good thing, very likely fifteen hundred
pounds a year ultimately. I think one should manage to get that, and
with that——”
The old lights flickered in his eyes for a minute; in mind he saw again
a possibility of something akin to the old position, of a return to
work with scope in it, and, consequently, liberty, power, and all that