The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories
any of our minds that Davidson has really seen the place. In some
unaccountable way, while he moved hither and thither in London, his sight
moved hither and thither in a manner that corresponded, about this distant
island. _How_ is absolutely a mystery.
That completes the remarkable story of Davidson's eyes. It's perhaps the
best authenticated case in existence of real vision at a distance.
Explanation there is none forthcoming, except what Professor Wade has
thrown out. But his explanation invokes the Fourth Dimension, and a
dissertation on theoretical kinds of space. To talk of there being "a kink
in space" seems mere nonsense to me; it may be because I am no
mathematician. When I said that nothing would alter the fact that the
place is eight thousand miles away, he answered that two points might be a
yard away on a sheet of paper, and yet be brought together by bending the
paper round. The reader may grasp his argument, but I certainly do not.
His idea seems to be that Davidson, stooping between the poles of the big
electro-magnet, had some extraordinary twist given to his retinal elements
through the sudden change in the field of force due to the lightning.
He thinks, as a consequence of this, that it may be possible to live
visually in one part of the world, while one lives bodily in another. He
has even made some experiments in support of his views; but, so far, he
has simply succeeded in blinding a few dogs. I believe that is the net
result of his work, though I have not seen him for some weeks. Latterly I
have been so busy with my work in connection with the Saint Pancras
installation that I have had little opportunity of calling to see him. But
the whole of his theory seems fantastic to me. The facts concerning
Davidson stand on an altogether different footing, and I can testify
personally to the accuracy of every detail I have given.
VIII.
THE LORD OF THE DYNAMOS.
The chief attendant of the three dynamos that buzzed and rattled at
Camberwell, and kept the electric railway going, came out of Yorkshire,
and his name was James Holroyd. He was a practical electrician, but fond
of whisky, a heavy, red-haired brute with irregular teeth. He doubted the
existence of the Deity, but accepted Carnot's cycle, and he had read
Shakespeare and found him weak in chemistry. His helper came out of the
mysterious East, and his name was Azuma-zi. But Holroyd called him
Pooh-bah. Holroyd liked a nigger help because he would stand kicking--a
habit with Holroyd--and did not pry into the machinery and try to learn
the ways of it. Certain odd possibilities of the negro mind brought into
abrupt contact with the crown of our civilisation Holroyd never fully
realised, though just at the end he got some inkling of them.
To define Azuma-zi was beyond ethnology. He was, perhaps, more negroid
than anything else, though his hair was curly rather than frizzy, and his
nose had a bridge. Moreover, his skin was brown rather than black, and the
whites of his eyes were yellow. His broad cheekbones and narrow chin gave
his face something of the viperine V. His head, too, was broad behind, and
low and narrow at the forehead, as if his brain had been twisted round in
the reverse way to a European's. He was short of stature and still shorter
of English. In conversation he made numerous odd noises of no known
marketable value, and his infrequent words were carved and wrought into
heraldic grotesqueness. Holroyd tried to elucidate his religious beliefs,
and--especially after whisky--lectured to him against superstition and
missionaries. Azuma-zi, however, shirked the discussion of his gods, even
though he was kicked for it.
Azuma-zi had come, clad in white but insufficient raiment, out of the
stoke-hole of the _Lord Clive_, from the Straits Settlements and
beyond, into London. He had heard even in his youth of the greatness and
riches of London, where all the women are white and fair, and even the
beggars in the streets are white, and he had arrived, with newly-earned
gold coins in his pocket, to worship at the shrine of civilisation. The
day of his landing was a dismal one; the sky was dun, and a wind-worried
drizzle filtered down to the greasy streets, but he plunged boldly into
the delights of Shadwell, and was presently cast up, shattered in health,
civilised in costume, penniless, and, except in matters of the direst
necessity, practically a dumb animal, to toil for James Holroyd, and to be
bullied by him in the dynamo shed at Camberwell. And to James Holroyd
bullying was a labour of love.
There were three dynamos with their engines at Camberwell. The two that
have been there since the beginning are small machines; the larger one was
new. The smaller machines made a reasonable noise; their straps hummed
over the drums, every now and then the brushes buzzed and fizzled, and the
air churned steadily, whoo! whoo! whoo! between their poles. One was loose
in its foundations and kept the shed vibrating. But the big dynamo drowned
these little noises altogether with the sustained drone of its iron core,
which somehow set part of the ironwork humming. The place made the
visitor's head reel with the throb, throb, throb of the engines, the
rotation of the big wheels, the spinning ball-valves, the occasional
spittings of the steam, and over all the deep, unceasing, surging note of
the big dynamo. This last noise was from an engineering point of view a
defect, but Azuma-zi accounted it unto the monster for mightiness and
pride.
If it were possible we would have the noises of that shed always about the
reader as he reads, we would tell all our story to such an accompaniment.
It was a steady stream of din, from which the ear picked out first one
thread and then another; there was the intermittent snorting, panting, and
seething of the steam engines, the suck and thud of their pistons, the
dull beat on the air as the spokes of the great driving wheels came round,
a note the leather straps made as they ran tighter and looser, and a
fretful tumult from the dynamos; and, over all, sometimes inaudible, as
the ear tired of it, and then creeping back upon the senses again, was
this trombone note of the big machine. The floor never felt steady and
quiet beneath one's feet, but quivered and jarred. It was a confusing,
unsteady place, and enough to send anyone's thoughts jerking into odd
zigzags. And for three months, while the big strike of the engineers was
in progress, Holroyd, who was a blackleg, and Azuma-zi, who was a mere
black, were never out of the stir and eddy of it, but slept and fed in the
little wooden shanty between the shed and the gates.
Holroyd delivered a theological lecture on the text of his big machine
soon after Azuma-zi came. He had to shout to be heard in the din. "Look at
that," said Holroyd; "where's your 'eathen idol to match 'im?" And
Azuma-zi looked. For a moment Holroyd was inaudible, and then Azuma-zi
heard: "Kill a hundred men. Twelve per cent, on the ordinary shares," said
Holroyd, "and that's something like a Gord."
Holroyd was proud of his big dynamo, and expatiated upon its size and
power to Azuma-zi until heaven knows what odd currents of thought that and
the incessant whirling and shindy set up within the curly black cranium.
He would explain in the most graphic manner the dozen or so ways in which
a man might be killed by it, and once he gave Azuma-zi a shock as a sample
of its quality. After that, in the breathing-times of his labour--it was
heavy labour, being not only his own, but most of Holroyd's--Azuma-zi
would sit and watch the big machine. Now and then the brushes would
sparkle and spit blue flashes, at which Holroyd would swear, but all the
rest was as smooth and rhythmic as breathing. The band ran shouting over
the shaft, and ever behind one as one watched was the complacent thud of
the piston. So it lived all day in this big airy shed, with him and
Holroyd to wait upon it; not prisoned up and slaving to drive a ship as
the other engines he knew--mere captive devils of the British Solomon--had
been, but a machine enthroned. Those two smaller dynamos Azuma-zi by force
of contrast despised; the large one he privately christened the Lord of
the Dynamos. They were fretful and irregular, but the big dynamo was
steady. How great it was! How serene and easy in its working! Greater and
calmer even than the Buddhas he had seen at Rangoon, and yet not
motionless, but living! The great black coils spun, spun, spun, the rings
ran round under the brushes, and the deep note of its coil steadied the
whole. It affected Azuma-zi queerly.
Azuma-zi was not fond of labour. He would sit about and watch the Lord of
the Dynamos while Holroyd went away to persuade the yard porter to get
whisky, although his proper place was not in the dynamo shed but behind
the engines, and, moreover, if Holroyd caught him skulking he got hit for
it with a rod of stout copper wire. He would go and stand close to the
colossus, and look up at the great leather band running overhead. There
was a black patch on the band that came round, and it pleased him somehow
among all the clatter to watch this return again and again. Odd thoughts
spun with the whirl of it. Scientific people tell us that savages give
souls to rocks and trees,--and a machine is a thousand times more alive
than a rock or a tree. And Azuma-zi was practically a savage still; the
veneer of civilisation lay no deeper than his slop suit, his bruises, and
the coal grime on his face and hands. His father before him had worshipped
a meteoric stone, kindred blood, it may be, had splashed the broad wheels
of Juggernaut.
He took every opportunity Holroyd gave him of touching and handling the
great dynamo that was fascinating him. He polished and cleaned it until
the metal parts were blinding in the sun. He felt a mysterious sense of
service in doing this. He would go up to it and touch its spinning coils
gently. The gods he had worshipped were all far away. The people in London
hid their gods.
At last his dim feelings grew more distinct, and took shape in thoughts,
and at last in acts. When he came into the roaring shed one morning he
salaamed to the Lord of the Dynamos, and then, when Holroyd was away, he
went and whispered to the thundering machine that he was its servant, and
prayed it to have pity on him and save him from Holroyd. As he did so a
rare gleam of light came in through the open archway of the throbbing
machine-shed, and the Lord of the Dynamos, as he whirled and roared, was
radiant with pale gold. Then Azuma-zi knew that his service was acceptable
to his Lord. After that he did not feel so lonely as he had done, and he
had indeed been very much alone in London. And even when his work-time was
over, which was rare, he loitered about the shed.
Then, the next time Holroyd maltreated him, Azuma-zi went presently to the
Lord of the Dynamos and whispered, "Thou seest, O my Lord!" and the angry
whirr of the machinery seemed to answer him. Thereafter it appeared to him
that whenever Holroyd came into the shed a different note came into the
sounds of the dynamo. "My Lord bides his time," said Azuma-zi to himself.
"The iniquity of the fool is not yet ripe." And he waited and watched for
the day of reckoning. One day there was evidence of short circuiting, and
Holroyd, making an unwary examination--it was in the afternoon--got a
rather severe shock. Azuma-zi from behind the engine saw him jump off and
curse at the peccant coil.
"He is warned," said Azuma-zi to himself. "Surely my Lord is very
patient."
Holroyd had at first initiated his "nigger" into such elementary
conceptions of the dynamo's working as would enable him to take temporary
charge of the shed in his absence. But when he noticed the manner in which