Chapter VIII

Every profession and most trades, except perhaps a few humble female ones, such as that of washerwoman, have their societies: some have only trade unions, but many have more or less social and club-like ones as well. So vast and wide a profession as engineering, stretching from the construction of the Assouan Dam to the nice adjustment of a waste-pipe, naturally has many societies in connection with it. Michael Annarly was a member of several; also of several others of a more generally scientific or quasi-scientific nature. It cannot be said that he had very often attended the meetings of any, or found them of great interest when he did; he was essentially of the unco-operative sort, in his work independent of ordinary methods, indifferent to accepted opinions, and a little impatient of them and of the people dealing in them. Still, partly from policy, and partly from a rather pathetic effort to be in union with his kind, he had occasionally attended various meetings. The opportunities naturally had not been numerous during the time he was at Galhardy’s, but he had taken them when they came. He had occasionally read a paper or contributed to a discussion: always to the advancement of knowledge, both of the subject and his hearers; though not always to the advancement of the self-esteem of former reputed authorities, of which he had not always thought to be tender. Such a thing is not forgotten, notably by the sufferer; indeed, it is very liable to be remembered, especially when the man who committed the offence has come to grief. There are some, then, who see in his downfall the consequence of his dangerously unconstitutional mind and methods, and some who perceive a just retribution on one who has caught them (the authorities) tripping, and frankly said so. Such things would be remembered against Michael now; and those who had no personal reasons against him would look upon him with curiosity or perhaps pity, or the shrugged shoulders of superior wisdom. In the circumstances, it is not surprising that he had no inclination to attend the meetings of any society that autumn and winter, although doing so was his sole chance of meeting men of kindred tastes.

“You don’t know what they are,” he told Nan once; “you would not have thought I and my affairs could interest them or matter to them, but I can tell you they do, a deal more than any of the subjects they are supposed to care for. I have seen a deal more eagerness and enthusiasm over the question of who is going to get the chair of engineering at Muddleborough-cum-Pudley than over a discussion on the effect of torque on the structure of metals. That was the subject, by the way, on which old B—— got so angry with me. He was wrong, and he didn’t forgive me for showing it. My observations have since received practical application, when, I understand, he fathered the theories he condemned when they were mine; but he has not forgiven me any the more for that. Nor has he forgiven me Galhardy’s; he had a nephew there, rather a waster, a junior and always will be, but the old man was awfully proud of it. He did not like my situation there. He will like my present situation; and, owing to the nephew, and other circumstances, he and all his friends, following and satellites, will have known all there is to know about it, and a good deal more besides, almost as soon as you did.”

“That is one of the reasons why you should go to meetings where you will see him and his friends,” Nan said. “They cannot know the truth, no one knows that wholly, and if you are never seen they will think you are ashamed to show yourself because the worst they imagine is true.”

“I don’t care what they think.”

“Then go,” she urged. “If they and their opinion don’t matter, why mind going among them?”

“Because they are a lot of rule-of-thumb, time-serving place-hunters, and their ceaseless talk about nothing wearies me.”

“They can’t all be that,” she protested; “there must be some who are worth meeting.”

He admitted there were. “There are some men worth going a long way to meet,” he admitted; “they are not the ones who talk much, or who are there often; still, usually one happens on one of them.”

“Then for their sake it is worth going.”

“Why? I don’t want to hear about the work that is worth while; I don’t want to hear what other men are doing, or what there is to be done. I have nothing to do with it now; I have done with it, or, rather, it with me.”

“Perhaps so,” she agreed, and then began to ask about the chances of picking up draughtsman’s work at the meetings of any of the societies.

He said it might happen, more likely at the technical, though possibly even at the purely learned or academic ones. She did not in so many words urge him to go on that account, but he saw the connection.

“You want me to take up this work, if I can get it?” he said. He did not want it himself; how little he wanted no one knew. It had always seemed to him the veriest threads and remnants of his profession, a dreary monotony that led nowhere, more utterly distasteful even than the drawing of chair-backs and writing Robert Barmister’s letters. But Nan wished it; she, in her ignorance, seemed to think something of it, and she had been good to him—so good that he had not the heart to disappoint her by telling her how poor and meagre it really was.

“Very well,” he said, “I’ll go to-night. Perhaps I shall be able to pick up a job.”

And he went. And though he did not pick up a job, Nan was satisfied, for when he came back he told her of a discussion there had been in which it was clear he had taken a part, forgetting, in his anxiety to establish a point, his own equivocal position. No doubt he had remembered it before and afterwards; no doubt some present had helped him to do so; and no doubt the position had been trying enough (in spite of his declaration of indifference) to one of his acutely perceptive temperament and overstrained nerves. But the stirring of former interests, and the response to the appeal of familiar terms, were equally real. The next time Nan suggested he should go to a meeting, he went with less urging.

That time it happened he met Johnson, a member of the firm of patent agents employed by Galhardy’s. He had come across him a good deal during the latter part of the time he was at the great foundries, having more than once given advice, unofficially, on technical subjects in connection with patents. Possibly Johnson remembered this now; possibly, also, he knew enough of the methods of the firm to suspend judgment on Michael’s affairs. At all events he showed no inclination to avoid his company.

“What are you doing now?” he asked casually in the course of talk.

“For a living? Making drawings of chair-backs for a relative.”

The tone was careless, and Johnson thought it a jest; but Michael assured him to the contrary.

“Fact,” he said, still speaking lightly. “Don’t you believe I can do it? I can; I draw rather well.”

“Yes,” Johnson said—he had suddenly seen the speaker’s eyes, and saw that in them at utter variance with the light tone and manner.

“Why chair-backs?” he asked. “Why not something more in line with your previous work?”

“Because they offered first,” Michael answered truthfully, but still so carelessly as to almost leave a doubt about the truth. “I’m not particular, anything that offers will do for me. I’d do chair-legs, if they were wanted, or geometrical patterns for linoleum, or machine drawings, anything.”

“Is that a fact?” Johnson said, and then added, with just a trace of hesitancy, “would you do our drawings?”

For half a second Michael shrank; the instinct to decline, to turn from this contact with the work of the past, still more from the proffered help of a man from it, was tremendous. But swiftly came the thought of Nan, who expected him to get it, who expected something to come of it.

“Certainly, if you’ll give me any,” he said, and was grateful that the other kindly refrained from apologising for the nature of the work, and the poverty of the pay.

In that way Michael received his first draughtsman’s work. It was poorly paid, but, as a compensation, there was a good deal of it, and always likely to be. The Patent Office requires that all drawings of machinery and processes for which a patent is applied for should be of a certain size and fineness, and on a particular kind of paper. It is the patent agents’ business to get such made from the original drawings of the patentee, naturally employing whom they think fit to do it, and paying him a much smaller sum than their client pays them. Such drawing is very monotonous, and in a sense mechanical; demanding the nicest accuracy and attention to detail, without allowing any scope for individuality. It was particularly distasteful to one of Michael’s nature. Nevertheless, he did it when he could get it. If he saw little chance of arriving at anything better that way, it might at least ultimately be a method of earning a living. The principal difficulty he found in connection with it, was to refrain from pointing out to the patentee the technical flaws which he sometimes perceived in the invention thus brought to his notice.

Nan once asked him why he did not point them out.

“It wouldn’t be fair to Johnson,” he said. “The clients might resent their drawings being sent to a man who was able to find out the faults, and, consequently, they would judge, able to annex valuable ideas if he had a mind to—especially a man with a reputation like mine. Besides, what does it matter? It doesn’t matter to me if they are wrong.”

“No,” Nan said, but she thought that it did; that underneath there would always be something in him to which error of that sort mattered, and problems appealed. And probably she was right; at all events, in a little he glanced up from the drawing he was at work upon. It was one for an invention which would be rendered valueless by such a flaw—the result, most likely, of the inventor’s ignorance of a small and obscure law.

“I tell you what I might do here,” he said; “I might write out that law, put it so that anyone could apply it for himself to this invention, and send a copy of it to the patentee anonymously. If he is any good, he will at once see what he has done, and set it right before it is too late. I think I’ll do that.”

He did: but since it was done anonymously he naturally did not hear the result; and, his interest having suddenly burnt out, he never troubled to inquire if the specification was altered, or the application for the patent withdrawn.

This was in February. He had been more than three months in Soho then, and seemed, so far as one could judge, likely to be many more; working for Barmister in the day and drawing out other men’s inventions at night. Almost, it seemed, as if he had sunk into obscurity never to reappear; certainly to be as far as ever from any return to his old life and work. Towards the end of the month, it is true, he came into something like momentary touch with it. It was when he met Blake, of Blake and Kingswell.

Blake and Kingswell were the people who supplied oil to Galhardy’s: Michael had seen a certain amount of the junior partner during the last part of his time with the firm. The new steel process he had worked out was for an oil-hardened metal, and as a consequence he had had several interviews with Blake; when, besides discussing qualities of oil and kindred business details, they had talked of enough other things to form a favourable opinion of each other. But when he caught sight of the man in the City, where he had gone on some business for Barmister, his instinct was to avoid him. However, as it chanced, he was recognised before he more than thought of doing it.

“Hullo!” Blake said. “You in town? What are you doing?”

“I live in town,” Michael answered—he had no inclination to speak of the chair-backs.

“Consulting work?” Blake asked. “Very wise; much better worth your while than anything else. I always thought you were rather wasted at Galhardy’s.”

Michael said nothing. There were draughtsmen who called themselves consulting engineers, and he had a sudden distaste to owning himself a complete failure to this man who still thought him otherwise.

They walked on together for a while, speaking of various technicalities in connection with Blake’s business, notably some trouble there was with the filter presses in the oil works.

As Michael listened, the old instinct stirred. At first he only listened, but soon it was more; the familiar names and turns of thought called up the old attention. Without being aware of it, he was making inquiries and suggestions with the absorbed attention and keen insight he always had for such things.

At the corner of the street Blake said, “Couldn’t you manage to come down and have a look at the presses? Our works aren’t very far from town. We must have an expert opinion. I’d sooner have yours than any man’s I know. Can you do it?”

Again, as when Johnson offered him the draughtsman’s work, Michael hesitated. He could not himself have told why: not from any doubt of his ability to do what was required, or any dislike of it, nor yet from any uncertainty as to payment. He had none of these. Yet for the second he drew back from the idea; from embarking on anything, taking any step, however sure and desirable, out of the humble, present way. The sensation was mastered almost as quickly as it arose; he said he should be glad to give an opinion, and fixed a time for the visit of inspection when his absence was least likely to inconvenience Barmister.

It was a small matter really, this visit to the oil works; little more 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 which, for him, it entailed.

“I should have that man of Wallaby’s, if I ever did get in,” he said. “I don’t suppose he knows anything about marine engines, but that doesn’t matter, he’s a good man; I don’t think much of specialised knowledge _per se_; after all, it’s less what a man knows that matters in real problems, than how he sets about dealing with what he doesn’t know.”

Nan agreed and said nothing about air-castles and the previousness of arranging the staff of them before the first brick is laid; she knew that that childish faculty sometimes goes with the constructive mathematical mind.

But the enthusiasm did not remain with the builder now. “I don’t know that we need spend time talking of what I’ll do if I do make a success of it,” he said, “quite likely I shan’t make anything of the kind.”

But she did not believe that; nor did he really, although at times he insisted on it, speaking of the enormous difficulties of the hitherto unsolved problem presented by the big engines.

That same day he wrote to the steamship company, saying he was willing to undertake their work, suggesting terms and other arrangements. He did not mention the matter to Barmister; although he and Nan thought a great deal about it, neither mentioned it to her father, there would be time enough for that when all was settled.

And as it happened events justified this reticence. Two days later there came another letter from the company. Michael’s reply had been received, but after further consideration, the board had decided not to proceed on the lines originally indicated. Their own engineers hoped to be equal to doing all that was necessary, so they would not trouble him further in the matter.

“Are they equal to it?” Nan asked. “How can they be now if they weren’t four days ago?”

Michael shrugged his shoulders. “They may have hit on something,” he said, “though I hardly think so.”

“Nor do I,” she said significantly.

He took the blow, and blow it certainly was, very quietly. “After all,” he said, “it’s not really surprising; it’s only what we might have expected. The wonder is, not that they have backed out now, but that they appealed to me in the first instance. Most of the directors of this are in two or three kindred companies and thoroughly mixed in that lot; if they don’t absolutely know any of Galhardy’s directors personally they do indirectly; they must have known something about that affair.”

“Of course,” Nan said, “they would hardly have applied to you if they had not; it’s only because of that that you are free and willing to do what they wanted, and they know it; besides, if, as you say, it was through Mr. Blake they did apply to you, he would probably have said something about it to them, very likely not to your discredit.”

“Blake’s a good sort,” Michael said; “he’d have made the best tale he could; he believes the best, I think; he was awfully decent to me.”

His face brightened for a moment, as he recalled the afternoon with the oil presses.

“What has caused this change, then?” Nan asked. “Why have they altered their minds now?”

Michael did not know. “Possibly,” he suggested, “one director, more nervous or more suspicious or more punctilious than the rest, who was not there at the first discussion, came along afterwards and upset the others. Or perhaps some one of them has heard a fresh yarn about me. Or it might even be that someone in Galhardy’s, hearing there was a chance of me getting in there, has taken the trouble to talk to them. I don’t know how much interest Galhardy’s take in me and my proceedings, I should hardly have thought so much as that, still they may; they had a rather exalted opinion of the work I might do for other people, and the consequent damage to them. Anyway, I don’t see that it matters how it happened; it has happened, as it was likely to, and there’s an end.”

Nan nodded: there was an end, there was nothing to be gained by speculating on the reason or the manner of it.

“And after all,” he said, “perhaps it’s just as well. I dare say I shouldn’t have done any good with the thing, if I had had the chance; it’s a subject on which I have worked very little; probably I should have made a muddle of it. And working for people like that again—working that way——”

He did not finish the sentence, but it was plain that he shrank from the idea as he had before welcomed it, doubting his own ability and everything else.