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[Illustration: IN FRONT OF BASIL GREGORY WAS A PILE OF GOLD.]
CHANCE IN CHAINS
A Story of Monte Carlo
by
GUY THORNE
Author of "When It Was Dark," "The Drunkard," etc.
With Frontispiece from a Drawing by Howard T. Graves
New York
Sturgis & Walton Company
1914
Copyright, 1914
By Sturgis & Walton Company
Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1914
CHANCE IN CHAINS
CHAPTER I
It was nine o'clock at night, and the thirty huge dynamos of the Societe
Generale Electrique of Paris were nearly all at work. In the great
glass-roofed hall of the Mont Parnasse Central Power Station
blue-bloused workmen moved quietly over the shining floors of white
concrete, pausing now and then by this or that purring, spitting
monster, scrutinising the whirring, glittering copper drums, listening
with experienced ears for the slightest variation in the deep wasp-like
hum, touching a lever here, adjusting a screw there, or oiling a bearing
with tin cans beaked like a snipe.
Huge arc lamps hanging from the ceiling cast a steel-blue radiance over
the hall, a radiance so cruel and intense that the shadows of the
machinery which were thrown upon the floor were as black and sharply
defined as fretwork of ebony.
The incandescent lamps which showed above each of the three great
switchboards of brass and vulcanite, although they were burning at full
power, glowed orange in the stupendous light from above.
The monster dynamos were making light for half eastern Paris. The Gare
Mont Parnasse, from where trains were running every two minutes with
late business folk to Meudon, Sevres and Versailles, was lit from this
room. The dinner tables of the foreign Ambassadors on the Quai
Austerlitz were illuminated by favour of these serene, relentless
marvels, and, across the Seine, many a glittering cafe upon the heights
of the pleasure city Montmartre were switching on hundreds of fresh
lights in the expectation of their supper custom--even as a new dynamo
was started to cope with the extra strain.
At one side of the hall a few concrete steps led into the little
glass-fronted room where the superintendent engineer on duty always sat.
The room was some twelve feet square, walled with white tiles like a
model dairy, and from where he sat at a deal table the engineer could
look out into every part of the hall. In the hall itself it was cold,
though the electricians felt but little of it owing to the fresh ozone
constantly liberated from the dynamos into the air. Outside, in Paris,
it was bitterly cold--a damp and foggy cold of late November. But in the
room of the superintendent engineer an electric stove burned brightly
and warmed it.
Two people were in the room now, Emile Deschamps and Basil Gregory, both
of them employed by the Societe Generale.
Deschamps was a young man of about twenty-six. His jet black hair,
closely cropped to a rather large and well-shaped head, together with
the swarthy tint of his complexion, proclaimed him of the South, a
veritable son of the Midi from Orange, Avignon, or Marseilles. He wore a
small black moustache, and his long-fingered right hand was deeply
stained with the juice of cheap cigarettes.
The man who sat opposite to him, at the other end of the table, was
unmistakably English. He was smoking a briar pipe, and though his
clothes--neither new nor fashionably cut--were distinctly Parisian, his
fair hair, blue eyes and rather heavy yellow moustache were eloquent of
his nationality. He was bending over a large sheet of drawings on
tracing paper with strained and careful attention.
He looked up suddenly, removed the pipe from his mouth, and began
speaking in a torrent of French so perfect that he might very well have
passed for a Parisian.
"Emile, I think I have it at last. The position of neutrality varies
with the type of the machine owing to the fact of armature reaction,
which distorts the magnetic field. We must therefore connect the
commutating poles in series with the armature, when their windings will
carry the full armature current."
Deschamps nodded, thought for a moment, and a quick technical discussion
began between the two men, the sheet of drawings being pushed from one
to the other, marked and annotated in the margin with pencil.
Suddenly Deschamps leant back in his chair.
"Yes," he said, "there can be no doubt about it. We're on the track, if
we have not already discovered the most revolutionary theory in
wireless telegraphy that the world has known as yet! What we know now,
at nine o'clock on a November evening in a power station in Paris, might
alter the whole course of life and society all over the world."
The Englishman nodded, with less excited but perfectly sincere
agreement.
"Very well, then," cried Deschamps, "will the world ever benefit by our
three years' work, our marvellous discovery? No! We're two poor devils,
junior engineers of this company on two hundred and fifty francs a
month. In all France no one will listen to us, and in all England also,
as you have discovered. And why?"
"Oh, what is the use, Emile?" Gregory replied, cutting short his friend.
"We have talked it over too many times. It's no good making a song about
it. We have not got the money to carry out our experiments thoroughly
and to construct our models, twenty thousand pounds--five hundred
thousand francs, my friend! And as we shall never get that, no one will
listen to us and it will remain for someone else to make our discovery
when we're--either when we're dead or still nursing Thierry dynamos at a
few francs a day."
As he spoke he rolled up the sheet of drawings and, with a deep sigh,
thrust it into the inner pocket of his coat.
"Come along," he said; "we had better be getting home. It is more
comfortable there than here, at any rate; and there's still one bottle
of Macon."
They left the little alcoved room, walked slowly down the hall, with a
word or two to the foreman, and passed out into the office, where the
engineer who was to succeed them and watch through the night was smoking
with the timekeeper.
Then, arm in arm, they passed into Paris.
They were a strange couple, these two. Basil Gregory was the son of a
Cambridge tutor, who early in his career had gone to Paris as the
English master of a famous Lycee. He had married a Frenchwoman, who had
died five years after Basil's birth. The boy had been brought up in
Paris until he was old enough to go to one of the lesser public schools
of England, which was all his father could afford for him. He won a
science scholarship from his school to Cambridge, had worked hard and
played hard at the University, until an unfortunate encounter with a
proctor during one of the evenings of the "May Week" had caused him to
be sent down for ever and a day. It was a stupid affair enough, but the
hot-headed young man's treatment of the guardian of University morals
had been too flagrant to be passed over.
Basil had returned to Paris, spent six months as a pupil in the school
for electrical engineers, and had finally been apprenticed to the
Societe Generale. At the end of his apprenticeship his father had died,
leaving him his blessing and a couple of hundred pounds. From that time
to this, and he was now exactly the same age as his friend Deschamps,
the young man had worked as a junior engineer at the central power
station. His salary was ten pounds a month. There were innumerable
people before him, and his prospects seemed absolutely nil.
As for Deschamps, he was the son of a bankrupt wine merchant of
Marseilles. With a remarkable taste for science and an especial interest
in electricity, he had come to Paris--after an apprenticeship at the
electrical station of Monte Carlo--and was in precisely the same state
as Basil Gregory. The two young men had become friends at once. Each
recognised in the other a brain above the average. Both of them were
intensely interested in their work, both of them had the temper of mind
which flouts accepted theories and ever presses forward to new and
epoch-making discovery. They were pioneers, and knew it. Without
conceit, without any self-deception, they were quietly certain of their
own powers. They had worked together, spending every moment of their
spare time and every franc they could afford upon a new and original
development in wireless telegraphy. They had arrived at a point when
they were both convinced that they had wrested an entirely new secret
from Nature, and at this point they found, as so many inventors and
pioneers have found in the past, that the way was absolutely barred for
want of capital. In their hands they were sure they held the talisman of
fortune and undying renown. It was useless to them for want of money.
This night in Paris was bitter cold. Moreover, an infrequent and dreaded
occurrence in Paris, a dense fog lay over the city. These Parisian fogs
are not the sulphurous, pea-soup discomforts of London, but they are
almost as unpleasant, and quite as upsetting to ordinary life and
comfort. A dank, grey mist, opaque and wet, seems to rise from the
Seine, spread outwards in evergrowing density and chill, until all the
central quarter of Paris is hidden and throttled by it.
"_Diable!_" Deschamps said, coughing, as they left the power station
behind them. "_Une vraie brume Anglaise_."
Gregory shrugged his shoulders. "It is pretty bad," he said, "and we
can't see a yard in front of our noses. Still, if you had experienced a
London 'particular,' Emile--well, then you _would_ know!"
There was a silence between the young men as they tramped away to the
Latin Quarter, where they shared a room in a little fifth-rate hotel not
far from the Quai Voltaire. The night was bitterly cold, certainly not
inviting conversation, and the thoughts of the pair were cold and bitter
in harmony with the night. Genius is rarely unconscious of its power.
Basil Gregory and Emile Deschamps were not in the least conceited, but
each knew in his heart of hearts that already they approached those
heights upon which Tesla and Edison dwelt. They saw the top of the
mountain bathed in glorious sunshine, but between them and it there was
a great gulf only to be bridged by money.
Basil Gregory's case was, perhaps, the worse of the two, for Basil was
in love. Ethel McMahon, the pretty Irish girl, who was English mistress
in a young ladies' school in the Fauberg St. Honore, held all his heart,
but she, like him, was poor and friendless, and out of her wretched
salary supported an invalid mother, who was a martyr to one of the
cruellest forms of arthritis.
The young man ground his teeth in fury against Fate, as he strode by his
companion's side. Suddenly he began to talk rapidly, and with a true
Parisian vehemence.
"I shouldn't mind so much, Emile, if we wanted money for the reason that
such a lot of fellows of our age want it. But we don't. We don't want to
play the giddy goat"--_faire la bete_ was the French he used--"we don't
want to enjoy ourselves in the usual silly way. We only want the world
to recognise us for what we are. We want to benefit the whole world,
Emile, and for ourselves all we ask is recognition and sufficient to
live in comfort."
"It's true," Deschamps replied. "For myself, a flat in central Paris, a
motor car to take me quickly to my experimental works, money to travel
to America to see all the developments of electricity there--that is all
I ask."
"It's much the same with me," the other returned, "except that I want to
get married as well and give poor dear Ethel a happy life, and her
mother the comforts that she needs. And yet--oh, I'd give anything,
_anything_, to get the money for our experiments."
Deschamps shrugged his shoulders. "Well, we cannot rob a church," he
said, "and the penalties for any sort of burglary are most unpleasant in
France. We must even wait upon Fortune. After all, _mon ami_, our chance
may yet come. Every day we read in the newspapers of strange strokes of
fortune coming to people. I cannot believe that we shall never have our
opportunity. Who knows!"--he threw out an arm with one of the theatrical
gestures habitual to men of the South--"who knows but that this very
night some very great thing will happen to us! Faith! faith! We must
believe, and Fortune will be kind to us. She ever turns away coldly from
a faint and despairing heart!"
He took his fancy and embroidered it in a stream of words so vivid,
hopeful and full of fancy that he half persuaded the more phlegmatic
Englishman by his side. Basil listened in silence, warmed a little, and
was not quite so hopeless as he had been. Then, out of mere shame at his
own feeling, he stemmed the other's torrent of words.
"That is all very well," he said grimly, "but meanwhile Dame Fortune
seems to have deserted us worse than ever. While we have been talking
nonsense we have missed our way, and if you can tell me where we are, or
whereabouts the Hotel Buonaparte may be lying, I shall be extremely
obliged to you, Monsieur Deschamps of the rosy hopes!"
The two men stopped. It was as Gregory had said. That they were near the
Seine was obvious, because of the intenser thickness of the fog, but
there was no doubt that they had entirely lost their direction. The
white mist was as thick as wool, wet, motionless, and icy. Where they
stood, upon the pavement, and half-way down a mean, narrow street, the
blurred contours of which were perfectly unfamiliar, hardly a sound
could be heard. Wheel traffic there was none. The hum of fog-gripped
Paris came to them as if from an incredible distance; there was not even
a footstep to be heard.
Once more Deschamps shrugged his shoulders. "_Bien_," he said; "yes, we
have certainly 'done it this time,' as you say. I have no notion where
we are. I am as cold as an iceberg and as hungry as a goat."
They stood looking at each other, though the face of each was an
indistinct, pale glimmer. They had gone a little too much to the west,
and had lost themselves in the narrow network of mean streets somewhere
behind the Ecole Militaire. To reach the Latin Quarter would need
considerable ingenuity upon a clear evening when the lamps shone
brightly. At the moment it seemed a sheer impossibility.
"Shall we turn back?" Deschamps asked.
Gregory shook his head. "No," he replied. "You pretend to be so intimate
with the habits of Fortune, and yet you ask a question like that! Let us
go on. We are bound to find our way somehow into some street where there
is more life and movement. And if we meet a gang of Apaches--well, we
are neither of us weaklings, and we have got a couple of good
walking-sticks. Forward, Emile Deschamps! We go to seek our fortune!"
And as he said it he laughed with bitter cynicism.
They went on, but as they did so, and when they had walked a hundred and
fifty yards or more, the street in which they were grew even narrower
and more silent. Every now and then, at long distances, there was a gas
lamp, but its yellow light was so muffled by the fog that it hardly
penetrated for more than a yard or so, and if the prismatic colours the
light made upon the mist were beautiful, they were quite useless to two
young gentlemen hungry for supper and far from home.
Emile Deschamps took a box of matches from his pocket, wax ones, which
burned immediately without the spectral blue flame of the more general
Government article. He lit one--there was not a breath of wind--and held
it above his head. The two men walked onwards for a few yards while the
feeble light lasted, carefully scrutinising the tall houses which
abutted on the pavement. They seemed to consist of small workshops and
factories, now blind and deserted. Another match brought them to a
stretch of wide wood paling, beyond which rose dim objects seeming like
giant mounds or pyramids, and even as the match flickered out it threw
its light upon a painted sign.
"Ah!" Deschamps said suddenly. "Now I know! We are in the wood quarter!
This is a street of _chantiers de bois_."
Basil groaned. "Good heavens!" he said, "then we _have_ come out of our
way," for he knew instantly that they had penetrated to that part of
Paris where the huge wood-sheds were, where the firewood is cut and
stored, and timber for all other purposes is kept. All around them were
the great wood stacks and deserted yards. There was not a sound to be
heard, and doubtless the few watchmen that were on guard were
comfortably sleeping over the stoves in their huts.
"Go on, or turn back?" Deschamps said.
Gregory took a franc from his pocket, and spun it under a gas lamp to
which they had just come up. "Heads we go on," he said, and as the coin
fell upon the back of his hand, sure enough the figure of Liberty was
uppermost.
"That settles it," he said, and once again the boots of the friends rang
upon the pavement.
They had travelled for some fifty yards or so, when a rather brighter
light than usual came into their view.
"By Jove!" Gregory said, "an electric light at last! I know current is
supplied to this neighbourhood because there have recently been
representations in the Chamber of Deputies as to the necessity for
supplying current to all this part owing to the inflammable nature of
the wood. The Societe is interested in the matter. I saw some
correspondence about it in the office, but the people in this part are
very conservative and none too well off, either. Let us have a look."
They came up to the light. It was not a street lamp, but projected from
above the door of an old and rather shabby building, and immediately
beneath it was a trade sign which could easily be read in the stronger
illumination. This was the sign:
CARNET FRERES,
GRAVEURS SUR BOIS BOISAGE.
"Well, here's something," Gregory said, "and by the fact that the light
is still on, one may suppose that there is someone inside. It is a
wood-engraver's and wood-turner's workshop, you see. Yes, the door's
actually open! We will go in and inquire where we are."
As he spoke he pushed open a swing door of wood, from which the paint
was peeling, and, followed by Deschamps, entered without further ado.