The two girls left Sir Creighton Severn’s house in Kensington Palace
Gardens, and the dainty little motor Victoria made its way eastwards
under the skilful guidance of a young coachman engineer trained by Sir
Creighton himself.
Every one has heard of Sir Creighton Severn, the great inventor. A large
number of people, if asked what Sir Creighton had invented, would
reply “Electricity,” so closely has his name become associated with the
development of this power and its adaptation to the various necessities
of modern life.
Some time ago there was a general feeling throughout the country that
he had gone too far in this direction. There should surely be a limit,
people said, to the many humiliations to which scientific men were
subjecting that power which after all was nothing less than lightning
made captive, and under that name, the most imposing attribute of great
Jove himself. It was not so bad to ask it to light a well-appointed
drawing-room or to annihilate distance when applied to the end of a
few thousand miles of telegraph cable--there was a heroic aspect of
its employment in such ways: there was something of the dignity of an
international treaty in the relationship existing between civilisation
and electricity up to a certain point; but it was going quite too far
to set it to cook chump chops for the servants’ dinner, or to heat the
irons in the laundry.
People began to feel for electricity, just as they did when they heard
the story of King Alfred in the swineherd’s cottage. If the nations had
ceased to offer oblations to the leven of Jove that was no reason why it
should be degraded to the level of a very scullion.
But when Sir Creighton, after inventing the electric kitchener, and
the electric ironer, brought out an electric knife cleaner, an electric
boot-black, and an electric mouse trap--nay, when he destroyed the very
black-beetles in the kitchen by electricity, people ceased to protest.
They only shook their heads and said no good could come of such things.
Of course, these adaptations of the power of which Sir Creighton was
looked upon as the legitimate owner in succession to Jupiter (deceased),
represented only his hours of relaxation. They were the gleanings, so to
speak, of his electric harvest--the heel-taps of his electric banquet:
they only brought him in about five thousand a year in royalties. The
really great adaptations for which he was responsible filled the world
with admiration and his own pockets with money. He had lived so long in
close association with electricity that he had come to know every little
phase of its nature just as a man--after thirty years or so of married
life--comes to have an inkling of his wife’s character. He had invented
the electric ship that picked up broken cables at sea by merely passing
over where they were laid. He had invented the air purifier which
instantly destroyed every injurious element in the atmosphere of large
manufacturing towns, making them as pleasant to live in as London
itself. He had also produced a fog disperser; but he was not
sufficiently satisfied with its operation to give it to the public. It
was quite equal to the duty of giving fresh air and sunshine to his
own house and gardens, at times when people outside were choking with
sulphur and knocking their heads against lamp posts, but this was not
enough for Sir Creighton, and he withheld his discovery until he should
have so perfected it as to make it applicable to the widest areas.
He had sufficient confidence in his powers and in the ductility of his
partner--he had long ago come to allude to electricity as his _conjux
placens_--to feel certain that in the course of a year or two, he would
be in a position to clear the Atlantic Ocean of fogs and even to do
something with London itself.
But there was another discovery which Sir Creighton hoped he was on the
eve of perfecting--the greatest of all the long list already standing
to his credit--this was the Electric Digester. He had proved to the
satisfaction of every one except himself the possibility of treating not
only flesh meat but every form of diet in such a way as practically to
obviate the necessity for it to undergo the various tedious processes of
digestion before it became assimilated with the system.
He had early in life become impressed with the need of making a
departure from the old-fashioned methods of preparing food for human
consumption. In the early days of man--he put the date roughly at 150000
b. c., though he admitted that the recent discovery of a fossil scorpion
in the Silurian rocks left him about a million years to come and go
upon--there was probably no need for an Artificial Digestive. The early
man had plenty of exercise. It is quite conceivable that, with
such things as the Mammoth, the Mastodon, the Pterodactyl and the
Ichtheosaurus roaming about with empty stomachs, the human race should
have a good deal of exercise (Scoffers said that the human race was
properly so called). But the human race had won the race, and had then
settled down for a period of well-earned repose.
This was all very well, but their doing so had changed the most
important of the conditions under which they had lived, until, as
civilisation strengthened the human digestion had weakened. But instead
of openly acknowledging this fact and acting accordingly, physicians
had kept trying to tinker up the obsolete machinery with, naturally,
the most deplorable results. Instead of frankly acknowledging that man’s
digestion had gone the way of the tail, the supplemental stomach, and
the muscle that moved the ears, attempts were daily made to stimulate
the obsolete processes of digestion, but the result was not stimulating.
Sir Creighton Severn, however, frankly assumed that man had got rid of
his digestion to make way for his civilisation, and set about the task
of accommodating his diet to his altered conditions of life.
He had not yet succeeded in satisfying himself that his invention of the
Electric Digester would do all that he meant it to do; so, in spite of
the bitter cry that came from the great pie regions of North America,
imploring him to help them, he withheld it from the world for the
present.
Sir Creighton was wise enough to make a fool of himself every now and
again, and the fools said in their haste that his daughter was the
agency which he usually employed for effecting his purpose in this
direction. But while some said that it was his daughter who made a fool
of him others said that it was he who made a fool of his daughter.
No one seemed to fancy that it was quite possible for both statements to
be correct.
However this may be it may at once be said that Sir Creighton treated
his daughter as if she were a rational person, capable of thinking for
herself and of pronouncing a moderately accurate judgment of such minor
problems of life as were suggested to her. Without knowing why--though
her father could have told her all about it--she was most pleased
when she was trying certain experiments--not in electricity, but in
sociology.
And yet people said, simply because they saw that she was invariably
well dressed, that she had no scientific tendencies.
She had a certain indefinite beauty of her own that made people--some
people: mostly men--wonder where they had seen a flower like her--a
lily, they were nearly sure it was--or perhaps it was a white
clematis--the one with the star centre that swung so gracefully. They
continued looking at her and thinking of flowers, and happy is the girl
who makes people think of flowers when they see her!
Having very few delusions she knew that there was something of a
flower about her nature. And being well aware that flowers are the most
practical things in Nature, she had aspirations as boundless as those of
a lily.
That was why she was delighted when she attracted to her various forms
of idle insect life, male and female. Her aspirations were to attract
rather than to retain, for she had the lily’s instincts as well as
the lily’s industry. She knew that when youth made a bee-line to
her (speaking in a phrase of the garden) they did so for their own
advantage. And she awaited their departure with interest, knowing as she
did that it is when the insect leaves the lily that the latter is most
benefited; but without prejudice to the possibilities of the insect
being also benefited. She had no sympathy with the insectivorous plants
of womankind, though at the same time she knew that she was born with
a passion for experiments. She hoped, however, that her curiosity was
founded on a scientific basis.
She had, as it were, taken Love into her father’s laboratory, and with
his assistance subjected it to the most careful analysis. She was able
to assign to it a chemical symbol, and so she fancied that she knew all
there was to be known about love.
She knew a good deal less about it than does the flower of the lily when
the summer is at its height.
And now this offspring of the most modern spirit of investigation and
the most ancient femininity that existed before the scorpion found
his way into the Silurian rocks to sting, after the lapse of a
hundred thousand years, the biologists who had nailed their faith to
a theory--this blend of the perfume of the lily and the fumes of
hydrochlorate of potassium, was chatting to her friend Josephine West as
her motor-victoria threaded its silent way through the traffic of Oxford
Street to that region where Mr. Richmond had established his Technical
School of Literature.
Josephine West was the daughter of the right honourable Joseph West,
Under Secretary of State for the Department of Arbitration.