to end it when you stopped me. I hoped to get through more easily
without my burghers' aid, but I told them to follow if they saw me
stopped. You missed us in searching the spruit this morning.
"I have really private business at Swartzdorp. Word was brought to me
three days ago that Tante Anna dutifully buried Matakit months ago.
Vassell was the Kaffir's life; I will be his resurrection. A great
diamond of the first water is very salable, and the treasury of the
republic is running low."
"But it may not be a diamond of the first water," said I.
"It must be," said the patriarch. "Anything less would be too shabby a
mercy to Vassell."
*BOSS OF THE WORLD*
About one-tenth of the people in Boston are British Canadians, mostly
from the Maritime Provinces, an acquisitive prudent folk who see naught
to be gained by correcting casual acquaintances who mistake them for
down-east Yankees. Often, indeed, they are descendants of Hezekiahs and
Priscillas who, having been Royalists during the War of Independence,
found subsequent emigration to a British country incumbent on their
Puritan consciences. These Americans, returned to the ancestral New
England after four or five generations of absence, commonly find Boston
ways surprisingly congenial, though they continue to cherish pride in
British origin, and a decent warmth of regard for fellow natives of the
Maritime Provinces. Hence a known Canadian is frequently addressed by
an unsuspected one with, "I am from Canada, too." Having learned this
from ten years' experience, I was little surprised when old Adam Bemis,
meeting me on the corner of Tremont and Boylston Streets, in May, 1915,
stopped and stealthily whispered, "I am from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia."
"Really! I have always taken you for one of the prevalent minority, a
man from the State of Maine."
"Most folks do. It doesn't vex me any more. But I've wanted to tell
you any time the last ten years."
"Then, why didn't you?"
"It's not my way to hurry. You will understand that well when I
explain. I'm needing friendly advice."
He had ever worn the air of preoccupation during our twelve years'
acquaintance, but that seemed proper to an inventor burdened with the
task of devising and selecting novelties for the Annual Announcement by
which Miss Minnely's Prize Package Department furthers the popularity of
her famous Family Blessing. The happy possessor of five new subscription
certificates, on remitting them to Adam's Department, receives by mail,
prepaid, Number 1 Prize Package. Number 2 falls to the collector of ten
such certificates; and so on, in gradations of Miss Minnely's shrewd
beneficence. The magnifico of one thousand certificates obtains choice
between a gasoline auto-buggy and a New England farm. To be ever adding
to or choosing from the world's changing assortment of moral mechanical
toys, celluloid table ornaments, reversible albums, watches warranted
gold filled, books combining thrill with edification, and more or less
similar "premiums" to no calculable end, might well account for Old
Adam's aspect, at once solemn and unsettled.
"What is your trouble?" I enquired.
"The Odistor. My greatest discovery!" he whispered.
"Indeed! For your Department?"
"We will see about that. It is something mighty wonderful--I don't know
but I should say almighty."
"Goodness! What is its nature?"
"I won't say--not here. You couldn't believe me without seeing it
work--I wouldn't have believed it myself on anybody's word. I will
bring it on to your lodgings--that's a good place for the exhibition.
No--I won't even try to explain here--we might be overheard." He
glanced up and down Tremont Street, then across--"Sh--there she is
herself!" He dodged into a drug store opposite the Touraine.
Miss Mehitable Minnely, sole proprietor of The Family Blessing, was
moving imposingly from the Boylston Street front of the hotel toward her
auto-brougham. At the top step she halted and turned her cordial,
broad, dominant countenance in both directions as if to beam on streets
crowded with potential prize-package takers. She then spoke the
permitting word to two uniformed deferential attendants, who proceeded
to stay her carefully by the elbows, in her descent of the stone steps.
Foot passengers massed quickly on both sides of her course, watching her
large, slow progress respectfully. When the porters had conveyed her
across the pavement, and with deferential, persistent boosting made of
her an ample lading for the "auto," the chauffeur touched his
wide-peaked cap, and slowly rolled her away towards Brimstone Corner _en
route_ to the Blessing Building. Adam came out of the drug store
looking relieved.
"She doesn't like to see any of us on the street, office hours," he
explained with lips close to my ear. "Not that I ought to care one
mite." He smiled somewhat defiantly and added, "To see me dodging the
old lady's eye you'd never guess I'm _her_ boss. But I am." He eyed my
wonder exultantly and repeated, "It's so. She doesn't know it. Nobody
knows, except me. But I _am_ her boss. Just whenever I please."
On my continued aspect of perturbation he remarked, coolly:--"Naturally
you think my head is on wrong. But you will know better this evening.
I'm the World's boss whenever I choose to take the responsibility. If I
don't choose, _she_ goes on being my boss, and, of course, I'll want to
hold down my job. Well, good-day for the present. Or, say--I
forgot--will it suit you if I come about half-past-five? I can't get
there _much_ earlier. She's not too well pleased if any of us leave
before Park Street clock strikes five."
"Very well, Mr. Bemis--half past. I shall expect you."
"Expect a surprise, too."
He walked circumspectly across Boylston Street through the contrary
processions of vehicles, to the edging pavement of the Common, on his
way toward the new Old State House, and Miss Minnely's no less immense
Family Blessing Building.
It was precisely twenty-six minutes past five when Adam entered my
private office in the rear room of the ground floor of a sky-scraper
which overlooks that reach of Charles River lying between the Union Boat
Club House and the long, puritanic, impressive simplicity of Harvard
Bridge. He did not greet me, being preoccupied with the brown
paper-covered package under his left arm. With a certain eagerness in
his manner, he placed this not heavy burden on the floor, so that it was
hidden by the broad table-desk at which I sat. He stooped. I could
hear him carefully untie the string and open the clattering paper.
He then placed on the green baize desk-cover a bulbous object of some
heavy metal resembling burnished steel. It was not unlike a large white
Bermuda onion with a protuberant stem or nozzle one inch long,
half-an-inch in diameter, and covered by a metal cap. Obviously; the
bulb was of two equal parts, screwed together on a plane at right angles
to the perpendicular nozzle. An inch of the upper edge of the lower or
basic part was graduated finely as a vernier scale. The whole lower
edge of the upper half was divided, apparently into three hundred and
sixty degrees, as is the horizontal circle of a theodolite. The parts
were fitted with a clamp and tangent screw, by which the vernier could
be moved with minutest precision along the graduated circle.
"I was four years experimenting before I found out how to confine it,"
said Adam.
"What? A high explosive!"
"No--nothing to be nervous about. But what it is I can't exactly say."
"A scientific mystery, eh?"
"It might be called so, seeing as I don't myself know the real nature of
the force any more than electricians know what electricity is. They
understand how to generate and employ it, that's all. Did you ever see
a whirlwind start?"
"No."
"Think again. Not even a little one?"
"Of course I have often seen little whirlwinds on the street carrying up
dust and scraps of paper, sometimes dropping them instantly, sometimes
whirling them away."
"On calm days?"
"Really I can't remember. But I think not. It doesn't stand to reason."
"That's where you are mistaken. It is in the strongest kind of sunshine
on dead calm days that those little whirlwinds do start. What do you
suppose starts them?"
"I never gave it a thought."
"Few do. I've given it years of close thinking. You have read of ships
on tropic seas in dead calm having top-sails torn to rags by whirlwinds
starting 'way up there, deck and sea quiet as this room?"
"I've read of that. But I don't believe all the wonderful items I read
in the papers."
"There are more wonders than the papers print. I saw that happen twice
in the Indian Ocean, when I was a young man. I have been studying more
or less on it ever since. Now I will show you the remainder of my
Odistor. I call it that because folks when I was young used to talk of
a mysterious Odic force."
To the desk he lifted a black leather grip-sack, as narrow, as low, and
about twice as long as one of those in which surgeons carry their
implements. From this he extracted a simple-seeming apparatus which I
still suppose to have been of the nature of an electric machine.
Externally it resembled a rectangular umbrella box of metal similar to
that of the bulb. It was about four feet in length and four inches in
height and in breadth. That end which he placed nearest the window was
grooved to receive one-half the bulb accurately. Clamped longitudinally
to the top of the box was a copper tube half-an-inch in exterior
diameter, and closed, except for a pinhole sight, at the end farthest
from the window. The other, or open end, was divided evenly by a
perpendicular filament apparently of platinum.
Adam placed this sighted box on the green baize, its longer axis
pointing across the Charles River to Cambridge, through the window. He
carefully propped up the wire-net sash. Stooping at the desk he looked
through the pin-hole sight and shifted the box to his satisfaction.
"Squint along the line of sight," he said, giving place to me. I
stooped and complied.
"You see Memorial Hall tower right in the line?"
"Precisely."
"But what is nearest on the Cambridge shore?"
"The stone revetment wall."
"I mean next beyond that."
"The long shed with the big sign 'Builders' in black letters."
"All right. Sit here and watch that shed. No matter if it blows away.
They were going to tear it down anyway." He placed my chair directly
behind the sighted tube.
With an access of eagerness in his countenance, and something of tremor
apparent in his clutching fingers, he lifted the bulb, unscrewed its
metal cap and worked the tangent screw while watching the vernier
intently. He was evidently screwing the basal half closer to the
nozzle-bearing upper portion.
From a minute orifice in the nozzle or stem something exuded that
appeared first as a tiny, shimmering, sunbright, revolving globule. At
that instant he placed the bulb on its base in its niche or groove at
the outer or window end of the sighted box. Thus the strange revolving
globule was rising directly in the line of sight.
"Watch that shed," Adam ordered hoarsely.
I could not wholly take my eyes off the singular sphere, which resembled
nothing that I have elsewhere seen so much as a focus of sun rays from a
burning glass. But this intensely bright spot or mass--for it appeared
to have substance even as the incandescent carbon of an Edison lamp
seems to possess substance exterior to the carbon--rose expanding in an
increasing spiral within an iridescent translucent film that clung by a
tough stem to the orifice of the nozzle, somewhat as a soap-bubble
clings to the pipe whence it is blown. Yet this brilliant, this
enlarging, this magic globule was plainly whirling on its perpendicular
axis as a waterspout does, and that with speed terrific. The mere
friction of its enclosing film on the air stirred such wind in the room
as might come from an eighteen-inch electric fan. In shape the infernal
thing rapidly became an inverted cone with spiral convolutions. It
hummed like a distant, idly-running circular saw, a great top, or the
far-off, mysterious forewarning of a typhoon.
"Now!" Adam touched a button on the top of the metal box.
The gleaming, whirling, humming, prismatic spiral was then about
eighteen inches high. It vanished without sound or spark, as if the
film had been totally destroyed and the contained incandescence quenched
on liberation. For one instant I experienced a sense of suffocation, as
if all the air had been drawn out of the room. The inner shutters
clashed, the holland sunshade clattered, the door behind me snicked
open, air from the corridor rushed in.
"See the river!" Adam was exultant, but not too excited to replace the
metal cap on the nozzle.
Certainly the Charles River was traversed by a gust that raised white
caps instantly. A bulk-headed sailing-dory, owned by a Union Boat
Clubman whom I knew, lay over so far that her sail was submerged, and
her centre-board came completely out of water. Only the head and
clutching forearms of the two men aboard her could be seen. Afterward
they told me they had been quite surprised by the squall. Beyond the
Cambridge revetment wall a wide cloud of dust sprang up, hiding the
"Builders" shed.
When this structure reappeared Adam gasped, then stood breathless, his
countenance expressive of surprise.
He looked down at the Odistor, pondering, left hand fingers pressing his
throbbing temple. Lifting the bulb he inspected the vernier, laid it
down again, put on his spectacles and once more peered intently at the
graduated scale.
"I see," he said, "I was the least thing too much afraid of doing damage
in Cambridge back of the shed. But you saw the wind?"
"Certainly I saw wind."
"You know how it started?"
"I don't know what to think. It was very strange. What is the stuff?"
"Tell me what starts the whirlwind or the cyclone, and I can tell you
that. All I'm sure of is that I can originate the force, control it,
and release it in any strength I choose. Do you remember the chap
called AEolus we used to read about in the Latin book at school, he that
bagged up the winds long ago? I guess there was truth at the back of
that fable. He found out the secret before me, and he used it to some
extent. It died with him, and they made a god out of his memory--they
had some right to be grateful that he spared them. It must go to the
grave with me--so far as I've reasoned on the situation. But that's all
right. What's worrying me is the question--Shall I make any use of it?"
"I can see no use for it."
"What! Think again. It is the Irresistible Force. There is no
withstanding it. I can start a stronger hurricane than ever yet blew.
You remember what happened to that Hawaiian Island in the tornado last
year? That was a trifle to what I can do. It is only a matter of
confining a larger quantity in a stronger receiver and giving it a
swifter send off with a more powerful battery. I can widen the track
and lengthen the course to any extent."
"Suppose you can. Still it is only a destroyer. What's the good of
it?"
"What's the good of a Krupp gun. Or a shell. Or a bullet?"
"They are saleable."
He looked keenly at me for some seconds. "Do you see that far, or do you
only not see how it could be used as a weapon? That's it, eh! Well,
I'll tell you. There's England spending more'n ten million dollars a
day in the war. Suppose I go to Lord Kitchener. He's a practical, quick
man--in half an hour he sees what I can do. 'What will you give,' I ask
him, 'to have the Crown Prince and the rest of them Prussians blown
clear away?' 'What is your price?' he inquires. 'Ten million pounds
would be cheap,' I reply. 'Take five,' he says, 'we are not made of
money.' 'Well, seeing it's you,' I tell him."
"It is a considerable discount, Adam. But then you are a British
subject."
"Yes--kind of. But the conversation was imaginary. Discount or no
discount, I feel no special call to blow away whole armies of Germans.
If I could set the Odistor on the Kaiser, and the Crown Prince, and a
dozen or so more of the Prussian gang, I'd do it, of course. But how
could I find just where they were? Blowing away whole armies of men
don't seem right to me."
"But you needn't do that yourself. Sell your secret outright to the
British Government."
Adam stared as one truly astonished.
"Now what you think you're talking about?" he remonstrated. "Can't you
see farther than that? Suppose I sell the secret to Kitchener. Suppose
he clears out all the Germans with it. What next? Why, Ireland!
Kitchener is a Jingo Imperialist, which I never was and never will be.
I've heard of Jingoes saying time and again that England's interests
would be suited if Ireland was ten feet under water. Or suppose he only
blows the Irish out of Connaught, just to show the others they'd better
cut out the Sinn Finn. What then? First place, I like the Irish. My
wife's Irish. Next, consider all the world. Suppose England has got
the irresistible weapon. There's no opposing it. Suppose France was to
try, some time after this war is over. Away go her cities, farms,
vineyards, people, higher than Gilroy's kite. What next? All the rest
of the world then know they must do what the English say--Germans,
Italians, Russians, Yankees, Canadians. Now I'm a cosmopolitan, I am.
All kind of folk look good to me."
"But England ruling the world means universal peace," I said
enthusiastically. "Free trade, equal rights, all the grand altruistic
English ideals established forever and ever! Adam, let England have it!
You'll be remembered as the greatest benefactor of humanity. A Bemis
statue in Trafalgar Square, London! Sure! Think of that glory, Adam."
"For putting the English on top," he replied dryly. "I can't seem to
want to. Not but what the English are all right. But my kind of
Maritime Province Canadians are considerably more American than English,
though they never rightly know it till they've lived here and in the old
country. We're at home with Yankee ways and Yankee notions. In England
we're only colonials. Not but what the war may change that a bit."
"Take your secret to Washington then. President Wilson will see that you
get all that you can reasonably ask for it."
"Sure--but while the pro-German microbe is active in Washington, I will
not offer the thing there. Yet my first notion was to let the United
States have it--on conditions."
"What conditions?"
"Well, I'd bargain they must leave Canada alone. Woodrow would boss the
rest of the world, I was thinking, just the way I'll do it myself if
ever I _do_ make up my mind. _No_ bossing--everybody free and equal and
industrious--no aristocracy, except just enough to laugh at--no
domineering. But I ain't so pleased with Woodrow as I was when he
started presidenting. He ain't set the Filipinos free yet. And he
knowing how bad they was treated by this Republic. Why, the worst grab
ever England made wasn't a circumstance to Yankees allying with
Aguinaldo, and then seizing his country."
"To what government will you sell?" I inquired patiently.
"Well, now, if I was going to sell to any government it would be Sir
Wilfrid Laurier's. But he's got no government, now. Ontario folks beat
him last election, for being too reasonable. If ever there was the
makings of a good benevolent Despot, Laurier's the man. I used to be
saying to myself while I was perfecting the Odistor, says I inwardly,
'I'll give it to Laurier.' Of course, I was calculating he'd use it
first thing to annex the United States to Canada. That would be good
for both countries--if Laurier was on top. He'd give this Republic
Responsible Government, stop letting it be run by hole-and-corner
committees and trusts and billionaires, and, first of all, he'd
establish Free Trade all over the continent. That would be good for Nova
Scotia apple-growers, and, mind you, I'd like to do something for my
native Province before I die. Statue in Trafalgar Square, says you.
Think of a statue in Halifax--erected to me! 'ADAM BEMIS, BENEFACTOR OF
NOVA SCOTIA!' And a big apple-tree kind of surrounding my figure with
blessings! Sounds kind of good, eh. Why don't I give it to Laurier?
Well he's getting old. He ain't any too strong in health, either. He
mightn't live long enough to get things running right. And he'd be sure
to tell his colleagues how the Odistor is worked--he's such a strong
party man. That's the only fault he's got. Well, now, think what
happens after he drops out. Why, some ordinary cuss of his Party takes
over the Bossdom of the world. Now, all ordinary Canadian politicians
are hungry to be knighted, or baroneted. Laurier's successor, likely
enough, would give away the Odistor to England, in return for a handle
to his name. And once England got the Odistor--why, you know what I told
you before."
"Well, what Government will you sell to?"
"To none. Germany's out of the question, of course. France, Russia,
Italy, Japan--they're all unfitter than England, Canada or the States.
Once I planned to raise up the people that are down--the Poles, Irish,
Armenians, Filipinos, and so on. Then I got to fancying the Irish with
power to blow everything above rock in England out to sea. Would they
be satisfied with moving the Imperial Parliament to College Green,
giving England a Viceroy and local councils, putting a Catholic King in
George's shoes and fixing the coronation oath to abjuring Protestant
errors? I can't seem to think they'd be so mild. What would the Poles
do to the Prussians, Austrians, and Russians; or the Armenians to the
Turks, if I gave them the Odistor? No--I won't take such risks. If I
gave the thing to one Nation the only fair deal would be to give it to
all, big and little alike, making the smallest as powerful as the
biggest, everyone with power to blow all the others off the footstool.
What then? Would mutual fear make them live peaceably? I'm feared not.
Probably every one would be so afraid of every other that each would be
for getting its Odistors to work first. There'd be cyclones jamming
into cyclones all over outdoors, a teetotal destruction of crops, and
everything and everybody blown clean away at once. Wonder where they'd
light?"
His query, did not divert me from the main matter. "If you won't sell,
how can you get any money out of it?" I asked.
"No difficulty getting money out of it. Here I am able to blow
everything away--say Berlin and thereabouts for a starter, just to show
how the thing works. Then all hands would know I could blow away all
Europe--except maybe the Alps. I don't know exactly how strong the
Odistor could blow. Wouldn't all the Governments unite to pay me _not_
to do it. See? All the money John Rockefeller ever handled wouldn't pay
five minutes' interest on what I ought to get for just _not_ doing it.
No harm in not hurting anybody--see? And me working for Miss Minnely
for forty-five dollars a week!"
"Resign, Adam," I said earnestly, for the financial prospect was
dazzling. "Take me in as junior partner. Let us get at this thing
together."
"What? Blackmailing the nations! And you a professional Liberal like
myself! No! It wouldn't be straight. I can't have a partner--you'll
see that before I get through. But now I suppose that you will admit
that I _could_ get any amount of money out of the thing?"
"You have thought it all out wonderfully, Adam."