OLD ACQUAINTANCES.
Barbicane & Co.! The president of the Gun Club! What was the Gun Club
going to do with the North Pole? We shall see.
Is it necessary to formally introduce Impey Barbicane, the president of
the Gun Club, and Captain Nicholl, and J. T. Maston, and Tom Hunter with
the wooden legs, and the brisk Bilsby, and Colonel Bloomsberry and their
colleagues? No! Although twenty years had elapsed since the attention of
the world was concentrated on these remarkable personages, they had
remained much as they were, just as incomplete corporeally, and just as
obstreperous, just as daring, just as wrapped up in themselves as when
they had embarked in their extraordinary adventure. Time had made no
impression on the Gun Club; it respected them as people respect the
obsolete cannon that are found in the museums of old arsenals.
If the Gun Club comprised 1833 members at its foundation—that is persons
and not limbs, for a number of these were missing—if 30,575
correspondents were proud of their connection with the club, the number
had in no way decreased. On the contrary, thanks to the unprecedented
attempt they had made to open communication with the Moon, as related in
the Moon Voyage, its celebrity had increased enormously.
It will be remembered that a few years after the War of Secession
certain members of the Gun Club, tired of doing nothing, had proposed to
send a projectile to the Moon by means of a monster Columbiad. A gun
nine hundred feet long had been solemnly cast at Tampa Town, in the
Floridan peninsula, and loaded with 400,000 lbs. of fulminating cotton.
Shot out by this gun, a cylindro-conical shell of aluminium had been
sent flying among the stars of the night under a pressure of six million
millions of litres of gas. Owing to a deviation of the trajectory, the
projectile had gone round the Moon and fallen back to the earth,
dropping into the Pacific Ocean in lat. 27° 7′ N., long. 141° 37′ west;
when the frigate _Susquehanna_ had secured it, to the great satisfaction
of its passengers.
Of its passengers, two members of the Gun Club, the president, Impey
Barbicane, and Captain Nicholl, with a hare-brained Frenchman, had taken
passage in the projectile and had all returned from the voyage safe and
sound. But if the two Americans were then present ready to risk their
lives in some new adventure, it was not so with Michel Ardan. He had
returned to Europe, and made a fortune, and was now planting cabbages in
his retirement, if the best-informed reporters were to be believed.
Barbicane and Nicholl had also retired, comparatively speaking, but they
had retired only to dream of some new enterprise of a similar character.
They were in no want of money. From their last undertaking there
remained nearly two hundred thousand dollars out of the five millions
and a half yielded by the public subscriptions of the old and new
worlds; and by exhibiting themselves in their aluminium projectile
throughout the United States they had realized enough wealth and glory
to satisfy the most exacting of human ambitions. They would have been
content if idleness had not been wearisome to them; and it was probably
in order to find something to do that they had now bought the Arctic
regions.
But it should not be forgotten that if they had paid for their purchase
eight hundred thousand dollars and more, it was because Evangelina
Scorbitt had advanced the balance they required.
Although Barbicane and Nicholl enjoyed incomparable celebrity, there was
one who shared it with them. This was J. T. Maston, the impetuous
secretary of the Gun Club. Was it not this able mathematician who had
made the calculations which had enabled the great experiment to be made?
If he had not accompanied his two colleagues on their extraordinary
voyage, it was not from fear; certainly not! But the worthy gunner
wanted a right arm, and had a gutta-percha cranium, owing to one of
those accidents so common in warfare; and if he had shown himself to the
Selenites it might have given them an erroneous idea of the inhabitants
of the Earth, of which the Moon after all is but the humble satellite.
To his profound regret J. T. Maston had had to resign himself to staying
at home. But he was not idle. After the construction of the immense
telescope on the summit of Long’s Peak, one of the highest of the Rocky
Mountains, he had transported himself there, and from the moment he
found the projectile describing its majestic trajectory in the sky he
never left his post of observation. At the eye-piece of the huge
instrument he devoted himself to the task of following his friends as
they journeyed in their strange carriage through space.
It might be thought that the bold voyagers were for ever lost to earth.
The projectile, drawn into a new orbit by the Moon, might gravitate
eternally round the Queen of the Night as a sort of sub-satellite. But
no! A deviation, which by many was called providential, had modified the
projectile’s direction, and, after making the circle of the Moon,
brought it back from that spheroid at a speed of 172,800 miles an hour
at the moment it plunged into the ocean.
Luckily the liquid mass of the Pacific had broken the fall, which had
been perceived by the U.S. frigate _Susquehanna_. As soon as the news
had reached J. T. Maston, he had set out in all haste from the
observatory at Long’s Peak to the rescue of his friends. Soundings were
taken in the vicinity of where the shell had been seen to fall, and the
devoted Maston had not hesitated to go down in diver’s dress to find his
friends. But such trouble was unnecessary. The projectile being of
aluminium, displacing an amount of water greater than its own weight,
had returned to the surface of the Pacific after a magnificent plunge.
And President Barbicane, Captain Nicholl, and Michel Ardan were found in
their floating prison playing dominoes.
The part that Maston took in these extraordinary proceedings had brought
him prominently to the front. He was not handsome, with his artificial
cranium and his mechanical arm with its hook for a hand. He was not
young, for fifty-eight years had chimed and struck at the date of our
story’s beginning. But the originality of his character, the vivacity of
his intelligence, the fire in his eye, the impetuosity with which he had
attacked everything, had made him the beau-ideal of a man in the eyes of
Evangelina Scorbitt. His brain, carefully protected beneath its
gutta-percha roof was intact, and justly bore the reputation of being
one of the most remarkable of the day.
Mrs. Scorbitt—though the least calculation gave her a headache—had a
taste for mathematicians if she had not one for mathematics. She looked
upon them as upon beings of a peculiar and superior species. Heads where
_x_’s knocked against _x_’s like nuts in a bag, brains which rejoiced in
algebraic formulæ, hands which threw about triple integrals as an
equilibrist plays with glasses and bottles, intelligences which
understood this sort of thing:
∫∫∫Φ(_xyz_) _dx dy dz_
—these were the wise men who appeared worthy of all the admiration of a
woman, attracted to them proportionally to their mass and in inverse
ratio to the square of their distances. And J. T. Maston was bulky
enough to exercise on her an irresistible attraction, and as to the
distance between them it would be simply zero, if she succeeded in her
plans.
It must be confessed that this gave some anxiety to the secretary of the
Gun Club, who had never sought happiness in such close approximations.
Besides, Evangelina Scorbitt was no longer in her first youth; but she
was not a bad sort of person by any means, and she would have wanted for
nothing could she only see the day when she was introduced to the
drawing-rooms of Baltimore as Mrs. J. T. Maston.
The widow’s fortune was considerable. Not that she was as rich as Gould,
Mackay, Vanderbilt, or Gordon Bennett, whose fortunes exceed millions,
and who could give alms to a Rothschild. Not that she possessed the
millions of Mrs. Moses Carper, Mrs. Stewart, or Mrs. Crocker; nor was
she as rich as Mrs. Hammersley, Mrs. Helby Green, Mrs. Maffitt, Mrs.
Marshall, Mrs. Para Stevens, Mrs. Mintbury, and a few others. But she
was the possessor of four good millions of dollars, which had come to
her from John P. Scorbitt, who had made a fortune by trade in
fashionable sundries and salt pork. And this fortune the generous widow
would have been happy to employ for the advantage of J. T. Maston, to
whom she would bring a treasure of tenderness yet more inexhaustible.
At Maston’s request, she had cheerfully consented to put several
hundreds of thousands of dollars at the disposal of the North Polar
Practical Association, without even knowing what it was all about. With
J. T. Maston concerned in it she felt assured that the work could not
but be grandiose, sublime, super-excellent. The past of the Gun Club’s
secretary was voucher enough for the future.
It may be guessed, therefore, if she lost confidence when the
auctioneer’s hammer knocked down the North Pole to Barbicane & Co. While
J. T. Maston formed part of the “Co.” could she do otherwise than
applaud?
And thus it happened that Evangelina Scorbitt found herself chief
proprietor of the Arctic regions within the eighty-fourth parallel. But
what would she do with them? Or rather, how was the company going to get
any benefit out of their inaccessible domain?
That was the question! And if in a pecuniary sense it had much interest
for Mrs. Scorbitt, from a curiosity point of view it had quite as much
interest for the world at large.
The trusting widow had asked a few questions of Maston before she
advanced the funds. But Maston invariably maintained the closest
reserve. Mrs. Scorbitt, he remarked, would know soon enough, but not
before the hour had come, for she would be astonished at the object of
the new association.
Doubtless he was thinking of some undertaking which to quote Jean
Jacques, “never had an example, and never will have imitators,” of
something destined to leave far behind the attempt made by the Gun Club
to open up communication with the Moon.
When Evangelina grew somewhat pressing in her inquiries, J. T. Maston
had placed his hook on his half-closed lips, and remarked soothingly,—
“Have confidence, Mrs. Scorbitt; have confidence!”
And if Mrs. Scorbitt had confidence before the sale, what immense joy
she must have experienced at the result!
Still she could not help asking the eminent mathematician, what he was
going to do next. And though she smiled on him bewitchingly, the eminent
mathematician only replied, as he cordially shook her hand,—
“You will know very soon!”
That shake of the hand immediately calmed the impatience of Mrs.
Scorbitt. And a few days later there was another shake, for the old and
new worlds were considerably shaken—to say nothing of the shake that was
coming—when they learnt the project for which the North Polar Practical
Association appealed to the public for subscriptions.
The company announced that it had “acquired” the territory for the
purpose of working—“the Coal Fields at the North Pole”!