Tono-Bungay, H. G. Wells [reading like a writer .TXT] 📗

the world for miles about it is blasted and scorched and dead. You can have it for the getting. You’ve got to take it⁠—that’s all!”

“That sounds all right,” said I. “Have you samples?”

“Well⁠—should I? You can have anything⁠—up to two ounces.”

“Where is it?”⁠ ⁠…

His blue eye smiled at me and scrutinised me. He smoked and was fragmentary for a time, fending off my questions; then his story began to piece itself together. He conjured up a vision of this strange forgotten kink in the world’s littoral, of the long meandering channels that spread and divaricate and spend their burden of mud and silt within the thunderbelt of Atlantic surf, of the dense tangled vegetation that creeps into the shimmering water with root and sucker. He gave a sense of heat and a perpetual reek of vegetable decay, and told how at last comes a break among these things, an arena fringed with bone-white dead trees, a sight of the hard-blue sea line beyond the dazzling surf and a wide desolation of dirty shingle and mud, bleached and scarred.⁠ ⁠… A little way off among charred dead weeds stands the abandoned station⁠—abandoned because every man who stayed two months at that station stayed to die, eaten up mysteriously like a leper with its dismantled sheds and its decaying pier of wormrotten and oblique piles and planks, still insecurely possible.

And in the midst, two clumsy heaps shaped like the backs of hogs, one small, one great, sticking out under a rib of rock that cuts the space across⁠—quap!

“There it is,” said Gordon-Nasmyth, “worth three pounds an ounce, if it’s worth a penny; two great heaps of it, rotten stuff and soft, ready to shovel and wheel, and you may get it by the ton!”

“How did it get there?”

“God knows!⁠ ⁠… There it is⁠—for the taking! In a country where you mustn’t trade. In a country where the company waits for good kind men to find it riches and then take ’em away from ’em. There you have it⁠—derelict.”

“Can’t you do any sort of deal?”

“They’re too damned stupid. You’ve got to go and take it. That’s all.”

“They might catch you.”

“They might, of course. But they’re not great at catching.”

We went into the particulars of that difficulty. “They wouldn’t catch me, because I’d sink first. Give me a yacht,” said Gordon-Nasmyth; “that’s all I need.”

“But if you get caught,” said my uncle.

I am inclined to think Gordon-Nasmyth imagined we would give him a cheque for six thousand pounds on the strength of his talk. It was very good talk, but we didn’t do that. I stipulated for samples of his stuff for analysis, and he consented⁠—reluctantly.

I think, on the whole, he would rather I didn’t examine samples. He made a motion pocketwards, that gave us an invincible persuasion that he had a sample upon him, and that at the last instant he decided not to produce it prematurely.

There was evidently a curious strain of secretiveness in him. He didn’t like to give us samples, and he wouldn’t indicate within three hundred miles the position of this Mordet Island of his. He had it clear in his mind that he had a secret of immense value, and he had no idea at all of just how far he ought to go with business people. And so presently, to gain time for these hesitations of his, he began to talk of other things. He talked very well. He talked of the Dutch East Indies and of the Congo, of Portuguese East Africa and Paraguay, of Malays and rich Chinese merchants, Dyaks and negroes and the spread of the Muhammadan world in Africa today. And all this time he was trying to judge if we were good enough to trust with his adventure. Our cosy inner office became a little place, and all our business cold and lifeless exploits beside his glimpses of strange minglings of men, of slayings unavenged and curious customs, of trade where no writs run, and the dark treacheries of eastern ports and uncharted channels.

We had neither of us gone abroad except for a few vulgar raids on Paris; our world was England, and the places of origin of half the raw material of the goods we sold had seemed to us as remote as fairyland or the forest of Arden. But Gordon-Nasmyth made it so real and intimate for us that afternoon⁠—for me, at any rate⁠—that it seemed like something seen and forgotten and now again remembered.

And in the end he produced his sample, a little lump of muddy clay speckled with brownish grains, in a glass bottle wrapped about with lead and flannel⁠—red flannel it was, I remember⁠—a hue which is, I know, popularly supposed to double all the mystical efficacies of flannel.

“Don’t carry it about on you,” said Gordon-Nasmyth. “It makes a sore.”

I took the stuff to Thorold, and Thorold had the exquisite agony of discovering two new elements in what was then a confidential analysis. He has christened them and published since, but at the time Gordon-Nasmyth wouldn’t hear for a moment of our publication of any facts at all; indeed, he flew into a violent passion and abused me mercilessly even for showing the stuff to Thorold. “I thought you were going to analyse it yourself,” he said with the touching persuasion of the layman that a scientific man knows and practises all the sciences.

I made some commercial inquiries, and there seemed even then much truth in Gordon-Nasmyth’s estimate of the value of the stuff. It was before the days of Capern’s discovery of the value of canadium and his use of it in the Capern filament, but the cerium and thorium alone were worth the money he extracted for the gas-mantles then in vogue. There were, however, doubts. Indeed, there were numerous doubts. What were the limits of the gas-mantle trade? How much thorium, not to speak of cerium, could they take at a maximum. Suppose that quantity was high enough to justify our shipload, came doubts in another quarter.