[CW] Rudyard Kipling's short story: "Wireless"

[D.J.J. Ring, Jr.]

It's a funny thing, this Marconi business, isn’t it?’ said Mr. Shaynor,
coughing heavily. ‘Nothing seems to make any difference, by what they tell
me—storms, hills, or anything; but if that’s true we shall know before
morning.’

‘Of course it’s true,’ I answered, stepping behind the counter. ‘Where’s old
Mr. Cashell?’

‘He’s had to go to bed on account of his influenza. He said you’d very
likely drop in.’

‘Where’s his nephew?’

‘Inside, getting the things ready. He told me that the last time they
experimented they put the pole on the roof of one of the big hotels here,
and the batteries electrified all the water-supply, and’—he giggled—‘the
ladies got shocks when they took their baths.’

‘I never heard of that.’

‘The hotel wouldn’t exactly advertise it, would it? Just now, by what Mr.
Cashell tells me, they’re trying to signal from here to Poole, and they’re
using stronger batteries than ever. But, you see, he being the guvnor’s
nephew and all that (and it will be in the papers too), it doesn’t matter
how they electrify things in this house. Are you going to watch?’

‘Very much. I’ve never seen this game. Aren’t you going to bed?’

‘We don’t close till ten on Saturdays. There’s a good deal of influenza in
town, too, and there’ll be a dozen prescriptions coming in before morning. I
generally sleep in the chair here. It’s warmer than jumping out of bed every
time. Bitter cold, isn’t it?’

‘Freezing hard. I’m sorry your cough’s worse.’

‘Thank you. I don’t mind cold so much. It’s this wind that fair cuts me to
pieces.’ He coughed again hard and hackingly, as an old lady came in for
ammoniated quinine. ‘We’ve just run out of it in bottles, madam,’ said Mr.
Shaynor, returning to the professional tone, ‘but if you will wait two
minutes, I’ll make it up for you, madam.’

I had used the shop for some time, and my acquaintance with the proprietor
had ripened into friendship. It was Mr. Cashell who revealed to me the
purpose and power of Apothecaries’ Hall what time a fellow-chemist had made
an error in a prescription of mine, had lied to cover his sloth, and when
error and lie were brought home to him had written vain letters.

‘A disgrace to our profession,’ said the thin, mild-eyed man, hotly, after
studying the evidence. ‘You couldn’t do a better service to the profession
than report him to Apothecaries’ Hall.’

I did so, not knowing what djinns I should evoke; and the result was such an
apology as one might make who had spent a night on the rack.

I conceived great respect for Apothecaries’ Hall, and esteem for Mr.
Cashell, a zealous craftsman who magnified his calling. Until Mr. Shaynor
came down from the North his assistants had by no means agreed with Mr.
Cashell. ‘They forget,’ said he, ‘that, first and foremost, the compounder
is a medicine-man. On him depends the physician’s reputation. He holds it
literally in the hollow of his hand, Sir.’

Mr. Shaynor’s manners had not, perhaps, the polish of the grocery and
Italian warehouse next door, but he knew and loved his dispensary work in
every detail. For relaxation he seemed to go no farther afield than the
romance of drugs—their discovery, preparation, packing, and export—but it
led him to the ends of the earth, and on this subject, and the
Pharmaceutical Formulary, and Nicholas Culpepper, most confident of
physicians, we met.

Little by little I grew to know something of his beginnings and his hopes—of
his mother, who had been a school-teacher in one of the northern counties,
and of his red-headed father, a small job-master at Kirby Moors, who died
when he was a child; of the examinations he had passed and of their
exceeding and increasing difficulty; of his dreams of a shop in London; of
his hate for the price-cutting Co-operative stores; and, most interesting,
of his mental attitude towards customers.

‘There’s a way you get into,’ he told me, ‘of serving them carefully, and I
hope, politely, without stopping your own thinking. I’ve been reading
Christy’s *New Commercial Plants* all this autumn, and that needs keeping
your mind on it, I can tell you. So long as it isn’t a prescription, of
course, I can carry as much as half a page of Christy in my head, and at the
same time I could sell out all that window twice over, and not a penny wrong
at the end. As to prescriptions, I think I could make up the general run of
’em in my sleep, almost.’

For reasons of my own, I was deeply interested in Marconi experiments at
their outset in England; and it was of a piece with Mr. Cashell’s unvarying
thoughtfulness that, when his nephew the electrician appropriated the house
for a long-range installation, he should, as I have said, invite me to see
the result.

The old lady went away with her medicine, and Mr. Shaynor and I stamped on
the tiled floor behind the counter to keep ourselves warm. The shop, by the
light of the many electrics, looked like a Paris-diamond mine, for Mr.
Cashell believed in all the ritual of his craft. Three superb glass
jars—red, green, and blue—of the sort that led Rosamond to parting with her
shoes—blazed in the broad plate-glass windows, and there was a confused
smell of orris, Kodak films, vulcanite, tooth-powder, sachets, and
almond-cream in the air. Mr. Shaynor fed the dispensary stove, and we sucked
cayenne-pepper jujubes and menthol lozenges. The brutal east wind had
cleared the streets, and the few passers-by were muffled to their puckered
eyes. In the Italian warehouse next door some gay feathered birds and game,
hung upon hooks, sagged to the wind across the left edge of our
window-frame.

‘They ought to take these poultry in—all knocked about like that,’ said Mr.
Shaynor. ‘Doesn’t it make you feel fair perishing? See that old hare! The
wind’s nearly blowing the fur off him.’

I saw the belly-fur of the dead beast blown apart in ridges and streaks as
the wind caught it, showing bluish skin underneath. ‘Bitter cold,’ said Mr.
Shaynor, shuddering. ‘Fancy going out on a night like this! Oh, here’s young
Mr. Cashell.’

The door of the inner office behind the dispensary opened, and an energetic,
spade-bearded man stepped forth, rubbing his hands.

‘I want a bit of tin-foil, Shaynor,’ he said. ‘Good-evening. My uncle told
me you might be coming.’ This to me, as I began the first of a hundred
questions.

‘I’ve everything in order,’ he replied. ‘We’re only waiting until Poole
calls us up. Excuse me a minute. You can come in whenever you like—but I’d
better be with the instruments. Give me that tin-foil. Thanks.’

While we were talking, a girl—evidently no customer—had come into the shop,
and the face and bearing of Mr. Shaynor changed. She leaned confidently
across the counter.

‘But I can’t,’ I heard him whisper uneasily—the flush on his cheek was dull
red, and his eyes shone like a drugged moth’s. ‘I can’t. I tell you I’m
alone in the place.’

‘No, you aren’t. Who’s *that*? Let him look after it for half an hour. A
brisk walk will do you good. Ah, come now, John.’

‘But he isn’t——’

‘I don’t care. I want you to; we’ll only go round by St. Agnes’. If you
don’t——’

He crossed to where I stood in the shadow of the dispensary counter, and
began some sort of broken apology about a lady-friend.

‘Yes,’ she interrupted. ‘You take the shop for half an hour—to oblige *me*,
won’t you?’

She had a singularly rich and promising voice that well matched her outline.


‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it—but you’d better wrap yourself up, Mr.
Shaynor.’

‘Oh, a brisk walk ought to help me. We’re only going round by the church.’ I
heard him cough grievously as they went out together.

I refilled the stove, and, after reckless expenditure of Mr. Cashell’s coal,
drove some warmth into the shop. I explored many of the glass-knobbed
drawers that lined the walls, tasted some disconcerting drugs, and, by the
aid of a few cardamoms, ground ginger, chloric-ether, and dilute alcohol,
manufactured a new and wildish drink, of which I bore a glassful to young
Mr. Cashell, busy in the back office. He laughed shortly when I told him
that Mr. Shaynor had stepped out—but a frail coil of wire held all his
attention, and he had no word for me bewildered among the batteries and
rods. The noise of the sea on the beach began to make itself heard as the
traffic in the street ceased. Then briefly, but very lucidly, he gave me the
names and uses of the mechanism that crowded the tables and the floor.

‘When do you expect to get the message from Poole?’ I demanded, sipping my
liquor out of a graduated glass.

‘About midnight, if everything is in order. We’ve got our installation-pole
fixed to the roof of the house. I shouldn’t advise you to turn on a tap or
anything to-night. We’ve connected up with the plumbing, and all the water
will be electrified.’ He repeated to me the history of the agitated ladies
at the hotel at the time of the first installation.

‘But what *is* it?’ I asked. ‘Electricity is out of my beat altogether.’

‘Ah, if you knew *that* you’d know something nobody knows. It’s just It—what
we call Electricity, but the magic—the manifestations—the Hertzian waves—are
all revealed by *this*. The coherer, we call it.’

He picked up a glass tube not much thicker than a thermometer, in which,
almost touching, were two tiny silver plugs, and between them an
infinitesimal pinch of metallic dust. ‘That’s all,’ he said, proudly, as
though himself responsible for the wonder. ‘That is the thing that will
reveal to us the Powers—whatever the Powers may be—at work—through space—a
long distance away.’

Just then Mr. Shaynor returned alone and stood coughing his heart out on the
mat.

‘Serves you right for being such a fool,’ said young Mr. Cashell, as annoyed
as myself at the interruption. ‘Never mind—we’ve all the night before us to
see wonders.’

Shaynor clutched the counter, his handkerchief to his lips. When he brought
it away I saw two bright red stains.

‘I—I’ve got a bit of a rasped throat from smoking cigarettes,’ he panted. ‘I
think I’ll try a cubeb.’

‘Better take some of this. I’ve been compounding while you’ve been away.’ I
handed him the brew.

‘’Twon’t make me drunk, will it? I’m almost a teetotaller. My word! That’s
grateful and comforting.’

He set down the empty glass to cough afresh.

‘Brr! But it was cold out there! I shouldn’t care to be lying in my grave a
night like this. Don’t *you* ever have a sore throat from smoking?’ He
pocketed the handkerchief after a furtive peep.

‘Oh, yes, sometimes,’ I replied, wondering, while I spoke, into what agonies
of terror I should fall if ever I saw those bright-red danger-signals under
my nose. Young Mr. Cashell among the batteries coughed slightly to show that
he was quite ready to continue his scientific explanations, but I was
thinking still of the girl with the rich voice and the significantly cut
mouth, at whose command I had taken charge of the shop. It flashed across me
that she distantly resembled the seductive shape on a gold-framed
toilet-water advertisement whose charms were unholily heightened by the
glare from the red bottle in the window. Turning to make sure, I saw Mr.
Shaynor’s eyes bent in the same direction, and by instinct recognised that
the flamboyant thing was to him a shrine. ‘What do you take for your—cough?’
I asked.

‘Well, I’m the wrong side of the counter to believe much in patent
medicines. But there are asthma cigarettes and there are pastilles. To tell
you the truth, if you don’t object to the smell, which is very like incense,
I believe, though I’m not a Roman Catholic, Blaudett’s Cathedral Pastilles
relieve me as much as anything.’

‘Let’s try.’ I had never raided a chemist’s shop before, so I was thorough.
We unearthed the pastilles—brown, gummy cones of benzoin—and set them alight
under the toilet-water advertisement, where they fumed in thin blue spirals.


‘Of course,’ said Mr. Shaynor, to my question, ‘what one uses in the shop
for one’s self comes out of one’s pocket. Why, stock-taking in our business
is nearly the same as with jewellers—and I can’t say more than that. But one
gets them’—he pointed to the pastille-box—‘at trade prices.’ Evidently the
censing of the gay, seven-tinted wench with the teeth was an established
ritual which cost something.

‘And when do we shut up shop?’

‘We stay like this all night. The guv—old Mr. Cashell—doesn’t believe in
locks and shutters as compared with electric light. Besides, it brings
trade. I’ll just sit here in the chair by the stove and write a letter, if
you don’t mind. Electricity isn’t my prescription.’

The energetic young Mr. Cashell snorted within, and Shaynor settled himself
up in his chair over which he had thrown a staring red, black, and yellow
Austrian jute blanket, rather like a table-cover. I cast about, amid
patent-medicine pamphlets, for something to read, but finding little,
returned to the manufacture of the new drink. The Italian warehouse took
down its game and went to bed. Across the street blank shutters flung back
the gaslight in cold smears; the dried pavement seemed to rough up in
goose-flesh under the scouring of the savage wind, and we could hear, long
ere he passed, the policeman flapping his arms to keep himself warm. Within,
the flavours of cardamoms and chloric-ether disputed those of the pastilles
and a score of drugs and perfume and soap scents. Our electric lights, set
low down in the windows before the tun-bellied Rosamond jars, flung inward
three monstrous daubs of red, blue, and green, that broke into kaleidoscopic
lights on the faceted knobs of the drug-drawers, the cut-glass scent
flagons, and the bulbs of the sparklet bottles. They flushed the white-tiled
floor in gorgeous patches; splashed along the nickel-silver counter-rails,
and turned the polished mahogany counter-panels to the likeness of intricate
grained marbles—slabs of porphyry and malachite. Mr. Shaynor unlocked a
drawer, and ere he began to write, took out a meagre bundle of letters. From
my place by the stove, I could see the scalloped edges of the paper with a
flaring monogram m the corner and could even smell the reek of chypre. At
each page he turned toward the toilet-water lady of the advertisement and
devoured her with over-luminous eyes. He had drawn the Austrian blanket over
his shoulders, and among those warring lights he looked more than ever the
incarnation of a drugged moth—a tiger-moth as I thought.

He put his letter into an envelope, stamped it with stiff mechanical
movements, and dropped it in the drawer. Then I became aware of the silence
of a great city asleep—the silence that underlay the even voice of the
breakers along the sea-front—a thick, tingling quiet of warm life stilled
down for its appointed time, and unconsciously I moved about the glittering
shop as one moves in a sick-room. Young Mr. Cashell was adjusting some wire
that crackled from time to time with the tense, knuckle-stretching sound of
the electric spark. Upstairs, where a door shut and opened swiftly, I could
hear his uncle coughing abed.

‘Here,’ I said, when the drink was properly warmed, ‘take some of this, Mr.
Shaynor.’

He jerked in his chair with a start and a wrench, and held out his hand for
the glass. The mixture, of a rich port-wine colour, frothed at the top.

‘It looks,’ he said, suddenly, ‘it looks—those bubbles—like a string of
pearls winking at you—rather like the pearls round that young lady’s neck.’
He turned again to the advertisement where the female in the dove-coloured
corset had seen fit to put on all her pearls before she cleaned her teeth.

‘Not bad, is it?’ I said.

‘Eh?’

He rolled his eyes heavily full on me, and, as I stared, I beheld all
meaning and consciousness die out of the swiftly dilating pupils. His figure
lost its stark rigidity, softened into the chair, and, chin on chest, hands
dropped before him, he rested open-eyed, absolutely still.

‘I’m afraid I’ve rather cooked Shaynor’s goose,’ I said, bearing the fresh
drink to young Mr. Cashell. ‘Perhaps it was the chloric-ether.’

‘Oh, he’s all right.’ The spade-bearded man glanced at him pityingly.
‘Consumptives go off in those sort of dozes very often. It’s exhaustion . .
. I don’t wonder. I daresay the liquor will do him good. It’s grand stuff.’
He finished his share appreciatively. ‘well, as I was saying—before he
interrupted—about this little coherer. The pinch of dust, you see, is
nickelfilings. The Hertzian waves, you see, come out of space from the
station that despatches ’em, and all these little particles are attracted
together—cohere, we call it—for just so long as the current passes through
them. Now, its important to remember that the current is an induced current.
There are a good many kinds of induction——’

‘Yes, but what *is* induction?’

‘That’s rather hard to explain untechnically. But the long and the short of
it is that when a current of electricity passes through a wire there’s a lot
of magnetism present round that wire; and if you put another wire parallel
to, and within what we call its magnetic field—why, then the second wire
will also become charged with electricity.’

‘On its own account?’

‘On its own account.’

‘Then let’s see if I’ve got it correctly. Miles off, at Poole, or wherever
it is——’

‘It will be anywhere in ten years.’

‘You’ve got a charged wire——’

‘Charged with Hertzian waves which vibrate, say two hundred and thirty
million times a second.’ Mr. Cashell snaked his forefinger rapidly through
the air.

‘All right—a charged wire at Poole, giving out these waves into space. Then
this wire of yours sticking out into space—on the roof of the house—in some
mysterious way gets charged with those waves from Poole——’

‘Or anywhere—it only happens to be Poole to-night.’

‘And those waves set the coherer at work, just like an ordinary
telegraph-office ticker?’

‘No! That’s where so many people make the mistake. The Hertzian waves
wouldn’t be strong enough to work a great heavy Morse instrument like ours.
They can only just make that dust cohere, and while it coheres (a little
while for a dot and a longer while for a dash) the current from this
battery—the home battery’—he laid his hand on the thing—‘can get through to
the Morse printing-machine to record the dot or dash. Let me make it
clearer. Do you know anything about steam?’

‘Very little. But go on.’

‘Well, the coherer is like a steam-valve. Any child can open a valve and
start a steamer’s engines, because a turn of the hand lets in the main
steam, doesn’t it? Now, this home battery here ready to print is the main
steam. The coherer is the valve, always ready to be turned on. The Hertzian
wave is the child’s hand that turns it.’

‘I see. That’s marvellous.’

‘Marvellous, isn’t it? And, remember, we’re only at the beginning. There’s
nothing we shan’t be able to do in ten years. I want to live—my God, how I
want to live, and see it develop!’ He looked through the door at Shaynor
breathing lightly in his chair. ‘Poor beast! And he wants to keep company
with Fanny Brand.’

‘Fanny *who*?’ I said, for the name struck an obscurely familiar chord in my
brain—something connected with a stained handkerchief, and the word
‘arterial.’

‘Fanny Brand—the girl you kept shop for.’ He laughed. ‘That’s all I know
about her, and for the life of me I can’t see what Shaynor sees in her, or
she in him.’

‘*Can’t* you see what he sees in her?’ I insisted.

‘Oh, yes, if *that’s* what you mean. She’s a great, big, fat lump of a girl,
and so on. I suppose that’s why he’s so crazy after her. She isn’t his sort.
Well, it doesn’t matter. My uncle says he’s bound to die before the year’s
out. Your drink’s given him a good sleep, at any rate.’ Young Mr. Cashell
could not catch Mr. Shaynor’s face, which was half turned to the
advertisement.

I stoked the stove anew, for the room was growing cold, and lighted another
pastille. Mr. Shaynor in his chair, never moving, looked through and over me
with eyes as wide and lustreless as those of a dead hare.

‘Poole’s late,’ said young Mr. Cashell, when I stepped back. ‘I’ll just send
them a call.’

He pressed a key in the semi-darkness, and with a rending crackle there
leaped between two brass knobs a spark, streams of sparks, and sparks again.


‘Grand, isn’t it? *That’s* the Power—our unknown Power—kicking and fighting
to be let loose,’ said young Mr. Cashell. ‘There she goes—kick—kick—kick
into space. I never get over the strangeness of it when I work a
sending-machine—waves going into space, you know. T.R. is our call. Poole
ought to answer with L.L.L.’

We waited two, three, five minutes. In that silence, of which the boom of
the tide was an orderly part, I caught the clear ‘*kiss—kiss—kiss*’ of the
halliards on the roof, as they were blown against the installation-pole.

‘Poole is not ready. I’ll stay here and call you when he is.’

I returned to the shop, and set down my glass an a marble slab with a
careless clink. As I did so, Shaynor rose to his feet, his eyes fixed once
more on the advertisement, where the young woman bathed in the light from
the red jar simpered pinkly over her pearls. His lips moved without
cessation. I stepped nearer to listen. ‘And threw—and threw—and threw,’ he
repeated; his face all sharp with some inexplicable agony.

I moved forward astonished. But it was then he found words—delivered roundly
and clearly. These:

And threw warm gules on Madeleine’s young breast.

The trouble passed off his countenance, and he returned lightly to his
place, rubbing his hands.

It had never occurred to me, though we had many times discussed reading and
prize-competitions as a diversion, that Mr, Shaynor ever read Keats, or
could quote him at all appositely. There was, after all, a certain
stained-glass effect of light on the high bosom of the highly-polished
picture which might, by stretch of fancy, suggest, as a vile chromo recalls
some incomparable canvas, the line he had spoken. Night, my drink, and
solitude were evidently turning Mr. Shaynor into a poet. He sat down again
and wrote swiftly on his villainous note-paper, his lips quivering.

I shut the door into the inner office and moved up behind him. He made no
sign that he saw or heard. I looked over his shoulder, and read, amid
half-formed words, sentences, and wild scratches:—

 ——Very cold it was. Very cold
The hare—the hare—the hare—
The birds——

He raised his head sharply, and frowned toward the blank shutters of the
poulterer’s shop where they jutted out against our window. Then one clear
line came:—

The bare, in spite of fur, was very cold.

The head, moving machine-like, turned right to the advertisement where the
Blaudett’s Cathedral pastille reeked abominably. He grunted, and went on:—

 Incense in a censer——
Before her darling picture framed in gold—
Maiden’s picture—angel’s portrait—

‘Hsh!’ said Mr. Cashell guardedly from the inner office, as though in the
presence of spirits. ‘There’s something coming through from somewhere; but
it isn’t Poole.’ I heard the crackle of sparks as he depressed the keys of
the transmitter. In my own brain, too, something crackled, or it might have
been the hair on my head. Then I heard my own voice, in a harsh whisper:
‘Mr. Cashell, there is something coming through here, too. Leave me alone
till I tell you.’

‘But I thought you’d come to see this wonderful thing—Sir,’ indignantly at
the end.

‘Leave me alone till I tell you. Be quiet.’

I watched—I waited. Under the blue-veined hand—the dry hand of the
consumptive—came away clear, without erasure:—

                 And my weak spirit fails
To think how the dead must freeze—

he shivered as he wrote—

Beneath the churchyard mould.

Then he stopped, laid the pen down, and leaned back.

For an instant, that was half an eternity, the shop spun before me in a
rainbow-tinted whirl, in and through which my own soul most dispassionately
considered my own soul as that fought with an over-mastering fear. Then I
smelt the strong smell of cigarettes from Mr. Shaynor’s clothing, and heard,
as though it had been the rending of trumpets, the rattle of his breathing.
I was still in my place of observation, much as one would watch a rifle-shot
at the butts, halfbent, hands on my knees, and head within a few inches of
the black, red, and yellow blanket of his shoulder. I was whispering
encouragement, evidently to my other self, sounding sentences, such as men
pronounce in dreams.

‘If he has read Keats, it proves nothing. If he hasn’t—like causes
*must*beget like effects. There is no escape from this law.
*You* ought to be grateful that you know “St. Agnes’ Eve” without the book;
because, given the circumstances, such as Fanny Brand, who is the key of the
enigma, and approximately represents the latitude and longitude of Fanny
Brawne; allowing also for the bright red colour of the arterial blood upon
the handkerchief, which was just what you were puzzling over in the shop
just now; and counting the effect of the professional environment, here
almost perfectly duplicated—the result is logical and inevitable. As
inevitable as induction.’

Still, the other half of my soul refused to be comforted. It was cowering in
some minute and inadequate corner—at an immense distance.

Hereafter, I found myself one person again, my hands still gripping my
knees, and my eyes glued on the page before Mr. Shaynor. As dreamers accept
and explain the upheaval of landscapes and the resurrection of the dead,
with excerpts from the evening hymn or the multiplication-table, so I had
accepted the facts, whatever they might be, that I should witness, and had
devised a theory, sane and plausible to my mind, that explained them all.
Nay, I was even in advance of my facts, walking hurriedly before them,
assured that they would fit my theory. And all that I now recall of that
epoch-making theory are the lofty words: ‘If he has read Keats it’s the
chloric-ether. If he hasn’t, it’s the identical bacillus, or Hertzian wave
of tuberculosis, *plus* Fanny Brand and the professional status which, in
conjunction with the main-stream of subconscious thought common to all
mankind, has thrown up temporarily an induced Keats.’

Mr. Shaynor returned to his work, erasing and rewriting as before with
swiftness. Two or three blank pages he tossed aside. Then he wrote,
muttering:

The little smoke of a candle that goes out.

‘No,’ he muttered. ‘Little smoke—little smoke—little smoke. What else?’ He
thrust his chin forward toward the advertisement, whereunder the last of the
Blaudett’s Cathedral pastilles fumed in its holder. ‘Ah!’ Then with relief:—


The little smoke that dies in moonlight cold.

Evidently he was snared by the rhymes of his first verse, for he wrote and
rewrote ‘gold—cold—mould’ many times. Again he sought inspiration from the
advertisement, and set down, without erasure, the line I had overheard:—

And threw warm gules on Madeleine’s young breast.

As I remembered the original it is ‘fair’—a trite word—instead of ‘young,’
and I found myself nodding approval, though I admitted that the attempt to
reproduce ‘Its little smoke in pallid moonlight died’ was a failure.

Followed without a break ten or fifteen lines of bald prose—the naked soul’s
confession of its physical yearning for its beloved—unclean as we count
uncleanliness; unwholesome, but human exceedingly; the raw material, so it
seemed to me in that hour and in that place, whence Keats wove the
twenty-sixth, seventh, and eighth stanzas of his poem. Shame I had none in
overseeing this revelation; and my fear had gone with the smoke of the
pastille.

‘That’s it,’ I murmured. ‘That’s how it’s blocked out. Go on! Ink it in,
man. Ink it in!’

Mr. Shaynor returned to broken verse wherein ‘loveliness’ was made to rhyme
with a desire to look upon ‘her empty dress.’ He picked up a fold of the
gay, soft blanket, spread it over one hand, caressed it with infinite
tenderness, thought, muttered, traced some snatches which I could not
decipher, shut his eyes drowsily, shook his head, and dropped the stuff.
Here I found myself at fault, for I could not then see (as I do now) in what
manner a red, black, and yellow Austrian blanket coloured his dreams.

In a few minutes he laid aside his pen, and, chin on hand, considered the
shop with thoughtful and intelligent eyes. He threw down the blanket, rose,
passed along a line of drug-drawers, and read the names on the labels aloud.
Returning, he took from his desk Christy’s *New Commercial Plants* and the
old Culpepper that I had given him, opened and laid them side by side with a
clerky air, all trace of passion gone from his face, read first in one and
then in the other, and paused with pen behind his ear.

‘What wonder of Heaven’s coming now?’ I thought.

‘Manna—manna—manna,’ he said at last, under wrinkled brows. ‘That’s what I
wanted. Good! Now then! Now then! Good! Good! Oh, by God, that’s good!’ His
voice rose and he spoke rightly and fully without a falter:—

 Candied apple, quince and plum and gourd,
With jellies smoother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates in argosy transferred
>From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one
>From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon.

He repeated it once more, using ‘blander’ for ‘smoother’ in the second line;
then wrote it down without erasure, but this time (my set eyes missed no
stroke of any word) he substituted ‘soother’ for his atrocious second
thought, so that it came away under his hand as it is written in the book—as
it is written in the book.

A wind went shouting down the street, and on the heels of the wind followed
a spurt and rattle of rain.

After a smiling pause—and good right had he to smile—he began anew, always
tossing the last sheet over his shoulder:—

 The sharp rain falling on the window-pane.
Rattling sleet—the wind-blown sleet.

Then prose: ‘It is very cold of mornings when the wind brings rain and sleet
with it. I heard the sleet on the window-pane outside, and thought of you,
my darling. I am always thinking of you. I wish we could both run away like
two lovers into the storm and get that little cottage by the sea which we
are always thinking about, my own dear darling. We could sit and watch the
sea beneath our windows. It would be a fairyland all of our own—a fairy
sea—a fairy sea . . . .’

He stopped, raised his head, and listened. The steady drone of the Channel
along the sea-front that had borne us company so long leaped up a note to
the sudden fuller surge that signals the change from ebb to flood. It beat
in like the change of step throughout an army—this renewed pulse of the
sea—and filled our ears till they, accepting it, marked it no longer.

 A fairyland for you and me
Across the foam-beyond . . .
A magic foam, a perilous sea.

He grunted again with effort and bit his underlip. My throat dried, but I
dared not gulp to moisten it lest I should break the spell that was drawing
him nearer and nearer to the highwater mark but two of the sons of Adam have
reached. Remember that in all the millions permitted there are no more than
five—five little lines—of which one can say: ‘These are the pure Magic.
These are the clear Vision. The rest is only poetry.’ And Mr. Shaynor was
playing hot and cold with two of them!

I vowed no unconscious thought of mine should influence the blindfold soul,
and pinned myself desperately to the other three, repeating and
re-repeating:—

 A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover.

But though I believed my brain thus occupied, my every sense hung upon the
writing under the dry, bony hand, all brown-fingered with chemicals and
cigarette-smoke.

Our windows fronting on the dangerous foam,

(he wrote, after long, irresolute snatches), and then—

 Our open casements facing desolate seas
Forlorn—forlorn—

Here again his face grew peaked and anxious with that sense of loss I had
first seen when the Power snatched him. But this time the agony was tenfold
keener. As I watched it mounted like mercury in the tube. It lighted his
face from within till I thought the visibly scourged soul must leap forth
naked between his jaws, unable to endure. A drop of sweat trickled from my
forehead down my nose and splashed on the back of my hand.

 Our windows facing on the desolate seas
And pearly foam of magic fairyland—

‘Not yet—not yet,’ he muttered, ‘wait a minute. *Please* wait a minute. I
shall get it then—

 Our magic windows fronting on the sea,
The dangerous foam of desolate seas . . .
        For aye.

*Ouh*, my God!’

>From head to heel he shook—shook from the marrow of his bones outwards—then
leaped to his feet with raised arms, and slid the chair screeching across
the tiled floor where it struck the drawers behind and fell with ajar.
Mechanically, I stooped to recover it.

As I rose, Mr. Shaynor was stretching and yawning at leisure.

‘I’ve had a bit of a doze,’ he said. ‘How did I come to knock the chair
over? You look rather——’

‘The chair startled me,’ I answered. ‘It was so sudden in this quiet.’

Young Mr. Cashell behind his shut door was offendedly silent.

‘I suppose I must have been dreaming,’ said Mr. Shaynor.

‘I suppose you must,’ I said. ‘Talking of dreams—I—I noticed you
writing—before——’

He flushed consciously.

‘I meant to ask you if you’ve ever read anything written by a man called
Keats.’

‘Oh! I haven’t much time to read poetry, and I can’t say that I remember the
name exactly. Is he a popular writer?’

‘Middling. I thought you might know him because he’s the only poet who was
ever a druggist. And he’s rather what’s called the lover’s poet.’

‘Indeed. I must dip into him. What did he write about?’

‘A lot of things. Here’s a sample that may interest you.’

Then and there, carefully, I repeated the verse he had twice spoken and once
written not ten minutes ago.

‘Ah! Anybody could see he was a druggist from that line about the tinctures
and syrups. It’s a fine tribute to our profession.’

‘I don’t know,’ said young Mr. Cashell, with icy politeness, opening the
door one half-inch, ‘if you still happen to be interested in our trifling
experiments. But, should such be the case——’

I drew him aside, whispering, ‘Shaynor seemed going off into some sort of
fit when I spoke to you just now. I thought, even at the risk of being rude,
it wouldn’t do to take you off your instruments just as the call was coming
through. Don’t you see?’

‘Granted—granted as soon as asked,’ he said, unbending. ‘I *did* think it a
shade odd at the time. So that was why he knocked the chair down?’

‘I hope I haven’t missed anything,’ I said.

‘I’m afraid I can’t say that, but you’re just in time for the end of a
rather curious performance. You can come in too, Mr. Shaynor. Listen, while
I read it off’.’

The Morse instrument was ticking furiously. Mr. Cashell interpreted: ‘“ *K.K.V.
Can make nothing of your signals.*”’ A pause. ‘“ *M.M.V. M.M.V. Signals
unintelligible. Purpose anchor Sundown Bay. Examine instruments to-morrow.*”
Do you know what that means? It’s a couple of men-o’-war working Marconi
signals off the Isle of Wight. They are trying to talk to each other.
Neither can read the other’s messages, but all their messages are being
taken in by our receiver here. They’ve been going on for ever so long. I
wish you could have heard it.’

‘How wonderful!’ I said. ‘Do you mean we’re overhearing Portsmouth ships
trying to talk to each other—that we’re eavesdropping across half South
England?’

‘Just that. Their transmitters are all right, but their receivers are out of
order, so they only get a dot here and a dash there. Nothing clear.’

‘Why is that?’

‘God knows—and Science will know tomorrow. Perhaps the induction is faulty;
perhaps the receivers aren’t tuned to receive just the number of vibrations
per second that the transmitter sends. Only a word here and there. Just
enough to tantalise.’

Again the Morse sprang to life.

‘That’s one of ’em complaining now. Listen “*Disheartening—most
disheartening.*” It’s quite pathetic. Have you ever seen a spiritualistic
seance? It reminds me of that sometimes—odds and ends of messages coming out
of nowhere—a word here and there—no good at all.’

‘But mediums are all impostors,’ said Mr. Shaynor, in the doorway, lighting
an asthma-cigarette. ‘They only do it for the money they can make. I’ve seen
’em.’

‘Here’s Poole, at last—clear as a bell. L.L.I,. Now we shan’t be long.’ Mr.
Cashell rattled the keys merrily. ‘Anything you’d like to tell ’em?’

No, I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I’ll go home and get to bed. I’m feeling a
little tired.’

=30=
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