The Man Who Made Gold Read online

  THE MAN WHO MADE GOLD

  By HILAIRE BELLOC

  Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  The Man Who Made Gold

  Prologue

  IN the new great Stockham wing of the Examination Halls, still called (in spite of his subsequent imprisonment) by the name of the Empire Maker who had paid for it, there was gathered a great audience, most of it from the University, the rest from the ignorant lay world outside.

  They had come to listen to one of the most distinguished scientists in the world. His name was already familiar in America, and had been mentioned in two or three technical reviews upon the Continent: I mean Mr. Charles Lexington, the Reader to the University in Electro-Chemistry, a Fellow of St. Olaf’s.

  He was delivering the first of the Railby Lectures of that season, so-called (in spite of his subsequent imprisonment) from the generous Founder of thirty years before.

  B

  By the terms of the Trust, the lecturer, who received the sum of a pound a minute, was required “to speak for one hour on some subject connected with physical science in its relation to the human society.” It was a wide field. But there was a general understanding, based upon a clause of the Trust, that the subject chosen should as far as possible be taken from the later developments of research and especially from those upon which no conclusions could be drawn. The lecturers were to be chosen from the nationals of the more progressive countries (scheduled as Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Holland, the German Reich, Finland, Esthonia and Latvia, and, of course the United States; and from the associated free nations of the British Empire save the West Indies, British Guiana, the Seychelles Islands, Malta and Cyprus). It was further laid down by the Trust that the same lecturer should not deliver more than one lecture in three years—which was only fair, when you consider what the fee was and how poor most lecturers are.

  The subject which had drawn so large an audience was “The Transmutation of Metals,” and while the subject itself was an attraction, the fame of the lecturer a greater attraction still, the chief attraction was the Chairman; for Lord Taylor himself, though on the point of starting for the Lido, had found time to snatch a Saturday afternoon from his crushing labours in the great group of Banks which he directed.

  The old gentleman had excellent reasons for such condescension. He had read on that very subject all that an educated man could and should read. He was more inclined than many a younger man to believe that science might achieve the transmutation of metals on a large scale at any moment. He had considered—indeed, it had taken up most of his thoughts of late—what the results would be if some cheaper metal could as a commercial proposition be transformed into gold.

  The word “transformed” was inaccurate. Lord Taylor was well abreast of the times. He knew as well as you and I and the leader writers and the politicians—pretty well everyone except the racing men—that what would really happen was the taking away of one or more electrons from an element-group, with the result that the so-called element acted upon ceased to be and another element—in this case called gold—took its place. It was no mere changing of, say, mercury into gold, any more than washing out the bone dust and chalk from a patent salt is changing patent salt into real salt.

  Yes, he knew all that all right. He had a clear picture of the modern atom—so different from its dead grandfather, the Victorian atom! He could see the dignified proton sitting in the middle and all the little electrons dancing round it in rings like so many billiard balls round the dome of St. Paul’s.

  It is true that this picture itself was a little old-fashioned; for since he had framed it science had advanced yet another step and electrons were doing something else. Still, the essentials of the new scientific dogma remained firmly fixed in his mind.

  It was no joke! The scientists were on the threshold of something enormous : no less than the production of gold at will.

  If it caught the bankers unprepared there’d be a crash—and he would be in the middle of it.

  Therefore was Lord Taylor there that day. The man put up to talk was the best authority, and Lord Taylor must be in touch. He could not be content to read the printed report of the lecture. He wanted to get a physical impression, to listen to the voice and its intonations; to watch the gestures; to mark hesitation or certitude. He wanted to be really informed.

  I am afraid he was a little disappointed. Mr. Lexington had all the qualities required for his task. He was gentlemanly, tall and thin, wore a pinch-nose (or Nasen-Knipper, as we say in the University), his pale hair was rather long, and his moustache duly drooped. His collar also was soft.

  In one respect only was Mr. Charles Lexington not perfectly true to type. His voice was too deep. But his manner was so learned that this defect was corrected by an occasional squeak or rush up the octave after the most approved models.

  No, it was not in the lecturer that Lord Taylor was disappointed—for he had known the man from boyhood, and his father before him. There was even a close intimacy between the two families. What disappointed him as the lecture proceeded was the quality of the information he derived from it. It was abundantly clear from all that Mr. Lexington had to say that transmutation demanded nothing but the knocking out of a few paltry electrons, yet it was apparently the painful duty of the lecturer to confess that the electrons had stood their ground.

  “There is, indeed, Pomphaftigzeiter’s famous experiment, which, had it succeeded, would have been conclusive,” he said, peering at his notes, “and when vapour of mercury was subjected some years ago by another pioneer to a high electrical charge it may have left behind it certain minute granules of pure gold.” But with the caution of a true scientist (how different from the untrue ones, who lay down the law!) Charles Lexington would not commit himself. Indeed, he was too much aware of the cold boiled eye of his colleague the Regius Professor fixed on him from the second row of the stalls to give himself away on anything.

  He concluded, however, after plenty of safe-guarding, with the suggestion that the whole thing was only a question of time. We had got the electron out from its lurking-place behind the gross veils of the senses; we knew him; we could count him, we could tell him off as a shepherd tells his sheep; and who shall set boundaries to our powers of worrying one sheep and another from out the flock?

  Mr. Charles Lexington ended with a passage of rhetoric after his kind, in which he sang the Psalm of Hope, and sat down having spoken for exactly fifty-nine minutes and a half, and earned his cheque like a man.

  It might seem strange that such an hour spent in the Chair by Lord Taylor should have had any further effect on his mind. He had certainly learned nothing, he was as wise as when he had come into the room, and so was every member of the audience; for I hope there is no one, lay or professional, who at this time of day does not know the now very simple doctrine of atomic structure. But a thing spoken is very different from a thing read, the action, the emphasis and the rest of it, working on the mind of an old man who had been turning over the subject a good deal too much in his head for rather a long time past, did their work. And when Lord Taylor climbed into his motor to drive back to London it was with a sort of feeling that at any moment they might do the trick after all—and what would the robin do then, poor thing?

  Humph! Gold to be manufactured on a commercial basis! Gold at a cost of production of, say,
five shillings the ounce. My word! When the news came it would be too late to act! Could one persuade the authorities to act before the news came?

  And with that I leave him for a little, to turn from the glories of Modern Science to the puerilities of the Alchemists.

  Chapter I

  Henry Bolter was an undergraduate in his fourth year. His college was St. Olaf’s, founded long ago in honour of that great saint and king who distinguished himself by fastening his captives to rocks at low tide and watching the water rise.

  The reason Henry Bolter was at St. Olaf’s was that his father, generally known as Old Bolter, had been at St. Olaf’s before him : as also had his elder brother, senior to him by four years, an athlete who had just gone down after getting his Blue. Henry Bolter differed, I regret to say, not a little from Old Bolter the Worthy, and Elder Brother Bolter the Blue. He differed from them within and without, in shape and in colour, in texture, manner and creed. He differed from them so much that anyone who had not known Mother Bolter during the Bolters’ Indian years might have suspected her virtue. For Old Bolter—who had also been a Blue in his time—had featured under Queen Victoria a Viking lad, very worthy of St. Olaf’s. And his eldest son, born before the Indian episode, had proved a second Viking Bolter. After an interval of thirty years, with George V on the throne of his grandmother, Old Bolter, rich by birth and much richer after the Indian stunt, had given his old college a new library, while Bolter the Blue, already engaged to an heiress, was game to give a large subscription for the new barge on the river. Both Old Bolter and Bolter the Blue supported and did honour to the established church at large, and to the parish church inside the Park in particular. Both the Father and the Son kept their minds informed upon Europe and the Empire (which, in their eyes, included the United States) by reading The Times; kept their sense of humour lively and clean by reading Punch; and also had the sense to read the excellent verse of Mr. Kipling, the Poet Laureate, and half a dozen other of our leading poets.

  I am sorry to have wasted so much of your time and my space with the Bolters, because we shall soon have to drop them. They play but. an initial part in the very interesting story you are about to read. The truth is that I was led on, desiring as I did to make clear the unique and isolated case of Henry, the young Bolter, now still up at the University.

  For, oh, see! How different was Harry! Observe him in his rooms out of College in his last year of University sufferings. Mark him and his surroundings. Though he rents the plain sitting-room of a licensed lodgings at 24 Brecon Street, near the Cathedral, he has made his room something as odd as his own dark self. He lies in that state of exhaustion too common to him after his opiate, stretched limply upon a long divan, covered with stuffs of the Levant. You find him under a subdued light that filters through the carven oriental framework fitted on the single window; the dim atmosphere is full of strange scents and with such ornaments upon the walls as ill befit a Bolter.

  On sombre hangings, which hide the paper, you may discern as your eyes grow accustomed to the glimmer certain drawings in black and white which represent things not of this world—evil flowers, beasts half human, and leering eyes. Heavy curtains at the casement hold permanently the memory of stale incense. From the ceiling there hangs an inverted alabaster bowl wherein floats, on its little bath of olive oil, a little sacerdotal wick always alight and shedding a subdued halo through the darkened air of the room.

  In the darkest corner between the window and the wall, opposite the sofa and its two luxurious Eastern rugs, stood the strangest part of all this furniture. Upon a coffer of the Italian fifteenth century, deeply carved and marked with old gold, stood as upon a pedestal a head, very grotesque, too living and even to the most robust a little startling. It had been fashioned by one whom Henry Bolter had unfortunately sought out in a dead, silent and half-ruined city of Apulia a year before; someone of whose talent or inspiration he had heard, and whom he had been at infinite pains to discover.

  The head was that of a not too dignified devil. It was made of composition, but had been treated so as to have a surface like old wood and covered, as a wooden carving might have been, with paint. The face leered and was thrust forward. There bulged from it eyes of I know not what bright material, but intense for such a face. From no position in that curtained room could one avoid the gaze, nor did Henry Bolter, stretched at his loose length along the sofa, avoid it; he rather dwelt on it in a trance he would not break.

  The young man gave an impression not only of listlessness, but of physical disease, so far had the misuse of some drug undermined him. His long, delicate hands hung nerveless, his dark, olive face was on the boundary between expressionless despair and useless wisdom, and his eyes burned therein, or rather smouldered, open, over wide, and permanently mournful. His long, black hair, all lank, was in an arranged disorder which he had once thought out, but which had now become a habit.

  So he lay in what those very few of his contemporaries who had been allowed to peer into the place had called, some of them The Harem, others the Cave of Baphomet. His drug-clouded ears heard noon booming solemnly from the cathedral, with a sound mellowed by three hundred years.

  At that same hour of noon the less profound but more direct timepiece of St. Olaf’s, stuck up in the modern front, of the new library, gave out from its sham fourteenth-century carvings a most inadequate imitation of medieval things; it struck twelve with a sharpness which would stand no nonsense. It was the signal for Mr. Charles Lexington, Fellow and Tutor of St. Olaf’s, Reader in Electro-Chemistry to the University, author of The Flowering of the Atom in the popular “What Things Are” series, and Railby Lecturer of the year, to step down from the platform where he had been lecturing, and make for his rooms on the other side of the Quad.

  The unfortunate reader—unless he has been so foolish as to skip the Prologue of this masterpiece—has already met Charles Lexington. Meet him again, for you will have a good deal to do with him.

  He was a man typical of his profession and a good hand at his trade : atheist, industrious, clearheaded, very conscientious about his work, trying hard to keep up the standard of his pupils and to give St. Olaf’s the same name in his own branch of Science as it had already gained in Classics and Philosophy, Sophistry, and History.

  To-day as he walked smartly across the Quad. to his rooms he was disturbed and he was knitting his brows. Bolter had cut his lecture again! It was the third time in ten days! He had marked the empty place at the beginning of his lecture, made a pretext for waiting a moment in the hope that the lad would come in, and then had gone on with his demonstration. Bolter had become a problem. This kind of thing would not do. Something must be done. But the solution was not easy, for the Bolters counted at St. Olaf’s. He had not solved it by the time he had reached his room, put down his pile of books, and sat down to think it over.

  Normally Henry Bolter should have been sent down. The College would have been well rid of him. Half a dozen times in the last year that issue had been proposed, and half a dozen times, either by Lexington’s own advice or by the President’s, it had been decided to do nothing. It was necessary to go slow with Old Bolter; and apart from that there was a genuine feeling of loyalty and affection towards the Bolter name. It had become part of the structure of the place.

  Moreover, against Harry Bolter there was nothing sufficiently definite. He was slack in his work, but he never failed in the terminal examinations. His essays were eccentric, they verged on the absurd, and sometimes read as though he were ridiculing his superiors; they dragged in allusions to alchemy and used an archaic wording; but they never showed insufficient knowledge. From the day when at his own choice his father had allowed him to begin to read for his Degree in Electro-Chemistry he had kept up to the required standard, he had read the minimum amount in the required books, he had understood what he had read. But there was in his conduct, in his slackness of attendance, in his solemn pretence at occult knowledge, in his reverence for the Cabala and hints at
the Philosopher’s Stone, something which was not laziness but contempt of court. It was this also which appeared in his written work, and which, in the case of any other man, would have finished his career at the University. But a Bolter was a Bolter. Therein the problem lay.

  Lexington fished out from the pile of weekly essays that one in the characteristic hand of the exasperating youth (a hand carefully modelled upon a Venetian script of the late fifteenth), and read it through once again.

  It was an extraordinary production, fantastic and yet disturbing. It dealt straightforwardly enough with the theme that had been set. It showed a sufficient knowledge of the text-books, but it introduced in strange little asides turns meaningless and metaphors drawn from the mystical nonsense which has been dead these two hundred years. It spoke with respect in one place of some charlatan, seer or other, who followed Wallenstein three hundred years ago, and it quoted, as one might quote from some great modern authority, the formula of Brozius upon the “governance of the base elements by the noble.” It treated with perfect assurance as historical fact the famous description of Helvetius which tells us how he made gold from lead.

  In five minutes Henry Bolter’s tutor had finished this last and most exasperating of the young man’s vagaries and his mind was made up. He must see the boy; he must talk to him thoroughly and tell him that it lay between a complete reformation and the end of his career. There must be a general clean-up. It wouldn’t do, and something must be done.

  The conscientious Lexington was a man of action. He took a sheet of the College note-paper and wrote :—

  Dear Mr. Bolter,

  This kind of thing won’t do, and something must be done. This morning, for the third time since the beginning of term, I noticed you were not in your place at my lecture. I am ready to make every allowance, but this kind of thing is becoming serious. Moreover, the weekly essay you sent me, I must frankly say, passes the limits of what is tolerable in the way of extravagance. You can hardly have meant it seriously, and if you did not it is a piece of unpardonable impertinence to send such a thing to your tutor and a Fellow of your College.