Part 20

“And I also could have lived thus,” thought Raphael, as he recalled the learned man from his meditations by asking of him how to produce any effect on the talisman, which he placed before him.

“Although my credulity must amuse you, sir,” so the Marquis ended, “I will conceal nothing from you. That skin seems to me to be endowed with an insuperable power of resistance.”

“People of fashion, sir, always treat science rather superciliously,” said Planchette. “They all talk to us pretty much as the _incroyable_ did when he brought some ladies to see Lalande just after an eclipse, and remarked, ‘Be so good as to begin it over again!’ What effect do you want to produce? The object of the science of mechanics is either the application or the neutralization of the laws of motion. As for motion pure and simple, I tell you humbly, that we cannot possibly define it. That disposed of, unvarying phenomena have been observed which accompany the actions of solids and fluids. If we set up the conditions by which these phenomena are brought to pass, we can transport bodies or communicate locomotive power to them at a predetermined rate of speed. We can project them, divide them up in a few or an infinite number of pieces, accordingly as we break them or grind them to powder; we can twist bodies or make them rotate, modify, compress, expand, or extend them. The whole science, sir, rests upon a single fact.

“You see this ball,” he went on; “here it lies upon this slab. Now, it is over there. What name shall we give to what has taken place, so natural from a physical point of view, so amazing from a moral? Movement, locomotion, changing of place? What prodigious vanity lurks underneath the words. Does a name solve the difficulty? Yet it is the whole of our science for all that. Our machines either make direct use of this agency, this fact, or they convert it. This trifling phenomenon, applied to large masses, would send Paris flying. We can increase speed by an expenditure of force, and augment the force by an increase of speed. But what are speed and force? Our science is as powerless to tell us that as to create motion. Any movement whatever is an immense power, and man does not create power of any kind. Everything is movement, thought itself is a movement, upon movement nature is based. Death is a movement whose limitations are little known. If God is eternal, be sure that He moves perpetually; perhaps God is movement. That is why movement, like God is inexplicable, unfathomable, unlimited, incomprehensible, intangible. Who has ever touched, comprehended, or measured movement? We feel its effects without seeing it; we can even deny them as we can deny the existence of a God. Where is it? Where is it not? Whence comes it? What is its source? What is its end? It surrounds us, it intrudes upon us, and yet escapes us. It is evident as a fact, obscure as an abstraction; it is at once effect and cause. It requires space, even as we, and what is space? Movement alone recalls it to us; without movement, space is but an empty meaningless word. Like space, like creation, like the infinite, movement is an insoluble problem which confounds human reason; man will never conceive it, whatever else he may be permitted to conceive.

“Between each point in space occupied in succession by that ball,” continued the man of science, “there is an abyss confronting human reason, an abyss into which Pascal fell. In order to produce any effect upon an unknown substance, we ought first of all to study that substance; to know whether, in accordance with its nature, it will be broken by the force of a blow, or whether it will withstand it; if it breaks in pieces, and you have no wish to split it up, we shall not achieve the end proposed. If you want to compress it, a uniform impulse must be communicated to all the particles of the substance, so as to diminish the interval that separates them in an equal degree. If you wish to expand it, we should try to bring a uniform eccentric force to bear on every molecule; for unless we conform accurately to this law, we shall have breaches in continuity. The modes of motion, sir, are infinite, and no limit exists to combinations of movement. Upon what effect have you determined?”

“I want any kind of pressure that is strong enough to expand the skin indefinitely,” began Raphael, quite of out patience.

“Substance is finite,” the mathematician put in, “and therefore will not admit of indefinite expansion, but pressure will necessarily increase the extent of surface at the expense of the thickness, which will be diminished until the point is reached when the material gives out----”

“Bring about that result, sir,” Raphael cried, “and you will have earned millions.”

“Then I should rob you of your money,” replied the other, phlegmatic as a Dutchman. “I am going to show you, in a word or two, that a machine can be made that is fit to crush Providence itself in pieces like a fly. It would reduce a man to the conditions of a piece of waste paper; a man--boots and spurs, hat and cravat, trinkets and gold, and all----”

“What a fearful machine!”

“Instead of flinging their brats into the water, the Chinese ought to make them useful in this way,” the man of science went on, without reflecting on the regard man has for his progeny.

Quite absorbed by his idea, Planchette took an empty flower-pot, with a hole in the bottom, and put it on the surface of the dial, then he went to look for a little clay in a corner of the garden. Raphael stood spellbound, like a child to whom his nurse is telling some wonderful story. Planchette put the clay down upon the slab, drew a pruning-knife from his pocket, cut two branches from an elder tree, and began to clean them of pith by blowing through them, as if Raphael had not been present.

“There are the rudiments of the apparatus,” he said. Then he connected one of the wooden pipes with the bottom of the flower-pot by way of a clay joint, in such a way that the mouth of the elder stem was just under the hole of the flower-pot; you might have compared it to a big tobacco-pipe. He spread a bed of clay over the surface of the slab, in a shovel-shaped mass, set down the flower-pot at the wider end of it, and laid the pipe of the elder stem along the portion which represented the handle of the shovel. Next he put a lump of clay at the end of the elder stem and therein planted the other pipe, in an upright position, forming a second elbow which connected it with the first horizontal pipe in such a manner that the air, or any given fluid in circulation, could flow through this improvised piece of mechanism from the mouth of the vertical tube, along the intermediate passages, and so into the large empty flower-pot.

“This apparatus, sir,” he said to Raphael, with all the gravity of an academician pronouncing his initiatory discourse, “is one of the great Pascal’s grandest claims upon our admiration.”

“I don’t understand.”

The man of science smiled. He went up to a fruit-tree and took down a little phial in which the druggist had sent him some liquid for catching ants; he broke off the bottom and made a funnel of the top, carefully fitting it to the mouth of the vertical hollowed stem that he had set in the clay, and at the opposite end to the great reservoir, represented by the flower-pot. Next, by means of a watering-pot, he poured in sufficient water to rise to the same level in the large vessel and in the tiny circular funnel at the end of the elder stem.

Raphael was thinking of his piece of skin.

“Water is considered to-day, sir, to be an incompressible body,” said the mechanician; “never lose sight of that fundamental principle; still it can be compressed, though only so very slightly that we should regard its faculty for contracting as a zero. You see the amount of surface presented by the water at the brim of the flower-pot?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very good; now suppose that that surface is a thousand times larger than the orifice of the elder stem through which I poured the liquid. Here, I am taking the funnel away----”

“Granted.”

“Well, then, if by any method whatever I increase the volume of that quantity of water by pouring in yet more through the mouth of the little tube; the water thus compelled to flow downwards would rise in the reservoir, represented by the flower-pot, until it reached the same level at either end.”

“That is quite clear,” cried Raphael.

“But there is this difference,” the other went on. “Suppose that the thin column of water poured into the little vertical tube there exerts a force equal, say, to a pound weight, for instance, its action will be punctually communicated to the great body of the liquid, and will be transmitted to every part of the surface represented by the water in the flower-pot so that at the surface there will be a thousand columns of water, every one pressing upwards as if they were impelled by a force equal to that which compels the liquid to descend in the vertical tube; and of necessity they reproduce here,” said Planchette, indicating to Raphael the top of the flower-pot, “the force introduced over there, a thousand-fold,” and the man of science pointed out to the marquis the upright wooden pipe set in the clay.

“That is quite simple,” said Raphael.

Planchette smiled again.

“In other words,” he went on, with the mathematician’s natural stubborn propensity for logic, “in order to resist the force of the incoming water, it would be necessary to exert, upon every part of the large surface, a force equal to that brought into action in the vertical column, but with this difference--if the column of liquid is a foot in height, the thousand little columns of the wide surface will only have a very slight elevating power.

“Now,” said Planchette, as he gave a fillip to his bits of stick, “let us replace this funny little apparatus by steel tubes of suitable strength and dimensions; and if you cover the liquid surface of the reservoir with a strong sliding plate of metal, and if to this metal plate you oppose another, solid enough and strong enough to resist any test; if, furthermore, you give me the power of continually adding water to the volume of liquid contents by means of the little vertical tube, the object fixed between the two solid metal plates must of necessity yield to the tremendous crushing force which indefinitely compresses it. The method of continually pouring in water through a little tube, like the manner of communicating force through the volume of the liquid to a small metal plate, is an absurdly primitive mechanical device. A brace of pistons and a few valves would do it all. Do you perceive, my dear sir,” he said taking Valentin by the arm, “there is scarcely a substance in existence that would not be compelled to dilate when fixed in between these two indefinitely resisting surfaces?”

“What! the author of the _Lettres provinciales_ invented it?” Raphael exclaimed.

“He and no other, sir. The science of mechanics knows no simpler nor more beautiful contrivance. The opposite principle, the capacity of expansion possessed by water, has brought the steam-engine into being. But water will only expand up to a certain point, while its incompressibility, being a force in a manner negative, is, of necessity, infinite.”

“If this skin is expanded,” said Raphael, “I promise you to erect a colossal statue to Blaise Pascal; to found a prize of a hundred thousand francs to be offered every ten years for the solution of the grandest problem of mechanical science effected during the interval; to find dowries for all your cousins and second cousins, and finally to build an asylum on purpose for impoverished or insane mathematicians.”

“That would be exceedingly useful,” Planchette replied. “We will go to Spieghalter to-morrow, sir,” he continued, with the serenity of a man living on a plane wholly intellectual. “That distinguished mechanic has just completed, after my own designs, an improved mechanical arrangement by which a child could get a thousand trusses of hay inside his cap.”

“Then good-bye till to-morrow.”

“Till to-morrow, sir.”

“Talk of mechanics!” cried Raphael; “isn’t it the greatest of the sciences? The other fellow with his onagers, classifications, ducks, and species, and his phials full of bottled monstrosities, is at best only fit for a billiard-marker in a saloon.”

The next morning Raphael went off in great spirits to find Planchette, and together they set out for the Rue de la Sante--auspicious appellation! Arrived at Spieghalter’s, the young man found himself in a vast foundry; his eyes lighted upon a multitude of glowing and roaring furnaces. There was a storm of sparks, a deluge of nails, an ocean of pistons, vices, levers, valves, girders, files, and nuts; a sea of melted metal, baulks of timber and bar-steel. Iron filings filled your throat. There was iron in the atmosphere; the men were covered with it; everything reeked of iron. The iron seemed to be a living organism; it became a fluid, moved, and seemed to shape itself intelligently after every fashion, to obey the worker’s every caprice. Through the uproar made by the bellows, the crescendo of the falling hammers, and the shrill sounds of the lathes that drew groans from the steel, Raphael passed into a large, clean, and airy place where he was able to inspect at his leisure the great press that Planchette had told him about. He admired the cast-iron beams, as one might call them, and the twin bars of steel coupled together with indestructible bolts.

“If you were to give seven rapid turns to that crank,” said Spieghalter, pointing out a beam of polished steel, “you would make a steel bar spurt out in thousands of jets, that would get into your legs like needles.”

“The deuce!” exclaimed Raphael.

Planchette himself slipped the piece of skin between the metal plates of the all-powerful press; and, brimful of the certainty of a scientific conviction, he worked the crank energetically.

“Lie flat, all of you; we are dead men!” thundered Spieghalter, as he himself fell prone on the floor.

A hideous shrieking sound rang through the workshops. The water in the machine had broken the chamber, and now spouted out in a jet of incalculable force; luckily it went in the direction of an old furnace, which was overthrown, enveloped and carried away by a waterspout.

“Ha!” remarked Planchette serenely, “the piece of skin is as safe and sound as my eye. There was a flaw in your reservoir somewhere, or a crevice in the large tube----”

“No, no; I know my reservoir. The devil is in your contrivance, sir; you can take it away,” and the German pounced upon a smith’s hammer, flung the skin down on an anvil, and, with all the strength that rage gives, dealt the talisman the most formidable blow that had ever resounded through his workshops.

“There is not so much as a mark on it!” said Planchette, stroking the perverse bit of skin.

The workmen hurried in. The foreman took the skin and buried it in the glowing coal of a forge, while, in a semi-circle round the fire, they all awaited the action of a huge pair of bellows. Raphael, Spieghalter, and Professor Planchette stood in the midst of the grimy expectant crowd. Raphael, looking round on faces dusted over with iron filings, white eyes, greasy blackened clothing, and hairy chests, could have fancied himself transported into the wild nocturnal world of German ballad poetry. After the skin had been in the fire for ten minutes, the foreman pulled it out with a pair of pincers.

“Hand it over to me,” said Raphael.

The foreman held it out by way of a joke. The Marquis readily handled it; it was cool and flexible between his fingers. An exclamation of alarm went up; the workmen fled in terror. Valentin was left alone with Planchette in the empty workshop.

“There is certainly something infernal in the thing!” cried Raphael, in desperation. “Is no human power able to give me one more day of existence?”

“I made a mistake, sir,” said the mathematician, with a penitent expression; “we ought to have subjected that peculiar skin to the action of a rolling machine. Where could my eyes have been when I suggested compression!”

“It was I that asked for it,” Raphael answered.

The mathematician heaved a sigh of relief, like a culprit acquitted by a dozen jurors. Still, the strange problem afforded by the skin interested him; he meditated a moment, and then remarked:

“This unknown material ought to be treated chemically by re-agents. Let us call on Japhet--perhaps the chemist may have better luck than the mechanic.”

Valentin urged his horse into a rapid trot, hoping to find the chemist, the celebrated Japhet, in his laboratory.

“Well, old friend,” Planchette began, seeing Japhet in his armchair, examining a precipitate; “how goes chemistry?”

“Gone to sleep. Nothing new at all. The Academie, however, has recognized the existence of salicine, but salicine, asparagine, vauqueline, and digitaline are not really discoveries----”

“Since you cannot invent substances,” said Raphael, “you are obliged to fall back on inventing names.”

“Most emphatically true, young man.”

“Here,” said Planchette, addressing the chemist, “try to analyze this composition; if you can extract any element whatever from it, I christen it diaboline beforehand, for we have just smashed a hydraulic press in trying to compress it.”

“Let’s see! let’s have a look at it!” cried the delighted chemist; “it may, perhaps, be a fresh element.”

“It is simply a piece of the skin of an ass, sir,” said Raphael.

“Sir!” said the illustrious chemist sternly.

“I am not joking,” the Marquis answered, laying the piece of skin before him.

Baron Japhet applied the nervous fibres of his tongue to the skin; he had skill in thus detecting salts, acids, alkalis, and gases. After several experiments, he remarked:

“No taste whatever! Come, we will give it a little fluoric acid to drink.”

Subjected to the influence of this ready solvent of animal tissue, the skin underwent no change whatsoever.

“It is not shagreen at all!” the chemist cried. “We will treat this unknown mystery as a mineral, and try its mettle by dropping it in a crucible where I have at this moment some red potash.”

Japhet went out, and returned almost immediately.

“Allow me to cut away a bit of this strange substance, sir,” he said to Raphael; “it is so extraordinary----”

“A bit!” exclaimed Raphael; “not so much as a hair’s-breadth. You may try, though,” he added, half banteringly, half sadly.

The chemist broke a razor in his desire to cut the skin; he tried to break it by a powerful electric shock; next he submitted it to the influence of a galvanic battery; but all the thunderbolts his science wotted of fell harmless on the dreadful talisman.

It was seven o’clock in the evening. Planchette, Japhet, and Raphael, unaware of the flight of time, were awaiting the outcome of a final experiment. The Magic Skin emerged triumphant from a formidable encounter in which it had been engaged with a considerable quantity of chloride of nitrogen.

“It is all over with me,” Raphael wailed. “It is the finger of God! I shall die!----” and he left the two amazed scientific men.

“We must be very careful not to talk about this affair at the Academie; our colleagues there would laugh at us,” Planchette remarked to the chemist, after a long pause, in which they looked at each other without daring to communicate their thoughts. The learned pair looked like two Christians who had issued from their tombs to find no God in the heavens. Science had been powerless; acids, so much clear water; red potash had been discredited; the galvanic battery and electric shock had been a couple of playthings.

“A hydraulic press broken like a biscuit!” commented Planchette.

“I believe in the devil,” said the Baron Japhet, after a moment’s silence.

“And I in God,” replied Planchette.

Each spoke in character. The universe for a mechanician is a machine that requires an operator; for chemistry--that fiendish employment of decomposing all things--the world is a gas endowed with the power of movement.

“We cannot deny the fact,” the chemist replied.

“Pshaw! those gentlemen the doctrinaires have invented a nebulous aphorism for our consolation--Stupid as a fact.”

“Your aphorism,” said the chemist, “seems to me as a fact very stupid.”

They began to laugh, and went off to dine like folk for whom a miracle is nothing more than a phenomenon.

Valentin reached his own house shivering with rage and consumed with anger. He had no more faith in anything. Conflicting thoughts shifted and surged to and fro in his brain, as is the case with every man brought face to face with an inconceivable fact. He had readily believed in some hidden flaw in Spieghalter’s apparatus; he had not been surprised by the incompetence and failure of science and of fire; but the flexibility of the skin as he handled it, taken with its stubbornness when all means of destruction that man possesses had been brought to bear upon it in vain--these things terrified him. The incontrovertible fact made him dizzy.

“I am mad,” he muttered. “I have had no food since the morning, and yet I am neither hungry nor thirsty, and there is a fire in my breast that burns me.”

He put back the skin in the frame where it had been enclosed but lately, drew a line in red ink about the actual configuration of the talisman, and seated himself in his armchair.

“Eight o’clock already!” he exclaimed. “To-day has gone like a dream.”

He leaned his elbow on the arm of the chair, propped his head with his left hand, and so remained, lost in secret dark reflections and consuming thoughts that men condemned to die bear away with them.

“O Pauline!” he cried. “Poor child! there are gulfs that love can never traverse, despite the strength of his wings.”

Just then he very distinctly heard a smothered sigh, and knew by one of the most tender privileges of passionate love that it was Pauline’s breathing.

“That is my death warrant,” he said to himself. “If she were there, I should wish to die in her arms.”

A burst of gleeful and hearty laughter made him turn his face towards the bed; he saw Pauline’s face through the transparent curtains, smiling like a child for gladness over a successful piece of mischief. Her pretty hair fell over her shoulders in countless curls; she looked like a Bengal rose upon a pile of white roses.

“I cajoled Jonathan,” said she. “Doesn’t the bed belong to me, to me who am your wife? Don’t scold me, darling; I only wanted to surprise you, to sleep beside you. Forgive me for my freak.”

She sprang out of bed like a kitten, showed herself gleaming in her lawn raiment, and sat down on Raphael’s knee.

“Love, what gulf were you talking about?” she said, with an anxious expression apparent upon her face.

“Death.”