CHAPTER XIII.—Another Patient.
“Des ailes! des ailes! des ailes!
Comme dans le chant de Ruckert.”
—Théophile Gautier.
“So you think a flying machine impossible, sir, and me, I presume, a fanatic? Well, well, you have Eusebius with you. ‘Such an one,’ he says—meaning me, and inventors like me—‘is a little crazed with the humors of melancholy.’”
The speaker was the man whom Barton had rescued from the cogs and wheels and springs of an infuriated engine. Barton could not but be interested in the courage and perseverance of this sufferer, whom he was visiting in hospital. The young surgeon had gone to inspect the room in Paterson’s Rants, and had found it, as he more or less expected, the conventional den of the needy inventor. Our large towns are full of such persons. They are the Treasure Hunters of cities and of civilization—the modern seekers for the Philosopher’s Stone. At the end of a vista of dreams they behold the great Discovery made perfect, and themselves the winners of fame and of wealth incalculable.
For the present, most of these visionaries are occupied with electricity. They intend to make the lightning a domestic slave in every house, and to turn Ariel into a common carrier. But, from the aspect of Winter’s den in Paterson’s Rents, it was easy to read that his heart was set on a more ancient foible. The white deal book-shelves, home-made, which lined every wall, were packed with tattered books on mechanics, and especially on the art of flying. Here you saw the spoils of the fourpenny box of cheap bookvendors mixed with volumes in better condition, purchased at a larger cost. Here—among the litter of tattered pamphlets and well-thumbed “Proceedings” of the Linnean and the Aeronautic Society of Great Britain—here were Fredericus Hermannus’ “De Arte Volandi,” and Cayley’s works, and Hatton Turner’s “Astra Castra,” and the “Voyage to the Moon” of Cyrano de Bergerac, and Bishop Wilkins’s “Dædalus,” and the same sanguine prelate’s “Mercury, The Secret Messenger.” Here were Cardan and Raymond Lully, and a shabby set of the classics, mostly in French translations, and a score of lucubrations by French and other inventors—Ponton d’Amocourt, Borelli, Chabrier, Girard, and Marey.
Even if his books had not shown the direction of the new patient’s mind—(a man is known by his books at least as much as by his companions, and companions Winter had none)—even if the shelves had not spoken clearly, the models and odds-and-ends in the room would have proclaimed him an inventor. As the walls were hidden by his library, and as the floor, also, was littered with tomes and pamphlets and periodicals, a quantity of miscellaneous gear was hung by hooks from the ceiling.
Barton, who was more than commonly tall, found his head being buffeted by big preserved wings of birds and other flying things—from the sweeping pinions of the albatross to the leathery covering of the bat. From the ceiling, too, hung models, cleverly constructed in various materials; and here—a cork with quills stuck into it, and with a kind of drill-bow—was the little flying model of Sir George Cayley. The whole place, dusty and musty, with a faded smell of the oil in birds’ feathers, was almost more noisome than curious. When Barton left it, his mind was made up as to the nature of Winter’s secret, or delusion; and when he visited that queer patient in hospital, he was not surprised either by his smattered learning or by his golden dreams.
“Yes, sir; Eusebius is against me, no doubt,” Winter went on with his eager talk. “An acute man—rather too acute, don’t you think, for a Father of the Church? That habit he got into of smashing the arguments of the heathen, gave him a kind of flippancy in talking of high matters.”
“Such as flying?” put in Barton.
“Yes; such as our great aim—the aim of all the ages, I may call it. What does Bishop Wilkins say, sir? Why, he says, (I doubt not but that flying in the air may be easily effected by a diligent and ingenious artificer.) ‘Diligent,’ I may say, I have been; as to ‘ingenious,’ I leave the verdict to others.”