The City of Beautiful Nonsense

by E. Temple Thurston

Read it to her! Sit in Kensington Gardens and have his work listened to by the Lady of St. Joseph! He took it out of his pocket without another word and read it then and there.

This is it.

AN IDYLL OF SCIENCE

The world has grown some few of its grey hairs in search of the secret of perpetual motion. How many, with their ingeniously contrived keys, have not worn old and feeble in their efforts to open this Bluebeard's chamber: until their curiosity sank exhausted within them? You count them, from the dilettante Marquis of Worcester, playing with his mechanical toy before a king and his court, Jackson, Orffyreus, Bishop Wilkins, Addeley, with the rest of them, and, beyond arriving at the decision of the French Academy--"that the only perpetual motion possible ... would be useless for the purpose of the devisers," you are drawn to the conclusion that mankind shares curiosity with the beasts below him and calls it science lest the world should laugh.

You have now in this idyll here offered you, the story of one who found the secret, and showed it to me alone. Have patience to let your imagination wander through Irish country lanes, strolling hither and thither, drawn to no definite end, led by no ultimate hope, and the history of the blind beggar, who discovered the secret of perpetual motion, shall be disclosed for you; all the curiosity that ever thrilled you shall be appeased, feasted, satiated.

There was not one in the country-side who knew his name. Name a man in Ireland and you locate him; Murphy, and he comes from Cork--Power, and he comes from Waterford. Why enumerate them all? But this blind beggar had no name. There was no place that claimed him. With that tall silk hat of his which some parish priest had yielded him, with his long black coat which exposure to the sorrowful rains of a sad country had stained a faded green; with his long, crooked stick that tapped its wearisome, monotonous dirge and his colourless, red 'kerchief knotted round his neck, he was a figure well-known in three or four counties.

No village owned him. At Clonmel, they denied him, at Dungarvan, they disowned him; yet the whole country-side, at certain seasons of the year, had heard that well-known tapping of the crooked stick, had seen those sightless eyes blinking under the twisted rim of the old silk hat. For a day or so in the place, he was a well-known figure; for a day or so they slipped odd pennies into his sensitively opened palm, but the next morning would find him missing. Where had he gone? Who had seen him go? Not a soul! The rounded cobbles and the uneven pavements that had resounded to the old crooked stick would be silent of that tapping noise for another year, at least.

But had chance taken you out into the surrounding country, and had it taken you in the right direction, you would have found him toiling along by the hedges--oh, but so infinitely slowly!--his shoulders bent, and his hand nodding like some mechanical toy that had escaped the clutches of its inventor and was wandering aimlessly wherever its mechanism directed.

How it came to be known that he sought the secret of perpetual motion, is beyond me. It was one of those facts about him which seem as inseparable from a man as the clothes that belie his trade. You saw him coming up the road towards you and the words "perpetual motion" rushed, whispering, to your mind. About the matter himself, he was sensitively reticent; yet he must have told someone--someone must have told me. Who was it? Some inhabitant of the village of Rathmore must have spread the story. Whom could it have been? Foley, the carpenter? Burke, the fisherman? Fitzgerald, the publican--Troy, the farmer? I can trace it to none of these. I cannot remember who told me: and yet, when each year he came round for the ceremonies of the Pattern day, when they honoured the patron saint, I said as I saw him: "Here is the blind beggar who tried to invent perpetual motion." The idea became inseparable from the man.

With each succeeding year his movements became more feeble, his head hung lower as he walked. You could see Death stalking behind him in his footsteps, gaining on him, inch by inch, until the shadow of it fell before him as he walked.