Basil had returned to Paris, spent six months as a pupil in the school for electrical engineers, and had finally been apprenticed to the Société Générale. At the end of his apprenticeship his father had died, leaving him his blessing and a couple of hundred pounds. From that time to this, and he was now exactly the same age as his friend Deschamps, the young man had worked as a junior engineer at the central power station. His salary was ten pounds a month. There were innumerable people before him, and his prospects seemed absolutely nil.
As for Deschamps, he was the son of a bankrupt wine merchant of Marseilles. With a remarkable taste for science and an especial interest in electricity, he had come to Paris—after an apprenticeship at the electrical station of Monte Carlo—and was in precisely the same state as Basil Gregory. The two young men had become friends at once. Each recognised in the other a brain above the average. Both of them were intensely interested in their work, both of them had the temper of mind which flouts accepted theories and ever presses forward to new and epoch-making discovery. They were pioneers, and knew it. Without conceit, without any self-deception, they were quietly certain of their own powers. They had worked together, spending every moment of their spare time and every franc they could afford upon a new and original development in wireless telegraphy. They had arrived at a point when they were both convinced that they had wrested an entirely new secret from Nature, and at this point they found, as so many inventors and pioneers have found in the past, that the way was absolutely barred for want of capital. In their hands they were sure they held the talisman of fortune and undying renown. It was useless to them for want of money.
This night in Paris was bitter cold. Moreover, an infrequent and dreaded occurrence in Paris, a dense fog lay over the city. These Parisian fogs are not the sulphurous, pea-soup discomforts of London, but they are almost as unpleasant, and quite as upsetting to ordinary life and comfort. A dank, grey mist, opaque and wet, seems to rise from the Seine, spread outwards in evergrowing density and chill, until all the central quarter of Paris is hidden and throttled by it.
"Diable!" Deschamps said, coughing, as they left the power station behind them. "Une vraie brume Anglaise."
Gregory shrugged his shoulders. "It is pretty bad," he said, "and we can't see a yard in front of our noses. Still, if you had experienced a London 'particular,' Emile—well, then you would know!"
There was a silence between the young men as they tramped away to the Latin Quarter, where they shared a room in a little fifth-rate hotel not far from the Quai Voltaire. The night was bitterly cold, certainly not inviting conversation, and the thoughts of the pair were cold and bitter in harmony with the night. Genius is rarely unconscious of its power. Basil Gregory and Emile Deschamps were not in the least conceited, but each knew in his heart of hearts that already they approached those heights upon which Tesla and Edison dwelt. They saw the top of the mountain bathed in glorious sunshine, but between them and it there was a great gulf only to be bridged by money.
Basil Gregory's case was, perhaps, the worse of the two, for Basil was in love. Ethel McMahon, the pretty Irish girl, who was English mistress in a young ladies' school in the Fauberg St. Honoré, held all his heart, but she, like him, was poor and friendless, and out of her wretched salary supported an invalid mother, who was a martyr to one of the cruellest forms of arthritis.
The young man ground his teeth in fury against Fate, as he strode by his companion's side. Suddenly he began to talk rapidly, and with a true Parisian vehemence.
"I shouldn't mind so much, Emile, if we wanted money for the reason that such a lot of fellows of our age want it. But we don't. We don't want to play the giddy goat"—faire la bête was the French he used—"we don't want to enjoy ourselves in the usual silly way. We only want the world to recognise us for what we are. We want to benefit the whole world, Emile, and for ourselves all we ask is recognition and sufficient to live in comfort."