The Session was drawing to its end. The Paddenham deal—which Gowle, in that fanatical sheet of his, called “The Paddenham Scandal”—had gone through. Many had thought of putting up some opposition against it in the Commons, and all had given way at last—for the sake of the children, Mrs. Fossilton assures me.
At the Branch Bank more than a million pounds sat looking foolish, still on current account, and its guardians were living in a perilous Paradise.
July had not long to live (nor the Home Secretary either for that matter, though he was in crude health, for he was destined to fall off the Matterhorn that very coming August—but I digress), when the Dæmon played a trump and presented to Mr. Charlbury’s patient but ingenious fancy one more good, great and thumping Petre deal. For John K. Petre was the master of American Rotors—and the opportunity lay patent. Mr. Charlbury long wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. But the Dæmon knew why.
The Rotor has come to enter into nearly everything that a man sees, and does, to-day. The last generation, that of the Great War, never dreamt of it. Ours will remember how it came, first in the modest form of a toy with an outlandish name, and put upon the market in London and Paris by the Japanese. Then there were two or three years of experiment, with occasional newspaper paragraphs, and Lord Winnipeg’s unfortunate venture in which Saillant and his crowd were mixed up—I am afraid the Frenchman got the better of it. But, anyhow, it was wound up within eighteen months. Then there were two years in which the only advertisement the new thing got was a crop of popular jeers.
The Rotor was already driving our heavy vehicles and pretty well all our large merchant vessels. The Navy had taken it up before anybody else. It was beginning to do part of the domestic work, especially in the new underground flats, where it could be fitted in the first digging without the change over that is necessary in the old-fashioned over-ground houses. It was beginning to be used for private cars, though no one had yet started a fleet of taxis with it in those days. I am speaking of 1948.
Somehow or other none of the many companies connected with the new discovery could make good. The work was there all right; it was the profit that seemed to misfire.
For one thing the theorists and the busybodies had tinkered with it. Those people (prominent everywhere in local government) who have read too many books and have not seen enough of life, talked of “reserving for the community” the “future possibilities of the Rotor.” That frightened off investors. Then the London County Council made most absurd regulations, hampering the commercial development of what already ought to have been a universal form of power.
The provincial towns were hopeless. Birmingham coolly went into the Rotor business on the rates, and even hall-marked a particular type of Rotor which it thrust upon all domestic users and manufacturers in the town. It did worse. It let out the smaller machines at a price which barely earned 4 per cent. on the cost and quite killed commercial competition. Manchester was nearly as bad. Glasgow and Liverpool were not far behind in their half-socialist absurdities. The only northern community of any size which acted with common sense in the matter was Pudsey, which had the distinction of being the first English town to leave private enterprise completely free in this matter. But the southern residential towns, and especially the watering-places, are, as every one knows, in a much better tradition; and the Rotor companies paid fair dividends in these sections: especially Brighton, where Sir Charles Waldschwein was the presiding genius of the enterprise.
But every one surveying the figures for the whole group of connected ventures would have shared the gloom of that great scientist, in his way an eminent business man, Lavino (an Englishman, in spite of his name, or rather a Welshman) who prophesied openly at the Cardiff inaugural that the Rotor would never pay, and yet had the patriotism to join the board of the youngest of the linked companies.