“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.