The silence was suddenly startled by a howl of mingled ecstasy and rage from Marston.
He would have fallen off the bridge, had not the others held him firmly. Then he burst into a laugh loud and long, and quite as formidable as his howl.
Then he tore away from his friends, and began beating himself over the head.
"Oh!" he cried in accents between a yell and a groan, "what chuckleheads we are! What numskulls! What jackasses! What double-treble-barrelled gibbering idiots!" Then he fell to beating himself over the head again.
"What's the matter, Marston, for heaven's sake!" cried his friends, vainly trying to hold him.
"Speak for yourself!" cried others, Belfast among the number.
"No exception, Belfast! You're as bad as the rest of us! We're all a set of unmitigated, demoralized, dog-goned old lunatics! Ha! Ha! Ha!"
"Speak plainly, Marston! Tell us what you mean!"
"I mean," roared the terrible Secretary, "that we are no better than a lot of cabbage heads, dead beats, and frauds, calling ourselves scientists! O Barbican, how you must blush for us! If we were schoolboys, we should all be skinned alive for our ignorance! Do you forget, you herd of ignoramuses, that the Projectile weighs only ten tons?"
"We don't forget it! We know it well! What of it?"