“Poor Madame Claudet! I’m so sorry! Her husband was a very wealthy man. They had a lot of valuable property, I believe, in Brazil. We knew her in Florida. I’m so glad we’ve come across her. I shall ask mother to invite her to go with us to Touraine.”
At luncheon Geoffrey met Lord Hendlewycke, whom, of course, he had known in London. All the men who went up and down St. James’s Street knew Hendlewycke as a very hard-up peer, who was glad to get dinners and luncheons at other people’s expense. How he lived nobody exactly knew, for he was believed not to possess the proverbial “bean.” Yet he was a bright optimist, with a fund of amusing anecdotes, and very popular with hostesses of all sorts.
In the afternoon the French widow called upon Mrs. Beverley, and was received with great enthusiasm. At tea Geoffrey met her again, and afterwards agreed with Sylvia that she was a most charming person. She had been born in the Alpes Maritimes, but had been taken to America by her parents when she was about eighteen, and had married a Mr. Claudet, an American, whose father had been French. Hence she possessed all the natural chic of the Frenchwoman, combined with the go-ahead characteristics of the American.
Next day, notwithstanding Sylvia’s appeal, Geoffrey left Dinard for London in response to a telegram he pretended had come from Marconi House. Mrs. Beverley, at heart, did not regret his departure, because she hoped that during the motor tour through the Côtes du Nord, Morbihan, and the Maine-et-Loire, which she had arranged, his lordship might propose to Sylvia.
Back again at the Marconi Works at Chelmsford, Geoffrey became immersed in his patient research into further wonders of wireless. He was engaged with others upon a new idea.
One day he had occasion to go from Chelmsford over to Witham, where there had just been established the new wireless station in direct communication with Paris. Witham is nine miles from Chelmsford, and, although messages from France are received upon the aerial wires there, the transmission is effected from the great aerial at the Chelmsford Works.
On that particular morning he had been in the transmission room at Chelmsford, watching the huge panel with its big array of great illuminated globes—the transmission-valves for continuous waves—and chatting with Mr. Drew, the shrewd, dark-haired engineer in grey tweeds, who was, perhaps, the world’s greatest expert in wireless telephony. In the big hall, full of wonderful apparatus and huge condensers—the result of many scientific brains—the pair had been watching the relay work, the rapid dots and dashes from the key at Witham, and then, in consultation, they had agreed upon a still further diagram that might perhaps give better results.
In consequence, Falconer had gone over to Witham, leaving the ever-watchful Mr. Drew with his powerful transmission-set, with which he had a short time before spoken across the Atlantic, and to Senatore Marconi while on board his yacht in the Mediterranean—the set which he regarded with as much tenderness as though it were his own child—as, indeed, it really was.
That wonderful display of apparatus was but the germ of a revolution in the transmission of speech. It was purely experimental, and was now being used, not for long-distance telephony, but for the exchange of Morse signals with Paris—sent automatically at such a speed as to be unreadable by any listener.
The inner room was a hive of industry. Upon the operating bench was a “siphon recorder”—a delicate instrument which was actually writing, by means of a kind of fountain pen, upon the paper “tape” the dots and dashes sent automatically at a speed of one hundred words a minute. The pen never left the paper, but rose up and down, making short or long strokes in violet ink on the upper side of the paper, and was one of the latest marvels of delicate wireless instruments.