Fighting the Flames by R. M. Ballantyne (rooftoppers .TXT) 📖

When Willie Willders knocked at Tom Tippet’s door, at the top of the house, a rich jovial bass voice cried, “Come in.” So Willie went in, and stood before a stout old gentleman, whose voluminous whiskers, meeting below his chin, made ample amends for the total absence of hair from the top of his head.

Mr Tippet stood, without coat or vest, and with his braces tied round his waist, at a carpenter’s bench, holding a saw in his right hand, and a piece of wood in his left.

“Well, my lad, what’s your business?” he inquired in the voice of a stentor, and with the beaming smile of an elderly cherub.

“Please, sir, a note—from a lady.”

“I wish your message had been verbal, boy. It’s so difficult to read ladies’ hands; they’re so abominably angular, and—where are my specs? I’ve a mind to have ’em screw-nailed to my nose. Ah! here they are.”

He found them under a jack-plane and a mass of shavings; put them on and read the note, while Willie took the opportunity of observing that Mr Tippet’s room was a drawing-room, parlour, dining-room, workshop, and old curiosity-shop, all in one. A half-open door revealed the fact that an inner chamber contained Mr Tippet’s bed, and an indescribable mass of machinery and models in every stage of progression, and covered with dust, more or less thick in exact proportion to their respective ages. A dog and cat lay side by side on the hearth asleep, and a small fire burned in a grate, on the sides of which stood a variety of crucibles and such-like articles and a glue-pot; also a tea-pot and kettle.

“You want a situation in my office as a clerk?” inquired Mr Tippet, tearing up his sister’s letter, and throwing it into the fire.

“If you please, sir,” said Willie.

“Ha! are you good at writing and ciphering?”

“Middlin’, sir.”

“Hum! D’you know where my office is, and what it is?”

“No, sir.”

“What would you say now,” asked Mr Tippet, seating himself on his bench, or rather on the top of a number of gimblets and chisels and files and pincers that lay on it; “what would you say now to sitting from morning till night in a dusty ware-room, where the light is so feeble that it can scarcely penetrate the dirt that encrusts the windows, writing in books that are so greasy that the ink can hardly be got to mark the paper? How would you like that, William Willders—eh?”

“I don’t know, sir,” replied Willie, with a somewhat depressed look.

“Of course you don’t, yet that is the sort of place you’d have to work in, boy, if I engaged you, for that is a correct description of my warehouse. I’m a sleeping partner in the firm. D’ye know what that is, boy?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, it’s a partner that does no work; but I’m wide-awake for all that, an’ have a pretty good notion of what is going on there. Now, lad, if I were to take you in, what would you say to 5 pounds a year?”

“It don’t sound much, sir,” said Willie bluntly, “but if you take me in with the understandin’ that I’m to work my way up’ards, I don’t mind about the pay at first.”

“Good,” said Mr Tippet, with a nod of approval. “What d’ye think of my workshop?” he added, looking round with a cherubic smile.

“It’s a funny place,” responded Willie, with a grin.

“A funny place—eh? Well, I daresay it is, lad, in your eyes; but let me tell you, it is a place of deep interest, and, I may add without vanity, importance. There are inventions here, all in a state bordering more or less upon completion, which will, when brought into operation, modify the state of society very materially in many of its most prominent phases. Here, for instance, is a self-acting galvano-hydraulic engine, which will entirely supersede the use of steam, and, by preventing the consumption of coal now going on, will avert, or at least postpone, the decline of the British Empire. Able men have calculated that, in the course of a couple of hundred years or so, our coal-beds will be exhausted. I have gone over their calculations and detected several flaws in them, which, when corrected, show a very different result—namely, that in seventeen or eighteen years from this time there will not be an ounce of coal in the kingdom!”

Mr Tippet paused to observe the effect of this statement. Willie having never heard of such things before, and having a thoughtful and speculative as well as waggish turn of mind, listened with open eyes and mouth and earnest attention, so Mr Tippet went on:

“The frightful consequences of such a state of things you may conceive, or rather they are utterly inconceivable. Owing to the foundations of the earth having been cut away, it is more than probable that the present coal districts of the United Kingdom will collapse, the ocean will rush in, and several of our largest counties will become salt-water lakes. Besides this, coal being the grand source of our national wealth, its sudden failure will entail national bankruptcy. The barbarians of Europe, taking advantage of our condition, will pour down upon us, and the last spark of true civilisation in our miserable world will be extinguished—the last refuge for the hunted foot of persecuted Freedom will be finally swept from the face of the earth!”

Here Mr Tippet brought the saw down on the bench with such violence, that the dog and cat started incontinently to their legs, and Willie himself was somewhat shaken.

“Now,” continued Mr Tippet, utterly regardless of the sensation he had created, and wiping the perspiration from his shining head with a handful of shavings; “now, William Willders, all this may be, shall be, prevented by the adoption of the galvano-hydraulic engine, and the consequent restriction of the application of coal to the legitimate purposes of warming our dwellings and cooking our victuals. I mean to bring this matter before the Home Secretary whenever I have completed my invention, which, however, is not quite perfected.

“Then, again,” continued Mr Tippet, becoming more and more enthusiastic as he observed the deep impression his explanations were making on Willie, who stood glaring at him in speechless amazement, “here you have my improved sausage-machine for converting all animal substances into excellent sausages. I hold that every animal substance is more or less good for food, and that it is a sad waste to throw away bones and hair, etcetera, etcetera, merely because these substances are unpalatable or difficult to chew. Now, my machine gets over this difficulty. You cut an animal up just as it is killed, and put it into the machine—hair, skin, bones, blood, and all—and set it in motion by turning on the galvano-hydraulic fluid. Delicious sausages are the result in about twenty minutes.

“You see my dog there—Chips I call him, because he dwells in the midst of chips and shavings; he sleeps upon chips, and if he does not exactly eat chips, he lives upon scraps which have a strong resemblance to them. The cat has no name. I am partial to the time-honoured name of ‘Puss.’ Besides, a cat is not worthy of a name. Physically speaking, it is only a bundle of living fur—a mere mass of soft animated nature, as Goldsmith would express it. Intellectually it is nothing—a sort of existent nonentity, a moral void on which a name would be utterly thrown away. Well, I could take these two animals, Chips and Puss, put them in here (alive, too, for there is a killing apparatus in the instrument which will effectually do away with the cruel process of slaughtering, and with its accompanying nuisances of slaughter-houses and butchers)—put them in here, I say, and in twenty minutes they would be ground up into sausages.

“I know that enemies to progress, ignorant persons and the like, will scoff at this, and say it is similar to the American machine, into one end of which you put a tree, and it comes out at the other end in the shape of ready-made furniture. But such scoffs will cease, while my invention will live. I am not bigoted, William. There may be good objections to my inventions, and great difficulties connected with them, but the objections I will answer, and the difficulties I will overcome.

“This instrument,” continued Mr Tippet, pointing to a huge beam, which leant against the end of the small apartment, “is only a speculative effort of mine. It is meant to raise enormous weights, such as houses. I have long felt it to be most desirable that people should be able to raise their houses from their foundations by the strength of a few men, and convey them to other localities, either temporarily or permanently. I have not succeeded yet, but I see my way to success; and, after all, the idea is not new. You can see it partially carried out by an enterprising company in this city, whose enormous vans will remove the whole furniture of a drawing-room, almost as it stands, without packing. My chief difficulty is with the fulcrum; but that is a difficulty that met the philosopher of old. You have heard of Archimedes, William—the man who said he could make a lever big enough to move the world, if he could only get a fulcrum to rest it on. But Archimedes was weak in that point. He ought to have known that, even if he did get such a fulcrum, he would still have required another world as long as his lever, to enable him to walk out to the end of it. No, by the way, he might have walked on the lever itself! That did not occur to me before. He might even have ridden along it. Come, that’s a new idea. Let me see.”

In order the better to “see,” Mr Tippet dropt the piece of wood from his left hand, and pressed his fingers into both eyes, so as to shut out all earthly objects, and enable him to take an undistracted survey of the chambers of his mind. Returning suddenly from the investigation, he exclaimed:

“Yes, William, I don’t quite see my way to it; but I can perceive dimly the possibility of Archimedes having so formed his lever, that a line of rails might have been run along the upper side of it, from the fulcrum to the other end.”

“Yes, sir,” exclaimed Willie, who, having become excited, was entering eagerly into his patron’s speculations, and venting an occasional remark in the height of his enthusiasm.

“Such a thing might be done,” continued Mr Tippet emphatically; “a small carriage—on the galvano-hydraulic principle, of course—might run to and fro—”

“With passengers,” suggested Willie.

“Well—with passengers,” assented Mr Tippet, smiling. “Of course, the lever would be very large—extremely large. Yes, there might be passengers.”

“An’ stations along the line?” said Willie.

Mr Tippet knitted his brows.

“Ye–yes—why not?”