"Old man," he said, in tones little above a whisper, "I"ve got a fortune for you."
"Dear old libeller, leave it with the lift-man," said Bones. "He has a wife and three children."
Mr. Jelf examined his watch.
"I"ve got to get away at three o"clock, old man," he said.
"Don"t let me keep you, old writer," said Bones with insolent indifference.
Jelf smiled.
"I"d rather not say where I"m going," he volunteered. "It"s a scoop, and if it leaked out, there would be the devil to pay."
"Oh!" said Bones, who knew Mr. Jelf well. "I thought it was something like that."
"I"d like to tell you, Tibbetts," said Jelf regretfully, "but you know how particular one has to be when one is dealing with matters affecting the integrity of ministers."
"I know, I know," responded Bones, wilfully dense, "especially huffy old vicars, dear old thing."
"Oh, them!" said Jelf, extending his contempt to the rules which govern the employment of the English language. "I don"t worry about those poor funny things. No, I am speaking of a matter--you have heard about G.?" he asked suddenly.
"No," said Bones with truth.
Jelf looked astonished.
"What!" he said incredulously. "You in the heart of things, and don"t know about old G.?"
"No, little Mercury, and I don"t want to know," said Bones, busying himself with his papers.
"You"ll tell me you don"t know about L. next," he said, bewildered.
"Language!" protested Bones. "You really mustn"t use Sunday words, really you mustn"t."
Then Jelf unburdened himself. It appeared that G. had been engaged to L."s daughter, and the engagement had been broken off....
Bones stirred uneasily and looked at his watch.
"Dispense with the jolly old alphabet," he said wearily, "and let us get down to the beastly personalities."
Thereafter Jelf"s conversation condensed itself to the limits of a human understanding. "G" stood for Gregory--Felix Gregory; "L" for Lansing, who apparently had no Christian name, nor found such appendage necessary, since he was dead. He had invented a lamp, and that lamp had in some way come into Jelf"s possession. He was exploiting the invention on behalf of the inventor"s daughter, and had named it--he said this with great deliberation and emphasis--"The Tibbetts-Jelf Motor Lamp."
Bones made a disparaging noise, but was interested.
The Tibbetts-Jelf Lamp was something new in motor lamps. It was a lamp which had all the advantages of the old lamp, plus properties which no lamp had ever had before, and it had none of the disadvantages of any lamp previously introduced, and, in fact, had no disadvantages whatsoever. So Jelf told Bones with great earnestness.
"You know me, Tibbetts," he said. "I never speak about myself, and I"m rather inclined to disparage my own point of view than otherwise."
"I"ve never noticed that," said Bones.
"You know, anyway," urged Jelf, "that I want to see the bad side of anything I take up."
He explained how he had sat up night after night, endeavouring to discover some drawback to the Tibbetts-Jelf Lamp, and how he had rolled into bed at five in the morning, exhausted by the effort.
"If I could only find one flaw!" he said. "But the ingenious beggar who invented it has not left a single bad point."
He went on to describe the lamp. With the aid of a lead pencil and a piece of Bones"s priceless notepaper he sketched the front elevation and discoursed upon rays, especially upon ultra-violet rays.
Apparently this is a disreputable branch of the Ray family. If you could only get an ultra-violet ray as he was sneaking out of the lamp, and hit him violently on the back of the head, you were rendering a service to science and humanity.
This lamp was so fixed that the moment Mr. Ultra V. Ray reached the threshold of freedom he was tripped up, pounced upon, and beaten until he (naturally enough) changed colour!
It was all done by the lens.
Jelf drew a Dutch cheese on the table-cloth to Ill.u.s.trate the point.
"This light never goes out," said Jelf pa.s.sionately. "If you lit it to-day, it would be alight to-morrow, and the next day, and so on. All the light-buoys and lighthouses around England will be fitted with this lamp; it will revolutionise navigation."
According to the exploiter, homeward bound mariners would gather together on the p.o.o.p, or the hoop, or wherever homeward bound manners gathered, and would chant a psalm of praise, in which the line "Heaven bless the Tibbetts-Jelf Lamp" would occur at regular intervals.
And when he had finished his eulogy, and lay back exhausted by his own eloquence, and Bones asked, "But what does it _do_?" Jelf could have killed him.
Under any other circ.u.mstances Bones might have dismissed his visitor with a lecture on the futility of attempting to procure money under false pretences. But remember that Bones was the proprietor of a new motor-car, and thought motor-car and dreamed motor-car by day and by night. Even as it was, he was framing a conventional expression of regret that he could not interest himself in outside property, when there dawned upon his mind the splendid possibilities of possessing this accessory, and he wavered.
"Anyway," he said, "it will take a year to make."
Mr. Jelf beamed.
"Wrong!" he cried triumphantly. "Two of the lamps are just finished, and will be ready to-morrow."
Bones hesitated.
"Of course, dear old Jelf," he said, "I should like, as an experiment, to try them on my car."
"On your car?" Jelf stepped back a pace and looked at the other with very flattering interest and admiration. "Not your car! _Have_ you a car?"
Bones said he had a car, and explained it at length. He even waxed as enthusiastic about his machine as had Mr. Jelf on the subject of the lamp that never went out. And Jelf agreed with everything that Bones said. Apparently he was personally acquainted with the Carter-Crispley car. He had, so to speak, grown up with it. He knew its good points and none of its bad points. He thought the man who chose a car like that must have genius beyond the ordinary. Bones agreed. Bones had reached the conclusion that he had been mistaken about Jelf, and that possibly age had sobered him (it was nearly six months since he had perpetrated his last libel). They parted the best of friends. He had agreed to attend a demonstration at the workshop early the following morning, and Jelf, who was working on a ten per cent. commission basis, and had already drawn a hundred on account from the vendors, was there to meet him.
In truth it was a n.o.ble lamp--very much like other motor lamps, except that the bulb was, or apparently was, embedded in solid gla.s.s. Its princ.i.p.al virtue lay in the fact that it carried its own acc.u.mulator, which had to be charged weekly, or the lamp forfeited its t.i.tle.
Mr. Jelf explained, with the adeptness of an expert, how the lamp was controlled from the dashboard, and how splendid it was to have a light which was independent of the engine of the car or of faulty acc.u.mulators, and Bones agreed to try the lamp for a week. He did more than this: he half promised to float a company for its manufacture, and gave Mr. Jelf fifty pounds on account of possible royalties and commission, whereupon Mr. Jelf faded from the picture, and from that moment ceased to take the slightest interest in a valuable article which should have been more valuable by reason of the fact that it bore his name.
Three days later Hamilton, walking to business, was overtaken by a beautiful blue Carter-Crispley, ornamented, it seemed from a distance, by two immense bosses of burnished silver. On closer examination they proved to be nothing more remarkable than examples of the Tibbett-Jelf Lamp.
"Yes," said Bones airily, "that"s the lamp, dear old thing. Invented in leisure hours by self and Jelf. Step in, and I"ll explain."
"Where do I step in," asked Hamilton, wilfully dense--"into the car or into the lamp?"
Bones patiently smiled and waved him with a gesture to a seat by his side. His explanation was disjointed and scarcely informative; for Bones had yet to learn the finesse of driving, and he had a trick of thinking aloud.