Guy Thorne - Chance in Chains - A Story of Monte Carlo

It was nine o'clock at night, and the thirty huge dynamos of the Société Générale Electrique of Paris were nearly all at work. In the great glass-roofed hall of the Mont Parnasse Central Power Station blue-bloused workmen moved quietly over the shining floors of white concrete, pausing now and then by this or that purring, spitting monster, scrutinising the whirring, glittering copper drums, listening with experienced ears for the slightest variation in the deep wasp-like hum, touching a lever here, adjusting a screw there, or oiling a bearing with tin cans beaked like a snipe.

Huge arc lamps hanging from the ceiling cast a steel-blue radiance over the hall, a radiance so cruel and intense that the shadows of the machinery which were thrown upon the floor were as black and sharply defined as fretwork of ebony.

The incandescent lamps which showed above each of the three great switchboards of brass and vulcanite, although they were burning at full power, glowed orange in the stupendous light from above.

The monster dynamos were making light for half eastern Paris. The Gare Mont Parnasse, from where trains were running every two minutes with late business folk to Meudon, Sèvres and Versailles, was lit from this room. The dinner tables of the foreign Ambassadors on the Quai Austerlitz were illuminated by favour of these serene, relentless marvels, and, across the Seine, many a glittering café upon the heights of the pleasure city Montmartre were switching on hundreds of fresh lights in the expectation of their supper custom – even as a new dynamo was started to cope with the extra strain.

At one side of the hall a few concrete steps led into the little glass-fronted room where the superintendent engineer on duty always sat.

The room was some twelve feet square, walled with white tiles like a model dairy, and from where he sat at a deal table the engineer could look out into every part of the hall. In the hall itself it was cold, though the electricians felt but little of it owing to the fresh ozone constantly liberated from the dynamos into the air. Outside, in Paris, it was bitterly cold – a damp and foggy cold of late November. But in the room of the superintendent engineer an electric stove burned brightly and warmed it.

Two people were in the room now, Emile Deschamps and Basil Gregory, both of them employed by the Société Générale.

Deschamps was a young man of about twenty-six. His jet black hair, closely cropped to a rather large and well-shaped head, together with the swarthy tint of his complexion, proclaimed him of the South, a veritable son of the Midi from Orange, Avignon, or Marseilles. He wore a small black moustache, and his long-fingered right hand was deeply stained with the juice of cheap cigarettes.

The man who sat opposite to him, at the other end of the table, was unmistakably English. He was smoking a briar pipe, and though his clothes – neither new nor fashionably cut – were distinctly Parisian, his fair hair, blue eyes and rather heavy yellow moustache were eloquent of his nationality. He was bending over a large sheet of drawings on tracing paper with strained and careful attention.

He looked up suddenly, removed the pipe from his mouth, and began speaking in a torrent of French so perfect that he might very well have passed for a Parisian.

"Emile, I think I have it at last. The position of neutrality varies with the type of the machine owing to the fact of armature reaction, which distorts the magnetic field. We must therefore connect the commutating poles in series with the armature, when their windings will carry the full armature current."

Deschamps nodded, thought for a moment, and a quick technical discussion began between the two men, the sheet of drawings being pushed from one to the other, marked and annotated in the margin with pencil.

Suddenly Deschamps leant back in his chair.

"Yes," he said, "there can be no doubt about it. We're on the track, if we have not already discovered the most revolutionary theory in wireless telegraphy that the world has known as yet! What we know now, at nine o'clock on a November evening in a power station in Paris, might alter the whole course of life and society all over the world."

The Englishman nodded, with less excited but perfectly sincere agreement.

"Very well, then," cried Deschamps, "will the world ever benefit by our three years' work, our marvellous discovery? No! We're two poor devils, junior engineers of this company on two hundred and fifty francs a month. In all France no one will listen to us, and in all England also, as you have discovered. And why?"

"Oh, what is the use, Emile?" Gregory replied, cutting short his friend. "We have talked it over too many times. It's no good making a song about it. We have not got the money to carry out our experiments thoroughly and to construct our models, twenty thousand pounds – five hundred thousand francs, my friend! And as we shall never get that, no one will listen to us and it will remain for someone else to make our discovery when we're – either when we're dead or still nursing Thierry dynamos at a few francs a day."

As he spoke he rolled up the sheet of drawings and, with a deep sigh, thrust it into the inner pocket of his coat.

"Come along," he said; "we had better be getting home. It is more comfortable there than here, at any rate; and there's still one bottle of Maçon."

They left the little alcoved room, walked slowly down the hall, with a word or two to the foreman, and passed out into the office, where the engineer who was to succeed them and watch through the night was smoking with the timekeeper.

Then, arm in arm, they passed into Paris.

They were a strange couple, these two. Basil Gregory was the son of a Cambridge tutor, who early in his career had gone to Paris as the English master of a famous Lycée. He had married a Frenchwoman, who had died five years after Basil's birth. The boy had been brought up in Paris until he was old enough to go to one of the lesser public schools of England, which was all his father could afford for him. He won a science scholarship from his school to Cambridge, had worked hard and played hard at the University, until an unfortunate encounter with a proctor during one of the evenings of the "May Week" had caused him to be sent down for ever and a day. It was a stupid affair enough, but the hot-headed young man's treatment of the guardian of University morals had been too flagrant to be passed over.

Basil had returned to Paris, spent six months as a pupil in the school for electrical engineers, and had finally been apprenticed to the Société Générale. At the end of his apprenticeship his father had died, leaving him his blessing and a couple of hundred pounds. From that time to this, and he was now exactly the same age as his friend Deschamps, the young man had worked as a junior engineer at the central power station. His salary was ten pounds a month. There were innumerable people before him, and his prospects seemed absolutely nil.

As for Deschamps, he was the son of a bankrupt wine merchant of Marseilles. With a remarkable taste for science and an especial interest in electricity, he had come to Paris – after an apprenticeship at the electrical station of Monte Carlo – and was in precisely the same state as Basil Gregory. The two young men had become friends at once. Each recognised in the other a brain above the average. Both of them were intensely interested in their work, both of them had the temper of mind which flouts accepted theories and ever presses forward to new and epoch-making discovery. They were pioneers, and knew it. Without conceit, without any self-deception, they were quietly certain of their own powers. They had worked together, spending every moment of their spare time and every franc they could afford upon a new and original development in wireless telegraphy. They had arrived at a point when they were both convinced that they had wrested an entirely new secret from Nature, and at this point they found, as so many inventors and pioneers have found in the past, that the way was absolutely barred for want of capital. In their hands they were sure they held the talisman of fortune and undying renown. It was useless to them for want of money.