The Chamber of Life Read online

  Melbourne's Story

  Glimpses of last night came back to me and pieced themselves togetherslowly while I undressed and drew the water for my bath.

  Melbourne had been interested to know that I worked for Bausch, themotion picture producer.

  "Perhaps you could be of aid to me some time," he said thoughtfully.

  "In what way, Mr. Melbourne?" I asked him.

  "I can talk to you about that later," he replied cryptically. "Tell meabout your work."

  So I told him the conception I had of the motion pictures to be made inthe future. He listened with keen interest.

  "I visualize a production going beyond anything done today," I said,"and yet one that would be possible now, if there were someone capableof creating it. A picture with sound and color, reproducing faithfullythe ordinary life about us, its tints and voices, even the noises of thecity--or traffic passing in the street and newsboys crying the scores ofthe afternoon games--vividly and naturally. My picture would be socarefully constructed that the projector could be stopped at any momentand the screen would show a scene as harmonious in design andcomposition and coloring, and as powerful in feeling, as a painting byRockwell Kent." After a pause I added, "And I'd give almost anything ifI could do it myself."

  Melbourne looked at me sympathetically, reflectively.

  "It might be possible," he said after a time.

  "What do you mean, Mr. Melbourne?" He puffed at a cigar, and considered.

  "It's not something I could explain to you off-hand," he said. "It'sstrange and it's new. It needs preparation."

  "I'm ready to listen," I said with eager interest. He smiled.

  "Perhaps I had better tell you a little of my life."

  "Go on," I answered briefly.

  "I had ideas much like yours when I was a boy," he began his story. "Inhigh school and college I had believed myself an artist. I was a goodmusician, and I dabbled with painting and literature. I wanted to comeback for post-graduate work, though, and something attracted me toscience. I had put off studying mathematics until my graduating year,only to find that it fascinated me. And I was curious about physics.

  * * * * *

  "While I was studying for my Master's degree and my Doctorate, I feltthe need of some interest to merge all the divergent sides of my nature.Something that would give me a chance to be both the artist and the manof science. That was a quarter of a century ago. The motion picture andthe phonograph were just coming into the public eye. They seemed tosupply just the field for which I felt a need.

  "I had much the same idea as yourself, except that there were nodiscoveries to back it--no color photography, no method for harmonizingsound and sight. Indeed, neither the screen nor the phonograph had cometo be regarded yet as essentially more than a toy. But, like yourself,I had vision. And enthusiasm. And an intense desire to create.

  "After I had taken my degrees, I went to work with almost abnormalintensity. With sufficient income to live as I desired, I fitted up mylaboratory and concentrated on the thing I wanted to do. I spent yearsat it. I gave my youth--or, at least, the best of my youth--to thatlabor. Long before sound and color pictures were perfected commercially,I had developed similar processes for myself. But they were not what Iwanted. The real thing was beyond my grasp, and I couldn't see how toattain it.

  "I worked feverishly. I think I must have worked myself into a sort offrenzy, a sort of madness. I never mingled with people, and I becamebitter and despondent. One day my nerves broke down. I smashedeverything in my laboratory, all my models, all my apparatus, and Iburned the plans and papers I had labored over for years.

  "My physician told me that I must rest and recuperate. He told me I mustinterest myself again in daily life, in people and inanimate things. SoI went away. For the next few years I traveled. I tore myself away fromeverything scientific and plunged into the business of living. Almostovernight I became an adventurer, tasting sensations with the sameardor I had once given to my work. I went back to art, to painting andliterature and music. I was a connoisseur of wines and of foods and ofwomen. I was an experimenter with life.

  "Little by little, though, the zest of that passed away. I grew tired ofmy dilettantism. And eventually I found that, even while I had beenmoving about the world and experiencing its curious values, my mind hadbeen grappling quietly, subconsciously, with my old problem. The changein my life had given me the wider outlook, the keener understandingnecessary to the accomplishment of my task. In the end, I went back toit again with renewed vigor. With greater power, too, and greatersanity."

  * * * * *

  Melbourne paused here. Sensing his need, I brought him a highball, andone for myself. He tasted it with a quizzical expression.

  "They call this whisky nowadays!" he observed absently, with quietirony. I wanted to hear the rest of his account.

  "Go on with your story, sir," I begged him.

  "The rest is simple enough--but it's the meat of the narrative. You see,I had to revise the way I was going about my work, and I went at it at anew angle. By this time wireless telegraphy was being widely developed,and there were many features of it that appealed to me. With theknowledge I had gained during my first feverish years of experiment,however, I was able to go far beyond what has been done in recent timeswith radio.

  "I used a system differing in many respects from that of the commercialradio. We haven't time now to go into all that--I can tell you later,and it involves much that is highly technical and still secret. It issufficient if I explain that my object was to evolve and fuse methodsfor doing with each of the senses what radio does with sound.Telephotography was the simplest problem--the others required an almostsuperhuman amount of labor.

  "But my biggest job was to combine them. And, to do that, I had to useknowledge I had gained not only in the laboratory but in my wanderingsabout the earth--not only in the colleges and salons of Europe andAmerica, but in the bazaars and temples of India, Egypt, China. I had tounite the lore of ancient and modern civilizations, and I created a newfactor in electrical science. I suppose the simplest and mostintelligible name for it would be mental telepathy. But it is more thanthat, and basically it is as simple and material as your own motionpictures."

  I think Melbourne would have gone on and told me more about hisdiscoveries. At that moment, however, he paused to reflect, and welooked up to find the others leaving. The bottle of Scotch was empty.

  "Ready, Melbourne?" Barclay called. We rose.

  "I didn't realize it was so late," Melbourne answered. "Mr. Barrett andI have found each other most interesting."

  We all found our hats and went out. Melbourne and Barclay, eachapologizing for having neglected the other, said good-bye. Barclay wastired and wanted to go to bed. He went off with the others, butMelbourne turned my way.

  "If you're not too weary of my company," he said, "I'll go with you alittle way."

  "You know I'm not," I answered. "I've never been so interested inanything before. It sounds like a chapter from Wells, or Jules Verne."

  He smiled, with a little shake of his head, and we walked on for awhilein silence toward the lake....

  * * * * *

  All this came back to me swiftly and with an effect of incoherence, muchas a dream moves, during the few moments when I was getting ready for mybath. I laid out my shaving things, and put a record on the Victrola. Ihave never quite conquered my need for music while I bathe and dress. Ithink the record was a Grieg nocturne--something cool and quiet, with atouch of acutely sweet pain and melancholy.

  Then I happened to glance at a mirror for the first time. I stood amazedand transfixed. Overnight I had grown a beard such as wanderers bringback with them from the wilderness. Under the beard, my face seemed tohave altered somehow, to have changed in some peculiar way. Physicallyit appeared younger, with an expression of calm and repose such as I hadnever before seen on a man's face. But the eyes were wise and o
ld, asif--overnight!--the mind behind them had learned the knowledge of alltime.

  Or was it overnight? I could not lose that feeling that time had passedby since my last contact with ordinary life. It was as though, somewhereand somehow, I had lived for weeks or months in some new plane, andforgotten it. I felt richer and older than I had once felt, and thethings I had been remembering seemed remote.

  At that moment, a chance strain from the machine in my living roombrought back a whole new group of vivid impressions, strange and yet ina sense more familiar than my memories of Melbourne. They opened up tome a different life in which I seemed to have participated by chance,and a life which had, at first sight, no point of contact with thereality to which I had returned....