Melbourne's Story
:
The Chamber Of Life
Glimpses of last night came back to me and pieced themselves together
slowly while I undressed and drew the water for my bath.
Melbourne had been interested to know that I worked for Bausch, the
motion 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 late
," he replied cryptically. "Tell me
about your work."
So I told him the conception I had of the motion pictures to be made in
the 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 capable
of creating it. A picture with sound and color, reproducing faithfully
the ordinary life about us, its tints and voices, even the noises of the
city--or traffic passing in the street and newsboys crying the scores of
the afternoon games--vividly and naturally. My picture would be so
carefully constructed that the projector could be stopped at any moment
and the screen would show a scene as harmonious in design and
composition and coloring, and as powerful in feeling, as a painting by
Rockwell Kent." After a pause I added, "And I'd give almost anything if
I 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's
strange 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. "In
high school and college I had believed myself an artist. I was a good
musician, and I dabbled with painting and literature. I wanted to come
back for post-graduate work, though, and something attracted me to
science. 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 felt
the 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 man
of science. That was a quarter of a century ago. The motion picture and
the phonograph were just coming into the public eye. They seemed to
supply just the field for which I felt a need.
"I had much the same idea as yourself, except that there were no
discoveries to back it--no color photography, no method for harmonizing
sound and sight. Indeed, neither the screen nor the phonograph had come
to 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 abnormal
intensity. With sufficient income to live as I desired, I fitted up my
laboratory and concentrated on the thing I wanted to do. I spent years
at it. I gave my youth--or, at least, the best of my youth--to that
labor. Long before sound and color pictures were perfected commercially,
I had developed similar processes for myself. But they were not what I
wanted. The real thing was beyond my grasp, and I couldn't see how to
attain it.
"I worked feverishly. I think I must have worked myself into a sort of
frenzy, a sort of madness. I never mingled with people, and I became
bitter and despondent. One day my nerves broke down. I smashed
everything in my laboratory, all my models, all my apparatus, and I
burned the plans and papers I had labored over for years.
"My physician told me that I must rest and recuperate. He told me I must
interest myself again in daily life, in people and inanimate things. So
I went away. For the next few years I traveled. I tore myself away from
everything scientific and plunged into the business of living. Almost
overnight I became an adventurer, tasting sensations with the same
ardor I had once given to my work. I went back to art, to painting and
literature and music. I was a connoisseur of wines and of foods and of
women. I was an experimenter with life.
"Little by little, though, the zest of that passed away. I grew tired of
my dilettantism. And eventually I found that, even while I had been
moving about the world and experiencing its curious values, my mind had
been grappling quietly, subconsciously, with my old problem. The change
in my life had given me the wider outlook, the keener understanding
necessary to the accomplishment of my task. In the end, I went back to
it again with renewed vigor. With greater power, too, and greater
sanity."
* * * * *
Melbourne paused here. Sensing his need, I brought him a highball, and
one for myself. He tasted it with a quizzical expression.
"They call this whisky nowadays!" he observed absently, with quiet
irony. 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 a
new angle. By this time wireless telegraphy was being widely developed,
and there were many features of it that appealed to me. With the
knowledge I had gained during my first feverish years of experiment,
however, I was able to go far beyond what has been done in recent times
with radio.
"I used a system differing in many respects from that of the commercial
radio. 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 is
sufficient if I explain that my object was to evolve and fuse methods
for doing with each of the senses what radio does with sound.
Telephotography was the simplest problem--the others required an almost
superhuman amount of labor.
"But my biggest job was to combine them. And, to do that, I had to use
knowledge I had gained not only in the laboratory but in my wanderings
about the earth--not only in the colleges and salons of Europe and
America, but in the bazaars and temples of India, Egypt, China. I had to
unite the lore of ancient and modern civilizations, and I created a new
factor in electrical science. I suppose the simplest and most
intelligible name for it would be mental telepathy. But it is more than
that, and basically it is as simple and material as your own motion
pictures."
I think Melbourne would have gone on and told me more about his
discoveries. At that moment, however, he paused to reflect, and we
looked 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 and
I have found each other most interesting."
We all found our hats and went out. Melbourne and Barclay, each
apologizing for having neglected the other, said good-bye. Barclay was
tired and wanted to go to bed. He went off with the others, but
Melbourne turned my way.
"If you're not too weary of my company," he said, "I'll go with you a
little way."
"You know I'm not," I answered. "I've never been so interested in
anything 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 awhile
in silence toward the lake....
* * * * *
All this came back to me swiftly and with an effect of incoherence, much
as a dream moves, during the few moments when I was getting ready for my
bath. I laid out my shaving things, and put a record on the Victrola. I
have never quite conquered my need for music while I bathe and dress. I
think the record was a Grieg nocturne--something cool and quiet, with a
touch of acutely sweet pain and melancholy.
Then I happened to glance at a mirror for the first time. I stood amazed
and transfixed. Overnight I had grown a beard such as wanderers bring
back with them from the wilderness. Under the beard, my face seemed to
have altered somehow, to have changed in some peculiar way. Physically
it appeared younger, with an expression of calm and repose such as I had
never before seen on a man's face. But the eyes were wise and old, as
if--overnight!--the mind behind them had learned the knowledge of all
time.
Or was it overnight? I could not lose that feeling that time had passed
by since my last contact with ordinary life. It was as though, somewhere
and somehow, I had lived for weeks or months in some new plane, and
forgotten it. I felt richer and older than I had once felt, and the
things I had been remembering seemed remote.
At that moment, a chance strain from the machine in my living room
brought back a whole new group of vivid impressions, strange and yet in
a sense more familiar than my memories of Melbourne. They opened up to
me 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 the
reality to which I had returned....