Tom Tiddler's Island, стр. 41
“Fake!” was Colin’s comment, accompanied by a shrug of his shoulders. “You don’t swallow that, do you?”
“Not as it stands, I admit. Modem ideas don’t allow for any such half-way materials as argentaurum was supposed to be. But let that go, for the moment. The point is that Emmens took his argentaurum gold to the United States Mint. They tested it, found it was gold right enough, and bought it from him over the counter. Between April and December, 1897, they purchased between six and seven hundred ounces of his gold—close on eight thousand dollars’ worth of gold at the price then current. And that’s no newspaper yam.”
“Not pulling my leg, really?” Colin demanded suspiciously.
“Not in the slightest.”
“But why didn’t someone else repeat the experiments and——”
“Suppose you yourself made a discovery of that sort,” Northfleet interrupted, “what would you do? If you were a pure dyed-in-the-wool scientific man with no interests beyond the search for truth and the advancement of knowledge, you’d publish your method and throw the thing open to the world. But science is a dashed poorly-paid industry, let me tell you. Wouldn’t you be just a trifle tempted to stick to your discovery and make money out of it, instead of giving the show away? I don’t mind admitting that I’d suffer a qualm or two if I had to come to a decision myself about that. And, besides, it might be made well worth your while to keep your jaw shut. The gold industry has a lot of ramifications, and some people might prefer to pay you for secrecy—pay high, too.”
“Hadn’t seen that side of it,” Colin admitted handsomely.
“Emmens made no bones about it,” Northfleet went on. “He went into the thing purely as a case of Mammon-seeking. He said so himself: ’No disciples desired and no believers asked for’; that was his attitude when Crookes tackled him about his process. Now if you’d been in Emmens’s shoes, what line would you have taken?”
“Keep it dark, I suppose, and go on selling the gold.”
“And suppose the newspapers got hold of it and made a mild stunt of your alchemy, what then?”
“Keep on saying nothing, and let them tire of it.”
“Or else publish a wholly misleading account of your process to keep the really dangerous people—your fellow-chemists—clean off the track. Keep them guessing as long as you could. And, if they bothered you, tell them that science could go and cook itself, for all you cared. In fact, behave in a wholly unscientific manner, with a dose of rudeness thrown in.”
“And was this stunt really run at a profit?” Colin asked in a less sceptical tone.
“His figures show that he made a profit of one pound six shillings on every ounce of silver transmuted, after all costs had been deducted. Nowadays, with gold up in price, the profits would be far bigger.”
“H’m!” Colin ejaculated thoughtfully.
“I only spoke of Emmens to knock some of that cocksureness out of you, Trent,” Northfleet explained. “You can forget about him now. He hasn’t the remotest connection with the present affair. I just want you to realise that gold-making is quite on the cards, and that economical gold-making isn’t an impossibility. You can’t rule it out entirely; we’ve got a bit more careful about saying ‘Impossible!’ nowadays in chemistry. Now, does the name of Leven suggest anything to you. F. A. Leven, with a lot of the alphabet after it.”
“Lemme see.” Colin pondered. “D’you mean the scientific fellow?”
“He was Professor of Chemistry at the Westem Adelphi College in Bayswater, in our day.”
“Oh, yes!” Colin had a sudden recollection. “I remember. Didn’t he get into a row with the police over some pretty ladies in the street and get hauled off to the lock-up, once?”
“Here’s Fame!” said Northfleet sardonically. “Be a distinguished scientific man for years, and the man in the street never hears of you. Get into some squalid row at a street-corner and you print yourself on the public memory. That’s what happened in Leven’s case, anyhow. He was one of the smartest men in his own line; but his line wasn’t the sort that the man in the street could make head or tail of; so Leven’s name meant nothing to the public until he was had up at Bow Street.”
“Well, what about it, anyway?” Colin inquired. “That scandal’s ten years old now. I read about it when I was in my first year at U.C.L.”
“Don’t be in a hurry, Trent. That incident’s important. Straws show the way the wind blows.”
Colin caught the hint.
“Bad lad, eh? Bit of a rip, and all that sort of thing, you mean?”
“Draw your own conclusions,” Northfleet grunted. “I’ve stuck to the facts, pure and simple. I prefer that course, for certain reasons. But I’ll say this. Leven had very expensive tastes and he drew A salary of seven hundred pounds a year. I dare say he had a private practice to help him. Still, if there was any truth in rumours, he must have found it a stiff business. He got in amongst a lot of very queer fish, too. I don’t need to say any more. You can read between the lines yourself.”
His shrug was very expressive.
“All right. Skip that, and get on,” Colin suggested.
“Very well. The next stage of the thing is pretty vague. It was mostly a matter of hints dropped here and there to different people. He’d got on to a big thing, had Leven. He didn’t push it on the world, as if he wanted the world to know all about it. No, he seemed to let it out in spite of himself. At a dinner he’d do himself extremely well off the wine-list, and then he’d grow a bit talkative. Something would be blurted out on the spur of the moment; then he’d wake up