Ghosts by Gaslight (6 page)

The rooming house was managed by a smiling, swarthy man named Emanetoglu, whose brother actually owned it, as well as two other buildings across the river. Mr. Emanetoglu manifested himself promptly at 8 a.m. on the fifteenth of every month, to collect the rent, and to drift into corners and corridors like smoke, commenting diffidently on the condition of paint, wallpaper, and bathroom floorboards. Impossible to dislike—except by Griffith, who referred to him as “Glue Pot,” when he was not calling him “The Wog”—he had, nevertheless, the rainy air of an apologetic ghost, as much trapped in the house by fate as they by finances. On the rare occasion that any roomer was briefly late with a rent payment, he was patient but oddly sorrowful, as though the lapse were somehow his own fault.

“You shouldn’t call him that, you know,” Scheuch chided Griffith once. “He’s a decent enough chap, Turk or no.”

“I hate seeing them strutting around so, that’s all.” Griffith bit down hard on the stem of the briar pipe he had lately taken to affecting. “Never used to see a one of them west of Greek Street. Now they’re all over London, got themselves the Ritz, got themselves Lord’s, got themselves Marks and Sparks, got themselves a bloody princess, they’ll shove a white man off the sidewalk if he don’t look slippy about it. You’d think they’d won the bloody war—and by God, I think that’s what
they
think. But they
didn’t
win the bloody war!”

Vordran spoke up then, in the way he had that always made him sound as though he were talking to himself. “Didn’t they, then? They fought us to a standstill. We bled ourselves dry, for no reason that I could ever see, and now they own half the Empire. We were fools.”

“Feel that way, you ought to go and enlist for a Turk,” Griffith mumbled as he stalked away.

It was during the late summer and early fall of 18__ that Angelos became obsessed with the study of what he called “etheric telegraphy.” His top-floor room—inconvenient to reach, but immensely practical for his pigeons—quickly became a hotbed of strange small sounds, and he began increasingly to ask Scheuch for assistance in dealing with certain mathematical issues. “There’s this chap named Faraday, and another one named Maxwell, and there’s a Yank
dentist,
if you’ll believe it, with some outlandish name like Mahlon Loomis, and all of them rattling on about electromagnetism, etheric force, amperes, communal fields . . . I don’t half know what three-quarters of that gibberish means, but I have to know. Can’t say why, I just
do
.” Scheuch, who was by nature an amiable, accommodating man, did his best to oblige.

Knowing Angelos better than either Griffith or Vordran ever bothered to know anyone, Scheuch expected this new passion to burn itself out by Boxing Day, at the very latest. But time passed, and snow fell; and, if anything, Angelos’s fervor grew only more intense. He spoke to Scheuch of partial differential equations, of spark-gap transmission and a thing called a coherer, apparently as indescribable as a state of grace. He returned late from work with packages from shops Scheuch had never heard of, crammed with wire coils, hand-cranks and strangely shaped glass bottles, along with magnets—endless magnets of every form and size. He went frequently without sleep; and Scheuch, who left for work at the same time as he, often saw him stumbling downstairs, his eyes plainly fogged and his step unsteady. He would not have been at all surprised to see Angelos brusquely dismissed from Christ’s for habitual drunkenness, but somehow he continued to be well regarded by his instructors, and to keep his marks at least at a respectable level. The tattered oilcloth leftovers from the last experimental balloon gathered dust in a far corner, in company with the banjo. The pigeons disappeared.

“I cannot even say what it is that he is aiming for,” Scheuch told Griffith on one of the days when the latter was in a mood to be comparatively genial with a non-public-school man. “He speaks constantly of ethereal waves of some sort—of induction,
con
duction . . . even of being able to affect physical objects in another room, another
country
. I’d set him down as a pure crackpot, except that he’s such a
plausible
chap, if you know what I mean. One could almost believe . . .” He shrugged helplessly and raised his eyebrows.

“We had a fellow like that up at Balliol,” Griffith reflected. “Rum cove from the first. Other chaps kept bullpups, ratters—he kept a monkey, called it his
associate
. Never could find a roommate because of that beast. Always experimenting, night and day—chemistry, I suppose, from the smell, or maybe that was the monkey. Killed in the war, poor chap. Him, not the monkey. Can’t say what became of the monkey.”

“Different sort, Angelos,” Scheuch replied. “Not defending him or anything, just saying he’s not exactly round the bend. Eccentric, absolutely, but not . . . I don’t know—not
potty,
not like that. Eccentric.”

Griffith, his interest lost well before Scheuch had finished speaking, raised an eyebrow himself and said, “Jew.”

That winter was a hard one, even for London. The Russell Square rooming house, like most such, lacked any form of central heating, and all four men suffered to one degree or another from colds and chilblains. The world-famous London fog, which was not a proper fog at all, settled over the city, leaving a coal-oil film over everything; the Thames froze over, and a few starving wolves invaded from the countryside, as none had been known to do since prewar days. The men trudged to their various occupations through the dirty snow, or—in Vordran’s case—waited with hats pulled tightly down for one of the new streetcars, which might, in postwar London, be steam- or battery-driven on one day, then pulled by teams of men or horses the next. Simpson’s suffered a notable falling-off in custom, enough that Griffith was on involuntary furlough an extra day out of the week; while the bank where Scheuch was employed frequently went whole days without a single client coming in from the street. The city closed down, as though under a filthy potlid; and—with the same legendary stoicism through which they had endured the Turkish siege—Londoners simply waited for the winter to end.

But in Russell Square, Angelos remained the single cheerful soul. (“Well he might be,” Griffith sneered, “as many frozen paupers as he and his grisly crew must be slicing up these days.”) The young man still worked a full day at Christ’s Hospital, then made his way home to spend half the night making odd, frequently disquieting noises with his homebuilt machines for which Scheuch had no names. Most often he slouched into Scheuch’s rooms to slap down a scribbled-over clutch of foolscap, grumbling, “Bloody Faraday, bloody Hughes, bloody diamagnetism, makes no bloody
sense
!” and appealing for assistance with a new batch of equations. “If you could just cast an eye over these, I swear I’ll not trouble you again.
Bloody
Faraday!”

Scheuch aided as best a country day school education and a certain natural bent for mathematics allowed him to do, thus becoming the closest thing Angelos possessed to a colleague, without in the least comprehending exactly what the other could possibly be driving toward. As he commented warily to Vordran, “It’s a good bit like playing blindman’s buff, where your eyes are covered and you’re spun around until you can’t tell where you’re facing, or which way anything is. I don’t know what on earth the man has in mind.”

Much to his surprise, the older man answered him slowly and thoughtfully, saying, “Well, many of the people he quotes to you share an interest in wireless communication. Who knows—he may yet have you talking to people in Africa or China, this time next year. If you know anyone there, that is to say,” and he made the little half-hiccough sound that qualified as a chuckle with Vordran.

Scheuch gave a weary shrug, spreading his hands, as he found himself doing more and more when asked about Angelos’s behavior. “That could be what he’s after, for all of me—as much time as I’ve spent with the fellow, I confess I haven’t the least idea.” Turning away, he added, “I do sometimes fancy I hear voices in his rooms, you know. Through the door, when I’m passing.”

“Voices?” Vordran had a longer attention span than Griffith. “What sort of voices?”

“
Pieces
of voices,” Scheuch answered vaguely. “Snatches, phrases . . . probably not voices at all, just Angelos talking to himself, the way he does.” Vordran stood looking after him for some while, rubbing his chin.

The winter passed. The snow melted, leaving the city gutters running with soiled water; hawthorn and horse chestnut trees began to bloom in Victoria Park, and bluebells cautiously replaced the snowdrops of Highgate. The women of London began to be seen in the filmy headscarves and baggy iridescent pantaloons that had become the highest style since Princess Maude had worn them to a state dinner in Prince Selim Ali’s honor. Griffith was fully employed at Simpson’s once more, while the Bishopsgate firm where Vordran would never be a clerk bustled with new clients suing their families. Scheuch spent most days at the bank on his feet, jovial and patient as ever as he handled other people’s money and tended the firm’s shining brass calculators. London—at least the London they three knew—was London again.

And Angelos, one pleasant Sunday afternoon, invited them all to tea in his rooms.

Scheuch, being the only one who had spent any length of time there, was far less taken aback than Vordran or Griffith by the cheery chaos of the sitting room, which—like Angelos’s bedroom and the small alcove which served him as a closet—did double duty as laboratory and storage space. Tea was brewed over the fireplace, identical to the hearths they all had, and served at a large round table that had once been a chandler’s cable spool. Vordran sat in the one reasonably sturdy armchair, Scheuch on the precarious settee. Griffith stood.

Angelos began slowly, uncharacteristically hesitant, plainly feeling for words. “I believe I have something interesting to tell you. To show you, rather—and it is entirely likely that you three will be the only chaps I ever
do
show it to. It’s not something I can exactly take down to the Patent Office, as you’ll see.” He started to add something else, but halted, and only repeated lamely, “As you’ll see.”

Vordran cleared his throat, “May I make the occasion perhaps a bit easier for you? I’ve already suggested to Scheuch here that you are probably attempting to create some form of long-distance communication, such as others are seeking in France and Germany, and—I believe—America. Am I correct?”

“Well,” Angelos said. “Yes. I mean . . . well, yes and no.
Yes,
that was how I started out—
yes,
that’s what I got caught up in like Faraday and Maxwell and those fellows. I mean, imagine being able to push a button, turn a knob, and immediately be speaking to someone on the other side of the world. Of
course,
I was . . . oh, I’m sorry—more tea, anyone? Biscuit?”

No one wanted either, for excellent reasons. Angelos continued. “But something else happened . . . yes, something rather else. I can’t quite explain it yet, even to myself, so I’ll just have to show you. If you’ll give me a moment.”

He hurried into his bedroom and returned quickly with an armload of assorted wires, a fragile-appearing copper disc in a linen wrapper, and a pair of metal frames. One of these had a spindle that was plainly meant for the disc, and a hand-crank to turn it; the other featured a small dial and a needle like that of a compass, mounted on a pivot and surrounded by a tightly wound copper coil. “In any case,” he said, “whatever I was after, electricity was my main problem from the start—can’t do anything without electricity, can you? Had to produce it myself, since I couldn’t afford any sort of voltaic battery, so I did what I could, stealing my betters’ ideas. You mount the disc on the generator—so—and connect your galvanometer—that’s what this thing is, measures the current, you see—and then you crank the, ah, crank, and there you are. Child’s play”—he grinned shyly—“speaking as a child.”

He gripped the hand-crank lightly, but did not turn it. “Mind you, it’s really not very efficient, for what it does. You get counterflow in certain areas, and there’s a lot of energy wasted heating up the disc itself. But I’ve mounted a couple of magnets on the disc, as you see, and that does seem to settle things down a bit. I’m still tinkering with it—it’s all hit or miss, really.” He spread his arms in a mock-dramatic attitude. “All my own work, as those screever chaps who draw on the pavement say. And that’s how
I
spent my Christmas hols.”

Griffith’s Oxford drawl cut across the younger man’s enthusiasm like a shark’s fin in a bathtub. “Perfectly charming, Angelos, utterly captivating, but people are producing electricity left and right everywhere you turn. Can’t throw a brick these days, can you, without hitting someone’s new toy, someone’s
ee
-lectro-whatsit, though what it’ll all come to in the end, I’m sure I can’t say. What makes
your
toy—ah—unique, distinctive? If I may ask?”

For a moment it seemed to Scheuch that Angelos might actually cry, not so much at Griffith’s words as at his tone, which deliberately, precisely and finally implied the insuperable distance between a Balliol College man (if not a graduate) and a Jewish medical student who would never quite lose his East End accent. Then Angelos said quietly, “Right. Quite right. Yes. I’ll show you.”

He reached into his coat pocket and removed a common stethoscope, of the sort that first-years at Christ’s Hospital aspired earnestly toward and wore like a badge of honor after its awarding. “Really a perfect machine, when you think about it,” he remarked, fondling it like a cherished pet. “I don’t imagine anyone’ll ever improve on old Cammann, I really don’t. No moving parts—nothing to break down—and no sound made by the human body has the least chance of escaping it. Seemed to me that it might work just as well when it came to . . . voices.”

“Voices.” Scheuch looked around at the other two men. “There,
told
you I thought I heard voices.”