The Eternal Adam and other stories (17 page)

‘One thousand dollars!’

‘A thousand dollars,’ repeated the
auctioneer. ‘Any advance on 1,000? A thousand dollars for the first ticket to
the concert. Do I hear another bid?’

In the silences between outbursts, a low
rustling sound spread through the hall. In spite of myself, I was impressed.
Turner, sure that victory was in his grasp, looked smugly at his admirers. He
held in his hand a sheaf of bank notes from one of the 600 banks that do
business in the United States, and waved them about, shouting again: ‘One
thousand dollars!’

Then a new voice rang out. ‘Three thousand
dollars!’ I turned my head to see who had spoken.

‘Hurrah!’ shouted the excited crowd.

‘Three thousand dollars,’ repeated the
auctioneer.

In the face of such competition the hatter
turned and fled with his head down, completely unnoticed in the excitement.

‘Sold for 3,000 dollars!’ cried the
auctioneer.

Up strode Augustus Hopkins in person, the
free citizen of the United States of America. Obviously he was well on the way
to becoming a famous man. All he needed now was to have anthems composed in his
honour.

I escaped from the hall with difficulty and
just barely managed to push my way through the 10,000 people standing at the
door to greet the triumphant purchaser. As soon as he came in sight he was
greeted with shouts of praise. For the second time since the previous evening,
he was taken back to the Washington Hotel by the exuberant populace. He greeted
them with a mixture of modesty and arrogance, and that evening, in response to
popular demand, he made an appearance on the hotel balcony, to the applause of
the delirious crowd.

‘Well, what do you make of it?’ Mr Wilson
asked me later, when I told him about the day’s events.

‘As a Frenchman and a Parisian, I think
Madame Sontag will be kind enough to let me have a ticket without paying 15,000
francs for it.’

‘I think so too,’ said Mr Wilson, ‘but if
this Mr Hopkins is clever enough, the 3,000 dollars he spent may bring him
100,000. A man as eccentric as that can make millions just by stooping down and
picking them up.’

‘What kind of man can this Hopkins be?’
wondered Mrs Melvil. At that very moment, the entire city of Albany was asking
the same question.

That question was answered by the events of
the next few days. The steamboat from New York unloaded more packing cases,
even more extraordinary in shape and size than the first. One of them, which
looked like a house, carelessly (or carefully, depending on one’s point of
view) got stuck in a narrow street on the outskirts of Albany. It could go no
farther, and there it had to stay, motionless as a block of stone. During the
next twenty-four hours the entire population of the town arrived on the scene.
Hopkins took advantage of the crowds to make fiery speeches, lashing out at the
ignorant architects and even suggesting that he would have the plan of the
streets changed to make way for his freight.

The feasible solutions were soon reduced to
two. The packing case, whose contents were the object of widespread curiosity,
could be broken open, or the tumbledown house impeding its progress could be
demolished. The curious citizens of Albany would no doubt have preferred the
first option, but Hopkins vetoed it. Still, something had to be done. Traffic
in the neighbourhood was blocked and the police were threatening to get a court
order to have the packing case broken up. Hopkins solved the problem by buying
the offending house and having it torn down.

This last little touch, as might have been
expected, brought him to the pinnacle of his renown. His name and story made
the rounds of every living room in town. He was the topic of conversation at
the Independent Club and the Union Club. In the Albany cafés, wagers were laid
as to what this mysterious man was planning to do. The newspapers indulged in
the wildest speculation, temporarily diverting public attention from the
problems that had recently arisen between Cuba and the United States. I believe
it even led to a duel between a merchant and one of the town’s officials, and
that Hopkins’s backer emerged victorious on that occasion.

When Madame Sontag gave her concert, which
I attended with much less fanfare than our hero did, his presence all but
changed the entire purpose of the gathering.

Eventually the mystery was explained, and
soon Augustus Hopkins stopped trying to conceal it. He was simply a businessman
who had come to set up a kind of World’s Fair just outside Albany. He was
planning to operate independently one of those colossal undertakings which up
until then had been the monopoly of governments.

He had bought for this purpose a vast tract
of uncultivated land about ten miles from Albany, with nothing standing on it
but the ruins of Fort William, which at one time protected English trading
posts along the Canadian frontier. He was already in the process of hiring
workmen to make a start on his gigantic projects. His immense packing cases no
doubt contained tools and construction equipment.

As soon as this news reached the Albany
stock market, it aroused an unusually keen interest among the traders. They all
wanted an option to buy shares from the great entrepreneur. Although Hopkins
gave vague replies to all their questions, an artificial market soon sprang up
for these imaginary shares, and from then on the affair began to snowball.

‘This man is a very clever speculator,’ Mr
Wilson remarked to me one day. ‘I don’t know whether he’s a millionaire or a
beggar, because you’d have to be either Job or Rothschild to undertake such a
venture, but he’ll certainly make a huge fortune.’

‘I don’t know what to believe any more, my
dear Mr Wilson. And I don’t know which to admire more, a man with nerve enough
to embark on such an enterprise, or a country that supports and promotes it,
and asks nothing in return.’

‘That’s the road to success, my dear sir.’

‘Or to ruin,’ I replied.

‘Well,’ retorted Mr Wilson, ‘let me tell
you that in America, a bankruptcy makes everyone rich and ruins no one.’

My only arguments against Mr Wilson were
the facts themselves, and so I waited impatiently for the outcome of all the
manoeuvring and publicity, which I found extremely interesting. I collected
every titbit of news about Augustus Hopkins’s venture, and every day I read
reports of it in the newspapers. The first group of workmen had left for the
site and the ruins of Fort William were beginning to disappear. The only topic
of conversation was these construction projects, and what their ultimate
purpose might be. Suggestions poured in from all sides, from New York and
Albany, Boston and Baltimore. ‘Musical instruments’.

‘daguerreotype pictures’, ‘abdominal
supports’, ‘centrifugal pumps’, ‘square pianos’ were some of the guesses vying
for attention, and the American imagination was going full speed ahead. It was
stated as a fact that a whole new town would spring up around the Exposition.
It was rumoured that Augustus Hopkins planned to found a city that would rival
New Orleans, and to name it after himself. Next came the theory that this city
(which would of course be fortified because of its proximity to the Canadian
border) would shortly become the capital of the United States! And so on, and
so on.

While these and many other exaggerated
ideas were circulating through every brain, the hero of the moment had almost
nothing to say. He paid regular visits to the Albany Stock Exchange, made
inquiries about business matters, took note of recently arrived shipments, but
remained tight-lipped about his own extensive plans. It was surprising that
such a powerful man had put out no actual publicity. Perhaps he considered
himself above using everyday methods of starting up an enterprise and intended
to do it purely on his own merits.

Developments had reached this point when, one fine morning, the
New
York Herald
carried the following item:

As everyone
knows, work on the Albany World’s Fair is progressing rapidly. By now the ruins
of old Fort William have disappeared and foundations are being dug for splendid
new buildings. There is widespread enthusiasm for the project. The other day a
workman’s pick turned up the remains of an enormous skeleton that had evidently
lain buried there for thousands of years. We hasten to add that this discovery
will in no way delay work on what will be the eighth wonder of the world, right
here in the United States.

I paid no more attention to these few lines
than to any of the countless brief news items that clutter up American
newspapers. Little did I suspect the use that would be made of them later. As
Augustus Hopkins told it, the new discovery took on an extraordinary
importance. He was now as free with his speeches, stories, theories, and
deductions about the unearthing of this prodigious skeleton as he had been
reluctant before to explain the plans that lay behind his great undertaking. It
seemed as if all his speculations and money-making schemes were wrapped up in
that one newly discovered item. The discovery had come about, apparently, in a
miraculous fashion. For three days, excavations had been under way, on
Hopkins’s orders, aimed at reaching the other end of the gigantic fossil, but
still without results. No one could tell how big it might eventually prove to
be. It was Hopkins himself, while he was supervising the excavation of a deep
hole about 200 feet from the first one, who finally made out the end of the
cyclopean carcass. The news immediately spread with lightning speed, and the
discovery, unique in the annals of geology, became an event of world-wide
significance.

The impressionable Americans, with their
tendency to revise and exaggerate, soon spread the news around, adding to its
importance to suit their own tastes. People wondered about the origin of these
huge remains and about the significance of their presence in the hitherto
undisturbed earth. The Albany Institute undertook a study on the topic.

I must admit that this question held more
interest for me than the future splendours of the Palace of Industry or the
eccentric speculations of the New World. I began watching for every little
incident related to it. That was not hard to do, for the press served it up in
every possible way. I was even fortunate enough to learn about it in detail
from citizen Hopkins himself.

Since his arrived in Albany, this
extraordinary man had been sought out by the high society of the city. In the
United States, where the merchant class are the nobility, it was only natural
that such a venturesome speculator should be received with the honours due to
his rank. And so he was welcomed in clubs and at family teas with
characteristic eagerness. I met him one evening in Mr Wilson’s living room.
Naturally, there was no talk of anything but the topic of the day, and in any
case. Mr Hopkins did not wait to be asked about it.

He gave us an interesting, thorough,
scholarly, but witty description of the discovery, how it had come about, and
what its unforeseeable consequences might be. At the same time, he hinted that
he was considering how he might make a profit from it.

‘But,’ he told us, ‘our work has had to
stop for the moment, because I have already put up some of my new buildings
between the first and last excavations, where the two extremities of the
skeleton were uncovered.’

‘But are you sure,’ someone asked, ‘that
the two ends of the animal are joined together under the unexplored area?’

‘There isn’t the slightest doubt about
that,’ Hopkins assured his questioners. ‘Judging from the bone fragments we
have dug up so far, the creature must be gigantic – much, much bigger than the
famous mastodon that was discovered in the Ohio valley some time ago.’

‘Do you really think so?’ exclaimed a Mr
Cornut, who was a naturalist of sorts, and ‘did’ science in the same way as his
fellow-citizens did business.

‘I’m sure of it,’ replied Hopkins. ‘The
monster’s structure shows that it obviously belonged to the order of
pachyderms, for it possesses all the characteristics so well described by Mr de
Humboldt.’

‘It’s really a shame,’ I interjected, ‘that
the whole skeleton can’t be dug up.’

‘And what’s stopping us?’ Cornut asked
excitedly.

‘Why ... the buildings that have just been
put up ...’

I had hardly uttered these words, which
seemed to me nothing more than plain common sense, when I found myself
surrounded by a circle of disdainful smiles. To these worthy merchants, it
seemed a very simple matter to tear everything down, even the largest of
buildings, in order to unearth a creature that dated from the time of the
flood. No one was surprised, therefore, when Hopkins announced that he had
already given orders to that effect. Everyone congratulated him heartily, and opined
that fortune was right in favouring bold and enterprising men. For myself, I
offered him my warmest compliments and promised to be one of the first to come
and see his marvellous discovery. I even offered to go to Exhibition Park (a
term that was by now in the public domain), but he asked me to wait until the
excavations had been completed, for it was still too soon to estimate how huge
the fossil really was.

Four days later, the
New York Herald
published new details about the gigantic skeleton. The carcass was not, the
writer declared superciliously, that of a mammoth, or a mastodon, or a
megatherium, or a pterodactyl, or a plesiosaurus. The remains of all the
above-mentioned creatures belong to the tertiary era, or to the Mesozoic at the
very earliest, whereas the excavations that Hopkins was directing went right to
the primal layers of the earth’s crust, in which no fossil had ever been
discovered before. This display of science (of which the American merchants
understood very little) aroused considerable excitement. What other conclusion
could be drawn but that this monster – since it was neither a mollusc, nor a
pachyderm, nor a rodent, nor a ruminant, nor a carnivore, nor a sea mammal – was
a man? And that this man was a giant more than forty metres tall? No one could
now deny the existence of a race of titans older than
homo sapiens.
If
this were true (and everyone agreed that it was), even the best established
geological theories would have to be changed, for fossils had been found well
below the diluvian deposits, indicating that they had been buried there before
the flood.