Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 by Lord Kelvin's Machine Page A

to do with me—or with this story except in a
peripheral way.
                   My father-in-law, William Keeble, had been
teaching me the trade of toy-making, and I sat there meddling with an
India-rubber elephant with enormous ears that I had finished assembling that
very morning. Its trunk would rotate when you pushed its belly, and the ears
would flap, and out of its mouth would come the magnified noise of ratcheting
gears, which sounded, if you had an imagination, like trumpeting—or at least
like the trumpeting of a rubber elephant with mechanical nonsense inside. It
was funny to look at, though.
                   I remember wondering what it would have been
like if Keeble himself had built it, and thinking that
I at least ought to have given it a hat, maybe with a bird in it, and I
listened idly to Godall and the old fellow talk about numismatics and about a
clockwork match that the man was peddling. Then he left, very cheerfully,
entirely forgetting his parcel of matches and going away up Rupert Street toward Brewer.
                   A minute passed, neither of us noticing the
parcel. Then Godall spotted it and shouted damnation, or something, and I was
up and out the door with it under my arm and with my elephant in my other hand.
I ran up the street, dodging past people until I reached the corner, where I
found the old man in a tearoom trying to sell little cheesecloth bags of green
tea that could be dropped into a cup of boiling water and then retrieved
again—not for the purpose of being reused, mind you, but so that the leaves
wouldn't muck up the brew. The proprietor read tea leaves, though, as well as
palms and scone crumbs, and wasn't at all interested in the invention, although
I thought it was fairly clever and said so when I returned his automatic
matches. He said that he admired my elephant, too, and I believe he did. We
chatted over a cup of tea for ten minutes and then I strolled back down,
thinking correctly that St. Ives would have shown up by then.
                   There at the side of the street, half a block
up from the cigar divan, was a hansom cab, rather broken-down and with a
curtain of shabby velvet drawn across the window. As I was passing it, the
curtain pushed aside and a face popped out. I thought at first it was a woman,
but it wasn't; it was a man with curled hair to his shoulders. His complexion
was awful, and he had a sort of greasy look about him and a high effeminate
collar cut out of a flowery chintz. It was his eyes, though, that did the
trick. They were filled with a mad unfocused passion, as if everything around
him—the cab, the buildings along Rupert Street , me—signified something to him. His glance
shot back and forth in a cockeyed vigilance, and he said, almost whispering,
"What is that?"
                   He was looking up the street at the time, so I
looked up the street too, but saw nothing remarkable. "Beg your
pardon," I said.
                   "That there."
                   He peered down the street now, so I did too.
                   "There."
                   Now it was up into the air, toward a bank of
casements on the second floor. There was a man staring out of one, smoking a
cigar.
                   "Him?" I
asked.
                   He gave me such a look that I thought I'd
landed upon it at last, but then I saw that I was wrong.
                   "That. In your
hand."
                   The elephant. He
blinked rapidly, as if he had something in his eye. "I like that," he
said, and he squinted at me as if he knew me. There was something in his face,
too, that I almost recognized. But he was clearly mad, and the madness,
somehow, had given him a foreign cast, as if he were a citizen from nowhere on
earth and had scrambled his features into an almost impenetrable disguise.
                   I felt sorry for him, to tell