I recognized the more readily the separate and inhuman vitality this Case of ours was beginning to assume when I carefully considered its action upon myself. My connection with it was slight by comparison with that of some of the others, but I was aware of its operation. The attitudes into which it began to constrain me were not quite natural attitudes. It exercised pressure. What pressure?

Well, to begin with, this pressure—that I began to find it difficult to leave it alone. Both at home and at the office of the Daily Circus it intruded between me and the work I ought to have been getting on with. Little fleeting pictures began to interpose themselves. Sometimes I would find myself looking fixedly at a galley-slip or a page still damp from the proving-press and seeing, not the thing in my hand, but Joan Merrow running in with the children from the garden again; at home my page of manuscript would blur and there in a doorway Philip Esdaile would stand, his eyes dancing with a stilly excitement, the curaÇao and the candle once more in his hands. And this, in my curious trade, is a serious matter. Out of precisely these insubstantialities I have to contrive to pay my rent and income-tax and to provide my bread-and-butter. I will not go so far as to say that I dreamed of the Case at night, but it began to play the dickens with my work. Unable to settle down to it, I found the Park drawing me instead, and even in the afternoons, which in ordinary commercial honesty were not my time at all, I began to put in the briefest and most perfunctory appearances at the office. I contented myself with the appearance of busyness, and wondered how long it would be before my chief caught me out.

In this frame of mind I happened one afternoon, by the merest chance, to run across Cecil Hubbard. I had dropped into a Technical and Scientific Exhibition of some sort, and I had thought I had seen Hubbard's white-topped cap and foursquare back in the downstairs rooms, but had lost them again. It was upstairs, a quarter of an hour later, that I found him.

He was watching another man, evidently an attendant or official of the Exhibition, who wore a double telephone-receiver about his ears and was slowly turning the handle of an instrument that at a first glance resembled an overgrown typewriter. Hubbard was peering into the mechanism. Then, at the invitation of the other man, he removed his cap and clasped the receiver about his head. The official continued to turn the handle.

"Hallo!" I said, coming up. "May one ask what it is?"

Hubbard turned. "Hallo, what are you doing here?" was his greeting. Then to the attendant, "What do you say the thing's called?"

It was the optophone, and perhaps you may have seen, or rather heard it. It is an instrument for enabling a totally blind man to read a page of ordinary print. I myself had never heard of the thing, and am not sure that I give a technically correct description of it now, but, as I understand it, the page travels along the carriage in such a way that each letter in turn passes over a tiny ray of light that is directed through a morsel of selenium. The letter causes an interruption; a lower-case "l," for example, which is a straight line, making one kind of break, but an "i," which is the "l" with the dot cut off the top, a different one; and so with the other letters. The transmutation is of light into sound, and the official assured us that with a very little practice the ear learns to distinguish the minute variations in the telephonic receiver without difficulty.

Remembering Hubbard's former (to me lunatic) conjectures that day when I had called on him at the Admiralty, I thought it an odd chance that I should come upon him examining such a thing as this optophone seemed to be; but our talk did not begin with that. Leaving the instrument, we turned away between glass showcases of fabrics and British glass and brilliant dyes and crystals and approached a window-bay that looked out on a gray courtyard.

"Well, what are you doing here?" he said again cheerfully. "It's a long time since you looked me up."

I told him that I went to all sorts of places in search of a little clowning for the Circus, and added that it was precisely the same distance from his place to mine as from mine to his. He laughed.

"I should have thought this was out of your line," he replied. "Well, what's the news?"

It was not likely that Hubbard had forgotten incidents so remarkable as those of that Lennox Street breakfast-party. Moreover, I could see he was sorry he had met me at this dead hour of the afternoon; he always talked better over lunch at Simpson's, with a Bronx or a Martini to start off with. Failing these, there was nothing for it but a cup of tea to wash down our chat, and as a matter of fact it was at a Slater's place in the Strand, with a rather good little band of violin, 'cello and piano that, a quarter of an hour later, we settled down.

"Well, Esdaile's taken your friend Chummy away," I observed when our teapots had been brought.

"Oh, he has, has he?" said Hubbard. "Queer business that, wasn't it? Have you made anything of it all yet?"

"I can't say I have; but then I'm rather at a disadvantage in not knowing your friend. Tell me something about him."

"Well—what, for example?"

"As I know nothing you can't go far wrong," I replied.

Music is one of the Commander's passions, and, as I say, that Slater band was not too bad. I think it was the "Valse Triste" that sent him off into a reverie. The young creature who played the fiddle had bobbed hair and was rather an attractive sort of sylph, and the Commander's blue eyes with the dark dots in them were fixed on her intricately-moving fingers.

Then he came out of his musing with a sudden jerk. What I especially like about Hubbard is that he usually knows what you want to know, and does not cease to feel the working of your mind even through a longish silence.

"Extraordinary thing," were his words as he came out of that silence. "It seems to be like the wind—blows whither it listeth. You look for it where you'd expect it and it isn't there, and then up it pops in a place you'd never think of looking for it."

This sounded to me rather like some of my own Publicity conclusions; but "What does?" I prompted him.

"Oh, the fluence—the gism—the real stuff—the thing you know when you see it but haven't got a name for," he replied off-handedly. "I suppose you writer-fellows call it genius.... How old's Smith? Twenty-four I should say, so it isn't a matter of accumulated experience. He couldn't be more dead right if he was a hundred-and-four."

"Right about what?"

"Well, about his job. Aviation. What it's for, just as much as ever now the War's over."

"Tell me—but remember I'm a journalist."

"All the better," he replied promptly. "The more you rub it in the better. The War only ended a few months ago, but a good many people seem to be trying to think there's never been one. That's right enough from the economic point of view, of course—gets people back to work again—but there is the other side, and I wish you would rub it in."

"Well, what do you want rubbed in?"

The eyes that had caught mine in Esdaile's studio rested on my face again now. Then he pulled out a fat cigarette.

"Civil aviation's for War, of course—the next War," he said almost contemptuously. "You're not one of those who think it's for express-letters, are you? Or carrying a cheap-jack Bradford agent to make a dicker in wool? That's where so many of you newspaper fellows make the mistake. You're all so clever at disguising the truth. You don't take people into your confidence enough."

Professionally this began to interest me. The public, its interests and its confidence are supposed to be my business.

"Go on," I said.

"Well, you don't," Hubbard repeated. He has rather a rapid and abrupt manner of speech that enables him better than anybody I know to carry off the things men are usually a little shy about. "The Bradford man has his affairs, I know, and it may sometimes be an advantage to get a letter there a couple of hours quicker, but that's not the point. There are two points, as a matter of fact. One's the training of your men, and the other's continuity of manufacture. If this country forgets either of 'em it may as well chuck its hand in. Why," he exclaimed in a phrase that arrested me in a quite remarkable way as chiming in so exactly with my own private observations, "look at the Elizabethans! What did they do? They wanted ships and they wanted sailors. So they developed the North Sea fishing industry. Gave 'em all sorts of bonuses and rebates and privileges. Not for the sake of a few dead fish. Not on your life. It was to keep the men in training and the shipyards running and the Spaniard out. And it's the same with civil aviation to-day."

I won't say that I had never thought of this before. But one thinks of all sorts of things that evaporate in the thinking, so that for practical purposes they might just as well never have been thought. It was his energy and certitude and single-mindedness that gave it all its force. And although I am a journalist, that is why I think that all our print is dead and cold until it is vivified by the heard and passionate voice. Oh, I know the stock argument—that for one that is reached by the human voice a thousand are influenced by the printed word. Well, so they are, until a contradictory word is printed and both messages jam to a standstill. But you can't jam the pentecostal flames that give the prophets utterance. I am inclined to think that if there is one indestructible thing in the world it is the Uttered Word. Naturally I refrain from dwelling too much on this in the office of the Daily Circus. But it lies behind every word of our print for all that.

"Another thing," Hubbard continued. "I don't know much about the Elizabethans, but I'm prepared to bet that a good many of 'em were youngsters. While old Burleigh was nodding, some infant just out of his cradle was getting away with it. At all events, there's no reason that I can see why he shouldn't as well be twenty as ninety—every practical reason why he should, in fact."

"Do you mean young Smith's like that?" I suddenly asked.

Perhaps it wasn't quite fair. When a man has the pluck to talk on these lines it is rather a cold douche to bring it all down to one finite and fallible human being. Even the pentecostal flame may flicker at times. But I noticed that Hubbard did not say No. Indeed, he did not answer me at all. His eyes were on the child with the fiddle again and the living, climbing fingers.

"Clever hands, aren't they?" he said. "Wish I could play the fiddle."