Bones in London - Edgar Wallace [60]
“Oh!” said Bones, who knew Mr Jelf well. “I thought it was something like that.”
“I’d like to tell you, Tibbetts,” said Jelf regretfully, “but you know how particular one has to be when one is dealing with matters affecting the integrity of ministers.”
“I know, I know,” responded Bones, wilfully dense, “especially huffy old vicars, dear old thing.”
“Oh, them!” said Jelf, extending his contempt to the rules which govern the employment of the English language. “I don’t worry about those poor funny things. No, I am speaking of a matter – you have heard about G?” he asked suddenly.
“No,” said Bones with truth.
Jelf looked astonished.
“What!” he said incredulously. “You in the heart of things, and don’t know about old G?”
“No, little Mercury, and I don’t want to know,” said Bones, busying himself with his papers.
“You’ll tell me you don’t know about L next,” he said, bewildered.
“Language!” protested Bones. “You really mustn’t use Sunday words, really you mustn’t.”
Then Jelf unburdened himself. It appeared that G had been engaged to L’s daughter, and the engagement had been broken off…
Bones stirred uneasily and looked at his watch.
“Dispense with the jolly old alphabet,” he said wearily, “and let us get down to the beastly personalities.”
Thereafter Jelf’s conversation condensed itself to the limits of a human understanding. “G” stood for Gregory – Felix Gregory; “L” for Lansing, who apparently had no Christian name, nor found such appendage necessary, since he was dead. He had invented a lamp, and that lamp had in some way come into Jelf’s possession. He was exploiting the invention on behalf of the inventor’s daughter, and had named it – he said this with great deliberation and emphasis – “The Tibbetts-Jelf Motor Lamp.”
Bones made a disparaging noise, but was interested.
The Tibbetts-Jelf Lamp was something new in motor lamps. It was a lamp which had all the advantages of the old lamp, plus properties which no lamp had ever had before, and it had none of the disadvantages of any lamp previously introduced, and, in fact, had no disadvantages whatsoever. So Jelf told Bones with great earnestness.
“You know me, Tibbetts,” he said. “I never speak about myself, and I’m rather inclined to disparage my own point of view than otherwise.”
“I’ve never noticed that,” said Bones.
“You know, anyway,” urged Jelf, “that I want to see the bad side of anything I take up.”
He explained how he had sat up night after night, endeavouring to discover some drawback to the Tibbetts-Jelf Lamp, and how he had rolled into bed at five in the morning, exhausted by the effort.
“If I could only find one flaw!” he said. “But the ingenious beggar who invented it has not left a single bad point.”
He went on to describe the lamp. With the aid of a lead pencil and a piece of Bones’ priceless notepaper he sketched the front elevation and discoursed upon rays, especially upon ultra-violet rays.
Apparently this is a disreputable branch of the Ray family. If you could only get an ultra-violet ray as he was sneaking out of the lamp, and hit him violently on the back of the head, you were rendering a service to science and humanity.
This lamp was so fixed that the moment Mr Ultra V Ray reached the threshold of freedom he was tripped up, pounced upon, and beaten until he (naturally enough) changed colour!
It was all done by the lens.
Jelf drew a Dutch cheese on the table-cloth to illustrate the point.
“This light never goes out,” said Jelf passionately. “If you lit it today, it would be alight tomorrow, and the next day, and so on. All the light-buoys and lighthouses around England will be fitted with this lamp; it will revolutionize navigation.”
According to the exploiter, homeward bound mariners would gather together on the poop, or the hoop, or wherever homeward bound mariners gathered, and would chant a psalm of praise, in which the line “Heaven bless the Tibbetts-Jelf Lamp” would occur at regular intervals.
And when he had finished his eulogy, and lay back exhausted by his own eloquence, and Bones asked, “But what does it do?