I could stand his mocking no longer. I stumbled mechanically out of the room and out of the house. I even forgot my hat and gloves. For an hour I walked in the moonlight. Gradually I succeeded to a more hopeful frame of mind. This was due to my ignorance of mathematics. Had I understood the real meaning of what he asked, I should have been utterly despondent.
Perhaps this problem of sixty miles a minute was not so impossible, after all. At any rate, I could attempt, though I might not succeed. And Rivarol came to my mind. I would ask him. I would enlist his knowledge to accompany my own devoted perseverance. I sought his lodgings at once.
The man of science lived in the fourth story back. I had never been in his room before. When I entered, he was in the act of filling a beer-mug from a carboy labeled _aqua fortis_.
“Seat you,” he said. “No, not in that chair. That is my Petty-Cash-Adjuster.”
But he was a second too late. I had carelessly thrown myself into a chair of seductive appearance. To my utter amazement, it reached out two skeleton arms, and clutched me with a grasp against which I struggled in vain. Then a skull stretched itself over my shoulder and grinned with ghastly familiarity close to my face.
Rivarol came to my aid with many apologies. He touched a spring somewhere, and the Petty-Cash-Adjuster relaxed its horrid hold. I placed myself gingerly in a plain cane-bottomed rocking-chair, which Rivarol assured me was a safe location.
“That seat,” he said, “is an arrangement upon which I much felicitate myself. I made it at Heidelberg. It has saved me a vast deal of small annoyance. I consign to its embraces the friends who bore, and the visitors who exasperate, me. But it is never so useful as when terrifying some tradesman with an insignificant account. Hence the pet name which I have facetiously given it. They are invariably too glad to purchase release at the price of a bill receipted. Do you well apprehend the idea?”
While the Alsatian diluted his glass of _aqua fortis_, shook into it an infusion of bitters, and tossed off the bumper with apparent relish, I had time to look around the strange apartment.
The four corners of the room were occupied respectively by a turning-lathe, a Rhumkorff coil, a small steam-engine, and an orrery in stately motion. Tables, shelves, chairs, and floor supported an odd aggregation of tools, retorts, chemicals, gas-receivers, philosophical instruments, boots, flasks, paper-collar boxes, books diminutive, and books of preposterous size. There were plaster busts of Aristotle, Archimedes, and Compte, while a great drowsy owl was blinking away, perched on the benign brow of Martin Farquhar Tupper. “He always roosts there when he proposes to slumber,” explained my tutor. “You are a bird of no ordinary mind. _Schlafen Sie wohl._”