The Diamond Maker

== THE DIAMOND MAKER ==
=== By H.G. Wells ===
Published in Westminster Papers 1956
Some business had detained me in Chancery Lane nine in the evening, and
thereafter, having some inkling of a headache, I was disinclined either for
entertainment or further work. So much of the sky as the high cliffs of that
narrow canon of traffic left visible spoke of a serene night, and I determined
to make my way down to the Embankment, and rest my eyes and cool my head by
watching the variegated lights upon the river. Beyond comparison the night is
the best time for this place; a merciful darkness hides the dirt of the waters,
and the lights of this transitional age, red glaring orange, gas-yellow, and
electric white, are set in shadowy outlines of every possible shade between
grey and deep purple. Through the arches of Waterloo Bridge a hundred points of
light mark the sweep of the Embankment, and above its parapet rise the towers
of Westminster,warm grey against the starlight. The black river goes by with
only a rare ripple breaking its silence, and disturbing the reflections of the
lights that swim upon its surface.
"A warm night," said a voice at my side.
I turned my head, and saw the profile of a man who was leaning over the
parapet beside me. It was a refined face, not unhandsome, though pinched and
pale enough, and the coat collar turned up and pinned round the throat marked
his status in life as sharply as a uniform. I felt I was committed to the price
of a bed and breakfast if I answered him.
I looked at him curiously. Would he have anything to tell me worth the
money, or was he the common incapable--incapable even of telling his own story?
There was a quality of intelligence in his forehead and eyes, and a certain
tremulousness in his nether lip that decided me.
"Very warm," said I; "but not too warm for us here."
"No," he said, still looking across the water, "it is
pleasant enough here . . . . just now."
"It is good," he continued after a pause, "to find
anything so restful as this in London. After one has been fretting about
business all day, about getting on, meeting obligations, and parrying dangers,
I do not know what one would do if it were not for such pacific corners."
He spoke with long pauses between the sentences. "You must know a little
of the irksome labour of the world, or you would not be here. But I doubt if
you can be so brain-weary and footsore as I am . . . . Bah! Sometimes I doubt
if the game is worth the candle. I feel inclined to throw the whole thing
over--name, wealth and position--and take to some modest trade. But I know if I
abandoned my ambition--hardly as she uses me--I should have nothing but remorse
left for the rest of my days."
He became silent. I looked at him in astonishment. If ever I saw a man
hopelessly hard-up it was the man in front of me. He was ragged and he was
dirty, unshaven and unkempt; he looked as though he had been left in a dust-bin
for a week. And he was talking to me of the irksome worries of a large
business. I almost laughed outright. Either he was mad or playing a sorry jest
on his own poverty.
"If high aims and high positions," said I, "have their
drawbacks of hard work and anxiety, they have their compensations. Influence,
the power of doing good, of assisting those weaker and poorer than ourselves;
and there is even a certain gratification in display . . . . . "
My banter under the circumstances was in very vile taste. I spoke on the
spur of the contrast of his appearance and speech. I was sorry even while I was
speaking.
He turned a haggard but very composed face upon me. Said he: "I
forgot myself. Of course you would not understand."
He measured me for a moment. "No doubt it is very absurd. You will
not believe me even when I tell you, so that it is fairly safe to tell you. And
it will be a comfort to tell someone. I really have a big business in hand, a
very big business. But there are troubles just now. The fact is . . . . I make
diamonds."
"I suppose," said I, "you are out of work just at
present?"
"I am sick of being disbelieved," he said impatiently, and
suddenly unbuttoning his wretched coat he pulled out a little canvas bag that
was hanging by a cord round his neck. From this he produced a brown pebble.
"I wonder if you know enough to know what that is?" He handed it to
me.
Now, a year or so ago, I had occupied my leisure in taking a London
science degree, so that I have a smattering of physics and mineralogy. The
thing was not unlike an uncut diamond of the darker sort, though far too large,
being almost as big as the top of my thumb. I took it, and saw it had the form
of a regular octahedron, with the curved faces peculiar to the most precious of
minerals. I took out my penknife and tried to scratch it--vainly. Leaning
forward towards the gas-lamp, I tried the thing on my watch-glass, and scored a
white line across that with the greatest ease.
I looked at my interlocutor with rising curiosity. "It certainly is
rather like a diamond. But, if so, it is a Behemoth of diamonds. Where did you
get it?"
"I tell you I made it," he said. "Give it back to
me."
He replaced it hastily and buttoned his jacket. "I will sell it you
for one hundred pounds," he suddenly whispered eagerly. With that my
suspicions returned. The thing might, after all, be merely a lump of that
almost equally hard substance, corundum, with an accidental resemblance in
shape to the diamond. Or if it was a diamond, how came he by it, and why should
he offer it at a hundred pounds?
We looked into one another's eyes. He seemed eager, but honestly eager.
At that moment I believed it was a diamond he was trying to sell. Yet I am a
poor man, a hundred pounds would leave a visible gap in my fortunes and no sane
man would buy a diamond by gaslight from a ragged tramp on his personal
warranty only. Still, a diamond that size conjured up a vision of many
thousands of pounds. Then, thought I, such a stone could scarcely exist without
being mentioned in every book on gems, and again I called to mind the stories
of contraband and light-fingered Kaffirs at the Cape. I put the question of
purchase on one side.
"How did you get it?" said I.
"I made it."
I had heard something of Moissan, but I knew his artificial diamonds
were very small. I shook my head.
"You seem to know something of this kind of thing. I will tell you
a little about myself. Perhaps then you may think better of the purchase."
He turned round with his back to the river, and put his hands in his pockets.
He sighed. "I know you will not believe me."
"Diamonds," he began--and as he spoke his voice lost its faint
flavour of the tramp and assumed something of the easy tone of an educated
man--are to be made by throwing carbon out of combination in a suitable flux
and under a suitable pressure; the carbon crystallises out, not as black-lead
or charcoal-powder, but as small diamonds. So much has been known to chemists
for years, but no one yet had hit upon exactly the right flux in which to melt
up the carbon, or exactly the right pressure for the best results. Consequently
the diamonds made by chemists are small and dark, and worthless as jewels. Now
I, you know, have given up my life to this problem--given my life to it.
"I began to work at the conditions of diamond making when I was
seventeen, and now I am thirty-two. It seemed to me that it might take all the
thought and energies of a man for ten years, or twenty years, but, even if it
did, the game was still worth the candle. Suppose one to have at last just hit
the right trick before the secret got out and diamonds became as common as
coal, one might realize millions. Millions!"
He paused and looked for my sympathy. His eyes shone hungrily. "To
think," said he, "that I am on the verge of it all, and here!
"I had," he proceeded, "about a thousand pounds when I
was twenty-one, and this, I thought, eked out by a little teaching, would keep
my researches going. A year or two was spent in study, at Berlin chiefly, and
then I continued on my own account. The trouble was the secrecy. You see, if
once I had let out what I was doing, other men might have been spurred on by my
belief in the practicability of the idea; and I do not pretend to be such a
genius as to have been sure of coming in first, in the case of a race for the
discovery. And you see it was important that if I really meant to make a pile,
people should not know it was an artificial process and capable of turning out
diamonds by the ton. So I had to work all alone. At first I had a little
laboratory, but as my resources began to run out I had to conduct my
experiments in a wretched unfurnished room in Kentish Town, where I slept at
last on a straw mattress on the floor among all my apparatus. The money simply
flowed away. I grudged myself everything except scientific appliances. I tried
to keep things going by a little teaching, but I am not a very good teacher,
and I have no university degree, nor very much education except in chemistry,
and I found I had to give a lot of time and labour for precious little money.
But I got nearer and nearer the thing. Three years ago I settled the problem of
the composition of the flux, and got near the pressure by putting this flux of
mine and a certain carbon composition into a closed-up gun-barrel, filling up
with water, sealing tightly, and heating."
He paused.
"Rather risky," said I.
"Yes. It burst, and smashed all my windows and a lot of my
apparatus; but I got a kind of diamond powder nevertheless. Following out the
problem of getting a big pressure upon the molten mixture from which the things
were to crystallise, I hit upon some researches of Daubree's at the Paris
Laboratorie des Poudres et Salpetres. He exploded dynamite in a tightly screwed
steel cylinder, too strong to burst, and I found he could crush rocks into a
muck not unlike the South African bed in which diamonds are found. It was a
tremendous strain on my resources, but I got a steel cylinder made for my
purpose after his pattern. I put in all my stuff and my explosives, built up a
fire in my furnace, put the whole concern in, and--went out for a walk."
I could not help laughing at his matter-of-fact manner. "Did you
not think it would blow up the house? Were there other people in the
place?"
"It was in the interest of science," he said, ultimately.
"There was a costermonger family on the floor below, a begging-letter
writer in the room behind mine, and two flower-women were upstairs. Perhaps it
was a bit thoughtless. But possibly some of them were out.
"When I came back the thing was just where I left it, among the
white-hot coals. The explosive hadn't burst the case. And then I had a problem
to face. You know time is an important element in crystallisation. If you hurry
the process the crystals are small--it is only by prolonged standing that they
grow to any size. I resolved to let this apparatus cool for two years, letting
the temperature go down slowly during the time. And I was now quite out of
money; and with a big fire and the rent of my room, as well as my hunger to
satisfy, I had scarcely a penny in the world.
"I can hardly tell you all the shifts I was put to while I was
making the diamonds. I have sold newspapers, held horses, opened cab-doors. For
many weeks I addressed envelopes. I had a place as assistant to a man who owned
a barrow, and used to call down one side of the road while he called down the
other.
"Once for a week I had absolutely nothing to do, and I begged. What
a week that was! One day the fire was going out and I had eaten nothing all
day, and a little chap taking his girl out, gave me sixpence--to show off.
Thank heaven for vanity! How the fish-shops smelt! But I went and spent it all
on coals, and had the furnace bright red again, and then--Well, hunger makes a
fool of a man.
"At last, three weeks ago, I let the fire out. I took my cylinder
and unscrewed it while it was still so hot that it punished my hands, and I
scraped out the crumbling lava-like mass with a chisel, and hammered it into a
powder upon an iron plate. And I found three big diamonds and five small ones.
As I sat on the floor hammering, my door opened, and my neighbour, the
begging-letter writer came in. He was drunk--as he usually is.
"'Nerchist,' said he. 'You're drunk,' said I. ''Structive scoundrel,' said
he. 'Go to your father,' said I, meaning the Father of Lies. 'Never you mind,'
said he, and gave me a cunning wink, and hiccuped, and leaning up against the
door, with his other eye against the door-post, began to babble of how he had
been prying in my room, and how he had gone to the police that morning, and how
they had taken down everything he had to say--''siffiwas a ge'm,' said he. Then
I suddenly realised I was in a hole. Either I should have to tell these police
my little secret, and get the whole thing blown upon, or be lagged as an
Anarchist. So I went up to my neighbour and took him by the collar, and rolled
him about a bit, and then I gathered up my diamonds and cleared out. The
evening newspapers called my den the Kentish Town Bomb Factory. And now I
cannot part with the things for love or money.
"If I go in to respectable jewellers they ask me to wait, and go
and whisper to a clerk to fetch a policeman, and then I say I cannot wait. And
I found out a receiver of stolen goods, and he simply stuck to the one I gave
him and told me to prosecute if I wanted it back. I am going about now with
several hundred thousand pounds-worth of diamonds round my neck, and without
either food or shelter. You are the first person I have taken into my
confidence. But I like your face and I am hard-driven."
He looked into my eyes.
"It would be madness," said I, "for me to buy a diamond
under the circumstances. Besides, I do not carry hundreds of pounds about in my
pocket. Yet I more than half believe your story. I will, if you like, do this:
come to my office to-morrow . . . . "
"You think I am a thief!" said he keenly. "You will tell
the police. I am not coming into a trap."
"Somehow I am assured you are no thief. Here is my card. Take that,
anyhow. You need not come to any appointment. Come when you will."
He took the card, and an earnest of my good-will.
"Think better of it and come," said I.
He shook his head doubtfully. "I will pay back your half-crown with
interest some day--such interest as will amaze you," said he.
"Anyhow, you will keep the secret? . . . . Don't follow me."
He crossed the road and went into the darkness towards the little steps
under the archway leading into Essex Street, and I let him go. And that was the
last I ever saw of him.
Afterwards I had two letters from him asking me to send bank-notes--not
cheques--to certain addresses. I weighed the matter over and took what I
conceived to be the wisest course. Once he called upon me when I was out. My
urchin described him as a very thin, dirty, and ragged man, with a dreadful
cough. He left no message. That was the finish of him so far as my story goes.
I wonder sometimes what has become of him. Was he an ingenious monomaniac, or a
fraudulent dealer in pebbles, or has he really made diamonds as he asserted?
The latter is just sufficiently credible to make me think at times that I have
missed the most brilliant opportunity of my life. He may of course be dead, and
his diamonds carelessly thrown aside--one, I repeat, was almost as big as my
thumb. Or he may be still wandering about trying to sell the things. It is just
possible he may yet emerge upon society, and, passing athwart my heavens in the
serene altitude sacred to the wealthy and the well-advertised, reproach me
silently for my want of enterprise. I sometimes think I might at least have
risked five pounds.
Category:Wells
Category:Westminster Papers
Category:Published