I’ve rarely had cause to remark upon Professor Moriarty’s genius for disguise. There’s good reason for that. Anyone less wholly shoved up his own bum than Sir Nevil Stent would have seen through Moriarty’s beards and hoods and skullcaps and spectacles in a trice. That snake-oscillation mannerism always gave him away. He didn’t list card-sharping among his favoured crimes, or he’d have known about ‘tells’ and taken steps to suppress his. On one occasion, I tried to raise the matter in as tactful a fashion as possible, venturing to suggest that the Professor moderate his ‘cobra-neck tell’ when incognito.
‘What are you talking about, Moran? Have you been at the diacetylmorphine hydrochloride again?’
There was no sense in pressing the matter further. Genius or no, Moriarty truly didn’t know about the thing he did with his neck. I wondered if he was unconsciously trying to make it difficult for the hangman. Probably not. It was just a habit. Other men scratch their balls, fiddle with their watch chains or chew their moustaches. That’s when it’s a good time to double up, throw the mortgage into the pot and slide an ace out of your cuff.
Nevertheless, Moriarty acquitted himself adequately in the multiple roles of ‘C., Cave’, filthy shopkeeper, ‘long-necked cabbie’, dispenser of jovially ominous sentiments, and ‘Hooded Man of Mystery’, mouth-piece of Martian Royalty. (Stent never did persuade anyone else to say ‘Marsian’.) As you can tell from the diary, the worthy Mrs Halifax, pouting Polly, Italian Joe (Signor Galvani), PCP and some nobly self-sacrificing specimens of vampyroteuthis infernalis also strutted and fret their weary hours on the stage.
It’s a shame there wasn’t any money in it. The whole palaver cost the Firm a great deal, exhausting the proceeds of five good-sized blags, and sinking Moriarty into debts we had to work hard to pay off. I know we have a reputation as rotters and crooks and all, but it doesn’t do to default on payments owed someone who likes to be called the Lord of Strange Deaths. Hellish vampire squid wouldn’t have been the half of it.
For the Prof, the pay-off came at Stent’s lecture.
VI
This time, the Royal Astronomical Society wasn’t a grand enough platform for Sir Nevil, but we were back in Burlington House. The edifice is also HQ of the Royal Society, a body so sniffily superior it feels it doesn’t even need to give you the full name — which, as it happens, is The Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge — when you are expected to prostrate yourself before the hallowed altars of high science and furthermore purchase an illustrated souvenir program booklet to memorialise the hours you spent snoozing through a lecture. Chairman at the time of these occurrences was Thomas Henry Huxley, and you know what the Astronomer Royal thought of him. I don’t doubt Huxley thought the same right back at Stent, who — for reasons which by now must be glaring — was not as popular with the general community of test-tube sniffers and puppy-vivisectors as he was with his home crowd of stargazing toadies.
Again, we took our seats. Sans disguises, on the assumption Stent wouldn’t notice us in the crowd — at least, not until the crucial moment. The hall was packed, as if word had leaked out that Lola Montez would be tightrope-walking nude over the audience while Jenny Lind sang all eighty-six verses of‘The Ballad of Eskimo Nell’. Every branch of science was represented, for Stent had announced his lecture would radically affect all of them equally. A lot of textbooks would need revising (or burning) after this one, the rumour-mill insisted. To me, the mob looked like an unkempt crowd of smelly schoolmasters on a spree, but the Prof clucked and tutted to himself, listing the great names who had shown up. Besides our home-grown brainboxes, there were yanks, frogs, krauts, eye-ties, dressed-up natives from far-flung lands and an authentic Belgian — all trailing more degrees, honours, doctorates and professorships than you could shake a stick at. It would have been humbling if they weren’t mostly aged and chalk-covered. We had salted the room with a few of our own fellahs, who carried hat boxes or picnic hampers and were a bit fidgety in clean, respectable clothes. A squeaky-voiced draper’s clerk tried to squeeze in on a platform ticket, but was properly ejected for being a lower-class bounder. [24]
This time, Stent went for dramatic effect.
The house lights dimmed, and a spot came up on the lectern. The Conqueror of Mars posed dramatically in a vestment-like long white coat.
‘Gentlemen,’ he began, ‘we are not alone…’
He whipped a dust cloth from the ‘reflecting telescope’ which incorporated the ‘crystal egg’. In the end, Polly had been forced to draw him a picture to show how she had ‘accidentally’ made it work. Between shows, someone had to reset or replace the strip of exposures inside the box and put in a new incandescent bulb — which meant getting Stent away from his toy. Fortunately, he’d quite a nose for Dr Tirmoary’s Infusions and was often in a daze.
‘I give you… the Planet Mars!’
Stent toggled a lever and electric current made a motor grind. Red images were cast on a white board erected on the platform. Squid crawled across a sandbox, gagging for water. There were gasps of awe, though a few coughs of scepticism too. A few sequences wound backwards, which gave an eerie, unnatural effect — as if pictures that moved weren’t unnatural enough.
I’d seen some of these views ‘taken’ by Mr Paul A. Robert of Brighton. Urchin assistants had to hand-colour the scenes, picture by picture. Robert has a glass-roofed studio under construction on the Downs. I had to be blindfolded and driven up and around country lanes before visiting it because he fears some Yankee swine is out to poach the process and present it as his own invention. Good luck to him, I say. Apart from making a fool of the Astronomer Royal, all Robert’s whateveroscope is good for is giving anyone who stares too long at the stuttering pictures a blinding headache. There was still that damned whirring and flapping as exposures passed in front of the incandescent. The bloody racket is why Robert’s Box Pictures in Motion will never ‘catch on’, if you ask me. They’ll never replace the stereopticon. [25]
After the images from the crystal egg passed, Stent was assailed by questions. Some were about the creatures, but most were about Robert’s Box — which several in the audience had heard of before. One or two had even seen the thing demonstrated while the inventor was soliciting funds for development of his annoying wonder of the age. When Stent repeated his assertion that the Box was a ‘reflecting telescope’, someone called him a ‘blithering idiot’. He looked displeased. Several helpful souls shouted out the principles on which the Box worked. A couple of young fellahs got into a heated argument about ‘persistence of vision’ and ‘Muybridge strips’. No one cared much about what they had seen (it could have been a chuffing train or a couple snogging, for all they cared) but many were intrigued by the process whereby moving images were cast on a board. Stent had caused a sensation, but not the way he expected.
24
The draper’s clerk was H.G. Wells, who evidently learned something about this business. See:
25
Less well remembered than rival cinema pioneers the Lumière Brothers, Georges Méliès or Thomas Edison, Paul Aloysius Robert (1870–1944) was a significant contributor to the early days of the motion picture. He directed