For he was now moving
daily among those strange creations of man's brain, to some so
abhorrent, to him of an interest so inexhaustible: in which iron,
water, and fire are made to serve as slaves, now with a tread more
powerful than an elephant's, and now with a touch more precise and
dainty than a pianist's. The taste for machinery was one that I
could never share with him, and he had a certain bitter pity for my
weakness. Once when I had proved, for the hundredth time, the
depth of this defect, he looked at me askance. 'And the best of
the joke,' said he, 'is that he thinks himself quite a poet.' For
to him the struggle of the engineer against brute forces and with
inert allies, was nobly poetic. Habit never dulled in him the
sense of the greatness of the aims and obstacles of his profession.
Habit only sharpened his inventor's gusto in contrivance, in
triumphant artifice, in the Odyssean subtleties, by which wires are
taught to speak, and iron hands to weave, and the slender ship to
brave and to outstrip the tempest. To the ignorant the great
results alone are admirable; to the knowing, and to Fleeming in
particular, rather the infinite device and sleight of hand that
made them possible.
Pages:
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92