BULLET-PROOF
SO far as I know, the true story of the Bugsley Vacuum Jacket has never yet been made public. Now the death of the distinguished officer, who was associated with the patentee in the production of what has virtually revolutionised modern warfare, has removed what polite embargo lay upon the tongues of the informed, and there can be no indiscretion or ill-taste in admitting the "general" to the humours of an anecdote, which the "particular" was wont often to relate in private, with a keen sense of the nature of the laugh which it raised against himself.
The circumstances which, many years ago, led to the resignation, by Major Cheverel Manton, of his official position in Pall Mall will be still within the recollection of many. The gallant officer had pledged himself and his credit to the impenetrability of a certain bullet-proof coat designed by a Mr. Bugsley, and his strength of faith in the invention had lacked only the force to convince the superior impenetrability of his department. His demand for a trial being persistently ignored, he took, finally, the extreme step of resigning his commission, as the most practical form of protest possible against, as he considered it, the ruinous supineness of the War Office. That the result came to justify this step served the enlightened public, of course, for a delirious scandal by and by; yet, no doubt, the War Office had had its excuse, and one even—as Major Manton himself was moved presently to admit—of a more than commonly reasonable complexion. For the fact had been that, while Mr. Bugsley was a notorious patenter of chimeras, his backer—always a "cranky," hot-tempered man—had only recently at the time recovered from a severe influenza, and was supposed still subject to hallucinations.
Whatever the official rendering of the case, however, the evolution of the famous service jacket, from its first practical test in the Borstall explorative expedition to its ultimate adoption by the Government authorities, is a certain matter of history; and assuredly the late Major Manton never had reason to regret his firm confidence in the virtues of an invention, which compensated him with a fortune for the position he sacrificed to uphold it.
The story, as related by the Major, ran as follows:
"I was one of the officials of the Ordnance. It was part of my duties to interview cranks. Do you realise what that means—the ineffable weariness of flesh and waste of time? I dare say you have no conception of the number of people in the world who are busily engaged in trying to extract sunbeams out of cucumbers. A single day spent at the War Office would enlighten you, perhaps. I suppose that, as human nature swings at the eternal balance between offence and defence, it is natural that a disproportion of inventive genius should flow Pall-Mallwards. There is no such fruitful inspiration, of the right sort, as that which points to the most economic method of destroying one's enemies. Of all creative cranks, the man who invented or adapted the guillotine stands, in my opinion, at the head of the poll. Bugsley, for all his versatility, couldn't touch him.
"That man had haunted me for years—a suave apparition. You never saw him? He couldn't survive his only success, and was found sitting at his desk dead and smiling over the post which had brought him Borstall's testimonial to the efficacy of the jacket.
"The first time I saw him was on an afternoon in the late nineties. I had been pestered out of reason that day, I remember, and was in a bad mood for considering any further Colney Hatch patents—sights that would enable a man to kill with his eyes shut, powders that would explode automatically on the least little international friction, plugs for compressed rations to be carried in a rifle-barrel, and buttons each a receptacle for a condensed meat lozenge. I had been harassed, I say, and my temper was no doubt a bit short when Bugsley was shown in to me. There was nothing repugnant about the man; but I developed an instinctive antagonism to him on the spot. He was very short and thick and ungainly, with an enormous smiling face and knock knees. As he stood rattling the pence in his trouser-pockets, with his feet finned out, his little fat thighs pressed together, and his great beaked nose tilted up at an angle, he reminded me of nothing so much as the aldermanic turtle. I saw a calm and unctuous assurance in his smile, and snapped out at him instanter:
"'State your business, if you please. I've no time to spare. A word will do.'
"He answered at once, looking sideways at the ceiling, 'I have a little fancy—Vacuums. There's a fortune in it.'
"That was his obsession—and he never looked away from the ceiling, but casually, in expressing it. Vacuums, vacancy, vacuity—the man's mind was gone on the craze. I don't know how to put it fairly. There is the jacket to speak for him; but, before that, there were certainly other things. His single idea was that where nothing was, nothing could happen—that all strategy in warfare should be directed to enticing the enemy to waste his energies and his ammunition upon emptiness.
"In this first case it was a design for a gun he brought. The weapon was to fire smokeless powder; but there was an arrangement in the breech for ejecting laterally, and simultaneously with the discharge, a miniature blank shell, filled with black powder, which, bursting at a point some two or three hundred yards distant, should mislead the enemy as to the position of your piece, and draw their fire upon nothing.
"I explained, briefly, some technical difficulties, and got rid of the man—as I thought. But not a bit of it. A month later he turned up again, smiling at the ceiling, and offered me a plan for a refracting instrument, which was to project the apparition of bodies of men moving upon the enemy from as many points as you liked, while the living troops which produced them were to be all confounded in the most diabolical and confusing way with the illusions. If I had hesitated over the first suggestion, as sincere in its way, I saw at once now the true character of the eccentric, and dismissed him without ceremony. A month later he called again, and took the ceiling into his confidence, with that eternal and imperturbable catch-phrase of his, 'I have a little fancy. There's a fortune in it.' This time it was a sort of compound heliograph, for dazzling the eyes of a whole troop of the enemy's horse when either making or resisting a cavalry-charge. I told him to go, and he went. I gave orders that he was not to be admitted again, and he was not admitted. Did that save me? Nothing of the sort. A few weeks later I was leaving the office, when a shadow emerged from a doorway, and an oily voice whispered in my ear, 'I have a little fancy, Major. There's a fortune in it.' It was for a sort of captive balloon, it appeared, to be floated, a tempting mark, over the enemy's lines, with two dummy aeronauts in the car stuffed with high explosives, and designed to spread destruction around the moment the thing should be brought down. I faced the creature decisive.
"'Mr. Bugsley,' I said; 'I have heard many of your inventions now, and this is really the last I wish to be told about, You mustn't approach me again, and I must tell you that your genius is wasted in these directions. Your province, if you will believe me, is in the large domain of pantomime, and I should recommend you to apply at Drury Lane.'
"He smiled, murmured 'Vacuums,' and fell back. But I was mistaken in supposing I had laid the apparition of him. He took to haunting me by post, in typewritten copy; his large placid face mooned at me round street corners, or was pressed against the glass of shop-fronts while I trafficked within; he put advertisements in the papers, addressed to Major C. M., and relating, in a sort of loose cypher, the details of new lunacies. I found myself studying these against my will; I developed a sickening subconsciousness of his presence in my neighbourhood; I thought about him constantly. Bit by bit he seemed to weave his insane personality into the very fibre of my being, and I grew to loathe the imposition, as it were, of a dual personality thrust upon me—only my Mr. Hyde was horribly benevolent, and the murderous moiety was myself. My dreams grew disturbed because of him, and my temperature constantly stood at a perilous figure. This state of things may have continued, in varying moods, for a year or two, when I got my big dose of influenza which pretty well laid me flat. I had to chuck everything, and rusticate. The demon of the complaint must be my apology for what followed.
"You know how it takes some people, even the sanest? That is the devil of what they call its convalescence. One can endure the fever and the pain and the nausea; but the suicidal depression during recovery! One looks out on the world through warped spectacles. Everything seems to have gone irredeemably crooked, ugly; everything presents a baffling front, and nothing, it appears, can by any hope shake itself straight again. I was in a foul bad way; and one day I sat, muffled in my dressing-gown, brooding my ruin, moral and material, and eyeing a revolver, army-service pattern, which lay on a table beside me. It was loaded in all its seven chambers, and I waited only the word of the demon to take it up.
"'I have a little fancy,' said a voice; and there he stood before me. Bugsley, and no other! That was in my bungalow down in Buckinghamshire, and how he had tracked me there the Lord only knows. But it didn't matter. The vision had had to materialise for me, and here was its most appropriate form. I took up the revolver and arose, grinning like a lynx. There were seven chambers—four for him and three for me.
"He had not altered by a crease, save that he looked even stouter and stumpier than his wont. His short frock-coat was buttoned almost to bursting across his chest; his gills were swollen and his eyes projecting. He gave his bow- window a resounding thwack.
"'Don't do that,' I said, 'or you'll break the glass.'
"He smiled like one in a beatitude.
"'No fear, Major,' he said. 'This time, I have done it.'
"'You have,' I said sternly. 'On your head be it!'
"It was his stomach I fired at, however. I couldn't help it; the mark was so sure and obtrusive.
"I waited a panic moment for the smoke to clear—and then I saw him. He was standing with his little legs straddled, his hands behind his back, and that ineffable smile on his face.
"'Don't mind me,' he said. 'Try again.'
"A sort of dementia seized me. One after the other I emptied the remaining six chambers at the impervious figure, and then threw down the weapon and reeled to a chair, at the moment that my servant, rushing from a distance, broke into the room. The man stood appalled before the apparition of the chuckling stranger, the reeking room, and my own livid face; and in that instant the intruder had thrown open his coat, and revealed underneath—what you all know now.
"'Behold,' said he, ' the Bugsley Vacuum jacket—bullet-proof, Major, as you must have convinced yourself. There's a fortune in it.'
"That was the way he excused me. It all passed for an experiment. He was a good soul, and he hadn't left me a cartridge for my own affairs.
"There's the story."