The Electrical Experience by Frank Moorhouse Read Free Book Online Page A

after, he had resolved never again to acknowledge her. His judgement subdued the roaring protest of his body. He never again acknowledged her, despite, at first, her puzzled, hurt smiles in the street. Her notes, calls, and entreaties.
    The only person he mentioned it to was Tutman, who told him to go ahead and enjoy himself. ‘It might soften you up, George.’
    He disregarded this advice.
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    The flesh, the passions have no special rights or claims on the behaviour.
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    Take the leverless fountain pen. The leverlessfountain pen is an applaudable work of genius, but he had no doubts that it would be superseded. This was not because he could see anything wrong with the leverless fountain pen, or because he knew what would replace it. He knew it would be replaced because he believed in the implacable laws of progress. Perhaps an electrical pen which transmitted words the way the telephone transmitted voice? He put that only as a suggestion.
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    To move with Progress one had to shake free of the clutching, bony hand of the past. Men always thought in terms of the past. Take himself. He had thought of an electrical ‘pen’. Why pen? Simply because the pen preceded. Look at refrigeration. At first thousands of pounds were spent trying to make a refrigerator which would freeze a block of ice in the top. Imitating the ice-chest. But the answer had been absorption refrigeration. Extracting the heat to make cold. Inventive men knew how to give the past the slip.
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    When and why did a man lose the faculty of change? Was it some point in the dying of the mind and body. A hardening of the nervous system. He practised keeping his mind agile. Daily he made himself think thoughts he had not thought before. He forced himself to consider the worst. He practised considering the opposite. He tried always to imagine at least two other possible ways of doing something. He fed his mind with maxims and precepts—the how-to-do-it manual of the mind.
    The shattered photograph of those earlier, united days.
    Motion caused friction. It was the deepest mystery of life that this should be so. That change always hurt someone. Why the human race had to pay for its advancement. There were always rats in the cellar of life. It was a fact of mechanical life that without friction we could have perpetual motion.
    He picked up the fragments of glass. F- dash it. He picked up the damaged framed photograph and put it away in the bottom drawer of the desk. F- dash.
    Jim Tutman had been an experimenter, when he was a boy. George had shared the experiments with Tutman, transfixed with awe and anxiety.
    In those happier childhood days.
    Tutman had a ‘laboratory’. In a shed at the back of the house down the paddock. Stoppered bottles of chemicals. Liquids and powders of dangerous colours, blue-edged labels, the riveting words POISON and EXPLOSIVE . The invisible, floating presence of sulphur, ammonia, chlorine, and various oxides which pinched at the nostrils. Electrical batteries.
    Tutman had cylinders of gas. He had a 2 h.p. American kerosene engine. Tutman’s father indulged him. Considered him a genius. George also, in those days, considered Tutman a genius. Tutman’s father probably didn’t know at first, looking back, just how elaborate and how dangerous the set-up in the shed had been.
    Tutman played around with the early refrigerants. Tutman was always making ice with maniacal ecstasy.
    George would ride his horse into town on Sunday afternoons and go straight to Tutman’s laboratory.
    â€˜Want to see me freeze a mouse?’
    A white mouse would be taken from Tutman’s breeding cage.
    He would choke back pity and watch the white mouse, pink-nosed, freeze in a jar in a flurry of squeaks and twistings.
    The ice would form and finally in the clear, solid ice, as if in a glass case, the mouse would be held, paw and nose against the ice.
    He’d always been disappointed, always hoping that when the