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

ice melted the mouse would still be alive. The mouse never revived. They experimented with resuscitation, using electrical shocks, but they never succeeded.
    There was an explosive device, or so Tutman said, and traps of other kinds for anyone who tried to break into the shed. Tutman talked of a ‘secret ray’. Tutman hinted that he would be pleased to see someone try to break into the laboratory—to test the effectiveness of the traps.
    â€˜Want to see some fireworks?’
    He had seen Tutman’s gunpowder and home-made fire works many times.
    Tutman lost a finger that way.
    The doctor had been unable to find the finger. Tutman had, in fact, put it in his pocket.
    Tutman showed him the finger later in a jar of formalin.
    Tutman preserved the tattered finger for amusement.
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    To have given money to Tutman now, these many years later, would have been to risk catching one’s own hand in the Cogs of Progress. Tutman, who had always been so ahead of his times, had fallen behind and was lost.
    Hallstrom, the Kelvinator, the Leonard refrigerator, and the Cogs of Progress were destroying him. He could always find work—at the diary factory, maybe.
    But he realised that Tutman would never work for wages. He was the independent business man, inventor. In recent years, brooding, drinking, allowing himself and his business to run down.
    Why, he’d suggested to Tutman time and time again that the system of ice delivery to the home was the weak point in his organisation.
    Ice-men dripping water through the house, the unshaven ice-men with their hessian bags. No good. Not modern. They were always hired for their muscle, never for their appearance. They should have been Ambassadors of Ice. And the size of the blocks shrinking in the sun.
    He had suggested to Tutman an ice servery. A flap in the wall of the house so that the ice could be put through into the ice-chest from the outside. Night deliveries. But Tutman stopped thinking somewhere in the late twenties. Shut down his mind. He had at one time suggested to Tutman a partnership in his owncordial-making business, maybe going into ice-cream. That was some years back. Thank god, Tutman had not taken up the offer.
    It did no good to fist-fight with refrigerator salesmen in the street. Or to heckle Hallstrom at the show demonstrations.
    We are but the engine-drivers of Progress—we do not make the timetable.
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    He learned by telephone message next day that James Tutman had disappeared during the night, leaving his wife, his two almost grown children, and a bankrupt ice-making business.
    He was, as a man of feeling, disturbed by the news. It was quite a knock. But as a realist he was somewhat relieved. Supposing of course that he had simply left town. Gone to some other town.
    He did not admire himself for his sense of relief, but, on the other hand, did not relish facing Tutman in the street or seeing him decline into god-knows-what. Somehow it was best, he felt in the hours following the news, that Tutman rule off the book at this point. The town could care for his wife.
    Tutman was a lesson. He himself was considering going into shop and café refrigeration. Keeping up. The domestic refrigerator could well mean the end of wholesale ice-cream, and he had decided against that idea. With electric refrigeration people would be making ice-cream in their homes.
    Tutman was a lesson for us all.
    Tutman’s sunburned body was found some days later in the bush not far from town. The post-mortem showed that it had been death by cyanide poisoning, which caused much comment and reached the city papers. His wife testified that for a year or so Tutman had carried in his pocket a small phial of cyanide. She had beseeched him not to be morbid. He had even prepared a phial for her and the children. She described her husband as in a state of chronic depression. He said the town had turned its back on him. No longer needed him. His career had come to an end