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THE BLOOD DROP STONE.

BY EDMUND VALE.

IF a casual observer were asked to describe Warren, he would probably say that he was a good practical mechanic. Knowing him well myself, I should describe him as a poet who could not write poetry, an artist who could not paint, and a musician who could not compose. I suppose the world is full of people to whom one could apply this definition, but few there are who press their inclinations so far as to discover a new medium in which they can excel.

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Warren's pet theme, which, I remember, in college days, he used to discourse to a degree bordering on fanaticism, was the fitness of Nature. As, unfortunately, he did not possess a brilliant or even interesting manner of address, one was easily led into boredom rather than enthusiasm by listening to him. It is doubtful whether in any community other than that of Cambridge undergraduates his dull harangues upon his all-absorbing topic would have gained any hearing at all. As it was, however, towards the end of his third year quite a number of people were interested, if not enthusiastic, in what came to be known as "Warren's Inevitable," and the thing bid fair to become, not a cult indeed-Warren was no cult breeder-but a philosophy.

Warren's Inevitable was stress laid upon the harmonies in Nature. There was harmony, Warren said, not only in all the colours both of dead and living things in the natural landscape and also in all the sounds of dead and living things, but an extraordinary co-operation in harmony between the two. For instance, savage-looking scenery is tenanted by birds and beasts of uncouth utterance. In such a place the winds will whirl in a peculiar way and the waters fall with a noise of menace. By the reedy fen the waters, winds, and birds all support the ocular impression of rest and calm. In places of luxuriant growth the nightingale and thrush are found. It is when Nature looks most forbidding that thunder, her most terrible voice, is heard: and so on. As Warren advanced with his theories he took up the subject of phonography. His idea was that the most beautiful of Nature's sounds were as well deserving of record as the pictures she gave to the eye. It was not long before he was able, by means of electrical devices, to make records of the songs of different birds, of the chirruping of grasshoppers, of the noise even of winds and waters.

In the late spring of 1914 I

had a letter from Warren. In the ends of Cash and Boom.

six pages it contrived to convey to me that I was invited to spend a week with him where he and his recording apparatus were encamped on the coast of North Wales. It fell out happily that I was in need of a holiday, so I accepted. Through the inscrutable workings of Luck, my sole travelling companion in the last part of my journey was a brisk little gentleman who was proceeding to precisely the same destination as myself-namely, to Warren's camp. When we had made this discovery of mutual interest he introduced himself more completely by handing me a card where his name was set forth in the American style as Cornelius P. Brudd. The qualification Perfecto Gramophone Company was also annexed. This announcement caught my eye with some amusement. Was it really true that the great Inevitable was going to be commercialised ? Mr Brudd confirmed my suspicion: he was indeed a feeler from the great world journeying to judge how far this new class of record could be exploited for the amusement of the public.

My companion was an Englishman with a Canadian experience. He was very bright and optimistic about the works of Warren, and quite hopeful that my old friend could be weaned from his disinterested, artistic, and scientific investigations, and made to serve

As, however, I had come on this visit to escape from commercialism, I was a little annoyed at the presence of Cornelius P., although he averred that he was only going to stay for one night, and I refused his proffer of a lift in his motorcar from Pwllheli Station, preferring the more antiquated method of the rustic mailcart.

"Well," said he, "you must do as you like. I've never been round this neck of the woods before. But I guess you'll be tired some before you see the noble city of Aberdaron ! '

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The mail-cart certainly was not true to the service watchword of "Post Haste "; but as we drove up and down the pretty little hills and came at last on to the open moorland, where the gorse blazed and the blue sea lay sparkling in the distance at the end of the Carnarvon peninsula, I congratulated myself on my choice of transport. The "noble city of Aberdaron at last presented itself suddenly at the foot of a steep hill wedged in between a trout stream and the sea. My impression was a quaint water-wheel, a quaint little stone bridge, a small compact group of low, whitewashed cottages, and a church whose graveyard was bigger than the whole village. "Yes," said my friend the postman when I remarked this fact. He pointed out to sea: This graveyard bury him the

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whole world as well as Aber- atmosphere of the cinematodaron." graph theatre at Reading, which my wife and I honour once a week, by means of Warren's invention! This reflection raised my friend from his old memory picture, where the enthusiast wrestled unceasingly in the coils of prolixity while spectators yawned, to a wizard conjuring in the midst of a clapping audience.

Warren did not meet me, but the landlord of the Anchor Inn gave me his whereabouts and directions how to find him. It appeared that he was camped on a cliff about a mile away. I was in no great hurry to get to him, as I thought whatever business had to be talked had better be got over before I arrived. I had never seen Warren's patent phonograph. I had not, in fact, thought very much about it until I met Cornelius P. But somehow, though one would, of course, disallow this admission in public, the new fact that pennies seemed about to be turned out of Warren's Inevitable raised the thing on a higher plane of interest, and I felt myself growing appreciably more anxious to see the apparatus that recorded the sounds of winds and waves.

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I had been travelling all night, and the afternoon was stiflingly hot, so I walked at my leisure, as buzz-brained as any holiday-maker, on the beach at the edge of the tide, where, in the wet zone, every other stone appeared a priceless gem. The great solemn wall like waves, with their sparkling ebullition and their soft aftermath of brine and lather, filled me with the old unfailing pleasure of the sea. Was it not now among probable things that all this stir of lights and sounds in Aberdaron Bay might be carried bodily even into the exhausted

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When I ascended the cliff I beheld the goal of my travel some quarter of a mile away. No less than three tents were pitched. Two men were visible. I had recourse to my fieldglasses, and reconnoitred these individuals with great amusement. Warren was as he always had been. He was haranguing. His large head, with its curly-wig mop, was wagging and bobbing. Cornelius P. sat opposite him on the sward, supported on stiffened arms and outsplayed hands. His little billycock hat was set back, and his face, even at this distance, wore the look I was so well accustomed to, of amazed boredom. I was greatly entertained. I bore down upon the couple with skippings and jumpings and hallooings.

I gathered obliquely that Brudd had been suffering two hours of demonstration of records in which he had no interest whatever. In fact, I gathered shrewdly that he was already tying up his pursestrings and casting about for an excuse to depart before his appointed hour. I therefore

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began at once to take upon myself the rôle of demonstrating salesman. Winds and waves I ruled out at once, and confined myself to the utterances of birds and men. Cases and cases and cases of records I handled with the bold confidence of a tailor trying to hypnotise a customer with bales and parcels from unexplored shelves. It was no good poor Warren try ing to foist off on me, "Tearing sound made by starlings flockgathering in the autumn," or such an alluring triumph as "Sound of doe rabbit burrowing underground," or "Puffin and razor-bill contesting site for a nest"; I went for such vulgarities as the songs of the nightingale, thrush, and blackcap, and gradually Mr Brudd began to revive.

The advantage of Warren's system of recording was that you were able to do it from a distance. You had a microphone, very similar to the mouthpiece of a telephone. It was a small box about ten inches square. You placed

this where the sounds were expected to make themselves heard, and connected yourself with it at any distance you pleased by means of a light insulated cable. You had a telephone-receiver in circuit yourself, and you "listened in," as an exchange operator would say, until what you wanted to record sounded in your ear. Then you turned on your phonograph and took your impression. The whole thing was not very different

really from the invention of Edison, except that you picked up your sounds over a telephone-line and employed amplifiers to develop it and give it more precise definition.

Warren certainly had some curiosities among his stock calculated to intrigue the lay mind. Amongst other experimental flights he had contrived to get his microphone installed at a railway booking-office, and one record rehearsed a lively dialogue between the booking-clerk and an old lady who insisted on buying a ticket to Brighton at Euston Station. Another was taken a foot below the surface in a public swimming-bath, where snatches of conversation sounded harsh and reverberating, and were punctuated in a ludicrous fashion by the whimper of rising bubbles and drippings and floppings and splashings. Poor old Warren! what a miserable tool he was that afternoon in the hands of the worldlings.

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I begin to fear that I have allowed too much head to my disquisition. I set out with the idea of giving a true account of the tragic circumstance of the Blood Drop Stone which, at the beginning of July 1914, aroused so much interest. But somehow, when I took up my pen, I felt I could not overlook the lighter side of that memorable night, and I hope the reader may forgive my discursiveness.

The afternoon wore on towards evening, and the sun

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lay low on the horizon. Brudd, who had intended staying the night at the Anchor Inn in the village, was by now 80 interested in Warren's repertoire, or rather mine, that he seemed unwilling to leave the camp. We were discussing the point as to whether or not he should stay the night with us and get a good farewell breath of sea air before he returned to his Perfecto Gramophonism, when a man, whom I had noticed for some time strolling about the cliffs fixing his gaze on various points of the horizon, came up to us. He was a burly heavy-shouldered man, well whiskered, and wearing bell-bottomed trousers and a wideawake hat. "Good evening, gentlemen!" said he.

"Good evening." "Too late for birds-nesting now, I doubt."

Oh yes," said Warren. "But I am still busy with my machine, Mr Wilkinson. If you would like to hear any of my records it would give me great pleasure"

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"Good!" said Warren.

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Good, do you call it?" said Wilkinson. "If I was you gentlemen I should call it very bad indeed. If you're caught up here in a buster you'll know all about it. If I was you I should stow all my gear and batten all down right snug and skip into the village for the night."

The old sailor seemed very anxious for our welfare, but the more pessimistic he became about the weather the more did Warren wax enthusiastic, until the good man gave us up as rash lubbers, and went away muttering. The prospect certainly did look very forbidding, and the sun was already obscured by large masses of cumulus cloud that were invading the sky from the south-west. It set now in a flare of yellow, reflecting on the sleek surface of the sea in a garish way, giving an air of false gaiety. The clouds soon lost their pretty clustered forms and merged into large tawny banks. The sea turned to a steely grey, and its surface became wizened by dry hot currents of air that puffed in our faces on the cliff like harbingers of evil.

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These signs delighted Warren. The old sailor was right," said he. Everything is in tune for thunder. Listen to the low of the cattle: you never hear them low like that at any other time. Listen to the cry of the gulls: they know what's coming! Listen to the noise the water makes in the caves:

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