They still spoke, however, in whispers, hardly daring to utter their
thoughts aloud.
The silence was suddenly startled by a howl of mingled ecstasy and rage
from Marston.
He would have fallen off the bridge, had not the others held him firmly.
Then he burst into a laugh loud and long, and quite as formidable as his
howl.
Then he tore away from his friends, and began beating himself over the
head.
"Oh!" he cried in accents between a yell and a groan, "what chuckleheads
we are! What numskulls! What jackasses! What double-treble-barrelled
gibbering idiots!" Then he fell to beating himself over the head again.
"What's the matter, Marston, for heaven's sake!" cried his friends,
vainly trying to hold him.
"Speak for yourself!" cried others, Belfast among the number.
"No exception, Belfast! You're as bad as the rest of us! We're all a set
of unmitigated, demoralized, dog-goned old lunatics! Ha! Ha! Ha!"
"Speak plainly, Marston! Tell us what you mean!"
"I mean," roared the terrible Secretary, "that we are no better than a
lot of cabbage heads, dead beats, and frauds, calling ourselves
scientists! O Barbican, how you must blush for us! If we were
schoolboys, we should all be skinned alive for our ignorance! Do you
forget, you herd of ignoramuses, that the Projectile weighs only ten
tons?"
"We don't forget it! We know it well! What of it?"
"This of it: it can't sink in water without displacing its own volume
in water; its own volume in water weighs thirty tons! Consequently, it
can't sink; more consequently, it hasn't sunk; and, most consequently,
there it is before us, bobbing up and down all the time under our very
noses! O Barbican, how can we ever venture to look at you straight in
the face again!"
Marston's extravagant manner of showing it did not prevent him from
being perfectly right.
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