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the fifth tier of seats on the opposite side. "And do you see the next man to
him, the one in the white hat? Well, there is quite a gap between them, is
there not?"
"Certainly," I answered. "They are a seat apart. The gap is the unoccupied
seat."
He leaned over to me and spoke seriously. "Between the red-whiskered man and
the white-hatted man sits Ben Wasson. You have heard me speak of him. He is
the cleverest pugilist of his weight in the country. He is also a Caribbean
negro, full-blooded, and the blackest in the United State;. He has on a black
overcoat buttoned up. I saw him when he came in and took that seat. As soon as
he sat down he disappeared. Watch closely; he may smile."
I was for crossing over to verify Lloyd's statement, but he restrained me.
"Wait," he said.
I waited and watched, till the red-whiskered man turned his head as though
addressing the unoccupied seat; and then, in that empty space, I saw the
rolling whites of a pair of eyes and the white double-crescent of two rows of
teeth, and for the instant I could make out a negro's face. But with the
passing of the smile his visibility passed, and the chair seemed vacant as
before.
"Were he perfectly black, you could sit alongside him and not see him,"
Lloyd said; and I confess the illustration was apt enough to make me well-nigh
convinced.
I visited Lloyd's laboratory a number of times after that, and found him
always deep in his search after the absolute black. His experiments covered
all sorts Of pigments, such as lamp-blacks, tars, carbonized vegetable
matters, soots of oils and fats, and the various carbonized animal substances.
"White light is composed of the seven primary colors," he argued to me. "But
it is itself, of itself, invisible. Only by being reflected from objects do it
and the objects become visible. But only that portion of it that is reflected
becomes visible. For instance, here is a blue tobacco-box. The white light
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strikes against it, and, with one exception, all its component colors violet,
indigo, green, yellow, orange, and red are absorbed. The one exception is
BLUE. It is not absorbed, but reflected.Therefore the tobacco-box gives us a
sensation of blueness. We do not see the other colors because they are
absorbed. We see only the blue. For the same reason grass is GREEN. The green
waves of white light are thrown upon our eyes."
"When we paint our houses, we do not apply color to them," he said at
another time. "What we do is to apply certain substances that have the
property of absorbing from white light all the colors except those that we
would have our houses appear. When a substance reflects all the colors to the
eye, it seems to us white. When it absorbs all the colors, it is black. But,
as I said before, we have as yet no perfect black. All the colors are not
absorbed. The perfect black, guarding against high lights, will be utterly and
absolutely invisible. Look at that, for example."
He pointed to the palette lying on his work-table. Different shades of black
pigments were brushed on it. One, in particular, I could hardly see. It gave
my eyes a blurring sensation, and I rubbed them and looked again.
"That," he said impressively, "is the blackest black you or any mortal man
ever looked upon. But just you wait, and I'll have a black so black that no
mortal man will be able to look upon it and see it!"
On the other hand, I used to find Paul Tichlorne plunged as deeply into the
study of light polarization, diffraction, and interference, single and double
refraction, and all manner of strange organic compounds.
"Transparency: a state or quality of body which permits all rays of light to
pass through," he defined for me. "That is what I am seeking. Lloyd blunders
up against the shadow with his perfect opaqueness. But I escape it. A
transparent body casts no shadow; neither does it reflect light-waves that is,
the perfectly transparent does not. So, avoiding high lights, not only will
such a body cast no shadow, but, since it reflects no light, it will also be
invisible."
We were standing by the window at another time. Paul was engaged in
polishing a number of lenses, which were ranged along the sill. Suddenly,
after a pause in the conversation, he said, "Oh! I've dropped a lens. Stick
your head out, old man, and see where it went to."
Out I started to thrust my head, but a sharp blow on the forehead caused me
to recoil. I rubbed my bruised brow and gazed with reproachful inquiry at
Paul, who was laughing in gleeful, boyish fashion.
"Well?" he said.
"Well?" I echoed.
"Why don't you investigate?" he demanded. And investigate I did. Before
thrusting out my head, my senses, automatically active, had told me there was
nothing there, that nothing intervened between me and out-of-doors, that the
aperture of the window opening was utterly empty. I stretched forth my hand
and felt a hard object, smooth and cool and flat, which my touch, out of its
experience, told me to be glass. I looked again, but could see positively
nothing.
"White quartzose sand," Paul rattled off, "sodic carbonate, slaked lime,
cutlet, manganese peroxide there you have it, the finest French plate glass,
made by the great St. Gobain Company, who made the finest plate glass in the
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