Minerva bounced into my office, deliberately banged the door, flopped into the chair which is usually reserved for my own use, without even a by-your-leave, and began to hum impatiently. Such signs were suggestive. The domestic barometer indicated "Change," "Rain," "Stormy."
A soft answer turneth not the hand of a barometer backward, so I sat silently waiting for the breaking of the storm.
Presently the impatient humming drifted into a measure from "The Tales of Hoffmann," the hand hesitated for a moment, and then steadily swung round to "Set Fair."
I laid down the umbrella I had taken up for emergencies, and the Home Champion smiled her apologies.
"It was a very near thing," she explained, "and a lucky thing for you that I remembered that waltz."
"So I see. And am I to take your free and easy, breezy manner as a sign that the launch was a success"
"Oh, the launch was simply ripping. And the 'Aquitania' is a duck. But the builders and the designers are rotters. I've no patience with them. Out-of-dates! Antiques!"
"What's wrong?"
"Wrong! Why, there's no billiard-room on board! The architects, or engineers, or whatever they call themselves, have allowed for everything you could think of—except the most important. They have made no provision for killing the tedium of the voyage. I call it a shame—a perfect shame. Everything but billiards; but billiards never mentioned.
Don't you agree with me that it is a shame?"
Provisionally I agreed.
"There are to be entrance halls, music and smoke rooms, a library, a ballroom, a swimming and diving pond, a lounge, a deck garden, a cinema theatre, and everything imaginable and desirable, excepting only a billiard-room.
Are the Clyde shipbuilders all Scotch Presbyterians? Just think of a vessel with 5,000 persons aboard and nowhere to play a hundred-up!"
"The providing of that particular, my dear, still baffles the ingenuity of ship-furnishers."
"Do you mean to say it isn't narrow-mindedness that's responsible?" she asked.
"Not quite. I should rather call it small than narrow, for the fact is we don't appear to have a mind large enough to find us a way out of the difficulty of keeping a billiard table level at sea. That is the whole story, my dear."
"And I was kept out of the Mechanics Laboratory at College for this!" exclaimed Minerva in disgust. "The dear little men things must have the Engineering Benches!—and with all their special opportunities and experience they cannot keep a billiard table level at sea.... Oh, I want to break something!"
I handed her a hammer and a small sheet of glass....
"Now tell me," said she, with a deep sigh of relief, replacing the hammer on my desk, "tell me what has been done in this matter. Anything at all? Or do we discreetly blot out all reference to that department in mechanical nonachievement?"
I related all I knew about the subject. Time and time again have experiments been made by billiard table manufacturers to produce tables which will remain level on board ship, but none have been successful. Most of the leading makers have patents in hand, but none of them are satisfactory.
The difficulty lies in keeping the table perfectly level, that the roll of the vessel may not affect the balls in play. Some interesting suggestions for such tables have been made: tables with thick felt or layers of cotton wool under the cloth, which would prevent the slowly moving balls on this style of, bed from responding to the movements of the ship; tables with polished wooden beds and cubes for balls; tables to swing from adjustable rods attached to the ceiling; tables to move on pivots, after the style of the compass; tables to sit on huge ball and socket joints instead of upon legs fixed to the floor; tables to float on mercury; tables bolted to movable decks. In short, tables to keep level in all circumstances have been floated on the dreams and visions of inventors for the past fifty years, but to date nobody has succeeded in hitting the idea that will stand the test of practical application. All this I described fully, Minerva displaying keen interest.
"Do you remember that lecture of mine on the Temperance Question, Jack, which I delivered a few years ago to the Society for the Suppression of Faddist Teetotallers?" she asked.
"What on earth has that got to do with billiards on board ship?"
"Everything. Do you remember my suggestion to the Trade?"
"Can't say I do."
"Do you mean to say you have actually forgotten the only rational solution of the Temperance Problem ever submitted to the world?"
"Afraid I have," I admitted.
"Well! well! Et tu, Brute! Even thou, Oh you brute, to ignore my brilliant brains! Please to remember that my suggestion to the publicans was to fix a gyroscope on each of their customers, before they allowed them to leave their premises. The inartistic movements of the Trade's finished products are offensive to the public eye, and the strongest argument the teetotallers have. If only this offence were removed, I argued—as it could be with the aid of the gyroscope— the Temperance platform would collapse for lack of support."
"We were talking about billiards at sea, my dear," I interrupted, "not bibbers at sea."
"You are dense, Jack," she smiled. "Don't you see the connection between a wobbly man half-seas over and a wobbly billiard table on the sea?"
"On my life, no."
"I give you up!" she sighed, rising. "Sometimes I wonder what I married you for! But, excuse me, I'm off to interview a shipbuilder. I have an idea. Guess what's in the back of my head."
"Perhaps a bee in your bonnet," I suggested.
"No. A GYROSCOPE."