The Diamond Maker--H. G. WellsThe Diamond Maker
BY H. G. Wells
Some business had detained me in Chancery Lane until nine in the evening, and 
thereafter, having some inkling of a headache, I was disinclined either for 
entertainment or further work. So much of the sky as the high cliffs of that 
narrow caon of traffic left visible spoke of a serene night, and I determined 
to make my way down to the Embankment, and rest my eyes and cool my head by 
watching the variegated lights upon the river. Beyond comparison the night is 
the best time for this place; a merciful darkness hides the dirt of the waters, 
and the lights of this transition age, red, glaring orange, gas-yellow, and 
electric-white, are set in shadowy outlines of every possible shade between grey 
and deep purple. Through the arches of Waterloo Bridge a hundred points of light 
mark the sweep of the Embankment, and above its parapet rise the towers of 
Westminster, warm grey against the starlight. The black river goes by with only 
a rare ripple breaking its silence, and disturbing the reflections of the lights 
that swim upon its surface.

'A warm night,' said a voice at my side.

I turned my head, and saw the profile of a man who was leaning over the parapet 
beside me. It was a refined face, not unhandsome, though pinched and pale 
enough, and the coat collar turned up and pinned round the throat marked his 
status in life as sharply as a uniform. I felt I was committed to the price of a 
bed and breakfast if I answered him.

I looked at him curiously. Would he have anything to tell me worth the money, or 
was he the common incapable - incapable even of telling his own story? There was 
a quality of intelligence in his forehead and eyes, and a certain tremulousness 
in his nether lip that decided me.

'Very warm,' said I; 'but not too warm for us here.'

'No,' he said, still looking across the water, 'it is pleasant enough 
here...just now.'

'It is good,' he continued after a pause, 'to find anything so restful as this 
in London. After one has been fretting about business all day, about getting on, 
meeting obligations, and parrying dangers, I do not know what one would do if it 
were not for such pacific corners.' He spoke with long pauses between the 
sentences. 'You must know a little of the irksome labour of the world, or you 
would not be here. But I doubt if you can be so brain-weary and footsore as I 
am...Bah! Sometimes I doubt if the game is worth the candle. I feel inclined to 
throw the whole thing over - name, wealth, and position - and take to some 
modest trade. But I know if I abandoned my ambition - hardly as she uses me - I 
should have nothing but remorse left for the rest of my days.'

He became silent. I looked at him in astonishment. If ever I saw a man 
hopelessly hard-up it was the man in front of me. He was ragged and he was 
dirty, unshaven and unkempt; he looked as though he had been left in a dust-bin 
for a week. And he was talking to me of the irksome worries of a large business. 
I almost laughed outright. Either he was mad or playing a sorry jest on his own 
poverty.

'If high aims and high positions,' said I, 'have their drawbacks of hard work 
and anxiety, they have their compensations. Influence, the power of doing good, 
of assisting those weaker and poorer than ourselves; and there is even a certain 
gratification in display....'

My banter under the circumstances was in very vile taste. I spoke on the spur of 
the contrast of his appearance and speech. I was sorry even while I was 
speaking.

He turned a haggard but very composed face upon me. Said he: 'I forget myself. 
Of course you would not understand.'

He measured me for a moment. 'No doubt it is very absurd. You will not believe 
me even when I tell you, so that it is fairly safe to tell you. And it will be a 
comfort to tell someone. I really have a big business in hand, a very big 
business. But there are troubles just now. The fact is...I make diamonds.'

'I suppose,' said I, 'you are out of work just at present?'

'I am sick of being disbelieved,' he said impatiently, and suddenly unbuttoning 
his wretched coat he pulled out a little canvas bag that was hanging by a cord 
round his neck. From this he produced a brown pebble. 'I wonder if you know 
enough to know what that is?' He handed it to me.

Now, a year or so ago, I had occupied my leisure in taking a London science 
degree, so that I have a smattering of physics and mineralogy. The thing was not 
unlike an uncut diamond of the darker sort, though far too large, being almost 
as big as the top of my thumb. I took it, and saw it had the form of a regular 
octahedron, with the carved faces peculiar to the most precious of minerals. I 
took out my penknife and tried to scratch it - vainly. Leaning forward towards 
the gas-lamp, I tried the thing on my watch-glass, and scored a white line 
across that with the greatest ease.

I looked at my interlocutor with rising curiosity. 'It certainly is rather like 
a diamond. But, if so, it is a Behemoth of diamonds. Where did you get it?'

'I tell you I made it,' he said. 'Give it back to me.'

He replaced it hastily and buttoned his jacket. 'I will sell it you for one 
hundred pounds,' he suddenly whispered eagerly. With that my suspicions 
returned. The thing might, after all, be merely a lump of that almost equally 
hard substance, corundum, with an accidental resemblance in shape to the 
diamond. Or if it was a diamond, how came he by it, and why should he offer it 
at a hundred pounds?

We looked into one another's eyes. He seemed eager, but honestly eager. At that 
moment I believed it was a diamond he was trying to sell. Yet I am a poor man, a 
hundred pounds would leave a visible gap in my fortunes and no sane man would 
buy a diamond by gaslight from a ragged tramp on his personal warranty only. 
Still, a diamond that size conjured up a vision of many thousands of pounds. 
Then, thought I, such a stone could scarcely exist without being mentioned in 
every book on gems, and again I called to mind the stories of contraband and 
lightfingered Kaffirs at the Cape. I put the question of purchase on one side.

'How did you get it?' said I.

'I made it.'

I had heard something of Moissan, but I knew his artificial diamonds were very 
small. I shook my head.

'You seem to know something of this kind of thing. I will tell you a little 
about myself. Perhaps then you may think better of the purchase.' He turned 
round with his back to the river, and put his hands in his pockets. He sighed. 
'I know you will not believe me.'

'Diamonds,' he began - and as he spoke his voice lost its faint flavour of the 
tramp and assumed something of the easy tone of an educated man - 'are to be 
made by throwing carbon out of combination in a suitable flux and under a 
suitable pressure; the carbon crystallizes out, not as blacklead or 
charcoal-powder, but as small diamonds. So much has been known to chemists for 
years, but no one yet has hit upon exactly the right pressure for the best 
results. Consequently the diamonds made by chemists are small and dark, and 
worthless as jewels. Now I, you know, have given up my life to this problem - 
given my life to it.

'I began to work at the conditions of diamond making when I was seventeen, and 
now I am thirty-two. It seemed to me that it might take all the thought and 
energies of a man for ten years, or twenty years, but, even if it did, the game 
was still worth the candle. Suppose one to have at last just hit the right 
trick, before the secret got out and diamonds became as common as coal, one 
might realize millions. Millions!'

He paused and looked for my sympathy. His eyes shone hungrily. 'To think,' said 
he, 'that I am on the verge of it all, and here!

'I had,' he proceeded, 'about a thousand pounds when I was twenty-one, and this, 
I thought, eked out by a little teaching, would keep my researches going. A year 
or two was spent in study, at Berlin chiefly, and then I continued on my own 
account. The trouble was the secrecy. You see, if once I had let out what I was 
doing, other men might have been spurred on by my belief in the practicability 
of the idea; and I do not pretend to be such a genius as to have been sure of 
coming in first, in a case of a race for the discovery. And you see it was 
important that if I really meant to make a pile, people should not know it was 
an artificial process and capable of turning out diamonds by the ton. So I had 
to work all alone. At first I had a little laboratory, but as my resources began 
to run out I had to conduct my experiments in a wretched unfurnished room in 
Kentish Town, where I slept at last on a straw mattress on the floor among all 
my apparatus. The money simply flowed away. I grudged myself everything except 
scientific appliances. I tried to keep things going by a little teaching, but I 
am not a very good teacher, and I have no university degree, nor very much 
education except in chemistry, and I found I had to give a lot of time and 
labour for precious little money. But I got nearer and nearer the thing. Three 
years ago I settled the problem of the composition of the flux, and got near the 
pressure by putting this flux of mine and a certain carbon composition into a 
closed-up gun-barrel, filling up with water, sealing tightly, and heating.'

He paused.

'Rather risky,' said I.

'Yes. It burst, and smashed all my windows and a lot of my apparatus; but I got 
a kind of diamond powder nevertheless. Following out the problem of getting a 
big pressure upon the molten mixture from which the things were to crystallize, 
I hit upon some researches of Daubr's at the Paris Laboratorie des Poudres et 
Salptres. He exploded dynamite in a tightly screwed steel cylinder, too strong 
to burst, and I found he could crush rocks into a muck not unlike the South 
African bed in which diamonds are found. It was a tremendous strain on my 
resources, but I got a steel cylinder made for my purpose after his pattern. I 
put in all my stuff and my explosives, built up the fire in my furnace, put the 
whole concern in, and - went for a walk.'

I could not help laughing at his matter-of-fact manner. 'Did you not think it 
would blow up the house? Were there other people in the place?'

'It was in the interest of science,' he said ultimately. 'There was a 
costermonger family on the floor below, a begging-letter writer in the room 
behind mine, and two flower-women were upstairs. Perhaps it was a bit 
thoughtless. But possibly some of them were out.

'When I came back the thing was just where I left it, among the white-hot coals. 
The explosive hadn't burst the case. And then I had a problem to face. You know 
time is an important element in crystallization. If you hurry the process the 
crystals are small - it is only by prolonged standing that they grow to any 
size. I resolved to let this apparatus cool for two years, letting the 
temperature go down slowly during that time. And I was now quite out of money; 
and with a big fire and the rent of my room, as well as my hunger to satisfy, I 
had scarcely a penny in the world.

'I can hardly tell you all the shifts I was put to while I was making the 
diamonds. I have sold newspapers, held horses, opened cab-doors. For many weeks 
I addressed envelopes. I had a place as assistant to a man who owned a barrow, 
and used to call down one side of the road while he called down the other. Once 
for a week I had absolutely nothing to do, and I begged. What a week that was! 
One day the fire was going out and I had eaten nothing all day, and a little 
chap taking his girl out gave me sixpence - to show off. Thank heaven for 
vanity. How the fish-shops smelt! But I went and spent it all on coals, and had 
the furnace bright red again, and then - Well, hunger makes a fool of a man.

'At last, three weeks ago, I let the fire out. I took my cylinder and unscrewed 
it while it was still so hot that it punished my hands, and I scraped out the 
crumbling lava-like mass with a chisel, and hammered it into a powder upon an 
iron plate. And I found three big diamonds and five small ones. As I sat on the 
floor hammering, my door opened, and my neighbour, the begging-letter writer, 
came in. He was drunk - as he usually is. " 'Nerchist," said he. "You're drunk," 
said I. "'Structive scoundrel," said he. "Go to your father," said I, meaning 
the Father of Lies. "Never you mind," said he, and gave me a cunning wink, and 
hicupped, and leaning up against the door, with his other eye against the 
door-post, began to babble of how he had been prying into my room, and how he 
had gone to the police that morning, and how they had taken down everything he 
had to say - " 'siffiwas a ge'm," said he. Then I suddenly realized I was in a 
hole. Either I should have to tell these police my litle secret, and get the 
whole thing blown upon, or be lagged as an Anarchist. So I went up to my 
neighbour and took him by the collar, and rolled him about a bit, and then I 
gathered up my diamonds and cleared out. The evening newspapers called my den 
the Kentish-Town Bomb Factory. And now I cannot part with the things for love or 
money.

'If I go in to respectable jewellers they ask me to wait, and go and whisper to 
a clerk to fetch a policeman, and then I say I cannot wait. And I found out a 
receiver of stolen goods, and he simply stuck to the one I gave him and told me 
to prosecute if I wanted it back. I am going about now with several hundred 
thousand pounds' worth of diamonds round my neck, and without either food or 
shelter. You are the first person I have taken into my confidence. But I like 
your face and I am hard-driven.'

He looked into my eyes.

'It would be madness,' said I, 'for me to buy a diamond under the circumstances. 
Besides, I do not carry hundreds of pounds about in my pocket. Yet I more than 
half believe your story. I will, if you like, do this: come to my office 
tomorrow...'

'You think I am a thief!' said he keenly. 'You will tell the police. I am not 
coming into a trap.'

'Somehow I am assured you are no thief. Here is my card. Take that, anyhow. You 
need not come to any appointment. Come when you will.'

He took the card,and an earnest of my good will.

'Think better of it and come,' said I.

He shook his head doubtfully. 'I will pay back your half-crown with interest 
some day - such interest as will amaze you,' said he. 'Anyhow, you will keep the 
secret?...Don't follow me.'

He crossed the road and went into the darkness towards the little steps under 
the archway leading into Essex Street, and I let him go. And that was the last I 
ever saw of him.

Afterwards I had two letters from him asking me to send banknotes - not cheques 
- to certain addresses. I weighed the matter over, and took what I conceived to 
be the wisest course. Once he called upon me when I was out. My urchin described 
him as a very thin, dirty, and ragged man, with a dreadful cough. He left no 
message. That was the finish of him so far as my story goes. I wonder sometimes 
what has become of him. Was he an ingenious monomaniac, or a fraudulant dealer 
in pebbles, or has he really made diamonds as he asserted? The latter is just 
sufficiently credible to make me think at times that I have missed the most 
brilliant opportunity of my life. He may of course be dead, and his diamonds 
carelessly thrown aside - one, I repeat, was almost as big as my thumb. Or he 
may be still wandering about trying to sell the things. It is just possible he 
may yet emerge upon society, and, passing athwart my heavens in the serene 
altitude sacred to the wealthy and the well-advertised, reproach me silently for 
my want of enterprise. I sometimes think I might at least have risked five 
pounds.



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