Chapter Two: Introductions
As an emerging scientist, Joseph Bell was quite popular with the scientific community. After graduating from Oxford, Mr. Bell was named one of the institute's most promising young scholars of our time. Though he wasn't a household name until 1880, Mr. Bell was quite popular with the London middle class. Mr. Bell spent many a night in the pub. Though a scientist, Mr. Bell was not a typical, spotless, almost flaunting individual. He liked the common man. He enjoyed the company of another human being, regardless of social status or any other Englishman marking. Mr. Bell would talk to anyone who would listen.
One reason why people liked Joseph so much was his willingness to talk about whatever seemed interesting that is, not always talking about his current project or the latest word from the scientific community. Anyone and everyone was his friend. He was a good natured man all around.
Joseph often spent nights in the Gears and Cheers Pub holding stimulating yet not necessarily intellectual conversation with everyone from Baxter Basil to the waitress whom everyone referred to as Madame Pomp. Madame Pomp was a big burly woman who didn't look like she took up very much space until you either heard her speak in her manly booming voice or until she was breaking up a bar fight and throwing both the poor souls out of the front doors. Madame Pomp was the Pub's peacekeeper and was not a force to be reckoned with. She perhaps could have been called "pretty" in her youth but that term, even then, would have been a stretch. What she had in beauty (and trust me, it wasn't very much) she destroyed with her personality. She was loud and rough around the edges. It is such a curious thing of the human race that one who is a bit rough around the edges so to say can be completely written off for a devilish creature with a spirit more foul than even the drunkest of sailors, without even the slightest look deeper into her character. Human souls are bottomless wells of emotion and character. One should not disregard the well based on a simple taste of the top skimming of the water, but rather quench their thirst with water drawn from deeper in the well. This was the social art of Mr. Bell. He knew just how to operate the bucket and pulley to draw only the best water from each soul-well. And in this art he was well skilled.
Aside from his work in the scientific theory of luminous rocks and his social prowess, Mr. Bell enjoyed the fashion of the time. He grew up right when the steam revolution was taking place and though his family was upper-middle class, he couldn't always afford the latest and greatest of the steam fashion movement as he would have liked. But even from infancy, so his mother would claim, Joseph was a bright boy. In secondary school, Joseph learned the craft of metal working in all sense of the phrase for which he used to craft his own accessories according to the fashion. In his late adolescent years Joseph worked for a time in an iron mine. He learned many things in that mine about hard work and the joys of receiving due pay.
In the prime of his life, Joseph was a strapping man. He always kept his clothes neat even when casual. He knew how to mend a button, resole a shoe, frame glasses, repair a broken pocket watch and other homely tasks that one should not expect a former miner to be able to do. Joseph had learned from a small age that knowing such things in life was often better than having to pay someone to do the task. He kept his beard neatly trimmed close to the skin. It was a typical looking beard that did not connect to the sideburns but rested solely on the chin and around the chops. All of the lines were straight and smooth; Joseph was handy with a razor and could easily carve out a straight line from even the bushiest of beards.
A marked feature of Mr. Bell's presence was his Kapp and Peterson pipe. It was a neatly furnished cherry wood pipe with a black finished mouth piece and the Royal Airship Division's emblem on the side in silver. Mr. Bell could smoke any tobacco in his pipe but preferred the Virginia bright. It had a light taste that was light enough to be combined with other flavors but by itself was naturally sweet, but not too sweet, and had a pleasant smell to it. Joseph didn't smoke everyday but still often enough to make his pipe a telltale feature of his appearance. He believed that a pipe every Sunday evening was the perfect way to end a day and start a week.
As to where he took his smoke, Bell preferred to sit in a little corner of Baxter's pub and watch the guests come and go as he pleased. Sometimes a gentleman would join him and, Bell being his friendly self, they would engage in the most good natured of parleys. Bell was a very well read man who could talk about anything from current literature to the most current of events. He read the paper every morning with his tea and buttered bread. One striking quality of his speech though, was certainly his ability to shift the conversation form topic to topic as he pleased without boring or losing his counterpart. Small talk was as much his forte as was full conversation.
Mr. Bell always sat in the same corner. It was close enough to the hearth to keep him comfortable in winter and far enough from it to keep him comfortable in the summer. I sconce sat above his head on the wall where it gave off the homely glow one knows to be Flicker Powder. The wood paneling on the wall was cherry, matching his Kapp and Peterson, as were all the tables and chairs. Behind him, tucked neatly in the corner, stood the coat and hat rack. It was a bronze piece of metal roughly as tall as Baxter who was a good deal taller than Joseph. The bottom of the stand curled out into ornate circles which all seemed to meet together at one point or another on the floor. Inside each of the three large circles were more circles which intersected and crossed in a uniform pattern of curved diamonds and bent squares. The hooks on the stand came up and curled out much as the bottom of the stand did. There was a single circle on the top of each hook. The golden bronze finish was slightly worn away in several spots on the hooks to reveal a less attractive grey. The top of the stand was a spire in the form of the old gothic spires which stand on the tops of old wrought-iron gates outside of church cemeteries. The coat rack seemed to Joseph to be the finishing piece in that corner of the room which attracted him so much. It seemed to glow under the light of the sconce and next to the fire of the hearth.
The rest of the pub was decorated, or rather scattered with, trinkets and gadgets of all sorts from the time period. It was as if any device ever made could find some artistic use here in this little pub in London. The Gears and Cheers Pub, owned by Baxter Basil who was not trending with steam when he bought the place off the old man, had amassed and collected everything to do with steam or clockwork. In the end, he became obsessed with the types of things that scared him at first. The Gears and Cheers pub was aptly named as the years went on and more gears were mounted on walls and stuck onto tables and chairs. Let us not forget either the cheers had in the pub through the years.
The story truly begins on the thirteenth birthday of little Mary Bell, the daughter of esteemed scientist Joseph Bell, in the Gears and Cheers Pub. It is the year 1884, five years after the discovery and application of Flicker Powder. Mr. Bell is now one of the wealthier citizens of London, though no one would ever know the difference either in his attitude or apparel. But for his daughter, Joseph would spend a fortune to make her happy, even though she didn't require such measures to be so. She was his only daughter and that was enough reason for him.