The Peacemaker

by C. S. Forester

  C. S. FORESTER

  The Peacemaker

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  A Note on the Author

  Chapter One

  Doctor Edward Pethwick, mathematics and physics master at the Liverpool School, was sitting at a window in his room adjoining the senior physics laboratory. He had laid aside the calculation on which he was engaged in order to watch the proceedings in the playing fields beneath the window. The Officers’ Training Corps was coming on parade in readiness for a rehearsal of to-morrow’s review by a general from the War Office; to-day they were being reviewed merely by a general who did not use the title—Mr. Henry Laxton, C.M.G., D.S.O., M.A., Headmaster of the Liverpool School, who had risen during the war from the rank of captain in the Territorial Army to the command of a brigade, and when the war was over had returned to the teaching profession and had accepted this headmastership; it gave the school a decided prestige to have at its head a brigadier-general, because even though he punctiliously never used the title everyone who mattered knew that it was his by right.

  At the moment his son, Henry Laxton the Second, Captain of the School and Sergeant of No. 3 Platoon, was bringing his detachment on to the parade-ground. He walked with a swagger which was an improvement on that of the regular sergeant-major’s; he handled his silver-topped cane to the manner born; and the long bayonet which swung on his hip rhythmically with his stride was the finishing touch to his soldierly appearance.

  Pethwick saw his dark eyes beneath his cap peak gauging carefully, but without hurry the distance between the head of his column and the space where No. 3 platoon should be. Then young Laxton shouted the order—although ‘shout’ is too barbaric a word for that beautifully modulated word of command.

  ‘At the halt, on the left, form—platoon.’

  No. 3 platoon came up into line exactly where it ought to have been, and stood rigid.

  ‘Order— hype. Standa—tease.’

  The fifty rifles came down like one; the fifty left feet made only one sound as they were pushed out.

  Pethwick, watching from his window, knew he could never have done anything like that. His voice would have risen to a squeak with the excitement. He would have misjudged the distance hopelessly, so that the little devils at the head of the platoon would have bumped delightedly into the line ahead of them. He could not conceive of himself ever having fifty boys under such perfect control as to order arms and stand at ease without a fidget or a wriggle anywhere along the line.

  Pethwick was conscious of a vague envy of young Laxton. He envied him the calm self-confidence of his carriage, his coolness, and his efficiency in action. He ranked young Laxton in his mind with all the other people whom he described to himself—drawing upon a vague memory of Fiona Macleod’s Immortal Hour—as ‘the Lordly Ones,’ people who could do things in front of other people without fumbling at their neckties.

  Pethwick tried to comfort himself by thinking of things which he could do with ease and which were quite beyond young Laxton’s capacity; only that very morning in class Laxton had come down badly in attempting to demonstrate Cayley’s proof of the Binomial Theorem, which to Pethwick was literally no more abstruse than the addition of two and two, but there was somehow no comfort in the memory; for Pethwick was of such an unfortunate mental composition as to find no pleasure in the malicious contemplation of other people’s difficulties.

  Down on the parade-ground the regular sergeant-major and young Laxton had posted the markers—this was a very formal parade indeed.

  ‘Markers, steady.’

  The drums rolled as the lines dressed. The officers were on parade now, Pethwick’s colleagues all of them, Summers with his medals, Malpas and Stowe trim in their new uniforms, Hicks still tugging at his gloves—he, too, was not of the Lordly Ones. Swords were drawn and glittered in the sun. It was rare indeed for swords to be seen in the playing fields of the Liverpool School. The khaki ranks stood fast, motionless. The very atmosphere seemed charged with a tension which told that the great moment of the day was at hand.

  Then the doors of the school hall towards which the parade was facing flew open, and the headmaster stepped out. Summers bawled an order. The band played a lively march—making a horrible hash of the opening bars—and the swords flashed as they came to the salute, and the rifles came to the present as though actuated by one single vast machine.

  Mr. Laxton’s appearance fully justified all this ceremony. He was not in uniform—after all, this was only a rehearsal of to-morrow’s review—but by a happy thought he was wearing morning clothes, superb in cut and style, setting just the right note of informal formality. He stood with his yellow gloves and silver-mounted stick in one hand and his silk hat raised in the other during the general salute, and then he came forward, while Summers hastened to meet him, to walk along the lines in formal inspection.

  Dr. Pethwick continued to watch and suffer. He knew that if he were to put on a morning coat he would look like a seedy shop-walker, and in a silk hat he would look simply absurd.

  And then Dr. Pethwick’s heart gave a little kick inside his ribs. Mr. Laxton was now standing at the flagstaff which marked the saluting-point, and by his side was a young woman in a brown summer frock, talking animatedly. It was his daughter Dorothy, whom Dr. Pethwick considered to be the sweetest, most beautiful, most lovely of all the Lordly Ones. Even leaving out of account the fact that Dr. Pethwick was a married man, it is remarkable that he had come to differentiate between Lordly Ones to such an extent that the sight of one particular one of them a hundred yards away should send up his pulse-rate, while none of the others affected him in any such manner. Yet if Dr. Pethwick had been able to put his feelings into words, he would have said that Dorothy Laxton was a fountain of sweetness, and that within the circle of Dorothy Laxton’s arms (although he had no personal experience) lay all the bliss and rest and happiness of any conceivable paradise. Even looking at her over the playing fields brought a pain into his breast—a pain in which he found an odd pleasure. Pethwick gulped and looked away, allowing his mind, for the first time for a quarter of an hour, to revert to the calculation which half covered the large sheet of paper before him. The expression he was dealing with there included half the Greek alphabet and half the English, as well as eight or nine other symbols which only come to light in mathematical text-books. Even Dr. Pethwick had found himself floundering a little helplessly at the moment when young Laxton had marched up No. 3 platoon to distract him.

  When the Encyclopædia Britannica writes its little biographies of mathematicians and similar odd people, it is generous enough in its praise of their achievements. Sometimes, indeed, it even condescends to some small detail of their private lives, saying, perhaps, ‘for the next twenty years he was happily occupied as Professor of Mathematics at So-and-So University,’ and sometimes, even, it goes so far as to give a vague hint of ‘domestic trouble,’ or ‘illness.’ But from those poor data it is hard to conjure up a complete picture of the life of such a man as Pethwick, of the troubles and distractions caused him by such things as far unconnec
ted with mathematics as his strong views upon disarmament and the facts that he loved his headmaster’s daughter, and that a silk hat did not suit his looks, and that his headmaster had been a brigadier-general, and that his wife was a slovenly and malicious drunkard, or even that the Officers’ Training Corps should choose to hold a rehearsal of a review under the windows of his room, in the afternoon following a morning when VB had been badly behaved and the Upper Sixth had been worse.

  Perhaps all these dissimilar ingredients contributed to the sigh with which Pethwick picked up his pen again in his long, beautiful fingers and addressed himself to the tangle of neat symbols while outside the band blared and the Officers’ Training Corps plunged into the complicated wheel which was to get them into position for the march past.

  It is conceivable that the distraction did Pethwick good, that the few minutes during which his mind had been empty of his work gave it an opportunity to rally for the last final effort. But it is just as likely that the stimulus given to his circulation and reactions by the distant sight of Dorothy Laxton may have been responsible. However it was, Pethwick’s pen moved across the paper without hesitation for some minutes. Line was added to line of the calculation. Two nasty corners were turned by ingenious devices. The expression simplified itself. Pethwick’s eyebrows rose at one discovery; it was all very surprising. If he had been able to carry the calculation in his head he might have deduced all this weeks ago, and he was rather annoyed with himself for not having done so—he told himself that Gauss or Clerk Maxwell would have achieved the feat easily; in that he was wrong, betrayed into error by his habitual poor opinion of his own capacity.

  The mathematical expression had been reduced now to the simplest form such a thing could possibly attain, and Pethwick looked at it with surprise. This was not what he had started to prove. He had set out to find a zero, and here was definite evidence that there was not a zero to be found; that when all allowances had been made there was a substantial residuum left over.

  That was how Pethwick regarded it; actually he deserved a good deal more credit. Before he had set about this calculation the flair, the inspiration, which denotes the great scientist, had told him that there might perhaps be this residuum despite the general consensus of mathematical opinion. The notion had bothered him until he had determined to settle it once and for all. Now he had proved himself right, proved that the two minor factors to which a whole series of keen minds had refused to attach importance were important after all, and he had already formed an erroneous estimate of his own achievement. He told himself that he had believed he would reach a zero and had reached a positive result instead, whereas actually in his heart of hearts he had known all along that he would reach that result. But Pethwick could never give himself credit for anything.

  All the same, it was equally characteristic of him that he did not look back through his calculation to check its correctness. He knew that was all right. The only doubtful point was whether Klein’s original figures, with Norbury’s elaborations of them, were accurate. Pethwick looked again at Norbury’s eloquent paragraphs in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society which had originally inspired his investigation. Klein was probably accurate, and Norbury was certainly right as far as he had gone—which was not very far. At that rate the result which Pethwick had reached was exceedingly interesting mathematically. The experimental investigation which should follow would also be interesting. Pethwick was not very excited at the thought of that. He was much more of a mathematician than a physicist, and his lack of self-assurance made him continually doubtful of his manipulative skill.

  But something might easily come of his discovery. There might be some application in the arts, in several directions. Electrical generation might be simplified, or for that matter broadcasting, or motor-car ignition. Because Pethwick had spent three weeks wrestling with the figures housewives all over the world might find their electric irons cheaper to run, or little clerks might come home from their offices to listen in with more efficient radio sets, or ten million motorists in ten million garages would have to give one fewer turn to the cranks of their motor-cars on cold mornings.

  Pethwick smiled with one side of his mouth at the exuberance of his imagination. There was an enormous distance between a row of figures on a sheet of paper and the general adoption of an invention which might possibly spring from bench experiments which might perhaps follow from those figures. But still, such was the stimulus given to his mind by this extravagant imagination of his that he resolved to carry out the very next day a few simple practical confirmations of his theoretical deductions. As he put his papers away in his desk he was already listing in his mind pieces of apparatus which he would need for preliminary work, and which the resources of the senior physics laboratory at the Liverpool School could provide.

  Chapter Two

  As Doctor Edward Pethwick came out of the Science Buildings of the school into the courtyard (Mr. Laxton discountenanced the use of the word ‘playground,’ which had generally been employed before his accession) he encountered his headmaster and his headmaster’s daughter coming away from the saluting point now that the review was over.

  Doctor Pethwick took off his hat and passed on. Mr. Laxton nodded with a condescension which was made all the more remarkable by his morning coat and silk hat. Dorothy smiled very charmingly indeed. And as Dr. Pethwick went on, conscious of the fact that his coat crumpled below its collar, and that his soft hat was shabby, and his shoes unclean, Mr. Laxton cocked his head sideways after him and said:

  ‘Queer bloke, that.’

  Mr. Laxton was of the type that cannot help making a comment about anyone he happened to encounter.

  ‘Doctor Pethwick? I like him.’

  ‘Oh, he’s all right, I suppose, in his way. But you have to be a damn’ good disciplinarian before you can dress like that in a boys’ school, you know, Dorothy. And he’s not.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think he was,’ said Dorothy.

  Dorothy, as a matter of fact, was always reminded by Dr. Pethwick’s appearance of the White Knight in Through the Looking-Glass—perhaps the most lovable character in English fiction, but hardly of the type to keep order in a secondary school.

  ‘Honestly, Dorothy, I ought to get rid of him,’ said Mr. Laxton. ‘He can’t keep discipline, and he can’t teach, and he’s no good at games, and his wife—’

  ‘Don’t let’s talk about his wife, said Dorothy. She had heard too much about Mrs. Pethwick; wherever two or three women were gathered together in that suburb there was always some discussion of Mrs. Pethwick.

  ‘But then, I don’t know,’ said Mr. Laxton. ‘I thought about it when I first came here, and decided against sacking him then, and the same arguments hold good now, I suppose. He’s an old boy of the school, you know, and although he is a London man, he’s the only one left on the staff, thank God. Did I tell you the new man who’s coming next term is Winchester and New?’

  ‘Yes, Father,’ said Dorothy. She thought of adding, but refrained, ‘Several times.’

  ‘Oh yes, so I did. What were we talking about before that? Oh, Pethwick. I didn’t tell you that that astronomer chap on the board of governors—what’s his name?—Runciman, that’s it—was talking to me about a couple of papers of Pethwick’s in some mathematical journal or other. Marvellous stuff, Runciman was saying.’

  ‘Really?’ said Dorothy, with a trace of interest. ‘What were they about?’

  ‘Don’t ask me, girl. It’s not my line, as you know jolly well. But Runciman obviously thought the world of him—“A very brilliant young mathematician, evidently,” and all that sort of thing.’

  ‘Young?’ questioned Dorothy, who was twenty-three.

  ‘God bless my soul, yes,’ said Mr. Laxton. ‘He’s not much older than you are. I see his name on the honours board every time I take prayers in hall. He got his degree—B.Sc.—in 1921. and I know he was nineteen at the time. He’s thirty-one. Got his doctorate at twenty-four. Runcima
n was talking to me about his thesis at the same time as the other things.’

  Dorothy remembered guiltily that only last week she had decided that she would marry someone just over thirty, as that was the most suitable age. It was a shock to her to realise that Dr. Pethwick was that age, although she had never pictured herself married to him.

  ‘I hope,’ mused Mr. Laxton, ‘that he does something really brilliant soon. Suppose he became as famous as Einstein. Think what a lot of good that would do to the school.’

  Mr. Laxton had ambitions regarding the school. He wished to raise it to pre-eminence among secondary schools—nay more, he had visions of making a public school of it and himself attaining the lofty distinction of admission to the Public School Headmasters’ Conference. In the last three years he had done much towards it; he had weeded out all the members of the staff—save for Dr. Pethwick—who did not hold degrees from Oxford or Cambridge; there was even a half-blue on the staff. He had introduced the practice of corporal punishment and the teaching of Greek—although his board of governors had so far managed to prevent him from making Greek a compulsory subject for the tradesmen’s sons and small clerks’ sons who were his pupils.

  Mr. Laxton’s chief trouble was the name of the school. Everyone who was not initiated thought that the Liverpool School must be in Liverpool, a mere provincial place, instead of, as was actually the case, owing its name to its Victorian founder and being in a suburb of London as near to the heart of things as St. Paul’s and Dulwich College and Merchant Taylors’, which everyone knew to be real public schools. Even the Old Boys would not help him much. They insisted on calling themselves Old Liverpudlians—a disgusting provincial name—and remained stone-deaf to hints from the headmaster that he would welcome any movement to change the name into something more airy and gentlemanly.

  In Mr. Laxton’s mind the retention of Dr. Pethwick on the staff was a noble gesture, a magnificent recognition of the rise of democracy, a most notable example of the fact that nowadays a career was always open to talent. For Dr. Pethwick had no education beyond the Liverpool School and the University of London. Everyone knew that he was only the son of a local saddler—dead now, thank God—and that he had all sorts of queer cousins and relations still living in the district who were only working-class people. And also that he had a terrible wife—of the same class, of course.