Mercifully, bewilderment came later and helped to neutralise the pain. He was able to bring himself at last to try and remember the things Dorothy had said to him and to try and work out the reason for his dismissal. Here he was hampered by his humility. He naturally assumed that Dorothy, by virtue of her status as a Lordly One, had every right to dismiss him without explanation—without reason, for that matter. She was perfectly entitled, in his opinion, to hurt him as much as the whim took her.
The assumption, however, was not entirely satisfying. The scientific brain demanded examination of all other hypotheses before adhering to the most likely—and the scientific brain was at work, somewhere, beneath all the agony. Dorothy had called him a liar and a coward; Pethwick forced himself to consider this matter; in the same way a doctor might force himself to handle his own broken leg. If Dorothy had called him a liar it must be because he had told her something which she believed not to be true.
Pethwick went back in his mind examining his memory of what he had told her. He was biased. He could not bring himself to think that the things he sincerely believed in, the things he had felt to be true, or had known to be true, might be doubted by anybody. He ruled at once out of the argument, then, any question as to whether he loved her, or would always love her. The fact that he did not sleep with his wife was so much of a fact, so solid and indisputable, that he only gave it the most fleeting moment’s thought.
There were other matters on which his conscience pricked him a little—so little that until he began this examination he had been quite unaware of it. This disarmament business, for instance. He had not been as enthusiastic in the cause of the reduction of armaments as had Dorothy; his enthusiasm had been, if not the result of mere politeness, at least devoid of Dorothy’s pure fanaticism. Many of Dorothy’s arguments had appeared far-fetched to his logical mind; he told himself guiltily that he would never have agreed with them so completely if it had not been Dorothy who had put them forward. He had been a liar for agreeing with her, and a coward for not stating his objections.
This evening Pethwick only worked as far forward as this point before the feeling of loss returned again in overwhelming force. Dorothy had been eminently successful in her aim of hurting him as much as she had been hurt; the weak point was that if Pethwick had been the kind of liar she thought he was he would never have suffered so much. As it was he suffered in the way a child suffers; he was plunged into bottomless misery. It seemed as if there were no hope or joy left on earth.
In fact, there seemed to be nothing on earth left to live for. The discovery of the Klein–Pethwick Effect was nothing when weighed in the scales against this present calamity. Pethwick would have contemplated death quite calmly had the idea presented itself to him. But he was not of the impulsive kind which tends towards suicide. And by a curious association of ideas as soon as he realised that he was both unhappy and tired, he began automatically to go to bed. He had gone to bed unhappy so often before.
As ever, the routine of tooth-cleaning and hand-washing did much to calm his mind. He crept into the bedroom as he had done so often before, and got ready for bed in the dark room, lit only by such light as crept in through the windows from the street lamps outside.
For once, Mary’s intuition had failed her. She had crept up to bed some time before, and had kept herself awake awaiting this moment. When Pethwick slipped gently into the bed beside her she turned over with her hands out to him; he had thought her asleep. There was no doubting the genuineness of Mary’s passion for him at the moment. She knew she had come near to losing him, and that had taught her how much she had to lose. She had stayed sober on his account for nearly a week now, and she felt towards him the tenderness which often results towards those on whose behalf one makes sacrifices. And besides, he had seemed so unhappy, so hurt, that evening. All that she had in the way of maternal instinct had been called up and roused at the sight of his pathetic unhappiness. She wanted to pet him and comfort him.
She put her arms round his bony body and caught him to her. She found his lips in the darkness and kissed them eagerly. She thought she noticed some return of her kisses, and she pressed hotly to him, lip to lip. But the body she held was unresponsive. For one half second Pethwick’s misery had had the better of him. The first impulse of Pethwick’s instincts had been to forget Dorothy in Mary’s kisses—as nearly as that had Mary’s intuition guided her correctly—but the revulsion was immediate. He lay impassive in her arms. That natural kindliness of his caused him to restrain the shudder of distaste which nearly overcame him. Such is the complication of human nature that it seemed to him that to return Mary’s kisses would be insulting to Mary as well as to Dorothy. The situation was horrible to him, and yet he wished to make sure that Mary did not know it. He bore her kisses for a space, and then he patted her shoulder gently, just as husbands always pat their wives’ shoulders.
‘Good night,’ he whispered, and he forced himself to add, ‘dear.’
As Mary’s embrace loosened he turned on his side away from her. The poor man thought he had very tactfully ignored her urgent self-offering as though he had never been aware of it. But Mary knew; she knew she had failed, and her night was full of bitterness.
Yet by having broken in thus upon Pethwick’s state of mind she had done him a service. She had jumbled his thoughts and his emotions sufficiently to give him a chance to sleep, and he slept untroubled until daylight.
Chapter Nine
The chaos attendant upon the end of the scholastic year had descended upon the Liverpool School. The Six Formers who had just endured their Matriculation examination and were going to leave idled wantonly about the school, beyond all control. The middle forms had recovered from their school examination and were delighting in the freedom from supervision which they enjoyed while the harassed staff were marking papers and preparing reports. The junior forms were wild with excitement at the near approach of the holidays; they were drunk with sunshine and restless in confinement. The common-room was always full of irritated masters with piles of unfinished reports before them, trying hard to think of five-word remarks (about small boys whom they knew vaguely) which had not been used before, would express politely what they thought and yet not irritate parents unduly, and which would impress the headmaster with their keenness of observation and painstaking understanding.
The headmaster himself was harassed with the suspense of awaiting the report of the Board of Education, and the results of the public examinations; he had to find jobs for half the boys who were leaving; he had to fill up vacancies on the staff, he had to keep his eye on the financial situation as presented to him by the School Secretary, and he had to face a drop in numbers due to the new entries being fewer in number than the departures.
Dr. Pethwick moved through all this turmoil like a being from another world. He had quite forgotten to worry about whether the Matriculation results would justify the Governors in continuing to pay him the large salary which he drew. He blandly ignored the riotous high spirits of the forms he had to teach. The most ingenious tricks played by Horne and Hawkins and their imitators failed to penetrate through the indifference with which he regarded them. He went through the report-writing business completely unmoved. Having made up, or remembered from last year, thirty remarks which could be used on reports, he used these thirty for every form on which he had to report, in the arbitrary order in which he first thought of them, so that many boys that year had remarks made upon their progress in mathematics or physics which depended solely upon their alphabetical order. It was as good a way as most others, and the mechanical writing down helped to keep his nervous condition nearer normal.
Unlike any of the other staff, he contrived to have time for thinking. The forms he was supposed to be controlling did exactly what they liked—and what that was would take too long to tell—while he brooded over his trouble. He did not even notice the nagging of his wife, which had started again coincident with her beginning to drink once more. He was d
eveloping a fixed idea. The muddle of thought in his mind was beginning to straighten itself out, with pathetic inaccuracy of direction.
The basic necessity under which he believed himself to labour was to prove to Dorothy Laxton that he was not a coward and that he was an ardent advocate of the reduction of armaments. At least, he believed himself to be a coward, but wanted to prove to Dorothy that he was willing to dare all that a brave man might dare. And if, even now, he felt he was not quite such a pure fanatic on the subject of disarmament as was Dorothy, he was set upon wringing disarmament from a reluctant world and bearing it to her as a trophy. Such was his urgent, terrible determination to bring this about that he was soon distinguishable from the ordinary fanatic only by taking account of the steps in which he had arrived at that state of mind.
It is possible that if it had not been for the nearly simultaneous discovery of the Klein–Pethwick Effect his fanaticism might have found expression in the more usual channels. It is possible—inconceivable though it appears—that Pethwick might have become one more of the pathetic folk who try to further various causes by walking through the streets bearing posters with printed messages, or who speak from soap boxes at street corners, and who run the gauntlet of hecklers in Hyde Park on Sunday afternoons.
It is possible, though hardly probable. Pethwick was not a man of words, and self-contradictory as it appears, a scientist is essentially a man of action. The problems presented to him are of necessity problems which can only be solved by action rather than by debate. The first impulse of the scientist with something to be done is to do something, whether it be expansion of a mathematical formula, or testing a hypothesis at the experimental bench. There is never any doubt in his mind whether he should break into action; the occasional difficulty only is how he should. The spectacled absent-minded professor beloved of the comic journals, who boils his watch and times it with an egg in his hand, may even in actuality do that sort of thing in his private life; but in his laboratory or at his desk he may be as brimful of action and daring and vigour as ever was Nelson at the Nile or a financier in the City.
So that Pethwick, now that his attention was diverted from a scientific problem to a social one, sought for a way in which to get into action, and in the Klein–Pethwick Effect he found the means ready to his hand. He was extraordinarily glad that he had not yet published his results. He was aware of his own deficiencies; he knew that his ignorance of a good many of the practical details of ordinary affairs was a serious matter, but that did not deter him. He looked upon himself in this matter as a piece of apparatus which he had to employ for lack of anything better. Any scientist worth his salt will struggle through with makeshift apparatus whose very weaknesses can be forced to serve the end in view, as Faraday and Darwin demonstrated.
On the last day of term, when school was over, a taxicab was being loaded up outside the headmaster’s house, beside the Liverpool School. There were trunks and suitcases, and fishing-rods and guns and cameras, all the impedimenta of a holiday party in Norway. Then came Miss Dorothy Laxton, and seated herself in the cab. She was the advanced guard of the expedition. Her duty was to convey herself and the baggage to Norway by the ordinary steamer route—her father was proud of the fact that she could be relied upon to do so efficiently. He was to follow later, after the final meeting of the Governors; travelling by air via Oslo he would reach the rendezvous almost as soon as she did. Henry Laxton junior would follow later still, when the Officers’ Training Corps camp was over.
As Dorothy got into the cab, a tall bowed figure came walking past the house on the opposite side of the road. This was Dr. Pethwick. He carried a heavy suitcase which he set down on the ground at sight of Dorothy. Dorothy caught sight of him standing there staring across at her, and she started guiltily. For a moment a wild thought came into her head of running across to him, of saying something to him, no matter what, which might make amends for her cruelty of a week before. But she put the idea aside. Really sufficient time had not elapsed for repentance, and her father and Henry were at the door of the cab, and the driver had just started the engine running.
‘King’s Cross, sir? Right, sir,’ said the driver, and let in his clutch.
The taxicab moved off and round the corner, just as Pethwick remembered to pull off his hat. Dorothy had one last glimpse of him standing there with his suitcase at his feet. Mr. Laxton, nodding to him across the road, wondered vaguely for a moment what old Pethwick was taking away with him from the school in that battered old suitcase, but he did not think about it for long. Old Pethwick was harmless enough.
On his arrival at 41, Launceton Avenue, Dr. Pethwick carried the suitcase up to the spare bedroom. His wife was out at her mother’s as usual, and he worked without interruption for a short while. The little bedroom contained an iron truckle bed without coverings, a deal chair and dressing-table, and a deal table—all that Mary, when they had furnished the house ten years ago, had deemed necessary to supply for the use of the possible guest who so far had never come. Pethwick drew the table over to the window and laid out on it the various pieces of apparatus which he had brought from the school. They were not very complex nor excessively heavy. Two of the items were without the stamp of shop-made finish—they had been put together by Pethwick himself, and displayed all the clumsy efficiency of scientific experimental apparatus. Over these two instruments Pethwick bent with some little anxiety which was immediately relieved. The brittle gauge strips were unbroken; no damage had been done by their transport.
With his long careful fingers Pethwick began to set the apparatus together. He fished a few lengths of wire out of the suitcase to make his connections, and he took the electric lamp out of its socket, and replaced it with a double plug from which two strands of flex could convey power. One he connected to his main circuit. The other he took over to the dressing-table across the room, on which he mounted the bit of apparatus which he had devised as a means to demonstrate in a lecture-room—if ever he were to do so—the Klein–Pethwick Effect. This was a simple little electro-magnet on a stand, a plain horseshoe of iron with a few turns of wire round it; under the poles which pointed downward, was a little brass tray, and on the tray was a bit of iron. When Pethwick closed the switch the bit of iron instantly leaped up to the poles of the magnet and was held there.
Next Pethwick applied himself to the apparatus on the table. He made his final adjustments, stooping to read the Vernier gauge with care, and then he switched on the power. The make-and-break started its cheerful buzz, and instantly the bit of iron across the room fell from the magnet with a little clatter into the brass tray. Pethwick broke and renewed the circuit; the iron fell and rose, fell and rose, as often as he did so—a neat and obvious demonstration of how the magnetism of the magnet waxed and waned at his will, four yards away. Pethwick’s apparatus had not suffered in transport.
Yet hardly was he assured of this when he heard a heavy step on the stair outside. Even if he had been given no other data, Pethwick could have told who it was by the manner in which the door was flung open. Mary made her entrance a full second, as her custom was, after the door had crashed against the wall.
‘I thought you were doing something,’ said Mary, standing balancing on the threshold, her eyes travelling round the room.
‘I heard you when I came in,’ went on Mary. ‘What’s this you’re doing?’
‘An experiment,’ said Pethwick, non-committally.
‘We don’t want experiments in this house,’ said Mary. ‘A bedroom’s not the place for experiments.’
Pethwick did what he was about to do even if Mary had not come back then; he switched off his two circuits, and began to dismantle his apparatus.
‘Yes, I should if I were you,’ said Mary, when the sound of the make-and-break ceased and she guessed from his action what he was doing. ‘You take all that stuff out of my house. You’ll be blowing us all up or something.’
To Mary, although she had been married for ten years to a doctor
of science, the word ‘experiment’ still connoted explosions and stenches; her standard of education was that of the comic strips. And the sight of her husband at work on something she could not understand outraged her possessive instinct and roused all her jealousy.
‘I won’t have that going on in my house,’ Mary reiterated. ‘You’ve never done it before.’
To Mary’s mind this last statement of hers was an argument.
‘Very well, dear,’ said Pethwick. ‘I’ll take it all away tomorrow.’
‘Where are you going to take it to?’ demanded Mary, instantly.
Pethwick, stooping over his apparatus as he carefully disconnected the wiring, told his wife the first lie he had ever told her in his life.
‘Back to school,’ he said.
Mary was not accustomed to catching out her husband in a lie. She noticed nothing odd about her husband’s tone; anything unusual about it she attributed to his constrained attitude. She pounced instead on his next misdemeanour.
‘So that’s where that suitcase went to,’ she said—Pethwick was packing the apparatus away by now. ‘You mind you bring it back again. It’s not meant for things like that.’
‘Yes, dear,’ said Pethwick, as mildly as ever.
‘Now come and have your tea,’ said Mary. ‘Keeping everything waiting like this.’
Yet despite all these distractions it was on that evening that Pethwick matured his plan. He went over it in his mind again, considering every niggling detail. It was a very typical production of an overstrained mind, devised with the utmost care and attention; the only argument against it being that it was fundamentally unsound, like some marvellous system of arithmetic based upon the principle that two and two make five.
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