‘I’ve never been in town when it was going on,’ said Lenham. ‘But by all accounts it seems to have done the trick all right.’
‘Yes,’ said Pethwick.
‘It must have held everything up properly,’ went on Lenham. ‘And we’ve got two cars in the garage this minute that we’re having to put new magnetos into. Lucky their owners were both insured all-in.’
‘Can you insure against that?’ asked Pethwick, surprised.
‘Yes,’ said Lenham. ‘It was a bit of a job getting the companies to see reason, but we got them in the end under the “civil commotion” clause. So that’s all right. But the owners are pretty furious, all the same.’
Pethwick said nothing in reply; there seemed to be nothing to say.
‘I don’t know how you feel about it, sir,’ went on Lenham at length, ‘but I don’t think the Peacemaker’s going to get very far on these lines. He’s annoying people too much—putting their backs up and yet not causing quite enough trouble to be taken seriously.’
Again Pethwick did not answer. He was wondering whether the new scheme he had in mind would cause enough trouble for him to be taken seriously.
‘And yet I don’t blame him, somehow,’ said Lenham, thoughtfully. ‘It’s a fine ideal he’s got before him. Armaments are a sheer waste of money and a very likely cause of trouble. People say that war’s inevitable, and a natural state of man, and so on. Well, even if it’s true, the country that can construct the most efficient army in peace time would also be the one which would win a war if one started when everybody was disarmed. It’s—it’s—I mean that it’s just like a race. Without armaments it would be like everyone starting from scratch. Armaments are like giving everyone a start, but the longest start to the fastest runners instead of the slower ones. Abolition wouldn’t make any difference to anyone’s prestige. Powerful countries would be just as safe, and weak ones just as insafe. I can’t think what all the fuss is about.’
‘That’s what I think,’ said Pethwick, carefully.
‘It’s a pity,’ said Lenham, ‘that the Peacemaker can’t work out another invention. There’s only one thing I can think of which would stop war for certain.’
‘And what is that?’ asked Pethwick.
‘Something that would kill commanders-in-chief,’ said Lenham. ‘If there was a weapon which would do that for certain, just one a day, let’s say, I don’t think armies would exist for long.’
‘Yes,’ said Pethwick, and hesitated. ‘So you don’t think the Peacemaker is going to succeed?’ Lenham shook his head a little sadly.
‘He might,’ he said, ‘if he’s terrifically lucky, and very persistent, and very rich, so that he can extend his radius of action. I hope he does. But I can’t believe he will—perhaps that’s just because what he’s after seems too good to be practicable. After all, in the old days people laughed at Jenner just because they couldn’t imagine a world without smallpox. Nowadays they can’t picture a world without armaments, or unemployment, or hunger. But there’s nothing intrinsically impossible about these ideas. He might bring it off.’
They sat together in silence after that, until Lenham stirred a little restlessly. He was feeling uncomfortable at his recent self-revelation.
‘Let’s get going again,’ he said. ‘I want to see you go up the gears again.’
And Pethwick’s experimental training revealed its depth once more. Despite his abstraction, despite the warm friendly glow he felt towards Lenham, he did not make the mistake Lenham was anticipating. He took the car out of gear before he stretched out his foot to the self-starter button.
Chapter Twenty
On the Saturday before Bank Holiday The Times appeared with the contents bill and headlines that Pethwick—this much at least he had learned about the potentialities of the British Press—had almost expected. ‘New Manifesto from the Peacemaker,’ it said. ‘Fresh Threats.’
The letter was brief, in the usual style of the Peacemaker.
Dear Sir (it said),
I am sorry that so little attention has been paid to my request for serious consideration of the question of disarmament. In consequence I propose to interfere again with the traffic of the City of London on Friday morning, as apparently it is necessary that I should have to demonstrate once more the great capacity for causing a disturbance which is at my disposal. In addition, I promise that if nothing is done soon I shall have to take further steps. They will be of the very greatest consequence, and will cause inconvenience much greater than any that has been caused up to the present.
Pethwick read the letter studiously. There was no thrill now at seeing his writings printed in The Times. And he was conscious, vaguely, that the letter was not all it should be. But for the life of him he could not see in what it was lacking It said everything that had to be said; there was no possible double meaning which could be read into it. Two or three of the phrases were modelled—unconsciously, it is true—on some of the more effective expressions employed by very successful masters at the Liverpool School when dealing with unruly classes. Yet there was no denying the fact that it caused the public to be extremely annoyed—he had only to glance at the editorial comment to see that. And the leader referred to an interview which had been granted by a Cabinet Minister—as it was August, and the House was not sitting, the usual method of obtaining an official pronouncement by the aid of questions in the Commons was unavailable. Pethwick searched for the interview and found it. It was brief enough—almost as laconic as the Peacemaker’s writings themselves.
‘His Majesty’s Government,’ said the minister, in reply to the questions put to him, ‘is not accustomed to committing itself to any policy at the dictation of obscure agitators who have not the courage to come out into the open. England has, of course, always been in favour of reduction of armaments, and is accustomed to urge this policy at every opportunity. But the government will not be deflected in the least from its course either by threats or by criminal activities.’
Another article, after a description of Friday’s muddle in the City, compared the Peacemaker’s activities with those of the advocates of women’s suffrage before the war, when windows were smashed and country houses burned and letter-boxes filled with paint. These crimes had not brought the grant of women’s suffrage an inch nearer. Pethwick scratched his head, and raked back in his memory for what he had learnt and the trifle he could remember about the suffrage movement. Women had the vote now, hadn’t they? There had been some excitement only a little while ago about the extension of the grant to women of twenty-one. So the movement must have succeeded at some time or other, and not very long after all these outrages catalogued here. In Pethwick’s opinion it was an example of the effectiveness of outrages, not of the reverse. The inconsistency would never have been remedied if attention had not been called to it by violent action. So would it be with armaments. He was going through with it, and The Times could say what it liked.
He did not notice, when he rose from the table to continue the execution of his plan of campaign, how meekly Mary acquiesced in his statement that he was going out again that morning—but when he could not know that as soon as he was gone Mary pounced upon The Times and studied carefully what he had been reading; from her seat opposite him she had noted the position of those parts of the newspaper which had most interested him.
Pethwick walked round to Lenham’s garage. There was quite a pleasant thrill about going up the alley at the back, and taking out his key, and opening the door to disclose his own motor-car. There was excitement in the prospect of driving the car all by himself, without the solid moral support of Lenham’s presence, through what he knew would be thick traffic.
The difficulties he encountered were largely those which he had not anticipated. He made the discovery that it is by no means as easy as it appears to back a motor-car out of a narrow garage into a narrow alley. Pethwick had to climb out of the driver’s seat eleven times in all, to study the relative position of wings and doorposts
and walls, and to note how the front wheels were set. He got himself into such a muddle that he had to go back and forward an inch or two at a time, nearly a score of times, before he could induce the nearside rear wing to come round clear of the wall at the same time as the nearside front wing cleared the doorpost. Even then the tip of the bumper bar scored the paint. In this particular problem his theoretical knowledge of mechanics and geometry always asserted itself just a little too late in dealing with the obstinate habit of the front end of a motor-car moving in reverse to take a larger circle than the rear end.
But he got it out at last. He was quite breathless by the time he shut the garage door and climbed up into the driver’s seat for the last time. He drove carefully in bottom gear down the alley-way, and, after an unconscionable wait, he managed to insert the Morris into the rush of traffic in the High Street. At a sober eighteen miles an hour he began his voyage round the suburbs. Bus-drivers cursed him, and hatless youths in M.G.s turned round and stared, but he did not notice them—his gaze was rigidly fixed upon the stretch of road in front of him. This was the Saturday before Bank Holiday, and the pavements were crowded with shoppers at the same time as the roads were full of traffic pouring down to the seaside.
Pethwick drove with his right foot ever ready to be transferred in haste to the brake pedal; there were adventures every hundred yards, what with pedestrians so bent upon the business of shopping that they had no idea whether they were on the pavement or the road, and shopping housewives in cars pulling out unexpectedly from the kerb, and motor-buses to be passed when they stopped—a great, big adventure this—and the apparently impassable passage between trams and the kerb to be negotiated, and, as well as all this, stops to be made occasionally here and there. For this was no mere pleasure cruise. Pethwick was driving his car to-day bent upon the furtherance of the new plan.
Every stop he made was somewhere near a radio shop—not very near, in some cases, as he could never bring himself to drive across the road and it took him some time always to get in to the kerb, and there had to be fifty yards clear of parked vehicles before he could attempt it. But wherever he stopped, he made his way on foot back to the radio shop which had caught his eye, and at every shop he bought a couple of accumulators. For this new plan of his he needed electrical power in some quantity, from a portable source, and it was only by buying accumulators and taking them about in a motor-car that he could achieve this. Half an ampere at a hundred volts would be impossible to supply in any other manner; and Pethwick was not going to call attention to himself by buying twenty-five thirty-ampere-hour accumulators at a single shop.
Yet nowadays anyone can buy a couple of accumulators without attracting special notice, and that was what Pethwick did. His route through the suburbs was blazed with thirteen stops to buy accumulators, just as a man buying poison will visit a dozen chemists’ shops to obtain a sufficient supply. By the time Pethwick had finished his round the floor of the poor old Morris was completely covered with accumulators laid side by side. Then he drove back, to the incredibly difficult operation of getting the car up the alley-way and into the garage again. His legs were all of a tremble by the time he had done it.
Even then there was still much to be done. He had to take the train up to London Bridge, and a bus from there to Hammer Court, and he had to come all the way back again with the suitcase which for ten days had lain locked in the cupboard in his office. This motoring business had one very great advantage; the garage for which he had contracted to pay young Lenham eight shillings a week provided him with a secure sanctuary additional to the one at Hammer Court. He could switch on the light there and lock his door, and sit in the secure stuffiness inside and tinker with his apparatus without fear of interruption.
That was how he spent his afternoon, sitting on an old packing-case left by the preceding tenant with his feet in a puddle of oil, rewinding his armatures and adapting his condenser to the new source of current. There was in existence only one set of apparatus for the production of the Klein–Pethwick Effect, and that was incredibly crude and home-made, but it worked—recent events had proved that. In that it was like the crude but effective appliances with which Faraday had first explored the electro-magnetic world. Now Pethwick had to alter it to suit direct current in place of alternating, a hundred volts instead of two hundred and twenty, and it took a long time with his lack of tools and in that bad light. It was late when he reached home again.
Even Pethwick was surprised at not being greeted by his wife with a storm of abuse on his eventual arrival, but the poor man was so desperately weary, so sick with hunger and fatigue, that he could draw no conclusions from her ominous silence. He did not guess at the thunder in the offing. All he was conscious of at the moment was that the work had progressed. He had learnt to drive a car, and he had constructed an apparatus capable of being transported in that car. Whenever he chose now he could produce the Klein–Pethwick Effect—for a few hours, until his accumulators were discharged—anywhere in England that he should think proper. The thought of that even made him smile a little, despite his miserable feeling of isolation, as he crawled into bed. He slept heavily the moment he turned over on his side, and, such was his exhaustion, he slept without movement until late on Sunday morning.
Experience had taught Dr. Pethwick by now that if he wanted to save himself time and trouble, it was better to put the next scheme in hand while the present one was under way. Now that he was ready to carry out the ‘new threats’ that he had uttered through the medium of The Times it was advisable to start preparations for his projected attempt upon Paris. They would call for time and tact, as he was well aware. He made the first approaches that Sunday at dinner-time. He tried to speak with supreme offhandedness.
‘Would you mind very much, dear,’ he asked, ‘if I were to go away for a few days next week?’
‘Mind?’ said Mary. ‘Of course I’d mind. Not that I’d notice much difference, the way you’ve been leaving me alone all this week.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Pethwick. ‘Don’t you think you could manage without me just for a day or two?’
‘I’ve never heard of such a thing,’ snapped Mary. ‘Where do you want to go to?’
‘Well,’ said Pethwick, and even he hesitated. It was such a colossal innovation which he was proposing. ‘As a matter of fact—I want to go abroad.’
‘Abroad!’
The only people Mary knew who had ever crossed the Channel had done so twenty years ago, in uniforms and under government orders. The thing was unheard of, incredible. Except that—and here Mary stiffened with fright—except that she was abroad, at that very moment. Mary stared at Pethwick, and Pethwick looked at Mary, and failed to conceal his unease.
‘Yes,’ said Pethwick, trying as hard as he could to keep the conversation on the level of the commonplace. ‘Lots of people do, you know. I want to go to Paris.’
‘But you can’t—you can’t go to Paris,’ said Mary.
She really meant that at the moment she said it. A day trip to Boulogne might perhaps have seemed possible to her, but a journey to Paris, where everyone talked French, and involving the use of French trains, and the eating of foreign messes, and ending in a place proverbial for its gaiety and wickedness, seemed to be an experience which could not possibly happen to someone whom she knew intimately.
‘There doesn’t seem to be any reason why I shouldn’t, if you can do without me,’ said Pethwick.
‘But how are you going to get there? What do you want to do in Paris?’
‘Oh, I can go by boat and train the same as everybody else does,’ said Pethwick, with an apparent nonchalance which he was really far from feeling on the point. ‘And—Piffy’s giving three lectures at the University of Paris which I want to hear. They ought to cover new ground, and I don’t want to miss them.’
At the last moment, when Pethwick had committed himself to this speech, he had realised that the human factor had let him down again—he had completely forgotten t
he name of the eminent French physicist he had intended to quote. But in the fleeting one tenth of a second allowed him he had managed to invent a name which might sound reasonable to Mary’s English ear; and apparently it did.
‘Piffy?’
‘Yes, the man who wrote that paper on hydrostatics which I was so interested in last year.’
Mary never knew what papers interested her husband; certainly she never hoped to remember anything on that subject for a year.
‘But he won’t lecture in English.’
Pethwick grinned as assuredly as he could.
‘The language of mathematics is much the same anywhere,’ he said. ‘I’ll follow his blackboard work all right, and his bench demonstrations. I think it’ll be worth going.’
‘Anyway, you can’t go by yourself.’
In a clairvoyant moment Pethwick realised that he had begun the conversation in the wrong way. He should have begun by inviting Mary to accompany him to Paris, and on her inevitable and indignant refusal his hands would have been free. As it was, if he were to invite her now she would accept, because that would be something different from his first proposal, and would be consequently proof of victory. And he would have no opportunity of assailing Paris traffic from a hotel bedroom if Mary were with him. He was like a general who has made a faulty deployment of his army; only by hard fighting could he hope to retrieve the initial tactical error.
‘Of course I’m going,’ he said, indignantly.
‘Not without me you’re not.’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘No, you’re not.’
Pethwick hit the table with his fist; he tried to imitate what he thought would be the behaviour of Mr. Holliday dealing with a pack of recalcitrant schoolboys.
‘I’m going,’ he said, loudly. ‘Once and for all, I’m going. And I don’t want you with me. You’d only be in the way and we can’t afford it.’
Naturally that was the point where the real quarrel began. There is no need to recount the details. There were hard words said on both sides because Pethwick, wrought up to a pitch he had never reached before, and reacting violently from his recent overstrain, suddenly discovered that he could use hard words, and he found a savage pleasure—the greater because it was new to him—in using them. He let fly several vicious remarks, and most of them were true enough, but they upset Mary very badly indeed. It was not long before there were tears mingled with her recriminations, and the sight of Mary in tears, instead of having its usual effect on Pethwick, made him in his present unnatural condition more vicious than ever. It ended—it would be accurate to say that it reached an apparent end—in a manner usual in domestic quarrels, although nearly unprecedented in the Pethwick family; in Pethwick rising to his feet and stalking out of the room, and out of the house, just like any ordinary husband.
The Peacemaker Page 17