Revelation!
What had he and the Book been saying to each other all through these years?
What could it say to him now?
What could he say to himself?
He sat and listened to the dripping leaves and in the darkness a new revelation of life came to him. He suffered, and he surrendered to his suffering, and in surrendering became like a man reborn.
Time seemed to have lost all significance for him. He did not know how long he had been sitting there in the darkness, and, strangely enough, he was not conscious of his wet clothes. The hour might be any hour of the night, and two solitary cars passing on their way south proved to him that the other world still survived. So utterly alone was he for the moment that he might have been the last man left alive on earth.
The storm had rumbled itself out, and the stillness was supreme, and in the far distance he heard a clock striking. It was the Four Oaks church clock striking midnight, and he was glad of the sound. The beginning of another day, but what could the new day bring him? What was he going to do? Find his way to the steps and up to the cottage? But he would be more helpless there than a small child, utterly and significantly helpless.
He began to feel chilled, and he was telling himself that he must make some effort when he heard the sound of footsteps coming up the road. The rhythm was both irregular and hurried, and they struck him as being the footsteps of someone who was very tired. A tramp? No, they were a woman’s footsteps, and somehow familiar. He was conscious of feeling a strange pang at the heart. He sat rigid, not knowing that a moon was shining, and that he was sitting there in a patch of moonlight.
The footsteps were very close to him now, and suddenly they seemed to quicken. The darkness became breathless. He was acutely conscious of a familiar presence.
“O, John—my dear——”
She dropped her suit-case on the cinders. He felt her hands on his shoulders.
“O, my dear, you’re all wet. You haven’t been sitting out here all through that storm?”
His hands went up and clasped hers.
“Mary, you’ve come back?”
“Of course. Do you think——? I’m sorry, John. Forgive me.”
And suddenly he had his face in her bosom.
“O, Mary, mother—I’ve found myself out. I’ve been a blind beast to you. It’s you who must try to forgive.”
She held his head in her arms.
“There, John, there. You’ve been so unhappy, I know. And I have always tried——”
Both of them were weeping, and he said, “Yes—I know. I’m not blind any longer, not in that way. I made everyone unhappy. But it is going to be different now. I’m going to read in another kind of book. Not that the book’s wrong, Mary. I read my poor blind self into it—that’s all.”
She kissed him.
“That’s all right, John, that’s all right.”
But his hand was groping for some object, that blatant bell. He grasped it by the handle.
“Just a moment, Mary.”
She drew aside, and with a sweep of the air he flung the thing across the road into the ditch below the beech wood.
“Let it rot there.”
A sudden breeze stirred the beech leaves. They seemed to utter an approving and applauding murmur.
THE MADNESS OF PROFESSOR PYE
Professor Pye’s house was visible from one point on the Dorking-Guildford road as a cube of concrete rising above the dark foliage of a group of old yews. Standing upon the chalk ridge and reached only by a steep and flinty lane whose privacy was emphasized by a notice board, it suggested the isolation of an iceberg. Professor Pye’s message to humanity carried no sense of uplift. His notice board did not challenge the casual crowd to climb the heights and speak of Plotinus and Einstein.
It was a rude and abrupt notice board. It said—or rather, it snarled—
Private.
Keep out!
Yes, you!
A serious hiker in shorts, shirt and spectacles, happening upon that notice board, remarked upon it to his mate.
“That’s the sort of thing that puts my back up. Let’s trespass, Maisie.”
Maisie was less politically minded than her mate. It was a hot day, and the lane was steep and stony.
“I don’t see any sense, Fred, in climbing a hill just to have a row.”
“It’s one’s duty to have a row with a fellow who——”
The lady fanned herself with a piece of bracken.
“Too many flies, and I want my tea.”
They passed on, but happening upon a roadman trimming a hedge the young man in spectacles paused to ask questions.
“Excuse me, who lives up there? The fellow who put up that notice board.”
The roadman ran a thumb along the edge of his swaphook.
“That there white house?”
“I suppose so. Sort of chap who owns the earth.”
The roadman grinned.
“Chap named Pye—Professor Pye. Very particular about his privacy.”
“I should say so.”
“Down there in the village they call him Old Crusty.”
The hiker’s spectacles glimmered approvingly.
“Bit of a misanthrope, what!”
The roadman was not familiar with the word, but he divined its meaning.
“All crust and no apple.”
The hikers applauded this piece of rustic humour and passed on in search of tea.
Now, Professor Pye was a very distinguished physicist, but to the public he was not even a name. As a scientist he had not received from his confrères the recognition that is acceptable to a philosopher, and when the simple things of life go wrong there can be no more unphilosophic person than your philosopher. Things had gone wrong for Professor Pye. Someone had once described him as “A man whom nobody liked, a piece of cold flat-fish,” which was both true and an exaggeration. There had been moments in his life when Alfred Pye had been furiously eager to be liked. As a man he had fallen in love with women and friendship and success and the swagger of it, and all of them had flouted him. He possessed a great brain and an unfortunate exterior, a certain resemblance to an undersized grey he-goat.
Women actually shrank from him as from something that was both cold and unpleasantly libidinous. As a young man he had been shocked and wounded and enraged by this shrinking. He could remember sitting on a seat in a moonlit garden, burning to utter the words that other men could utter, and suddenly the girl had risen to her feet. Actually, she had shuddered.
“I think it’s too cold out here.”
And poor Pye’s passion had flopped like a fallen angel into bitter and icy waters.
He was strangely repellent to anything with warm blood, women, children, dogs, his fellow-men, and at one period of his life he had—with bitter irony—made pets of a snake and a tortoise. These cold-blooded creatures had accepted him, and had fed out of his hands. He might have said that they recognized the brother reptile.
II
But one thing he did possess, and that was money. The Pyes père and grandpère had been Birmingham men, successful manufacturers of hardware, and Alfred had been an only son. Being interested in pure science, he had sold the business on his father’s death, and retired into his laboratory with two hundred thousand pounds in gilt-edged securities. He was somewhat sensitive about his money. He knew that though the world had no affection for Alfred Pye it would smile upon Alfred’s pile of cash.
The making of a misanthrope may be a complex business, and if at the age of sixty Professor Pye hated humanity he had his reasons for this hatred. A man who has lived alone with himself for fifteen years can turn sour in the process, and Pye’s uncontestable brilliancy made scorn easy. As a younger man he had carried out experimental work as a subordinate, only to have his very suggestive discoveries exploited by his senior. Professor Gasson, in claiming the younger man’s researches for the honour of a particular University, had seen to it that much of the honou
r had materialized as a personal halo. Professor Gasson had an international reputation. He was a facile writer, one of those men who can popularize the abstruse and the mysterious. He was now Sir Philip Gasson.
Pye had never forgotten or forgiven the ingenious fraud. It had taught him secretiveness, made him even more lone and separative. He had withdrawn from the world of men, academic and otherwise. He had purchased thirty acres of land on the North Downs and built himself a kind of little concrete fortress, a strong place that was as complete and self-supporting as money and brains could make it. It contained a laboratory; it possessed its own water supply, a powerful electric installation, an oil storage tank, a miniature observatory. Even Professor Pye’s dietary was eccentric. He drank nothing but water or strong coffee, and lived on grape-fruit, oranges, apples, nuts, bread and cheese. Life in all its details was simplified and subordinated to his work. The laboratory was his holy of holies, and in it he functioned like a priest.
He possessed one temple-servant, a curious creature named Hands, an ex-service man who had lost his hearing and half a face in the war. Life’s disfigurements and frustrations had made Hands as much a recluse as his master. He was a queer, sedulous slave who lived with a small mongrel dog in the kitchen, and who made beds, and stoked the furnace, and ran the oil engine and dynamo, and controlled the stores, and pottered about in a very small garden of his own. There was nothing of the spy about Hands. A large, gentle, tame creature who smoked a pipe, and liked to feel his hands licked by his dog’s tongue, he could resign himself to his environment. He attached himself like a neuter cat. So attached had he become to the solitary place on the downs that semi-suburban Surrey had become as wild to him as a jungle.
Between these two men there existed the kind of affection that had united Robinson Crusoe and good Man Friday. Isolation held them together. Hands had a disfigured face, the professor a warped soul. Hands hated nothing; to the professor hatred of the world of men had become a sinister inspiration. Pye was so malignantly sober in his scorn for all the follies and hypocrisies and conventions of the social scheme that he was too sober to be sane as carnal man understands sanity. Year by year Pye was becoming nothing but a brain, a concentration of pure and merciless intelligence, an intelligence that was hostile to his fellows.
If he had any affection for any creature it was for Hands. Hands could lip-read, and being deaf he never heard the rasp of Alfred Pye’s voice, nor did he feel the abruptness with which his master spoke to him.
“Hands—turn off that radiator.”
“Hands—more bread.”
“Hands—the oil’s too low in the storage tank. When are those damned fools coming to refill it?”
Hands would nod his head reassuringly.
“Yes, sir.”
He had a flat and toneless voice, and eyes that were not unlike the eyes of his dog.
“Yes, sir—I’ll see to it, sir.”
According to Trade Union standards he was one of the most overworked men upon earth, a meek automaton with a curious capacity for devotion. He was sure that Professor Pye was a very wonderful person, a kind of superman. That, too, was Professor Pye’s conviction. The outer world was full of damned fools, monkeys, mountebanks, people who would be better dead. The professor’s egotism had grown like some monstrous fungus, or like a fantastic brain uncontrolled by any of the human reactions. In his younger days—like all normal men—he had wanted to be liked, and the world had not liked him. A bitter and solitary egotism cherished hate.
Sometimes on a summer day he would go up to the little white tower of his house and stand there looking down into that deep, green, beautiful valley. He could command a short strip of the road, and observe the procession of cars passing along the tarmac surface. To the satanic Pye upon his height they looked like tin toys, absurd little mechanisms that crawled and tooted.
“Beetles, ants.”
So—that was civilization, a procession of little standardized robots running around in their little machines, people who had no more originality than flies. An insect world, grubs that daily consumed the pulp of a popular press. Professor Pye’s scorn was cosmic. If he felt himself to be a creature living in a world of other dimensions to those clerks and shopmongers he had some justification for his arrogance. He had a wonderful intelligence. He was living on the brink of catastrophic revelations. He had worked for years in that fascinating atmosphere where things physical melt into the seemingly miraculous. Like Professor Rutherford and his disciples he had been analysing the atom. His dream had been to dissociate the atom, and somewhere he had read that centuries would elapse before man could split and control atomic energy.
Professor Pye had smiled over that particular paragraph in a learned article.
“Damned fools!”
He knew what he knew. The lightning was in his hands. He had but to discover how to control and to project it. And then? No Jove upon Olympus would be so potent as this little grey man of sixty standing alone upon his concrete tower.
The world had misliked him, ignored him, cheated him.
“Damned fools!”
He would give the world thunder and lightning.
III
It happened on an afternoon in June. Hands had carried an ancient basket chair into his piece of garden, and was proposing to enjoy a pipe and a little relaxation. His dog lay at his feet and blinked up at him through the sunlight. It was a warm and gentle summer day, but for Hands it had been a day of toil and trial.
A lorry full of stores had arrived from Garrod’s. The professor purchased everything in bulk in London, and Hands had had to deal with those stores and pack them away in the store-room.
The oil-tanker had laboured up the lane to recharge the storage tank. Also, it happened to be charging day, and the oil engine had behaved temperamentally. So, in fact, had the professor. When Hands had knocked at the door of the laboratory and attempted to inform his master that the stores had arrived and been checked and put away, the professor, forgetting Hand’s deafness, had screamed at him:
“Get out. Don’t interrupt me.”
Not hearing the order, Hands had continued to knock at the locked door.
“I’ve had trouble with the engine, sir.”
And suddenly the door had flown open, and Professor Pye, red lidded, wild as to the head, and in nothing but shirt and grey flannel trousers, had raged at him.
“Get out, you fool. Don’t come worrying here. I’m busy.”
The meek Hands, watching his master’s mouth, had repeated his news about the engine.
“Accumulator’s low, sir.”
“What!”
“I dare say I’ll get it going soon.”
The professor had gibbered at him.
“You’d better. Most damnably important. Telephone to Guildford for a mechanic.”
“Oh—I’ll get it right, sir.”
“You had better.”
And Professor Pye had slammed the door and locked it.
Hands, sucking his pipe, felt pleasantly sleepy. After all, some gentlemen were funny, just as colonels and sergeant-majors had been funny in the army, but this life suited Hands. Professor Pye might be a little grey bit of wire and wisdom, with a tufted chin and red-lidded eyes, an irritable gentleman, but after all he was a great man. He paid Hands generously. There were days when the professor was as smooth as silk. The dog was asleep with his head resting against his master’s right foot, and Hands himself was on the brink of dozing.
Then, something startled both man and dog. Hands straightened in his chair; the dog, up and quivering, emitted three sharp barks, and stood whimpering. There had been no sound, but both dog and man had felt a curious vibration like an earth tremor. Hands could have sworn that his chair had moved under him.
He stood up, holding in his right hand a pipe that had gone out. He looked at the quivering dog.
“What was it, Jumbo?”
Jumbo, tail down, whimpered and looked up obliquely at his master.
Neither did Hands. He put his pipe away in his pocket. He stared at the white wall behind him. He was a man whose mind worked slowly.
“Anything wrong in there?”
He remembered reading somewhere that strange things sometimes happened to learned gentlemen who experimented in laboratories. Had anything happened to Professor Pye? The suggestion was a sufficient stimulus, and Hands became the man of action. He rushed into the house and found himself staring at a glazed door at the end of the corridor. The glass in the door had been smashed, blown out upon the floor.
Hands pushed it back, and crunching broken glass, made for the laboratory. He sniffed the air. No, there was no strange smell. The door of the laboratory was painted white, and down the two upper panels ran dark scars. They were cracks where the panels had been split.
Hands rushed at the door, seized the handle, and shook it.
“What’s happened, sir? Are you all right?”
Silence, an inevitable silence so far as Hands was concerned. The door was locked. He put his face close to one of the cracks and tried to see into the laboratory. He could distinguish a table, and he realized that the table, a stout, deal bench, was lying on its side. There was a foot visible beside it, or rather—a black boot, toe upturned and everted.
Hands put a shoulder to the door and heaved. It defied him. He drew back a yard and charged it. He was a heavy man, and the lock plate gave, and Hands and the door went in together. Recovering himself, he stood and stared. The laboratory looked as though a bull had been active in a glass and china shop. The windows were smashed; everything seemed on the floor.
Professor Pye was on the floor, surrounded by what appeared to be the glass and metal fragments of some complicated apparatus.
Hands bent over his master. Professor Pye’s face was the colour of old vellum; his eyes were closed, and from his nostrils blood oozed. Hands had seen dead men in the war; Professor Pye looked like death, and Hands was frightened.
Two in a Train Page 4