Uncle John was approaching his car, a vehicle so remarkable that it deserves some special notice. It was an immense Bentley of extremely uncertain age, reminding the beholder of nothing so much as one of those vast old four-poster beds one finds in show palaces. I always expected to find an iron step of the sort used to help one mount into a dog-cart, but Uncle John, with a nimbleness surprising in a man of his bulk, swung the starting handle and scrambled on board before the car had time to run away. He told me once that he had learned to do the winding-up and jumping after the car had run away one day in Oxford and he had been forced to commandeer a bicycle and chase it down St. Giles, catching it only about ten feet from some pile of notable stone. He had had very little doubt that, if it had felt so inclined, his Bentley would have demolished Oxford as a kind of hors d’oeuvre and continued to do the same by Cambridge for an entrée.
Conversation in this car was an impossibility. All one could do was to hang on to the sides and hope for the best, thanking God that there was no boom to swing over suddenly and catch you a crack on the side of the head when Uncle John brought her to, rather too suddenly. Uncle John concentrated on his driving with the grim concentration of a chessplayer. I have an idea that he really is rather frightened of it, but is determined that he will show it who is the master. His idea of showing it consists of driving as fast as he can and braking just in time to avoid disaster.
Whenever it seemed that the Bentley had successfully jumped over a Baby Austin or had contracted to a width of eighteen inches to squeeze between a lorry and a bus, Uncle John glanced up to heaven as if to thank it and, releasing one clutching hand from the wheel, snatched a large red bandana handkerchief from his pocket and rubbed it across his glasses. I held my breath during his prayers and the intervals when his sight was obscured by the gaudy handkerchief, but it seemed that his prayers were always answered and that he must have had a private treaty with heaven, for nothing out of the way happened—a few skids on tram-lines and terrified cyclists could hardly count.
At last, after a drive that seemed to have lasted for ten years, we drew up outside the best hotel in Gowerburgh. Drew up is, perhaps, hardly the right phrase, for stopping with Uncle John implied a great deal more than that; the skilful use of a snaffle seemed to attend the ceremony in spirit. I could have imagined my uncle calling for an ostler to rub his steed down and give it a bran mash. As it was he beckoned to Hatton and me to dismount. We climbed out of the back where we had been perched on bundles of books, books of all sorts—from detective stories and biographies to scientific works and bound copies of periodicals. We drew a large tarpaulin over this cockpit in case it rained and followed Uncle John into the White Lion.
He was already seated at a table in the dining room, with three glasses of sherry in front of him, reading a detective story by John Dickson Carr. We sat down and he looked up. “I’ve ordered the food,” he said, “boys of your age don’t know what to eat in a place like this. In a pub like this you should never get anything with a French name, it only covers the fact that they are using up the things that were left over from yesterday.” The waiter, who was standing by, smiled at this slanderous statement. “What would you like to drink, sir?” he asked, holding out the wine list.
Uncle John smiled villainously up at him as he pushed away the book. “Beer. You don’t imagine I’m going to ruin my digestion drinking your vinegar disguised as Chateau this and Chateau that, do you? Three pints of bitter.”
While we ate a mixed grill I asked my uncle about Professor Silver, trying to hide my faint distaste from him. It was no use. “Aha,” boomed Uncle John, “you don’t like him, do you? Well, you’re not the only one, but he’s a clever man all the same. A walkin’ inferiority complex, that’s what he is. He’s just finished writin’ a vast book about everything and is determined that it’ll out Hogben Hogben and leave Haldane and Huxley in the slim volume class. Don’t tell him I said this or he’ll never talk to me again,” he grunted gustily and went on, “or at least until he wants something from me.”
I glanced around and saw that the people at all the tables near were listening to my uncle; he saw me looking at them but continued as loudly as before. “Oh, I don’t mind him. The poor devil doesn’t know what he wants, except that he wishes to be famous and he hopes that the Compendium of Knowledge will establish him, and that it will be a tombstone over his forgotten bones. The person I can’t stand is his familiar spirit, Porter. I’d rather have a glass of stout any day.” He hooted at his pun and then caught my severe glance and looked down at his plate for a moment, as if slightly ashamed. It was half a minute before I realised that he was still laughing, either at his own joke or at me. He looked up again, his face normal. “Porter’s a nasty devil if you want one. And there are a lot of people who would be glad to see him in his grave. I, for one, would be pleased to send a wreath, how about you, Peter, eh?”
Peter Hatton scowled and muttered “I’d like to kill the bastard, always shoving himself in where he’s not wanted.” This was above my head so I looked for an answer in the bottom of my tankard. When I came up for air my uncle John looked at me and said, “Oh, there you are, Andrew? I thought we’d lost you. Don’t you worry yourself about our likes and dislikes, they have nothing to do with your job and however much reason Peter has for dislikin’ Porter I don’t think you’ll find him stickin’ a lancet between his ribs.”
For the rest of the lunch Uncle John and Peter tried to teach me something about heredity. I was not a very apt pupil, but I managed to get a rough idea of the Mendelian theory after they had illustrated it for me on the table with matches, some in their original purity and some dipped in the mustard. After they had finished with this I showed them how to make a tripod with three matches, strong enough to support a tankard of beer. Uncle John managed to do the trick at his first try and, just to prove how strong the tripod was, he had the tankards filled up again, explaining that the empty ones were not giving the trick a fair chance.
We had coffee and liqueurs and then Uncle John rubbed his hands together joyfully. “I’ll drive you two boys up to the university,” he announced with pleasure at the thought of showing off his charger once again, “and Peter will show you round, John, and then he’ll tell you a bit about what he’s doin’. I’ve got one or two people I must see.”
Peter and I jammed ourselves in between the books and cowered down, feeling that it was perhaps safer to be inside the cockpit than sitting on its edge, for at any rate by doing this we avoided risk of being shaken off. I had my mouth open when the Bentley started and it was quite a time before I could manage to shut it, owing to the pressure of the wind.
The University of Gowerburgh had handed over the whole of several departments, Chemistry, Biology and Zoology, for the use of the Congress, and these in turn had been divided up into lecture rooms, demonstrations and exhibits. Peter, rightly judging that I would get the greatest amount of instruction out of the exhibits, took me round these. I looked into innumerable microscopes at strange brightly coloured landscapes with objects that looked like stuffed caterpillars. These were called chromosomes, Peter told me, and, so far as I could make out, they contained unknown objects called genes. Each characteristic I possessed was apparently due to the fact that I had a gene ordering me to possess it. I had blue eyes because I had the gene for it, my hair was dark because I had the gene for it, and it seemed that I had inherited these genes from my parents, who in turn had inherited them from their parents and so on right back to the beginning of history when my first ancestors were bits of jelly in a pond. I thought of the mediaeval idea of the homunculus and wondered whether it had not been nearer to the truth than the ages of enlightenment had allowed.
Peter got so carried away by the process of inheritance that I became quite depressed to think that I had nothing that was not present in my ancestors. There did not seem to be much point in being an individual. Peter noticed my depressed features and laughed. “What’s the matter, Andrew?” he sai
d, “finding all this above your head?” I shook my head and explained my thoughts. “Oh, that’s all right,” Peter said, “you are a biological necessity.” He then proceeded to tell me about mutations in genes which apparently meant that sometimes breeding was not true but that for some unexplained reason a freak was born who had qualities that were not present in either parent. I did not like to think that if I had any individuality it was as the result of my being a freak and I told him so and he went on to wound my vanity even further by telling me that, after all, I was only something frothed up around an egg, by that egg in order to guarantee its continued existence. Having reduced me to the level of a milk-shake, Peter took pity on me and suggested that I might like a cup of tea. I wondered whether the hot tea would not melt the froth but decided I would risk it.
We walked across a lawn to the students’ union which had in honour of the occasion been turned into a cafe for the use of the members of the Congress. We went into the tea-room and Peter looked around him anxiously. A girl in a white overall waved to him and we went toward her. I did not know whether I was included in her wave so I lagged behind and was going to sit down at an unoccupied table when Peter said, “Come on, froth, don’t melt before you get your tea.” He introduced the girl as Mary Lewis and me as a frothed-up egg who was feeling worried about it. I thought the joke was beginning to pall and was glad when he turned to his companion. “Well, Mary,” he said, “how’ve things been this afternoon? Has that swine Porter been around?”
She hesitated for a moment and then said, “Yes, he’s been fussing about all the time. Telling us all how to do things and explaining how he would run things if he was in charge. Thank God he’s not in charge. Old Silver’s bad enough, but Porter would be ten thousand times worse.”
Peter looked at her and his lower lip tightened. “I can’t stand the way he comes up to you, Mary,” he said, “and puts his dirty arm round your shoulder while he looks to see what you’re doing. One of these days I’ll crack him one in the middle of his fat face.” The thought seemed to please him and he smiled as he rubbed his knuckles.
“Now, Peter,” Mary said, “he’s not as bad as all that, you know. His manner’s against him and he can’t help it. I’m sure he doesn’t realise that he’s being unpleasant.”
I cowered down out of the draught as Peter snorted, “Oh, no, he’s not bad, is he? It’s just his unfortunate manner, is it? I suppose he can’t help stealing the credit for other people’s ideas, can he? What about your pet drosophila sub-obscura? Who wrote the article about them in the Journal of Genetics? You know you did, but your name did not appear at all. It was all a contribution to science by that brilliant young geneticist—Doctor Ian Porter.”
Mary smiled and said, “Well, I was working under him, wasn’t I? Anyhow, Mr. Blake must be finding this discussion very dull.” I changed this subject by asking them what drosophila was. “The vinegar-fly to you, old boy,” replied Peter, appearing to forget his thoughts about the unpleasant Dr. Porter. “It has a new generation once a fortnight and so we can have in a year the same amount of development that would occur in a couple of centuries of the history of mankind. It’s a nice thought, isn’t it, that we know more about a little red-eyed fly, no bigger than a match head, than we know about any other creature on the face of the earth?” He paused and continued reflectively, “I wonder what kind of ancestry produced Porter.” Mary looked at him warningly and said, “Now, Peter.” He looked over his shoulder and, following his eyes, I saw Porter approaching, with Professor Silver behind him, like an adoring terrier.
Porter looked at us insolently and drawled, in his mock-Oxford Canadian accent, “Hullo, Hatton and Mr. Whatsyername.” “Blake,” I supplied obligingly, but he ignored me and went round the table to the place where Mary was sitting. She frowned at Peter who seemed to me slightly white around the temples and whose hands, beside me, were clenched so tightly that his knuckles were the yellow of old paper. Porter put his arm on Mary’s left shoulder and then sat down in the chair at her right, so that his arm was across her shoulder. Professor Silver sat down quietly beside me and said something I did not hear as I was too occupied in the scene across the table.
Mary Lewis tried to disengage herself from the arm round her shoulders but Porter’s fingers tightened on her overall. She turned her eyes on Peter as if commanding him to remain seated and then looked round. “Dr. Porter,” she said coldly, “I would rather that you didn’t put your arm round my shoulder.”
I thought the whole affair was developing into a melodrama and, while I can stand my melodrama on the stage or in one of my favourite gothic novels, I do not feel comfortable when I am, however remotely, mixed up in it, so I dug in my pocket and found a packet of cigarettes. Putting on my best silly-ass, fools-walk-in expression I offered them to Mary. She looked surprised but took one. “Dr. Porter?” I asked, holding them so that he could not reach them with his free hand and was forced to take his arm off Mary’s shoulder to pick one out of the packet. I thought for a moment that he was going to ignore the Player’s I was holding out, then he relaxed and, removing his arm, took a cigarette. Mary moved round the table to light her cigarette from the match Peter offered her and, when it was going, she sat down in the vacant chair beside him.
Although the atmosphere felt a little less like that of a ruined monastery on a thundery night with the bats dipping around and the headless abbot on the prowl, there was still a good deal of tension about and I think I have rarely seen as much hate bottled in any glance as I saw in the one Peter threw at Porter. I know that if I had been Porter I would have felt that I would not, under any circumstances, meet Peter alone. The only person who seemed to be unaware of the thick atmosphere round our table was Professor Silver, who was grating away at my side about the unfamiliarity of my surroundings and who offered to help me if he could. He gave me the impression that despite his diffidence there was no one present at the congress who could help me like Professor Silver. I thanked him for his kind offer and he seemed genuinely pleased to think that I was not hostile toward him, and moved on to the subject of my uncle.
“I have known your uncle, Professor Stubbs,” he said, “for a considerable number of years. He’s a very brilliant man but lacks the concentrated drive and he is always running off after some wild idea or other. All the same, I must admit he has made some contributions, some excellent contributions. But it’s a pity that he doesn’t stick to the one thing. You know the old saving about a cobbler sticking to his last?”
By inclining my head toward him I indicated the fact that I did, indeed, know the old saying and I thought of my uncle John and the pleased way he would have puffed out his moustache if he had been able to overhear Professor Silver trying to pinch him into a pigeonhole. I determined that I would tell him all about it on the first possible occasion, and I would also suggest that he dropped Porter a word of warning about the fate of those who walked on gunpowder barrels with lighted matches in their hands. I did not think that I would like to see Peter up in court on a charge of assault.
Porter was pulling heavily on his cigarette and he leaned forward. “Mr. Whatsyername, you’re a nephew of Professor Stubbs, eh?” he said. “Blake. Yes,” I replied; I do not know why it was but the fact that he could not remember my name annoyed me so much that I felt that I would quite gladly join Peter in a party to beat him up. I think the reason that this trick irritated me was that I felt it was deliberate insolence, for on neither occasion had there been any real need for him to address me by name at all, a look in my direction would have been sufficient to draw my attention to the fact that he was speaking to me if he had really been quite unable to remember my name, which I doubted, as it did not seem to be a difficult one to recall, certainly no harder than Porter.
“Funny old boy, isn’t he?” Porter continued. “I can never understand what he’s doing playing at being a scientist. He’s no more a scientist than I am a magpie.” I heard a faint laugh from Peter at my side, but, fortunatel
y, the sound did not reach across the table. He rolled on undisturbed, “He knows a little about everything but nothing much about anything.” He seemed pleased with his remark and paused. The voice of Professor Silver scraped its way into my consciousness. “Now Ian,” he was saying, in a tone of mild and affectionate rebuke, “that’s hardly fair. I was just telling Mr. Blake that his uncle had made some very real contributions and that we scientists regretted his multitude of side lines. Don’t you agree with me, Ian?” He seemed to be begging for agreement and smiled as if he had received a kindly pat on his head when Porter looked at him a little sourly and said, grudgingly, “Well, Silver, I suppose I will allow you that, but you can’t deny that he’s got a mind like a magpie and is a picker up of the unconsidered trifles left by other and better men. That he manages to make anything out of them is just his luck. Then he’s not a serious scientist but an actor. Look at that car of his. He just has it for effect. Look at that pipe he smokes. Look at his clothes. Everything about him shows that he’s just an actor and not a very good one at that.”
Peter and Mary rose, and the former said, “Coming, Andrew?” I got up and nodded to Silver and then to Porter. “We’ll continue the subject of your uncle another time,” he said, “if you like, Mr. Whatsyername.” “Blake,” I muttered automatically and turned my back.
Chapter 2
Congress Dances
I HAD DINNER with Uncle John at the White Lion. I told him about the opinions I had collected concerning his character and abilities. He sucked at the large cigar he was smoking and, removing it, blew a series of smoke rings, the sight of which made him chuckle like a child that had just succeeded in blowing its first soap-bubble. “Of course they’re right,” he bellowed. “Other people are always right about one. I know I’m lazy and that I pick up the ideas that other men have long ago discarded. But they only give you one side of the picture. I want to see why the ideas were discarded, what went wrong with the works and whether I can’t find a way round the difficulty.”
Unholy Dying Page 2