The booming voice of my uncle broke in. “Will you children,” it enquired testily, “please forget the existence of Dr. Porter for a few minutes and inform an old man, who is no doubt a bit out of date, whether this is a congress of scientists or a convocation of nursemaids, gathered together to discuss the fast behaviour of the girl at number seventeen. You should be ashamed of yourselves, and I’ve a good mind to treat you like naughty schoolchildren and fine you sixpence for each unnecessary mention of that man’s name.”
Dr. Swartz chewed nervously at his pipe and then produced a pigskin purse. “Professor, since I’m only a poor foreigner, will you take it in my national currency?” He held out a ten-cent piece, remarking to Peter and me, “I get off a penny lighter than you boys.” Uncle John rumbled internally and took the coin. Then the rumbling grew to a roar and exploded into laughter. “Thank’ee, boy,” he said when the laughter had again subsided to a distant roll of thunder, “you took me back more years than it’s seemly for me to confess to. I suddenly saw myself sittin’ on the edge of a desk and taking a tanner off a tearful small boy who had written some vulgarity on a lavatory wall. Theoretically the sixpence was to pay the cleaner for the job of deletin’ the cloacal verse, but I’m afraid I forgot and embezzled it. That was the last fine I imposed until today and I’m goin’ to embezzle once again.” He slipped the dime into his waistcoat pocket and went on, “Well, then, we’re agreed that from now on there’ll be no unnecessary mention of the name of the quite unnecessary doctor?”
I think we all smiled a trifle sheepishly as we gave him our promises that we would not so much as think of Porter unless we were forced to do so. I remembered that I had to find something upon which to write an article, for though I was living free and apparently holidaying, I was relying upon the money I made to live on for the next three months, while I did a little work in the British Museum on some mad nineteenth-century painters, including the cheerful Richard Dadd, who having drawn up a list of people suitable for abolition by assassination, beginning “the Pope, the King, my father,” decided that the first two were impracticable and then cut his father’s throat before carrying the old man down to a pond and throwing him in.
Uncle John introduced me to a stout middle-aged Indian who was an authority on the sugarcane and who, by crossing the cane with some sort of bamboo, had managed to produce a bigger and richer cane than the native Indian one. He told me, with great joy, that most of the sugar consumed in India had formerly come from Java and that his success had so enraged the Javanese authorities that they had refused to allow him to land when he had been invited by the planters to come and advise them upon their methods.
He had the most beautiful little charts and exhibits to show how the production of native Indian sugar had increased since he had started “fiddling about with nature.” An ordinary sugar lump, marked “Twenty Years Ago,” was placed beside a fancy one the size of a child’s head, labeled “Today,” and a blank space had a large stencilled notice “Tomorrow?” He was a very good showman and managed to make me quite interested in the problems of agriculture in India, showing me, also, the work of other Indian plant-breeders; in particular, heads of rice the size of the tassels on a theatre drop-curtain with grains all the same size. I took a great number of notes and then decided that I would go over to the common room and write my article on the Congress notepaper, as I had discovered that the paper upon which I had written my notes was the last I had with me.
On my way across the lawn I met Mary. “Hullo,” she said, “would you like to be a guinea pig?” I felt my ears anxiously to see if they were drooping and answered her, “Well, I haven’t got a tail for you to use to pick me up and so my eyes won’t drop out.” She laughed, “Don’t be silly, Andrew. What I meant is would you mind being used in an experiment? It’s all right. Don’t look so frightened, we won’t hurt you. If we want to indulge in vivisection we’ve got to sign a certificate for each animal used, and I don’t think we’d find that we’d be able to pass you on a certificate. There would be such awkward questions. No, all we want is a drop of your blood and we’ll tell you your blood-group. It’s always a useful thing for you to know, as you might need a transfusion sometime and it would save time then.”
“If you promise not to hurt me,” I replied, “I don’t mind your having just one drop of my blood. What do you want to know my blood group for? What will you do with it when you’ve got it?” She looked at me as if to say that I would not understand and said, “Well, you know that we have a strange habit of collecting seemingly useless information in the hope that we can put it to some use later. This blood-collecting is, then, just another example of our magpie habits. It isn’t really my job, but Dr. Swartz is shorthanded and asked me to help. There’ll be lots of other things for you to try. Come along, then.”
I put on my sternest expression and reminded her that I, also, in my quiet way, was one of the world’s workers and that I had an article to write, but promised that I would find Dr. Swartz’s demonstration when I had finished my article, in less than an hour’s time, and I said that, if they desired it, I would come disguised as a white mouse.
The information which the Indian had given me worked up into a very nice story of the “human interest” variety. I drew a picture of the Indian village with its stunted canes, no higher than a ten-year child, and that of the future, almost overshadowed by canes with flowered tassels out of the reach of a tall man. I then took the article over to the sugar exhibit and showed it to the plant-breeder, feeling that if he corrected it there would not be much fear of my making any serious mistakes. He crossed out one or two of my sentences and suggested others to take their place, and gave me several new ideas which meant that I had to go and rewrite the article. As a result of this it was nearly twelve o’clock before I reached the demonstration.
The door was open and I could see that there were only three or four people in the room. Dr. Swartz was standing beside a table on which, like musical glasses, there was a long row of small vessels half-filled with liquids. At one end of the table lay a pile of fountain pen fillers, glass-tubes coming to a point, with a rubber bulb at the opposite end, and a heap of sheets of paper, and a box of pencils. At the other end a studious-looking young man was seated with a drawing board in front of him, on which he had pinned a large sheet of cartridge-paper divided up into sections by ruled pencil lines. Mary was filling a lot of test tubes with yellow liquid and placing them carefully in numbered stands, and another girl, also in a white overall, was writing labels which she stuck to the test tubes. It all looked terribly businesslike and aseptic, reminding me of the operating theatre where I had had my appendix removed when I was a child. All my childish fears came back to me and I would have retired quietly if Mary had not turned round at that moment and cried, “Oh, there you are, Andrew, I thought you were never coming.” She looked at her wristwatch, “You said you would be here about three-quarters of an hour ago.”
I explained that I had taken longer than I had intended over my article and, with unwilling feet, I advanced toward the menacing ranks of test tubes. “Sit down here,” I was told and was pushed into a chair. The other girl washed the lobe of my ear with a swab of cotton wool dipped in methylated spirit. Mary took hold of the lobe and I heard a click; she pinched my ear and said, “There, that didn’t hurt, did it?” I looked round and saw that she was holding up one of her test tubes and that the yellow liquid was now pink with my blood. “How did you get that,” I demanded, and she held out an instrument slightly resembling a thin hypodermic syringe. She twisted something and then held it out toward me, releasing a lever as she did so. There was a click and a tiny knife-blade shot out.
At that moment I heard steps behind me and looked round. It was Dr. Porter. He paid no attention to either Mary or me but went up to Dr. Swartz and began speaking to him in a low voice. I faced Mary and saw that she was glaring at his back as if she wished that she could stick the little knife she held in her hand through his hea
rt. “What’s the idea of the yellow stuff?” I said cheerfully. As if I had yanked her hair Mary returned to me, “Oh, that’s sodium citrate. It prevents your blood coagulating. You know if you cut yourself while shaving how the blood dries into a little hard knob. The citrate prevents the sample we have taken from doing the same.”
She put some of the blood on each of three microscope slides and then, with a glass rod removed a drop of liquid from various bottles and mixed it up with the blood on the slides. I heard Porter’s voice raised behind me, “Then it will be all right, Swartz, if I use this place during lunch.” “Quite all right, Doctor.” As Porter went out of the door he met Peter coming in. Neither of them seemed to notice the other.
When Porter’s footsteps had died away in the corridor, Peter jerked his thumb over his shoulder and said, “What did he want?” Swartz rolled his empty pipe into the corner of his mouth and replied, “He, or I suspect, Silver, has some new noncoagulant that he wants to try out. I told him he could do it during lunch.”
Peter turned to Mary. “I see you’ve got Andrew as a victim,” he remarked. “I just dropped in, Mary, to tell you that I may be a little late at lunchtime. There are one or two things I must do first.”
“It’s all right,” she replied, “I’ll hang about for you outside the common room or I’ll be in the writing-room, dealing with the letters I should have written last week.” Peter nodded cheerfully to me and went out. Mary continued playing tricks with my blood and then she looked up at me. “Your group is O,” she said.
I had not the slightest idea what she meant, but, trying to look intelligent, I enquired “What’s wrong with it? Is it very rare? Or does it mean that I’ve got some terrible disease which may pop up at any minute and carry me off?”
She laughed, “No, it’s all correct. You are in the commonest group. We divide the blood into four groups, A, AB, B and O. A is the rarest and O is the commonest. You can give blood to any of the other groups, you’re what’s called a Universal Donor, but you can only receive it from another O.” I wanted to know why I could not receive blood from anyone and she explained that while my blood would not clot the blood of a person in another group, their blood would form a clot in my veins and I would die. I determined that I would not have anything to do with anyone else’s blood if I had any say in the matter.
Dr. Swartz beckoned me over. “Since you’re here, Mr. Blake,” he said, “you might as well go through the bag of tricks. Taste this and tell me whether you find it sweet or bitter.”
He held out a teaspoon containing a little colourless liquid and I felt like a small boy being induced to take castor oil and I wondered faintly, remembering the way he had held out the dime to my uncle, whether he would give me a penny if I took my medicine without making a fuss. For a moment I did not taste anything, then the liquid was very sweet. I spat it out and told Dr. Swartz that I had found it anything but bitter and asked him what it was.
“Oh,” he replied, “it’s strange stuff, some people find it sweet and others so bitter that they can hardly keep it in their mouths. You see these,” he pointed to the vessels containing liquids and I nodded. “I want you to take this teaspoon and dropper and this sheet of paper and pencil. You will see that the paper is divided up into columns headed Bitter, Sour, Brackish, Tasteless, Salt, Sweet and so on? Well, I want you to put a tick opposite the number of each of these vessels in the right column. You think you can do that?”
I answered that I thought I could, but that I hoped he hadn’t laid any booby-traps for me, such as a glassful of an emetic. He assured me that he had not laid any such traps and I started off on my tasting-round. I began very carefully, tasting each drop slowly and rolling it round my tongue, but I soon decided that there were no tricks and speeded things up, making a squiggle in the appropriate column.
When I had finished the young man with the drawing-board took my paper and ran his pencil along the columns. When he reached the foot of the page he looked up at me and said, “This is very strange. You’ve got a very good sense of taste for you detected a point oh one solution of sea-water, but you’ve tasted all the sours as sweet. I’ve not come across that idiocrasy before this morning and then I have two cases of it.” He took my name and other details and entered them on his large sheet of paper. “Can you do this?” he said, making a V out of his tongue and protruding it between his teeth. It looked very simple but I found I could not do it, though I felt that I could learn with a little practice and I said so. “Oh, no, you couldn’t,” he laughed, “some people can do it and others can’t.” I wished to know what reason he had for asking me whether I could make a V out of my tongue, but all he said was that they were just adding it to their list of things they collected. The same reason applied to the fact that the lobes of my ears were loose, a fact duly noted on its column opposite my name.
I asked Dr. Swartz if he would correct some notes for me in the afternoon, if I wrote them out before lunch, for it had occurred to me that I could make my next day’s article out of the blood-grouping and tasting and thus manage to get a day ahead, which would mean that I could spend a lazy day. The lanky American said that he would be very pleased to help me and I pinched some sheets of paper from him, copied out my tastes and retired to look for a quiet corner where I could write down the various things that had happened to me, before I forgot all about them under the pressure of the new things I would see. I told Mary to tell Uncle John, if she saw him, that I had gone to do some work but would be having lunch in the common room in about half an hour’s time. “I’ll tell him he’ll see you in an hour,” she said, “and you’ll see him two hours from now. He promised to come here at eleven this morning and he has not turned up yet.”
My shoes clapped noisily on the stone-paved corridors as I wandered along them in search of an unoccupied room. After I had interrupted the closing minutes of several lectures I at last found an empty laboratory and sat down, flanked on each side by the slender stems of Bunsen burners, like a fantastic devil enthroned on an altar for a black mass.
I started to write down a careful account of my treatment at the gentle hands of Mary and Dr. Swartz, but I did not seem to be able to concentrate and doodled all over the margins of my paper. When at last I had finished my notes I looked over my doodles. I have a sort of morbid interest in the products of my sub-conscious; it is rather like seeing the middle of my back or the far side of the moon. There were the usual squiggles that looked like the little red worms that I used to watch in the stagnant water-butt behind the rose-garden in my father’s garden. Then there was a neat drawing of the spring lancet with which Mary had drawn the blood from my earlobe.
Under a black thunder-cloud I suddenly noticed the face of Dr. Porter, mounted on a broken Ionic column. I felt annoyed at the sight of his face staring out of my notes. After all, I had promised Uncle John that I would not pull up the figure of Porter unnecessarily. I felt in my trouser-pocket for a sixpence. Then I took out my pen again and obliterated the grinning face with a flood of ink.
I rolled up my notes and stuck them in my jacket pocket, thinking as I did so that Uncle John’s behaviour was infectious. I did not see anyone as I walked down the corridor and out across the lawn to the common room. The clock on the wall showed me that I had taken three-quarters of an hour to write my notes. It was nearly half-past one. I did not see Peter or Mary but, after looking around, I made out the figure of my uncle slumped in a chair. He was holding a book up with one hand, while the other held a fork which travelled in circuitous routes to and from his mouth, often taking nothing from the plate.
I made my way between the tables and sat down facing him. I had time to order my lunch and eat it and start on the coffee before he realised that I was sitting opposite him. He heaved himself up and, tearing a corner off a letter as a book-mark, closed his detective novel. “Humph, young man,” he rumbled, “how long have you been here? Ten minutes, eh? Well that’s not the way to treat your uncle. It doesn’t show a proper respect fo
r your elders if you don’t draw their attention to the fact that they’re lookin’ slovenly.” His eyes twinkled.
“By the way, Uncle John,” I said, “I’m afraid I owe you sixpence. I doodled the face of ‘that man’ on the edge of my notes, and I think it’s only fair that that should count as a mention, don’t you?”
He put his stubby fingers together in a judicial manner and said ponderously, “Well, I think that threepence would serve in that case since you have not broadcast your doodle. Then I should fine myself for being caught in the attitude in which you found me. The fine for slovenliness has not been fixed so I suggest that we call it quits. Are you finished? Yes? Well, I wonder whether you would mind givin’ me a hand with my exhibits for the next half-hour. It would help a lot if you could.”
We got up and he shoved his novel into his pocket and stumped beside me toward the door. In the entrance we met Mary. She seemed to be upset about something and asked, rather sharply, “Has either of you seen Peter?” I shook my head and she brushed past us into the dining-room. Uncle John turned and looked after her over the top of his spectacles and breathed deeply.
When we were halfway across the lawn Peter ran past us, paying no attention to us. His hair was ruffled and someone seemed to have tugged at his tie. Again my uncle turned and beamed benevolently over his steel-rims.
As we entered the building we heard the clatter of running feet at the far end of the corridor. Then the figure of Professor Silver appeared, with his cockatoo plume of hair bobbing up and down as he cantered. Uncle John turned to me and boomed, “Humph, everyone seems to be in a hurry today.”
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