Part 24

He wondered how much more remained of this appalling night. It would have made so little difference if they had taken the day train and travelled first-class. Wasn't she indeed entitled to travel first-class? Pictures of the immense spaciousness, the softness, cleanliness and dignity of first-class compartments appeared in his mind....

He would have looked at his watch, but to get at it would mean disturbing the silent young man on his left.

Outside in the corridor there broke out a noisy dispute about a missing coupon, a dispute in that wonderful language that is known to the facetious as _entente cordiale_, between an Englishman and the conductor of the train....

Sec. 14

In Paris there was a dispute with an extortionate cabman, and the crossing from Dieppe to Newhaven was rough and bitterly cold. They were both ill. They reached home very dirty and weary, and among the pile of letters and papers on Trafford's desk was a big bundle of Science Note proofs, and two letters from Croydon and Pinner to alter the hours of his lectures for various plausible and irritating reasons.

The little passage looked very small and rather bare as the door shut behind them, and the worn places that had begun to be conspicuous during the last six months, and which they had forgotten during the Swiss holiday, reasserted themselves. The dining-room, after spacious rooms flooded with sunshine, betrayed how dark it was, and how small. Those Bokhara embroideries that had once shone so splendid, now, after Mrs. Lee's rich and unlimited harmonies, seemed skimpy and insufficient, mere loin-cloths for the artistic nakedness of the home. They felt, too, they were beginning to find out their post-impressionist picture. They had not remembered it as nearly so crude as it now appeared. The hole a flying coal had burnt in the unevenly faded dark-blue carpet looked larger than it had ever done before, and was indeed the only thing that didn't appear faded and shrunken.

Sec. 15

The atmosphere of the Lees' villa had disturbed Marjorie's feelings and ideas even more than it had Trafford's. She came back struggling to recover those high resolves that had seemed so secure when they had walked down to Les Avantes. There was a curiously tormenting memory of that vast, admirable nursery, and the princely procession of children that would not leave her mind. No effort of her reason could reconcile her to the inferiority of Margharita's equipment. She had a detestable craving for a uniform for May. But May was going....

But indeed she was not so sure that May was going.

She was no longer buoyantly well, she was full of indefinable apprehensions of weakness and failure. She struggled to control an insurgence of emotions that rose out of the deeps of her being. She had now, she knew, to take on her share of the burden, to become one of the Samurai, to show her love no longer as a demand but as a service. Yet from day to day she procrastinated under the shadow of apprehended things; she forebore to dismiss May, to buy that second-hand typewriter she needed, to take any irrevocable step towards the realization of the new way of living. She tried to think away her fears, but they would not leave her. She felt that Trafford watched her pale face with a furtive solicitude and wondered at her hesitations; she tried in vain to seem cheerful and careless in his presence, with an anxiety, with premonitions that grew daily.

There was no need to worry him unduly....

But soon the matter was beyond all doubting. One night she gathered her courage together suddenly and came down into his study in her dressing-gown with her hair about her shoulders. She opened the door and her heart failed her.

"Rag," she whispered.

"Yes," he said busily from his desk, without looking round.

"I want to speak to you," she answered, and came slowly, and stood beside him silently.

"Well, old Marjorie?" he said presently, drawing a little intricate pattern in the corner of his blotting paper, and wondering whether this was a matter of five pounds or ten.

"I meant so well," she said and caught herself back into silence again.

He started at the thought, at a depth and meaning in her voice, turned his chair about to look at her, and discovered she was weeping and choking noiselessly. He stood up close to her, moving very slowly and silently, his eyes full of this new surmise, and now without word or gesture from her he knew his thought was right. "My dear," he whispered.

She turned her face from him. "I meant so well," she sobbed. "My dear! I meant so well." Still with an averted face her arms came out to him in a desperate, unreasoning appeal for love. He took her and held her close to him. "Never mind, dear," he said. "Don't mind." Her passion now was unconstrained. "I thought--" he began, and left the thing unsaid.

"But your work," she said; "your research?"

"I must give up research," he said.

"Oh, my dearest!"

"I must give up research," he repeated. "I've been seeing it for days. Clearer and clearer. _This_ dear, just settles things. Even--as we were coming home in the train--I was making up my mind. At Vevey I was talking to Solomonson."

"My dear," she whispered, clinging to him.

"I talked to Solomonson. He had ideas--a proposal."

"No," she said.

"Yes," he said. "I've left the thing too long."

He repeated. "I must give up research--for years. I ought to have done it long before."

"I had meant so well," she said. "I meant to work. I meant to deny myself...."

"I'm glad," he whispered. "Glad! Why should you weep?" It seemed nothing to him then, that so he should take a long farewell to the rare, sweet air of that wonderland his mind had loved so dearly. All he remembered was that Marjorie was very dear to him, very dear to him, and that all her being was now calling out for him and his strength. "I had thought anyhow of giving up research," he repeated. "This merely decides. It happens to decide. I love you, dear. I put my research at your feet. Gladly. This is the end, and I do not care, my dear, at all. I do not care at all--seeing I have you...."

He stood beside her for a moment, and then sat down again, sideways, upon his chair.

"It isn't you, my dear, or me," he said, "but life that beats us--that beautiful, irrational mother.... Life does not care for research or knowledge, but only for life. Oh! the world has to go on yet for tens of thousands of years before--before we are free for that. I've got to fight--as other men fight...."

He thought in silence for a time, oddly regardless of her. "But if it was not you," he said, staring at the fireplace with knitted brows, "if I did not love you.... Thank God, I love you, dear! Thank God, our children are love children! I want to live--to my finger-tips, but if I didn't love you--oh! love you! then I think now--I'd be glad--I'd be glad, I think, to cheat life of her victory."

"Oh, my dear!" she cried, and clung weeping to him, and caught at him and sat herself upon his knees, and put her arms about his head, and kissed him passionately with tear-salt lips, with her hair falling upon his face.

"My dear," she whispered....

Sec. 16

So soon as Trafford could spare an afternoon amidst his crowded engagements he went to talk to Solomonson, who was now back in London. "Solomonson," he said, "you were talking about rubber at Vevey."

"I remember," said Solomonson with a note of welcome.

"I've thought it over."

"I _thought_ you would."

"I've thought things over. I'm going to give up my professorship--and science generally, and come into business--if that is what you are meaning."

Solomonson turned his paper-weight round very carefully before replying. Then he said: "You mustn't give up your professorship yet, Trafford. For the rest--I'm glad."

He reflected, and then his bright eyes glanced up at Trafford. "I knew," he said, "you would."

"I didn't," said Trafford. "Things have happened since."

"Something was bound to happen. You're too good--for what it gave you. I didn't talk to you out there for nothing. I saw things.... Let's go into the other room, and smoke and talk it over." He stood up as he spoke.

"I thought you would," he repeated, leading the way. "I knew you would. You see,--one _has_ to. You can't get out of it."

"It was all very well before you were married," said Solomonson, stopping short to say it, "but when a man's married he's got to think. He can't go on devoting himself to his art and his science and all that--not if he's married anything worth having. No. Oh, I understand. He's got to look about him, and forget the distant prospect for a bit. I saw you'd come to it. _I_ came to it. Had to. I had ambitions--just as you have. I've always had an inclination to do a bit of research on my own. I _like_ it, you know. Oh! I could have done things. I'm sure I could have done things. I'm not a born money-maker. But----." He became very close and confidential. "It's----_them_. You said good-bye to science for a bit when you flopped me down on that old croquet-lawn, Trafford." He went off to reminiscences. "Lord, how we went over! No more aviation for me, Trafford!"

He arranged chairs, and produced cigars. "After all--this of course--it's interesting. Once you get into the movement of it, it takes hold of you. It's a game."

"I've thought over all you said," Trafford began, using premeditated phrases. "Bluntly--I want three thousand a year, and I don't make eight hundred. It's come home to me. I'm going to have another child."

Solomonson gesticulated a congratulation.

"All the same, I hate dropping research. It's stuff I'm made to do. About that, Solomonson, I'm almost superstitious. I could say I had a call.... It's the maddest state of affairs! Now that I'm doing absolutely my best work for mankind, work I firmly believe no one else can do, I just manage to get six hundred--nearly two hundred of my eight hundred is my own. What does the world think I could do better--that would be worth four times as much."

"The world doesn't think anything at all about it," said Solomonson.

"Suppose it did!"

The thought struck Sir Rupert. He knitted his brows and looked hard obliquely at the smoke of his cigar. "Oh, it won't," he said, rejecting a disagreeable idea. "There isn't any world--not in that sense. That's the mistake you make, Trafford."

"It's not what your work is worth," he explained. "It's what your advantages can get for you. People are always going about supposing--just what you suppose--that people ought to get paid in proportion to the good they do. It's forgetting what the world is, to do that. Very likely some day civilization will get to that, but it hasn't got to it yet. It isn't going to get to it for hundreds and hundreds of years."

His manner became confidential. "Civilization's just a fight, Trafford--just as savagery is a fight, and being a wild beast is a fight,--only you have paddeder gloves on and there's more rules. We aren't out for everybody, we're out for ourselves--and a few friends perhaps--within limits. It's no good hurrying ahead and pretending civilization's something else, when it isn't. That's where all these socialists and people come a howler. Oh, _I_ know the Socialists. I see 'em at my wife's At Homes. They come along with the literary people and the artists' wives and the actors and actresses, and none of them take much account of me because I'm just a business man and rather dark and short, and so I get a chance of looking at them from the side that isn't on show while the other's turned to the women, and they're just as fighting as the rest of us, only they humbug more and they don't seem to me to have a decent respect for any of the common rules. And that's about what it all comes to, Trafford."

Sir Rupert paused, and Trafford was about to speak when the former resumed again, his voice very earnest, his eyes shining with purpose. He liked Trafford, and he was doing his utmost to make a convincing confession of the faith that was in him. "It's when it comes to the women," said Sir Rupert, "that one finds it out. That's where _you've_ found it out. You say, I'm going to devote my life to the service of Humanity in general. You'll find Humanity in particular, in the shape of all the fine, beautiful, delightful and desirable women you come across, preferring a narrower turn of devotion. See? That's all. _Caeteris paribus_, of course. That's what I found out, and that's what you've found out, and that's what everybody with any sense in his head finds out, and there you are."

"You put it--graphically," said Trafford.

"I feel it graphically. I may be all sorts of things, but I do know a fact when I see it. I'm here with a few things I want and a woman or so I have and want to keep, and the kids upstairs, bless 'em! and I'm in league with all the others who want the same sort of things. Against any one or anything that upsets us. We stand by the law and each other, and that's what it all amounts to. That's as far as my patch of Humanity goes. Humanity at large! Humanity be blowed! _Look_ at it! It isn't that I'm hostile to Humanity, mind you, but that I'm not disposed to go under as I should do if I didn't say that. So I say it. And that's about all it is, and there you are."

He regarded Trafford over his cigar, drawing fiercely at it for some moments. Then seeing Trafford on the point of speaking, he snatched it from his lips, demanded silence by waving it at his hearer, and went on.

"I say all this in order to dispose of any idea that you can keep up the open-minded tell-everybody-every-thing scientific attitude if you come into business. You can't. Put business in two words and what is it? Keeping something from somebody else, and making him pay for it--"

"Oh, look here!" protested Trafford. "That's not the whole of business."

"There's making him want it, of course, advertisement and all that, but that falls under making him pay for it, really."

"But a business man organizes public services, consolidates, economizes."

Sir Rupert made his mouth look very wide by sucking in the corners. "Incidentally," he said, and added after a judicious pause: "Sometimes ... I thought we were talking of making money."

"Go on," said Trafford.

"You set me thinking," said Solomonson. "It's the thing I always like about you. I tell you, Trafford, I don't believe that the majority of people who make money help civilization forward any more than the smoke that comes out of the engine helps the train forward. If you put it to me, I don't. I've got no illusions of that sort. They're about as much help as--fat. They accumulate because things happen to be arranged so."

"Things will be arranged better some day."

"They aren't arranged better now. Grip that! _Now_, it's a sort of paradox. If you've got big gifts and you choose to help forward the world, if you choose to tell all you know and give away everything you can do in the way of work, you've got to give up the ideas of wealth and security, and that means fine women and children. You've got to be a _deprived_ sort of man. 'All right,' you say, 'That's me!' But how about your wife being a deprived sort of woman? Eh? That's where it gets you! And meanwhile, you know, while _you_ make your sacrifices and do your researches, there'll be little mean sharp active beasts making money all over you like maggots on a cheese. And if everybody who'd got gifts and altruistic ideas gave themselves up to it, then evidently only the mean and greedy lot would breed and have the glory. They'd get everything. Every blessed thing. There wouldn't be an option they didn't hold. And the other chaps would produce the art and the science and the literature, as far as the men who'd got hold of things would let 'em, and perish out of the earth altogether.... There you are! Still, that's how things are made...."

"But it isn't worth it. It isn't worth extinguishing oneself in order to make a world for those others, anyhow. Them and their children. Is it? Eh? It's like building a temple for flies to buzz in.... There is such a thing as a personal side to Eugenics, you know."

Solomonson reflected over the end of his cigar. "It isn't good enough," he concluded.

"You're infernally right," said Trafford.

"Very well," said Solomonson, "and now we can get to business."

Sec. 17

The immediate business was the systematic exploitation of the fact that Trafford had worked out the problem of synthesizing indiarubber. He had done so with an entire indifference to the commercial possibilities of the case, because he had been irritated by the enormous publicity given to Behrens' assertion that he had achieved this long-sought end. Of course the production of artificial rubbers and rubber-like substances had been one of the activities of the synthetic chemist for many years, from the appearance of Tilden's isoprene rubber onward, and there was already a formidable list of collaterals, dimethybutadiene, and so forth, by which the coveted goal could be approached. Behrens had boldly added to this list as his own a number of variations upon a theme of Trafford's, originally designed to settle certain curiosities about elasticity. Behrens' products were not only more massively rubber-like than anything that had gone before them, but also extremely cheap to produce, and his bold announcement of success had produced a check in rubber sales and widespread depression in the quiveringly sensitive market of plantation shares. Solomonson had consulted Trafford about this matter at Vevey, and had heard with infinite astonishment that Trafford had already roughly prepared and was proposing to complete and publish, unpatented and absolutely unprotected, first a smashing demonstration of the unsoundness of Behrens' claim and then a lucid exposition of just what had to be done and what could be done to make an indiarubber absolutely indistinguishable from the natural product. The business man could not believe his ears.

"My dear chap, positively--you mustn't," Solomonson had screamed, and he had opened his fingers and humped his shoulders and for all his public school and university training lapsed undisguisedly into the Oriental. "Don't you _see_ all you are throwing away?" he squealed.

"I suppose it's our quality to throw such things away," said Trafford, when at last Solomonson's point of view became clear to him. They had embarked upon a long rambling discussion of that issue of publication, a discussion they were now taking up again. "When men dropped that idea of concealing knowledge, alchemist gave place to chemist," said Trafford, "and all that is worth having in modern life, all that makes it better and safer and more hopeful than the ancient life, began."

"My dear fellow," said Solomonson, "I know, I know. But to give away the synthesis of rubber! To just shove it out of the window into the street! _Gare l'eau!_ O! And when you could do with so much too!"....

Now they resumed the divergent threads of that Vevey talk.

Solomonson had always entertained the warmest friendship and admiration for Trafford, and it was no new thing that he should desire a business co-operation. He had been working for that in the old days at Riplings; he had never altogether let the possibility drop out of sight between them in spite of Trafford's repudiations. He believed himself to be a scientific man turned to business, but indeed his whole passion was for organization and finance. He knew he could do everything but originate, and in Trafford he recognized just that rare combination of an obstinate and penetrating simplicity with constructive power which is the essential blend in the making of great intellectual initiatives. To Trafford belonged the secret of novel and unsuspected solutions; what were fixed barriers and unsurmountable conditions to trained investigators and commonplace minds, would yield to his gift of magic inquiry. He could startle the accepted error into self-betrayal. Other men might play the game of business infinitely better than he--Solomonson knew, indeed, quite well that he himself could play the game infinitely better than Trafford--but it rested with Trafford by right divine of genius to alter the rules. If only he could be induced to alter the rules secretly, unostentatiously, on a business footing, instead of making catastrophic plunges into publicity! And everything that had made Trafford up to the day of his marriage was antagonistic to such strategic reservations. The servant of science has as such no concern with personal consequences; his business is the steady, relentless clarification of knowledge. The human affairs he changes, the wealth he makes or destroys, are no concern of his; once these things weigh with him, become primary, he has lost his honour as a scientific man.

"But you _must_ think of consequences," Solomonson had cried during those intermittent talks at Vevey. "Here you are, shying this cheap synthetic rubber of yours into the world--for it's bound to be cheap! any one can see that--like a bomb into a market-place. What's the good of saying you don't care about the market-place, that _your_ business is just to make bombs and drop them out of the window? You smash up things just the same. Why! you'll ruin hundreds and thousands of people, people living on rubber shares, people working in plantations, old, inadaptable workers in rubber works...."

Sir Rupert was now still a little incredulous of Trafford's change of purpose, and for a time argued conceded points. Then slowly he came to the conditions and methods of the new relationship. He sketched out a scheme of co-operation and understandings between his firm and Trafford, between them both and his associated group in the city.

Behrens was to have rope and produce his slump in plantation shares, then Trafford was to publish his criticism of Behrens, reserving only that catalytic process which was his own originality, the process that was to convert the inert, theoretically correct synthetic rubber, with a mysterious difference in the quality of its phases, into the real right thing. With Behrens exploded, plantation shares would recover, and while their friends in the city manipulated that, Trafford would resign his professorship and engage himself to an ostentatious promotion syndicate for the investigation of synthetic rubber. His discovery would follow immediately the group had cleared itself of plantation shares; indeed he could begin planning the necessary works forthwith; the large scale operations in the process were to be protected as far as possible by patents, but its essential feature, the addition of a specific catalytic agent, could be safely dealt with as a secret process.

"I hate secrecy," said Trafford.

"Business," interjected Solomonson, and went on with his exposition of the relative advantages of secrecy and patent rights. It was all a matter of just how many people you had to trust. As that number increased, the more and more advisable did it become to put your cards on the table and risk the complex uncertain protection of the patent law. They went into elaborate calculations, clerks were called upon to hunt up facts and prices, and the table was presently littered with waste arithmetic.

"I believe we can do the stuff at tenpence a pound," said Solomonson, leaning back in his chair at last, and rattling his fountain pen between his teeth, "so soon, that is, as we deal in quantity. Tenpence! We can lower the price and spread the market, sixpence by sixpence. In the end--there won't be any more plantations. Have to grow tea.... I say, let's have an invalid dinner of chicken and champagne, and go on with this. It's fascinating. You can telephone."