H G Wells Omnibus, page 192
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.”
§ 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.”
They dined together, and Solomonson on champagne rather than chicken. His mind, which had never shown an instant’s fatigue, began to glow and sparkle. This enterprise, he declared, was to be only the first of a series of vigorous exploitations. The whole thing warmed him. He would rather make ten thousand by such developments, than a hundred thousand by mere speculation. Trafford had but scratched the surface of his mine of knowledge. “Let’s think of other things,” said Sir Rupert Solomonson. “Diamonds! No! They’ve got too many tons stowed away already. A diamond now—it’s an absolutely artificial value. At any time a new discovery and one wild proprietor might bust that show. Lord!—diamonds! Metals? Of course you’ve worked the colloids chiefly. I suppose there’s been more done in metals and alloys than anywhere. There’s a lot of other substances. Business has hardly begun to touch substances yet, you know, Trafford—flexible glass, for example, and things like that. So far we’ve always taken substances for granted. On our side, I mean. It’s extraordinary how narrow the outlook of business and finance is—still. It never seems to lead to things, never thinks ahead. In this case of rubber, for example——”
“When men fight for their own hands and for profit and position in the next ten years or so, I suppose they tend to become narrow.”
“I suppose they must.” Sir Rupert’s face glowed with a new idea, and his voice dropped a little lower. “But what a pull they get, Trafford, if perhaps—they don’t, eh?”
“No,” said Trafford with a smile and a sigh, “the other sort gets the pull.”
“Not this time,” said Solomonson; “not with you to spot processes and me to figure out the cost—” he waved his hands to the litter that had been removed to a side table—“and generally see how the business end of things is going….”
* * *
BOOK THE THIRD
MARJORIE AT LONELY HUT
* * *
CHAPTER THE FIRST
Successes
§ 1
I find it hard to trace the accumulation of moods and feelings that led Trafford and Marjorie at last to make their extraordinary raid upon Labrador. In a week more things happen in the thoughts of such a man as Trafford, changes, revocations, deflections, than one can chronicle in the longest of novels. I have already in an earlier passage of this story sought to give an image of the confused content of a modern human mind, but that pool was to represent a girl of twenty, and Trafford now was a man of nearly thirty-five, and touching life at a hundred points for one of the undergraduate Marjorie’s. Perhaps that made him less confused, but it certainly made him fuller. Let me attempt therefore only the broad outline of his changes of purpose and activity until I come to the crucial mood that made these two lives a little worth telling about, amidst the many thousands of such lives that people are living to-day….
It took him seven years from his conclusive agreement with Solomonson to become a rich and influential man. It took him only seven years, because already by the mere accidents of intellectual interest he was in possession of knowledge of the very greatest economic importance, and because Solomonson was full of that practical loyalty and honesty that distinguishes his race. I think that in any case Trafford’s vigor and subtlety of mind would have achieved the prosperity he had found necessary to himself, but it might have been, under less favorable auspices, a much longer and more tortuous struggle. Success and security were never so abundant nor so easily attained by men with capacity and a sense of proportion as they are in the varied and flexible world of to-day. We live in an affluent age with a nearly incredible continuous fresh increment of power pouring in from mechanical invention, and compared with our own, most other periods have been meagre and anxious and hard-up times. Our problems are constantly less the problems of submission and consolation and continually more problems of opportunity….
Trafford found the opening campaign, the operation with the plantation shares and his explosion of Behrens’ pretensions extremely uncongenial. It left upon his mind a confused series of memories of interviews and talks in offices for the most part dingy and slovenly, of bales of press-cuttings and blue-pencilled financial publications, of unpleasing encounters with a number of bright-eyed, flushed, excitable and extremely cunning men, of having to be reserved and limited in his talk upon all occasions, and of all the worst aspects of Solomonson. All that part of the new treatment of life that was to make him rich gave him sensations as though he had ceased to wash himself mentally, until he regretted his old life in his laboratory as a traveller in a crowded night train among filthy people might regret the bathroom he had left behind him….
But the development of his manufacture of rubber was an entirely different business, and for a time profoundly interesting. It took him into a new astonishing world, the world of large-scale manufacture and industrial organization. The actual planning of the works was not in itself anything essentially new to him. So far as all that went it was scarcely more than the problem of arranging an experiment upon a huge and permanent scale, and all that quick ingenuity, that freshness and directness of mind that had made his purely scientific work so admirable had ample and agreeable scope. Even the importance of cost and economy at every point in the process involved no system of considerations that was altogether novel to him. The British investigator knows only too well the necessity for husbanded material and inexpensive substitutes. But strange factors came in, a new region of interest was opened with the fact that instead of one experimenter working with the alert responsive assistance of Durgan, a multitude of human beings—even in the first drafts of his project they numbered already two hundred, before the handling and packing could be considered—had to watch, control, assist or perform every stage in a long elaborate synthesis. For the first time in his life Trafford encountered the reality of Labour, as it is known to the modern producer.
