H G Wells Omnibus, page 301
And when at last the curve hid them and he pulled up the carriage window and turned to her to meet the love-light in her eyes she said to him: ‘And now you are going to show me the real world and all those cities and lakes and mountains where at last we shall feel at home.’
Only she never did seem to feel at home.
She never talked about this family of hers to him, after the transit of these two samples, and she corresponded with them with an infrequent regularity. She never gave him any reason to suppose she cared very much for them. But the fact which presently became apparent, that, unlike him, she was a good sailor and loved wind and rough seas, seemed to link her to them rather than to him. Many husbands have objected to their wives’ relations because they were too near, but he found he objected to hers because they were too remote. And also she loved mountains and crags and precipitous places. He didn’t. They climbed the Matterhorn at great expense, he gave more trouble to the guides than she did, and at the summit she seemed to be pleased but still gravely looking for more.
Once on holiday in Cornwall they had been basking together on the beach after lunch and suddenly her pose, as she sat thinking, reminded him of a picture he had seen somewhere of Undine, La Motte Fouques Undine, sweet and detached, looking across the far levels of the sea, lost in some unimaginable reverie. Undine too had had some uncouth and menacing brothers. That was when the fancy of her as a sort of changeling, as something ultra-terrestrial and not quite human first came to him. That was when ‘fey’ came out of the vocabulary.
This Undine suggestion hung about for months. First he let this exaggeration of her faint unearthliness play mischievously in his mind, and then he tried to restrain and banish it. Sometimes he tried to persuade himself that every man’s wife is really an Undine, but he could never make really convincing observations in that matter. Maybe, he thought, you never get near enough to any woman but your own wife to appreciate her remoteness.
A multitude of possibly quite accidental divergences grouped themselves about that ‘fey’.
He spun the thread of that word’s suggestion into a web about her. It swept aside the one worse alternative that conceivably she was just simple and lacking in aesthetic enterprise. At first that ‘fey’ was a fantastic exaggeration and then it became more and more an observation, an explanation for her undeniable detachment from so much that excited and stirred him, and from so much that he believed ought to excite and stir anybody. That struggle of his ideals with a dark underworld of doubts, which made it urgent for him to keep thinking, feeling, appreciating—like an urgent skater over thin ice and a cold abyss of disbelief—had no counterpart. She could keep still and remain content in her convictions, in something deep—whatever it was that she knew and did not communicate.
There was no malice in her detachment from him. He could have understood malice better. He had seen mutual jealousy and mutual detraction often enough among his married friends. The better the artists the worse the lovers. He understood that fight for individual assertion which makes love a legendary unreality, a blend of fantasy and grossness, in the world of the intelligentsia. But this was not the assertion of an individuality; it was a complete indifference to his values. It was a foreignness—to the whole world.
Whenever Mr. Davis had a slump in his vitality he realized this widening estrangement from his wife more acutely. The lower the ebb the intenser the realization. And this day his realization was exceptionally vivid …
This very morning she had made a remark that stirred him to a protest he abandoned in despair. There was to be a big concert at the Pantechnicon Hall with Rodhammer conducting. He was enthusiastic for going. She did not want to go.
He argued against her disinclination. ‘You used to like music.’
‘But I have heard music, dearest.’
‘Heard music! My dear, what a queer way to put things!’
She shook her head from side to side without speaking. There was a time when the self-assurance of her faint smile had seemed very lovely to him. Mona Lisa and all that, but now it irritated him with a sense of invincible and unapproachable opposition.
‘But you’ve only heard Rodhammer once before!’
‘Why should I want to hear Rodhammer again—a little better or not so good?’
‘But music!’
‘There’s a limit to music,’ she said.
‘A limit!’
‘I’ve a feeling that I’ve done with music. It was wonderful, charming, sustaining, all that music we went to hear—to begin with. I loved that as much as I’ve loved anything. But if one has taken music in—hasn’t one taken it in?’
‘Taken it in! You mean—?’ he tried.
‘I mean you don’t always want to be sitting down to attend to it after you’ve heard—what there is to it. We aren’t—professional.’
Professional! When she did use words she used them in a very deadly fashion. ‘I never tire of music,’ he said.
‘But does the sort of music there is say anything—does it say anything fresh?’
‘It’s eternally fresh.’
‘How?’
‘He made a hopeless gesture. ‘But why have you become indifferent?’
‘But why are you still so enthusiastic?’
‘But don’t you get—something wonderful? An exaltation? A world of absolute sensuous emotion?’
‘No—I did at first. A sort of exaltation. I agree. And still I like—rhythm. It’s pleasant to hear music going on, but it’s no longer something I want to listen to especially. Going to hear music in concerts seems to me like going to see pictures in galleries … Or reading anthologies… . Or looking over a collection of butterflies in a museum… . A time comes… .’
‘Then, in short, you won’t go to the concert?’
‘I feel a little tired but I will go if you like.’
‘Oh! not like that,’ he said and ended their talk.
But he went over it again in his own mind and now he was going over it once more. He knew people to whom music meant much and people to whom music meant little, but to take up music as Mary had, in a spirit of glad discovery, and then to put it down again as one might put down an unimportant novel, distressed his mind. But that was how she seemed to deal with everything in life. Even with friendship, even with love, she had that same flash of interest, that rapid appreciation, and then she turned away. To what?
He spoke aloud, addressing Lower Regent Street: ‘You can’t afford to give up music like that. You can’t afford to give up art.’
And what he did not say because he could not bring himself to say it, was: ‘And how can you afford to give up love?’
When the child comes, will she give up that?
Or will she go on loving the child. Leaving me behind? My part played?
The eternal going on! This complete instability of values! …
Could it fail to distress a man who was in effect a professor of stable values?
4.
And here we must note another rather unusual element in the mélange of Mr. Davis’s troubles, a queer little thing that would have mattered nothing to a less imaginative man, but which was to thread through all the train of thought upon which he was presently to embark. It was a very slender thread indeed, a matter so irrational and ridiculous that it seems almost unfair to him to mention it. And yet it certainly played a slight deflecting role in guiding him to the strange idea. It cannot therefore be ignored altogether.
Since his school days he had had a secret detestation of his own Christian name. Facetious upper-school boys had made it plain that there was a shadow on it Neither in the Old Testament nor in the New, is the name of Joseph adorned with that halo of triumphant virility which is the desire of every young male. He had struggled to insist that he should always be called ‘Jo.’ But the mortifying realization that he was a ‘Joseph’ damped his private meditations.
There was not the faintest circumstance to justify any marital uneasiness on his part. No one sane could have entertained a suspicion of his Mary’s integrity—nor did he, in the foreground of his mind. And yet, he would have been happier under a different name.
So it was.
5.
And here we must note another rather unusual element in the mélange of Mr. Davis’s troubles, a queer little thing that would have mattered nothing to a less imaginative man, but which was to thread through all the train of thought upon which he was presently to embark. It was a very slender thread indeed, a matter so irrational and ridiculous that it seems almost unfair to him to mention it. And yet it certainly played a slight deflecting role in guiding him to the strange idea. It cannot therefore be ignored altogether.
Since his school days he had had a secret detestation of his own Christian name. Facetious upper-school boys had made it plain that there was a shadow on it Neither in the Old Testament nor in the New, is the name of Joseph adorned with that halo of triumphant virility which is the desire of every young male. He had struggled to insist that he should always be called ‘Jo.’ But the mortifying realization that he was a ‘Joseph’ damped his private meditations.
There was not the faintest circumstance to justify any marital uneasiness on his part. No one sane could have entertained a suspicion of his Mary’s integrity—nor did he, in the foreground of his mind. And yet, he would have been happier under a different name.
So it was.
Chapter 2
Mr. Joseph Davis Learns about Cosmic Rays
1.
The Planetarium Club abounds in unexpected conversations. It has a core of scientific men who are mostly devotees of the exact sciences, grave, shy, precise men, but wrapped round them are layers of biologists, engineers, explorers, civil servants, patent lawyers, criminologists, writers, even an artist or so. Almost any subject may be started in the smoking-room where most of the talk goes on, but the feeling against chewed newspaper is strong. Mr. Davis, as he ascended the club steps, made an effort to throw off those vague shadows that oppressed his mind, and to brighten his bearing to the quality that may be reasonably expected of a temperamental optimist.
But as he recrossed the hall from the vestiary to the dining-room he was still undecided whether he should sit at one of the small tables and go on with his state of uneasy deterioration, or take a place at one of the sociable boards. He elected for solitude, but repented as soon as his decision was made, and after his solitary lunch he made a real effort at sociability and joined a talking circle of a dozen men or more between the window and the fire, sitting down next to Foxfield, that hairy, untidy biologist, for whom he had a slightly condescending liking. The talk was rather under the stress of a new member, a parliamentary barrister, who might be almost anything in a few years’ time and manifestly felt as much. This man had been elected before it was realized that he was slightly larger than any one else in the club and disposed to behave accordingly, and his conversational method was rather an elucidatory cross-examination than an original contribution to the interchanges.
‘Tell me,’ he would say and even point a ringer. ‘I don’t know anything about these things. Tell me—’
‘Tell me,’ except in the case of monarchs, heirs apparent, and presidents of the United States, is by the standards of the Planetarium atrocious conversational manners. But so far no one in the club had been able to get this point of view over to the new-comer: It would happen sooner or later but so far it had not happened. He was talking now with an air of making out some sort of case against modern physics and demonstrating how entirely more sensible and practical a mind which had passed through the ennobling exercises of Greats and a straightforward legal and political training could be.
‘Atoms and force were good enough for Lucretius and they were good enough for my stinks master when I was a boy. Then suddenly you have to disturb all that. There’s wonderful discoveries, and the ak is full of electrons and neutrons and positons.’
‘Positrons,’ a voice corrected.
‘It’s all the same to us. Positrons. And photons and protons and deutrons. Alpha rays and Beta rays and Gamma rays and X rays and Y rays. And they fly about like solar systems and all the rest of it. And the dear old Universe that used to be fixed and stable begins to expand and contract—like God playing a concertina. Tell me—frankly. I suggest to you—it’s a bluff. It’s something out of nothing. It’s just a way of selling us mystery bottles with scientific labels. I ask you.’
He paused with the air of a man who has put a poser.
A small, elderly, but still acutely acid old gentleman was sitting deep in one of the armchairs. The finger had not challenged him, but now he put out a lean hand and spoke with a thin penetrating voice, like a rapier, with the faint glint of a Scotch accent along the edge.
‘You say Tell me—and Tell me. Will you have the grace to listen while I tell ye? And not interrupt?’
And when the slightly outsize member made as if he had something further to say, the old gentleman just raised his hand and said: ‘No. Listen, I tell ye, and told you shall be.’
The rising man, just faintly abashed, assumed an attitude of sceptical and slightly impatient intelligence, looking round the group for support in what he evidently imagined was going to be a duel of wits. Just for a moment he imagined that. And then suddenly he felt like facing twelve implacably hostile jurymen and the first lesson of the Planetarium Club entered into his soul. Not to bounce.
Quietly and unobtrusively he allowed himself to lapse into the pose of the modest best boy in the class who knows that he still has much to learn and who cannot command any one to tell him but is glad to be told.
‘These things boil down,’ said the old gentleman. ‘I’ve lectured about them for years. And followed the changes. When one gets old one has to be concise and it’s fortunate I’ve had some practice in packing my statements. Still I’ll have to take five minutes. I’ll do all I can for you. Those Oxford teachers of yours—for it’s Oxford you come from—probably left your mathematical philosophy in a worst state than they found it when you came up from your English public school—if indeed your formula-dodging schoolmasters gave you any mathematical understanding at all even there—so I may not be able to explain everything to you. Some bits I’ll just have to tell you—as you put it. But it’s really quite simple and credible stuff they’ve made of it in the last twenty-five years, Rutherford and Bragg and Niels Bohr and the rest of those fellows, and the younger people find no difficulty about it at all.’
And with that and a galling air of careful simplification he proceeded to unfold a compact modern view of space and time and the movements of things therein. ‘Don’t ask me what electricity is,’ he said, ‘and I’ll tell you everything else as we have it up to date. It’s none so complicated as you think and there’s never a contradiction.’
And very neatly he took his nucleus, twisted up his atoms with electrons and neutrons round the central proton, and sent them eddying into a world of throbbing photons. Then he ran his hand along the sixty-odd octaves of the spectrum from the hundred-yard electro-magnetic undulations beyond the longest radio length through heat rays and light rays to X rays and Gamma rays, smacked a few atoms together, shot them through with helium atoms, and described the results, and by way of epilogue gave a lucid word to those flying sub-atomies, the cosmic rays.
‘After all, it’s none so confused,’ he said, and indeed the pictures that arose as one listened to his slightly remonstrating, very persuasive Scotch intonation had the music of ripples and wavelets, of dancing reflections upon the side of a ship, of the concentric colour rings of films on water, of every sort of pleasant patterning and logical ornamentation. He made dead matter dance and circle, set to partners, interfere, shimmer, glow, become iridescent and mysteriously endowed with energy. The atoms of our fathers seemed by contrast like a game of marbles abandoned in a corner of a muddy playground on a wet day. He even had a cautious word for the young neutrinos, the latest aspirants to his dance in the atomic assembly-rooms. The one or two men who were experts in the subject listened, pleased to hear the A B C of their subject so lucidly delivered, and the rest were glad to check up their vague impressions of these fluctuating modern conceptions.
‘And where do we come in?’ asked someone. ‘Where is thought and the soul in all this?’
‘Just a film, just a thin zone of reflection halfway in the scale of size between those electrons and the stars,’
2.
Davis followed that compact discourse in a mood of unusual self-forgetfulness. It was, he found, as refreshing as good drink, and as little likely to linger in the system. And even the new member betrayed a certain humility in his attention,
But he still felt it was his duty to himself to talk.
‘Those cosmic rays of yours,’ he said. ‘They are the most difficult part of your story. They aren’t radiations. They aren’t protons. What are they? They go sleeting through the universe incessantly, day and night, going from nowhere to nowhere. For the life of me I find that hard to imagine.’
‘They must come from somewhere,’ said a quiet little man with an air of producing a very special contribution to the discussion.
‘We note their existence,’ said the old gentleman. ‘We watch them but we draw no premature conclusions. They are infinitesimal particles flying at an inconceivable velocity. They come from all directions of outer space. And that’s as much as we know about them. If I put out my finger like that for a second or so, there’s only just a dozen or so gone through it in a second. And no harm done. Which is just as well. There’s more up above us in the outer atmosphere. But fortunately they get reflected and absorbed. You know we have a sort of filtering halo about the earth, a sort of cloak of electrons, which keeps off any excess of these radiations.’
‘That Heaviside layer,’ a stout rufous man, who had apparently been asleep, interpolated.
