The Peacemaker

  At that very moment Dr. Pethwick was hoping, as he put his key into his front door, that his wife was not going to be ‘difficult’ this evening. And as he came into the front hall he knew that she was. She came out of the dining-room with that heaviness and exaggeration of gait which foretold the worst.

  ‘Hullo!’ said Mary Pethwick. Then she put out her hand against the wall and rested against it in a negligent sort of way. Her demeanour indicated that there was no real need for this support; she did it from choice, not to help her keep her balance.

  ‘Hullo, dear,’ said Pethwick, hanging up his hat.

  ‘Your tea’s not ready,’ said Mary, as though it were his fault.

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter,’ replied Pethwick. ‘I’ll get it myself.’

  He edged past her along the hall into the little kitchen; she made no effort to get out of his way but stood watching every step he took. The little kitchen was full of squalor. On the gas stove stood the frying-pan in which had been cooked the breakfast bacon. The sink and the small table beside it were covered with dirty saucepans and dishes. Pethwick looked round for the kettle, found it in the littered pantry, filled it, and set it on the stove. Then he heard Mary’s blundering step down the hall, and she came in after him; the door, pushed open a shade too violently, crashed against the wall. Mary put her back against the wall beside the dresser and watched his movements jealously. In that tiny room, littered as it was, there was hardly room for Pethwick to move now. Pethwick sighed; he was experienced now in Mary’s ‘difficultness.’ When she followed him about like this it meant that she was looking for an opportunity to grumble. The only shadow of comfort left was that as the grumbling was quite inevitable it did not matter what he did.

  He cleared the little table by stacking the dirty things neatly in the sink—until that was done there was nowhere anything could be set down for a second. He washed out the teapot. He found, miraculously, a clean cup and saucer and plate. There were fragments of a broken jug under the sink. The only other two jugs in the house were dirty and greasy; he would have to pour his milk direct from the bottle—there was, fortunately, a little left. There was a smear of butter on the breadboard. The half loaf had stood since morning in the sunshine coming through the kitchen window; its cut surface was hard and dry.

  An incautious movement on Pethwick’s part set his foot on the saucer of milk put down for the cat beside the stove. It broke under his heel, and the milk streamed across the dirty floor.

  ‘There!’ said Mary. ‘Look what you’ve done! All over my nice clean kitchen!’

  ‘I’m sorry, dear,’ said Pethwick. ‘I’ll mop it up.’

  He picked up a dishcloth from beside the sink and stooped over the mess.

  ‘That’s a teacloth,’ screamed Mary. ‘Don’t use a teacloth for that!’

  Pethwick put it back where he found it; the colour of the thing made the mistake excusable. He found something else, mopped up the mess, put the cloth back, and began cutting himself bread and butter.

  ‘Look how you’re wasting the gas!’ said Mary.

  The kettle was boiling. Mary often left kettles boiling until the bottom was burnt out of them, and she did not mind in the least how much gas was used, but she had to find something to harass her husband with. Pethwick made his tea, and went on cutting bread and butter.

  ‘That’s all the bread there is,’ said Mary, again as if it were his fault. Pethwick checked himself in the act of cutting. Half a small loaf is not much if it has to constitute a man’s evening meal and two persons’ breakfast. Incautiously he allowed himself to say something which might be construed as displaying a little annoyance.

  ‘Didn’t the baker come to-day?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s not my fault if he comes when I’m out,’ said Mary, leaping into the long sought opening. ‘Fancy saying that to me! Do you expect—’

  There is no need to give a verbatim account of what Mary Pethwick went on to say. The fact that Pethwick had dared to hint that she had neglected her domestic duties was a splendid starting point, from which she could counter-attack in righteous indignation. With malice she poisoned her barbed words. She knew, with the ingenuity of evil, how to wound. She jeered at his proverbial inability to keep a class in order, at his untidy appearance, at all the weaknesses of which he was conscious and for which he was ashamed.

  Some husbands, sitting silent, could have let her words pass unheeded, practically unheard, but that was impossible to Pethwick. He was a far too sensitive man. He listened, and every word hurt. The stale bread and butter he was trying to eat at the kitchen table turned in his mouth to something more like sawdust than ever. The bitter strong tea to which he had looked forward was too bitter to drink. He pushed his cup away and rose from the table, to be censured again, of course, for the sin of waste. Mary had no objection to making use of the most ridiculous charges against him. They gave her time to think of more wounding things without having to check her speech.

  Only one thing ever caused her to pause. It came now, while Pethwick stood waiting for the kettle to boil before beginning to wash up. Mary said suddenly that she could no longer bear the sight of him. It was a splendid excuse for moving away with dignity. Pethwick heard her go along the hall and into the dining-room, and he heard the sideboard door there open and close. He knew why. Then in a little while the kitchen door crashed open again and Mary came back to renew the onset, all the while that Pethwick was trying to wash clean the greasy dishes and saucepans.

  When the washing up was completed Pethwick went into the drawing-room and unpacked from his bag the thirty-one exercise books which contained the physics homework of VB, but in the next two hours he only succeeded in marking two of them, and those were during the two intervals when Mary went into the dining-room to the sideboard cupboard. The other twenty-nine took him hardly more than an hour after Mary had gone up to bed. heavily and slowly, pulling herself up by the banisters at every step.

  And if it be asked why Pethwick endured treatment of this sort without revolt, the answer can only be found in his heredity and his environment. The saddler, his father, had been a thoughtful little wisp of a man; his mother had been a big masterful woman of generous figure, not at all unlike, in her young days, the woman Pethwick married—who was her niece, and, consequently, Pethwick’s cousin. That big bullying mother of his had much to answer for. She won her little white-faced son’s love and frightened him out of his life in turns.

  The years of Edward Pethwick’s adolescence were a lunatic time, when there was war, and air-raids, and his father’s earnings amounted more than once to nearly a thousand pounds in the year. Mrs. Pethwick lived gloriously, never more than half-drunk but rarely less, and in time Mr. Pethwick came to follow her example. Other people bought pianos and fur coats; the Pethwicks made a more magnificent gesture still and sent their son to a secondary school instead of putting him to work at fourteen. They destined him to be the first member of their family on either side to earn his living by his brain instead of by his hands. The result was that Edward Pethwick matriculated at sixteen before the war was over, and took his degree at nineteen very brilliantly indeed just before his parents quitted a world where a saddler’s earnings had shrunk to an amount which would hardly suffice to make two people drunk even once a week.

  Where the mathematical talent came from in Pethwick’s make-up is hard to tell. That particular mental twist is strongly hereditary, but it is hard to find any other example of it either in Pethwick’s father’s family or in his mother’s. But as none of them, as far as can be ascertained, ever stayed at school long enough for any talent of that sort to be discovered it is possible that it was present but latent among them.

  Pethwick married at twenty. He would have had to have been a clever man to avoid that fate. For on the death of his parents his aunt had taken care of him, and within the year the combined efforts of the whole of his aunt’s family were successful in their aim. It was a tremendous prize, for Pethwick was a me
mber of a profession, a school-teacher, not merely several rungs higher up the social ladder than his wife’s family, but he might be said to be on another ladder altogether. His very salary at twenty was far larger than his father-in-law earned at fifty. If Mary had not married him she would have had to hope that the time would come when perhaps some shop assistant or lorry driver would in an unguarded moment give her the opportunity of snatching him out of bachelorhood.

  As it was, Mary won a colossal prize—a house with three bedrooms in it and no lodgers at all (until she married Mary never lived in a house with less than two families); a husband with a job which more likely than not would continue safely for forty years (he was the only man she knew with a job of more than a week’s permanency); more clothes than she could wear and more food than she could eat, where previously there had been no certainty of even a minimum of either. Shop-keepers would treat her with deference, where previously she had been accustomed to a state of society where the shop-keeper was a man of social distinction to whom customers deferred.

  In eleven years Mary had grown used to it—eleven years of nothing much to do and no particular desire to do it. For that matter, in two months Mary had grown bored with her new house and her new furniture so that even her mother’s generous envy was no longer sweet to her. There was a bottle of stout to drink at lunch time. Her mother liked gin but could so rarely afford it that it was nice to have some handy when she came. And when she went to visit her family and in the evening went, as a matter of course, to the ‘King’s Arms,’ it was nice, when her turn came, to say, ‘Won’t you make it a short one this time?’ and to have a Scotch herself, and to take out of her purse a couple of half-crowns to pay for it all—more than her father could spend there in a week without going short on something else. It was not very long before Pethwick was quite used to coming home to a wife with something the matter with her temper.

  If only Mary had found something to keep her occupied before the habit of solitary drinking took hold of her she might have been a good wife. If children had come—lots of them—or if Pethwick had been a severe task-master, or if Mary had been ambitious as regards clothes or social position, or food, or if, incredibly, she had developed a talent for art or literature, matters might have been different. But as it was she had plunged into idleness, she had found idleness unsatisfying, and she had come to dull her racing mind with drink. After all, it was excusable. The only people Mary knew considered a man fortunate to be drunk, and it took so little, even now, to unbalance her, that the habit was easily formed.

  Nor was her husband any help to her. He was far too queer a person. He could never see any attraction in drink—he had the complete distaste for it which occasionally characterises the offspring of drunken parents—and he was a fool about his wife. She and his mother were the only women he had ever known, and he thought women were marvellous beings, and ten years of married life had no more widened his knowledge of them than ten years of mathematical research had done.

  Pethwick put VB’s physics homework away in his bag, switched off the light, and went up to bed. The nightly routine of washing his hands and cleaning his teeth relieved his mind of much of the tension and distress the evening had brought him, and when he went into the bedroom Mary was, heaven be praised, already asleep—on her back, and snoring a little, with her underclothes strewn about the room. Pethwick put on his ragged pyjamas and climbed quietly in beside her. There were nights when Mary’s visits to the dining-room sideboard only made her more and more wakeful and, consequently, quarrelsome, and these were nights of purgatory for Pethwick, but happily this was not one of them.

  He could compose himself on his pillow and allow his current of thought, clear now, and unhurried, to flow through his mind. He thought about Officers’ Training Corps, and Dorothy Laxton and VB’s bad behaviour and the chance of cramming Dawson through the intermediate B.Sc. this summer. And while that side of his brain was digesting these matters, the other side was developing the consequences of his mathematical discovery of that afternoon. It went steadily on regardless of his other thoughts, like a clock ticking in a drawing-room where a party is going on, attracting no attention but turning the hands unfalteringly.

  Then it broke in upon his consciousness, staggeringly, as though the drawing-room clock were suddenly to strike with Big Ben’s volume of sound. That mathematical expression at which his calculations had ended in the afternoon had transformed itself in his mind, had assumed a vital new guise, presenting itself with clarity as a stunning revelation. Pethwick’s heart beat faster even than if he was thinking about Dorothy Laxton, and for once in his life he had no thought to spare for her. He was making his way from point to point of a new deduction in that highly rarefied atmosphere where mathematics tend to become not merely a measure of, but identical with, electro-magnetics and electro-kinetics. He knew now that he was progressing towards not merely an interesting mathematical discovery which might make a flutter in the Royal Society and which might just possibly affect practical electromagnetics to some slight degree, but that he was about to find something else, something much more important, a completely new development, a physical reaction of a kind hitherto unknown, whose nature he could now see clearly although only experimental tests could determine its amplitude. It might be something very small, measured by practical standards—Pethwick could picture ingenious lecturers devising neat little mechanisms for displaying what would be called the Klein–Pethwick Effect—or it might be great, very great indeed, so great as perhaps, to affect the history of the world.

  We all know now that it was great enough to do so, and indeed might have done so if Pethwick had been only a mathematician, and not a man married to a drunken wife, and in love with his headmaster’s daughter, and subject to all the other influences which these pages have endeavoured to describe.

  Chapter Three

  Mr. Holliday was one of those bluff and burly young men who stand no nonsense from boys. As the assistant physics master at the Liverpool School he was just as efficient as at the nets where the boys liked him even when they did not know that he had only just missed his Blue as a fast bowler for Cambridge. He never had any qualms about the discipline. He could face and tackle any crisis. On that historic occasion a year ago when some naughty boys hid a parcel of fish in a locker in the laboratory on the day before the half-term holiday, so that when the school reopened four days later the place stank like a whaling station in the hot weather, it was Mr. Holliday who guessed the cause, and who broke open the lockers until the source of the stench was located, and who discovered the miscreants, and who (in accordance with Mr. Laxton’s new methods of punishment) caned them most satisfactorily—Dr. Pethwick, his senior, had never caned a boy in his life.

  Consequently, when Mr. Holliday observed that IVA was not progressing rapidly with the experiment he had set them to do, after explaining it to them, he plunged boldly into the trouble, selecting, as was his wont, one outstanding individual for censure and, if necessary, punishment

  ‘What are you looking for, Williams?’ he asked, pleasantly. ‘Trouble?’

  Williams was a boy of much the same type as Holliday himself (although Mr. Holliday did not see the resemblance), rather stocky, rather stupid, rather simple.

  ‘No, sir,’ said Williams. ‘I’m just asking Merivale if he’s getting on all right.’

  ‘How nice of you to be so anxious about Merivale,’ said Holliday. ‘But I strongly advise you to go back to your place and get on with your experiment.’

  ‘I can’t, sir, please, sir,’ said Williams.

  ‘Oh,’ said Holliday. ‘So your anxiety about Merivale was not entirely disinterested?’

  Mr. Holliday had lately begun to realise the value of sarcasm as a help in the maintenance of discipline and was unconsciously imperilling his popularity thereby. Williams merely stood still and resented Mr. Holliday’s remarks in silence.

  ‘I suppose,’ continued Holliday, ‘that you did not pay attention when I
was explaining to you Gauss’s method for Determining the Moment of a Magnet. But the diagrams are still on the blackboard. With the help of those you ought to be able to make some progress. I hope you can, Williams, for your sake and especially for the sake of what you sit on.’

  That was the sort of remark which ought to have drawn a snigger from the rest of the class; Mr. Holliday was quite surprised when it did not come. He looked round at the faces turned towards him from the laboratory benches, and in them he read at last that he was not dealing with naughtiness or indiscipline. He came down from his dais and approached the benches.

  ‘Is anybody else in difficulty?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, sir. Yes, sir,’ came from different parts of the laboratory.

  ‘Well, what’s your trouble, then, Maskell?’ he went on. Maskell was the clever boy of the form.

  ‘It’s this compass needle, sir,’ said Maskell. ‘It doesn’t seem to work.’

  Holliday bent over it. He twisted the little glass box round, and the needle spun round idly. When it came to rest it was certainly not pointing north. He tapped the case. The needle spun again, and came to rest in a different position. Clearly there was not a trace of magnetism left in it. He approached it to the bar magnet lying on the sheet of paper on which Maskell was conducting his experiment. There was not the least quiver in the needle at all.

  ‘That’s queer,’ said Holliday to himself.

  ‘The magnet seems all wrong, too, sir,’ said Maskell.