The Peacemaker

Holliday slipped the magnet into the paper stirrup which hung from the thread, and allowed it to swing free. As soon as the rotation due to the extension of the thread was finished, the magnet swung idly, without a trace of the dignified north-seeking beat which delighted Holliday’s heart even now, after observing it a hundred thousand times.

  ‘H’m,’ said Holliday.

  He grabbed another bar magnet from the bench, and brought its north pole towards first the north and then the south pole of the suspended magnet. Nothing happened. He brought the two magnets into contact—so still was the room that the little metallic chink they made was heard everywhere. But neither bar magnet was disturbed. They were quite indifferent. It might have been two pieces of brass he was bringing into contact, for all the attraction that was displayed.

  Holliday looked up from the bench; from beneath his fair eyebrows he swept his glance round the form. In the expression on the boys’ faces he read interest, indifference, or amusement, according to their varying temperaments, but no sign of guilt.

  ‘Are all your magnets and compass needles like this?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said the form.

  Holliday went across to the cupboard and took out the tray of bar magnets. The ones remaining there were in the same state—the keepers joining north and south poles betrayed no trace of adhesion. He called for the laboratory assistant.

  ‘Owens! Owens!’

  Owens appeared from his den.

  ‘Did you notice anything funny about these magnets and compass needles when you put them out?’ demanded Holliday.

  ‘Well, sir, I thought they—’

  Holliday heard half of what he had to say and then sent him off. Clearly Owens had no hand in the business, and whatever had been done to the magnets had been done before the lesson began. He stood for a moment in thought. But now that IVA had got over the initial interest and surprise they seemed likely to take advantage of the unusual state of affairs. They were already beginning to fidget and wriggle and giggle and play—four of the gravest crimes in Mr. Holliday’s calendar. Mr. Holliday took a Napoleonic decision, characteristically. He swept away the whole question of Determining the Moment of a Magnet. He called to Owens for blocks of glass, and pins; he mounted his dais, and wiped the blackboard clean of Gauss’s method. Within two minutes the subject of the lesson was changed to the Determination of the Index of Refraction of Glass, whereby there was no risk of further trouble due to the mischievous activities of naughty boys with the electro-magnetic apparatus. And, true to the disciplinary standard which Mr. Holliday had set himself the boys reaped nothing of what they would term benefit, from someone unknown’s misdemeanour. Although half an hour had been wasted, in the remaining hour the class had completed the experiment, thanks to Mr. Holliday’s shrewd driving of them. No gap had been made in the sacred syllabus—the Determination of the Moment of a Magnet could safely be left now until the old magnets had been remagnetised or new ones obtained.

  When the class was finished Mr. Holliday considered it his duty to go in and report to his senior, Dr. Pethwick, upon the latest misbehaviour of the boys. But Dr. Pethwick did not receive the news in a sensible fashion—indeed, Holliday had no hope that he would. He was in the little advanced physics laboratory, which had gradually become his own owing to the dearth of boys needing instruction in advanced physics. Later on Mr. Holliday made many and desperate efforts to recall just what apparatus there was upon the bench engaging his attention when Holliday walked in, but he never succeeded. The big electrometer was there, Holliday noticed, and there was a lead from the power plug in the wall to some simple make-and-break which was buzzing cheerfully away surrounded by various other instruments. But of those other instruments Mr. Holliday, later on, could only recall a vague picture of a big red magnet and something which might have been a glowing radio valve or even a vacuum tube, so casual had been Mr. Holliday’s glance as a result of the indignation which burned within him.

  ‘There’s been trouble again in the junior lab.,’ said Mr. Holliday.

  Dr. Pethwick merely turned his lean white face towards him and did not hear him.

  ‘Some of those young devils have demagnetised every blessed magnet in the magnet drawer,’ expanded Mr. Holliday.

  That news certainly seemed to have some effect upon Dr. Pethwick. He switched off the current so that the buzz of the make-and-break stopped abruptly, and came round the bench to Holliday. His hands flapped. Mr. Holliday, recounting the interview much later, described him as looking like a new-caught fish flapping on the bank.

  ‘Every blessed one,’ said Holliday, referring still to the magnets. ‘And the compass needles as well. I bet it’s Horne and Hawkins, and that crowd.’

  ‘D-do you think so?’ quavered Dr. Pethwick.

  ‘It’s two months since the last of their silly practical jokes,’ fumed Holliday. ‘They were just about due for another. But they’ve bitten off more than they can chew this time. I wouldn’t have a bottom like the one young Horne is going to have to-morrow for something.’

  Dr. Pethwick’s eyebrows rose. Holliday attributed the gesture to his own outspokenness regarding young Horne’s bottom—no one ever mentioned bottoms to Dr. Pethwick—but he stood his ground stoutly.

  ‘He’s jolly well earned it,’ he said, ‘and he’s going to get what’s coming to him.’

  Dr. Pethwick seemed more embarrassed than ever.

  ‘I—I shouldn’t do anything about it yet—’ he began. ‘Perhaps—’

  ‘But I must,’ protested Holliday. ‘These things have to be jumped on at once. Hard.’

  Then Mr. Holliday attributed Dr. Pethwick’s hesitancy to fear of what Mr. Laxton would say regarding yet another disciplinary row on the Science side.

  ‘Oh, don’t you worry,’ he went on, hotly. ‘We won’t have any song and dance about it. I’ll have young Horne and Hawkins up in my classroom this evening and get the truth out of ’em. I’ll give ‘em six each and that will be the end of that.’

  ‘But—’ said Dr. Pethwick. ‘But—’

  These un-Napoleonic ‘buts,’ this dilatoriness, set a seal on Holliday’s wrath. He issued a proclamation of independent action.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘it happened in my class, and it’s my business to deal with it. And I’m going to.’

  And with that he flung out of the advanced physics laboratory, leaving Dr. Pethwick bending over his experimental bench with a worried look on his face Dr. Pethwick straightened his back, and eyed his apparatus again. He opened the door leading through to the senior laboratory, and looked at the cupboard which held the drawer of bar magnets. He noted its position. Standing in the doorway he looked back and forward, noting the relative positions of his emitter, the magnet he was experimenting with, and the magnet cupboard. There could be no doubt now that the Klein-Pethwick Diamagnetic Effect was very marked and powerful. It set him wondering whether anywhere further along that straight line—beyond the walls of the school, perhaps, perhaps ten miles away—any more magnets had lost their magnetism. Then with a rush and a clatter Remove B came pouring into the senior laboratory, and Dr. Pethwick had to turn aside and disconnect his apparatus in the advanced laboratory. The five minutes which he expended on that were a golden time for Remove B. Without supervision for that period they played Old Harry throughout the senior laboratory, with the result that by the time Dr. Pethwick was ready to give them their lesson they were well out of hand, and that, combined with a certain abstractedness on the part of Dr. Pethwick, led to the lesson developing into a most delightful exhibition of rowdyism.

  And meanwhile Mr. Holliday was encountering both ridicule and opposition, which, such was his temperament, only served to confirm him in his opinion. Up in the common-room the staff went to no pains to conceal their amusement at hearing that he had a lesson spoilt by the machinations of Horne, Hawkins, and their followers.

  ‘I never knew a science class yet where discipline was maintained.’ said Stowe, who taught Classics.
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  Holliday could only glower at him; the statement was too idiotic even to contradict.

  ‘Yes,’ added Malpas, the Modern Languages master, ‘don’t you remember the great fish joke? That was a rare one.’

  ‘They got all that was due to them, all the same,’ said Holliday, taking the offensive against his better judgment.

  ‘Really?’ said Malpas, lunging neatly for the opening. ‘It doesn’t seem to have done much good, all the same, judging by this new development.’

  ‘If I were better supported—’ glowered Holliday, and Malpas and Stowe tittered gently.

  ‘Discipline is a one-man job,’ said Malpas solemnly, quoting words used by the Head on a previous occasion. Holliday was a simply ideal man to rag.

  ‘But look here, Holliday,’ said Dutton, who taught Chemistry. ‘D’you mean to say they quite demagnetised about thirty bar magnets and compass needles as well?’

  ‘I do,’ snarled Holliday.

  ‘Of course,’ said Dutton, ‘I’m only a chemist, and I’m not very up to date, and I came down from Cambridge a good long time before some of you younger men, but I always understood it was jolly difficult to demagnetise iron completely. There ought to have been enough left for IVB to get some sort of result, surely.’

  Dutton was only partly attempting to annoy Holliday; he was really interested in the point he had raised.

  ‘I wouldn’t put anything past Horne and Hawkins,’ interposed Malpas, who knew nothing about the subject at all.

  ‘But what about the compass needles?’ said Dutton. ‘If you take a bar magnet and chuck it about a lot I suppose you can weaken it nearly to zero, but it would puzzle me to demagnetise a compass needle in a brass case without damaging the case.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t know our young scientists,’ said Malpas, airily. ‘They better their instruction. Young Hawkins is an inventive genius, you know, and he’s blossomed out under Holliday’s parental care. Don’t you remember the Aeolian harp? I bet you do, Summers.’

  Summers was the geography master. In their last great rag before the celebrated rotten-fish joke Horne and Hawkins had profited by Holliday’s instruction in Elementary Sound to construct an Aeolian harp and had hung it out of the window just before Summers came in to teach them; during the subsequent hour the wild fitful music called forth by the wind had pervaded the room in a weird and ghostly fashion, driving Summers nearly to distraction. He had turned out every boy’s desk and pockets seeking for the source of the noise; he had even (led on by the tactful suggestions of the form humorists) sent a message to the music room before he had succeeded in solving the mystery.

  Everyone laughed at the recollection, and Summers had to defend himself.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, heatedly, ‘I had them nailed down within the hour, and they’ve never forgotten it, either. They haven’t tried any practical jokes on me twice.’

  That is the way the history of the world is built up. Malpas’s reference to a schoolboy’s Aeolian harp, and Summers’ hot rejoinder on the subject sufficed both to distract Holliday’s attention from Dutton’s very relevant suggestion and to raise his temper to such a pitch that he forgot all about it until it was too late. Otherwise Holliday might easily have followed up the idea, and guessed at Dr. Pethwick’s responsibility in the matter, and the history of the world might have been different.

  As it was, Holliday remained filled with righteous indignation all the afternoon, and, having sent for Horne and Hawkins after afternoon school, abruptly charged them with a crime entirely absent from their calendar, extensive though that was. Even the ready wits of these two young gentlemen failed them when they found themselves confronted with an accusation of demagnetising. They had come prepared to refute charges of brewing sulphuretted hydrogen in the classroom inkwells and of tying up the school bell-rope the week before so that the porter had had to find a ladder before ringing the bell (so that the school happily missed five minutes of lessons) and of these two crimes they were only guilty of one. But this demagnetising business beat them. They stuttered and stammered, and their innocence compared badly with the virtuous indignation they would have assumed to perfection if they had been guilty. Holliday, firmly convinced from the start of their guilt, was raised to a pitch of positive certainty by their blundering denials. He fell upon them in the end and beat them with all the shrewd application of strength and perfection of timing to be expected of a man who had only just missed his cricket Blue. It did him a world of good, and it is to be hoped that it did Horne and Hawkins a world of good, too.

  The trouble was that when he boasted of the deed to Dr. Pethwick the latter was intensely embarrassed about it. No man as shy as he was could face all the commotion and explanations and fuss and bother consequent upon owning up to an act for which two schoolboys had been caned. Dr. Pethwick shrank with horror from the thought of the common-room remarks, and Mr. Laxton’s clumsy comments, and the apologies which would have to be tendered to Horne and Hawkins. And, as a man of retiring disposition will do, he readily found reasons and excuses for not assuming the responsibility. He wanted to investigate the Klein–Pethwick Effect a little more closely before publishing his results.

  He did not want publicity. The modest columns of the Philosophical Transactions were good enough for him. He knew that the Fellowship of the Royal Society was a certainty now. He knew that Einstein and Eddington would be pleased and congratulatory because the mere demonstration of the existence of the Klein–Pethwick Effect was a substantial confirmation of the Theory of Relativity, and additional mathematical investigation might be enormously important. He decided that as the summer holidays were not far off he would keep his secret until then. And thereby he brought catastrophe a little nearer.

  Chapter Four

  Dr. Edward Pethwick was in the seventh heaven of delight. He had encountered Miss Dorothy Laxton as he was walking home from school, and she was not merely walking in a direction which would take her past his house, but she had actually decided to walk along with him, and she was talking to him with all the intelligence and sincerity with which he credited her.

  It was two years now since she had come down from Somerville, and yet she had not lost the desperate earnestness of young Oxford. Disarmament was the subject she chose to discuss with Dr. Pethwick—at least, she would have called it a discussion, but, as anyone might have expected who knew them both, it was not so much a discussion as an expression of Miss Laxton’s own views and opinions while Dr. Pethwick supplied the conjunctions.

  ‘The crucial point,’ said Dorothy, ‘is that the great majority of people really don’t want armaments.’

  ‘No?’ said Dr. Pethwick.

  ‘Supposing,’ said Dorothy, ‘supposing you could take a free referendum throughout Europe—throughout the world if you like. Supposing the issue was—on the one side, to go on as we are, and on the other side, no armies, no navies, no anything like that at all. Which do you think would win?’

  ‘Which do you think?’ asked Dr. Pethwick.

  ‘Oh, the peace party,’ said Dorothy. ‘Oh, I’m sure of it. After all, who wants these things? People with shares in armament firms, I suppose. And people who want to get their nephews into good jobs. Yes, and the idiots who think fighting’s good for people. That’s all.’

  ‘M’m,’ said Dr. Pethwick.

  ‘Doesn’t it make you furious to think about it all?’ asked Dorothy. ‘The whole wicked business has started again, just as it did before the last war—you know, the war to end war. There’s competition in armaments again, and everyone knows where that leads to. If there’s an army there must be a staff. And if there’s a staff it must make plans to fight someone—that’s its job. And every staff must try to find out what the other staff’s plans are. And those plans are going to leak out sooner or later. Then there’s bad blood, and more plans, and more competition, and people get used to the idea of another war coming so that when it begins there’s no real attempt made to stop it.’

  ??
?M’m.’

  ‘It’s the mere fact of the existence of armaments which makes war possible, in other words.’

  ‘M’m.’

  ‘And that general who came down to inspect the Corps last week was talking to Father at dinner about “our enemies at Geneva!” I wanted to butt in, but—after all he was our guest, and you know what Father is like.’

  Again their eyes met, and there was a little significant silence between them. Pethwick had no difficulty in realising that Mr. Laxton held the strongest views in opposition to his daughter’s. And although they did not unite in condemning him openly, there was a feeling of union somewhere. They felt closer together after that, as though they were sharing a secret. Pethwick boiled with secret happiness, and even Dorothy felt an inward comfort.

  ‘And think what they could do if there weren’t wars, and armies, and navies and so on. Do you know, that with the money spent in England on armaments, and on paying for the last war, we could send every single man and woman to a University until they were twenty-one, feed them and clothe them and educate them. Really educate them. Think what that would mean to the world!’

  Dr. Pethwick could only lift an eyebrow at this statement. He could not even say ‘M’m.’

  ‘Of course,’ added Dorothy hurriedly, ‘you’d never persuade people to submit to the amount of taxation they pay now for armaments to pay for education. They’d never do it. But you could do a lot, all the same—clear the slums, and start productive works, and give everyone with talent a chance of better education, anyway. Couldn’t you?’

  Dorothy’s hot brown eyes caught Pethwick’s mild grey ones, and held them.

  ‘Couldn’t you?’ persisted Dorothy.

  ‘Yes,’ said Pethwick.

  Dr. Pethwick would have gone on from there to say how a short time ago he had been interrupted by an important calculation by all the tomfoolery of a review of the Officers’ Training Corps under his windows, and he could have drawn a neat parable from the story, if only Dorothy had allowed him to get a word in edgeways.