‘And that’s only one side of the question,’ said Dorothy. ‘That’s without discussing what another war would be like. There are new weapons, and new poisons, and all the other horrors we can hardly bear to think of. Why, do you know, people’s minds are so wrapped up in the subject that even now if there’s a new invention the first thought of everyone is how it could be applied in war?’
Dr. Pethwick gave a guilty start at that. He realised that despite his own vaguely pacific views he had devoted a good deal of thought—quite unconsciously, if the expression can be allowed—as to what difference the Klein–Pethwick Effect would make in a modern battle. He was startled.
‘As a matter of fact—’ he began, slowly. But Dr. Pethwick was not destined to finish that speech for some time to come.
They had reached the corner of Launceton Avenue; they were at the front gate of No. 41, where Dr. Pethwick lived. There was someone sitting on the doorstep, leaning back against the angle of the door and the wall. Dorothy, at Pethwick’s side, drew a sharp, hissing breath. It was Mary Pethwick. Her hat hung precariously on the back of her head, and her clothes were daubed with mud. But it was not the condition of her dress which first caught the eye. It was her face. There was mud and there was blood on her face, and it was swollen and puffy and bruised where the flesh could be seen through the mask of blood and mud. The first impression was one of terrible damage after a severe accident.
‘Oh,’ said Dorothy. She ran up the path and bent over Mary, Pethwick hurrying after her.
‘’Sall right,’ said Mary, lifting the hideous face, and leering at Dorothy through her swollen eyelids. ‘Norring marrer me. Lirrelassdent. ’S all.’
The providence that looks after drunken people had guided Mary’s reeling steps to 41, Launceton Avenue quite correctly. Probably policemen had eyed her sharply as she had staggered along the pavements, but had forborne to arrest a respectably dressed woman. But once inside the gate her mazy determination had deserted her—Pethwick knew how it did. She had fallen down on the path. She had fallen at the doorstep. She had bumped her face on the door-handle, and on the step. Pethwick could see the key lying there, and drops of blood, and the smear on the knob—a scientist’s powers of observation are trained like a detective’s. Dazed and silly, she had turned away from the door and fallen again in the muddy flower-bed below the front window. After that, with one last effort of the clouded mind, she had pulled herself into the sitting position on the doorstep in which they had found her. And she was still quite ready to deny that there was anything the matter with her.
‘Oh, you poor thing!’ said Dorothy, bending over her.
‘’S all right, I tell you. ’M all righ’. Assdent.’
Dorothy looked round at Pethwick. His face was grey.
‘I’ll take her in,’ he said quietly. ‘You’ll be late for your meeting.’
He reached past her, without meeting her eyes, to open the door.
‘Don’t you want a doctor?’ asked Dorothy. She still thought that Mary had at least been run over, and she had never seen a drunken woman before.
‘No,’ said Pethwick slowly. ‘I don’t think a doctor is necessary. I’ll look after her.’
He stooped to lift Mary’s swollen body from the doorstep, and while he was doing so a sudden rush of realisation came to Dorothy. She remembered all she had heard whispered about Mary Pethwick in scholastic tea-parties. ‘You know, my dear,’ a school-master’s wife would whisper to a school-master’s cousin, ‘she drinks!’ Dorothy remembered that at times Mrs. Pethwick had acted queerly when she met her—her speech had been uncertain and ill-connected, and her gait hesitating. Up to that moment Dorothy had, very wisely, discounted the evidence of gossip, and she had distrusted the evidence of her own ears and eyes. But here was the thing proved to her.
Pethwick had put his long thin arms round his wife’s body, and was half carrying her, half dragging her into the hall, his long frail body bending under the strain. Dorothy took her round the knees and lifted her weight off the floor—Dorothy’s compact, well-trained physique was far better adapted to carrying weights than Pethwick’s gangling figure. Between them they got her up the stairs and laid her on the bed in the littered bedroom. Examining the bruised face with a more dispassionate eye, Dorothy could see now that the damage was superficial.
‘Bring me some warm water,’ she said, ‘and a flannel, and a basin. I’ll look after her.’
By the time Pethwick came up again Dorothy had been busy. She had taken off the muddy dress and shoes, and tucked Mary up in bed. Resolutely she had kept herself from shuddering at what she noticed—Mary’s horrid underclothes, and the dingy sheets, and Pethwick’s ragged pyjamas which she had tucked away under his pillow.
She took the basin from Pethwick’s trembling hands, felt the temperature of the water, soaked the flannel, and began to sponge away the dirt and blood from Mary’s face.
‘’Oo d’you fink you are?’ asked Mary suddenly. ‘Chuck it. You’re ’urting.’
When Mary was sober she generally managed to gloss over to a small extent the rasping Cockney dialect of her childhood, but when she was drunk it was more apparent than ever.
‘I’m afraid it’s got to be done,’ said Dorothy, gently.
With one hand she held Mary’s feeble two; Mary’s head rested in the crook of her arm, and with her other hand she went on sponging.
There had been occasions before when she had dressed the hurts of her six-year younger brother.
‘Assdent,’ said Mary.
The mud and the blood were wiped away. Beneath them Dorothy found three small cuts and a big bruise—a black eye.
‘It’s all right, I think,’ said Dorothy, trying to examine these coolly.
‘’Sall right. Lemmi ’lone.’
The torpor of drink was fast engulfing Mary. The bruised head turned on Dorothy’s arm, and drooped towards the pillow.
‘Give me the towel,’ ordered Dorothy, ‘and you can take those things away.’
Pethwick, waiting down in the little hall, heard Dorothy’s step above as she gave a few last touches to the bedroom. He heard Mary’s cracked voice sing a couple of bars of a song, tuneless and mirthless, before it trailed away into silence. Then the door shut and Dorothy came down the stairs.
The doors were all open in the hall. Dorothy could see the disordered sitting-room and kitchen, all the filth and evidence of neglect. There ran through her mind a memory of what her father had said—‘a very brilliant young mathematician.’ And he stood there at the foot of the stairs, and the working of his face revealed the torment within him. He was clasping and unclasping his hands, and even in that light and at that moment Dorothy noticed their slender beauty. She was sick with unhappiness at the fate which had overtaken him, and it was revealed to her what horrors he had been through uncomplainingly. And she had always liked him, and now she more than liked him. She put out her hands towards his beautiful ones.
‘Oh,’ she said, as weakness overtook her. She swayed for a moment holding his hands before she came forward on to his breast.
Dorothy had been kissed at parties by subalterns and graduates, and there had once been a mad interval with a young surgeon, but there had never been anything like this. She felt she wanted to give and give. She would tear herself to shreds if only that would alleviate some of his unhappiness.
Pethwick kissed her forehead and her cheek. He did not feel himself worthy of her lips. It did not even occur to him to venture on such a sacrilege, not even though the pressure of her bosom against him sent the blood faster through his veins. He held her hands. He stooped, and with infinite tenderness and reverence he kissed their cool palms. He was awestruck and humble, like a knight in the presence of the Grail. One of the Lordly Ones had taken notice of his existence, had tacitly given him leave to worship at her feet where formerly he had only worshipped from afar. She smiled as he bent before her, and touched his thin fair hair, and his ears, and the nape of his neck, so that pa
ssion surged in him, and he dared all, and kissed her lips as she smiled, and entered into Paradise.
Presently sanity came back to them in some degree.
‘What about your meeting?’ he whispered.
‘I’m too late for that—anyway,’ she whispered back, and she kissed him again, and for a time sanity disappeared once more, as it will sometimes even in the case of Honours Graduates in History and Doctors of Science.
It could not last long, for all that. Pethwick was neither a bold enough lover nor sufficiently experienced. Soon they became aware that they were kissing in a squalid little house; that beside them was a kitchen stacked with dirty dishes, and beside that a sitting-room thick with dust and litter, and that overhead there lay a drunken woman whose snores were penetrating the bedroom door, and drifting down the stairs to them, so that they fell apart a little self-consciously.
Pethwick’s fingers twittered. He wanted to shut that kitchen door and shut out all sight of that muddle, but he could not do it unobtrusively. Dorothy saw the gesture.
‘Were you going to clear up?’ she asked.
Pethwick nodded, shamefaced. He did not mind how much he did for his wife, but he came from a stratum of society wherein there is something to be ashamed of in the admission that a man may do housework.
‘I’ll help you,’ said Dorothy.
That was how they got over their self-consciousness. Amid the boiling of kettles, and clattering of dishes, while Dorothy, bare-armed, worked with scourer and mop, and Pethwick wiped and put away, there was no room for false modesty. They were friends again as well as lovers by the time washing up was finished, and they were both happily conscious of it, too.
When it was all finished Dorothy looked at her wrist-watch as she replaced it.
‘I really ought to be going,’ she said.
Pethwick nodded. His experience of life so far had not given him any illusions that Paradise might continue for ever. Dorothy might have added, ‘I don’t want to,’ to her statement that she must be going, but she did not. She could only look like it, and Pethwick with bowed head missed the expression on her face. When he looked up again she was pulling on her gloves.
A scientist may be an unsatisfactory lover. His training may lead him to deduce from a gesture of that sort the intention of immediate departure. He led the way back through the hall to the front door. The manners he had had to acquire caused him to open the door, which was a pity, because that meant their farewell could be seen from the street and must therefore be restrained. Yet Dorothy put both her hands in his to say goodbye. The fading evening light lit up his mild, kindly face.
‘Good-bye,’ said Dorothy, and then, after a second’s pause, ‘You dear.’
With that she was gone, hurrying out to the gate, and along the pavement, lest he should see the tears which had come to her eyes at the thought of the sorrow he had borne and still would bear, uncomplainingly.
Pethwick stood long at the door staring after her, long after she was out of sight, and he turned away at length back into an everyday world which was somehow all misty with happiness. And while the human, ordinary part of him was musing shyly over this amazing occurrence, the incorrigible mathematical part had picked up the thread of those Klein–Pethwick calculations once more, and was evolving more and more surprising results. Presumably that was how in Pethwick’s mind his love for Dorothy and his researches into electro-magnetics became so intertwined, that he could never think about the one without the other; and that, quite probably, is the germ of the subsequent development whereby in Pethwick’s mind the employment of the Klein–Pethwick Effect to solve problems of disarmament was so seriously considered. The stage of the world was being set for the tragedy.
Chapter Five
It was in this fashion that Dorothy Laxton and Edward Pethwick became lovers. They never were, in all their short period of happiness, ‘lovers.’ They loved each other without sleeping together—not because Dorothy had any conscientious scruples about sleeping with a man to whom she was not married. But to have done so meant either scandal or intrigue, and they both of them turned with loathing from those without giving the matter a second thought. Seeing that it was only for a few weeks that their happiness endured they never came to know the strain that such happiness brings with it.
They could chatter together unendingly. Pethwick was the kind of man who has to learn what passion is—the passion that takes a man by the throat and rouses the instincts of the Neanderthal man even in the bosom of a professor of mathematics. He learnt that too late; his love affair did not last long enough. He was too unsure of himself, his love for Dorothy was to selfless, quite apart from the fact that circumstances were too strongly against them. It took a long period of chatter about disarmament or housing reform to rouse him to the pitch of wanting to kiss Dorothy—or rather of realising that he wanted to—and when he did want to he rarely could. A headmaster’s daughter and an assistant schoolmaster are surrounded by spies, voluntary and involuntary. There are hundreds, thousands, of people who know them by sight and are willing to talk about them; and Pethwick and Dorothy were loftily above setting themselves to deceive the world. Rather than that they submitted to having nothing to deceive the world about.
Besides, the talk in which they indulged was exciting, pleasurable in itself. While they were coming to know each other Dorothy could pour out to Pethwick all the ideas which had fermented in her mind during the two years she had been housekeeping for her father. Two years of housekeeping (Dorothy had agreed about that when she came down from Somerville) should be part of every woman’s training, even when she is an Honours Graduate in History, but they can be deadly dull. They can be made duller still by the additional duties attendant upon doing the honours of a secondary school headmaster’s household, especially when one’s mind is choc-a-bloc with ideas about how the world should be reformed—ideas which are consistently scouted by one’s father and one’s young brother, and are simply horrifying (‘My dear, that sounds like socialism’) to the wives of the Staff. All the Staff had wives who thought (presumably Laxton chose Staff who would marry that sort of wife) that poor people preferred drawing unemployment pay to doing work, and preferred slums to good houses, and did not mind their babies dying, and ought to contribute to the cost of a war fought when they were children; and who thought there was something underhand about co-operation, and something undignified about the League of Nations, and something impossible about disarmament, and who were so generally uncreative that Dorothy’s blood boiled whenever she had anything to do with them.
Pethwick was different. He was a man who did things—even though the things he did were quite unintelligible to her. He had the open mind of the scientist, and he had a first-hand knowledge of working-class life which Dorothy was glad to draw upon for information. Pethwick had no prejudices. Pethwick’s mind was not hide-bound. If his pacifism had been merely quiescent and not rabid up to this time it was because his interests had been concentrated on other creative ideas. As it was, her notions fell on fertile soil. He caught her enthusiasms rapidly, and they would agree with each other until they were quite intoxicated with each other’s good sense and the world seemed a brighter happier place even though they had not yet remoulded it save in conversation.
It was quite early in their new friendship that Dorothy heard about the Klein–Pethwick Effect. Oddly enough—it is thus that the history of the world is built up—it was a discussion regarding corporal punishment which brought the matter into conversation. Dorothy adduced as part of her argument Mr. Holliday’s boastings (recounted by Mrs. Holliday) about how he had brought Horne and Hawkins to reason. She checked herself when she saw the queer guilty look on Pethwick’s face. For a moment she was tormented with the idea that she had hurt his feelings by this thoughtless allusion to the lack of discipline on the Science Side. But it was not that at all.
‘You know,’ began Pethwick, doubtfully, ‘it was my fault that those two boys were beaten.’
Somehow Dorothy’s views on corporal punishment altered a little at that. If it were Pethwick’s doing, then something might be said in favour of corporal punishment—that was how she felt, even if it were not how she thought.
‘Do you mean you wanted Mr. Holliday to—?’ she asked.
‘No!’ said Dr. Pethwick hotly. ‘No. They didn’t deserve it. I didn’t want him to cane them. I—I ought to have stopped him.’
‘Why?’ asked Dorothy, softly.
‘It—it was I who did the thing Holliday was no annoyed about, not Horne and Hawkins.’
‘You?’ said Dorothy amazed.
‘Yes,’ said Pethwick, and he began to make her the first announcement of his discovery, rather shyly, and with a difficulty regarding his words. He was actuated by the same motives as caused an Elizabethan adventurer to pour the riches of the Spanish Main at his lady’s feet, or a Dyak head-hunter to present to his betrothed the fruits of his latest expedition.
‘You see,’ said Pethwick, ‘I was carrying out a series of experiments in the advanced lab. I wanted to confirm some calculations of mine, based on some suggestions Klein put forward last year. You see, I’ve made a discovery.’
‘Oh, good,’ said Dorothy.
‘It’s rather interesting,’ went on Pethwick, ‘because—’
‘Because—?’
Pethwick found himself confronted with the necessity of explaining the most recent development of the modern physics to an Honours Graduate in History, to whom the name of Relativity meant no more than that name, and whose knowledge of electricity was limited to the ability to change a blown fuse-wire. He evaded the difficulty as far as he could.
‘Theoretically it’s very important,’ he said, ‘at least I think so. We’ll soon know what the people who really matter think about it. It’s one side—one facet, you might say—of confirmation of the Theory of Relativity. There are various deductions which may be made from it, I think. It throws rather an interesting light on various hypotheses. But practically it boils down to a contra-magnetic effect—that is the only word I can think of—exerted over a field extending to a considerable distance from the emitter—I don’t know even now quite how far.’