‘Yes?’ said Dorothy. For a moment she pretended to understand, until her good sense got the better of her. Then she went on—‘I don’t know what you mean. Don’t forget I never studied physics. Could you say it again differently?’
‘Well, it’s this way. By using quite a simple sort of emitter I can create a curious contra-magnetic effect for some distance.’
‘Oh, a sort of ray?’
Dorothy found that rather thrilling. She had read of death rays in the thrillers she sometimes condescended to read.
‘No, not a ray,’ said Pethwick with asperity. Then he softened. ‘Well, I suppose the lay public would call it a ray. That’s what the newspapers would say. But all I can say is it’s an Effect—the wave hypothesis is in a state of flux just now, you know.’
‘But what is this Effect? What does it do?’
‘Oh, I told you. It’s contra-magnetic—very strongly so indeed.’
‘But—but— I’m sorry to be so ignorant, but what is a contra-magnetic effect, please?’
‘In this case it means that any magnets in that field lose their magnetism. Permanently, in the case of permanent magnets. Magnetism cannot exist in that field. I fancy—’
Pethwick had to check himself. It was impossible to go on with the simplest of his hypothetical explanations of the phenomenon to someone ignorant of scientific terminology. And it was obvious that Dorothy had not realised the practical implications of what he had just said. He pulled himself together. He tried to make himself imagine that he was not addressing a Lordly One, but some inky third-form boy.
‘There might be some important consequences, you know,’ he said. ‘For instance— You drive a motor-car, don’t you? In that motor-car is a magnet.’
‘Is there?’
Dorothy was one of those people who drive brilliantly and can execute all running repairs and still not realise that a motor-car is driven by the repeated explosion of mixtures of combustible gas and air ignited by an electric spark.
‘Oh, of course there is. The dynamo—the magneto, in other words—is just a permanent magnet with a coil of wire rotating in its field. The self-starter is a coil of wire and an electromagnet. Well, if while you are driving your car you came into this contra-magnetic effect—’
‘The magnet would go on strike and I should stop.’
‘Quite. And you wouldn’t be able to go on again until you had bought yourself a new magneto and put it in in place of the old one.’
‘Oh,’ said Dorothy. ‘Now I see.’
She was very much impressed.
‘The permanent magnet and the electro-magnet,’ went on Pethwick, trying to talk with the eloquence of those popular handbooks on science which he detested, ‘occupy a very important position in our economy. There’s hardly a piece of apparatus in which they don’t play a part. Trams, buses, motorcars, trains, telephones, aeroplanes, generating stations, transformers, railway signals, not one could function without the aid of magnetism. We owe all our modern civilisation to Faraday, in other words.’
‘And now you know,’ said Dorothy, ‘how to put the clock back to before Faraday’s time.’
‘Yes,’ said Pethwick simply, and they were both of them silent for a while. Then Pethwick began again, uneasily.
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘looked at in that light, the possibilities are all destructive, not constructive. But it isn’t so. And I didn’t intend it that way when I began the calculations. It helps electro-magnetic theory on enormously, I fancy. It—’
He was up again against the blank wall of Dorothy’s ignorance of physics. There was only this one aspect of the discovery which she could appreciate.
‘You remember once saying something to me about the application of new inventions in war?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘When you said that even I had been thinking about—this.’
They looked at each other.
‘You could stop aeroplanes?’ said Dorothy.
‘Well, yes, I think so. It wouldn’t be very easy, of course. About as difficult as catching an aeroplane in the beam of a searchlight. But it could be done with a fair amount of certainty.’
‘So that bombing raids could be stopped?’
‘Yes, I’d thought of that. And you could put submarines out of action under water. And tanks would be no use. And in favourable conditions you could hold up the motor transport of an army. And make ships’ compasses useless—unless by chance they were gyroscopic. You could make war impossible that way.’
Pethwick looked at Dorothy anxiously for approval. But there the student of science was up against the student of history. Just for a moment Dorothy agreed with him. Then she remembered some of what she had read in that connection.
‘No!’ she said passionately. ‘Don’t you believe that. There is no invention which can stop war in that way. Every time a new weapon has been discovered mealy-mouthed people have said that it would put an end to war. Macaulay makes the suggestion somewhere. Why, just after the last war people said that the new weapons would make war so horrible that there would never be another. But they’re talking about the next war now, aren’t they? Remember Bloch. He predicted what the last war would be like twenty years before it happened, but he went on to say that no country would be foolish enough to fight if it meant fighting that sort of war. But they did, all the same. No, dear, you can’t stop war just by altering the rules or the weapons.’
Dorothy was quite out of breath as a result of this long speech. She had to stop for a moment, while Pethwick blinked at her sadly. He had really thought that a pacifist application of his invention was possible, and he had been exalted at the thought of the pleasure it would give her. He could be logical enough with mathematical formulae, but his brain was not so ready in dealing with problems of human nature. But now that his ideas had been guided in the right direction he himself could follow up the deduction.
‘No,’ he agreed unhappily. ‘This wouldn’t stop war. I see now. If it ruled out tanks and aeroplanes we should get back to the old system of trench warfare without any of the solutions to the problem. Then we should be worse off than before, I suppose.’
Pethwick’s keen mind was groping among his limited general knowledge and his memories of what he had read casually about war.
‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘there are probably counter-measures which could be taken. I’ve explored some of the avenues without finding one, but of course I have hardly touched the subject. There almost for certain is some sort of screen which could guard against the Effect. If the engine were protected things would go on just as before. And of course there is no application to Diesel engines and steam engines and so on. They’d find a way out of the difficulty.’
‘They would,’ agreed Dorothy bitterly. ‘Every Weapon has found its antidote sooner or later. Look at the race between guns and armour.’
‘I ought to have thought of all this before,’ said Pethwick, and his disappointment was evident in his voice.
With that, remorse tore at Dorothy’s vitals. She had allowed herself to be run away with by her hobby. She was crabbing her lover’s invention just because it could not put an end to war.
‘Oh, my dear,’ she said. ‘Don’t be so unhappy about it. I should have had more sense. You’ve made a wonderful discovery, and here I am not saying how pleased I am about it. Because I am pleased. It’s the best news I’ve ever heard.’
She looked up at Pethwick striding along on his gangling legs beside her. There was a look in her eyes which gave Pethwick as much pleasure as the thought of Einstein’s congratulations.
Dorothy in the old days, before she had a lover, had told herself that in her relations between her and her man she would never display the blind self-abnegation of the woman of the previous generation—she would never knuckle under in the way her own mother, for instance, had knuckled under to her father. She was quite sure that any respect would be mutual. But in this case it was not so easy. She was utterly ignorant of sci
ence. She had to take so much on trust. The one thing she was sure of was that if Pethwick said that his discovery was important it was very important indeed—epoch-making, perhaps. She was most profoundly impressed, for she had all the exaggerated respect for scientific discovery which characterises the layman. And she was very glad, vaguely, that she had this feeling of Pethwick’s superiority over her.
‘Are you publishing your results?’ she asked.
‘Y—Yes,’ said Pethwick. ‘I ought to do so at once, of course. But I thought—’
His embarrassment was obvious. Dorothy found herself making tactful noises, and was slightly surprised thereat.
‘You see,’ plunged Pethwick. ‘After Holliday had caned Horne and Hawkins there’d be such a fuss if it all came out now that I was the one who had really done what they were beaten for. There’d be so many explanations. I thought I’d wait a little while, until the summer holidays began.’
Dorothy, to her eternal credit, grasped the implication without smiling. If her lover should choose to postpone the attainment of world-wide fame in order to avoid a few common-room explanations and formalities, she could not possibly interfere. A man who rated comfort so far above celebrity was unique in her cycle of acquaintances. And there was another aspect of the matter—
‘So am I the only person you’ve told?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ said Pethwick. ‘You’re the only one.’
Dorothy told herself she was a fool to feel so absurdly pleased about that, but the tone she used was not a very convincing one. Then a new fear gripped her.
‘But supposing someone else makes the same discovery?’ she said. ‘Supposing while you’re waiting—? Somebody else might get all the credit.’
‘I don’t think it matters,’ said Pethwick, ‘who it is that first discovers a thing, as long as somebody does. The personal element isn’t really important in science, is it? It’s only the progress that counts.’
Pethwick enunciated the simple selfless creed of the scientist without any arrière-pensée at all. He meant just what he said. Dorothy found herself gaping at this sublime simplicity. She decided that scientists had a good deal in common with the very early Christian Fathers. And more than that; she felt herself overflowing with tenderness towards him just on account of this very simplicity. For a moment she put a hand on his arm, despite the fact that they were in a public street in the presence of a thousand potential spies.
‘But I’d like you to get the credit,’ she said reproachfully. ‘You deserve it. You’re just the sort of man—’
Dorothy reined herself in; she felt, despite her intelligent lack of superstition, that she was speaking words of ill omen. The remainder of her sentence, if she had finished it, would have been—‘who does the work and never gets the credit for it.’ She realised at that instant that her words were truer than she had thought. She vowed to herself then and there that if ever there was a controversy as to who was entitled to fame on this account she would fight tooth and nail for Pethwick.
Even Pethwick could not help noticing the anxiety in her face.
‘I don’t think anyone else is likely to make the discovery,’ he said. ‘It’s some time since Klein published his calculations, and he died last year. And Norbury, who’s been working on those lines since then, doesn’t seem to have made any progress. You see, you couldn’t call it a simple piece of mathematics. It—it’s very involved, in fact. Klein himself, who had a very great mathematical brain indeed, didn’t see where he was aiming at. In fact he was aiming at something quite different at the time of his death. He’d missed one of the implications of his formulae. I don’t think he would have realised for a long time the possibility of this development, if he did at all. And Norbury’s rather—well, rather a charlatan as far as mathematics are concerned. None of the people working along these lines now are really capable of doing very much along them. As far as I know, of course.’
Dorothy could only look at him and smile. The man grew more adorable with every word he uttered. ‘A very great mathematical brain,’ forsooth, had ‘missed one of the implications.’ Yet Pethwick had missed an implication, too—a simpler one, to the effect that in that case his own mathematical brain was greater still. And Norbury—one of the few scientific names with which she was familiar and which appeared in the newspapers—was—‘well, rather a charlatan.’ Dorothy was perfectly convinced he was if Pethwick could say so so disarmingly. Then Pethwick was a greater man than the great Norbury—if she had met Norbury at a dinner party six months ago she would have been thrilled. Well, she was thrilled now at walking along the street with Pethwick.
And with all that this scientific part of the business was by far the less important half. It was his simplicity she loved him for—the modesty which forbade him from seeing anything remarkable in his achievement or in himself. The man had no notion that he was so astonishingly clever. He was as lovable as a child on that account. Furthermore, he had solved what he couldn’t call ‘a simple piece of mathematics.’ In this moment of insight Dorothy had a sudden realisation of what that involved—the indefatigable patience, the iron resolution, the undismayed perseverance, all the qualities which demanded her admiration and which one would hardly realise could be possessed by a professor of mathematics.
Yet for all this, there was something Dorothy did not know about Pethwick. She did not know that he called her, to himself, ‘a Lordly One.’ She did not realise yet that along with the simplicity and modesty which she loved there existed a chronic sense of inferiority.
Chapter Six
Altogether, during the second half of that summer term, there were eight occasions when Doctor Edward Pethwick met Miss Dorothy Laxton for conversation without a third person being present. No. 1 was the occasion when Mrs. Pethwick met with her accident on the doorstep—the time when Dorothy’s pity roused her to a rather unwomanly forwardness which precipitated the whole affair. It must have been at interview No. 3 that Dorothy heard first about the Klein–Pethwick Effect. At interviews Nos. 4, 5, and 6 their relationship tended to round itself off; raw edges were smoothed away.
It was not specially odd that they were happy without physical endearments and caresses. Neither of them was accustomed to them. It is possible that if Pethwick had not been a married man they might have gone through interviews 2–6 just the same without kissing or even thinking of kisses. The strong emotional stress which had stirred them on the first occasion was wanting. Dorothy was a healthy young woman, but it called for something rather unusual to break down her reserve. And she had her theories, too. Despite—or because of—her modernism she rated intellectual intercourse far above sexual intercourse; perhaps because she knew much more about the former than about the latter. And since it was impossible for them to indulge in physical caresses without a certain amount of intrigue and scheming they simply did without them, and did not consciously notice the loss.
There was one other factor, too, which contributed to Dorothy’s state of mind. She loathed Mary Pethwick with an intense physical loathing; she thought with disgust of her dirty underclothing and drunken habits. She was not going to share Pethwick with a woman like that. So she was content—happy, in fact—with the seven casual meetings, a total of perhaps ten hours spent in walking through suburban streets, varied with two occasions when they boldly drank coffee coram publico in the confectioner’s in the High Street. In these enlightened times no one, not even wives of the Staff, nor parents, could find anything wrong in a married man drinking coffee with a young woman twice in five weeks.
And they debated whether the Locarno Treaty was a betrayal of the League of Nations, and they discussed the crimes committed in the name of liberty at Versailles, and they tried to forecast the future of Co-operation, and they tried to outline a constructive housing policy; but most of all they talked about the two things which held first place in Dorothy’s attention—the Klein–Pethwick Effect and Disarmament.
Ordinary people would say that Dorothy had a
bee in her bonnet about disarmament, but perhaps it would be just as true, or false, to say that Joan of Arc had a bee in her bonnet about English invasions, or Florence Nightingale about sick-nursing. If Dorothy Laxton’s exertions had disarmed the world, set the world free from the haunting fear of war and from the burden of armaments, people nowadays might think about her with the reverence they extend to the other two women. There might be statues erected to her and essays written about her, and board school children might have to listen to one lesson a year about her life and work. As it is, she can only be described unsympathetically as a young woman with a bee in her bonnet, or sympathetically as a young woman of enthusiasms and convictions.
When seeking out the fundamental causes of things, it can only be concluded that the next step in this disarmament business was taken by Mr. Laxton, of all people—it goes without saying that he did it quite unconsciously. He did it at breakfast-time.
‘Have you called on all the married staff this year?’ he asked suddenly.
That was naturally—especially in Mr. Laxton’s opinion—one of the duties of the daughter of a widowed headmaster.
‘Nearly all,’ said Dorothy, shortly, and prayed that the answer would suffice.
‘Whom haven’t you called on?’ demanded Mr. Laxton.
‘Mrs. Summers—she’s been away such a lot nursing her mother—and—Mrs. Pethwick.’
‘You’re going to call on Mrs. Pethwick, of course? There’re only two weeks left of this term, you know.’
‘Do you really think I need?’ said Dorothy, forcing herself to speak disinterestedly. ‘She’s different from the others. I don’t believe she’d notice whether I did or not, and—you know it’s hateful to go there.’
Mr. Laxton had been a general during the war. He fervently believed the army doctrine that to get the best out of your men you must know them personally—from above, of course; a kind of bird’s-eye view. The same rule must necessarily apply to the womenfolk. These condescensions were a help to discipline.