1
AS he came closer to Whitechapel High Street, Jeremy found with surprise and some addition to his uneasiness, that this district had a more wakeful and week-day appearance. Many of the shops and eating-houses were open; and the Government order, issued two days before, forbidding the sale of liquor while the strike menace endured, was being frankly disregarded. This was the first use that had been made of the Public Order (Preservation of) Act, passed hurriedly and almost in secret two or three months before; and Jeremy, enquiring what his own feelings would have been if he had been in a like position to the restless workmen, had been stirred out of his ordinary political indifference to call it unwise. He might have been stirred to even greater feeling about the original Act if he had known that it was principally this against which the strikes were directed. But he had omitted to ask why the unions were striking, and no one had told him. The middle classes of those days had got used to unintelligible and apparently senseless upheavals. Now, as he passed by one public-house after another, all open, and saw the crowds inside and round the doors, conversing with interest and perceptibly rising excitement on only one topic, he rather wished that the order could have been enforced. There was something sinister in the silence which fell where he passed. He felt uncomfortably that he was being looked at with suspicion.
He turned out of the wide road, now empty of all wheeled traffic, except for a derelict tramcar which stood desolate, apparently where driver and conductor had struck work earlier or later than their fellows. In the side street which led to his destination, there were mostly women—dark, ugly, alien women—sitting on their doorsteps; and he began to feel even more afraid of them than of the men. They did not lower their voices as he passed, but he could not understand what they were saying. But as he swung with a distinct sense of relief into the little narrow court where Trehanoc absurdly lived and had his laboratory, he heard one of them call after him, “Dir-r-rty bourgeois!” and all the rest laugh ominously together. The repetition of the phrase in this new accent startled him and he fretted at the door because Trehanoc did not immediately answer his knock.
“Damn you for living down here!” he said heartily, when Trehanoc at last opened to him. “I don’t like your neighbors at all.”
“I know.... I know...,” Trehanoc answered apologetically. “But how could I expect—— And anyway they’re nice people really when you get to know them. I get on very well with them.” He paused and looked with some apprehension at Jeremy’s annoyed countenance.
He was a Cornishman, a tall, loose, queerly excitable and eccentric fellow, with whom, years before, Jeremy had worked in the laboratories at University College. He had taken his degree—just taken it—and this result, while not abating his strange passion for research in physics, seemed to have destroyed forever all hope of his indulging it. After that no one knew what he had done, until a distant relative had died and left him a few hundreds a year and the empty warehouse in Lime Court. He had accepted the legacy as a direct intervention of providence, refused the specious offers of a Hebrew dealer in fur coats, and had fitted up the crazy building as a laboratory, with a living-room or two, where he spent vastly exciting hours pursuing with the sketchiest of home-made apparatus the abstrusest of natural mysteries. One or two old acquaintances of the Gower Street days had run across him here and there, and, on confessing that they were still devoted to science, had been urgently invited to pay a visit to Whitechapel. They had returned, half-alarmed, half-amused, and had reported that Trehanoc was madder than ever, and was attempting the transmutation of the elements with a home-made electric coil, an old jam-jar, and a biscuit tin. They also reported that his neighborhood was rich in disagreeable smells and that his laboratory was inhabited by rats.
But Jeremy’s taste in acquaintances was broad and comprehensive, always provided that they escaped growing tedious. After his first visit to Lime Court he had not been slow in paying a second. His acquaintance ripened into friendship with Trehanoc, whom he regarded, perhaps only half-consciously, as being an inspired, or at any rate an exceedingly lucky, fool. When he received an almost illegible and quite incoherent summons to go and see a surprising new experiment, “something,” as the fortunate discoverer put it, “very funny,” he had at once promised to go. It was characteristic of him that, having promised, he went, although he had to walk through disturbed London, arrived grumbling, and reassured his anxious host without once ceasing to complain of the inconvenience he had suffered.
“I ought to tell you,” Trehanoc said, with increased anxiety when Jeremy paused to take breath, “that a man’s dropped in to lunch. I didn’t ask him, and he isn’t a scientist, and he talks rather a lot, but—but—I don’t suppose he’ll be much in the way,” he finished breathlessly.
“All right, Augustus,” Jeremy replied in a more resigned tone, and with a soothing wave of his hand, “carry on. I don’t suppose one extra useless object in one of your experiments will make any particular difference.”
He followed Trehanoc with lumbering speed up the narrow, uncarpeted stairs and into the big loft which served for living-room and kitchen combined. There he saw the useless object stretched on a couch—a pleasant youth of rather disheveled appearance, who raised his head and said lazily:
“Hullo! It’s you, is it? We met last night, but I don’t suppose you remember that.”
“No, I don’t,” said Jeremy shortly.
“No, I thought you wouldn’t. My name’s MacIan. You must have known that last night, because you told me twice that no man whose name began with Mac ever knew when he was boring the company.”
“Did I?” Jeremy looked a little blank, and then began to brighten. “Of course. You were the man who was talking about the General Strike being a myth. I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings too much?”
“Not at all. I knew you meant well; and, after all, you weren’t in a condition to realize what I was up to. The secret of it all was that by boring all the rest of the company till they wanted to scream I was very effectually preventing them from boring me. You see, I saw at once that the politicians had taken the floor for the rest of the evening, and I knew that the only way to deal with them was to irritate them on their own ground. It was rather good sport really, only, of course, you couldn’t be expected to see the point of it.”
Jeremy began to chuckle with appreciation. “Very good,” he agreed. “Very good. I wish I’d known.” And Trehanoc, who had been hovering behind him uneasily, holding a frying-pan, said with a deep breath of relief: “That’s all right, then.”
“What the devil’s the matter with you, Augustus?” Jeremy cried, wheeling round on him. “What do you mean, ‘That’s all right, then’?”
“I was only afraid you two chaps would quarrel,” he explained. “You’re both of you rather difficult to get on with.” And he disappeared with the frying-pan into the corner which was curtained off for cooking.
“Old Trehanoc’s delightfully open about everything,” MacIan observed, stretching himself and lighting a cigarette. “I suppose we all of us have to apologize for a friend to another now and again, but he’s the only man I ever met that did it in the presence of both. It’s the sort of thing that makes a man distinctive.”
Lunch was what the two guests might have expected, and probably did. The sausages would no doubt have been more successful if Trehanoc had remembered to provide either potatoes or bread; but his half-hearted offer of a little uncooked oatmeal was summarily rejected. Jeremy’s appetite, however, was reviving, and MacIan plainly cared very little what he ate. His interest lay rather in talking; and throughout the meal he discoursed to a stolidly masticating Jeremy and a nervous, protesting Trehanoc on the theme that civilization had reached and passed its climax and was hurrying into the abyss. He instanced the case of Russia.
“Russia,” he said, leaning over towards the Cornishman and marking his points with flourishes of a fork, “Russia went so far that she couldn’t get back. For a long time they shouted for the blockade to be raised so that they could get machinery for their factories and their railways. Now they’ve been without it so long they don’t want it any more. Oh, of course, they still talk about reconstruction and rebuilding the railways and so forth, but it’ll never happen. It’s too late. They’ve dropped down a stage; and there they’ll stop, unless they go lower still, as they are quite likely to.”
Trehanoc looked up with a fanatical gleam in his big brown eyes, which faded as he saw MacIan, poised and alert, waiting for him, and Jeremy quietly eating with the greatest unconcern. “I don’t care what you say,” he muttered sullenly, dropping his head again. “There’s no limit to what science can do. Look what we’ve done in the last hundred years. We shall discover the origin of matter, and how to transmute the elements; we shall abolish disease ... and there’s my discovery——”
“But, my dear man,” MacIan interrupted, “just because we’ve done this, that, and the other in the last hundred years, there’s no earthly reason for supposing that we shall go on doing it. You don’t allow for the delicacy of all these things or for the brutality of the forces that are going to break them up. Why, if you got the world really in a turmoil for thirty years, at the end of that time you wouldn’t be able to find a man who could mend your electric light, and you’d have forgotten how to do it yourself. And you don’t allow for the fact that we ourselves change.... What do you say, Tuft? You’re a scientist, too.”
“The present state of our knowledge,” Jeremy replied cheerfully with his mouth full, “doesn’t justify prophecies.”
“Ah! our knowledge ... no, perhaps not. But our intuitions!” And here, as he spoke, MacIan seemed to grow for a moment a little more serious. “Don’t you know there’s a moment in anything—a holiday, or a party, or a love-affair, or whatever you like—when you feel that you’ve reached the climax, and that there’s nothing more to come. I feel that now. Oh! it’s been a good time, and we seemed to be getting freer and freer and richer and richer. But now we’ve got as far as we can and everything changes.... Change here for the Dark Ages!” he added with a sudden alteration in his manner. “In fact, if I may put it so, this is where we get out and walk.”
Jeremy looked at him, wondering vaguely how much of this was genuine and how much mere discourse. He thought that, whichever it was, on the whole he disliked it. “Oh! we shall go jogging on just as usual,” he said at last, as matter-of-fact as he could.
“Oh, no, we shan’t!” MacIan returned with equal coolness. “We shall go to eternal smash.”
Trehanoc looked up again from the food he had been wolfing down with absent-minded ferocity. “It doesn’t matter what either of you thinks,” he affirmed earnestly. “There’s no limit to what we are going to do. We——” A dull explosion filled their ears and shook the windows.
“And what in hell’s that?” cried Jeremy.