§ 12
A day or so after Troop’s departure Peter waylaid Oswald in the garden. Peter, now that Troop had gone, was amusing himself with dissection again—an interest that Troop had disposed of as a “bit morbid.” Oswald thought the work Peter did neat and good; he had to brush up his own rather faded memories of Huxley’s laboratory in order to keep pace with the boy.
“I wish you’d come to the Glory Hole and look at an old rat I dissected yesterday. I want to get its solar plexus and I’m not sure about it. I’ve been using acetic acid to bring out the nerves, but there’s such a lot of white stuff about....”
The dissection was a good piece of work, the stomach cleaned out and the viscera neatly displayed. Very much in evidence were eight small embryo rats which the specimen under examination, had not science overtaken her, would presently have added to the rat population of the world.
“The old girl’s been going it,” said Peter in a casual tone, and turned these things over with the handle of his scalpel. “Now is all this stuff solar plexus, Nobby?”...
The next morning Oswald stopped short in the middle of his shaving, which in his case involved the most tortuous deflections and grimacings. “It’s all right with the boy,” he said to himself.
“I think it’s all right.
“No nonsense about it anyhow.
“But what a tortuous, untraceable business the coming of knowledge is! Curiosity. A fad for dissecting. An instinct for cleanliness. Pride. A bigger boy like Troop.... Suppose Troop had been a different sort of boy?...
“But then I suppose Peter and he wouldn’t have hit it off together.”
Oswald scraped, and presently his mind tried over a phrase.
“Inherent powers of selection,” said Oswald. “Inherent.... I suppose I picked my way through a pretty queer lot of stuff....”
He stood wiping his safety-razor blade.
“There was more mystery in my time and more emotion. This is better....
“Facts are clean,” said Oswald, uttering the essential faith with which science has faced vice and priestcraft, magic and muddle and fear and mystery, the whole world over.
“Facts are clean.”