Roger North let himself down into the cane deck-chair by his study window with a sigh of relief. The wonderful weather still held. It had been a hot morning, there were people staying in the house—people who bored North—and lunch had been to him a wearisome meal. Everyone had consumed a great deal of food and wine and talked an amazing lot of nonsense, and made a great deal of noise, and the heat had become unbearable.
Here, though the warmth was great, the stillness was perfect. The rest of the world had retired to their rooms to change for the tennis party in the afternoon. North felt he could depend on at least an hour of quiet. Across the rosebeds and smooth lawns he could see his cattle lying in the tall grass under the trees. He watched others moving slowly from shade to shade—Daisy and Bettina, and Fancy—and presently Patricia, the big white mother of many pigs, hove in sight on her way to the woods. For North was a farmer too, and loved his beasts better, it must be owned, than he loved his own kind.
He cut a hole in the orange he had brought from the lunch-table and commenced to suck in great content. Like the ladies of Cranford he considered there was no other way to eat an orange. He also agreed with them that it was a pleasure that should be enjoyed in private.
He gave himself up to the soothing peace and rest of his cool shaded room. The friendly faces of his beloved books looked down on him, the fragrance of his roses came in, hot and sweet, a very quintessence of summer. Patricia had reached the wood now; he watched her dignified waddle disappear in its green depths. What a pleasant and beautiful world it all was, except for the humans.
He dropped the jangling remains of the irritating lunch interval out of his consciousness, and his mind drifted back to his morning’s work, the conclusion of a week of observation, of measurements, of estimating quantities, of balancing relations. A week of the scientist’s all-absorbing pursuit of knowledge, which had, as his wife complained, made him deaf and dumb and blind to all else. A disturbing fact in his work was beginning to force itself upon him. He was becoming more and more conscious that, in spite of the exquisite delicacy of scientific apparatus, observation was becoming increasingly difficult. He could no longer make the atom a subject of observation; it escaped him. He was beginning to base his arguments on mathematical formula. Even with the chemical atom, four degrees below the ultimate physical atom, he was beginning to reason, without basing his reasons on observation, because he could not observe; it was too minute, too fine, too delicate—it escaped him. He had no instrument delicate enough to observe. He had come to a deadlock. The fact forced itself upon him with ever-increasing insistence; he could no longer deny it. He could carry some of his investigations no farther without the aid of finer, subtler instruments. His methods failed him. Nor could his particular order of mind accept the new psychology. He could not investigate by means of hypnotism, or autoscopy, or accept the strange new psychological facts which were revolutionizing all the old ideas of human consciousness, because he could not get away from the fundamental fact that science had no theory with which these strange new things would fit, no explanation, as he had said to Ruth Seer, which could arrange them in a rational order. And, dreaming in the warmth of the afternoon, with the fragrance and beauty of the wonderful universe filtering into his consciousness, the idea penetrated with ever-growing insistence: Had the gods, by some wonderful chance, by some amazing good fortune, placed in his hands, his, Roger North’s, an instrument, finer, subtler, more delicate, than any of which he had ever dreamed, the consciousness that was materializing as Ruth Seer? He seemed struggling with himself, or rather with another self—a self that was striving to draw him into misty unreal things, and he shrank back into his world of what seemed to him solid, tangible things, things that he could touch and handle and prove by measure and calculation and observation. And then again the larger vision gripped him. Was there indeed a finer, subtler, more wonderful matter, waiting to be explored by different, finer, subtler methods? What was it Dick Carey and Ruth Seer cognized, contracted with outside his ken? Could he be certain it did not exist? “God! it would give you an horizon beyond eternity,” he had said to Ruth Seer; that was true enough—if the vision was true. Always till now he had thought of any vision beyond as a fable, invented by wise men to help lesser men through what was after all but a sorry business. And now, for the first time, it really gripped him—what it would mean if it were not a fable, not a useful deception for weaker men who could not face life as it really was. God! it would give you an horizon beyond eternity! The vision was as yet only a dim muddle of infinite possibilities and Roger North’s mind hated muddle. He was like the blind man of Bethsaida who, when Christ touched his eyes, looked up, and saw men, as trees, walking.
Suddenly he got up and moved a photograph of Dick Carey that stood upon his writing-table, moved it to an inconspicuous place on the mantelshelf amongst other photographs. Then he hesitated for a moment before he took one of the others and put it on the writing-table.
And this simple action meant that Roger North had put on one side his shrinking from the intangible and invisible and had started on new investigations with new instruments for observation.
Then he went back to his chair and began a second orange. Mansfield had just carried out the croquet mallets and balls, and was arranging for the afternoon games in his usual admirable manner. North watched him lazily as he sucked the orange, pleasantly conscious that a new interest had gripped his life, his mind already busy, tabulating, arranging the different subtler matter he proposed to work with.
It was here the door opened, and with the little clatter and bustle which always heralded her approach, his wife entered, curled, powdered and adorned, very pretty and very smart, for her afternoon party.
A visit from her at this moment was altogether unexpected. It was also unfortunate.