THE CONVERT
FOR the first time in his life, Henry Wolverton had been seriously upset.
His had been an orderly life. Even when he was at Shrewsbury, he had escaped bullying and other disturbances. He had been marked out as a future scholar who would be a credit to the school; and his calm air of reserve had also protected him. He might be classed as a “swat,” but he was not the kind of swat who gets singled out for bullying. He was no good at games, but he had a handsome, dignified presence, and he was never known to put on side.
At Oxford he passed from triumph to triumph. After he got his fellowship at Balliol, he married a girl-graduate from Lady Margaret Hall, and they worked happily together on his research. He was writing in many volumes, the Economic History of the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries; and at twenty-nine he was already an authority. His wife died rather incidentally when they had been married three years, but that had not seriously interfered with his life work.
Nor did the war, although it was a terrible nuisance, have any considerable effect upon him. He undertook work of “national importance” in Whitehall, and when he returned home in the afternoon to the house he had taken at the corner of Bedford Square, he found that he could still put in four or five valuable hours’ work on his history. And if he wanted extra time for research in the British Museum library, he could always get leave. Everyone in his department recognized the fact that he was an exceptional man, and that the work he was engaged upon would be a lasting monument to English scholarship.
By comparison, the war itself was almost an ephemeral thing.
Since the signing of the armistice, he had settled down to make up for lost time. He had his whole future planned. He hoped to finish his immediate task by the time he was sixty-five, but he foresaw that there would still be other work for him to do. He would, for example, almost certainly find it necessary by then to make revision in his earlier volumes.
It was no trifle that had upset him on this particular day. But even the fact that the English revolution had at last broken into the flame of civil war would not have disturbed him so seriously, if he had not conclusively proved in the course of the past five weeks that the revolution was impossible. Throughout the welter of the national strike disturbances, editors of any importance from the editor of the Times downwards had begged him for articles. Although he had specialized upon a study of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he was regarded as the first authority on the entire history of the English people. And in his articles, he had proved conclusively from his vast knowledge of precedents and tradition, that the temper of the English people would never seek the arbitrament of an armed revolution.
He was still convinced of that, although, so far as he could judge, the revolution had already begun.