Five years ago he had married into a well-known English family, and the doors of society had been opened wide to him. But his marriage had been a ghastly mistake. Olive, after marriage, had showed herself entirely out of sympathy with the idealism that formed so large a part of the complex character of her husband. She wanted money and power, and she drove spurs into her husband that he might obtain for her more and more money, more and more power. Any other ambition in Clifford she tried to sneer down with the ruthlessness of an utterly mercenary woman.
He had come to loathe the sensuous artificiality of his life. He had come to loathe the ruthless selfishness of finance. He was sick with the callousness of that stratum of the world in which he moved.
In the last couple of years he had found himself drawn powerfully towards the calm, passionless atmosphere of science in which his elder brother, John Rivière, had found his life-work. Rivière had made no worldly success for himself. The scientific researches he had undertaken made no stir when they found light in the pages of obscure quarterlies circulating amongst a few dozen other men engaged in similar research. Rivière had not the temperament to push himself or the children of his brain. He had settled into a solitary bachelor life in a small Canadian college—an unknown, unrecognized man—and yet the calm, steady purpose and the calm, passionless happiness of the life had made a deep impression on Clifford Matheson.
Rivière had come to an accidental death on a holiday with his brother in the wilds of northern Canada. Few knew of it beyond Matheson.
The financier had been drawn towards one special problem of science, and on this he had studied deeply the last few years. From his studies, an idea had developed which could only be worked out by experiments. Many years of patient research would be needed, for this thought-child of Matheson's was a master-idea, an idea which meant the exploring of a practically uncharted sea of knowledge.
In brief, it was an attack of root-problem of human disease. Doctors and pathologists had hitherto been viewing disease from the aspect of its myriad effects on the highly complex human being. It was as though one were to attempt to understand the subtleties of some full-grown language without first learning its elementary grammar—the foundations on which its super-structure is reared.
Now Matheson, coming to the problem with a strong, fresh mind unhampered by the swaddling clothes of a college training, saw it from a view-point entirely different to that of the doctors. He wanted to know the elementary grammar of human disease. He found that no book dealt with it—nor attempted to deal with it. No recognized department of a medical course took as its province the root-causes of disease. Pathology was a study of effects. Bacteriology—that again was merely a study of effects.
He had read widely amongst a variety of scientific research-matter, and had found that here and there an isolated attack was being made on the problem of causes. But nothing strong-planned—as any one of his financial schemes would be planned—nothing co-ordinated. The researches of the day were starting at points too complex, before the basic conditions of the problem were known.
He wanted to learn, and to give to the world, the basic facts.
Disease, as he viewed it, was primarily the result of abnormal conditions of living. His idea was to study it in its simplest possible form. To study the effects of abnormal conditions of life on the lowest living organisms—the microscopic blobs of life whose structure is elemental. From his wide reading of the last couple of years, he knew what little was already known and the vast field that was unexplored territory. He need not waste time over what others had already dealt with—the new territory offered sufficient field for a life-work.