Читать книгу The Peacemaker - Cecil Scott "C. S." Forester - Страница 2

Doctor Edward Pethwick, mathematics and physics master at the Liverpool School, was sitting at a window in his room adjoining the senior physics laboratory. He had laid aside the calculation on which he was engaged, in order to watch the proceedings in the playing fields beneath the window. The Officers' Training Corps was coming on parade in readiness for a rehearsal of tomorrow's review by a general from the War Office. Today they were being reviewed merely by a general who did not use the title—Mr. Henry Laxton, C.M.G., D.S.O., M.A., Headmaster of the Liverpool School, who had risen during the war from the rank of captain in the Territorial Army to the command of a brigade, and when the war was over had returned to the teaching profession and had accepted this headmastership. It gave the school a decided prestige to have at its head a brigadier-general, because even though he punctiliously never used the title everyone who mattered knew that it was his by right.

At the moment his son, Henry Laxton the Second, Captain of the School and Sergeant of No. 3 Platoon, was bringing his detachment on to the parade-ground. He walked with a swagger which was an improvement on that of the regular sergeant-major's; he handled his silver-topped cane to the manner born; and the long bayonet which swung on his hip rhythmically with his stride was the finishing touch to his soldierly appearance.

Pethwick saw his dark eyes beneath his cap peak gauging carefully, but without hurry, the distance between the head of his column and the space where No. 3 platoon should be. Then young Laxton shouted the order—although "shout" is too barbaric a word for that beautifully modulated word of command.

"At the halt, on the left form—platoon."

No. 3 platoon came up into line exactly where it ought to have been, and stood rigid.

"Order—hype. Standa—tease."

The fifty rifles came down like one; the fifty left feet made only one sound as they were pushed out.

Pethwick, watching from the window, knew he could never have done anything like that. His voice would have risen to a squeak with excitement. He would have misjudged the distance hopelessly, so that the little devils at the head of the platoon would have bumped delightedly into the line ahead of them. He could not conceive of himself ever having fifty boys under such perfect control as to order arms and stand at ease without a fidget or a wriggle anywhere along the line.

Pethwick was conscious of a vague envy of young Laxton. He envied him the calm self-confidence of his carriage, his coolness, and his efficiency in action. He ranked young Laxton in his mind with all the people whom he described to himself—drawing upon a vague memory of Fiona Macleod's Immortal Hour—as "the Lordly Ones," people who could do things in front of other people without fumbling at their neckties.

Pethwick tried to comfort himself by thinking of things which he could do with ease and which were quite beyond young Laxton's capacity; only that very morning in class Laxton had come down badly in attempting to demonstrate Cayley's proof of the Binomial Theorem, which to Pethwick was literally no more abstruse than the addition of two and two. But there was somehow no comfort in the memory, for Pethwick was of such an unfortunate mental composition as to find no pleasure in the malicious contemplation of other people's difficulties.

Down on the parade-ground the regular sergeant-major and young Laxton had posted the markers—this was a very formal parade, indeed.

"Markers, steady."

The drums rolled as the lines dressed. The officers were on parade now, Pethwick's colleagues all of them, Summers with his medals, Malpas and Stowe trim in their new uniforms, Hicks still tugging at his gloves—he, too, was not of the Lordly Ones. Swords were drawn and glittered in the sun. It was rare indeed for swords to be seen in the playing fields of the Liverpool School. The khaki ranks stood fast, motionless. The very atmosphere seemed charged with a tension which told that the great moment of the day was at hand.

Then the doors of the school hall towards which the parade was facing flew open, and the headmaster stepped out. Summers bawled an order. The band played a lively march—making a horrible hash of the opening bars—and the swords flashed as they came to the salute, and the rifles came to the present as though actuated by one single vast machine.

Mr. Laxton's appearance fully justified all this ceremony. He was not in uniform—after all, this was only a rehearsal of tomorrow's review—but by a happy thought he was wearing morning clothes, superb in cut and style, setting just the right note of informal formality. He stood with his yellow gloves and silver-mounted stick in one hand and his silk hat raised in the other during the general salute, and then he came forward, while Summers hastened to meet him, to walk along the lines in formal inspection.

Dr. Pethwick continued to watch and suffer. He knew that if he were to put on a morning coat he would look like a seedy shop-walker.

And then Dr. Pethwick's heart gave a little kick inside his ribs. Mr. Laxton was now standing at the flagstaff which marked the saluting-point, and by his side was a young woman in a brown summer frock, talking animatedly. It was his daughter Dorothy, whom Dr. Pethwick considered to be the sweetest, most beautiful, most lovely of all the Lordly Ones.

Even leaving out of account the fact that Dr. Pethwick was a married man, it is remarkable that he had come to differentiate between Lordly Ones to such an extent that the sight of one particular one of them a hundred yards away should send up his pulse-rate, while none of the others affected him in any such manner. Yet if Dr. Pethwick had been able to put his feelings into words, he would have said that Dorothy Laxton was a fountain of sweetness, and that within the circle of Dorothy Laxton's arms (although he had no personal experience) lay all the bliss and rest and happiness of any conceivable paradise. Even looking at her over the playing-fields brought a pain into his breast—a pain in which he found an odd pleasure.

Pethwick gulped and looked away, allowing his mind, for the first time for a quarter of an hour, to revert to the calculation which half covered the large sheet of paper before him. The expression he was dealing with there included half the Greek alphabet and half the English, as well as eight or nine other symbols which only come to light in mathematical textbooks. Even Dr. Pethwick had found himself floundering a little helplessly at the moment when young Laxton had marched up No. 3 platoon to distract him.

When the Encyclopedia Britannica writes its little biographies of mathematicians and similar odd people, it is generous enough in its praise of their achievements. Sometimes, indeed, it even condescends to some small detail of their private lives, saying, perhaps, "for the next twenty years he was happily occupied as Professor of Mathematics at So-and-So University," and sometimes even, it goes so far as to give a vague hint of "domestic trouble, or illness." But from those poor data it is hard to conjure up a complete picture of the life of such a man as Pethwick, of the troubles and distractions caused him by such things as far unconnected with mathematics as his strong views upon disarmament and the facts that he loved his headmaster's daughter, and that a silk hat did not suit his looks, and that his wife was a slovenly and malicious drunkard, or even that the Officers' Training Corps should choose to hold a rehearsal of a review under the windows of his room, in the afternoon following a morning when Vb had been badly behaved and the Upper Sixth had been worse.

Perhaps all these dissimilar ingredients contributed to the sigh with which Pethwick picked up his pen again in his long, beautiful fingers and addressed himself to the tangle of neat symbols while, outside, the band blared and the Officers' Training Corps plunged into the complicated wheel which was to get them into position for the march past.

It is conceivable that the distraction did Pethwick good, that the few minutes during which his mind had been empty of his work gave it an opportunity to rally for the last final effort. But it is just as likely that the stimulus given to his circulation and reactions by the distant sight of Dorothy Laxton may have been responsible. However it was, Pethwick's pen moved across the paper without hesitation for some minutes. Line was added to line of the calculation. Two nasty corners were turned by ingenious devices. The expression simplified itself.

Pethwick's eyebrows rose at one discovery; it was all very surprising. If he had been able to carry the calculation in his head he might have deduced all this weeks ago, and he was rather annoyed with himself for not having done so—he told himself that Gauss or Clerk Maxwell would have achieved the feat easily; in that he was wrong, betrayed into error by his habitual poor opinion of his own capacity.

The mathematical expression had been reduced now to the simplest form such a thing could possibly attain, and Pethwick looked at it with surprise. This was not what he had started to prove. He had set out to find a zero, and here was definite evidence that there was not a zero to be found; that when all allowances had been made there was a substantial residuum left over.

That was how Pethwick regarded it; actually he deserved a good deal more credit. Before he had set about this calculation the flair, the inspiration, which denotes the great scientist had told him that there might perhaps be this residuum despite the general consensus of mathematical opinion. The notion had bothered him until he had determined to settle it once and for all. Now he had proved himself right, proved that the two minor factors to which a whole series of keen minds had refused to attach importance were important after all, and he had already formed an erroneous estimate of his own achievement. He told himself that he had believed he would reach a zero and had reached a positive result instead, whereas actually in his heart of hearts he had known all along that he would reach that result. But Pethwick could never give himself credit for anything.

All the same, it was equally characteristic of him that he did not look back through his calculation to check its correctness. He knew that was all right. The only doubtful point was whether Klein's original figures, with Norbury's elaborations of them, were accurate.

Pethwick looked again at Norbury's eloquent paragraphs in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society which had originally inspired his investigation. Klein was probably accurate, and Norbury was certainly right as far as he had gone—which was not very far. At that rate the result which Pethwick had reached was exceedingly interesting mathematically. The experimental investigation which should follow would also be interesting. Pethwick was not very excited at the thought of that. He was much more of a mathematician than a physicist, and his lack of self-assurance made him continually doubtful of his manipulative skill.

But something might easily come of his discovery. There might be some application in the arts, in several directions. Electrical generation might be simplified, or for that matter broadcasting, or motorcar ignition. Because Pethwick had spent three weeks wrestling with figures housewives all over the world might find their electric irons cheaper to run, or little clerks might come home from their offices to listen in with more efficient radio sets, or ten million motorists in ten million garages would have to give one fewer turn to the cranks of their motor-cars on cold mornings.

Pethwick smiled with one side of his mouth at the exuberance of his imagination. There was an enormous distance between a row of figures on a sheet of paper and the general adoption of an invention which might possibly spring from bench experiments which might perhaps follow from those figures. But still, such was the stimulus given to his mind by this extravagant imagination of his that he resolved to carry out the very next day a few simple practical confirmations of his theoretical deductions. As he put his papers away in his desk he was already listing in his mind pieces of apparatus which he would need for preliminary work, and which the resources of the senior physics laboratory at the Liverpool School could provide.

As Dr. Edward Pethwick came out of the Science Buildings of the school into the courtyard (Mr. Laxton discountenanced the use of the word "playground," which had generally been employed before his accession) he encountered his headmaster and his headmaster's daughter coming away from the saluting point now that the review was over.

Dr. Pethwick lifted off his hat and passed on. Mr. Laxton nodded with a condescension which was made all the more remarkable by his morning coat and silk hat. Dorothy smiled very charmingly indeed. And as Dr. Pethwick went on, conscious of the fact that his coat crumpled below its collar, and that his soft hat was shabby, and his shoes unclean, Mr. Laxton cocked his head sideways after him and said:

"Queer bloke, that."

Mr. Laxton was of the type that cannot help making a comment about anyone he happened to encounter.

"Doctor Pethwick? I like him."

"Oh, he's all right, I suppose, in his way. But you have to be a damn' good disciplinarian before you can dress like that in a boys' school, you know, Dorothy. And he's not."

"I shouldn't think he was," said Dorothy.

Dorothy, as a matter of fact, was always reminded by Dr. Pethwick's appearance of the White Knight to Through the Looking-Glass—perhaps the most lovable character in English fiction, but hardly of the type to keep order in a secondary school.

"Honestly, Dorothy, I ought to get rid of him," said Mr. Laxton. "He can't keep discipline, and he can't teach, and he's no good at games, and his wife—"

"Don't let's talk about his wife," said Dorothy. She had heard too much about Mrs. Pethwick; wherever two or three women were gathered together in that suburb there was always some discussion of Mrs. Pethwick.

"But then, I don't know," said Mr. Laxton. "I thought about it when I first came here, and decided against sacking him then, and the same arguments hold good now, I suppose. He's an old boy of the school, you know, and although he is a London man, he's the only one left on the staff, thank God. Did I tell you the new man who's coming next term is Winchester and New?"

"Yes, Father," said Dorothy. She thought of adding, but refrained, "Several times."

"Oh, yes, so I did. What were we talking about before that? Oh, Pethwick. I didn't tell you that that astronomer chap on the board of governors—what's his name?—Runciman, that's it—was talking to me about a couple of papers of Pethwick's in some mathematical journal or other. Marvellous stuff, Runciman was saying."

"Really?" said Dorothy, with a trace of interest. "What were they about?"

"Don't ask me, girl. It's not my line, as you know jolly well. But Runciman obviously thought the world of him—'A very brilliant young mathematician, evidently,' and all that sort of thing."

"Young?" questioned Dorothy, who was twenty-three.

"God bless my soul, yes," said Mr. Laxton. "He's not much older than you are. I see his name on the honours board every time I take prayers in hall. He got his degree—B.Sc.—in 1921, and I know he was nineteen at the time. He's thirty-one. Got his doctorate at twenty-four. Runciman was talking to me about his thesis at the same time as the other things."

Dorothy remembered guiltily that only last week she had decided that she would marry someone just over thirty, as that was the most suitable age. It was a shock to her to realize that Dr. Pethwick was that age, although she had never pictured herself married to him.

"I hope," mused Mr. Laxton, "that he does something really brilliant soon. Suppose he became as famous as Einstein. Think what a lot of good that would do to the school."

Mr. Laxton had ambitions regarding the school. He wished to raise it to pre-eminence among secondary schools—nay more, he had visions of making a public school of it, and himself attaining the lofty distinction of admission to the Public School Headmasters' Conference. In the last three years he had done much towards it; he had weeded out all the members of the staff—save for Dr. Pethwick—who did not hold degrees from Oxford or Cambridge; there was even a half-blue on the staff. He had introduced the practice of corporal punishment and the teaching of Greek—although his board of governors had so far managed to prevent him from making Greek a compulsory subject for the tradesmen's sons and small clerks' sons who were his pupils.

Mr. Laxton's chief trouble was the name of the school. Everyone who was not initiated thought that the Liverpool school must be in Liverpool, a mere provincial place, instead of, as was actually the case, owing its name to its Victorian founder and being in a suburb of London as near to the heart of things as St. Paul's and Dulwich College and Merchant Taylors', which everyone knew to be real public schools. Even the Old Boys would not help him much. They insisted on calling themselves Old Liverpudlians—a disgustingly provincial name—and remained stone-deaf to hints from the headmaster that he would welcome any movement to change the name into something more airy and gentlemanly.

In Mr. Laxton's mind the retention of Dr. Pethwick on the staff was a noble gesture, a magnificent recognition of the rise of democracy, a most notable example of the fact that nowadays a career was always open to talent. For Dr. Pethwick had no education beyond the Liverpool School and the University of London. Everyone knew that he was only the son of a local saddler—dead now, thank God—and that he had all sorts of queer cousins and relations still living in the district who were only working-class people. And also that he had a terrible wife—of the same class, of course.

At that very moment Dr. Pethwick was hoping, as he put his key into his front door, that his wife was not going to be "difficult" this evening. And as he came into the front hall he knew that she was. She came out of the dining room with that heaviness and exaggeration of gait which foretold the worst.

"Hullo!" said Mary Pethwick. Then she put out her hand against the wall and rested against it in a negligent sort of way. Her demeanour indicated that there was no real need for this support; she did it from choice, not to keep her balance.

"Hullo, dear," said Pethwick, hanging up his hat.

"Your tea's not ready," said Mary, as though it were his fault.

"Well, it doesn't matter," replied Pethwick. "I'll get it myself."

He edged past her along the hall into the little kitchen; she made no effort to get out of his way but stood watching every step he took. The little kitchen was full of squalor. On the gas stove stood the frying pan in which had been cooked the breakfast bacon. The sink and the small table beside it were covered with dirty saucepans and dishes.

Pethwick looked round for the kettle, found it in the littered pantry, filled it and set it on the stove. Then he heard Mary's blundering step down the hall, and she came in after him; the door, pushed open a shade too violently, crashed against the wall.

Mary put her back against the wall beside the dresser and watched his movements jealously. In that tiny room, littered as it was, there was hardly room for Pethwick to move now. Pethwick sighed; he was experienced now in Mary's "difficultness." When she followed him about like this it meant that she was looking for an opportunity to grumble. The only shadow of comfort left was that as the grumbling was quite inevitable it did not matter what he did.

He cleared the little table by stacking the dirty things neatly in the sink—until that was done there was nowhere where anything could be set down for a second. He washed out the teapot. He found, miraculously, a clean cup and saucer and plate. There were fragments of a broken jug under the sink. The only other two jugs in the house were dirty and greasy; he would have to pour his milk direct from the bottle—there was, fortunately, a little left. There was a smear of butter on the breadboard. The half loaf had stood since morning in the sunshine coming through the kitchen window, its cut surface was hard and dry.

An incautious movement on Pethwick's part set his foot on the saucer of milk put down for the cat beside the stove. It broke under his heel, and the milk streamed across the dirty floor.

"There!" said Mary. "Look what you've done! All over my nice clean kitchen!"

"I'm sorry, dear," said Pethwick. "I'll mop it up."

He picked up a dishcloth from beside the sink and stooped over the mess.

"That's a teacloth," screamed Mary. "Don't use a teacloth for that!"

Pethwick put it back where he found it; the colour of the thing made the mistake excusable. He found something else, mopped up the mess, put the cloth back, and began cutting himself bread and butter.

"Look how you're wasting the gas!" said Mary.

The kettle was boiling. Mary often left kettles boiling until the bottom was burnt out of them, and she did not mind in the least how much gas was used, but she had to find something to harass her husband with. Pethwick made his tea, and went on cutting bread and butter.

"That's all the bread there is," said Mary, again as if it were his fault. Pethwick checked himself in the act of cutting. Half a small loaf is not much if it has to constitute a man's evening meal and two persons' breakfast. Incautiously he allowed himself to say something which might be construed as displaying a little annoyance.

"Didn't the baker come today?" he asked.

"It's not my fault if he comes when I'm out," said Mary, leaping into the long sought opening. "Fancy saying that to me! Do you expect—"

There is no need to give a verbatim account of what Mary Pethwick went on saying. The fact that Pethwick had dared to hint that she had neglected her domestic duties was a splendid starting point, from which she could counter-attack in righteous indignation. With malice she poisoned her barbed words. She knew, with the ingenuity of evil, how to wound. She jeered at his proverbial inability to keep a class in order, at his untidy appearance, at all the weaknesses of which he was conscious and for which he was ashamed.

Some husbands, sitting silent, could have let her words pass unheeded, practically unheard, but that was impossible to Pethwick. He was far too sensitive a man. He listened, and every word hurt. The stale bread and butter he was trying to eat at the kitchen table turned in his mouth to something more like sawdust than ever. The bitter strong tea to which he had looked forward was too bitter to drink. He pushed his cup away and rose from the table, to be censured again, of course, for the sin of waste. Mary had no objection to making use of the most ridiculous charges against him. They gave her time to think of more wounding things without having to check her speech.

Only one thing ever caused her to pause. It came now, while Pethwick stood waiting for the kettle to boil before beginning to wash up. Mary said suddenly that she could no longer bear the sight of him. It was a splendid excuse for moving away with dignity. Pethwick heard her go along the hall and into the dining-room, and he heard the sideboard door there open and close. He knew why. Then in a little while the kitchen door crashed open again and Mary came back to renew the onset, all the while that Pethwick was trying to wash clean the greasy dishes and saucepans.

When the washing up was completed Pethwick went into the drawing-room and unpacked from his bag the thirty-one exercise books which contained the physics homework of Vb, but in the next two hours he only succeeded in marking two of them, and those were during the two intervals when Mary went into the dining-room to the sideboard cupboard. The other twenty-nine took him hardly more than an hour after Mary had gone up to bed, heavily and slowly, pulling herself up by the banisters.

And if it be asked why Pethwick endured treatment of this sort without revolt, the answer can only be found in his heredity and his environment. The saddler, his father, had been a thoughtful little wisp of a man; his mother had been a big masterful woman of generous figure, not at all unlike, in her young days, the woman Pethwick married—who was her niece, and, consequently, Pethwick's cousin. That big bullying mother of his had much to answer for. She won her little white-faced son's love and frightened him out of his life in turns.

The years of Edward Pethwick's adolescence were a lunatic time, when there was war, and air-raids, and his father's earnings amounted more than once to nearly a thousand pounds in the year. Mrs. Pethwick lived gloriously, never more than half-drunk but rarely less, and in time Mr. Pethwick came to follow her example. Other people bought pianos and fur coats; the Pethwicks made a more magnificent gesture still and sent their son to a secondary school instead of putting him to work at fourteen. They destined him to be the first member of their family on either side to earn his living by his brain instead of by his hands.

The result was that Edward Pethwick matriculated at sixteen before the war was over, and took his degree at nineteen very brilliantly indeed just before his parents quitted a world where a saddler's earnings had shrunk to an amount which would hardly suffice to make two people drunk even once a week.

Where the mathematical talent came from in Pethwick's make-up it is hard to tell. That particular mental twist is strongly hereditary, but it is hard to find any other example of it either in Pethwick's father's family or in his mother's. But as none of them, as far as can be ascertained, ever stayed at school long enough for any talent of that sort to be discovered it is possible that it was present but latent among them.

Pethwick married at twenty. He would have had to have been a clever man to avoid that fate. For on the death of his parents his aunt had taken care of him, and within the year the combined efforts of the whole of his aunt's family were successful in their aim. It was a tremendous prize, for Pethwick was a member of a profession, a school-teacher, not merely several rungs higher up the social ladder than his wife's family, but he might be said to be on another ladder from theirs altogether.

His very salary at twenty was far larger than his father-in-law earned at fifty. If Mary had not married him she would have had to hope that the time would come when perhaps some shop assistant or lorry driver would in an unguarded moment give her the opportunity of snatching him out of bachelorhood.

As it was, Mary won a colossal prize—a house with three bedrooms in it and no lodgers at all (until she married Mary never lived in a house with less than two families); a husband with a job which more likely than not would continue safely for forty years (he was the only man she knew with a job of more than a week's permanency); more clothes than she could wear and more food than she could eat, where previously there had been no certainty of even a minimum of either. Shop-keepers would treat her with deference, where previously she had been accustomed to a state of society where the shop-keeper was a man of social distinction to whom customers deferred.

In eleven years Mary had grown used to it—eleven years of nothing much to do and no particular desire to do it. For that matter, in two months Mary had grown bored with her new house and her new furniture so that even her mother's generous envy was no longer sweet to her. There was a bottle of stout to drink at lunch time. Her mother liked gin but could so rarely afford it that it was nice to have some handy when she came.

And when she went to visit her family and in the evening went, as a matter of course, to the "King's Arms," it was nice, when her turn came, to say, "Won't you make it a short one this time?" and to have a Scotch herself, and to take out of her purse a couple of half-crowns to pay for all—more than her father could spend there in a week without going short on something else. It was not very long before Pethwick was quite used to coming home to a wife with something the matter with her temper.

If only Mary had found something to keep her occupied before the habit of solitary drinking took hold of her, she might have been a good wife. If children had come—lots of them—or if Pethwick had been a severe taskmaster, or if Mary had been ambitious as regards clothes, or social position, or food, or if, incredibly, she had developed a talent for art or literature, matters might have been different. But as it was she had plunged into idleness, she had found idleness unsatisfying, and she had come to dull her racing mind with drink. After all, it was excusable. The only people Mary knew considered a man fortunate to be drunk, and it took so little even now, to unbalance her that the habit was easily formed.

Nor was her husband any help to her. He was far too queer a person. He could never see any attraction in drink—he had the complete distaste for it which occasionally characterizes the offspring of drunken parents—and he was a fool about his wife. She and his mother were the only women he had ever known, and he thought women were marvellous beings, and ten years of married life had no more widened his knowledge of them than ten years of mathematical research had done.

Pethwick put Vb's physics homework away in his bag, switched off the light, and went up to bed. The nightly routine of washing his hands and cleaning his teeth relieved his mind of much of the tension and distress the evening had brought him, and when he went into the bedroom Mary was, heaven be praised, already asleep, snoring a little, with her clothes strewn about the room. Pethwick put on his ragged pyjamas and climbed quietly in beside her. There were nights when Mary's visits to the dining-room sideboard only made her more and more wakeful and, consequently, quarrelsome, and these were nights of purgatory for Pethwick, but happily this was not one of them.

He could compose himself on the pillow and allow his current of thought, clear now, and unhurried, to flow through his mind. He thought about Officers' Training Corps, and Dorothy Laxton and Vb's bad behaviour and the chance of cramming Dawson through the intermediate B.Sc. this summer. And while that side of his brain was digesting these matters, the other side was developing the consequences of his mathematical discovery of that afternoon. It went steadily on regardless of his other thoughts, like a clock ticking in a drawing-room where a party is going on, attracting no attention but turning the hands unfalteringly.

Then it broke in upon his consciousness, staggeringly, as though the drawing-room clock were suddenly to strike with Big Ben's volume of sound. That mathematical expression at which his calculations had ended in the afternoon had transformed itself in his mind, had assumed a vital new guise, presenting itself with clarity as a stunning revelation. Pethwick's heart beat faster even than if he were thinking about Dorothy Laxton, and for once in his life he had no thought to spare for her. He was making his way from point to point of a new deduction in that highly rarefied atmosphere where mathematics tend to become not merely a measure of, but identical with, electro-magnetics and electro-kinetics.

He knew now that he was progressing towards not merely an interesting mathematical discovery which might make a flutter in the Royal Society and which might just possibly affect practical electro-magnetics to some slight degree, but that he was about to find something else; something much more important, a completely new development, a physical reaction of a kind hitherto unknown, whose nature he could now see clearly although only experimental test could determine its amplitude. It might be something very small, measured by practical standards—Pethwick could picture ingenious lecturers devising neat little mechanisms for displaying what would be called the Klein-Pethwick Effect—or it might be great, very great indeed, so great as perhaps to affect the history of the world.

We all know now that it was great enough to do so, and indeed might have done so if Pethwick had been only a mathematician, and not a man married to a drunken wife, and in love with his headmaster's daughter, and subject to all the other influences which these pages have endeavoured to describe. But to get back to the amazing train of events which, like a tropical hurricane, began with an innocent enough disturbance of a minor sort—

Mr. Holliday was one of those bluff and burly young men who stand no nonsense from boys. As the assistant physics master at the Liverpool School he was just as efficient as at the nets where the boys liked him even when they did not know that he had only just missed his Blue as a fast bowler for Cambridge. He never had any qualms about discipline. He could face and tackle any crisis.

On that historic occasion a year ago when some naughty boys hid a parcel of fish in a locker in the laboratory on the day before the half-term holiday, so that when the school reopened four days later the place stank like a whaling station in the hot weather, it was Mr. Holliday who guessed the cause, and who broke open the lockers until the source of the stench was located, and who discovered the miscreants, and who (in accordance with Mr. Laxton's new methods of punishment) caned them most satisfactorily—Dr. Pethwick, his senior, had never caned a boy in his life.

Consequently, when Mr. Holliday observed that IVa was not progressing rapidly with the experiment he had set them to do, after explaining it to them, he plunged boldly into the trouble, selecting, as was his wont, one outstanding individual for censure and, if necessary, punishment.

"What are you looking for, Williams?" he asked, pleasantly. "Trouble?"

Williams was a boy of much the same type as Holliday himself (although Mr. Holliday did not see the resemblance), rather stocky, rather stupid, rather simple.

"No, sir," said Williams. "I'm just asking Merivale if he's getting on all right."

"How nice of you to be so anxious about Merivale," said Holliday. "But I strongly advise you to go back to your place and get on with your experiment."

"I can't, sir, please, sir," said Williams.

"Oh," said Holliday. "So your anxiety about Merivale was not entirely disinterested?"

Mr. Holliday had begun lately to realize the value of sarcasm as a help in the maintenance of discipline and was unconsciously imperilling his popularity thereby. Williams merely stood still and resented Mr. Holliday's remarks in silence.

"I suppose," continued Holliday, "that you did not pay attention when I was explaining to you Gauss's method for Determining the Moment of a Magnet. But the diagrams are still on the blackboard. With the help of those you ought to be able to make some progress. I hope you can, Williams, for your sake and especially for the sake of what you sit on."

That was the sort of remark which ought to have drawn a snigger from the rest of the class; Mr. Holliday was quite surprised when it did not come. He looked round at the faces turned towards him from the laboratory benches, and in them he read at last that he was not dealing with naughtiness or indiscipline. He came down from his dais and approached the benches.

"Is anybody else in difficulty?" he asked.

"Yes, sir. Yes, sir," came from different parts of the laboratory.

"Well, what's your trouble, then, Maskell?" he went on. Maskell was the clever boy of the form.

"It's this compass needle, sir," said Maskell. "It doesn't seem to work."

Holliday bent over it. He twisted the little glass box around, and the needle spun round idly. When it came to rest it was certainly not pointing to the north. He tapped the case. The needle spun again, and came to rest in a different position. Clearly there was not a trace of magnetism left in it. He approached it to the bar magnet lying on the sheet of paper on which Maskell was conducting his experiment. There was not the least quiver in the needle at all.

"That's queer," said Holliday to himself.

"The magnet seems all wrong, too, sir," said Maskell.

Holliday slipped the magnet into the paper stirrup which hung from the thread, and allowed it to swing free. As soon as the rotation due to the extension of the thread was finished, the magnet swung idly, without a trace of the dignified north-seeking beat which delighted Holliday's heart even now, after observing it a hundred thousand times.

He grabbed another bar magnet from the bench, and brought its north pole towards first the north and then the south pole of the suspending magnet. Nothing happened. He brought the two magnets into contact—so still was the room that the little metallic chink they made was heard everywhere. But neither bar magnet was disturbed. They were quite indifferent. It might have been two pieces of brass he was bringing into contact, for all the attraction that was displayed.

Holliday looked up from the bench; from beneath his fair eyebrows he swept his glance round the form. In the expression on the boys' faces he read interest, indifference or amusement, according to their varying temperaments, but no sign whatever of guilt.

"Are all your magnets and compass needles like this?" he asked.

"Yes, sir," said the form.

Holliday went across to the cupboard and took out the tray of bar magnets. The ones remaining there were in the same state—the keepers joining north and south poles betrayed no trace of adhesion. He called for the laboratory assistant.

"Owens! Owens!"

Owens appeared from his den.

"Did you notice anything funny about these magnets and compass needles when you put them out?" demanded Holliday.

"Well, sir, I thought they—"

Holliday heard half of what he had to say and then sent him off. Clearly Owens had no hand in the business, and whatever had been done to the magnets had been done before the lesson began. He stood for a moment in thought. But now the IVa had got over the initial interest and surprise, they seemed likely to take advantage of the unusual state of affairs. They were already beginning to fidget and wiggle and giggle and play—four of the gravest crimes in Mr. Holliday's calendar.

Mr. Holliday took a Napoleonic decision, characteristically. He swept away the whole question of Determining the Moment of a Magnet. He called to Owens for blocks of glass, and pins; he mounted his dais, and wiped the blackboard clean of Gauss's method. Within two minutes the subject of the lesson was changed to the Determination of the Index of Refraction of Glass, whereby there was no risk of further trouble due to the mischievous activities of naughty boys with the electro-magnetic apparatus. And, true to the disciplinary standard which Mr. Holliday had set himself the boys reaped nothing of what they would term benefit, from someone unknown's misdemeanour.

Although half an hour had been wasted, in the remaining hour the class had completed the experiment, thanks to Mr. Holliday's shrewd driving of them. No gap had been made in the sacred syllabus—the Determination of the Moment of a Magnet could safely be left now until the old magnets had been remagnetized.

When the class was finished Mr. Holliday considered it his duty to go in and report to his senior, Dr. Pethwick, upon the latest misbehaviour of the boys. But Dr. Pethwick did not receive the news in a sensible fashion—indeed, Holliday had no hope that he would. He was in the little advanced physics laboratory, which had gradually become his own owing to the dearth of boys needing instruction in advanced physics.

Later on Mr. Holliday made many and desperate efforts to recall just what apparatus there was upon the bench engaging his attention when Holiday walked in, but he never succeeded. The big electrometer was there, Holliday noticed, and there was a lead from the power plug in the wall to some simple make-and-break which was buzzing cheerfully away surrounded by various other instruments.

But of those other instruments Mr. Holliday, later on, could only recall a vague picture of a big red magnet and something which might have been a glowing radio valve or even a vacuum tube, so casual had been Mr. Holliday's glance as a result of the indignation which burned and seethed within him.

"There's been trouble again in the junior lab," said Mr. Holliday.

Dr. Pethwick merely turned his lean white face towards him and did not hear him.

"Some of these young devils have demagnetized every blessed magnet in the magnet drawer," expanded Mr. Holliday.

That news certainly seemed to have some effect upon Dr. Pethwick. He switched off the current so that the buzz of the make-and-break stopped abruptly, and came round the bench to Holliday. His hands flapped. Mr. Holliday, recounting the interview much later, described him as looking like a new-caught fish flapping on the bank.

"Every blessed one," said Holliday, referring still to the magnets. "And the compass needles as well. I bet it's Horne and Hawkins and that crowd."

"D-do you think so?" quavered Dr. Pethwick.

"It's two months since the last of their silly practical jokes," fumed Holliday. "They were just about due for another. But they've bitten off more than they can chew this time. I wouldn't have a bottom like the one young Horne is going to have tomorrow for something."

Dr. Pethwick's eyebrows rose. Holliday attributed the gesture to his own outspokenness regarding young Ho4ne's bottom—no one ever mentioned bottoms to Dr. Pethwick—but he stood his ground stoutly.

"He's jolly well earned it," he said, "and he's going to get what's coming to him."

Dr. Pethwick seemed more embarrassed than ever.

"I—I shouldn't do anything about it yet—" he began. "Perhaps—"

"But I must," protested Holliday. "These things have to be jumped on at once. Hard."

Then Mr. Holliday attributed Dr. Pethwick's hesitancy to fear of what Mr. Laxton would say regarding yet another disciplinary row on the Science side.

"Oh, don't you worry," he went on, hotly. "We won't have any song and dance about it. I'll have young Horne and Hawkins up in my classroom this evening and get the truth out of 'em. I'll give 'em six each and that will be the end of that."

"But—" said Dr. Pethwick. "But—"

These un-Napoleonic "buts," this dilatoriness, set a seal on Holliday's wrath. He issued a proclamation of independent action.

"Anyway," he said, "it happened in my class, and it's my business to deal with it. And I'm going to."

And with that he flung out of the advanced physics laboratory, leaving Dr. Pethwick bending over his experimental bench with a worried look on his face. Dr. Pethwick straightened his back, and eyed his apparatus again. He opened the door leading through to the senior laboratory, and looked at the cupboard which held the drawer of bar magnets. He noted its position.

Standing in the doorway he looked back and forward, noting the relative positions of his emitter, the magnet he was experimenting with, and the magnet cupboard. There could be no doubt now that the Klein-Pethwick Diamagnetic Effect was very marked and powerful. It set him wondering whether anywhere further along that straight line—beyond the walls of the school, perhaps, perhaps ten miles away—any more magnets had lost their magnetism. Then with a rush and a clatter Remove B came pouring into the senior laboratory, and Dr. Pethwick had to turn aside and disconnect his apparatus in the advanced laboratory.

The five minutes which he expended on that were a golden time for Remove B. Without supervision for that period they played Old Harry throughout the senior laboratory, with the result that by the time Dr. Pethwick was ready to give them their lesson they were well out of hand, and that, combined with a certain abstractedness on the part of Dr. Pethwick, led to the lesson developing into a most delightful exhibition of rowdyism.

Meanwhile, Mr. Holliday was encountering both ridicule and opposition, which, such was his temperament, only served to confirm him in his opinion. Up in the common-room the staff went to no pains to conceal their amusement at hearing that he had had a lesson spoilt by the machinations of Horne and Hawkins and their followers.

"I never knew a science class yet where discipline was maintained," said Stowe, who taught classics.

Holliday could only glower at him; the statement was too idiotic even to contradict.

"Yes," added Malpas, the Modern Languages master, "don't you remember the great fish joke? That was a rare one."

"They got all that was due to them, all the same," said Holliday, taking the offensive against his better judgement.

"Really?" said Malpas, lunging neatly for the opening. "It doesn't seem to have done much good, all the same, judging by this new development."

"If I were better supported—" glowered Holliday, and Malpas and Stowe tittered gently.

"Discipline is a one-man job," said Malpas solemnly, quoting words used by the Head on a previous occasion. Holliday was a simply ideal man to rag.

"But look here, Holliday," said Dutton, who taught Chemistry. "D'you mean to say they quite demagnetized about thirty bar magnets, and compass needles as well?"

"I do," snarled Holliday.

"Of course," said Dutton, "I'm only a chemist, and I'm not very up to date, and I came down from Cambridge a good long time before some of you younger men, but I always understood it was jolly difficult to demagnetize iron completely. There ought to have been enough left for IVb to get some sort of result, surely."

Dutton was only partly attempting to annoy Holliday; he was really interested in the point he had raised.

"I wouldn't put anything past Horne and Hawkins," interposed Malpas, who knew nothing about the subject at all.

"But what about the compass needles?" said Dutton. "If you take a bar magnet and chuck it about a lot I suppose you can weaken it nearly to zero, but it would puzzle me to demagnetize a compass needle in a brass case without damaging the case."

"Oh, you don't know our young scientists," said Malpas, airily. "They better their instruction. Young Hawkins is an inventive genius, you know, and he's blossomed out under Holliday's parental care. Don't you remember the Aeolian harp? I bet you do, Summers."

Summers was the geography master. In their last rag before the celebrated rotten-fish joke Horne and Hawkins had profited by Holliday's instruction in Elementary Sound to construct an Aeolian harp and had hung it out of the window just before Summers came in to teach them; during the subsequent hour the wild fitful music called forth by the wind had pervaded the room in a weird and ghostly fashion, driving Summers nearly to distraction. He had turned out every boy's desk and pockets seeking for the source of the noise; he had even (led on by the tactful suggestions of the form humorists) sent a message to the music room before he had succeeded in solving the mystery.

Everyone laughed at the recollection, and Summers had to defend himself.

"Anyway," he said, heatedly, "I had them nailed down within the hour, and they've never forgotten it, either. They haven't tried any practical jokes on me twice."

That is the way the history of the world is built up. Malpas's reference to a schoolboy's Aeolian harp, and Summers' hot rejoinder on the subject sufficed both to distract Holliday's attention from Dutton's very relevant suggestion and to raise his temper to such a pitch that he forgot all about it until it was too late. Otherwise Holliday might easily have followed up the idea, and guessed at Dr. Pethwick's responsibility in the matter, and the history of the world might have been different.

As it was, Holliday remained filled with righteous indignation all afternoon, and, having sent for Horne and Hawkins after afternoon school, abruptly charged them with a crime entirely absent from their calendar, extensive though it was. Even the ready wits of these two young gentlemen failed them when they found themselves confronted with an accusation of demagetizing.

They had come prepared to refute charges of brewing sulphuretted hydrogen in the class-room inkwells and of tying up the school bell-rope the week before so that the porter had to find a ladder before ringing the bell (so that the school happily missed five minutes of lessons) and of those two crimes they were only guilty of one. But this demagnetizing business beat them. They stuttered and stammered, and their innocence compared badly with the virtuous indignation they would have assumed to perfection if they had been guilty.

Holliday, firmly convinced from the start of their guilt, was raised to a pitch of positive certainty by their blundering denials. He fell upon them in the end and beat them with all the shrewd application of strength and perfection of timing to be expected of a man who had only just missed his cricket Blue. It did him a world of good, and it is to be hoped that it did Horne and Hawkins a world of good, too.

The trouble was that when he boasted of the deed to Dr. Pethwick the latter was intensely embarrassed about it. No man as shy as he was could face all the commotion and explanations and fuss and bother consequent upon owning up to an act for which two schoolboys had been caned. Dr. Pethwick shrank with horror from the thought of the common-room remarks, and Mr. Laxton's clumsy comments, and the apologies which would have to be tendered to Horne and Hawkins. And, as a man of retiring disposition will do, he readily found reasons and excuses for not assuming the responsibility. He wanted to investigate the Klein-Pethwick Effect a little more closely before publishing his results.

He did not want publicity. The modest columns of the Philosophical Transactions were good enough for him. He knew that the Fellowship of the Royal Society was a certainty now. He knew that Einstein and Eddington would be pleased and congratulatory because the mere demonstration of the existence of the Klein-Pethwick Effect was a substantial confirmation of the Theory of Relativity, and additional mathematical investigation might be enormously important. He decided that as the summer holidays were not far off he would keep his secret until then. And thereby he brought catastrophe a little nearer.