Читать книгу Two in a Train and Other Stories - Warwick Deeping - Страница 6

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But one thing he did possess, and that was money. The Pyes père and grandpère had been Birmingham men, successful manufacturers of hardware, and Alfred had been an only son. Being interested in pure science, he had sold the business on his father’s death, and retired into his laboratory with two hundred thousand pounds in gilt-edged securities. He was somewhat sensitive about his money. He knew that though the world had no affection for Alfred Pye it would smile upon Alfred’s pile of cash.

The making of a misanthrope may be a complex business, and if at the age of sixty Professor Pye hated humanity he had his reasons for this hatred. A man who has lived alone with himself for fifteen years can turn sour in the process, and Pye’s uncontestable brilliancy made scorn easy. As a younger man he had carried out experimental work as a subordinate, only to have his very suggestive discoveries exploited by his senior. Professor Gasson, in claiming the younger man’s researches for the honour of a particular University, had seen to it that much of the honour had materialized as a personal halo. Professor Gasson had an international reputation. He was a facile writer, one of those men who can popularize the abstruse and the mysterious. He was now Sir Philip Gasson.

Pye had never forgotten or forgiven the ingenious fraud. It had taught him secretiveness, made him even more lone and separative. He had withdrawn from the world of men, academic and otherwise. He had purchased thirty acres of land on the North Downs and built himself a kind of little concrete fortress, a strong place that was as complete and self-supporting as money and brains could make it. It contained a laboratory; it possessed its own water supply, a powerful electric installation, an oil storage tank, a miniature observatory. Even Professor Pye’s dietary was eccentric. He drank nothing but water or strong coffee, and lived on grape-fruit, oranges, apples, nuts, bread and cheese. Life in all its details was simplified and subordinated to his work. The laboratory was his holy of holies, and in it he functioned like a priest.

He possessed one temple-servant, a curious creature named Hands, an ex-service man who had lost his hearing and half a face in the war. Life’s disfigurements and frustrations had made Hands as much a recluse as his master. He was a queer, sedulous slave who lived with a small mongrel dog in the kitchen, and who made beds, and stoked the furnace, and ran the oil engine and dynamo, and controlled the stores, and pottered about in a very small garden of his own. There was nothing of the spy about Hands. A large, gentle, tame creature who smoked a pipe, and liked to feel his hands licked by his dog’s tongue, he could resign himself to his environment. He attached himself like a neuter cat. So attached had he become to the solitary place on the downs that semi-suburban Surrey had become as wild to him as a jungle.

Between these two men there existed the kind of affection that had united Robinson Crusoe and good Man Friday. Isolation held them together. Hands had a disfigured face, the professor a warped soul. Hands hated nothing; to the professor hatred of the world of men had become a sinister inspiration. Pye was so malignantly sober in his scorn for all the follies and hypocrisies and conventions of the social scheme that he was too sober to be sane as carnal man understands sanity. Year by year Pye was becoming nothing but a brain, a concentration of pure and merciless intelligence, an intelligence that was hostile to his fellows.

If he had any affection for any creature it was for Hands. Hands could lip-read, and being deaf he never heard the rasp of Alfred Pye’s voice, nor did he feel the abruptness with which his master spoke to him.

“Hands—turn off that radiator.”

“Hands—more bread.”

“Hands—the oil’s too low in the storage tank. When are those damned fools coming to refill it?”

Hands would nod his head reassuringly.

“Yes, sir.”

He had a flat and toneless voice, and eyes that were not unlike the eyes of his dog.

“Yes, sir—I’ll see to it, sir.”

According to Trade Union standards he was one of the most overworked men upon earth, a meek automaton with a curious capacity for devotion. He was sure that Professor Pye was a very wonderful person, a kind of superman. That, too, was Professor Pye’s conviction. The outer world was full of damned fools, monkeys, mountebanks, people who would be better dead. The professor’s egotism had grown like some monstrous fungus, or like a fantastic brain uncontrolled by any of the human reactions. In his younger days—like all normal men—he had wanted to be liked, and the world had not liked him. A bitter and solitary egotism cherished hate.

Sometimes on a summer day he would go up to the little white tower of his house and stand there looking down into that deep, green, beautiful valley. He could command a short strip of the road, and observe the procession of cars passing along the tarmac surface. To the satanic Pye upon his height they looked like tin toys, absurd little mechanisms that crawled and tooted.

“Beetles, ants.”

So—that was civilization, a procession of little standardized robots running around in their little machines, people who had no more originality than flies. An insect world, grubs that daily consumed the pulp of a popular press. Professor Pye’s scorn was cosmic. If he felt himself to be a creature living in a world of other dimensions to those clerks and shopmongers he had some justification for his arrogance. He had a wonderful intelligence. He was living on the brink of catastrophic revelations. He had worked for years in that fascinating atmosphere where things physical melt into the seemingly miraculous. Like Professor Rutherford and his disciples he had been analysing the atom. His dream had been to dissociate the atom, and somewhere he had read that centuries would elapse before man could split and control atomic energy.

Professor Pye had smiled over that particular paragraph in a learned article.

“Damned fools!”

He knew what he knew. The lightning was in his hands. He had but to discover how to control and to project it. And then? No Jove upon Olympus would be so potent as this little grey man of sixty standing alone upon his concrete tower.

The world had misliked him, ignored him, cheated him.

“Damned fools!”

He would give the world thunder and lightning.