“Ask her in, James”; and he thought: ‘If that’s Dinny, where did I put my wits?’
“Oh! Dinny! Canrobert says that this maxilla is pre-Trinil. Mokley says Paulo-post-Piltdown; and Eldon P. Burbank says propter Rhodesian. I say Sapiens; observe that molar.”
“I do, Uncle Adrian.”
“Too human altogether. That man had toothache. Toothache was probably the result of artistic development. Altamiran art and Cromagnon cavities are found together. Homo Sapiens, this chap.”
“No toothache without wisdom—how cheery! I’ve come up to see Uncle Hilary and Uncle Lawrence, but I thought if I had lunch with you first, I should feel stronger.”
“We shall,” said Adrian, “therefore go to the Bulgarian cafй.”
“Why?”
“Because for the moment we shall get good food there. It’s the latest propaganda restaurant, my dear, so we are probably safe at a moderate price. Do you want to powder your nose?”
“Yes.”
“In here, then.”
While she was gone Adrian stood and stroked his goatee and wondered exactly what he could order for eighteen and sixpence; for, being a public servant without private means, he rarely had more than a pound in his pocket.
“What,” said Dinny, when they were seated before an omelette Bulgarienne, “do you know about Professor Hallorsen, Uncle Adrian?”
“The man who set out to discover the sources of civilisation in Bolivia?”
“Yes; and took Hubert with him.”
“Ah! But left him behind, I gather?”
“Did you ever meet him?”
“I did. I met him in 1920, climbing the ‘Little Sinner’ in the Dolomites.”
“Did you like him?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Well, he was so aggressively young, he beat me to the top, and—he reminded me of baseball. Did you ever see baseball played?”
“No.”
“I saw it once in Washington. You insult your opponent so as to shake his nerve. You call him doughboy and attaboy, and President Wilson and Old Man Ribber, and things like that, just when he’s going to hit the ball. It’s ritual. The point is to win at any cost.”
“Don’t you believe in winning at any cost?”
“Nobody says they do, Dinny.”
“And we all try to when it comes to the point?”
“I have known it occur, even with politicians, Dinny.”
“Would you try to win at any cost, Uncle?”
“Probably.”
“You wouldn’t. I should.”
“You are very kind, my dear; but why this local disparagement?”
“Because I feel as bloodthirsty as a mosquito about Hubert’s case. I spent last night reading his diary.”
“Woman,” said Adrian, slowly, “has not yet lost her divine irresponsibility.”
“Do you think we’re in danger of losing it?”
“No, because whatever your sex may say, you never will annihilate man’s innate sense of leading you about.”
“What is the best way to annihilate a man like Hallorsen, Uncle Adrian?”
“Apart from a club, ridicule.”
“His notion about Bolivian civilisation was absurd, I suppose?”
“Wholly. There are, we know, some curious and unexplained stone monsters up there, but his theory, if I understand it, won’t wash at all. Only, my dear, Hubert would appear to be involved in it.”
“Not scientifically; he just went as transport officer.” And Dinny levelled a smile at her Uncle’s eyes. “It wouldn’t do any harm, would it, to hold up a stunt like that to ridicule? You could do it so beautifully, Uncle.”
“Serpent!”
“But isn’t it the duty of serious scientists to ridicule stunts?”
“If Hallorsen were an Englishman—perhaps; but his being an American brings in other considerations.”
“Why? I thought Science paid no regard to frontiers.”
“In theory. In practice we close the other eye. Americans are very touchy. You remember a certain recent attitude towards Evolution; if we had let out our shout of laughter over that, there might almost have been a war.”
“But most Americans laughed at it too.”
“Yes; but they won’t stand for outsiders laughing at their kith and kin. Have some of this soufflй Sofia?”
They ate in silence, each studying sympathetically the other’s face. Dinny was thinking: ‘I love his wrinkles, and it’s a nice little beard for a beard.’ Adrian was thinking: ‘I’m glad her nose turns up a little. I have very engaging nieces and nephews.’ At last she said:
“Well, Uncle Adrian, will you try and think of any way of strafing that man for the scurvy way he’s treated Hubert?”
“Where is he?”
“Hubert says in the States.”
“Have you considered, my dear, that nepotism is undesirable?”
“So is injustice, Uncle; and blood is thicker than water.”
“And this wine,” said Adrian, with a grimace, “is thicker than either. What are you going to see Hilary about?”
“I want to scrounge an introduction to Lord Saxenden.”
“Why?”
“Father says he’s important.”
“So you are out to ‘pull strings,’ as they say?”
Dinny nodded.
“No sensitive and honest person can pull strings successfully, Dinny.”
Her eyebrows twitched and her teeth, very white and even, appeared in a broad smile.
“But I’m neither, dear.”
“We shall see. In the meantime these cigarettes are really tiptop propaganda. Have one?”
Dinny took a cigarette, and, with a long puff, said:
“You saw great-Uncle ‘Cuffs’, didn’t you, Uncle Adrian?”
“Yes. A dignified departure. He died in amber, as you might say. Wasted on the Church; he was the perfect diplomat, was Uncle ‘Cuffs.’”
“I only saw him twice. But do you mean to say that HE couldn’t get what he wanted, without loss of dignity, by pulling strings?”
“It wasn’t exactly pulling strings with him, my dear; it was suavity and power of personality.”
“Manners?”
“Manner—the Grand; it about died with him.”
“Well, Uncle, I must be going; wish me dishonesty and a thick skin.”
“And I,” said Adrian, “will return to the jawbone of the New Guinean with which I hope to smite my learned brethren. If I can help Hubert in any decent way, I will. At all events I’ll think about it. Give him my love, and good-bye, my dear!”
They parted, and Adrian went back to his museum. Regaining his position above the maxilla, he thought of a very different jawbone. Having reached an age when the blood of spare men with moderate habits has an even-tempered flow, his ‘infatuation’ with Diana Ferse, dating back to years before her fatal marriage, had a certain quality of altruism. He desired her happiness before his own. In his almost continual thoughts about her the consideration ‘What’s best for her?’ was ever foremost. He had done without her for so long that importunity (never in his character) was out of the question where she was concerned. But her face, oval and dark-eyed, delicious in lip and nose, and a little sad in repose, constantly blurred the outlines of maxillae, thighbones, and the other interesting phenomena of his job. She and her two children lived in a small Chelsea house on the income of a husband who for four years had been a patient in a private Mental Home, and was never expected to recover his equilibrium. She was nearly forty, and had been through dreadful times before Ferse had definitely toppled over the edge. Of the old school in thought and manner, and trained to a coherent view of human history, Adrian accepted life with half-humorous fatalism. He was not of the reforming type, and the position of his lady love did not inspire him with a desire for the scalp of marriage. He wanted her to be happy, but did not see how in the existing circumstances he could make her so. She had at least peace and the sufficient income of him who had been smitten by Fate. Moreover, Adrian had something of the superstitious regard felt by primitive men for those afflicted with this particular form of misfortune. Ferse had been a decent fellow till the taint began to wear through the coatings of health and education, and his conduct for the two years before his eclipse was only too liberally explained by that eclipse. He was one of God’s afflicted; and his helplessness demanded of one the utmost scrupulosity. Adrian turned from the maxilla and took down a built-up cast of Pithecanthropus, that curious being from Trinil, Java, who for so long has divided opinion as to whether he shall be called man-ape or ape-man. What a distance from him to that modern English skull over the mantelpiece! Ransack the authorities as one might, one never received an answer to the question: Where was the cradle of Homo Sapiens, the nest where he had developed from Trinil, Piltdown, Neanderthal man, or from some other undiscovered collateral of those creatures? If Adrian had a passion, indeed, except for Diana Ferse, it was a burning desire to fix that breeding spot. They were toying now with the idea of descent from Neanderthal man, but he felt it wouldn’t do. When specialisation had reached a stage so definite as that disclosed by those brutish specimens, it did not swerve to type so different. As well expect development of red-deer from elk! He turned to that huge globe whereon were marked all discoveries of moment concerning the origin of modern Man, annotated in his own neat handwriting with notes on geological changes, time and climate. Where—where to look? It was a detective problem, soluble only in the French fashion by instinctive appreciation of the inherently probable locality, ratified by research at the selected spot—the greatest detective problem in the world. The foothills of the Himalayas, the Fayoum, or somewhere now submerged beneath the sea? If, indeed, it were under the sea, then it would never be established to certainty. Academic—the whole thing? Not quite, for with it was conjoined the question of man’s essence, the real primitive nature of the human being, on which social philosophy might and should be founded—a question nicely revived of late: Whether, indeed, man was fundamentally decent and peaceful, as examination into the lives of animals and some so-called savage peoples seemed to suggest, or fundamentally aggressive and restless, as that lugubrious record, History, seemed to assert? Find the breeding nest of Homo Sapiens, and there would emerge perhaps some evidence to decide whether he was devil-angel or angel-devil. To one with Adrian’s instincts there was great attraction in this revived thesis of the inherent gentleness of man, but his habit of mind refused to subscribe easily or wholesale to any kind of thesis. Even gentle beasts and birds lived by the law of self-preservation; so did primitive man; the devilries of sophisticated man began naturally with the extension of his activities and the increase of his competitions—in other words, with the ramifications of self-preservation induced by so-called civilised life. The uncomplicated existence of uncivilised man might well afford less chance to the instinct of self-preservation to be sinister in its manifestations, but you could hardly argue anything from that. Better to accept modern man as he was and try to curb his opportunities for mischief. Nor would it do to bank too much on the natural gentleness of primitive peoples. Only last night he had read of an elephant hunt in Central Africa, wherein the primitive negroes, men and women, who were beating for the white hunters, had fallen upon the carcasses of the slain elephants, torn them limb from limb, flesh from flesh, eaten it all dripping and raw, then vanished into the woods, couple by couple, to complete their orgy. After all, there was something in civilisation! But at this moment his janitor announced: