Durgan showed his old professor the marvels.
"If he chooses to do something here," said Durgan not too hopefully, "a man can...."
"What's become of the little old room where we two used to work?" asked Trafford.
"They'll turn 'em all out presently," said Durgan, "when this part is ready, but just at present it's very much as you left it. There's been precious little research done there since you went away—not what I call research. Females chiefly—and boys. Playing at it. Making themselves into D.Sc.'s by a baby research instead of a man's examination. It's like broaching a thirty-two gallon cask full of Pap to think of it. Lord, sir, the swill! Research! Counting and weighing things! Professor Lake's all right, I suppose, but his work was mostly mathematical; he didn't do much of it here. No, the old days ended, sir, when you...."
He arrested himself, and obviously changed his words. "Got busy with other things."
Trafford surveyed the place; it seemed to him to have shrunken a little in the course of the three years that had intervened since he resigned his position. On the wall at the back there still hung, fly-blown and a little crumpled, an old table of constants he had made for his elasticity researches. Lake had kept it there, for Lake was a man of generous appreciations, and rather proud to follow in the footsteps of an investigator of Trafford's subtlety and vigor. The old sink in the corner where Trafford had once swilled his watch glasses and filled his beakers had been replaced by one of a more modern construction, and the combustion cupboard was unfamiliar, until Durgan pointed out that it had been enlarged. The ground-glass window at the east end showed still the marks of an explosion that had banished a clumsy student from this sanctuary at the very beginning of Trafford's career.
"By Jove!" he said after a silence, "but I did some good work here."
"You did, sir," said Durgan.
"I wonder—I may take it up again presently."
"I doubt it, sir," said Durgan.
"Oh! But suppose I come back?"
"I don't think you would find yourself coming back, sir," said Durgan after judicious consideration.
He adduced no shadow of a reason for his doubt, but some mysterious quality in his words carried conviction to Trafford's mind. He knew that he would never do anything worth doing in molecular physics again. He knew it now conclusively for the first time.
§ 4
He found himself presently in Bond Street. The bright May day had brought out great quantities of people, so that he had to come down from altitudes of abstraction to pick his way among them.
He was struck by the prevailing interest and contentment in the faces he passed. There was no sense of insecurity betrayed, no sense of the deeps and mysteries upon which our being floats like a film. They looked solid, they looked satisfied; surely never before in the history of the world has there been so great a multitude of secure-feeling, satisfied-looking, uninquiring people as there is to-day. All the tragic great things of life seem stupendously remote from them; pain is rare, death is out of sight, religion has shrunken to an inconsiderable, comfortable, reassuring appendage of the daily life. And with the bright small things of immediacy they are so active and alert. Never before has the world seen such multitudes, and a day must come when it will cease to see them for evermore.
As he shouldered his way through the throng before the Oxford Street shop windows he appreciated a queer effect, almost as it were of insanity, about all this rich and abundant and ultimately aimless life, this tremendous spawning and proliferation of uneventful humanity. These individual lives signified no doubt enormously to the individuals, but did all the shining, reflecting, changing existence that went by like bubbles in a stream, signify collectively anything more than the leaping, glittering confusion of shoaling mackerel on a sunlit afternoon? The pretty girl looking into the window schemed picturesque achievements with lace and ribbon, the beggar at the curb was alert for any sympathetic eye, the chauffeur on the waiting taxi-cab watched the twopences ticking on with a quiet satisfaction; each followed a keenly sought immediate end, but altogether? Where were they going altogether? Until he knew that, where was the sanity of statecraft, the excuse of any impersonal effort, the significance of anything beyond a life of appetites and self-seeking instincts?
He found that perplexing suspicion of priggishness affecting him again. Why couldn't he take the gift of life as it seemed these people took it? Why was he continually lapsing into these sombre, dimly religious questionings and doubts? Why after all should he concern himself with these riddles of some collective and ultimate meaning in things? Was he for all his ability and security so afraid of the accidents of life that on that account he clung to this conception of a larger impersonal issue which the world in general seemed to have abandoned so cheerfully? At any rate he did cling to it—and his sense of it made the abounding active life of this stirring, bristling thoroughfare an almost unendurable perplexity....
By the Marble Arch a little crowd had gathered at the pavement edge. He remarked other little knots towards Paddington, and then still others, and inquiring, found the King was presently to pass. They promised themselves the gratification of seeing the King go by. They would see a carriage, they would see horses and coachmen, perhaps even they might catch sight of a raised hat and a bowing figure. And this would be a gratification to them, it would irradiate the day with a sense of experiences, exceptional and precious. For that some of them had already been standing about for two or three hours.
He thought of these waiting people for a time, and then he fell into a speculation about the King. He wondered if the King ever lay awake at three o'clock in the morning and faced the riddle of the eternities or whether he did really take himself seriously and contentedly as being in himself the vital function of the State, performed his ceremonies, went hither and thither through a wilderness of gaping watchers, slept well on it. Was the man satisfied? Was he satisfied with his empire as it was and himself as he was, or did some vision, some high, ironical intimation of the latent and lost possibilities of his empire and of the world of Things Conceivable that lies beyond the poor tawdry splendours of our present loyalties, ever dawn upon him?
Trafford's imagination conjured up a sleepless King Emperor agonizing for humanity....
He turned to his right out of Lancaster Gate into Sussex Square, and came to a stop at the pavement edge.
From across the road he surveyed the wide white front and portals of the house that wasn't big enough for Marjorie.
§ 5
He let himself in with his latchkey.
Malcolm, his man, hovered at the foot of the staircase, and came forward for his hat and gloves and stick.
"Mrs. Trafford in?" asked Trafford.
"She said she would be in by four, sir."
Trafford glanced at his watch and went slowly upstairs.
On the landing there had been a rearrangement of the furniture, and he paused to survey it. The alterations had been made to accommodate a big cloisonné jar, that now glowed a wonder of white and tinted whites and luminous blues upon a dark, deep-shining stand. He noted now the curtain of the window had been changed from something—surely it had been a reddish curtain!—to a sharp clear blue with a black border, that reflected upon and sustained and encouraged the jar tremendously. And the wall behind—? Yes. Its deep brown was darkened to an absolute black behind the jar, and shaded up between the lacquer cabinets on either hand by insensible degrees to the general hue. It was wonderful, perfectly harmonious, and so subtly planned that it seemed it all might have grown, as flowers grow....