With sardonic gusto, Winslow proposed my health and then Martin’s. We sipped the port. The fire was warm on our faces. Martin and I, not to be outfaced by Winslow, spoke of previous times when we had dined together in that room. The old man, satisfied with his performance, was becoming a little sleepy. The room was hot and comfortable. Some of the young men began to talk. Then the door clicked open: for a second I thought it was the waiter with the coffee, coming early because it was Christmas night: but it was Skeffington.
Winslow roused himself, his eyes red round the rims.
“My dear boy,” he said, “this is a most unexpected pleasure. Pray take a glass of port.”
“I apologise, Mr President,” said Skeffington. I noticed that his first glance had been in the direction of Martin.
“Don’t apologise, but sit down and fill your glass.”
It was unusual, but not startlingly so, for Fellows who had missed dinner to drop in afterwards for wine. As a rule, one would have taken it without curiosity, as most of them were taking it that night. But I couldn’t; nor, I felt sure, could Martin. Skeffington had sat down, and in silence watched his glass being filled. He was not dressed: for him, so formal and stiff with protocol, that was odd in itself. In a blue suit, his head thrown back, his cheeks high-coloured, he looked out of place in that circle.
The conversation went on, but Skeffington did not take part in it and Winslow was nearly asleep again. It was not long before Martin got to his feet. When we had said our good nights, and were outside in the court, I was not surprised to hear Skeffington come up behind us. “As a matter of fact,” he said to Martin, “I should like a word with you.”
“Do you want me alone?” said Martin.
“I’d just as soon Lewis knew,” said Skeffington.
Martin said that we had better go up to his rooms. They struck dank and cold, even on that muggy night. He switched on the electric fire, standing incongruously in the big sixteenth-century hearth.
“Well, Julian?” said Martin.
“I didn’t think I ought to keep it to myself any longer.”
“What is it?”
“The last few days I’ve been going more into the business of this chap Howard.”
“Yes?” Martin was still impassive, but bright-eyed.
“I can’t see any way out of it. I believe that he’s been telling the truth.”
7: The Component of Contempt
FOR an instant, none of us moved. It would have been hard to tell whether Martin had heard what Skeffington had just said. He was not looking at Skeffington. He gazed steadily at the hearth, in which the electric fire had one small incandescent star, much brighter than the glowing bars, where a contact had worked loose.
“What made you go into the business again?” he said at last, as though merely curious, as though that were the only question on his mind.
“I tell you,” said Skeffington, temper near the surface, “that he’s been telling the truth.”
“Can you prove it?” said Martin sharply.
“I can prove it enough to satisfy myself. Damn it, do you think I want to blackguard the old man?”
“That’s fair comment,” said Martin. “But have you got a hundred per cent proof that’ll satisfy everybody else?”
“Have you?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know what you intend to do,” I said, “but can you do anything without what a lawyer would think of as a proof? Have you got one?”
He looked flushed and haughty.
“In that sense,” he said, “I’m not sure that I have. But it will be good enough for reasonable people.”
“Then what do you intend to do?” Martin took up my question.
“The first thing is to get this chap Howard a square deal. That goes without question.”
He said it simply, honourably, and with his habitual trace of admonition and priggishness.
“When did you decide that?”
“The moment I realised that there was only one answer to the whole business. That was yesterday afternoon, though for forty-eight hours I hadn’t been able to see any other option.”
“I’m sorry,” said Martin, turning to him, “but it’s not so easy to accept that there can’t be one.”
“Don’t you think I’ve made sure that I’ve closed all the holes?”
“Don’t you think you might be wrong? After all, you’re saying you’ve been wrong once before, aren’t you?”
“You’ll see that I’m not wrong,” said Skeffington. “And there’s one point where I’d like your advice, both of you.”
He began answering the question Martin had asked first — what had made him “go into the business again”? It happened that, though Skeffington’s wife had not often seen her uncle Palairet while he was alive, she was on good terms with his solicitors. A partner in the firm had mentioned to the Skeffingtons that the last box of the old man’s papers was being sent to the college. Skeffington had, of course, thought it his duty to go through them.
As he explained, I thought, as I had done before, that his voice did not live up to his looks. It was both monotonous and brittle. But his mind was more competent than I had given him credit for. It was precise, tough, not specially imaginative, but very lucid. People had given me the impression that he was an amateur, and lucky ever to have been elected. I began to doubt it.
I was interested in his attitude towards old Palairet. Obviously he had not known him well. Skeffington seemed to have had an impersonal respect for him as a scientist of reputation, such as Skeffington himself longed to be. For Skeffington felt a vocation for science. He might be rich, he might be smart: he was not at ease with the academics, he could not talk to them as he had been able to talk to his brother-officers: the reason why he could get on with Martin and me was that he had met us in the official world, and knew some of the people we knew. Yet for all that, though he could not in his heart accept most of “those chaps” as social equals, he longed to win their recognition. He longed to do good work, as Palairet and Getliffe had done; he might have said this was setting his sights too high, but he was seeking exactly that kind of esteem.
“How did your wife get on with her uncle?” I asked, just as he was leading off into the scientific exposition.
“Oh,” said Skeffington, “he never saw her jokes.”
For a second I caught a sparkle in Martin’s eye. As I had heard him give both Skeffingtons maximum marks for humourlessness, I wondered what astonishing picture that reply conveyed.
As Skeffington went on, I found both him and Martin agreeing that whatever the old man was like, most of his scientific work was sound and safely established on the permanent record. His major set of researches were “textbook stuff”, Skeffington insisted.
“That’s what I don’t understand,” said Skeffington, simple, high-minded, incredulous. “Because, assuming that he cooked this other business, it couldn’t have done him tuppence-ha’pennyworth of good. It just doesn’t count beside the real good, solid stuff he’d got behind him. Was he crackers, do you think?”
The old man had done first-class scientific research, they told me: his major work, on the diffraction of atomic particles, was “quite water-tight”: some of the photographs were reproduced in the standard books. Martin fetched down a couple of volumes, and showed me the photographs, rather like rifle targets with alternate rings of light and dark. Those results were beyond dispute: they had been repeated, time and time again, in laboratories all over the world.
It was also beyond dispute that Palairet had become interested in an extension of his technique — not an important extension, something which only counted “marginally”, by the side of his established work. He had expected to be able to apply his technique to a slightly different kind of particle-diffraction. “For a rather highbrow reason, that no one could possibly have thought up a year ago, we now know it couldn’t work,” said Skeffington. But the old man had expected it to work. So had Howard, doing his research under the old man’s eye. The photograph in Howard’s paper demonstrated that it did work, said Martin, with a grim chuckle: demonstrated it by the unorthodox device of taking a genuine diffraction photograph and “blowing it up”, just like enlarging an ordinary photograph, so as to increase the distances between the light rings and the dark. It was from these distances that Howard in his paper had calculated the wave-lengths of the particles. “After blowing it up, someone got the results he expected,” said Skeffington.