He struggled to cut his leg of chicken. Archie was tall and spare, with a sharp nose and bony face, his eyes soft and brown, his hair dark and lank. He wore a suit of Donegal tweed with a red knitted tie in a loose collar, an outfit which other young men of his background would have thought more suitable for the butts than Belgravia.
'This chicken,' complained David Mellors across the oval mahogany table. 'I don't know what disease it succumbed to, but it's got a bad case of rigor mortis.'
'Watson, can't you do better than this?' demanded Archie of his manservant, who appeared with a dish of greyish boiled potatoes. The Jeeves was knobbly-faced, bald, tubby and flat footed. Archie proudly claimed the man never needed call him 'Sir'. The effect was his being uninterruptedly rude to all three of us.
'What's wrong with it?' Watson asked.
'We can't cut it, let alone eat it.'
David poured himself another glass of the chateau bottled claret. The food at Archie's was terrible, the drink superb and plentiful, and he never seemed to worry at our helping ourselves.
'You can't expect me to work miracles,' Watson replied surlily. 'If you wants proper vittles, you'll have to get a proper cook.'
'I'm sorry cooking is too much for you, Watson,' Archie told him apologetically. 'I'd engage a cook tomorrow, but you know how I disapprove of a house full of servants.'
'Then you'd better go out to Lyons Corner House. I can't do everything. Keeping this place clean is like dusting the bloody British Museum.'
'Of course, Watson, I appreciate all you do to make us comfortable.'
'If you don't want your chicken, I'll clear it away,' Watson said aggressively.
No, no, Watson, we'll try.'
'I've got some bicarbonate outside, and there's a stomach pump at Mary's,' said David.
'Watson really is a little difficult,' Archie murmured as he left. 'But if I didn't employ him, nobody else would. I just can't agree with you, Jim,' he resumed. 'I cannot take the Nazis seriously.'
'You haven't seen them at close quarters. I've been interrogated by them. That was quite frightening.'
'Yes, but Germans tend to browbeat people as a matter of course. It's part of the national character.'
'That's the very secret of Nazism. They exaggerate and twist every thought inside a German head. What once passed as normal now becomes dangerous and grotesque. Love of country, respect for discipline, pride in race…even uniforms and torchlight parades and camp fires, perfectly harmless in themselves, are these days exploited to the single end of the glorification of Adolf Hitler.'
'The Germans are perhaps a _krankes Volk,_ a sick people,' Archie reflected. 'But I'm perfectly certain that Hitler is simply whipping up excitement for excitement's sake, like a speedway rider or circus performer. To keep his people's minds off the economic situation.'
'You mean, Hitler's just the Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze?'
'Roughly, yes.'
'Oh, God. You blind fool.' I pushed away the chicken. I wasn't hungry any more, anyway. I had come back from Germany full of the dangers of Hitler and the blessings of sulphonamide. Nobody would believe me about either. I began to suspect I was in the wrong.
The following week, Archie found me my job. His father was the creator of Fry's Carbolic Soap, and a thousand other items by which the British masses removed their natural odours and substituted others. He was also a governor of the Arundel College which employs me to this day, which is akin to the Imperial College of Science in Kensington. In his secretively generous way, Archie got his father to grant a few hundred pounds for research into the disinfectant properties of various medicated soaps, and there was no difficulty in my being appointed its beneficiary.
Research in those days carried no glamorous suggestion of white-coated armies steadily advancing the frontiers of knowledge. It did not exist outside the few universities and exceptional departments like Sir Almroth Wright's. A busy Harley Street specialist might cut up a cat as spare-time relaxation, comparable with salmon fishing or hospital politics. If you needed research apparatus more elaborate than a Bunsen burner or a retort you constructed it yourself. There was nobody to manufacture it. There was anyway no money to buy it. I started that summer to examine the potency of antiseptics like carbolic, chlorine, formaldehyde or iodine against common household germs. In the end, I found plain soap to be more effective than any of them, I hope to the gratification of my sponsor.
But first I had to supply myself with germs, for which I turned to an acquaintance of my days in St Mary's, Dr Leonard Colebrook.
'Coli'-everyone called Colebrook by his bacteriological nickname from _Bacillus coli,_ even himself-was reared a strict Nonconformist, frugal, teetotal, his interests only gardening and euthanasia. Like me, he was a grammar school boy. He was due to leave the Inoculation Department the year after I quit it for Cambridge, and again like me found himself without hope of a job. Coli was grateful for a salary of Ј100 a year to work in the research laboratory of Queen Charlotte's Maternity Hospital, which midwives know the world over. He was still there, and the hospital was just down the way from Arundel College in the Marylebone Road.
Coli often bustled into Arundel from his little open Morris Oxford, with a bag which seemed more suited for the necessities of a leisured weekend than a day's work, which he would drop while simultaneously whipping off his Homburg hat and struggling from an enormous, enveloping raincoat, in another moment deep in discussion with some member of the staff more elevated than myself. I had started at Arundel promptly at the beginning of August, and during my second week intercepted him in the marble-lined hall.
'Why, it's Elgar. What have you been doing with yourself?' he asked amiably. He was slightly built and barely five feet tall, just turned fifty. 'The last I heard, you'd got a First at Cambridge and were doing some work on staining techniques with Hopkins. Well done.'
I told him about Wuppertal. He remarked, 'How's your German?'
'It's improved, _das versteht sich.'_
'German is essential for keeping up to date in any of the sciences.' Coli matched a deep voice with a deliberate, solemn way of saying things. 'You'll remember, I took myself off to Breslau while you were working under The Lion.' He used the more flattering soubriquet for Sir Almroth Wright. The pair were so close they were often compared in the department with father and son.
He mentioned Fleming and his mould juice. 'It was your fault, wasn't it, that the penicillium ever contaminated his Petri dish? Did you know that Professor Raistrick tried to purify the stuff, down the road from here at the London School of Tropical Medicine?' I had never heard of anyone interested in penicillin outside St Mary's. 'That must have been in 1929, or thereabouts. Flem sent him a sample from that original spore-Raistrick knows absolutely everything about moulds, of course. He tried growing it on a special glucose solution. It produced a sort of mat on the surface, but the potency's all in the juice underneath.'
My chemist's curiosity aroused, I asked, 'I suppose Raistrick never isolated the active principle?'
'He hadn't much luck. He ended up with a yellow pigment which he called "chrysogenin", and he tried extracting penicillin from it with ether. But unfortunately the penicillin simply disappeared into thin air. And you can't identify a chemical if it's too unstable to stay under your nose for more than half a minute.'
'No, of course not.'
'After that, I fancy Raistrick rather lost interest. They had other bad luck. One of his staff working on the mould juice was killed in a road accident, another died. They wrote an inconclusive paper about it in the _Biochemical Journal _towards the end of 1932, if you're interested.'