CHAPTER III

 

Two flights up, between the piano nobile and the servants' quarters under the roof, Lord Edward Tantamount was busy in his laboratory.

      The younger Tantamounts were generally military.  But the heir being a cripple, Lord Edward's father had destined him for the political career, which the eldest sons had always traditionally begin in the Commons and continued majestically in the Lords.  Hardly had Lord Edward come of age, when he was given a constituency to nurse.  He nursed it dutifully.  But oh, how he hated public speaking!  And when one met a potential voter, what on earth was one to say?  And he couldn't even remember the main items in the Conservative party programme, much less feel enthusiastic about them.  Decidedly, politics were not his line.

      'But what are you interested in?' his father had asked.  And the trouble was that Lord Edward didn't know.  Going to concerts was about the only thing he thoroughly enjoyed.  But obviously, one couldn't spend one's life going to concerts.  The fourth marquess could not conceal his anger and disappointment.  'The boy's an imbecile,' he said, and Lord Edward himself was inclined to agree.  He was good for nothing, a failure; the world had no place for him.  There were times when he thought of suicide.

      'If only he'd sow a few wild oats!' his father had complained.  But the young man was, if possible, even less interested in debauchery than in politics.  'And he's not even a sportsman,' the accusation continued.  It was true.  The massacre of birds, even in the company of the Prince of Wales, left Lord Edward quite unmoved, except perhaps by a faint disgust.  He preferred to sit at home and read, vaguely, desultorily, a little of everything.  But even reading seemed to him unsatisfactory.  The best that could be said of it was that it kept his mind from brooding and killed time.  But what was the good of that?  Killing time with a book was not intrinsically much better than killing pheasants and time with a gun.  He might go on reading like this for the rest of his days; but it would never help him to achieve anything.

      On the afternoon of April 18th, 1887, he was sitting in the library at Tantamount House, wondering whether life was worth living and whether drowning were preferable, as a mode of dying, to shooting.  It was the day that The Times had published the forged letter, supposed to be Parnell's, condoning the Phoenix Park murders.  The fourth marquess had been in a state of apoplectic agitation ever since breakfast.  At the clubs men talked of nothing else.  'I suppose it's very important,' Lord Edward kept saying to himself.  But he found it impossible to take much interest either in Parnellism or in crime.  After listening for a little to what people were saying at the club, he went home in despair.  The library door was open; he entered and dropped into a chair, feeling utterly exhausted as though he had come in from a thirty-mile walk.  'I must be an idiot,' he assured himself, when he thought of other people's political enthusiasms and his own indifference.  He was too modest to attribute the idiocy to the other people.  'I'm hopeless, hopeless.'  He groaned aloud, and in the learned silence of the vast library the sound was appalling.  Death; the end of everything; the river; the revolver ... Time passed.  Even about death, Lord Edward found, he could not think consecutively and attentively.  Even death was a bore.  The current Quarterly lay on the table beside him.  Perhaps it would bore him less than death was doing.  He picked it up, opened it casually and found himself reading a paragraph in the middle of an article about someone called Claude Bernard.  He had never previously heard of Claude Bernard.  A Frenchman, he supposed.  And what, he wondered, was the glycogenic function of the liver?  Some scientific business, evidently.  His eyes skimmed over the page.  There were inverted commas; it was a quotation from Claude Bernard's own writings.

      'The living being does not form an exception to the great natural harmony which makes things adapt themselves to one another; it breaks no concord; it is neither in contradiction to, nor struggling against, general cosmic forces.  Far from that, it is a member of the universal concert of things, and the life of the animal, for example, is only a fragment of the total life of the universe.'

      He read the word, idly first, then more carefully, then several times with a strained attention.  'The life of the animal is only a fragment of the total life of the universe.'  Then what about suicide?  A fragment of the universe would be destroying itself?  No, not destroying; it couldn't destroy itself even if it tried.  It would be changing its mode of existence.  Changing ... Bits of animals and plants became human beings.  What was one day a sheep's hind leg and leaves of spinach was the next part of the hand that wrote, the brain that conceived the slow movement of the Jupiter Symphony.  And another day had come when thirty-six years of pleasures, pains, hungers, loves, thoughts, music, together with infinite unrealized potentialities of melody and harmony had manured an unknown corner of a Viennese cemetery, to be transformed into grass and dandelions, which in their turn had been transformed into sheep, whose hind legs had in their turn been transformed into other musicians, whose bodies in their turn ... It was all obvious, but to Lord Edward an apocalypse.  Suddenly and for the first time he realized his solidarity with the world.  The realization was extraordinarily exciting; he rose from his chair and began to walk agitatedly up and down the room.  His thoughts were confused, but the muddle was bright and violent, not dim, not foggily languid as at ordinary times.  'Perhaps when I was at Vienna last year, I actually consumed a piece of Mozart's substance.  It might have been in a Wiener Schnitzel, or a sausage, or even a glass of beer.  Communion, physical communion.  And that wonderful performance of The Magic Flute - another sort of communion, or perhaps the same, really.  Transubstantiation, cannibalism, chemistry.  It comes down to chemistry in the end, of course.  Legs of mutton and spinach ... all chemistry.  Hydrogen, oxygen ... What are the other things?  God, how infuriating, how infuriating not to know!  All those years at Eton.  Latin verses.  What the devil was the good?  En! distenta ferunt perpingues uberra vaccae.  Why didn't they teach me anything sensible?  "A member of the universal concert of things."  It's all like music; harmonies and counterpoint and modulations.  But you've got to be trained to listen.  Chinese music ... we can't make head or tail of it.  The universal consert - that's Chinese music for me, thanks to Eton.  Glycogenic function of the liver ... it might be in Bantu, so far as I'm concerned.  What a humiliation!  But I can learn, I will learn, I will ...'

      Lord Edward was filled with an extraordinary exultation; he had never felt so happy in his life before.

      That evening he told his father that he was not going to stand for Parliament.  Still agitated by the morning's revelations of Parnellism, the old gentleman was furious.  Lord Edward was entirely unmoved; his mind was made up.  The next day he advertised for a tutor.  In the spring of the following year he was in Berlin working under Du Bois Reymond.

      Forty years had passed since then.  The studies of osmosis, which had indirectly given him a wife, had also given him a reputation.  His work on assimilation and growth was celebrated.  But what he regarded as the real task of his life - the great theoretical treatise on physical biology - was still unfinished.  'The life of the animal is only a fragment of the total life of the universe.'  Claude Bernard's words had been his life-long theme as well as his original inspiration.  The book on which he had been working all these years was but an elaboration, a quantitative and mathematical illustration of them.

      Upstairs in the laboratory the day's work had just begun.  Lord Edward preferred to work at night.  He found the daylight hours disagreeably noisy.  Breakfasting at half-past one, he would work for an hour or two in the afternoon and return to read or write till lunchtime at eight.  At nine or half-past he would do some practical work with his assistant, and when that was over they would sit down to work on the great book or to discussion of its problems.  At one, Lord Edward had his supper, and at about four or five he would go to bed.

      Diminished and in fragments, the B minor Suite came floating up from the great hall to the ears of the two men in the laboratory.  They were too busy to realize that they were hearing it.

      'Forceps,' said Lord Edward to his assistant.  He had a very deep voice, indistinct and without, so to speak, a clearly defined contour.  'A furry voice,' his daughter Lucy had called it, when she was a child.

      Illidge handed him the fine bright instrument.  Lord Edward made a deep noise that signified thanks and turned back with the forceps to the anaesthetized newt that lay stretched out on the diminutive operating table.  Illidge watched him critically, and approved.  The Old Man was doing the job extraordinarily well.  Illidge was always astonished by Lord Edward's skill.  You would never have expected a huge, lumbering creature like the Old Man to be so exquisitely neat.  His big hands could do the finest work; it was a pleasure to watch them.

      'There!' said Lord Edward at last and straightened himself up as far as his rheumatically bent back would allow him.  'I think that's all right, don't you?'

      Illidge nodded.  'Perfectly all right,' he said in an accent that had certainly not been formed in any of the ancient and expensive seats of learning.  It hinted of Lancashire origin.  He was a small man, with a boyish-looking freckled face and red hair.

      The newt began to wake up.  Illidge put it away in a place of safety.  The animal had not tail; it had lost that eight days ago, and tonight the little bud of regenerated tissue which would normally have grown into a new tail had been removed and grafted on to the stump of its amputated right foreleg.  Transplanted to its new position, would the bud turn into a foreleg, or continue incongruously to grow as a tail?  Their first experiment had been with a tail-bud only just formed; it had duly turned into a leg.  In the next, they had given the bud time to grow to a considerable size before they transplanted it; it had proved too far committed to tailhood to be able to adapt itself to the new conditions; they had manufactured a monster with a tail where an arm should have been.  Tonight they were experimenting on a bud of intermediate age.

      Lord Edward took a pipe out of his pocket and began to fill it, looking meditatively meanwhile at the newt.  'Interesting to see what happens this time,' he said in his profound indistinct voice.  'I should think that we must be just about on the border line between ...' He left the sentence unfinished; it was always difficult for him to find the words to express his meaning.  'The bud will have a difficult choice.'

      'To be or not to be,' said Illidge facetiously, and started to laugh; but seeing that Lord Edward showed no signs of having been amused, he checked himself.  Almost put his foot in it again.  He felt annoyed with himself and also, unreasonably, with the Old Man.

      Lord Edward filled his pipe.  'Tail becomes leg,' he said meditatively.  'What's the mechanism?  Chemical peculiarities in the neighbouring ...?  It can't obviously be the blood.  Or do you suppose it has something to do with the electric tension?  It does vary, of course, in different parts of the body.  Though why we don't all just vaguely proliferate like cancers ... Growing in a definite shape is very unlikely, when you come to think of it.  Very mysterious and ...'  His voice trailed off into a deep and husky murmur.

      Illidge listened disapprovingly.  When the Old Man started off like this about the major and fundamental problems of biology, you never knew where he'd be getting to.  Why, as likely as not he'd begin talking about God.  It really made one blush.  He was determined to prevent anything so discreditable happening this time.  'The next step with these newts,' he said in his most briskly practical tone, 'is to tinker with the nervous system and see whether that has any influence on the grafts.  Suppose, for example, we excised a piece of the spine ...'

      But Lord Edward was not listening to his assistant.  He had taken his pipe out of his mouth, he had lifted his head and at the same time slightly cocked it on one side.  He was frowning, as though making an effort to seize and remember something.  He raised his hand in a gesture that commanded silence; Illidge interrupted himself in the middle of his sentence and also listened.  A pattern of melody faintly traced itself upon the silence.

      'Bach?' said Lord Edward in a whisper.

      Pongileoni's blowing and the scraping of the anonymous fiddlers had shaken the air in the great hall, had set the glass of the windows looking on to it vibrating; and this in turn had shaken the air in Lord Edward's apartment on the further side.  The shaking air rattled Lord's Edward's membrana tympani; the interlocked malleus, incus and stirrup bones were set in motion so as to agitate the membrane of the oval window and raise an infinitesimal storm in the fluid of the labyrinth.  The hairy endings of the auditory nerve shuddered like weeds in a rough sea; a vast number of obscure miracles were performed in the brain, and Lord Edward ecstatically whispered 'Bach!'  He smiled with pleasure, his eyes lit up.  The young girl was singing to herself in solitude under the floating clouds.  And then the cloud-solitary philosopher began poetically to meditate.  'We must really go downstairs and listen,' said Lord Edward.  He got up.  'Come,' he said.  'Work can wait.  One doesn't hear this sort of thing every night.'

      'But what about the clothes,' said Illidge doubtfully.  'I can't come down like this.'  He looked down at himself.  It had been a cheap suit at the best of times.  Age had not improved it.

      'Oh, that doesn't matter.'  A dog with the smell of rabbits in his nostrils could hardly have shown a more indecent eagerness than Lord Edward at the sound of Pongileoni's flute.  He took his assistant's arm and hurried him out of the door and along the corridor towards the stairs.  'It's just a little party,' he went on.  'I seem to remember my wife having said ... Quite informal.  And besides,' he added, inventing new excuses to justify the violence of his musical appetite, 'we can just slip in without ... Nobody will notice.'

      Illidge had his doubts.  'I'm afraid it's not a very small party,' he began; he had seen the motors arriving.

      'Never mind, never mind,' interrupted Lord Edward, lusting irrepressibly for Bach.

      Illidge abandoned himself.  He would look like a horrible fool, he reflected, in his shiny blue serge suit.  But perhaps, on second thoughts, it was better to appear in shiny blue - straight from the laboratory, after all, and under the protection of the master of the house (himself in a tweed jacket), than in that old and, as he had perceived during previous excursions into Lady Edward's luscious world, deplorably shoddy and ill-made evening suit of his.  It was better to be totally different from the rich and smart - a visitor from another intellectual planet - than a fourth-rate and snobbish imitator.  Dressed in blue, one might be stared at as an oddity; in badly cut black (like a waiter) one was contemptuously ignored, one was despised for trying without success to be what one obviously wasn't.

      Illidge braced himself to play the part of the Martian visitor with firmness, even assertively.

      Their entrance was even more embarrassingly conspicuous than Illidge had anticipated.  The great staircase at Tantamount House comes down from the first floor in two branches with join, like a pair of equal rivers, to precipitate themselves in a single architectural cataract of Verona marble into the hall.  It debouches under the arcades, in the centre of one of the sides of the covered quadrangle, opposite the vestibule and the front door.  Coming in from the street, one looks across the hall and sees through the central arch of the opposite arcade the wide stairs and shining balustrades climbing up to a landing on which a Venus by Canova, the pride of the third marquess's collection, stands pedestalled in an alcove, screening with a modest but coquettish gesture of her two hands, or rather failing to screen, her marble charms.  It was at the foot of this triumphal slope of marble that Lady Edward had posted the orchestra; her guests were seated in serried rows confronting it.  When Illidge and Lord Edward turned the corner in front of Canova's Venus, tiptoeing, as they approached the music and the listening crowd, with steps ever more laboriously conspiratorial, they found themselves suddenly at the focus of a hundred pairs of eyes.  A gust of curiosity stirred the assembled guests.  The apparition from a world so different from theirs of this huge bent old man, pipe-smoking and tweed-jacketed, seemed strangely portentous.  He had a certain air of the skeleton in the cupboard - broken loose; or of one of those monsters which haunt the palaces of only the best and most aristocratic families.  The Beastie of Glamis, the Minotaur itself could hardly have aroused more interest than did Lord Edward.  Lorgnons were raised, there was a general craning to left and right, as people tried to look round the well-fed obstacles in front of them.  Becoming suddenly aware of so many inquisitive glances, Lord Edward took fright.  A consciousness of social sin possessed him; he took his pipe out of his mouth and put it away, still smoking, into the pocket of his jacket.  He halted irresolutely.  Flight or advance?  He turned this way and that, pivoting his whole bent body from the hips with a curious swinging motion, like the slow ponderous balancing of a camel's neck.  For a moment he wanted to retreat.  But love of Bach was stronger than his terrors.  He was the bear whom the smell of molasses constrains in spite of all his fears to visit the hunters' camp; the lover who is ready to face an armed and outraged husband and the divorce court for the sake of an hour in his mistress's arms.  He went forward, tiptoeing down the stairs more conspiratorially than ever - Guy Fawkes discovered, but yet irrationally hoping that he might escape notice by acting as though the Gunpowder Plot were still unrolling itself according to plan.  Illidge followed him.  His face had gone very red with the embarrassment of the first moment; but in spite of this embarrassment, or rather because of it, he came downstairs after Lord Edward with a kind of swagger, one hand in his pocket, a smile on his lips.  He turned his eyes coolly this way and that over the crowd.  The expression on his face was one of contemptuous amusement.  Too busy being the Martian to look where he was going, Illidge suddenly missed his footing on this unfamiliarly regal staircase with its inordinate treads and dwarfishly low risers.  His foot slipped, he staggered wildly on the brink of a fall, waving his arms, to come to rest, however, still miraculously on his feet, some two or three steps lower down.  He resumed his descent with such dignity as he could muster up.  He felt exceedingly angry, he hated Lady Edward's guests one and all, without exception.