Glory, alleluia! Then we will be married at Easter. Curse Uncle Edward’s
scruples! I could make you just as good a husband in Lent—but, as you
say, it’s a shame to upset the old boy. Now that the remote prospect has
really come so (comparatively) near, I feel all wobbly and inadequate.
It’s like bracing your muscles to pick up a heavy bag and finding
there’s nothing in it. One thought it was years off—and here it is—and
there it is, and that’s that.
Well!
Well, we are going to be married at Easter.
Well—it will be a good excuse for refusing silly invitations. No time.
Frightfully sorry. Going to be married at Easter, you know. A lot to do.
Ring. Best man. Bridesmaids’ presents and all that. Excuse me, old man,
I’ve got to see my tailor. Cheer-frightfully-ho, don’t you know.
I couldn’t get rid of Leader that way, though. He was horribly hearty
and stayed a very long time, and insisted on Lathom’s and my going down
to the College to see over the labs, and “meet a few of the men,” who
all hated me at sight, by the way, when they _did_ see me. I thought the
sooner we got it over the better, so we went this afternoon. Lathom is
in one of his vagrom moods—doing no work, and catching at any excuse to
waste time. I tried to get out of it, but no! I “absolutely must come,
old man.” I take it the idea was to impress Leader’s friends with the
idea that men of intellect are proud to know him. It had not occurred to
me that best-selling had such idiotic accompaniments.
Leader was in his element, of course, showing off his half-baked
knowledge, and exhibiting fragments of anatomy in bottles. I can see
Leader one of these days as the principal witness at an inquest,
frightfully slapdash and cocksure, professing that he can tell the time
of the murder to within five minutes by taking half a glance at the
corpse, and swearing somebody’s life away with cheerful confidence in
his own infallibility. He was highly impressive in the dissecting-room,
but at his best, I think, displaying his knowledge of poisons (which, by
the way, they seem to keep handy on the open shelves for any passing
visitor to help himself to). He was very great on synthetic drugs—all
made on the premises out of God knows what, and imitating nature so
abominably—abominably well, that is—that chemical analysis can’t tell
them apart. Indeed, indeed, sirs (and apart from the wearisomeness of
Leader), but this troubles me. Synthetic perfumes from coal-tar are bad
enough, and synthetic dyes, and I can put up with synthetic camphor and
synthetic poisons, but when it comes to synthetic gland-extracts like
adrenalin and thyroxin, I begin to get worried. Synthetic vitamins next,
I suppose, and synthetic beef and cabbages—and after that, synthetic
babies. So far, however, they don’t seem to have been able to make
synthetic life—the nearest they have got is stimulating frog-spawn into
life with needles. But what of the years to come? If, as the
bio-chemists say, life is only a very complicated chemical process, will
the difference between life and death be first expressible in a formula
and then prisonable in a bottle?
This is a jolly kind of letter to write to you, old girl, on this
auspicious occasion, but this everlasting question of life and the
making of life seems to haunt me—and it is, after all, not so remote
from the problem of marriage. We can pass it on and re-continue it, but
what is it? They say now that the universe is finite, and that there is
only so much matter in it and no more. But does life obey the same rule,
or can it emerge indefinitely from the lifeless? Where was it, when the
world was only a dusty chaos of whirling gas and cinders? What started
it? What gave it the thrust, the bias, to roll so ceaselessly and so
eccentrically. To look forward is easy—the final inertia, when the last
atom of energy has been shaken out of the disintegrating atom—when the
clocks stand still and time’s arrow has neither point nor shaft—but the
beginning!
One thing is certain. If I begin to think like this, I shall never write
another best-seller. Heaven preserve us from random speculation! Our own
immediate affairs are as important as the loves of the electrons in this
universe of infinitesimal immensities, and as far as we are concerned.
. . .
[The remainder of this letter, being of a very intimate nature, is not
available.]