[Additional and concluding portion.]
This damned business of Lathom’s.
People write books about murders, and the nice young men and women in
them enjoy the job of detecting. It is a good game and I like reading
the books. But the emotions of the nice young people are so
well-regulated, or so perfunctory, or something. They don’t feel like
worms and get put off their dinners when they have succeeded in
squeezing a damaging admission out of a friend. They don’t seem to
suffer from fits of retching terror for fear they should find out
something definite. Nor, while struggling with these complicated
miseries, do they ever have to fulfil contracts with publishers.
Sometimes they are filled with a stern sorrow—a nice, Brutus-like
sentiment. I envy their nerves.
My nerves went back on me about the time of our visit to St. Anthony’s.
I took a kind of hysterical pleasure in pointing out that we had no
proof of the murder. I didn’t want proof. I didn’t want to know. It was
like writing one of those horrible letters which call for a decisive
answer one way or another. You post it and wait, and you know that one
morning you will see your correspondent’s handwriting on an envelope,
and feel as hollow as a piece of bamboo. And you wait. Nothing comes.
And after a time you say, “It’s been lost in the post. Now I need not
know. Not now, at any rate. I can still pretend that it’s all right.
Nothing will happen to-day. I can eat my dinner and listen to the
wireless—and perhaps it will go on like that for ever.”
The answer to the Lathom problem seemed to have been lost in the post.
We did not talk about it at home. My wife knew that I winced from it. It
made other subjects impossible, too. Women, for instance, and the way
they influence their lovers—we would start as far off as Gordon Craig’s
theatre-masks or _Gryll Grange_ and Lord Curryfin’s _echeia_, and before
we had gone far, the figure of Clytemnestra would come bobbing over the
horizon, and I would be talking hurriedly, dismissing it, rushing into
technicalities about epode and stasimen, or about the chorus or the
machines—anything. Or if Elizabeth merely asked what we should have for
dinner, it seemed difficult to think of anything that was not flavoured
with mushrooms or founded on beef-stock. We lived for a whole week on
fish once, so sensitive did our minds become.
I got over it, more or less, after a time and, mercifully, Lathom let me
alone. It was not till March that a faint reminding echo of the thing
sounded faintly over the breakfast-table. I got a note from Mr. Perry,
the parson to whom I had once lent a volume of Eddington. At the sight
of his name I got a kind of painful twitching in the sore place.
The note was to invite me to dinner. An old college friend of his, the
extremely celebrated Professor Hoskyns, was coming over to spend the
evening with him. Hoskyns is, of course, a very brilliant physicist, and
Perry thought it would interest me to meet him. One or two other people
were coming as well. If I could put up with a very simple meal, he
thought we should enjoy a really enjoyable talk.
My first instinct was to refuse. I hated the idea of going into the
district and of seeing anybody even remotely connected with the
Harrisons. But the idea of meeting Hoskyns was fascinating. I have that
kind of vaguely inquiring mind that likes to be told what is going on,
even though I could not be troubled to make a single experiment myself,
and should not have the vaguest idea what experiment to make. A pap-fed,
negative, twentieth-century mind, open on all sides and wind-swept by
every passing gust. Elizabeth thought that a chat with a bunch of
scientific men would do me good. We need not, she said, mention the
Harrisons. In the end, I accepted, and I rather think Elizabeth must
have conveyed some sort of warning to Perry, for the Harrisons were not
mentioned.
Perry’s shabby little sitting-room seemed crowded with men and smoke
when I arrived. Professor Hoskyns, long, thin, bald, and much more
human-looking than his Press photographs, was installed in a
broken-springed leather armchair and called Perry “Jim.” There was also
a swarthy little man in spectacles, whom they both called “Stingo,” and
who turned out to be Professor Matthews, the biologist, the man who has
done so much work on heredity. A large, stout, red-faced person with a
boisterous manner was introduced as Waters. He was younger than the
rest, but they all treated him with deference, and it presently appeared
that he was the coming man in chemistry. Desultory conversation made it
clear that Matthews, Hoskyns and Perry had been contemporaries at
Oxford, and that Waters had been brought by Matthews, with whom he was
on terms of the heartiest friendship and disagreement. A thin youth,
with an eager manner and an irrepressible forelock, completed the party.
He sported a clerical collar and informed me that he was the new curate,
and that it was “a wonderful opportunity” to start his ministry under a
man like Mr. Perry.
The dinner was satisfying. A vast beef-steak pudding, an apple-pie of
corresponding size, and tankards of beer, quaffed from Perry’s old
rowing-cups, put us all into a mellow humour. Perry’s asceticism did
not, I am thankful to say, take the form of tough hash and lemonade, in
spite of the presence on his walls of a series of melancholy Arundel
prints, portraying brown and skinny anchorites, apparently nourished on
cabbage-water. It rather tended to the idea of: “Beef, noise, the
Church, vulgarity and beer,” and I judged that in their younger days, my
fellow-guests had kept the progs busy. However, the somewhat wearisome
flood of undergraduate reminiscence was stemmed after a time with
suitable apologies, and Matthews said, a little provocatively:
“So here we all are. I never thought you’d stick to it, Perry. Which has
made your job hardest—the War or people like us?”
“The War,” said Perry, immediately. “It has taken the heart out of
people.”
“Yes. It showed things up a bit,” said Matthews. “Made it hard to
believe in anything.”
“No,” replied the priest. “Made it easy to believe and difficult not to
believe—in anything. Just anything. They believe in everything in a
languid sort of way—in you, in me, in Waters, in Hoskyns, in mascots,
in spiritualism, in education, in the daily papers—why not? It’s
easier, and the various things cancel out and so make it unnecessary to
take any definite steps in any direction.”
“Damn the daily papers,” said Hoskyns. “And damn education. All these
get-clever-quick articles and sixpenny text-books. Before one has time
to verify an experiment, they’re all at you, shrieking to have it
formulated into a theory. And if you do formulate it, they misunderstand
it, or misapply it. If anybody says there are vitamins in tomatoes, they
rush out with a tomato-theory. If somebody says that gamma-rays are
found to have an action on cancer-cells in mice, they proclaim
gamma-rays as a cure-all for everything from old age to a cold in the
head. And if anybody goes quietly away into a corner to experiment with
high-voltage electric currents, they start a lot of ill-informed rubbish
about splitting the atom.”
“Yes,” said Matthews, “I thought I saw some odd remarks attributed to
you the other day about that.”
“Wasting my time,” said Hoskyns. “I told them exactly what they put into
my mouth. You’re right, Jim, they’d believe anything. The elixir of
life—that’s what they really want to get hold of. It would look well in
a headline. If you can’t give ’em a simple formula to cure all human
ills and explain creation, they say you don’t know your business.”
“Ah!” said Perry, with a twinkle of the eye, “but if the Church gives
them a set of formulæ for the same purpose, they say they don’t want
formulæ or dogmas, but just a loving wistfulness.”
“You’re not up-to-date enough,” said Waters. “They like their formulæ to
be red-hot, up-to-the-minute discoveries.”
“Why, so they are,” said Perry. “Look at Stingo here. He tells them that
if two unfit people marry, their unfitness will be visited on their
children unto the third and fourth generation, after which they will
probably die out through mere degeneration. We’ve been telling them that
for three or four thousand years, and Matthews has only just caught up
to us. As a matter of fact, you people are on our side. If _you_ tell
them the things, they may perhaps come to believe in them.”
“And possibly act on them, you think?” said Matthews. “But we have to do
all the work for them, just as you have to do the godly living.”
“That’s not altogether true,” said Perry.
“Near enough. But we do get on a bit faster, because we can give reasons
for things. Show me a germ, and I’ll tell you how to get rid of plague
or cholera. Call it Heaven’s judgment for sin, and all you can do is to
sit down under it.”
“But surely,” struck in the curate, “we are expressly warned in
Scripture against calling things judgments for sin. How about those
eighteen on whom the Tower of Siloam fell?”
“If it was anybody’s sin,” said Perry, “it was probably the carelessness
of the people who built the tower.”
“And that’s usually a sin that finds somebody out,” added Waters.
“Unfortunately, the sinner isn’t always the victim.”
“Why should it be?” said Matthews. “Nature does not work by a scheme of
poetical justice.”
“Nor does God,” said Perry. “We suffer for one another, as, indeed, we
must, being all members one of another. Can you separate the child from
the father, the man from the brute, or even the man from the vegetable
cell, Stingo?”
“No,” said Matthews. “It is you that have tried to keep up that story
about Man in the image of God and lord of nature and so on. But trace
the chain back and you will find every link hold—you yourself,
compounded from your father and mother by the mechanical chemistry of
the chromosomes. Back to your ancestors, back to prehistoric Neanderthal
Man and his cousin, Aurignacian. Neanderthal was a mistake, he wouldn’t
work properly and died out, but the line goes on back, dropping the
misfits, leaving the stabilised forms on the way—back to Arboreal Man,
to the common ancestor Tarsius, to the first Mammal, to the ancestral
bird-form, back to the Reptiles, the Trilobites, back to the queer,
shapeless jellies of life that divide and subdivide eternally in the
waters. The things that found some kind of balance with their
environment persisted, the things that didn’t, died out; and here and
there some freak found its freakishness of advantage and started a new
kind of life with a new equilibrium. At what point, Perry, will you
place your image of God?”
“Well,” said Perry, “I should not attempt to deny that Adam was formed
of the dust of the earth. And your ape-and-tiger ancestry at least
provides me with a scientific authority for original sin. What a mercy
the Church stuck to that dogma, in spite of Rousseau and the noble
savage. If she hadn’t, you scientists would have forced it back on her,
and how silly we should all have looked then.”
“But it was all guess-work,” retorted Matthews, “unless you call it
inspiration, and very inaccurate at that. If the author of Genesis had
said that man was made of sea-water, he would have been nearer the
truth.”
“Well,” said Waters, “he put the beginnings of life on the face of the
waters, which wasn’t so very far off.”
“But how did life begin?” I asked. “After all, there is a difference
between the Organic and the Inorganic. Or there appears to be.”
“That’s for Waters to say,” said Matthews.
“I can’t be very didactic about that,” said the chemist. “But it appears
possible that there was an evolution from Inorganic to Organic through
the Colloids. We can’t say much more, and we haven’t—so far—succeeded
in producing it in the laboratory. Matthews probably still believes that
Mind is a function of Matter, but if he asks me to demonstrate it for
him, I must beg to be excused. I can’t even show that Life is a function
of Matter.”
“The Behaviourists seem to think that what looks like Intelligence and
Freewill are merely mechanical responses to material stimuli,” I
suggested.
“That’s all very well,” said Hoskyns, emerging with a grin from a cloud
of tobacco-smoke, “but all you people talk so cheerfully about Matter,
as if you knew what it was. I don’t, and it’s more or less my job to
know. Go back again, go past your colloids and your sea-water. Go back
to the dust of the earth and the mass of rotating cinders which was
before the ocean even began. Go back to the sun, which threw the planets
off so unexpectedly, owing to a rare accident which might not happen in
a million light-years. Go back to the nebula. Go back to the atom. Do
some of the famous splitting we hear so much about. Where is your
Matter? It isn’t. It is a series of pushes or pulls or vortices in
nothingness. And as for your train of mechanical causation, Matthews,
when you come down to it, it resolves itself into a series of purely
fortuitous movements of something we can’t define in a medium that
doesn’t exist. Even your heredity-business is fortuitous. Why one set of
chromosomes more than any other? Your chain of causation would only be a
real one if all possible combinations and permutations were worked out
in practice. Something is going on, that is as certain as anything can
be—that is, I mean, it is the fundamental assumption we are bound to
make in order to reason at all—but how it started or why it started is
just as mysterious as it was when the first thoughtful savage invented a
god to explain it.”
“Why should it ever have started at all?” said Matthews. “As Matter
passes from one form to another, so forces change from one to another.
Why should we suppose a beginning—or an end if it comes to that? Why
not a perpetually shifting kaleidoscope, going through all its
transformations and starting again?”
“Why, my lad,” replied Hoskyns, “because in that case you will come slap
up against the second law of thermo-dynamics, and that will be the end
of you.”
“Oh!” said Mr. Perry, “the formula that starts so charmingly about
‘Nothing in the statistics of an assemblage’—that appears to be all the
Law and the Prophets nowadays.”
“Yes,” said Hoskyns. “Its general meaning is that Time only works in one
direction, and that when all the permutations and combinations have been
run through, Time will stop, because there will be nothing further by
which we can distinguish its direction. All the possibilities will have
been worked out, all the electrons will have been annihilated, and there
will be nothing more for them to do and no radiant energy left for them
to do it with. That is why there must be an end. And if an end,
presumably a beginning.”
“And the end is implicit in the beginning?” said I.
“Yes; but the intermediate stages are not inevitable in detail, only
overwhelmingly probable in the gross. There, Perry, if you like, you can
reconcile Foreknowledge with Freewill.”
“Life, then, I suppose, is but one more element of randomness,” said I,
“in the randomness of things.”
“Presumably,” said Hoskyns.
There was a pause.
“What is Life?” I asked, suddenly.
“Well, Pontius,” said Waters, “if we could answer that question we
should probably not need to ask the others. At present—chemically
speaking—the nearest definition I can produce is that it is a kind of
bias—a lop-sidedness, so to speak. Possibly that accounts for its
oddness.”
“I’ve said that kind of thing myself,” I said, rather astonished, “just
as a sort of feeble witticism. Have I hit on something true by
accident?”
“More or less. That is to say, it is true that, up to the present, it is
only living substance that has found the trick of transforming a
symmetric, optically inactive compound into a single, asymmetric,
optically active compound. At the moment that Life appeared on this
planet, something happened to the molecular structure of things. They
got a twist, which nobody has ever succeeded in reproducing
mechanically—at least, not without an exercise of deliberate selective
intelligence, which is also, as I suppose you’ll allow, a manifestation
of Life.”
“Thank you,” said Perry. “Do you mind saying the first part over again,
in words that a child could understand?”
“Well, it’s like this,” said Waters. “When the planet cooled, the
molecules of that original inorganic planetary matter were symmetric—if
crystallised, the crystals were symmetric also. That is, they were alike
on both sides, like a geometrical cube, and their reversed or
mirror-images would be identical with themselves. Substances of this
kind are said to be optically inactive; that is to say, if viewed
through the polariscope, they have no power to rotate the beam of
polarised light.”
“We will take your word for it,” said Perry.
“Oh, well, that’s quite simple. Ordinarily speaking, the vibrations in
the æther—need I explain æther?”
“I wish you could,” said Hoskyns.
“We will pass æther,” said Perry.
“Thank you. Well, ordinarily the ætheric vibrations which propagate the
light takes place in all directions at right angles to the path of the
ray. If you pass the ray through a crystal of Iceland spar, these
vibrations are all brought into one plane, like a flat ribbon. That is
what is called a beam of polarised light. Very well, then. If you pass
this polarised light through a substance whose molecular structure is
symmetric, nothing happens to it; the substance is optically inactive.
But if you pass it through, say, a solution of cane sugar, the beam of
polarised light will be twisted, and you will get a spiral effect, like
twisting a strip of paper either to the right or to the left. The cane
sugar is optically active. And why? Because its molecular structure is
asymmetric. The crystals of sugar are not fully developed. There is an
irregularity on one side, and the crystal and its mirror image are
reversed, like my right hand and my left.” He laid the palm of the right
hand on the back of the left to show his meaning. We all frowned and
practised on our own hands.
“Very good,” continued Waters. “Now, we can produce in the laboratory,
by synthesis from inorganic substances, other substances which were at
one time thought to be only the products of living tissues—camphor, for
instance, and some of the alkaloids used in medicine. But what is the
difference between our process and that of Nature? What happens is this.
The substance produced by synthesis always appears in what is called a
racemic form. It consists of two sets of substances—one set having its
asymmetry right-handed and the other left-handed, so that the product as
a whole behaves like an inorganic, symmetric compound; that is, its two
asymmetrics cancel one another out, and the product is optically
inactive and has no power to rotate the beam of polarised light. To get
a substance exactly equivalent to the natural product, we have to split
it into its two asymmetric forms. We can’t do that mechanically. We can
do it by the exercise of our living intelligence, of course, by
laboriously picking out the crystals. Or we can do it by swallowing the
substance, when our bodies will absorb and digest the dextro-rotating
form of, for example, glucose, and pass the lævo-rotating form out
unchanged. Or we can get a living fungus to do it for us, such as blue
mould, which will feed on and destroy the dextro-rotatory half of the
racemic form of paratartaric acid and leave unchanged the lævo-rotatory
half, which is the artificial, laboratory-made half. But we can’t, by
one mechanical laboratory process, turn an inorganic, inactive,
symmetric compound into one single, asymmetric, optically active
compound—and that is what living matter will do cheerfully, day by
day.”
Waters finished his exposition with a smart little thump of the fist on
the table. I knew what that was. It was the postman’s knock, bringing
the answer to that letter of mine. A horrid sinking feeling at the solar
plexus warned me that in a very few minutes I should have to ask a
question. Why need I do it? The subject was remote and difficult. I
could easily pretend not to understand. If there really was a difference
between the synthetic and the natural product, it was not my business to
investigate it. Waters was changing the subject. He had gone back to the
first day of creation. Hang him! Let him stay there!
“So that, as Professor Japp said, as long ago as 1898, ‘The phenomena of
stereo-chemistry support the doctrine of vitalism as revived by the
younger physiologists, and point to the existence of a directive force,
which enters upon the scene with Life itself and which, in no way
violating the laws of the kinetics of atoms’—that ought to comfort you,
Hoskyns—‘determines the course of their operation within the living
organism. That is that at the moment when Life first arose, a directive
force came into play—a force of precisely the same character as that
which enables the intelligent operator, by the exercise of his will, to
select one crystallised enantiomorph and reject its asymmetric
opposite.’ I learnt that passage by heart once, as a safeguard against
cocksureness and a gesture of proper humility in face of my subject.”
“In other words,” said Matthews, “you believe in miracles, and something
appearing out of nowhere. I am sorry to find you on the side of the
angels.”
“It depends what you mean by miracles. I think there is an intelligence
behind it all. Else, why anything at all?”
“You have Jeans on your side anyway,” put in Hoskyns. “He says,
‘Everything points with overwhelming force to a definite event, or
series of events, of creation at some time or times, not infinitely
remote. The universe cannot have originated by chance out of its present
ingredients.’ I can’t tell you what produced the first molecules of gas,
and you can’t tell me what produced the first asymmetric molecules of
Life. The parson here may think he knows.”
“I don’t know,” said Perry, “but I give it a name. I call it God. You
don’t know what the æther is, but you give it a name, and deduce its
attributes from its behaviour. Why shouldn’t I do likewise? You people
are making it all very much easier for me.”
It was no good. I had to ask my question. I burst in, violently,
inappropriately, on this theological discussion:
“You mean to tell me,” I said, “that it is possible to differentiate a
substance produced synthetically in the laboratory from one produced by
living tissue?”
“Certainly,” said Waters, turning to me in some surprise, but apparently
accepting my tardy realisation of this truth as mere vagary of my slow
and unscientific wits. “So long, of course, as the artificial substance
remains in the first or racemic form, for this would be optically
inactive, while that from the living tissues would rotate the beam of
polarised light, when viewed in the polariscope. If, however, that
racemic form had been already split up by the intelligent operator, or
some other living agency, into its two dextro- and lævo-rotary forms, it
would be impossible to distinguish between them.”
I saw a path of escape opening up. Surely the synthetic muscarine at St.
Anthony’s would have had this other operation performed on it. There was
no reason at all why I should interfere. I relapsed into silence, and
the conversation wandered on.
I was recalled to myself by a movement about me. Matthews was explaining
that he had to be getting home. Waters rose to accompany him. In a
minute he would be gone and the opportunity lost. I had only to sit
still.
I got up. I made my fatuous farewells. I said I had a perfectly good
wife to go home to. I thanked my host and said how much I had enjoyed
the evening. I followed the other men out into the narrow hall, with its
loaded umbrella-stand and ugly, discoloured wall-paper.
“Dr. Waters,” I said.
“Yes?” He turned smiling towards me. I must say something now or he
would think me a fool.
“May I have a word with you?”
“By all means. Which way do you go?”
“Bloomsbury,” said I, hoping desperately that he lived at Hendon or
Harringay.
“Excellent, I am going that way myself. Shall we share a taxi?”