"Not in this atmosphere. But I am at the Romeike College. And as soon as
I recalled examining you I remembered it--minutely. You were
intelligent, though unsound--about cryo-hydrates it was. Ah, you
remember me now. As most young women are correct by rote and
unintelligent in such questions, and as it doesn't matter a rap about
anything of that sort, whether you are correct or not, as long as the
mental gesture is right----" He paused for a moment, as though tired of
his sentence. "I remembered you."
He proceeded in his easy and detached manner, that seemed to make every
topic possible, to tell her his first impressions of her, and show how
very distinctly indeed he remembered her.
"You set me philosophizing. I'd never examined a girls' school before,
and I was suddenly struck by the spectacle of the fifty of you. What's
going to become of them all?"
"I thought," he went on, "how bright you were, and how keen and eager
you were--_you_, I mean, in particular--and just how certain it was
your brightness and eagerness would be swallowed up by some silly
ordinariness or other--stuffy marriage or stuffy domestic duties. The
old, old story--done over again with a sort of threadbare badness.
(Nothing to say against it if it's done well.) I got quite sentimental
and pathetic about life's breach of faith with women. Odd, isn't it, how
one's mind runs on. But that's what I thought. It's all come back to
me."
Marjorie's bright, clear eye came round to him. "I don't see very much
wrong with the lot of women," she reflected. "Things are different
nowadays. Anyhow----"
She paused.
"You don't want to be a man?"
"_No!_"
She was emphatic.
"Some of us cut more sharply at life than you think," he said, plumbing
her unspoken sense.
She had never met a man before who understood just how a girl can feel
the slow obtuseness of his sex. It was almost as if he had found her out
at something.
"Oh," she said, "perhaps you do," and looked at him with an increased
interest.
"I'm half-feminine, I believe," he said. "For instance, I've got just a
woman's joy in textures and little significant shapes. I know how you
feel about that. I can spend hours, even now, in crystal gazing--I don't
mean to see some silly revelation of some silly person's proceedings
somewhere, but just for the things themselves. I wonder if you have ever
been in the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, and looked at
Ruskin's crystal collection? I saw it when I was a boy, and it became--I
can't help the word--an obsession. The inclusions like moss and like
trees, and all sorts of fantastic things, and the cleavages and
enclosures with little bubbles, and the lights and shimmer--What were we
talking about? Oh, about the keen way your feminine perceptions cut into
things. And yet somehow I was throwing contempt on the feminine
intelligence. I don't do justice to the order of my thoughts. Never
mind. We've lost the thread. But I wish you knew my mother."
He went on while Marjorie was still considering the proper response to
this.
"You see, I'm her only son and she brought me up, and we know each
other--oh! very well. She helps with my work. She understands nearly all
of it. She makes suggestions. And to this day I don't know if she's the
most original or the most parasitic of creatures. And that's the way
with all women and girls, it seems to me. You're as critical as light,
and as undiscriminating.... I say, do I strike you as talking nonsense?"
"Not a bit," said Marjorie. "But you do go rather fast."
"I know," he admitted. "But somehow you excite me. I've been with
Solomonson a week, and he's dull at all times. It was that made me take
out that monoplane of his. But it did him no good."
He paused.
"They told me after the exam.," said Marjorie, "you knew more about
crystallography--than anyone."
"Does that strike you as a dull subject?"
"No," said Marjorie, in a tone that invited justifications.
"It isn't. I think--naturally, that the world one goes into when one
studies molecular physics is quite the most beautiful of Wonderlands....
I can assure you I work sometimes like a man who is exploring a magic
palace.... Do you know anything of molecular physics?"
"You examined me," said Marjorie.
"The sense one has of exquisite and wonderful rhythms--just beyond sound
and sight! And there's a taunting suggestion of its being all there,
displayed and confessed, if only one were quick enough to see it. Why,
for instance, when you change the composition of a felspar almost
imperceptibly, do the angles change? What's the correspondence between
the altered angle and the substituted atom? Why does this bit of clear
stuff swing the ray of light so much out of its path, and that swing it
more? Then what happens when crystals gutter down, and go into solution.
The endless launching of innumerable little craft. Think what a clear
solution must be if only one had ultra-microscopic eyes and could see
into it, see the extraordinary patternings, the swimming circling
constellations. And then the path of a ray of polarized light beating
through it! It takes me like music. Do you know anything of the effects
of polarized light, the sight of a slice of olivine-gabbro for instance
between crossed Nicols?"
"I've seen some rock sections," said Marjorie. "I forget the names of
the rocks."
"The colours?"
"Oh yes, the colours."
"Is there anything else so rich and beautiful in all the world? And
every different mineral and every variety of that mineral has a
different palette of colours, a different scheme of harmonies--and is
telling you something."
"If only you understood."
"Exactly. All the ordinary stuff of life--you know--the carts and motor
cars and dusty roads and--cinder sifting, seems so blank to me--with
that persuasion of swing and subtlety beneath it all. As if the whole
world was fire and crystal and aquiver--with some sort of cotton
wrappers thrown over it...."
"Dust sheets," said Marjorie. "I know."
"Or like a diamond painted over!"
"With that sort of grey paint, very full of body--that lasts."
"Yes." He smiled at her. "I can't help apologetics. Most people think a
professor of science is just----"
"A professor of science."
"Yes. Something all pedantries and phrases. I want to clear my
character. As though it is foolish to follow a vortex ring into a
vacuum, and wise to whack at a dirty golf ball on a suburban railway
bank. Oh, their golf! Under high heaven!... You don't play golf, do you,
by any chance?"
"Only the woman's part," said Marjorie.
"And they despise us," he said. "Solomonson can hardly hide how he
despises us. Nothing is more wonderful than the way these people go on
despising us who do research, who have this fever of curiosity, who
won't be content with--what did you call those wrappers?"
"Dust sheets."
"Yes, dust sheets. What a life! Swaddling bands, dust sheets and a
shroud! You know, research and discovery aren't nearly so difficult as
people think--if only you have the courage to say a thing or try a thing
now and then that it isn't usual to say or try. And after all----" he
went off at a tangent, "these confounded ordinary people aren't
justified in their contempt. We keep on throwing them things over our
shoulders, electric bells, telephones, Marconigrams. Look at the
beautiful electric trains that come towering down the London streets at
nightfall, ships of light in full sail! Twenty years ago they were as
impossible as immortality. We conquer the seas for these--golfers, puts
arms in their hands that will certainly blow them all to bits if ever
the idiots go to war with them, come sailing out of the air on them----"
He caught Marjorie's eye and stopped.
"_Falling_ out of the air on them," corrected Marjorie very softly.
"That was only an accident," said Mr. Trafford....
So they began a conversation in the lane where the trees met overhead
that went on and went on like a devious path in a shady wood, and
touched upon all manner of things....