Trafford was one of those rare scientific men who really ought to be
engaged in scientific research.
He could never leave an accepted formula alone. His mind was like some
insatiable corrosive, that ate into all the hidden inequalities and
plastered weaknesses of accepted theories, and bit its way through
every plausibility of appearance. He was extraordinarily fertile in
exasperating alternative hypotheses. His invention of destructive test
experiments was as happy as the respectful irony with which he brought
them into contact with the generalizations they doomed. He was already,
at six-and-twenty, hated, abused, obstructed, and respected. He was
still outside the Royal Society, of course, and the editors of the
scientific periodicals admired his papers greatly, and delayed
publication; but it was fairly certain that that pressure of foreign
criticism and competition which prevents English scientific men of good
family and social position from maintaining any such national standards
as we are able to do in art, literature, and politics, would finally
carry him in. And since he had a small professorship worth three hundred
a year, which gave him the command of a sufficient research laboratory
and the services of Mr. Durgan, a private income of nearly three hundred
more, a devoted mother to keep house for him, and an invincible faith in
Truth, he had every prospect of winning in his particular struggle to
inflict more Truth, new lucidities, and fresh powers upon this fractious
and unreasonable universe.
In the world of science now, even more than in the world of literature
and political thought, the thing that is alive struggles,
half-suffocated, amidst a copious production of things born dead. The
endowment of research, the organization of scientific progress, the
creation of salaried posts, and the assignment of honours, has attracted
to this field just that type of man which is least gifted to penetrate
and discover, and least able to admit its own defect or the quality of a
superior. Such men are producing great, bulky masses of imitative
research, futile inquiries, and monstrous entanglements of technicality
about their subjects; and it is to their instinctive antagonism to the
idea of a "gift" in such things that we owe the preposterous conception
of a training for research, the manufacture of mental blinkers that is
to say, to avoid what is the very soul of brilliant inquiry--applicable
discursiveness. The trained investigator is quite the absurdest figure
in the farce of contemporary intellectual life; he is like a bath-chair
perpetually starting to cross the Himalayas by virtue of a licence to do
so. For such enterprises one must have wings. Organization and genius
are antipathetic. The vivid and creative mind, by virtue of its
qualities, is a spasmodic and adventurous mind; it resents blinkers, and
the mere implication that it can be driven in harness to the unexpected.
It demands freedom. It resents regular attendance from ten to four and
punctualities in general and all those paralyzing minor tests of conduct
that are vitally important to the imagination of the authoritative dull.
Consequently, it is being eliminated from its legitimate field, and it
is only here and there among the younger men that such a figure as
Trafford gives any promise of a renewal of that enthusiasm, that
intellectual enterprise, which were distinctive of the great age of
scientific advance.
Trafford was the only son of his parents. His father had been a young
surgeon, more attracted by knowledge than practice, who had been killed
by a scratch of the scalpel in an investigation upon ulcerative
processes, at the age of twenty-nine. Trafford at that time was three
years old, so that he had not the least memory of his father; but his
mother, by a thousand almost unpremeditated touches, had built up a
figure for him and a tradition that was shaping his life. She had loved
her husband passionately, and when he died her love burnt up like a
flame released, and made a god of the good she had known with him. She
was then a very beautiful and active-minded woman of thirty, and she did
her best to reconstruct her life; but she could find nothing so living
in the world as the clear courage, the essential simplicity, and tender
memories of the man she had lost. And she was the more devoted to him
that he had had little weaknesses of temper and bearing, and that an
outrageous campaign had been waged against him that did not cease with
his death. He had, in some medical periodical, published drawings of a
dead dog clamped to display a deformity, and these had been seized upon
by a group of anti-vivisection fanatics as the representation of a
vivisection. A libel action had been pending when he died; but there is
no protection of the dead from libel. That monstrous lie met her on
pamphlet cover, on hoardings, in sensational appeals; it seemed
immortal, and she would have suffered the pains of a dozen suttees if
she could have done so, to show the world how the power and tenderness
of this alleged tormentor of helpless beasts had gripped one woman's
heart. It counted enormously in her decision to remain a widow and
concentrate her life upon her son.
She watched his growth with a care and passionate subtlety that even at
six-and-twenty he was still far from suspecting. She dreaded his
becoming a mother's pet, she sent him away to school and fretted through
long terms alone, that he might be made into a man. She interested
herself in literary work and social affairs lest she should press upon
him unduly. She listened for the crude expression of growing thought in
him with an intensity that was almost anguish. She was too intelligent
to dream of forming his mind, he browsed on every doctrine to find his
own, but she did desire most passionately, she prayed, she prayed in
the darkness of sleepless nights, that the views, the breadths, the
spacious emotions which had ennobled her husband in her eyes should rise
again in him.
There were years of doubt and waiting. He was a good boy and a bad boy,
now brilliant, now touching, now disappointing, now gloriously
reassuring, and now heart-rending as only the children of our blood can
be. He had errors and bad moments, lapses into sheer naughtiness, phases
of indolence, attacks of contagious vulgarity. But more and more surely
she saw him for his father's son; she traced the same great curiosities,
the same keen dauntless questioning; whatever incidents might disturb
and perplex her, his intellectual growth went on strong and clear and
increasing like some sacred flame that is carried in procession, halting
perhaps and swaying a little but keeping on, over the heads of a
tumultuous crowd.
He went from his school to the Royal College of Science, thence to
successes at Cambridge, and thence to Berlin. He travelled a little in
Asia Minor and Persia, had a journey to America, and then came back to
her and London, sunburnt, moustached, manly, and a little strange. When
he had been a boy she had thought his very soul pellucid; it had clouded
opaquely against her scrutiny as he passed into adolescence. Then
through the period of visits and departures, travel together,
separations, he grew into something detached and admirable, a man
curiously reminiscent of his father, unexpectedly different. She ceased
to feel what he was feeling in his mind, had to watch him, infer, guess,
speculate about him. She desired for him and dreaded for him with an
undying tenderness, but she no longer had any assurance that she could
interfere to help him. He had his father's trick of falling into
thought. Her brown eyes would watch him across the flowers and delicate
glass and silver of her dinner table when he dined at home with her.
Sometimes he seemed to forget she existed, sometimes he delighted in
her, talked to amuse her, petted her; sometimes, and then it was she was
happiest, he talked of plays and books with her, discussed general
questions, spoke even of that broadly conceived scheme of work which
engaged so much of his imagination. She knew that it was distinguished
and powerful work. Old friends of her husband spoke of it to her,
praised its inspired directness, its beautiful simplicity. Since the
days of Wollaston, they said, no one had been so witty an experimenter,
no one had got more out of mere scraps of apparatus or contrived more
ingenious simplifications.
When he had accepted the minor Professorship which gave him a footing in
the world of responsible scientific men, she had taken a house in a
quiet street in Chelsea which necessitated a daily walk to his
laboratory. It was a little old Georgian house with worn and graceful
rooms, a dignified front door and a fine gateway of Sussex ironwork much
painted and eaten away. She arranged it with great care; she had kept
most of her furniture, and his study had his father's bureau, and the
selfsame agate paper-weight that had pressed the unfinished paper he
left when he died. She was a woman of persistent friendships, and there
came to her, old connections of those early times trailing fresher and
younger people in their wake, sons, daughters, nephews, disciples; her
son brought home all sorts of interesting men, and it was remarkable to
her that amidst the talk and discussion at her table, she discovered
aspects of her son and often quite intimate aspects she would never have
seen with him alone.
She would not let herself believe that this Indian summer of her life
could last for ever. He was no passionless devotee of research, for all
his silence and restraints. She had seen him kindle with anger at
obstacles and absurdities, and quicken in the presence of beauty. She
knew how readily and richly he responded to beauty. Things happened to
have run smoothly with him so far, that was all. "Of course," she said,
"he must fall in love. It cannot be long before he falls in love."
Once or twice that had seemed to happen, and then it had come to
nothing....
She knew that sooner or later this completion of his possibilities must
come, that the present steadfastness of purpose was a phase in which
forces gathered, that love must sweep into his life as a deep and
passionate disturbance. She wondered where it would take him, whether it
would leave him enriched or devastated. She saw at times how young he
was; she had, as I suppose most older people have about their juniors,
the profoundest doubt whether he was wise enough yet to be trusted with
a thing so good as himself. He had flashes of high-spirited
indiscretion, and at times a wildfire of humour flared in his talk. So
far that had done no worse for him than make an enemy or so in
scientific circles. But she had no idea of the limits of his
excitability. She would watch him and fear for him--she knew the
wreckage love can make--and also she desired that he should lose nothing
that life and his nature could give him.