The world of Trafford and Marjorie was filled and transfigured by the
advent of their child.
For two days of abundant silences he had been preparing a statement of
his case for her, he had been full of the danger to his research and all
the waste of his life that her extravagance threatened. He wanted to
tell her just all that his science meant to him, explain how his income
and life had all been arranged to leave him, mind and time and energy,
free for these commanding investigations. His life was to him the
service of knowledge--or futility. He had perceived that she did not
understand this in him; that for her, life was a blaze of eagerly sought
experiences and gratifications. So far he had thought out things and had
them ready for her. But now all this impending discussion vanished out
of his world. Their love was to be crowned by the miracle of parentage.
This fact flooded his outlook and submerged every other consideration.
This manifest probability came to him as if it were an unforeseen
marvel. It was as if he had never thought of such a thing before, as
though a fact entirely novel in the order of the universe had come into
existence. Marjorie became again magical and wonderful for him, but in a
manner new and strange, she was grave, solemn, significant. He was
filled with a passionate solicitude for her welfare, and a passionate
desire to serve her. It seemed impossible to him that only a day or so
ago he should have been accusing her in his heart of disloyalty, and
searching for excuses and mitigations....
All the freshness of his first love for Marjorie returned, his keen
sense of the sweet gallantry of her voice and bearing, his admiration
for the swift, falconlike swoop of her decisions, for the grace and
poise of her body, and the steady frankness of her eyes; but now it was
all charged with his sense of this new joint life germinating at the
heart of her slender vigour, spreading throughout her being to change it
altogether into womanhood for ever. In this new light his passion for
research and all the scheme of his life appeared faded and unworthy, as
much egotism as if he had been devoted to hunting or golf or any such
aimless preoccupation. Fatherhood gripped him and faced him about. It
was manifestly a monstrous thing that he should ever have expected
Marjorie to become a mere undisturbing accessory to the selfish
intellectualism of his career, to shave and limit herself to a mere
bachelor income, and play no part of her own in the movement of the
world. He knew better now. Research must fall into its proper place,
and for his immediate business he must set to work to supplement his
manifestly inadequate resources.
At first he could form no plan at all for doing that. He determined that
research must still have his morning hours until lunch-time, and, he
privately resolved, some part of the night. The rest of his day, he
thought, he would set aside for a time to money-making. But he was
altogether inexperienced in the methods of money-making; it was a new
problem, and a new sort of problem to him altogether. He discovered
himself helpless and rather silly in the matter. The more obvious
possibilities seemed to be that he might lecture upon his science or
write. He communicated with a couple of lecture agencies, and was amazed
at their scepticism; no doubt he knew his science, on that point they
were complimentary in a profuse, unconvincing manner, but could he
interest like X--and here they named a notorious quack--could he _draw_?
He offered Science Notes to a weekly periodical; the editor answered
that for the purposes of his publication he preferred, as between
professors and journalists, journalists. "You real scientific men," he
said, "are no doubt a thousand times more accurate and novel and all
that, but as no one seems able to understand you----" He went to his old
fellow-student, Gwenn, who was editing _The Scientific Review_, and
through him he secured some semi-popular lectures, which involved, he
found, travelling about twenty-nine miles weekly at the rate of
four-and-sixpence a mile--counting nothing for the lectures. Afterwards
Gwenn arranged for some regular notes on physics and micro-chemistry.
Trafford made out a weekly time-table, on whose white of dignity,
leisure, and the honourable pursuit of knowledge, a diaper of red marked
the claims of domestic necessity.