But you must not suppose that at any time these huge grey problems of
our social foundations and the riddle of intellectual confusion one
reaches through them, and the yet broader riddles of human purpose that
open beyond, constitute the whole of Trafford's life during this time.
When he came back to Marjorie and his home, a curtain of unreality fell
between him and all these things. It was as if he stepped through such
boundaries as Alice passed to reach her Wonderland; the other world
became a dream again; as if he closed the pages of a vivid book and
turned to things about him. Or again it was as if he drew down the blind
of a window that gave upon a landscape, grave, darkling, ominous, and
faced the warm realities of a brightly illuminated room....
In a year or so he had the works so smoothly organized and Dowd so
reconciled, trained and encouraged that his own daily presence was
unnecessary, and he would go only three and then only two mornings a
week to conduct those secret phases in the preparation of his catalytic
that even Dowd could not be trusted to know. He reverted more and more
completely to his own proper world.
And the first shock of discovering that greater London which "isn't in
it" passed away by imperceptible degrees. Things that had been as vivid
and startling as new wounds became unstimulating and ineffective with
repetition. He got used to the change from Belgravia to East Ham, from
East Ham to Belgravia. He fell in with the unusual persuasion in
Belgravia, that, given a firm and prompt Home Secretary, East Ham could
be trusted to go on--for quite a long time anyhow. One cannot sit down
for all one's life in the face of insoluble problems. He had a motor-car
now that far outshone Magnet's, and he made the transit from west to
east in the minimum of time and with the minimum of friction. It ceased
to be more disconcerting that he should have workers whom he could
dismiss at a week's notice to want or prostitution than that he should
have a servant waiting behind his chair. Things were so. The main
current of his life--and the main current of his life flowed through
Marjorie and his home--carried him on. Rubber was his, but there were
still limitless worlds to conquer. He began to take up, working under
circumstances of considerable secrecy at Solomonson's laboratories at
Riplings, to which he would now go by motor-car for two or three days at
a time, the possibility of a cheap, resilient and very tough substance,
rubber glass, that was to be, Solomonson was assured, the road surface
of the future.