It occurred to him that he would go a little out of his way, and look at
the new great laboratories at the Romeike College, of which his old
bottle-washer Durgan was, he knew, extravagantly proud. Romeike's widow
was dead now and her will executed, and her substance half turned
already to bricks and stone and glazed tiles and all those excesses of
space and appliance which the rich and authoritative imagine must needs
give us Science, however ill-selected and underpaid and slighted the
users of those opportunities may be. The architects had had great fun
with the bequest; a quarter of the site was devoted to a huge square
surrounded by dignified, if functionless, colonnades, and adorned with
those stone seats of honour which are always so chill and unsatisfactory
as resting places in our island climate. The Laboratories, except that
they were a little shaded by the colonnades, were everything a
laboratory should be; the benches were miracles of convenience, there
wasn't anything the industrious investigator might want, steam, high
pressures, electric power, that he couldn't get by pressing a button or
turning a switch, unless perhaps it was inspiring ideas. And the new
library at the end, with its greys and greens, its logarithmic
computators at every table, was a miracle of mental convenience.
Durgan showed his old professor the marvels.
"If he _chooses_ to do something here," said Durgan not too hopefully,
"a man can...."
"What's become of the little old room where we two used to work?" asked
Trafford.
"They'll turn 'em all out presently," said Durgan, "when this part is
ready, but just at present it's very much as you left it. There's been
precious little research done there since you went away--not what _I_
call research. Females chiefly--and boys. Playing at it. Making
themselves into D.Sc.'s by a baby research instead of a man's
examination. It's like broaching a thirty-two gallon cask full of Pap to
think of it. Lord, sir, the swill! Research! Counting and weighing
things! Professor Lake's all right, I suppose, but his work was mostly
mathematical; he didn't do much of it here. No, the old days ended, sir,
when you...."
He arrested himself, and obviously changed his words. "Got busy with
other things."
Trafford surveyed the place; it seemed to him to have shrunken a little
in the course of the three years that had intervened since he resigned
his position. On the wall at the back there still hung, fly-blown and a
little crumpled, an old table of constants he had made for his
elasticity researches. Lake had kept it there, for Lake was a man of
generous appreciations, and rather proud to follow in the footsteps of
an investigator of Trafford's subtlety and vigor. The old sink in the
corner where Trafford had once swilled his watch glasses and filled his
beakers had been replaced by one of a more modern construction, and the
combustion cupboard was unfamiliar, until Durgan pointed out that it had
been enlarged. The ground-glass window at the east end showed still the
marks of an explosion that had banished a clumsy student from this
sanctuary at the very beginning of Trafford's career.
"By Jove!" he said after a silence, "but I did some good work here."
"You did, sir," said Durgan.
"I wonder--I may take it up again presently."
"I doubt it, sir," said Durgan.
"Oh! But suppose I come back?"
"I don't think you would find yourself coming back, sir," said Durgan
after judicious consideration.
He adduced no shadow of a reason for his doubt, but some mysterious
quality in his words carried conviction to Trafford's mind. He knew that
he would never do anything worth doing in molecular physics again. He
knew it now conclusively for the first time.