THE DEAD RAT
1
As he came closer to Whitechapel High Street, Jeremy found with
surprise and some addition to his uneasiness, that this district
had a more wakeful and week-day appearance. Many of the shops and
eating-houses were open; and the Government order, issued two days
before, forbidding the sale of liquor while the strike menace endured,
was being frankly disregarded. This was the first use that had been
made of the Public Order (Preservation of) Act, passed hurriedly and
almost in secret two or three months before; and Jeremy, enquiring what
his own feelings would have been if he had been in a like position to
the restless workmen, had been stirred out of his ordinary political
indifference to call it unwise. He might have been stirred to even
greater feeling about the original Act if he had known that it was
principally this against which the strikes were directed. But he had
omitted to ask why the unions were striking, and no one had told him.
The middle classes of those days had got used to unintelligible and
apparently senseless upheavals. Now, as he passed by one public-house
after another, all open, and saw the crowds inside and round the doors,
conversing with interest and perceptibly rising excitement on only one
topic, he rather wished that the order could have been enforced. There
was something sinister in the silence which fell where he passed. He
felt uncomfortably that he was being looked at with suspicion.
He turned out of the wide road, now empty of all wheeled traffic,
except for a derelict tramcar which stood desolate, apparently where
driver and conductor had struck work earlier or later than their
fellows. In the side street which led to his destination, there were
mostly women--dark, ugly, alien women--sitting on their doorsteps;
and he began to feel even more afraid of them than of the men. They
did not lower their voices as he passed, but he could not understand
what they were saying. But as he swung with a distinct sense of relief
into the little narrow court where Trehanoc absurdly lived and had his
laboratory, he heard one of them call after him, “Dir-r-rty bourgeois!”
and all the rest laugh ominously together. The repetition of the phrase
in this new accent startled him and he fretted at the door because
Trehanoc did not immediately answer his knock.
“Damn you for living down here!” he said heartily, when Trehanoc at
last opened to him. “I don’t like your neighbors at all.”
“I know.... I know...,” Trehanoc answered apologetically. “But how
could I expect---- And anyway they’re nice people really when you get
to know them. I get on very well with them.” He paused and looked with
some apprehension at Jeremy’s annoyed countenance.
He was a Cornishman, a tall, loose, queerly excitable and eccentric
fellow, with whom, years before, Jeremy had worked in the laboratories
at University College. He had taken his degree--just taken it--and
this result, while not abating his strange passion for research in
physics, seemed to have destroyed forever all hope of his indulging
it. After that no one knew what he had done, until a distant relative
had died and left him a few hundreds a year and the empty warehouse
in Lime Court. He had accepted the legacy as a direct intervention
of providence, refused the specious offers of a Hebrew dealer in fur
coats, and had fitted up the crazy building as a laboratory, with a
living-room or two, where he spent vastly exciting hours pursuing
with the sketchiest of home-made apparatus the abstrusest of natural
mysteries. One or two old acquaintances of the Gower Street days had
run across him here and there, and, on confessing that they were
still devoted to science, had been urgently invited to pay a visit to
Whitechapel. They had returned, half-alarmed, half-amused, and had
reported that Trehanoc was madder than ever, and was attempting the
transmutation of the elements with a home-made electric coil, an old
jam-jar, and a biscuit tin. They also reported that his neighborhood
was rich in disagreeable smells and that his laboratory was inhabited
by rats.
But Jeremy’s taste in acquaintances was broad and comprehensive, always
provided that they escaped growing tedious. After his first visit to
Lime Court he had not been slow in paying a second. His acquaintance
ripened into friendship with Trehanoc, whom he regarded, perhaps only
half-consciously, as being an inspired, or at any rate an exceedingly
lucky, fool. When he received an almost illegible and quite incoherent
summons to go and see a surprising new experiment, “something,” as the
fortunate discoverer put it, “very funny,” he had at once promised
to go. It was characteristic of him that, having promised, he went,
although he had to walk through disturbed London, arrived grumbling,
and reassured his anxious host without once ceasing to complain of the
inconvenience he had suffered.
“I ought to tell you,” Trehanoc said, with increased anxiety when
Jeremy paused to take breath, “that a man’s dropped in to lunch. I
didn’t ask him, and he isn’t a scientist, and he talks rather a lot,
but--but--I don’t suppose he’ll be much in the way,” he finished
breathlessly.
“All right, Augustus,” Jeremy replied in a more resigned tone, and
with a soothing wave of his hand, “carry on. I don’t suppose one extra
useless object in one of your experiments will make any particular
difference.”
He followed Trehanoc with lumbering speed up the narrow, uncarpeted
stairs and into the big loft which served for living-room and kitchen
combined. There he saw the useless object stretched on a couch--a
pleasant youth of rather disheveled appearance, who raised his head and
said lazily:
“Hullo! It’s you, is it? We met last night, but I don’t suppose you
remember that.”
“No, I don’t,” said Jeremy shortly.
“No, I thought you wouldn’t. My name’s MacIan. You must have known that
last night, because you told me twice that no man whose name began with
Mac ever knew when he was boring the company.”
“Did I?” Jeremy looked a little blank, and then began to brighten. “Of
course. You were the man who was talking about the General Strike being
a myth. I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings too much?”
“Not at all. I knew you meant well; and, after all, you weren’t in a
condition to realize what I was up to. The secret of it all was that
by boring all the rest of the company till they wanted to scream I was
very effectually preventing them from boring me. You see, I saw at once
that the politicians had taken the floor for the rest of the evening,
and I knew that the only way to deal with them was to irritate them on
their own ground. It was rather good sport really, only, of course, you
couldn’t be expected to see the point of it.”
Jeremy began to chuckle with appreciation. “Very good,” he agreed.
“Very good. I wish I’d known.” And Trehanoc, who had been hovering
behind him uneasily, holding a frying-pan, said with a deep breath of
relief: “That’s all right, then.”
“What the devil’s the matter with you, Augustus?” Jeremy cried,
wheeling round on him. “What do you mean, ‘That’s all right, then’?”
“I was only afraid you two chaps would quarrel,” he explained. “You’re
both of you rather difficult to get on with.” And he disappeared with
the frying-pan into the corner which was curtained off for cooking.
“Old Trehanoc’s delightfully open about everything,” MacIan observed,
stretching himself and lighting a cigarette. “I suppose we all of us
have to apologize for a friend to another now and again, but he’s the
only man I ever met that did it in the presence of both. It’s the sort
of thing that makes a man distinctive.”
Lunch was what the two guests might have expected, and probably did.
The sausages would no doubt have been more successful if Trehanoc had
remembered to provide either potatoes or bread; but his half-hearted
offer of a little uncooked oatmeal was summarily rejected. Jeremy’s
appetite, however, was reviving, and MacIan plainly cared very little
what he ate. His interest lay rather in talking; and throughout the
meal he discoursed to a stolidly masticating Jeremy and a nervous,
protesting Trehanoc on the theme that civilization had reached and
passed its climax and was hurrying into the abyss. He instanced the
case of Russia.
“Russia,” he said, leaning over towards the Cornishman and marking his
points with flourishes of a fork, “Russia went so far that she couldn’t
get back. For a long time they shouted for the blockade to be raised so
that they could get machinery for their factories and their railways.
Now they’ve been without it so long they don’t want it any more. Oh,
of course, they still talk about reconstruction and rebuilding the
railways and so forth, but it’ll never happen. It’s too late. They’ve
dropped down a stage; and there they’ll stop, unless they go lower
still, as they are quite likely to.”
Trehanoc looked up with a fanatical gleam in his big brown eyes,
which faded as he saw MacIan, poised and alert, waiting for him, and
Jeremy quietly eating with the greatest unconcern. “I don’t care what
you say,” he muttered sullenly, dropping his head again. “There’s no
limit to what science can do. Look what we’ve done in the last hundred
years. We shall discover the origin of matter, and how to transmute the
elements; we shall abolish disease ... and there’s my discovery----”
“But, my dear man,” MacIan interrupted, “just because we’ve done this,
that, and the other in the last hundred years, there’s no earthly
reason for supposing that we shall go on doing it. You don’t allow for
the delicacy of all these things or for the brutality of the forces
that are going to break them up. Why, if you got the world really in
a turmoil for thirty years, at the end of that time you wouldn’t be
able to find a man who could mend your electric light, and you’d have
forgotten how to do it yourself. And you don’t allow for the fact that
we ourselves change.... What do you say, Tuft? You’re a scientist, too.”
“The present state of our knowledge,” Jeremy replied cheerfully with
his mouth full, “doesn’t justify prophecies.”
“Ah! our knowledge ... no, perhaps not. But our intuitions!” And here,
as he spoke, MacIan seemed to grow for a moment a little more serious.
“Don’t you know there’s a moment in anything--a holiday, or a party, or
a love-affair, or whatever you like--when you feel that you’ve reached
the climax, and that there’s nothing more to come. I feel that now. Oh!
it’s been a good time, and we seemed to be getting freer and freer and
richer and richer. But now we’ve got as far as we can and everything
changes.... Change here for the Dark Ages!” he added with a sudden
alteration in his manner. “In fact, if I may put it so, this is where
we get out and walk.”
Jeremy looked at him, wondering vaguely how much of this was genuine
and how much mere discourse. He thought that, whichever it was, on the
whole he disliked it. “Oh! we shall go jogging on just as usual,” he
said at last, as matter-of-fact as he could.
“Oh, no, we shan’t!” MacIan returned with equal coolness. “We shall go
to eternal smash.”
Trehanoc looked up again from the food he had been wolfing down with
absent-minded ferocity. “It doesn’t matter what either of you thinks,”
he affirmed earnestly. “There’s no limit to what we are going to do.
We----” A dull explosion filled their ears and shook the windows.
“And what in hell’s that?” cried Jeremy.
2
For a moment all three of them sat rigid, staring instinctively out of
the windows, whence nothing could be seen save the waving branches of
the tree that gave its name to Lime Court. MacIan at last broke the
silence.
“The Golden Age,” he said solemnly, “has tripped over the mat. Hadn’t
we better go and see what’s happened to it?”
“Don’t be a fool!” Jeremy ejaculated. “If there really is trouble these
streets won’t be too pleasant, and we’d better not draw attention to
ourselves.” Immediately in the rear of his words came the confused
noise of many people running and shouting. It was the mixed population
of Whitechapel going to see what was up; and before many of them could
have done so, the real fighting must have begun. The sound of firing,
scattered and spasmodic, punctuated by the dull, vibrating bursts which
Jeremy recognized for bombs, came abruptly to the listeners in the
warehouse. There was an opening and shutting of windows and a banging
of doors, men shouting and women crying, as though suddenly the whole
district had been set in motion. All this gradually died away again and
left to come sharper and clearer the incessant noise of the rifles and
the bombs.
“Scott has set them going,” Jeremy murmured to himself, almost content
in the fulfilment of a prophecy, and then he said aloud: “Have you got
any cigarettes, Augustus? I can’t say we’re well off where we are, but
we’ve got to stop for a bit.”
Trehanoc produced a tin of Virginians which he offered to his guests.
“I’m afraid,” he said miserably, “that this isn’t a very good time for
asking you to have a look at my experiment.” Jeremy surveyed him with
a curious eye, and reflected that the contrast in the effect of the
distant firing on the three of them was worth observation. He himself
did not pretend to like it, but knew that nothing could be done, and
so endured it stoically. MacIan had settled in an armchair with a
cigarette and a very tattered copy of _La Vie Parisienne_, and was
giving an exhibition of almost flippant unconcern; but every time there
was a louder burst of fire his shoulders twitched slightly. Trehanoc’s
behavior was the most interesting of all. He had been nervous and
excited while they were at table, and the explosion had obviously
accentuated his condition. But he had somehow turned his excitement
into the channel of his discovery, and his look of hungry and strained
disappointment was pathetic to witness. It touched Jeremy’s heart, and
moved him to say as heartily as he could:
“Nonsense, old fellow. We’ll come along and see it in a moment. What’s
it all about?”
Trehanoc murmured “Thanks awfully.... I was afraid you wouldn’t
want....”--like a child who has feared that the party would not take
place after all. Then he sat down sprawlingly in a chair and fixed his
wild, shining eyes on Jeremy’s face. “You see,” he began, “I think
it’s a new ray. I’m almost certain it’s a new ray. But I’m not quite
certain how I got it. I’ll show you all that later. But it’s something
like the ray that man used to change bacilli. He changed bacilli
into cocci, or something. I’m no biologist; I was going to get in a
biologist when you’d helped me a bit. You remember the experiment I
mean, don’t you?”
“Vaguely,” said Jeremy. “It’s a bit out of my line, but my recollection
is that he used alpha rays. However, go on.”
“Well, that’s what I was after,” Trehanoc continued. “I believe these
rays do something of the same kind, and they’ve got other properties I
don’t understand. There’s the rat ... but I’ll show you the rat later
on. And then I got my hand in front of the vacuum-tube for half a
second without any protection....”
“Did you get a burn?” Jeremy asked sharply.
“No,” said Trehanoc. “No ... I didn’t ... that’s the strange thing. I’d
got a little radium burn on that hand already, and a festering cut as
well, where I jabbed myself with the tin-opener.... Well, first of all,
my hand went queer. It was a sort of dead, numb feeling, spreading into
the arm above the wrist, and I was scared, I can tell you. I was almost
certain that these were new rays, and I hadn’t the least notion what
effect they might have on living tissue. The numbness kept on all day,
with a sort of tingling in the finger-tips, and I went to bed in a bit
of a panic. And when I woke, the radium burn had quite gone, leaving a
little scar behind, and the cut had begun to heal. It _was_ very nearly
healed!”
“Quite sure it’s a new ray?” Jeremy interjected.
“Oh, very nearly sure. You see, I----” and he entered into a long and
highly technical argument which left Jeremy both satisfied and curious.
At the close of it MacIan remarked in a tone of deep melancholy:
“Tre, my old friend, if the experiment isn’t more exciting than the
lecture, I shall go out and take my turn on the barricades. I got lost
at the point where you began talking about electrons. Do, for heaven’s
sake, let’s go and _see_ your hell-broth!”
“Would you like to go and see it now?” Trehanoc asked, watching
Jeremy’s face with solicitous anxiety; and receiving assent he led the
way at once, saying, “You know, I use the cellar for this radio-active
work. The darkness.... And by the way,” he interrupted himself, “look
out how you go. This house is in a rotten state of repair.” The swaying
of the stairs down from the loft, when all three were upon them,
confirmed him alarmingly.
As they went past the front door towards the cellar steps, Jeremy,
cocking his head sideways, thought that every now and then some of
the shots rang out much louder, as though the skirmishing was getting
close to Lime Court. But he was by now deeply interested in Trehanoc’s
experiment, and followed without speaking.
When they came down into the cellar Trehanoc touched a switch and
revealed a long room, lit only in the nearer portion, where electric
bulbs hung over two great laboratory tables and stretching away into
clammy darkness.
“Here it is,” he said nervously, indicating the further of the two
tables, and hung on Jeremy’s first words.
Jeremy’s first words were characteristic. “How you ever get any result
at all,” he said, slowly and incisively, “is more than I can make out.
This table looks as though some charwoman had been piling rubbish on
it.”
“Yes, I know.... I know....” Trehanoc admitted in a voice of shame.
“That’s where I wanted you to help me. You see, I can’t be quite sure
exactly what it is that _does_ determine the result. There’s the
vacuum-tube, worked by a coil, and there’s an electric magnet ... and
that tube on the other side has got radium-emanation in it....”
“And then there’s the dead rat,” Jeremy interrupted rather brutally.
“What about the dead rat? Does that affect the result?” He pointed
with a forefinger, expressing some disgust, to a remarkably sleek and
well-favored corpse which decorated the end of the table.
“I was going to tell you....” Trehanoc muttered, twisting one hand
in the other. “You know, there _are_ rather a lot of rats in this
cellar----”
“I know,” said Jeremy.
“And when I was making the first experiment that chap jumped on to the
table and ran across in front of the vacuum-tube----”
“Well?”
“And he just dropped like that, dropped dead in his tracks ... and ...
and I was frightfully excited, so I only picked him up by his tail and
threw him away and forgot all about him. And then quite a long time
afterwards, when I was looking for something, I came across him, just
like that, just as fresh----”
“And when was that?” Jeremy asked.
“It must be quite six weeks since I made that first experiment.”
“So he’s one of the exhibits,” Jeremy began slowly. But a new outbreak
of firing, unmistakably closer at hand, broke across his sentence.
MacIan, who was beginning to find the rat a little tedious, and had
been hoping that Trehanoc would soon turn a handle and produce long,
crackling sparks, snatched at the interruption.
“I _must_ go up and see what’s happening!” he cried. “I’ll be back in a
minute.”
He vanished up the steps. When he returned, Jeremy was still turning
over the body of the rat with a thoughtful expression and placing it
delicately to his nose for olfactory evidence. Trehanoc, who seemed to
have begun to think that there was something shameful, if not highly
suspicious, in the existence of the corpse, stood before him in an
almost suppliant attitude, twisting his long fingers together, and
shuffling his feet.
MacIan disregarded the high scientific deliberations. “I say,” he cried
with the almost hysterical flippancy that sometimes denotes serious
nerve-strain, “it’s frightfully exciting. The fighting is getting
nearer, and somebody’s got a machine-gun trained down Whitechapel High
Street. There’s nobody in sight here, but I’m certain there are people
firing from the houses round about.”
“Oh, damn!” said Jeremy uneasily but absently, continuing to examine
the rat.
“And, I say, Tre,” MacIan went on, “do you think this barn of yours
would stand a bomb or two? It looks to me as if it would fall over if
you pushed it.”
“I’m afraid it would,” Trehanoc admitted, looking as if he ought to
apologize. “In fact, I’m always afraid that they’ll condemn it, but I
can’t afford repairs.”
“Oh, hang all that!” Jeremy suddenly interjected. “This is
extraordinarily interesting. Get the thing going, Trehanoc, and let’s
have a look at your rays.”
“That’s right, Tre,” said MacIan. “We’re caught, so let’s make the best
of it. Let’s try and occupy our minds as the civilians used to in the
old air-raid days. Stick to the dead rat, Tre, and let politics alone.”
He laughed--a laugh in which hysteria was now plainly perceptible--but
Trehanoc, disregarding him, went into a corner and began fumbling with
the switches. In a moment the vacuum-tube began to glow faintly, and
Jeremy and Trehanoc bent over it together.
Suddenly a loud knocking at the front door echoed down the cellar
steps. Trehanoc twitched his shoulders irritatingly, but otherwise did
not move. A moment after it was repeated, and in addition there was a
more menacing sound as though some one were trying to break the door in
with a heavy instrument.
“You’d better go and see what it is, Augustus,” Jeremy murmured
absorbedly. “It may be some one wanting to take shelter from the
firing. Go on, and I’ll watch this thing.”
Trehanoc obediently but reluctantly went up the cellar steps, and
Jeremy, with some idle, half-apprehending portion of his mind, heard
him throw open the front door and heard the sound of angry voices
coming through. But he remained absorbed in the vacuum-tube, until
MacIan, who was standing at the foot of the steps, said in a piercing
whisper:
“Here, Tuft, come here and listen!”
“Yes? What is it?” Jeremy replied vaguely, without changing his
position.
“Come here quickly,” MacIan whispered in an urgent tone. Jeremy was
aroused and went to the foot of the steps to listen. For a moment he
could only hear voices speaking angrily, and then he distinguished
Trehanoc’s voice shouting:
“You fools! I tell you there’s no one in the upper rooms. How could
any one be firing from the windows?” There was a shot and a gurgling
scream. Jeremy and MacIan turned to look at one another, and each saw
the other’s face ghastly, distorted by shadows which the electric light
in the cellar could not quite dispel.
“Good God!” screamed MacIan. “They’ve killed him!” He started wildly
up the stairs. Jeremy, as he began to follow him, heard another shot,
saw MacIan poised for a moment, arms up, on the edge of a step, and
just had time to flatten himself against the wall before the body fell
backwards. He ran down again into the cellar, and began looking about
desperately for a weapon of some kind.
As he was doing so there was a cautious footstep on the stair. “Bombs!”
he thought, and instinctively threw himself on the floor. The next
moment the bomb landed, thrown well out in the middle of the cellar,
and it seemed that a flying piece spun viciously through his hair. And
then he saw the table which held the glowing vacuum-tube slowly tilting
towards him and all the apparatus sliding to the floor, and at the same
moment he became aware that the cellar-roof was descending on his head.
He had time and wit enough to crawl under the other table before it
fell. Darkness came with it.
Jeremy struggled for a moment against unconsciousness. Then something
seemed to be going round and round, madly and erratically at first,
finally settling into a regular motion of enormous speed. He was
vaguely aware of the glowing vacuum-tube, and the dead rat, partly
illuminated by it, close to his face; but he felt himself being borne
away, he knew not whither. A sort of peace in that haste overtook his
limbs and he slept.