"What do you want to know that for?" I said. "What does a chap like you,
who can do it all backwards, want with molecules?"
Oh, he just wanted to know, he said.
So, on the way across the bridge, I gave it him more or less from the
book--molecular theory and all the rest of it. But, from the childish
questions he put, it was plain that he hadn't got the hang of it at all.
"Did the molecular theory allow things to pass through one another?" he
wanted to know; "_Could_ things pass through one another?" and a lot of
ridiculous things like that. I gave it up.
"You're a genius in your own way, Rooum," I said finally; "you know these
things without the books we plodders have to depend on. If I'd luck like
that, I think I should be content with it."
But he didn't seem satisfied, though he dropped the matter for that time.
But I had his acquaintance, which was more than most of us had. He
asked me, rather timidly, if I'd lend him a book or two. I did so, but
they didn't seem to contain what he wanted to know, and he soon returned
them, without remark.
Now you'd expect a fellow to be specially sensitive, one way or another,
who can tell when there's water a hundred feet beneath him; and as you
know, the big men are squabbling yet about this water-finding business.
But, somehow, the water-finding puzzled me less than it did that Rooum
should be extraordinarily sensitive to something far commoner and easier
to understand--ordinary echoes. He couldn't stand echoes. He'd go a
mile round rather than pass a place that he knew had an echo; and if he
came on one by chance, sometimes he'd hurry through as quick as he
could, and sometimes he'd loiter and listen very intently. I rather joked
about this at first, till I found it really distressed him; then, of
course, I pretended not to notice. We're all cranky somewhere, and for
that matter, I can't touch a spider myself.
For the remarkable thing that overtook Rooum--(that, by the way, is an
odd way to put it, as you'll see presently; but the words came that
way into my head, so let them stand)--for the remarkable thing that
overtook Rooum, I don't think I can begin better than with the first
time, or very soon after the first time, that I noticed this peculiarity
about the echoes.
It was early on a particularly dismal November evening, and this time we
were somewhere out south-east London way, just beyond what they are
pleased to call the building-line--you know these districts of wretched
trees and grimy fields and market-gardens that are about the same to real
country that a slum is to a town. It rained that night; rain was the most
appropriate weather for the brickfields and sewage-farms and yards of old
carts and railway-sleepers we were passing. The rain shone on the black
hand-bag that Rooum always carried; and I sucked at the dottle of a pipe
that it was too much trouble to fill and light again. We were walking in
the direction of Lewisham (I think it would be), and were still a little
way from that eruption of red-brick houses that ... but you've doubtless
seen them.
You know how, when they're laying out new roads, they lay down the
narrow strip of kerb first, with neither setts on the one hand nor
flagstones on the other? We had come upon one of these. (I had noticed
how, as we had come a few minutes before under a tall hollow-ringing
railway arch, Rooum had all at once stopped talking--it was the echo, of
course, that bothered him.) The unmade road to which we had come had
headless lamp-standards at intervals, and ramparts of grey road-metal
ready for use; and save for the strip of kerb, it was a broth of mud
and stiff clay. A red light or two showed where the road-barriers
were--they were laying the mains; a green railway light showed on an
embankment; and the Lewisham lamps made a rusty glare through the rain.
Rooum went first, walking along the narrow strip of kerb.
The lamp-standards were a little difficult to see, and when I heard Rooum
stop suddenly and draw in his breath sharply, I thought he had walked
into one of them.
"Hurt yourself?" I said.
He walked on without replying; but half a dozen yards farther on he
stopped again. He was listening again. He waited for me to come up.
"I say," he said, in an odd sort of voice, "go a yard or two ahead, will
you?"
"What's the matter?" I asked, as I passed ahead. He didn't answer.
Well, I hadn't been leading for more than a minute before he wanted to
change again. He was breathing very quick and short.
"Why, what ails you?" I demanded, stopping.
"It's all right.... You're not playing any tricks, are you?..."