Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (769 page)

‘Five thousand a year,’ Loftie muttered and turned the enthralling pages. ‘God! What one could afford!...But I’m not worth the money, Bull. Besides, it’s robbery...You’ll never arrive at anything by this astrology nonsense.’

‘But you may, on your lines. What do you suppose is the good of Research?’

‘God knows,’ Loftie replied, devouring the illustrations. ‘Only — only it looks — sometimes — as if He were going to tell.’

‘That’s all we want,’ Harries coaxed. ‘Keep your eye on Him, and if He seems inclined to split about anything, put it down.’

‘I’ve had my eye on that house for the last half-year. You could build out a lift-shaft at the back.’ Vaughan looked and spoke into the future.

Here the padrone came in to say that if more drinks were needed, they should be ordered.

Ackerman ordered; Harries stared at the fire; Loftie sank deeper into the catalogue; and Vaughan into his vision of the desirable house for his clinic. The padrone came back with a loaded tray.

‘It’s too much money to take — even from you, Bull.’ Vaughan’s voice was strained. ‘If you’d lend me a few hundred for my clinic, I could...’

Loftie came out of the catalogue and babbled to the same effect, while he reckoned up for just how many pounds a week the horror that defiled his life and lodgings could be honourably removed from both till it drank itself dead.

Harries reared up over them like a walrus affronted.

‘Do you remember the pill-box at Zillebeeke, and the skeleton in the door? Who pinched the bombs for us then?’ he champed.

‘Me and The Lofter,’ said Vaughan, sullen as a schoolboy.

‘What for?’

‘Because we dam’ well needed ‘em.’

‘We need ‘em worse now! We’re up against the beggar in the pill-box. He’s called Death — if you’ve ever heard of him. This stuff of mine isn’t money, you imbeciles! It’s a service-issue — same as socks. We — we haven’t kept on saving each other’s silly lives for this! Oh, don’t let me down! Can’t you see?’ The big voice quavered.

‘Kamerad, Bull! I’ll come in,’ said Loftie. Vaughan’s hands had gone up first, and he was the first to recover himself, saying: ‘What about “Tacks?” He isn’t let off, is he?’

‘No. I’m going to make commission out of the lot of you,’ said Ackerman. ‘Meantime! Come on, me multi-millionaires! The Bald-headed Beggar in the pill-box is old, but the night is yet young.’

The effects of five thousand a year are stimulating.

A mere Cabinet Minister, dependent on elections for his place, looking in on a Committee where Loftie was giving technical evidence, asked in too loud a whisper, if that all-but-graded Civil Servant were ‘one of my smell-and-tell temporaries.’ Loftie’s resignation was in that evening. Vaughan, assisted by an aunt, started a little nursing-home near Sloane Street, where his new household napery lift and drying- cupboards almost led to his capture by ‘just the kind of girl, my dear, to make an ideal wife for a professional man.’

Harries continued to observe the heavens, and commissioned Ackerman to find a common meeting-place. This — Simson House was its name — had been a small boys’ school in a suburb without too many trams. Ackerman put in floods of water, light and power, an almost inspired kitchen-range, a house-man and his cook-wife, and an ex-Navy petty rating as valet- plumber, steward-engineer, and butler-electrician; set four cots in four little bedrooms, and turned the classroom in the back garden into a cement-floored hall of great possibilities, which Harries was the first to recognise. He cut off a cubicle at one end of it, where he stored books, clocks, and apparatus. Next, Loftie clamoured for a laboratory and got it, dust and air-tight, with lots of the Schermoltz toys laid out among taps and sinks and glass shelves. Hither he brought various numbered odds-and-ends which Vaughan and other specialists had sent him in the past, and on which, after examination, he had pronounced verdicts of importance to unknown men and women. Some of the samples — mere webs of cancerous tissue — he had, by arts of his own, kept alive in broths and salts after sentence had been executed on their sources of origin.

There were two specimens — Numbers 127 and 128 — from a rarish sort of affliction in exactly the same stage of development and precisely the same position, in two women of the same age and physique, who had come up to Vaughan on the same afternoon, just after Vaughan had been appointed Assistant Surgeon at St. Peggotty’s. And when the absurdly identical operations were over, a man, whose praise was worth having, but whose presence had made Vaughan sweat into his palms, had complimented him. So far as St. Peggotty’s knew, both cases were doing well several months after. Harries found these samples specially interesting, and would pore over them long times on end, for he had always used the microscope very neatly.

‘Suppose you watch what these do for a while,’ he suggested to Loftie one day.

‘I know what they’ll do well enough,’ the other returned. He was hunting a line of his own in respect to brain-cells.

‘Then couldn’t you put Frost on to watch ‘em with a low-power lens?’ Harries went on. ‘He’s a trained observer in his own line. What? Of course he’s at your disposition, old man. You could make anything of him. Oh, by the way, do you happen to remember what time of day you operated on One-twenty-Seven and Eight?’

‘Afternoon, of course — at St. Peggotty’s — between three and five. It’s down somewhere.’

‘It don’t matter. I only wanted to get an idea. Then you’ll turn on Frost to watch ‘em? Thanks awfully.’

Frost, the valet-plumber, etc., was ex-captain of a turret, with the hard blue eye of the born gunlayer — a middle-aged, uncomely man, no mean mechanic, and used to instruments of precision. He liked sitting in a warm room, looking through a microscope at what he called ‘muckings,’ with instructions to ‘watch ‘em all round the clock and log all changes.’ But no sooner did he begin than Loftie, jealous as two women, and knowing what beginner’s luck may do, stood watch and watch with him. Loftie was in hard work on his brain-cells, and the monotony of this sentry-go made him fear that his mind might build theories on self-created evidence. So he told Frost, after a while, that the whole thing was absurd, as well as bad for the eyes. ‘Isn’t it?’ he added.

‘I don’t know how it is with you, sir,’ Frost replied. ‘It sometimes makes me feel as if I were seeing a sort of ripple strike up along the edges of ‘em. Like broken water, with the sun tipping it. Like Portland Race in open-and-shut weather.’

‘That’s eye-strain. But when does it come on — with you?’

‘Sometimes through the middle watch — from twelve to four a.m. Then, again, it will come on through the first and second dog-watches — four to eight p.m., sir.’

‘No matter which — what sample — you are looking at?’ Loftie asked keenly.

‘I’d say it depended on the sample. Now, One-twenty-Eight — ’seems to me — plays up in the middle watch — from midnight on — and One-twenty- Seven in the afternoon. I’ve logged it all.’

Three months later, at Simson House, Loftie told the others that, while not in the least departing from his own theories, there was a phenomenon, which for the sake of brevity he would call ‘tide,’ in Samples 127 and 128. It occurred at certain hours, which had all been noted and passed on to Harries — ’for what that may be worth.’

Harries smiled, and hired an expensive expert to photo the two samples and film them; which took several weeks and cost some hundreds of pounds. They all checked the magnified ‘tides’ by some curious tables which Harries had worked out — ’for what that’s worth,’ as Loftie said.

Harries said it was worth the expense, and took to spending a good deal of his leisure at Simson House. Vaughan, too, reeking of ether, would put in for shelter there, as the hunt after him (which his aunt whipped) quickened with his successes. Loftie had been almost a fixture in his lab. from the first; and poor ‘Tacks,’ who could no more have made a dishonest penny than he could have saved an honest one, catered for them so lavishly that even the cook shied at the weekly bills, which Harries flatly refused to audit.

Three months after their first film’s ‘release,’ Loftie read them a typed paper before dinner, asserting there was ‘tide’ in the normal cells of all tissues which he and his helper, Frost, had observed; but he could see no sign of ‘tide’ in the malignant areas. He detailed tests and observations till they yawned. Then Frost ran the latest film for them — in slow and quick time — and they sat round the fire.

‘I’m not committing myself to anything,’ said Loftie, speaking like a badly-shaken human being, ‘but every dam’ tissue up till now seems to have its own time for its own tides. Samples from the same source have the same tides in strength and time. But, as I showed you just now, there are minute constant variations — reactions to something or other — in each tide, as individual as finger-prints. I wouldn’t stake my reputation on it except to you. But I know it’s so.’

‘What do you suppose it means?’ Vaughan half-whispered.

‘As I read it,’ Harries spoke quietly, ‘the minor differences in those “tides” in the tissues are due to interferences with the main or external influence — whichever it may be — which sets up, or which is, the main tide in all matter. They both come from without. Not within.’

‘How far out?’ Vaughan asked.

‘‘Can’t tell — yet — to a few light-years. I’ve been trying to disentangle the minor interferences or influences — which may be due to the nearer — er — influences — from the main tide. In my opinion — ’

‘Stop!’ Loftie cried shrilly. ‘You swore us all not to theorise before a year.’

‘Hear me out! I’ve verified some of my calculations at my end of the game, and they justify me in saying that...we are all justified in getting tight to-night.’

So, then, they did: being drunk with the ferment of their own speculations before they went to table. Loftie, whom Ackerman confined to strong beer as best for tired brain-cells, rose up above the savoury, and said that he was ‘the Servant of the Infil-tresimally Minute, but not of that fat tape-worm, Tacks.’ Harries described to them the vasts of the Ultimate Heavens fizzing in spirals ‘with — or rather like — champagne,’ but all one generating station of one Power drawn from the Absolute, and of one essence and substance with all things. Then he slept soundly. Vaughan — the professional man — merely wanted to telephone for a taxi that he might drive to discredit a hated West End rival by calling him to his bedroom window and there discussing ‘dichotomy’ — a hard word at 3 A.M.

Then they packed Loftie off for a month’s holiday, with a cubic metre of seven-and-sixpenny detective novels, plus Vaughan’s aunt to see that he ate and dressed properly. On his return, he began certain experiments with mice, which Frost took charge of in the boiler-room, because he remembered when their ancestors served in the earliest submarines. It seemed that ‘tides’ worked in their tissues also; but slipped a little round the clock according to the season of each litter’s birth.

And there were born to them mice among mice with prodigious ‘tides.’ Some of these, inoculated at the flood, threw off the trouble, and were promoted by Frost to the rating of pets. Treated on their lowest ebbs, they perished less quickly than the average. Harries kept careful count of their times in all things and ways, and had Frost sling some of their cages on various compass-bearings or set them out in moonlight or thunderstorms.

This last was too much for Loftie, who returned once more to the legitimate drama of cultures and radium emanations, and the mysteries of malignant cells which never acknowledge any ‘tide.’ At the end of three weeks, he, and Frost, broke off the campaign.

He said to Harries one evening after watching their usual film: ‘What do you suppose germs think of?’

‘If you’ve got as far as that,’ was the answer, ‘you’ll develop an imagination one day.’

Then Vaughan came in full of trouble. His matron had been immobilised by sciatica, and his household staff had taken base advantages. He needed at once, some table-napkins, some bathtowels, two jacketed water jugs and a metal — not china — bedroom breakfast-set. Ackerman said he would speak to Frost and see what could be spared from the ship.

While they were laughing at Vaughan, St. Peggotty’s rang him up. He replied: ‘Well, well! If it was coming, it was to be expected now... . One of my beds empty?...You can have it...Send her over to me...You must!...I’ll warn my people to expect her?...Oh? That’s all right...I’ll send the car...Yes, and all other expenses...Because I operated on her originally, of course. We’ll expect her at nine, then...Righto!...Not in the least. Thank you, old man.’

He then telephoned his home to prepare for a patient, and returned to the still circle by the fire.

‘It’s one of those twin cases of mine,’ he explained. ‘One of ‘em’s back again. Recurrence — in the scar — after eighteen months.’

‘That means?’ said Harries.

‘With that particular kind of trouble — three — five months’ reprieve — perhaps. Then final recurrence. The other one’s all right, so far, they say.’

‘She would be. This one is One-twenty-Eight,’ said Loftie.

‘How do you make that out?’

Frost had entered and was going through Vaughan’s indent with Ackerman.