The Day of Uniting/Chapter 1

To Jimmy Blake, mathematics were as the Greek of Socrates to the unlearned senator. As for the calculi, they would have filled him with awe and wonder, if he had had any idea of their functions.

When, in the days of his extreme youth, Jimmy had been asked to prove that a circle was equal in area to a triangle whose base was equal to the circumference, and whose height was equal to the radius of the circle, Jimmy magnanimously accepted his master's word that it was so, and passed on to something more human, Though by some extraordinary means he scraped through school with a certificate and emerged from Oxford with a sort of degree, his mathematical paper would have caused Archimedes to turn in his grave.

It was his fate to live in the closest contact with the scientific mind. Jimmy Blake was a rich man and by some accounted eccentric, though the beginning and end of his eccentricity was to be found in his dislike for work and his choice of Blackheath as a desirable residential quarter. He had inherited from his father a beautiful old Georgian house facing the heath, which an enterprising auctioneer would have truthfully described as “standing in extensive and parklike grounds.”

Such an agent might have gone on to rhapsodize over the old-world gardens of Blake's Priory, the comfort of the accommodation, the Adam decorations, and when he had exhausted its esthetic and sylvan charms, his utilitarian mind would probably have descended to such mundane advantages as the central heating, electric installation, and the character of the soil.

Within these grounds there had once been a veritable priory. At some period of the seventeenth century when Greenwich and Blackheath were fashionable rendezvous for the elite and fashion of Elizabeth's court, and when the stately palace by the river saw Raleigh and Leicester, and the grand gentlemen and dames of society strolling on the grassy slopes of the Royal Park, a Major Blake had acquired the property and had erected a pleasure house for himself and his friends. The house no longer existed, but the gardens he had planned still sent forth their ancient fragrance.

To Jimmy the priory was home and, though he maintained a modest flat at the back of Park Lane, he spent very little of his time there. The glories of Elizabeth's Greenwich had departed definitely and completely and were one with the Court of Jamshid. Aged pensioners shuffled along the marble halls where the bucks of the Virgin Queen had pranced and prinked and a heavy-footed Drake had stalked with news of victories on the Spanish Main. Incidentally Jimmy came from a long line of adventurers and could trace his descent from an uncle of the great Blake.

“It is a standing wonder to me, Jimmy,” said Van Roon one night, “why a man like you, with the blood of filibusters in your veins, should be content to loaf through life behind the steering wheel of a Rolls, having no other objective than the satisfaction of your unscientific curiosity.”

“No curiosity is unscientific,” said Jimmy lazily. “I'm surprised at you, Jerry! Didn't Huxley or one of those Johnnies say”

Van Roon groaned. His was the scientific mind, against which Jimmy's intelligence was forever rubbing. Gerald van Roon was Jimmy's cousin, a brilliant genius to whom the world was a great laboratory, alternating with a small bedroom, with the furnishing of which he had never become acquainted, because he had not remained in the room long enough.

A tall, angular man with large, bony hands, a big, bulging forehead, two small, deep-set eyes which even his immense and powerful spectacles did not magnify, Gerald van Roon seemed the least suitable of companions for a man of Jimmy's tastes. He was exact, precise, orderly, had no human interests and absolutely no tastes in common with his happy-go-lucky cousin. And yet to the surprise of all who knew them, they lived together in the greatest harmony. Gerald amused Jimmy in one way and impressed him in another. The man's high principles, his almost fanatical passion for the truth which is, after all, the basic layer of the scientific mind, his childlike innocence in all worldly matters, his contempt for commerce and the rewards which commercial success brings, his extraordinary idealism—all these were very endearing qualities, which appealed strongly to the younger man.

“You're a funny devil,” said Jimmy throwing his napkin in a heap on the table. Gerald van Roon rolled his precisely and fitted the napkin ring exactly over the center of the roll. “I suppose you're going to that stink shop of yours?”

“I'm going to the laboratory,” said Gerald with a faint smile.

“Good Lord!” said Jimmy, shaking his head in wonder. “On a gorgeous day like this! Come with me to the sea, Jerry. I've got the old roller at the door, and in an hour and a half we'll be on the Sussex downs sniffing the beautiful ozone and watching the baa lambs frisk and gambol.”

“Come to my lab, and I'll make you some ozone in two seconds,” said Gerald, getting up from the table and fumbling for his pipe.

Jimmy groaned. His companion was at the door when he turned, his hand upon the handle.

“Jimmy, would you like to meet the prime minister?” he asked.

“Good Lord, no,” said Jimmy, astonished. “Why do you want me to meet the prime minister?”

“I don't really want you to meet him,” said Gerald, “but I thought you would enjoy the experience. Chapelle is very strong for science, and he is really an excellent mathematician.”

“I gathered that from his last budget,” said Jimmy grimly, for the prime minister was also chancellor of the exchequer.

He saw the puzzled look on Van Roon's face.

“A budget,” he explained politely, “is an apology made by a responsible minister in the House of Commons for the robberies he intends to commit in the ensuing year. But what about his mathematical qualities? I have no wish to meet mathematicians. Don't you think the scientific atmosphere in which I live is sufficiently thick without introducing a new brand of fog?”

“It doesn't matter,” said Gerald, opening the door. “Only he's giving a luncheon to a few interesting people.”

“Including yourself?”

“Including myself,” said Gerald gravely. “It is a luncheon party to meet Maggerson. He's coming back from America, but I suppose you know that?”

“Maggerson?” said Jimmy. “Who is Maggerson?”

If an actor were asked, “Who was Henry Irving?” or a doctor, “Who was Lister?” the questions would produce exactly the same tragic look of incredulity as dawned upon the ungainly face of Gerald van Roon.

“Who is Maggerson?” he repeated. “You're joking, Jimmy.”

“I'm not,” said Jimmy stoutly.

“You'll ask who Leibnitz was next!”

“Oh, I know all about him,” said Jimmy confidently. “He was a German socialist who was executed”

“Leibnitz,” interrupted the other severely, “was the greatest mathematician Germany has produced. He was a contemporary of Newton and together they produced the calculus.”

“Good luck to 'em,” said Jimmy. “And when they produced it, what did they do with it? Anyway, what is a calculus? Isn't that a sort of multiplication table?”

Then Jimmy heard about Maggerson and the calculus he had discovered or invented or adopted—he was not certain which. It was the calculus which was accepted by all authorities and which had superseded Leibnitz and Newton's and Lagrange's and was known as “Maggerson's Calculus of Variation.”

“Is it a book?” asked Jimmy at last, “because, dear old thing, I'll buy it and read it up. I don't want to meet Mr. Maggerson without being able to tell him how his little story ends.”

Whereupon Gerald van Roon, realizing that he was up against an unreceptive mind, wandered from the room making gestures of despair.

There were lots of things that Jimmy had learned at school and at the university which he had contrived successfully to forget. It was his proud boast that the only definite fact about English literature which remained with him was that Chaucer drank beer at the Tabard Inn. Jimmy had drunk beer at the same inn, though it had been slightly renovated since the days of the Canterbury Pilgrims. It is equally true that he had not only forgotten all that he ever knew about mathematics, but that even the algebraical signs were as foolishly uninformative to him as they had been when he had first met them in a preparatory school.

On the road to Eastbourne he fell in with another young man who was driving a big Italia car to the common danger of the public. They met after the young man had passed him in a cloud of dust furiously hooting for passage room. They might not have come into contact with one another at all, but ahead was a police trap into which the furious driver fell.

Jimmy slowed his car when his experienced eyes detected a member of the Sussex constabulary concealed in the hedge and, coming up with the offender, he recognized in him the gilded son of John Ponter, printer to the king's most excellent majesty.

“Hello, Jimmy,” said Ferdinand. “'Lo! Yes?” this to the constable who was taking laborious particulars in a small notebook. “I live at Carlton House Mansions. Can't this thing be settled out of court, cheery old fellow?”

“It can't, sir,” said the representative of the law with some firmness. “You were going fifty-five miles an hour on that road and we've been having accidents here.”

“Am I the first accident you've had to-day?” asked Ferdie Ponter, and the constable grinned.

“Stop at the Chequers Inn. It's about a mile along the road,” yelled Ferdie as Blake went on. Jimmy waved his hand affirmatively.

At the Chequers they parked their cars and went into the stuffy little bar to drink beer.

“I shall lose my license this time,” said Ferdie gloomily.

“Better lose your license than lose your young life,” said Jimmy. “Where are you going in such a devil of a hurry, anyway?”

“I'm lunching with a little girl at Eastbourne,” said Ferdie, and then of a sudden, Jimmy struck the zinc bar against which he was leaning.

“Ferdie, your people do a tremendous lot of scientific printing, don't they?”

“I believe so,” said Ferdie. “I never go into the beastly works unless I can't help it. We've an awfully clever foreman, a man named Sennett.”

“Sennett,” repeated Jimmy thoughtfully. “Is he an oldish gentleman, rather like Mark Twain in appearance?”

“I never met Mark Twain,” confessed Ferdinand, gulping at his beer.

“I know the old boy. He comes to see Gerald with proofs of books and things.”

“That's the chap. We print and publish all Van Roon's books, and devilish dry they are,” said Ferdie. “Another tankard of nut-brown ale, good dame,” this to the brass-haired lady behind the counter.

“Ferdie, what is a calculus?”

“What?” said the puzzled Ferdinand.

“What is a calculus? I've got an idea I know,” said Jimmy, “but I can't exactly place the fellow. I'm going to meet a man who's rather a whale on the subject.”

“Calculus? I seem to remember something about it,” said Ferdinand, scratching his nose. “Isn't that the stuff they used to teach us at school? A sort of thing for calculating distances and speeds, revolutions and things? You're not going in for that sort of tommyrot, are you?”

“No, only I'm meeting this fellow Maggerson.”

“Oh, Maggerson? We print him, too,” said the honorary printer. “A wild-looking Johnny like Paderewski, though I don't think he plays the piano. As a matter of fact, we make a lot of money out of him.”

He wiped his mouth with a silk handkerchief and strode out of the bar and Jimmy, paying the score, followed. And there and then might have ended his feeble interest in the calculus of Mr. Walter Maggerson, but for the fact that when he got back to Blackheath in time to change for dinner he discovered that Van Roon had two visitors. Steele, his valet, who was the information bureau of Blake's Priory, supplied the intelligence.

“Mr. van Roon's compliments, sir, and will you not dress for dinner to-night because he has two people whom he must ask to stay and they are not dressed.”

“Certainly, Moses,” said Jimmy. “Put out the suit I wear when I'm not dressed. Who are the gentlemen?”

“There's a gentleman and a lady, sir. Well, she's not exactly a lady,” he added, “a young girl, if I might describe her so.”

“If she looks like a young girl, she probably is, Moses, so there is no great danger of your overstating the case,” said Jimmy.

A few minutes later Gerald came into his dressing room.

“Do you mind if I ask two people to stay to dinner to-night, Jimmy?” he demanded.

“Of course not,” said Jimmy, a little surprised, for his cousin did not usually apologize for his invitations.

“The fact is,” Gerald hesitated, “something has gone wrong with that book of mine, and Ponters, the printers, have sent down their foreman. You remember him—old Sennett!”

“Sennett?” said Jimmy in surprise. “I was talking about him to-day. What has happened?”

“I hardly know,” said Gerald, “but apparently some scamp at the works, out of sheer mischief, has been interpolating all sorts of ridiculous sentences and statements in the scientific works which Ponters publish. They have only recently discovered this, and one of the first books that seems to have been tampered with was my book on 'The Distribution of Living Forms.'”

“What's that about?” asked Jimmy, interested. “It sounds like a textbook on beauty choruses to me.”

“Do you mind if they stay?” asked the other, ignoring the flippancy.

“Not a bit. Of course, I don't mind. What is the girl like?”

“The girl?” Jerry rubbed his chin absently. “Oh, she's—er—a girl. She has rather a perfect jaw. I was very much struck by her jaw.”

“Is she pretty? I suppose I needn't ask that if you were very much struck by her jaw,” said Jimmy.

“Pretty?” Gerald looked out of the window. “I suppose she may be considered pretty. She isn't malformed in any way.”

“You're inhuman,” said Jimmy hopelessly. “Get out before you corrupt Moses!”

“The fact is”—Gerald was obviously nervous—“I might have to keep Mr. Sennett here till quite late going through these proofs. Would you mind driving the girl home? Of course, we could telephone for a taxi, but her father is rather nervous about her, and I think somebody should accompany her.”

Jimmy smiled.

“Anything in the sacred cause of science,” he said solemnly.