On the morning of Monday, the 4th of August 1947, Mr Richard Thewless walked in pleasant sunshine through the West End of London. His object was commonplace enough, being simply that of obtaining temporary employment as a private tutor. Nevertheless, he had the sense of an occasion, and of an interest much transcending that which commonly accompanied his finding a new pupil. For this pupil – if indeed he landed the job – was somebody. Or rather – since small boys are necessarily nobodies – he was the son of one very decidedly somebody. Sir Bernard Paxton’s reputation was world-wide. He was beyond question the greatest of living physicists.
From his proposed connexion with this eminent person, Mr Thewless already extracted considerable satisfaction – to the point, indeed, of being quite unwontedly disposed to a somewhat premature counting of his chickens. It was, to begin with, with the learned and professional classes that, in general, he got on best. He liked people substantially of his own sort, and often continued to like them when they turned out not very readily able to meet his bills. Impecunious barristers, bankrupt country gentlemen, or harassed provincial professors with sons who must either win an Eton scholarship or be swept into the hideous maw of national education: these were persons whom Mr Thewless took pleasure in succouring. True, it was his duty sometimes to represent to them that Magdalen or Christ Church, King’s or Trinity – those farther goals – might be as readily attained through new and virtually costless establishments as through others still addressing themselves to the world of Alfred the Great or William of Wykeham or the Prince Consort. Nevertheless, Mr Thewless profoundly sympathized with the conservative disposition evinced by this category of his employers. For by instinct he was, as he sometimes told himself, a sober and self-respecting snob, just as by vocation he was a hanger-on of people themselves now no more than desperately hanging-on. And precisely here lay the particular attraction of Sir Bernard Paxton. Already – Mr Thewless reluctantly admitted it – the lower stratum of the intellectual class was being proletarianized, and there was always a limit to what the most conscientious tutor could achieve in households in which there appeared unnaturally and perpetually to preponderate distracting vistas of unwashed dishes and unsegregated babies. In that particular world nowadays only the high-ups had their heads substantially above the soapsuds. Yet here, surely, Sir Bernard Paxton must belong… Mr Thewless, hoping that his services might be retained by this eminent scientist, looked forward to a congenial environment still materially cushioned by a substantial prosperity.
But Mr Thewless was a man of measure. Mounting as he presently did the broad flight of steps to Sir Bernard’s front door, and responding with practised certainty to sundry preliminary indications of what lay within, he was visited by sharp misgiving. Often enough before he had been in this sort of house, but never with satisfaction for very long. Positive opulence was something which he found uncomfortably to jar with the spirit of the time; the poet whose social occasions obliged him to spend a day at Timon’s villa was not rendered more uneasy by its splendours than was Mr Thewless by anything resembling their latter-day counterpart. And why – the question suggested itself even as he raised his hand to the door-bell – yes, why in the world should a really great man take the trouble to surround himself with so emphatic a material magnificence?
A large element of taking trouble there must certainly be. Not even wealth (and what he was confronted with, he saw, was inherited wealth rather than the mere fruits of a substantial earned income) – not even wealth made this sort of thing trouble-free nowadays. Anxiety about where the housemaids were to come from and how the place was to be heated must, under present conditions, tiresomely creep out of housekeeper’s room and butler’s pantry and assault the owner. Nor – Mr Thewless understood – was there a Lady Paxton. Sir Bernard was a widower, so that female vanity could not be responsible for the maintaining of these splendours. Doubtless there were noblemen and others in high place for whom the utility of such a way of life still outweighed its inconvenience; people, Mr Thewless vaguely thought, who give political parties. But for a man whose labours were on that frontier where the higher physics passes into the inapprehensible it was distinctly odd.
And Mr Thewless shook his head. Whereupon Sir Bernard’s butler, taking this as indicating a disinclination on the part of the visitor to remove his overcoat, made a noise at once respectful and peremptory. Mr Thewless took off the overcoat. He handed the man his hat, and suffered the discomfiture of seeing an expert scrutiny passed upon the unimpressive label inside the crown. He had already relinquished his umbrella, which happened to be a good one; he had the impression that he was suspected of having purloined it during some momentary failure of surveillance in just such another resplendent place as this.
Then he was ushered into a library, where he waited for some time.
This interval, had he known it, was heavy with destiny. But Mr Thewless was aware of no more than a growing sense of oppression which he put down partly to the sultry quality of this London morning and partly to the sombre richness of the apartment. The furniture was ancient, carven, and massive, upholstered in dark velvets upon which glinted dull silver studs. Horripilant velvet, thought Mr Thewless – and being unable without discomfort even to think of sitting down he discreetly prowled about. It must all be Spanish, he decided, even to the heavy presses sheltering the books. And, of course, both pictures in the room were Spanish; indeed they were almost certainly the original work of Velazquez. Mr Thewless was somewhat humiliated to find that his first impulse before these masterpieces was in the direction of financial calculation. Persons who moved more familiarly among private collections of Old Masters were presumably superior to this vulgarity. Conscientiously then Mr Thewless elevated his mind to aesthetic contemplation. The first painting represented a peculiarly repulsive court dwarf; the second was of a radiant little prince, dark-haired and dark-eyed, who clasped a formidable musket in his right hand and glanced slantwise out from a scene of improbable carnage among wolves and boars. It was a vision of the felicity of childhood, and the whole room – it suddenly occurred to Mr Thewless – was contrived to contrast with it and set it off. And this made Mr Thewless uneasy. His uneasiness in turn made him feel bourgeois and provincial. And by this his uneasiness was increased yet further.
Caught in this unfortunate circle, Mr Thewless found himself distrusting everything around him. He distrusted an eminent physicist who lived like a grandee; he even distrusted his butler. But this was absurd. Why should he nurse dark suspicions of a man simply because he had been impertinently curious about a visitor’s hatter? Mr Thewless realized what was happening. He was simply more and more distrusting himself – and of the burden of this abasement he was endeavouring to lighten his ego by projecting the occasions of his distrust upon the world around him.
If Mr Thewless was not altogether confident about himself, this was certainly not because he had disappointed any very general expectations. Little had been prophesied of him, either by himself or others, which he had not fulfilled. First as a schoolmaster and later as a private coach he had given satisfaction to his employers, and these in return fed, clothed, and housed him, as well as providing small but fairly regular sums of money for recreation and to set against old age. This was the whole history of Mr Thewless as he sat in Sir Bernard Paxton’s library waiting to be interviewed. It is true that he sometimes found himself believing that other situations, had they come his way, would have aroused in him responses not altogether inadequate. But such secret persuasions were no doubt commonly harboured by the unsuccessful, and Mr Thewless attached small significance to them. On the other hand the self-distrust that intermittently assailed him worried him a good deal. Was it not baseless, after all, since what he was called upon to do he did reasonably well?
However all this might be, Mr Thewless upon the present occasion found himself growing irrationally cross – cross with himself and cross with the environment and presumed personality of Sir Bernard Paxton. This feeling might well have led him to a resolve to proceed no further, to decline the proposed engagement if it were offered to him. But actually it had a contrary effect. Mr Thewless resolved to get the job, and to get it as the result of displaying an uncompromising professional severity. He had just come to this decision when he was ushered in upon Sir Bernard.
It was rather like a trick played by a fashionable physician. From surroundings of elaborately contrived oppression and gloom he was abruptly transferred amid tones, proportions, and objects evocative of confidence, repose, and a buoyant, nervous tone. The room had all this even while being markedly exotic, for there was almost nothing in it which was not of the authentic arts and crafts of ancient China. Those strangely logical landscapes and those birds perched amid blossoms miraculously disposed were, Mr Thewless conjectured, about a thousand years old. In the British Museum he would have appreciated them very much; now, unfortunately, his first thought was again that a lot of money must have been spent on them. And, more than ever, he instinctively disapproved. A man who kept Spain and China cheek by jowl in this way almost certainly ordered his rooms wholesale. Yes, that would be it. Sir Bernard Paxton would simply decree a room and some professional person would forthwith purvey it. And not a merely commercial person by whom Sir Bernard might be roundly and wholesomely cheated. Rather some great connoisseur would be employed, some unfortunate pitchforked out of a ruined continent… At this rambling and undisciplined moment Mr Thewless saw Paxton.
At once everything faded out except the man himself. He was not even ‘Sir Bernard’; he was a single great name, belonging with Galileo, Bacon, Newton. He might live amid a menagerie; he might indulge not in mere ostentation and acquisitiveness, but in eccentricities, lunacies, deplorable vices – and there would remain the single overwhelming fact of his being Paxton still.
He stood in a window embrasure, bathed in sunshine. He turned as Mr Thewless advanced and the light caught that prodigious brow, that whole skull so tremendous that it would have been freakish and horrible had the man’s whole frame not been cast in a gigantic mould. The capacity for profound speculation was evident at once, and a moment later the habit of it was revealed in the settled lines of the forehead and mouth. Mr Thewless was impressed. But when he saw Paxton’s eyes he was overcome. Deeply and darkly blue, they were the eyes of a child who sees his first illuminated Christmas tree, or his first fall of snow. Only whereas the child’s emotion is transient Paxton’s was enduring. Whatever was the universe that Paxton contemplated it was one evoking the response of perpetual wonder and awe. All other men – Mr Thewless suddenly felt – lived with their noses hard up against a wall and their eyes painfully focused upon some few inches of brick and mortar. But Paxton’s stature carried him clear of the barrier and he looked out upon an illimitable prospect which he recognized as his heritage and his home.
The impression of all this was for some moments so overwhelming that Mr Thewless went almost automatically through the preliminary exchanges that followed. When the voice of genius did eventually reach him with any clarity it seemed to come, at first, from a long way off.
‘One way and another, my son has been unlucky for a number of years. I am afraid that his teaching has been something worse than indifferent. Wartime conditions, no doubt.’
Mr Thewless blinked. These were words extremely familiar to him. They might almost be described as standard at this stage of such an interview. Quite automatically, Mr Thewless looked judicial and nodded as does one man of superior understanding to another. But within him he was immediately aware of the impertinence of this when such a one as Paxton was in question.
‘A sensitive and slightly nervous boy. He has been judged unruly at times – and it is certainly true that he is not very amenable to discipline of the ordinary sort.’
‘Quite so.’ Mr Thewless’ tone conveyed complete understanding of the situation and complete confidence in his own power to deal with it. Mr Thewless was in fact (as an inward voice told him) going through his tricks. ‘Special arrangements may well be necessary in such a case, Sir Bernard. But they should be made with as little fuss as possible. The danger of too much indulgence should be frankly faced. It is no kindness to cocker and coddle a lad who will be obliged to face the world on his own one day. The advantage of a public school lies in its being, roughly speaking, a microcosm of that world. It reproduces that world’s rough-and-tumble, among other things. If a boy can stick it, he should. We must not be too quick to think in terms of guarding the young nerves from shock. On the other hand, when a sensitive child…’
Mr Thewless was eyeing Sir Bernard Paxton firmly and his voice did not falter. Nevertheless, he was keenly aware of the fatuity of presenting this shallow and platitudinous chatter to a man whose views must necessarily be both extensive and profound. Nor was his uneasiness diminished by the observation that Sir Bernard was responding much as commonplace parents did; that is to say, he was slightly disconcerted, slightly hostile, and more than a little impressed. And by the time Mr Thewless had reached the conclusion of his remarks (this conclusion being to the effect that, all things considered, young Paxton might well be delivered over to him for just so much modified cockering as a ripe experience should endorse) – by the time Mr Thewless got so far, Sir Bernard showed every sign of eating out of his hand.
For some moments Mr Thewless was triumphant. He had successfully presented just that air of professional severity upon which he had resolved while in the library, and the consequence was that the job appeared as good as his. With Sir Bernard Paxton he had kept his end up; he had been abased by neither his intellectual eminence nor the splendours of his way of living. And this was very satisfying to the ego.
These feelings on the part of Mr Thewless are so natural as scarcely to be worthy of record. More important is the fact that he had other feelings as well. In all this he saw himself as about one millimetre high. Of course Sir Bernard Paxton could be scored off; genius always can. And perhaps this genius was more vulnerable than many – for Mr Thewless had come to discern the weakness in the man before him. His will by no means matched his intellect. The creaking magnificence of this great London house attested it, for here was simply the issue of an irrelevant part of himself – his wealth – which he had been unable to resist. But more striking than this was what was already discernible of the relationship between Sir Bernard and his son. The father doted on the son, the son pushed the father around, and now the father was seeking extraneous aid. To Mr Thewless, who contrived to manage boys simply by taking his ability to do so for granted, this was a familiar situation in which there was always something slightly ridiculous. And the absurdity grew when the father was a towering person like Paxton. What was diminutive in Mr Thewless drew him for a moment into an attitude of pleased superiority.
But this was to take the matter basely. One has the duty of reverencing genius in its frailties as well as in its strength. And certainly it was not for Mr Thewless, confronting the intellectual beacon that was Paxton, to pride himself on the continued independence of his own flickering farthing candle. In any perplexity into which this great man had fallen it was his duty to assist to the maximum of his power… This resolution on the part of Mr Thewless, which was sincere and generous, added considerably to the jolt he was presently to experience. But, as it happened, it was to have consequences far wider than that. Upon it, and in the near future, imponderable things were to hang.
Meanwhile, Mr Thewless discoursed on School Certificate. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘substantially below the standard? I am afraid there must be something very far wrong. Is he a capable boy?’
With parents, this was one of Mr Thewless’ strongest words. A small boy who was likely enough to become a Senior Wrangler or a Fellow of Balliol he would by no means describe in terms more extravagant. And this he had found was a capital technique.
‘Capable?’ Sir Bernard sounded dubious. ‘Humphrey’s intelligence quotient is fair. In fact it is very high so far as the common run of able people go. But he does seem to be retarded in certain respects.’
Mr Thewless wondered whether he himself might be ranked among the common run of able people. He doubted it.
‘On the other hand’ – Sir Bernard spoke with an effort – ‘there are matters in which he is uncommonly precocious. That is particularly so in – um – the sphere of the emotional life.’
This sounded far from promising. Mr Thewless considered. ‘But he has at least held his place at school?’
Sir Bernard looked extremely gloomy. ‘They wouldn’t be in a hurry to turn out my son, you know. I doubt whether latterly the position has been other than that. Humphrey is somewhat ungovernable, as I said.’
‘But the holidays have begun, and he is at home? I think I had better see the boy, Sir Bernard, before even the most tentative arrangement is made.’
‘That is very reasonable. And I believe Humphrey is actually in the house at this moment. Only – it is really rather an awkward thing – he is at present quite resolved not to show himself.’
Mr Thewless, receiving this information, was expressively silent.
‘But he is quite keen on a certain holiday that has been proposed. Cousins on my late wife’s side – folk, actually, whom I seldom meet – have asked him to join them in Ireland for a month. It is there that I would wish you to accompany him, and keep him to his reading as well as you can. If Humphrey is given to understand that he may only go on condition that he has a tutor–’
‘I quite understand.’ And Mr Thewless was indeed perfectly familiar with bargaining and compromising parents. ‘Do these cousins live permanently in Ireland?’
‘I know almost nothing about them. But I imagine they merely have a place there to which they go at this time of year for shooting and diversions of that sort.’
‘In fact, the proposal would be that I should take Humphrey for purposes of study to what will probably prove to be a large house-party in a hunting-lodge or shooting-box? I hardly think that such conditions would be likely to favour application in a wayward lad.’
Sir Bernard looked harassed and depressed. ‘I quite see the force of what you say. And you do very well to insist on it. Only–’
At this moment there came a low buzzing sound from somewhere on the exquisitely lacquered table behind which Sir Bernard sat. With a word of apology, he picked up a telephone receiver. It was merely an instrument, Mr Thewless conjectured, by which he maintained communication with other parts of this ramifying establishment – and indeed what appeared to issue faintly from the earpiece was the voice of the objectionable butler. Mr Thewless disapproved of a gentleman thus ordering matters as if his home were a laboratory or an office. But genius, he reflected, makes its own rules. And again he surveyed the noble brow and perpetually wondering eyes of the great scientist. It was really satisfactory – it was really very satisfactory, after all – to find oneself drawn into the affairs of one so eminent.
‘At once,’ said Sir Bernard. There was something like surprise and relief in his tone. He replaced the receiver, and in the same moment his hand went down in what might have been the action of pressing an electric bell. He looked at Mr Thewless in an abstraction so extreme as to suggest that some profound speculation on the structure of the physical universe had suddenly come to him from the void. And then he spoke. ‘I shall give myself the pleasure,’ he said, ‘of writing to you by this evening’s post. Should it be possible…’
And thus in a matter of seconds – although not before achieving a full realization of what had happened – Mr Thewless found himself being shown out. Some more acceptable candidate for the distinction of tutoring young Humphrey Paxton had turned up. What manner of man was his successful rival? Mr Thewless had his answer as he stood in the hall waiting to be handed his suspect umbrella and his insufficient hat. For through the open door of the library he glimpsed a young man of athletic figure and confident bearing who was beguiling his brief period of waiting by turning over the pages of The Times. Mr Thewless knew the type.
He walked down the broad steps of the Paxton mansion into London sunlight. The letter which Sir Bernard would write that evening already lay open in his mind. He had received it before. That it was a disconcerting letter to receive was a fact lying not at all in the economic sphere. Mr Thewless was never unable to obtain employment, and that on terms as good as it ever occurred to him to bargain for. No, the jolt lay elsewhere… Mr Thewless reached the pavement and took a deep breath of air – an air equally redolent of lime trees and petrol engines. He was, he tried to persuade himself, well out of it. The Paxton establishment had irritated him; Humphrey Paxton sounded a most unpromising boy; the proposed arrangement would have been altogether unsatisfactory from a working point of view. Nevertheless, Mr Thewless was disappointed. And this, since he was an honest man, he presently admitted to himself. Galileo, Bacon, Newton…that morning he had been with the gods. Genius had half turned to him in its frailty and he had been prepared to shoulder whatever responsibility followed. In his heart Mr Thewless believed that he would have done not badly. As he turned away from the Paxton portico and walked through the quiet, almost empty square, he felt the universe contracting about him and building up, not many inches from his nose, its old and familiar horizons. It was as if, while in the great man’s presence, he too had for a moment contrived to peer over that brick wall. But now – to put it less graphically – the humdrum was establishing itself once more as his natural environment. For some little time his life would feel the narrower as a result of this episode. And then he would forget all about it.
But in this prognostication Mr Thewless was wrong. As a consequence of his visit to Sir Bernard Paxton, an altogether fuller life was presently to be his. And in this his fate was to contrast markedly with that of the young man whom he had glimpsed in the library.