and interesting, according to the remarkable ideals of
Neo-Georgian aestheticism. Such is the illogical quality of
humanity that Holsten, fresh from work that was like a petard
under the seat of current civilisation, saw these changes with
regret. He had come up Heath Street perhaps a thousand times, had
known the windows of all the little shops, spent hours in the
vanished cinematograph theatre, and marvelled at the high-flung
early Georgian houses upon the westward bank of that old gully of
a thoroughfare; he felt strange with all these familiar things
gone. He escaped at last with a feeling of relief from this
choked alley of trenches and holes and cranes, and emerged upon
the old familiar scene about the White Stone Pond. That, at
least, was very much as it used to be.
There were still the fine old red-brick houses to left and right
of him; the reservoir had been improved by a portico of marble,
the white-fronted inn with the clustering flowers above its
portico still stood out at the angle of the ways, and the blue
view to Harrow Hill and Harrow spire, a view of hills and trees
and shining waters and wind-driven cloud shadows, was like the
opening of a great window to the ascending Londoner. All that
was very reassuring. There was the same strolling crowd, the same
perpetual miracle of motors dodging through it harmlessly,
escaping headlong into the country from the Sabbatical stuffiness
behind and below them. There was a band still, a women's suffrage
meeting-for the suffrage women had won their way back to the
tolerance, a trifle derisive, of the populace again-socialist
orators, politicians, a band, and the same wild uproar of dogs,
frantic with the gladness of their one blessed weekly release
from the back yard and the chain. And away along the road to the
Spaniards strolled a vast multitude, saying, as ever, that the
view of London was exceptionally clear that day.
Young Holsten's face was white. He walked with that uneasy
affectation of ease that marks an overstrained nervous system and
an under-exercised body. He hesitated at the White Stone Pond
whether to go to the left of it or the right, and again at the
fork of the roads. He kept shifting his stick in his hand, and
every now and then he would get in the way of people on the
footpath or be jostled by them because of the uncertainty of his
movements. He felt, he confesses, 'inadequate to ordinary
existence.' He seemed to himself to be something inhuman and
mischievous. All the people about him looked fairly prosperous,
fairly happy, fairly well adapted to the lives they had to
lead-a week of work and a Sunday of best clothes and mild
promenading-and he had launched something that would disorganise
the entire fabric that held their contentments and ambitions and
satisfactions together. 'Felt like an imbecile who has presented
a box full of loaded revolvers to a Creche,' he notes.
He met a man named Lawson, an old school-fellow, of whom history
now knows only that he was red-faced and had a terrier. He and
Holsten walked together and Holsten was sufficiently pale and
jumpy for Lawson to tell him he overworked and needed a holiday.
They sat down at a little table outside the County Council house
of Golders Hill Park and sent one of the waiters to the Bull and
Bush for a couple of bottles of beer, no doubt at Lawson's
suggestion. The beer warmed Holsten's rather dehumanised system.
He began to tell Lawson as clearly as he could to what his great
discovery amounted. Lawson feigned attention, but indeed he had
neither the knowledge nor the imagination to understand. 'In the
end, before many years are out, this must eventually change war,
transit, lighting, building, and every sort of manufacture, even
agriculture, every material human concern--'
Then Holsten stopped short. Lawson had leapt to his feet. 'Damn
that dog!' cried Lawson. 'Look at it now. Hi! Here!
Phewoo-phewoo phewoo! Come HERE, Bobs! Come HERE!'
The young scientific man, with his bandaged hand, sat at the
green table, too tired to convey the wonder of the thing he had
sought so long, his friend whistled and bawled for his dog, and
the Sunday people drifted about them through the spring sunshine.
For a moment or so Holsten stared at Lawson in astonishment, for
he had been too intent upon what he had been saying to realise
how little Lawson had attended.
Then he remarked, 'WELL!' and smiled faintly, and-finished the
tankard of beer before him.
Lawson sat down again. 'One must look after one's dog,' he said,
with a note of apology. 'What was it you were telling me?'
Section 2
In the evening Holsten went out again. He walked to Saint Paul's
Cathedral, and stood for a time near the door listening to the
evening service. The candles upon the altar reminded him in some
odd way of the fireflies at Fiesole. Then he walked back through
the evening lights to Westminster. He was oppressed, he was
indeed scared, by his sense of the immense consequences of his
discovery. He had a vague idea that night that he ought not to
publish his results, that they were premature, that some secret
association of wise men should take care of his work and hand it
on from generation to generation until the world was riper for
its practical application. He felt that nobody in all the
thousands of people he passed had reallyawakened to the fact of
change, they trusted the world for what it was, not to alter too
rapidly, to respect their trusts, their assurances, their habits,
their little accustomed traffics and hard-won positions.
He went into those little gardens beneath the over-hanging,
brightly-lit masses of the Savoy Hotel and the Hotel Cecil. He
sat down on a seat and became aware of the talk of the two people
next to him. It was the talk of a young couple evidently on the
eve of marriage. The man was congratulating himself on having
regular employment at last; 'they like me,' he said, 'and I like
the job. If I work up-in'r dozen years or so I ought to be
gettin' somethin' pretty comfortable. That's the plain sense of
it, Hetty. There ain't no reason whatsoever why we shouldn't get
along very decently-very decently indeed.'
The desire for little successes amidst conditions securely fixed!
So it struck upon Holsten's mind. He added in his diary, 'I had
a sense of all this globe as that…'
By that phrase he meant a kind of clairvoyant vision of this
populated world as a whole, of all its cities and towns and
villages, its high roads and the inns beside them, its gardens
and farms and upland pastures, its boatmen and sailors, its ships
coming along the great circles of the ocean, its time-tables and
appointments and payments and dues as it were one unified and
progressive spectacle. Sometimes such visions came to him; his