because he allows himself to be endlessly astonished by nature’s variety and perversity. He has no prejudices, no expectations. He bears no ill-will to any life-form. He has often cut up worms, for when you live in a place like Long Calderwood you learn to make your own entertainment.
Besides these habits of mind, what skill does an experimenter need? He needs patience, deftness, and the ability to think of doing what other people would deem completely pointless.
Take M. Trembley. He was admittedly a gentleman, or at least tutor to a gentleman; but he had a humble cast of mind. M. Trembley crept about in ditches, dredging up vegetation and thick brown slime. With delight, and through his magnifying glass, he observed the hydra, a freshwater polyp with arms shaped like horns.
M. Trembley kept his retrieved polyps in glass jars. He cut them up with a small pair of scissors, lengthways, crossways, every-which-ways. There was no killing them. He minced them and he grafted them, he made three of one. He watched them regenerate. Some grew eight heads. One day he sneaked up on a polyp with a hog’s bristle and turned it inside out, forcing its posterior through its mouth. M. Trembley was awarded a medal. For a while, polyps were the top fashion. Even great ladies were seen pursuing them, draggling in ditches. Then the fashion changed, and the virtuosi moved on to electrical experiments.
What lessons do we pluck from M. Trembley’s work—a model of its type? Disbelieve everybody, even Aristotle. Write down your methods. Experiment. Do it over and over. Cut finer. Distrust general rules. Cut finer still.
They’d been thinking about a triumphal procession, but the trouble is, Joe Vance said, you can’t have a triumph without horses, and your ordinary horse set beside your giant looks like a low dog, a spaniel. So you’ve got to hire Percherons, and they don’t come cheap.
“They have to be caparisoned with cloth of gold,” the Giant said.
“Yes, the caparisons, that’s another expense,” Joe said. “What do you say we just walk around? It’s only a short step.”
So they set out on foot along Piccadilly. Crowds in the street gaped and jostled and craned their necks. Joe shouted satirically, “Look your fill, cheapskates, pop your eyes,” and produced a box, which he rattled in front of them.
They came to Spring Gardens. “Nice high ceilings, I thought,” Joe said. “Claffey, don’t spit on the floor, if you want to spit go out in the street.”
“Out in the street, is it?” Claffey glared.
“Now, now,” Joe said. “No cross words on our first day in our new house.”
Their exhibition room, above the cane shop, was airy and lofty. Their own quarters, at the back, were meaner, and yet ostentatious. “Bedding is ordered up from the landlord,” Vance said. “He has a woman sees to it, but we must provide our own linen. I know a supplier, as it happens …”
“Fine linen,” the Giant stipulated.
“Fine, to be sure.”
“A pair of sheets you can draw—swish—through a woman’s bangle.”
“If you will,” said Vance.
Jankin said, “Have we to sleep up in the air on platforms?”
“They are called beds, Jankin,” said the Giant. “You have come across them in stories.”
“Will I not roll off, when I am dreaming, and injure myself?”
“Very likely,” said the Giant.
Jankin pulled at his sleeve. “Mester, have you ever, you know, slept in a bed?”
“No,” the Giant said. “I never have, Jankin. There’s no point, really, when your legs from the knees have to dangle elsewhere, and if you turn in the night you crack your knuckles on the floor. Better stay level, ground level.”
“Still,” Jankin said, “it’s a great thing to be a giant. I wish I were one.”
“But as you’re not, you can relish the thought of an easy night.”
They heard a door bang, and a female step, and an exclamation. “Gentlemen all!”
“But we know you, Miss,” Pybus said.
It was the girl from the cellar, with the shining face and the silver hair. “I am employed here by your landlord, since he has forgotten how to speak our language, just to see that the night-soil man hauls your shit away, and that you are not setting fire to his premises, or painting on the walls. I hope you will not do that.”
Joe Vance grinned. “You’ll take a drink?”
“I will not. I work for the landlord, he gives me a meal a day and a penny for straw.”
“Straw? Straw be damned. You can share with us,” Joe offered.
“Or I can cut my throat,” the girl said calmly. “Either will do, I suppose?”
Joe scowled. “That red-head, the one with the kerchief. From the cellar. What’s her name?”
“Bitch.”
“What?”
“That is what we are all named, here in England. Shift my shit, bitch. Scrub my floor, bitch. Lift your skirt, bitch, shut your eyes, soon you’ll come by a nasty surprise.”
“This isn’t right,” the Giant said.
“Not pleasant, but highly reasonable,” the girl said. “Suppose one of ours is taken up and questioned: What is
