Lord Edward was filled with an extraordinary exultation; he had never felt so happy in his life before.
That evening he told his father that he was not going to stand for Parliament. Still agitated by the morning’s revelations of Parnellism, the old gentleman was furious. Lord Edward was entirely unmoved; his mind was made up. The next day he advertised for a tutor. In the spring of the following year he was in Berlin working under Du Bois Reymond.
Forty years had passed since then. The studies of osmosis, which had indirectly given him a wife, had also given him a reputation. His work on assimilation and growth was celebrated. But what he regarded as the real task of his life—the great theoretical treatise on physical biology—was still unfinished. “The life of the animal is only a fragment of the total life of the universe.” Claude Bernard’s words had been his lifelong theme as well as his original inspiration. The book on which he had been working all these years was but an elaboration, a quantitative and mathematical illustration of them.
Upstairs in the laboratory the day’s work had just begun. Lord Edward preferred to work at night. He found the daylight hours disagreeably noisy. Breakfasting at half-past one, he would walk for an hour or two in the afternoon and return to read or write till lunch time at eight. At nine or half past he would do some practical work with his assistant and when that was over they would sit down to work on the great book or to discussion of its problems. At one Lord Edward had his supper and at about four or five he would go to bed.
Diminished and in fragments, the B Minor Suite came floating up from the great hall to the ears of the two men in the laboratory. They were too busy to realize that they were hearing it.
“Forceps,” said Lord Edward to his assistant. He had a very deep voice, indistinct and without, so to speak, a clearly defined contour. “A furry voice,” his daughter Lucy had called it when she was a child.
Illidge handed him the fine bright instrument. Lord Edward made a deep noise that signified thanks and turned back with the forceps to the anaesthetized newt that lay stretched out on the diminutive operating table. Illidge watched him critically, and approved. The Old Man was doing the job extraordinarily well. Illidge was always astonished by Lord Edward’s skill. You would never have expected a huge, lumbering creature like the Old Man to be so exquisitely neat. His big hands could do the finest work; it was a pleasure to watch them.
“There!” said Lord Edward at last and straightened himself up as far as his rheumatically bent back would allow him. “I think that’s all right, don’t you?”
Illidge nodded. “Perfectly all right,” he said in an accent that had certainly not been formed in any of the ancient and expensive seats of learning. It hinted of Lancashire origins. He was a small man, with a boyish-looking freckled face and red hair.
The newt began to wake up. Illidge put it away in a place of safety. The animal had no tail; it had lost that eight days ago and tonight the little bud of regenerated tissue which would normally have grown into a new tail had been removed and grafted onto the stump of its amputated right foreleg. Transplanted to its new position, would the bud turn into a foreleg, or continue incongruously to grow as a tail? Their first experiment had been with a tail-bud only just formed; it had duly turned into a leg. In the next, they had given the bud time to grow to a considerable size before they transplanted it; it had proved too far committed to tailhood to be able to adapt itself to the new conditions; they had manufactured a monster with a tail where an arm should have been. Tonight they were experimenting on a bud of intermediate age.
Lord Edward took a pipe out of his pocket and began to fill it, looking meditatively meanwhile at the newt. “Interesting to see what happens this time,” he said in his profound, indistinct voice. “I should think we must be just about on the border line between …” He left the sentence unfinished: it was always difficult for him to find the words to express his meaning. “The bud will have a difficult choice.”
“To be or not to be,” said Illidge facetiously and started to laugh; but seeing that Lord Edward showed no signs of having been amused, he checked himself. Almost put his foot in it again. He felt annoyed with himself and also, unreasonably, with the Old Man.
Lord Edward filled his pipe. “Tail becomes leg,” he said meditatively. “What’s the mechanism? Chemical peculiarities in the neighbouring … ? It can’t obviously be the blood. Or do you suppose it has something to do with the electric tension? It does vary, of course, in different parts of the body. Though why we don’t all just vaguely proliferate like cancers … Growing in a definite shape is very unlikely, when you come to think of it. Very mysterious and …” His voice trailed off into a deep and husky murmur.
Illidge listened disapprovingly. When the Old Man started off like this about the major and fundamental problems of biology you never knew where he’d be getting to. Why, as likely as not he’d begin talking about God. It really made one blush. He was determined to prevent anything so discreditable happening this time. “The next step with these newts,” he said in his most briskly practical tone, “is to tinker with the nervous system and see whether that has any influence on the grafts. Suppose, for example, we excised a piece of the spine …”
But Lord Edward was not listening to his assistant. He had taken his pipe out of his mouth, he had lifted his
