Naturally, he was disliked by the men who actually did the scientific work of the world and who had little time to spare for cultivating notoriety. He was a member of a large number of those societies to which admission can be gained by payment of an entrance fee and subscription; and on the bills of his lectures and the title-pages of his books his name was followed by a string of letters which the uninitiated assumed to imply great scientific ability. His application for admission to the Royal Society had, however, been unsuccessful—a failure which he frequently and publicly attributed to jealousy.
It appears strange that such a man as this should have been selected by Fate as the agent of disaster; and it seems characteristic of him that, when the key of the problem was lying beside him, his energy was entirely engrossed in writing newspaper paragraphs on another matter. His mind worked exclusively through the medium of print and paper; so that even the most striking natural phenomenon escaped his observation.
At that time he lived in one of the houses of Cumberland Terrace, overlooking Regent’s Park. I cannot recall the number; and the place has long ago disappeared; but I remember that it was near St. Katherine’s College and it overlooked the grounds of St. Katherine’s House. Wotherspoon carried his scientific aura even into the arrangement of his residence; for what was normally the drawing-room of the house had been turned into a kind of laboratory-reception-room; so that casual visitors might be impressed by his ardour in the pursuit of knowledge. When anyone called upon him, he was always discovered in this room, fingering apparatus, pouring liquids from one tube into another, producing precipitates or doing something else which would strike the unwary as being part of a recondite process. I had a feeling, when I came upon him in the midst of these manoeuvres, that he had sprung up from his chair at the sound of the door bell and had plunged hastily into his operations. I know enough to distinguish real work from make-believe; and Wotherspoon never gave me the impression that he was engaged in anything better than window-dressing. At any rate, nothing ever was made public with regard to the results of these multitudinous experiments; and when, occasionally, I asked him if he proposed to bring out a paper, he merely launched into a diatribe against the jealousy of scientific men.
It was about this time that Henley-Davenport was making his earlier discoveries in the field of induced radioactivity. The results were too technical for the unscientific man to appreciate; but I had become interested, not so much in details as in possibilities; and I determined to go across the Park and pay a visit to Wotherspoon one evening. I knew that, as far as published information went, he would be in possession of the latest news; and it was easier to get it from him than to read it myself.
It was warm weather then. I decided to use my car instead of walking through the Park. I had a slight headache, and I thought that possibly a short spin later, in the cool of the evening, might take it away. As I drove, I noticed how thunderclouds were banking up on the horizon, and I congratulated myself that even if they broke I should have the shelter of the car and be saved a walk home through the rain.
When I reached Cumberland Terrace, I was, as I expected, shown up into Wotherspoon’s sanctum. I found him, as usual, deeply engrossed in work: he had his eye to the tube of a large microscope, down which he was staring intently. I noticed a slight change in the equipment of the room. There seemed to be fewer retorts, flasks and test-tube racks than there usually were; and two large tables at the windows were littered with flat glass dishes containing thin slabs of pinkish material which seemed to be gelatine. Things like incubators took up a good deal of the remaining space. But I doubt if it is worth while describing what I saw: I know very little of such things; and I question whether his apparatus would have passed muster with an expert in any case.
After a certain amount of fumbling with the microscope, which seemed largely a formal matter leading to nothing, he rose from his seat and greeted me with his customary preoccupied air. For a time we smoked and talked of Henley-Davenport’s work; but after he had answered my questions it became evident that he had no further interest in the subject; and I was not surprised when, after a pause, he broke entirely new ground in his next remark.
“Do you know, Flint,” he said, “I am losing interest in all these investigations of the atomic structure. It seems to me that while unimaginative people like Henley-Davenport are groping into the depths of the material Universe, the real thing is passing them by. After all, what is mere matter in comparison with the problems of life? I have given up atoms and I am going to begin work upon living organisms.”
That was so characteristic of Wotherspoon. He was always “losing interest in” something and “going to begin work” upon something else. I nodded without saying anything. After all, it seemed of very little importance what he “worked” at.
“I wonder if you ever reflect, Flint,” he continued, “if you ever ponder over our position in this Universe? Here we stand, like Dante, ‘midway in this our mortal life’; at the halfway house between the cradle and the grave in time. And in space, too, we represent the middle term between the endless stretches of the Macrocosm and the bottomless deeps of the Microcosm. Look up at the night-sky and your eyes will tingle with the rays from long-dead stars, suns that were blotted out ages ago
