There was a gray, woolly October fog over Hyde Park. The railings wept grimy tears, and the damp yellow leaves dropped soddenly from the soaked trees. Pedestrians looked chilled and sulky; camphor chests and cedar-presses had yielded up their treasures of sables and sealskin, chinchilla and silver fox. A double stream of fashionable traffic rolled west and east, and the rich clarets and vivid crimsons of the automobiles burned through the fog like genial, warming fires. A Baby-Bunting six horse-power petrol-car, in color a chrysanthemum yellow, came jiggeting by. The driver stopped. He was a technical chemist and biologist of note and standing, and I had last heard him speak from the platform of the Royal Institution.
“I haven’t seen you,” said the Professor, “for years.”
“That must be because you haven’t looked,” said I, “for I have both seen and heard you quite recently. Only you were upon the platform and I was on the ground-floor.”
“You are too much upon the ground-floor now,” said the Professor, with a shudder of a Southern European at the dampness around and under foot, “and I advise you to accept a seat in my car.”
And the Baby-Bunting, trembling with excitement at being in the company of so many highly-varnished electric victorias and forty horse-power auto-cars, joined the steadily-flowing stream going west.
“I wonder that you stoop to petrol, Professor,” I said, as the thin, skillful hand in the baggy chamois 265glove manipulated the driving-wheel, and the little car snaked in and out like a torpedo-boat picking her way between the giant warships of a Channel Squadron.
The Professor’s black brows unbent under the cap-peak, and his thin, tightly-gripped lips relaxed into a mirthless smile.
“Ah, yes; you think that I should drive my car by radio-activity, is it not? And so I could—and would, if the pure radium chloride were not three thousand times the price of gold. From eight tons of uranium ore residues about one gramme—that is fifteen grains—can be extracted by fusing the residue with carbonates of soda, dissolving in hydrochloric acid, precipitating the lead and other metals in solution by the aid of hydrogen-sulphide, and separating from the chlorides that remain—polonium, actinium, barium, and so forth—the chloride of radium. With a single pound of this I could not only drive an auto-car, my friend”—his olive cheek warmed, and his melancholy dark eyes grew oddly lustrous—“I could stop the world!”
“And supposing it was necessary to make it go on again?” I suggested.
“When I speak of the world,” exclaimed the Professor, “I do not refer to the planet upon which we revolve; I speak of the human race which inhabits it.”
“Would the human race be obliged to you, Professor?” I queried.
The Professor turned upon me with so sudden a verbal riposte that the Baby-Bunting swerved violently.
“You are not as young as you were when I met you first. To be plain, you are getting middle-aged. Do you like it?”
“I hate it!” I answered, with beautiful sincerity.
“Would you thank the man who should arrest, not the beneficent passage of Time, which means progress, but the wear and tear of nerve and muscle, tissue, and 266bone, the slow deterioration of the blood by the microbes of old age, for Metchnikoff has shown that there is no difference between the atrophy of senility and the atrophy caused by microbe poison? Would you thank him—the man who should do that for you? Tell me, my friend.”
I replied, briefly and succinctly: “Wouldn’t I?”
“Ha!” exclaimed the Professor, “I thought so!”
“But I should have liked him to have begun earlier,” I said. “Twenty-nine is a nice age, now.... It is the age we all try to stop at, and can’t, however much we try. Look there!”
A landau limousine, dark blue, beautifully varnished, nickel-plated, and upholstered in cream-white leather, came gliding gracefully through the press of vehicles. From the crest upon the panel to the sober workmanlike livery of the chauffeur, the turn-out was perfection. The pearl it contained was worthy of the setting.
“Look there?” I repeated, as the rose-cheeked, sapphire-eyed, smiling vision passed, wrapped in a voluminous coat of chinchilla and silver fox, with a toque of Parma violets under the shimmer of the silken veil that could only temper the burning glory of her wonderful Renaissance hair.
“There’s the exception to the rule.... There’s a woman who doesn’t need the aid of science or of Art to keep her at nine and twenty. There’s a woman in whom ‘the wear and tear of nerve and muscle, tissue and bone’ goes on—if it does go on—imperceptibly. Her blood doesn’t seem to be much deteriorated by the microbe of old age, Professor, does it? And she’s forty-three! The alchemistical forty-three, that turns the gold of life back into lead! The gold remains gold in her case, for that hair, that complexion, that figure, are,” I solemnly declared, “her own.”
267At that moment Lady Clanbevan gave a smiling gracious nod to the Professor, and he responded with a cold, grave bow. The glow of her gorgeous hair, the liquid sapphire of her eyes, were wasted on this stony man of science. She passed, going home to Stanhope Gate, I suppose, in which neighborhood she has a house; I had barely a moment to notice the white-bonneted, blue-cloaked nurse on the front of the landau, holding a bundle of laces and cashmeres, and to reflect that I have never yet seen Lady Clanbevan taking the air out of the society of a baby, when the Professor spoke:
“So Lady Clanbevan is the one woman who has no need of the aid of Art or science to preserve her beauty and maintain her appearance of youth? Supposing I could prove to you otherwise, my friend, what then?”
“I should say,” I returned, “that you had proved what everybody else denies. Even the enemies of that modern Ninon de l’Enclos, who has just passed——”
“With the nurse and the baby?” interpolated the Professor.
“With the nurse and the baby,” said I. “Even her enemies—and they are legion—admit the genuineness of the charms they detest. Mentioning the baby, do you know that for twenty years I have never seen Lady Clanbevan out without a baby? She must have quite a regiment of children—children of all ages, sizes, and sexes.”
“Upon the contrary,” said the Professor, “she has only one!”
“The others have all died young, then?” I asked sympathetically, and was rendered breathless by the rejoinder:
“Lady Clanbevan is a widow.”
“One never asks questions about the husband of a professional beauty,” I said. “His individuality is 268merged in hers from the day upon which her latest photograph assumes a marketable value. Are you sure there isn’t a Lord Clanbevan alive somewhere?”
“There is a Lord Clanbevan alive,” said the Professor coldly. “You have just seen him, in his nurse’s arms. He is the only child of his mother, and she has been a widow for nearly twenty years! You do not credit what I assert, my friend?”
“How can I, Professor?” I asked, turning to meet his full face, and noticed that his dark, somewhat opaque brown irises had lights and gleams of carbuncle-crimson in them. “I have had Lady Clanbevan and her progeny under my occasional observation for years. The world grows older, if she doesn’t, and she has invariably a baby—toujours a new baby—to add to the charming illusion of young motherhood which she sustains so well. And now you tell me that she is a twenty-years’ widow with one child, who must be nearly of age—or it isn’t proper. You puzzle me painfully!”
“Would you care,” asked the Professor after a moment’s pause, “to drive back to Harley Street with me? I am, as you know, a vegetarian, so I will not tax your politeness by inviting you to lunch. But I have something in my laboratory I should wish to show you.”
“Of all things, I should like to come,” I said. “How many times haven’t I fished fruitlessly for an invitation to visit the famous laboratory where nearly twenty years ago——”
“I traced,” said the Professor, “the source of phenomena which heralded the evolution of the R?ntgen Ray and the ultimate discovery of the radio-active salt they have christened radium. I called it protium twenty years ago, because of its various and protean qualities. Why did I not push on—perfect the discovery and anticipate 269Sir William C—— and the X——’s? There was a reason. You will understand it before you leave my laboratory.”
The Baby-Bunting stopped at the unfashionable end of Harley Street, in front of the dingy yellow house with the black front door, flanked by dusty boxes of mildewed dwarf evergreens, and the Professor, relieved of his fur-lined coat and cap, led the way upstairs as lightly as a boy. Two garret-rooms had been knocked together for a laboratory. There was a tiled furnace at the darker end of the long skylighted room thus made, and solid wooden tables much stained with spilt chemicals, were covered with scales, glasses, jars, and retorts—all the tools of chemistry. From one of the many shelves running round the walls, the Professor took down a circular glass flask and placed it in my hands. The flask contained a handful of decayed and moldy-looking wheat, and a number of peculiarly offensive-looking little beetles with tapir-like proboscides.
“The perfectly developed beetle of the Calandria granaria,” said the Professor, as I cheerfully resigned the flask, “a common British weevil, whose larv? feed upon stored grain. Now look at this.” He reached down and handed me a precisely similar flask, containing another handful of grain, cleaner and sounder in appearance, and a number of grubs, sharp-ended chrysalis-lik............