He read the words, idly first, then more carefully, then several times with a strained attention. ‘The life of the animal is only a fragment of the total life of the universe.’ Then what about suicide? A fragment of the universe would be destroying itself? No, not destroying; it couldn’t destroy itself even if it tried. It would be changing its mode of existence.
Changing…. Bits of animals and plants became human beings. What was one day a sheep’s hind leg and leaves of spinach was the next part of the hand that wrote, the brain that conceived the slow movement of the Jupiter Symphony. And another day had come when thirty-six years of pleasures, pains, hungers, loves, thoughts, music, together with infinite unrealized potentialities of melody and harmony had manured an unknown corner of a Viennese cemetery, to be transformed into grass and dandelions, which in their turn had been transformed into sheep, whose hind legs had in their turn been transformed into other musicians, whose bodies in their turn … It was all obvious, but to Lord Edward an apocalypse.
Suddenly and for the first time he realized his solidarity with the world. The realization was extraordinarily exciting; he rose from his chair and began to walk agitatedly up and down the room. His thoughts were confused, but the muddle was bright and violent, not dim, not foggily languid as at ordinary times. ‘Perhaps when I was at Vienna last year, I actually consumed a piece of Mozart’s substance. It might have been in a Wiener Schnitzel, or a sausage, or even a glass of beer. Communion, physical communion. And that wonderful performance of The Magic Flute—another sort of communion, or perhaps the same, really. Transubstantiation, cannibalism, chemistry.
It comes down to chemistry in the end, of course. Legs of mutton and spinach … all chemistry. Hydrogen, oxygen … What are the other things? God, how infuriating, how infuriating not to know! All those years at Eton. Latin verses. What the devil was the good? En! distenta ferunt perpingues ubera vaccae. Why didn’t they teach me anything sensible? “A member of the universal concert of things.” It’s all like music; harmonies and counterpoint and modulations. But you’ve got to be trained to listen. Chinese music… we can’t make head or tail of it. The universal concert—that’s Chinese music for me, thanks to Eton. Glycogenic function of the liver… it might be in Bantu, so far as I’m concerned. What a humiliation! But I can learn, I will learn, I will…’
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 halfpast 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 halfpast 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 nleat. 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 boyishlooking freckled face and red hair.
The newt began to wake up. Mlidge put it away in a place of safety. The animal had no tail; it had lost that eight days ago, and to-night the little bud of regenerated tissue which would normally have grown into a new tail had been removed and grafted on to 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. To-night 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 head and at the same time slightly cocked it on one side. He was frowning, as though making an effort to seize and remember something. He raised his hand in a gesture that commanded silence; Illidge interrupted himself in the middle of his sentence and also listened. A pattern of melody faintly traced itself upon the silence.
‘Bach?’ said Lord Edward in a whisper.
Pongileoni’s blowing and the scraping of the anonymous fiddlers had shaken the air in the great hall, had set the glass of the windows looking on to it vibrating; and this in turn had shaken the air in Lord Edward’s apartment on the further side. The shaking air rattled Lord Edward’s membrana tympani; the interlocked malleus, incus and stirrup bones were set in motion so as to agitate the membrane of
