Calamy couldn’t help laughing. ‘You’ve succeeded in rather damping my enthusiasm for that subject,’ he said. ‘I’d find it difficult to begin now, in cold blood.’
‘Please, please,’ Mary insisted. Wronged, it was she who asked pardon, she who cajoled. When one loves . . .
‘You’ve made it almost impossible to talk anything but nonsense,’ Calamy objected. But in the end he allowed himself to be persuaded. Embarrassed, rather awkwardly—for the spiritual atmosphere in which these ideas had been ruminated was dissipated, and it was in the void, so to speak, in the empty cold that his thoughts now gasped for breath—he began his exposition. But gradually, as he spoke, the mood returned; he became at home once more with what he was saying. Mary listened with a fixed attention of which, even in the darkness, he was somehow conscious.
‘Well, you see,’ he started hesitatingly, ‘it’s like this. I was thinking of all the different ways a thing can exist—my hand, for example.’
‘I see,’ said Mary Thriplow sympathetically and intelligently. She was almost too anxious to prove that she was listening, that she was understanding everything; she saw before there was anything to see.
‘It’s extraordinary,’ Calamy went on, ‘what a lot of different modes of existence a thing has, when you come to think about it. And the more you think, the more obscure and mysterious everything becomes. What seemed solid vanishes; what was obvious and comprehensible becomes utterly mysterious. Gulfs begin opening all around you—more and more abysses, as though the ground were splitting in an earthquake. It gives one a strange sense of insecurity, of being in the dark. But I still believe that, if one went on thinking long enough and hard enough, one might somehow come through, get out on the other side of the obscurity. But into what, precisely into what? That’s the question.’ He was silent for a moment. If one were free, he thought, one could go exploring into that darkness. But the flesh was weak; under the threat of that delicious torture it turned coward and traitor.
‘Well?’ said Mary at last. She moved closer to him, lightly, her lips brushed across his cheek. She ran her hand softly over his shoulder and along his arm. ‘Go on.’
‘Very well,’ he said in a business-like voice, moving a little away from her as he spoke. He held up his hand once more against the window. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘It’s just a shape that interrupts the light. To a child who has not yet learned to interpret what he sees, that’s all it would be, just a shaped blotch of colour, no more significant than one of those coloured targets representing a man’s head and shoulders that one learns shooting on. But now, suppose I try to consider the thing as a physicist.’
‘Quite,’ said Mary Thriplow; and from the movement of a floating tress of her hair which brushed against his shoulder he knew that she was nodding her head.
‘Well then,’ Calamy went on, ‘I have to imagine an almost inconceivable number of atoms, each consisting of a greater or lesser number of units of negative electricity whirling several million times a minute round a nucleus of positive electricity. The vibrations of the atoms lying near the surface sift out, so to speak, the electro-magnetic radiations which fall upon them, permitting only those waves to reach our eyes which give us the sensation of a brownish-pink colour. In passing it may be remarked that the behaviour of light is satisfactorily explained according to one theory of electro-dynamics, while the behaviour of the electrons in the atom can only be explained on a theory that is entirely inconsistent with it. Inside the atom, they tell us now, electrons move from one orbit to another without taking any time to accomplish their journey and without covering any space. Indeed, within the atom there is neither space nor time. And so on and so on. I have to take most of this on trust, I’m afraid, for I understand next to nothing about these things. Only enough to make me feel rather dizzy when I begin to think about them.’
‘Yes, dizzy,’ said Mary, ‘that’s the word. Dizzy.’ She made a prolonged buzzing over the z’s.
‘Well then, here are two ways already in which my hand exists,’ Calamy went on. ‘Then there’s the chemical way. These atoms consisting of more or fewer electrons whizzing round a nucleus of greater or lesser charge are atoms of different elements that build themselves up in certain architectural patterns into complicated molecules.’
Sympathetic and intelligent, Mary echoed: ‘Molecules.’
‘Now if, like Cranmer, I were to put my right hand into the fire, to punish it for having done something evil or unworthy (words, by the way, which haven’t much in common with chemistry), if I were to put my hand in the fire, these molecules would uncombine themselves into their constituent atoms, which would then proceed to build themselves up again into other molecules. But this leads me on at once to a set of entirely different realities. For if I were to put my hand in the fire, I should feel pain; and unless, like Cranmer, I made an enormous effort of will to keep it there, I should withdraw it; or rather it would withdraw itself almost without my knowledge and before I was aware. For I am alive, and this hand is part of a living being, the first law of whose existence is to preserve its life. Being alive, this hand of mine, if it were burnt, would set about trying to repair itself. Seen by a biologist, it reveals itself as a collection of cells, having each its appointed function, and existing harmoniously together, never trespassing upon one another, never proliferating into wild adventures of growth, but living, dying and growing to one end—that the whole which they compose may fulfil its purpose—and as though in accordance with a preordained plan. Say that the hand is burnt. From all round the burn the healthy cells would breed out of themselves new cells to fill in and cover the damaged places.’
‘How wonderful life is!’ said Mary Thriplow. ‘Life . . .’
‘Cranmer’s hand,’ Calamy went on, ‘had done an ignoble thing. The hand is part, not merely of a living being, but of a being that knows good and evil. This hand of mine can do good things and bad things. It has killed a man, for example; it has written all manner of words; it has helped a man who was hurt; it has touched your body.’ He laid his hand on her breast; she started, she trembled involuntarily under his caress. He ought to think that rather flattering, oughtn’t he? It was a symbol of his power over her—of her power, alas, over him. ‘And when it touches your body,’ he went on, ‘it touches also your mind. My hand moves like this, and it moves through your consciousness as well as here, across your skin. And it’s my mind that orders it to move; it brings your body into my mind. It exists in mind; it has reality as a part of my soul and a part of yours.’
Miss Thriplow couldn’t help reflecting that there was, in all this, the stuff for a very deep digression in one of her novels. “This thoughtful young writer . . .” would be quoted from the reviewers on the dust-cover of her next book.
‘Go on,’ she said.
Calamy went on. ‘And so these,’ he said, ‘are some of the ways—and there are plenty more, of course, besides—these are some of the ways in which my hand exists and is real. This shape which interrupts the light—it is enough to think of it for five minutes to perceive that it exists simultaneously in a dozen parallel worlds. It exists as electrical charges; as chemical molecules; as living cells; as part of a moral being, the instrument of good and evil; in the physical world and in mind. And from this one goes on to ask, inevitably, what relationship exists between these different modes of being. What is there in common between life and chemistry; between good and evil and electrical charges; between a collection of cells and the consciousness of a caress? It’s here that the gulfs begin to open. For there isn’t any connection—that one can see, at any rate. Universe lies on the top of universe, layer after layer, distinct and separate . . .’
‘Like a Neapolitan ice,’ Mary’s mind flew at once to the fantastic and unexpected comparison. “This witty young writer . . .” That was already on her dust-covers.
Calamy laughed. ‘All right,’ he agreed. ‘Like a Neapolitan ice, if you like. What’s true in the chocolate layer, at the bottom of the ice, doesn’t hold in the vanilla at the top. And a lemon truth is different from a strawberry truth. And each one has just as much right to exist and to call itself real as every other. And you can’t explain one in terms of the others. Certainly you can’t explain the vanilla in terms of any of the lower layers—you can’t explain mind as mere life, as chemistry, as physics. That at least is one thing that’s perfectly obvious and self-evident.’
‘Obvious,’ Mary agreed. ‘And what’s the result of it all? I really don’t see.’
‘Neither do I,’ said Calamy, speaking through an explosion of melancholy laughter. ‘The
