y
happy, fairly well adapted to the lives they had to lead--a week of work
and a Sunday of best clothes and mild promenading--and he had launched
something that would disorganise the entire fabric that held their
contentments and ambitions and satisfactions together. 'Felt like an
imbecile who has presented a box full of loaded revolvers to a Creche,'
he notes.

He met a man named Lawson, an old school-fellow, of whom history now
knows only that he was red-faced and had a terrier. He and Holsten
walked together and Holsten was sufficiently pale and jumpy for Lawson
to tell him he overworked and needed a holiday. They sat down at a
little table outside the County Council house of Golders Hill Park and
sent one of the waiters to the Bull and Bush for a couple of bottles of
beer, no doubt at Lawson's suggestion. The beer warmed Holsten's rather
dehumanised system. He began to tell Lawson as clearly as he could to
what his great discovery amounted. Lawson feigned attention, but indeed
he had neither the knowledge nor the imagination to understand. 'In
the end, before many years are out, this must eventually change war,
transit, lighting, building, and every sort of manufacture, even
agriculture, every material human concern----'

Then Holsten stopped short. Lawson had leapt to his feet. 'Damn that
dog!' cried Lawson. 'Look at it now. Hi! Here! Phewoo--phewoo phewoo!
Come HERE, Bobs! Come HERE!'

The young scientific man, with his bandaged hand, sat at the green
table, too tired to convey the wonder of the thing he had sought so
long, his friend whistled and bawled for his dog, and the Sunday people
drifted about them through the spring sunshine. For a moment or so
Holsten stared at Lawson in astonishment, for he had been too intent
upon what he had been saying to realise how little Lawson had attended.

Then he remarked, 'WELL!' and smiled faintly, and--finished the tankard
of beer before him.

Lawson sat down again. 'One must look after one's dog,' he said, with a
note of apology. 'What was it you were telling me?'

Section 2

In the evening Holsten went out again. He walked to Saint Paul's
Cathedral, and stood for a time near the door listening to the evening
service. The candles upon the altar reminded him in some odd way of the
fireflies at Fiesole. Then he walked back through the evening lights to
Westminster. He was oppressed, he was indeed scared, by his sense of the
immense consequences of his discovery. He