winding thoroughfare, and was in the act of making it commodious

and interesting, according to the remarkable ideals of
Neo-Georgian aestheticism. Such is the illogical quality of

humanity that Holsten, fresh from work that was like a petard
under the seat of current civilisation, saw these changes with

regret. He had come up Heath Street perhaps a thousand times, had
known the windows of all the little shops, spent hours in the

vanished cinematograph theatre, and marvelled at the high-flung
early Georgian houses upon the westward bank of that old gully of

a thoroughfare; he felt strange with all these familiar things
gone. He escaped at last with a feeling of relief from this

choked alley of trenches and holes and cranes, and emerged upon
the old familiar scene about the White Stone Pond. That, at

least, was very much as it used to be.
There were still the fine old red-brick houses to left and right

of him; the reservoir had been improved by a portico of marble,
the white-fronted inn with the clustering flowers above its

portico still stood out at the angle of the ways, and the blue
view to Harrow Hill and Harrow spire, a view of hills and trees

and shining waters and wind-driven cloud shadows, was like the
opening of a great window to the ascending Londoner. All that

was very reassuring. There was the same strolling crowd, the same
perpetual miracle of motors dodging through it harmlessly,

escaping headlong into the country from the Sabbatical stuffiness
behind and below them. There was a band still, a women's suffrage

meeting--for the suffrage women had won their way back to the
tolerance, a trifle derisive, of the populace again--socialist

orators, politicians, a band, and the same wild uproar of dogs,
frantic with the gladness of their one blessedweekly release

from the back yard and the chain. And away along the road to the
Spaniards strolled a vast multitude, saying, as ever, that the

view of London was exceptionally clear that day.
Young Holsten's face was white. He walked with that uneasy

affectation of ease that marks an overstrained nervoussystem and
an under-exercised body. He hesitated at the White Stone Pond

whether to go to the left of it or the right, and again at the
fork of the roads. He kept shifting his stick in his hand, and

every now and then he would get in the way of people on the
footpath or be jostled by them because of the uncertainty of his

movements. He felt, he confesses, 'inadequate to ordinary
existence.' He seemed to himself to be something inhuman and

mischievous. All the people about him looked fairly prosperous,
fairly 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 had a vague idea that night that he ought not to
publish his results, that they were premature, that some secret

association of wise men should take care of his work and hand it
on from generation to generation until the world was riper for

its practical application. He felt that nobody in all the
thousands of people he passed had really awakened to the fact of

change, they trusted the world for what it was, not to alter too
rapidly, to respect their trusts, their assurances, their habits,

their little accustomed traffics and hard-won positions.
He went into those little gardens beneath the over-hanging,

brightly-lit masses of the Savoy Hotel and the Hotel Cecil. He
sat down on a seat and became aware of the talk of the two people

next to him. It was the talk of a young couple evidently on the
eve of marriage. The man was congratulating himself on having

regular employment at last; 'they like me,' he said, 'and I like
the job. If I work up--in'r dozen years or so I ought to be

gettin' somethin' pretty comfortable. That's the plain sense of
it, Hetty. There ain't no reason whatsoever why we shouldn't get

along very decently--very decently indeed.'
The desire for little successes amidst conditions securely fixed!

So it struck upon Holsten's mind. He added in his diary, 'I had
a sense of all this globe as that....'

By that phrase he meant a kind of clairvoyant vision of this
populated world as a whole, of all its cities and towns and

villages, its high roads and the inns beside them, its gardens
and farms and upland pastures, its boatmen and sailors, its ships

coming along the great circles of the ocean, its time-tables and
appointments and payments and dues as it were one unified and

progressive spectacle. Sometimes such visions came to him; his
mind, accustomed to great generalisations and yet acutely

sensitive to detail, saw things far more comprehensively than the
minds of most of his contemporaries. Usually the teeming sphere

moved on to its predestined ends and circled with a stately
swiftness on its path about the sun. Usually it was all a living

progress that altered under his regard. But now fatigue a little
deadened him to that incessancy of life, it seemed now just an

eternal circling. He lapsed to the commoner persuasion of the
great fixities and recurrencies of the human routine. The remoter

past of wandering savagery, the inevitable changes of to-morrow
were veiled, and he saw only day and night, seed-time and

harvest, loving and begetting, births and deaths, walks in the
summer sunlight and tales by the winter fireside, the ancient

sequence of hope and acts and age perennially renewed, eddying on
for ever and ever, save that now the impious hand of research was

raised to overthrow this drowsy, gently humming, habitual, sunlit
spinning-top of man's existence....

For a time he forgot wars and crimes and hates and persecutions,
famine and pestilence, the cruelties of beasts, weariness and the

bitter wind, failure and insufficiency and retrocession. He saw
all mankind in terms of the humble Sunday couple upon the seat