woman on the platform in hopes that some arresting gesture might summon
him from this shadowy prison. But the audience sat still in a sheeplike,
grazing sort of attention, and Mrs. Ormiston continued to exercise her
distinguished querulousness on the subject of male primogeniture. So he
remained rooted in this oppressive sense of his own nothingness.

"Oh, come, I've had an hour or two!" he reassured himself. There were
those three days and nights when he stood at the wheel of the Father
Time, because the captain and every man who was wise about navigation
were dying in their bunks of New Guinea fever; days that came up from
the seas fresh as a girl from a bathe and turned to a torturing dome of
fire; nights when he looked up at the sky and could not tell which were
the stars and which the lights which trouble the eyes of sleep-sick
men. There was that week when he and Perez and the two French chemists
and the handful of loyal workmen held the Romanones Works against the
strikers. He was conscious that he had behaved well on these occasions
and that they had been full of beauty, but they had not nourished him.
They had ended when they ended. Such deeds gave a man nothing better
than the exultation of the actor, who loses his value and becomes a
suspended soul, unable to fulfil his function when the curtain falls.
"But you are condemning the whole of human action!" he expostulated with
himself. "Yes, I am condemning the whole of human action," he replied
tartly.

There remained, of course, his scientific work. That was indubitably
good. He had done well, considering he had not gone to South Kensington
till he was twenty and had broken the habit of study by a life of
adventure, simply because the idea of explosiveness had captured his
imagination. That rust is a slow explosion, that every movement is the
result of a physical explosion, that explosives are capricious as women