Cecil Scott C. S. Forester - The Peacemaker (Cecil Scott C. S. Forester) (Literary Thoughts Edition)

Everyone laughed at the recollection, and Summers had to defend himself.

"Anyway," he said, heatedly, "I had them nailed down within the hour, and they've never forgotten it, either. They haven't tried any practical jokes on me twice."

That is the way the history of the world is built up. Malpas's reference to a schoolboy's Aeolian harp, and Summers' hot rejoinder on the subject sufficed both to distract Holliday's attention from Dutton's very relevant suggestion and to raise his temper to such a pitch that he forgot all about it until it was too late. Otherwise Holliday might easily have followed up the idea, and guessed at Dr. Pethwick's responsibility in the matter, and the history of the world might have been different.

As it was, Holliday remained filled with righteous indignation all afternoon, and, having sent for Horne and Hawkins after afternoon school, abruptly charged them with a crime entirely absent from their calendar, extensive though it was. Even the ready wits of these two young gentlemen failed them when they found themselves confronted with an accusation of demagetizing.

They had come prepared to refute charges of brewing sulphuretted hydrogen in the class-room inkwells and of tying up the school bell-rope the week before so that the porter had to find a ladder before ringing the bell (so that the school happily missed five minutes of lessons) and of those two crimes they were only guilty of one. But this demagnetizing business beat them. They stuttered and stammered, and their innocence compared badly with the virtuous indignation they would have assumed to perfection if they had been guilty.

Holliday, firmly convinced from the start of their guilt, was raised to a pitch of positive certainty by their blundering denials. He fell upon them in the end and beat them with all the shrewd application of strength and perfection of timing to be expected of a man who had only just missed his cricket Blue. It did him a world of good, and it is to be hoped that it did Horne and Hawkins a world of good, too.

The trouble was that when he boasted of the deed to Dr. Pethwick the latter was intensely embarrassed about it. No man as shy as he was could face all the commotion and explanations and fuss and bother consequent upon owning up to an act for which two schoolboys had been caned. Dr. Pethwick shrank with horror from the thought of the common-room remarks, and Mr. Laxton's clumsy comments, and the apologies which would have to be tendered to Horne and Hawkins. And, as a man of retiring disposition will do, he readily found reasons and excuses for not assuming the responsibility. He wanted to investigate the Klein-Pethwick Effect a little more closely before publishing his results.

He did not want publicity. The modest columns of the Philosophical Transactions were good enough for him. He knew that the Fellowship of the Royal Society was a certainty now. He knew that Einstein and Eddington would be pleased and congratulatory because the mere demonstration of the existence of the Klein-Pethwick Effect was a substantial confirmation of the Theory of Relativity, and additional mathematical investigation might be enormously important. He decided that as the summer holidays were not far off he would keep his secret until then. And thereby he brought catastrophe a little nearer.

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