Louis de Bernières - The Dust That Falls From Dreams

‘I do have that mortification,’ said Russell. ‘You do not have to converse with me any further, should you find it repugnant, and I shall not find it offensive should you wish to move to another compartment at the next station.’

‘I can admire anyone who goes to prison for their beliefs,’ said Daniel, ‘although not quite as much as those who risk their lives for them.’

Russell bridled. ‘If I may say so, my objection was certainly not to dying for my country. I have never had any particular fear of death. I am certainly ready to die in a good cause, but I am not willing to kill for it.

‘I had no personal stake in it, in any case,’ he continued, ‘not until they raised the age of military service to forty-five, and by then I was already in prison, where they forgot they had put me when they got around to trying to recruit me. In other words I was not in prison for anything that could be construed as cowardice, because I was not eligible to serve. I did write an immense amount whilst I was in there, however.’

‘Oh, what did you write?’

‘ Principia Mathematica . A great deal of it.’

‘In Latin?’

Russell laughed and puffed at his pipe. ‘No, but it might as well have been. It concerns the relationship between logic and mathematics. I wrote it with a colleague, Alfred North Whitehead — have you heard of him? No? Well, the book is admittedly vast, and to the taste of very few, but I think it important. Logic is the youth of mathematics, d’you see, and mathematics is the manhood of logic.’

‘But does it butter any parsnips?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘This book,’ said Daniel, waving his Every Man his Own Mechanic , ‘butters parsnips. It will tell you how to silver-solder, how to calculate the stresses in girders and how to relieve the stresses in cast iron, and even, at the back, how to make a rabbit hutch and a hen coop. The question is, sir, what difference does it make if logic is derivable from mathematics or vice versa? Does the fact of being derivable imply that that was whence it really was derived? What parsnips are buttered?’

The philosopher was only momentarily flustered. ‘For me it simply has its own intrinsic interest and fascination. And, of course, when a theoretical advance is made, it is often an extremely long time before any practical ramifications occur to anybody. There are hundreds of examples, all of which have suddenly escaped my memory just exactly when I need them. Ah! Here’s one! In the last century, gentlemen like Gauss and Riemann worked out some of the details of a geometry for spaces that are intrinsically curved. Well, this buttered no parsnips. We did not, after all, apparently live in curved space. And then just very recently Albert Einstein determined that space is in fact curved because of the effects of universal gravity. Suddenly one needed Gauss and Riemann because one needed a geometry of this curved space. Lo and behold! Gauss and Riemann have buttered the parsnips, long after they are both dead!’

‘I haven’t caught up with all this new relativity stuff yet,’ said Daniel. ‘I’ve been meaning to. I have a friend who says you can understand it when you’re reading about it, and then when you’ve finished you no longer have the slightest idea what it was saying. You say it’s vast? This book of yours?’

‘Well, when it was finished I had to take it into Cambridge in a wheelbarrow. And it’s highly technical. It’s a pity, really. So few will ever try to take it on.’

‘Why don’t you write a version for duffers?’ suggested Daniel. ‘You know, the main ideas, as simply as you can, for the reasonably intelligent man who wants to know?’

‘It would still be fearfully specialist,’ said Russell, ‘but there would be some merit in doing such a thing for other mathe-maticians and philosophers who just want to grasp the general points. I’m spending the summer in Lulworth. It might be an excellent opportunity to take such a project on. I shall certainly give it some thought.’

‘What about a book for duffers about relativity?’

‘Well, Einstein’s little book of 1916 is perfectly good. It was very recently published in English. Still, it’s not a bad idea. I do feel that far too many people are excluded from understanding science through no fault of their own.’

‘Am I right in remembering that Rupert Brooke was an Apostle?’ asked Daniel.

‘Oh, poor old Rupert. Yes, he was. I always said he was the most beautiful man in England. He had a light about him. Almost a nimbus, one might say.’

‘My wife adored Rupert Brooke, partly because she once had a fiancé who looked just like him. He was killed, unfortunately.’

‘To be as beautiful and well loved as that, and then to die of a mosquito bite … well, what can one conclude?’

‘I conclude that God doesn’t give a damn,’ said Daniel, ‘or that the Devil is in charge and is masquerading as the Supreme Being, or that the Supreme Being is neither good nor omnipotent, or that the universe is an essentially impersonal and mechanical process and that all values are human.’

Russell gestured with his pipe. ‘I see you have the makings of a philosopher.’

‘That’s very kind of you, sir,’ said Daniel, much gratified, ‘and with your grasp of mathematics, I dare say you would have made a fine engineer.’

‘And buttered plenty of parsnips,’ said Russell.

It was the day after his return from Cambridge that Daniel said after dinner, when the family was gathered in the withdrawing room, ‘You’ll never guess who I ran into on the train to Cambridge.’

‘Oh, who? Do tell,’ said Ottilie.

‘Bertrand Russell!’

‘Really? Is he out of prison?’ asked Mrs McCosh. ‘I hope you gave him a good drubbing!’

‘A good drubbing? What on earth for?’

‘Such a nasty, drivelling little man. He did absolutely nothing during the war.’

‘He did protest against it, Mama,’ said Ottilie. ‘And he went to prison.’

‘I can see why a Christian might refuse to fight in a war,’ said Rosie, ‘because it does say “Thou shalt do no murder”, and Quakers won’t go to war, and they are frightfully good people, aren’t they? I just don’t think that when a soldier kills for a cause it’s actually murder. It’s something else, horrible, but not actually wrong, unless he knows it’s a rotten cause. But Bertrand Russell isn’t a Christian, is he?’

‘I thought it was “Thou shalt not kill”,’ said Ottilie.

‘It’s hard to know the exact translation,’ said Fairhead. ‘The original is, I think, very ambiguous.’

Daniel had felt his hackles start to rise, not at what Fairhead or Rosie had just said, but at what her mother had. Having lost the art of talking sammy during the war years, and seemingly unable to restrain himself, he turned and said to her, ‘I thought you must be a pacifist yourself.’

‘What? Me? A pacifist? Why on earth would you think such a dreadful thing?’

‘Because, by all accounts, you did virtually nothing yourself during the war.’

A shocked silence took hold of the room. ‘I was prepared to die,’ said Mrs McCosh at last. ‘I went frequently to Charing Cross to welcome in the wounded, and I even learned to shoot. I had many Belgian ladies to tea. I took fruit to the Cottage Hospital. And it is no small thing to run a house. And I kept a niblick by the door in case of invasion. I was quite prepared to brain a German with it.’

‘You shot pigeons and rats, and one chicken, I believe,’ said Daniel shortly.

There was a long embarrassing silence, and then Mrs McCosh said, ‘Our lost son would never have spoken to me like that.’

‘Has anyone any idea of what the weather will be like tomorrow?’ asked Ottilie brightly.