Nothing So Strange. James Hilton
reply she suddenly opened the door of one of the cages. A black and white cat squirmed eagerly into her arms and tried to reach up to her chin. She fondled it for a moment, then put it back in the cage. “What a pity I have to,” she whispered.
“You like cats?” he asked.
“I adore them. Do you?”
“Yes. Dogs too.”
It wasn’t a very intelligent end to the conversation but I could see it was the end. My mother was already putting on that glassy look she has when she is saying charming things and thinking of something else at the same time. I’ve often seen it at the tail end of a party. “I think perhaps I ought to be going…. So nice of you to ask me here and tell me everything. We must have you to the house again soon.”
He saw us down to the street, where Henry was waiting. In the car my mother was silent for a while, then she said: “It was my fault. I shouldn’t have poked my nose in.”
When I didn’t answer she added: “I suppose they have to do it.”
“He doesn’t. They weren’t his.”
She was silent again for some time, then asked suddenly: “Do you think you understand him?”
“Not after the way he talked to you today.”
“Why, what was wrong about that?”
“Nothing, only I’d always thought he was reserved and shy.”
“He is.”
“Not with you. He told you more in five minutes than he’d tell me in five years.”
“Wait till you’ve known him five years. You’ll be a better age.”
“So you think that’s why he doesn’t talk to me as he does to you? Because I’m too young?”
“Perhaps. Darling, don’t be annoyed. And I might be wrong too. I’ve never met scientists before. They must be queer people. The way they can do such things…and yet have ideals. The distant goal—he’s got his eyes fixed on it and he can’t see anything nearer.… And all his hard life and early struggles haven’t taught him anything. He doesn’t realize that even in the scientific world you’ve got to get about and make friends if you want to be a success. He lives like a hermit—anyone can see that. It would do him good to fall in love.”
I laughed. “Mathews says he’s scared of women altogether.”
“Mathews?”
“The man next door to him.”
“Oh yes…the one who…yes, I remember….”
“All the same, though, he wasn’t scared of you.”
She cuddled my arm and answered: “No, darling, it was I who was scared. He’s a peculiar man.”
* * * *
Ever since schooldays I have kept a diary of sorts, mostly the jotting down of engagements, never anything literary or confessional. Brad makes his appearance the first day I saw him; there’s the record: “Dinner Chelsea Professor Byfleet. Gave a lift home to American boy researching at Coll. Shy.” The entry for the day on which my mother came to tea is similarly brief. Just: “Tea in Brad’s lab. Mother. Cat.” And about a week later comes this: “End of College Term. Cat.”
What happened was that I got home from an afternoon walk to find my mother and Brad in the drawing room. They were talking together and my mother was nursing a black and white cat which immediately she thrust into my arms. “Look, Jane! It’s the same one! Brad just brought it—he’s given it to me!”
“It’s lovely,” I said, and I noticed she had called him Brad. So I said: “Hello, Brad.”
“Hello,” he answered.
She went on breathlessly: “And it wasn’t what we thought at all.… Tell her, Brad, unless…” She began to smile. “Unless you think she’s too young to know.”
My mother and I adored each other, but ever since I was about fourteen she had talked to me as if I were her own age, but of me as if I were still about twelve; and when this happened before my face I often got confused and said just what a twelve-year-old would say.
I did then. I said: “I’m not too young to know anything.”
Brad took it seriously. “I should say not. There’s nothing indecent about it.”
“Oh, don’t be silly—I was only joking,” my mother interrupted. “Tell her.”
“It’s nothing much. Apparently you both thought those animals in the room next to my lab were kept for vivisection. Anything but. All they have to do is to reproduce, reproduce, and keep on reproducing. Probably quite pleasant for them. Mathews is doing some new research in Genetics—he breeds a succession of generations to find out how certain characteristics crop up.”
Now that I had the explanation the fact that even jokingly I had been considered too young to know it made me almost feel I was. I said, in a rather asinine way: “Wouldn’t Mathews mind you taking away his cat?”
“He hadn’t begun any records of this animal, so any other would do just as well. He said so. Technically, of course, I’ve stolen the property of the University of London. How about calling the police?”
We all laughed and I handed the cat back to my mother.
“Mind you,” he went on, “don’t think I’m a sentimentalist. There’s a lot of nonsense talked about cruel scientists—I’ve never met any myself. Certainly at the College the men who have to do vivisections occasionally—”
My mother broke in: “You mean that it does go on there? I thought you said—just for breeding—”
“You must have misunderstood me—all I said was that the animals you saw, the ones Mathews keeps—”
“All right, all right, let’s not talk about it any more.”
“But you do believe me when I say that scientists aren’t cruel?”
Brad was like that, as I found so many times afterwards; he could never let well enough alone.
My mother said: “Many people are cruel. Wouldn’t you expect some of them to be scientists?”
“Statistically, yes….”
“Then I’ve won my argument. Have some tea.”
I said good-by to him long before he went because I had to go upstairs and pack; I was leaving for a holiday in Ireland the next morning. I think he stayed till my father came home just before dinner.
* * * *
My mother wrote while I was away, just her usual gossipy letters; one of them mentioned Brad and said he had been up to the house for dinner. “We had more music and sat up talking till late. He’s really beginning to be quite human….”
I was in Ireland over a month and returned to London for the beginning of the autumn term. It was September, and in a few weeks, if they followed their usual plan, my parents would return to America. I wondered what it would feel like to be on my own in London; I was halfway thrilled at the prospect.
I didn’t see Brad for a few days; then suddenly he met me as I was leaving a lecture. We shook hands and he asked about Ireland. “Did you climb any mountains?”
“Not exactly mountains. We hiked about, though. There were plenty of hills.”
“Did you visit Donegal?”
“No. Should I?”
“Someone told me that in the mountains there you get quartzite with a capping of sandstone—obviously the result of denudation.…” He went on, when I didn’t answer: “Geology’s one