The Club of Queer Trades

Ch. 5: The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd

Basil Grant had comparatively few friends besides myself; yet he

was the reverse of an unsociable man. He would talk to any one

anywhere, and talk not only well but with perfectly genuine concern

and enthusiasm for that person's affairs. He went through the

world, as it were, as if he were always on the top of an omnibus or

waiting for a train. Most of these chance acquaintances, of course,

vanished into darkness out of his life. A few here and there got

hooked on to him, so to speak, and became his lifelong intimates,

but there was an accidental look about all of them as if they were

windfalls, samples taken at random, goods fallen from a goods train

or presents fished out of a bran-pie. One would be, let us say, a

veterinary surgeon with the appearance of a jockey; another, a mild

prebendary with a white beard and vague views; another, a young

captain in the Lancers, seemingly exactly like other captains in

the Lancers; another, a small dentist from Fulham, in all

reasonable certainty precisely like every other dentist from

Fulham. Major Brown, small, dry, and dapper, was one of these;

Basil had made his acquaintance over a discussion in a hotel

cloak-room about the right hat, a discussion which reduced the

little major almost to a kind of masculine hysterics, the compound

of the selfishness of an old bachelor and the scrupulosity of an

old maid. They had gone home in a cab together and then dined with

each other twice a week until they died. I myself was another. I

had met Grant while he was still a judge, on the balcony of the

National Liberal Club, and exchanged a few words about the weather.

Then we had talked for about an hour about politics and God; for

men always talk about the most important things to total strangers.

It is because in the total stranger we perceive man himself; the

image of God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts

of the wisdom of a moustache.

One of the most interesting of Basil's motley group of

acquaintances was Professor Chadd. He was known to the ethnological

world (which is a very interesting world, but a long way off this

one) as the second greatest, if not the greatest, authority on the

relations of savages to language. He was known to the neighbourhood

of Hart Street, Bloomsbury, as a bearded man with a bald head,

spectacles, and a patient face, the face of an unaccountable

Nonconformist who had forgotten how to be angry. He went to and fro

between the British Museum and a selection of blameless tea-shops,

with an armful of books and a poor but honest umbrella. He was

never seen without the books and the umbrella, and was supposed (by

the lighter wits of the Persian MS. room) to go to bed with them in

his little brick villa in the neighbourhood of Shepherd's Bush.

There he lived with three sisters, ladies of solid goodness, but

sinister demeanour. His life was happy, as are almost all the lives

of methodical students, but one would not have called it

exhilarating. His only hours of exhilaration occurred when his

friend, Basil Grant, came into the house, late at night, a tornado

of conversation.

Basil, though close on sixty, had moods of boisterous babyishness,

and these seemed for some reason or other to descend upon him

particularly in the house of his studious and almost dingy friend.

I can remember vividly (for I was acquainted with both parties and

often dined with them) the gaiety of Grant on that particular

evening when the strange calamity fell upon the professor.

Professor Chadd was, like most of his particular class and type

(the class that is at once academic and middle-class), a Radical

of a solemn and old-fashioned type. Grant was a Radical himself,

but he was that more discriminating and not uncommon type of

Radical who passes most of his time in abusing the Radical party.

Chadd had just contributed to a magazine an article called "Zulu

Interests and the New Makango Frontier', in which a precise

scientific report of his study of the customs of the people of

T'Chaka was reinforced by a severe protest against certain

interferences with these customs both by the British and the

Germans. He-was sitting with the magazine in front of him, the

lamplight shining on his spectacles, a wrinkle in his forehead,

not of anger, but of perplexity, as Basil Grant strode up and down

the room, shaking it with his voice, with his high spirits and his

heavy tread.

"It's not your opinions that I object to, my esteemed Chadd," he

was saying, "it's you. You are quite right to champion the Zulus,

but for all that you do not sympathize with them. No doubt you

know the Zulu way of cooking tomatoes and the Zulu prayer before

blowing one's nose; but for all that you don't understand them as

well as I do, who don't know an assegai from an alligator. You are

more learned, Chadd, but I am more Zulu. Why is it that the jolly

old barbarians of this earth are always championed by people who

are their antithesis? Why is it? You are sagacious, you are

benevolent, you are well informed, but, Chadd, you are not savage.

Live no longer under that rosy illusion. Look in the glass. Ask

your sisters. Consult the librarian of the British Museum. Look at

this umbrella." And he held up that sad but still respectable

article. "Look at it. For ten mortal years to my certain knowledge

you have carried that object under your arm, and I have no sort of

doubt that you carried it at the age of eight months, and it never

occurred to you to give one wild yell and hurl it like a javelin--

thus--"

And he sent the umbrella whizzing past the professor's bald head,

so that it knocked over a pile of books with a crash and left a

vase rocking.

Professor Chadd appeared totally unmoved, with his face still

lifted to the lamp and the wrinkle cut in his forehead.

"Your mental processes," he said, "always go a little too fast.

And they are stated without method. There is no kind of

inconsistency"--and no words can convey the time he took to get to

the end of the word--"between valuing the right of the aborigines

to adhere to their stage in the evolutionary process, so long as

they find it congenial and requisite to do so. There is, I say, no

inconsistency between this concession which I have just described

to you and the view that the evolutionary stage in question is,

nevertheless, so far as we can form any estimate of values in the

variety of cosmic processes, definable in some degree as an

inferior evolutionary stage."

"True," he said, "there is no inconsistency, my son of the red

spear. But there is a great deal of incompatibility of temper. I

am very far from being certain that the Zulu is on an inferior

evolutionary stage, whatever the blazes that may mean. I do not

think there is anything stupid or ignorant about howling at the

moon or being afraid of devils in the dark. It seems to me

perfectly philosophical. Why should a man be thought a sort of

idiot because he feels the mystery and peril of existence itself?

Suppose, my dear Chadd, suppose it is we who are the idiots

because we are not afraid of devils in the dark?"

Professor Chadd slit open a page of the magazine with a bone

paper-knife and the intent reverence of the bibliophile.

"Beyond all question," he said, "it is a tenable hypothesis. I

allude to the hypothesis which I understand you to entertain, that

our civilization is not or may not be an advance upon, and indeed

(if I apprehend you), is or may be a retrogression from states

identical with or analogous to the state of the Zulus. Moreover, I

shall be inclined to concede that such a proposition is of the

nature, in some degree at least, of a primary proposition, and

cannot adequately be argued, in the same sense, I mean, that the

primary proposition of pessimism, or the primary proposition of the

non-existence of matter, cannot adequately be argued. But I do not

conceive you to be under the impression that you have demonstrated

anything more concerning this proposition than that it is tenable,

which, after all, amounts to little more than the statement that it

is not a contradiction in terms."

"You don't understand," he said, "but, on the other hand, as a

compensation, you don't mind smoking. Why you don't object to that

disgustingly barbaric rite I can't think. I can only say that I

began it when I began to be a Zulu, about the age of ten. What I

maintained was that although you knew more about Zulus in the sense

that you are a scientist, I know more about them in the sense that

I am a savage. For instance, your theory of the origin of language,

something about its having come from the formulated secret language

of some individual creature, though you knocked me silly with facts

and scholarship in its favour, still does not convince me, because

I have a feeling that that is not the way that things happen. If

you ask me why I think so I can only answer that I am a Zulu; and

if you ask me (as you most certainly will) what is my definition of

a Zulu, I can answer that also. He is one who has climbed a Sussex

apple-tree at seven and been afraid of a ghost in an English lane."

"Your process of thought--" began the immovable Chadd, but his

speech was interrupted. His sister, with that masculinity which

always in such families concentrates in sisters, flung open the

door with a rigid arm and said:

The philosopher rose with a dazed look, which always indicates in

such men the fact that they regard philosophy as a familiar thing,

but practical life as a weird and unnerving vision, and walked

dubiously out of the room.

"I hope you do not mind my being aware of it, Miss Chadd," said

Basil Grant, "but I hear that the British Museum has recognized

one of the men who have deserved well of their commonwealth. It is

true, is it not, that Professor Chadd is likely to be made keeper

of Asiatic manuscripts?"

The grim face of the spinster betrayed a great deal of pleasure and

a great deal of pathos also. "I believe it's true," she said. "If

it is, it will not only be great glory which women, I assure you,

feel a great deal, but great relief, which they feel more; relief

from worry from a lot of things. James' health has never been good,

and while we are as poor as we are he had to do journalism and

coaching, in addition to his own dreadful grinding notions and

discoveries, which he loves more than man, woman, or child. I have

often been afraid that unless something of this kind occurred we

should really have to be careful of his brain. But I believe it is

practically settled."

"I am delighted," began Basil, but with a worried face, "but these

red-tape negotiations are so terribly chancy that I really can't

advise you to build on hope, only to be hurled down into

bitterness. I've known men, and good men like your brother, come

nearer than this and be disappointed. Of course, if it is true--"

"Well," said the professor slowly, "in saying that you could

possess a knowledge of the essence of Zulu life distinct from--"

"You mean the post of keeper of the Asiatic manuscripts," he said,

opening his eye with childlike wonder. "Oh, yes, I got that. But

the real objection to your argument, which has only, I admit,

occurred to me since I have been out of the room, is that it does

not merely presuppose a Zulu truth apart from the facts, but

infers that the discovery of it is absolutely impeded by the

facts."

"I am crushed," said Basil, and sat down to laugh, while the

professor's sister retired to her room, possibly, possibly not.

It was extremely late when we left the Chadds, and it is an

extremely long and tiresome journey from Shepherd's Bush to

Lambeth. This may be our excuse for the fact that we (for I was

stopping the night with Grant) got down to breakfast next day at a

time inexpressibly criminal, a time, in point of fact, close upon

noon. Even to that belated meal we came in a very lounging and

leisurely fashion. Grant, in particular, seemed so dreamy at table

that he scarcely saw the pile of letters by his plate, and I doubt

if he would have opened any of them if there had not lain on the

top that one thing which has succeeded amid modern carelessness in

being really urgent and coercive--a telegram. This he opened with

the same heavy distraction with which he broke his egg and drank

his tea. When he read it he did not stir a hair or say a word, but

something, I know not what, made me feel that the motionless figure

had been pulled together suddenly as strings are tightened on a

slack guitar. Though he said nothing and did not move, I knew that

he had been for an instant cleared and sharpened with a shock of

cold water. It was scarcely any surprise to me when a man who had

drifted sullenly to his seat and fallen into it, kicked it away

like a cur from under him and came round to me in two strides.

"What does the woman mean?" I said after a pause, irritably.

"Those women have been saying that the poor old professor was mad

ever since he was born."

"You are mistaken," said Grant composedly. "It is true that all

sensible women think all studious men mad. It is true, for the

matter of that, all women of any kind think all men of any kind

mad. But they don't put it in telegrams, any more than they wire

to you that grass is green or God all-merciful. These things are

truisms, and often private ones at that. If Miss Chadd has written

down under the eye of a strange woman in a post-office that her

brother is off his head you may be perfectly certain that she did

it because it was a matter of life and death, and she can think of

no other way of forcing us to come promptly."

Basil scarcely said a word as we drove across Westminster Bridge,

through Trafalgar Square, along Piccadilly, and up the Uxbridge

Road. Only as he was opening the gate he spoke.

"I think you will take my word for it, my friend," he said; "this

is one of the most queer and complicated and astounding incidents

that ever happened in London or, for that matter, in any high

civilization."

"I confess with the greatest sympathy and reverence that I don't

quite see it," I said. "Is it so very extraordinary or complicated

that a dreamy somnambulant old invalid who has always walked on

the borders of the inconceivable should go mad under the shock of

great joy? Is it so very extraordinary that a man with a head like

a turnip and a soul like a spider's web should not find his

strength equal to a confounding change of fortunes? Is it, in

short, so very extraordinary that James Chadd should lose his wits

from excitement?"

"It would not be extraordinary in the least," answered Basil,

with placidity. "It would not be extraordinary in the least," he

repeated, "if the professor had gone mad. That was not the

extraordinary circumstance to which I referred."

The tall and angular figure of the eldest Miss Chadd blocked the

doorway as the door opened. Two other Miss Chadds seemed in the

same way to be blocking the narrow passage and the little parlour.

There was a general sense of their keeping something from view.

They seemed like three black-clad ladies in some strange play of

Maeterlinck, veiling the catastrophe from the audience in the

manner of the Greek chorus.

"Sit down, won't you?" said one of them, in a voice that was

somewhat rigid with pain. "I think you had better be told first

what has happened."

"I had better state everything that occurred just as it occurred.

This morning I was clearing away the breakfast things, my sisters

were both somewhat unwell, and had not come down. My brother had

just gone out of the room, I believe, to fetch a book. He came back

again, however, without it, and stood for some time staring at the

empty grate. I said, `Were you looking for anything I could get?'

He did not answer, but this constantly happens, as he is often very

abstracted. I repeated my question, and still he did not answer.

Sometimes he is so wrapped up in his studies that nothing but a

touch on the shoulder would make him aware of one's presence, so I

came round the table towards him. I really do not know how to

describe the sensation which I then had. It seems simply silly, but

at the moment it seemed something enormous, upsetting one's brain.

The fact is, James was standing on one leg."

"Yes," replied the dead voice of the woman without an inflection to

suggest that she felt the fantasticality of her statement. "He was

standing on the left leg and the right drawn up at a sharp angle,

the toe pointing downwards. I asked him if his leg hurt him. His

only answer was to shoot the leg straight at right angles to the

other, as if pointing to the other with his toe to the wall. He was

still looking quite gravely at the fireplace.

"`James, what is the matter?' I cried, for I was thoroughly

frightened. James gave three kicks in the air with the right leg,

flung up the other, gave three kicks in the air with it also and

spun round like a teetotum the other way. `Are you mad?' I cried.

`Why don't you answer me?' He had come to a standstill facing me,

and was looking at me as he always does, with his lifted eyebrows

and great spectacled eyes. When I had spoken he remained a second

or two motionless, and then his only reply was to lift his left

foot slowly from the floor and describe circles with it in the air.

I rushed to the door and shouted for Christina. I will not dwell on

the dreadful hours that followed. All three of us talked to him,

implored him to speak to us with appeals that might have brought

back the dead, but he has done nothing but hop and dance and kick

with a solemn silent face. It looks as if his legs belonged to some

one else or were possessed by devils. He has never spoken to us

from that time to this."

"Doctor Colman is with him," said Miss Chadd calmly. "They are in

the garden. Doctor Colman thought the air would do him good. And he

can scarcely go into the street."

Basil and I walked rapidly to the window which looked out on the

garden. It was a small and somewhat smug suburban garden; the

flower beds a little too neat and like the pattern of a coloured

carpet; but on this shining and opulent summer day even they had

the exuberance of something natural, I had almost said tropical.

In the middle of a bright and verdant but painfully circular lawn

stood two figures. One of them was a small, sharp-looking man with

black whiskers and a very polished hat (I presume Dr Colman), who

was talking very quietly and clearly, yet with a nervous twitch, as

it were, in his face. The other was our old friend, listening with

his old forbearing expression and owlish eyes, the strong sunlight

gleaming on his glasses as the lamplight had gleamed the night

before, when the boisterous Basil had rallied him on his studious

decorum. But for one thing the figure of this morning might have

been the identical figure of last night. That one thing was that

while the face listened reposefully the legs were industriously

dancing like the legs of a marionette. The neat flowers and the

sunny glitter of the garden lent an indescribable sharpness and

incredibility to the prodigy--the prodigy of the head of a hermit

and the legs of a harlequin. For miracles should always happen in

broad daylight. The night makes them credible and therefore

commonplace.

"I know," said Adelaide Chadd bitterly. "I suppose we shall have to

tell him about this. I thought that no good fortune would ever come

easily to us."

"You know what I shall have to tell him," said the professor's

sister, almost fiercely. "I don't know that we need give it its

wretched name. Do you think that the keeper of Asiatic manuscripts

will be allowed to go on like that?" And she pointed for an

instant at the figure in the garden, the shining, listening face

and the unresting feet.

"Then I have an hour before me," said Grant, and without another

word threw up the window and jumped out into the garden. He did

not walk straight up to the doctor and lunatic, but strolling

round the garden path drew near them cautiously and yet apparently

carelessly. He stood a couple of feet off them, seemingly counting

halfpence out of his trousers pocket, but, as I could see, looking

up steadily under the broad brim of his hat.

Suddenly he stepped up to Professor Chadd's elbow, and said, in a

loud familiar voice, "Well, my boy, do you still think the Zulus

our inferiors?"

The doctor knitted his brows and looked anxious, seeming to be

about to speak. The professor turned his bald and placid head

towards Grant in a friendly manner, but made no answer, idly

flinging his left leg about.

Chadd only shuffled his feet and kicked a little with the other

leg, his expression still benevolent and inquiring. The doctor cut

in rather sharply. "Shall we go inside, professor?" he said. "Now

you have shown me the garden. A beautiful garden. A most beautiful

garden. Let us go in," and he tried to draw the kicking

ethnologist by the elbow, at the same time whispering to Grant: "I

must ask you not to trouble him with questions. Most risky. He

must be soothed."

"Of course your directions must be followed out, doctor. I will

endeavour to do so, but I hope it will not be inconsistent with

them if you will leave me alone with my poor friend in this garden

for an hour. I want to watch him. I assure you, Dr Colman, that I

shall say very little to him, and that little shall be as soothing

as--as syrup."

"That is soon settled," said Basil composedly, and took off his

own big hat and clapped it on the egglike skull of the professor.

The latter did not turn round but danced away with his eyes on the

horizon.

The doctor put on his glasses again, looked severely at the two

for some seconds, with his head on one side like a bird's, and

then saying, shortly, "All right," strutted away into the house,

where the three Misses Chadd were all looking out from the parlour

window on to the garden. They looked out on it with hungry eyes

for a full hour without moving, and they saw a sight which was

more extraordinary than madness itself.

Basil Grant addressed a few questions to the madman, without

succeeding in making him do anything but continue to caper, and

when he had done this slowly took a red note-book out of one

pocket and a large pencil out of another.

He began hurriedly to scribble notes. When the lunatic skipped

away from him he would walk a few yards in pursuit, stop, and

make notes again. Thus they followed each other round and round

the foolish circle of turf, the one writing in pencil with the

face of a man working out a problem, the other leaping and

playing like a child.

After about three-quarters of an hour of this imbecile scene,

Grant put the pencil in his pocket, but kept the note-book open

in his hand, and walking round the mad professor, planted himself

directly in front of him.

Then occurred something that even those already used to that wild

morning had not anticipated or dreamed. The professor, on finding

Basil in front of him, stared with a blank benignity for a few

seconds, and then drew up his left leg and hung it bent in the

attitude that his sister had described as being the first of all

his antics. And the moment he had done it Basil Grant lifted his

own leg and held it out rigid before him, confronting Chadd with

the flat sole of his boot. The professor dropped his bent leg,

and swinging his weight on to it kicked out the other behind,

like a man swimming. Basil crossed his feet like a saltire cross,

and then flung them apart again, giving a leap into the air. Then

before any of the spectators could say a word or even entertain a

thought about the matter, both of them were dancing a sort of jig

or hornpipe opposite each other; and the sun shone down on two

madmen instead of one.

They were so stricken with the deafness and blindness of

monomania that they did not see the eldest Miss Chadd come out

feverishly into the garden with gestures of entreaty, a gentleman

following her. Professor Chadd was in the wildest posture of a

pas-de-quatre, Basil Grant seemed about to turn a cart-wheel,

when they were frozen in their follies by the steely voice of

Adelaide Chadd saying, "Mr Bingham of the British Museum."

Mr Bingham was a slim, well-clad gentleman with a pointed and

slightly effeminate grey beard, unimpeachable gloves, and formal

but agreeable manners. He was the type of the over-civilized, as

Professor Chadd was of the uncivilized pedant. His formality and

agreeableness did him some credit under the circumstances. He had

a vast experience of books and a considerable experience of the

more dilettante fashionable salons. But neither branch of

knowledge had accustomed him to the spectacle of two grey-haired

middle-class gentlemen in modern costume throwing themselves

about like acrobats as a substitute for an after-dinner nap.

The professor continued his antics with perfect placidity, but

Grant stopped abruptly. The doctor had reappeared on the scene,

and his shiny black eyes, under his shiny black hat, moved

restlessly from one of them to the other.

"Dr Colman," said Basil, turning to him, "will you entertain

Professor Chadd again for a little while? I am sure that he needs

you. Mr Bingham, might I have the pleasure of a few moments'

private conversation? My name is Grant."

"Miss Chadd will excuse me," continued Basil easily, "if I know

my way about the house." And he led the dazed librarian rapidly

through the back door into the parlour.

"Mr Bingham," said Basil, setting a chair for him, "I imagine that

Miss Chadd has told you of this distressing occurrence."

"She has, Mr Grant," said Bingham, looking at the table with a sort

of compassionate nervousness. "I am more pained than I can say by

this dreadful calamity. It seems quite heart-rending that the thing

should have happened just as we have decided to give your eminent

friend a position which falls far short of his merits. As it is, of

course--really, I don't know what to say. Professor Chadd may, of

course, retain--I sincerely trust he will--his extraordinarily

valuable intellect. But I am afraid--I am really afraid--that it

would not do to have the curator of the Asiatic

manuscripts--er--dancing about."

The clock on the mantelpiece ticked for just the moments required

for Basil to clear his throat and collect his words, and then he

said:

"My proposal is this. I do not know that in the strict use of words

you could altogether call it a compromise, still it has something

of that character. My proposal is that the Government (acting, as I

presume, through your Museum) should pay Professor Chadd L800 a

year until he stops dancing."

"Eight hundred a year!" said Mr Bingham, and for the first time

lifted his mild blue eyes to those of his interlocutor--and he

raised them with a mild blue stare. "I think I have not quite

understood you. Did I understand you to say that Professor Chadd

ought to be employed, in his present state, in the Asiatic

manuscript department at eight hundred a year?"

"No," he said firmly. "No. Chadd is a friend of mine, and I would

say anything for him I could. But I do not say, I cannot say, that

he ought to take on the Asiatic manuscripts. I do not go so far as

that. I merely say that until he stops dancing you ought to pay

him L800 Surely you have some general fund for the endowment of

research."

"I really don't know," he said, blinking his eyes, "what you are

talking about. Do you ask us to give this obvious lunatic nearly a

thousand a year for life?"

"What for, then?" asked the meek Bingham, suppressing an instinct

meekly to tear his hair. "How long is this endowment to run? Not

till his death? Till the Judgement day?"

"No," said Basil, beaming, "but just what I said. Till he has

stopped dancing." And he lay back with satisfaction and his hands

in his pockets.

"Come, Mr Grant," he said. "Do I seriously understand you to

suggest that the Government pay Professor Chadd an extraordinarily

high salary simply on the ground that he has (pardon the phrase)

gone mad? That he should be paid more than four good clerks solely

on the ground that he is flinging his boots about in the back

yard?"

"There is really nothing more to be said, Mr Grant," he said

coldly. "What you are trying to explain to me may be a joke--a

slightly unfeeling joke. It may be your sincere view, in which case

I ask your pardon for the former suggestion. But, in any case, it

appears quite irrelevant to my duties. The mental morbidity, the

mental downfall, of Professor Chadd, is a thing so painful to me

that I cannot easily endure to speak of it. But it is clear there

is a limit to everything. And if the Archangel Gabriel went mad it

would sever his connection, I am sorry to say, with the British

Museum Library."

"Stop!" said Basil sternly. "Stop while there is yet time. Do you

want to take part in a great work, Mr Bingham? Do you want to help

in the glory of Europe--in the glory of science? Do you want to

carry your head in the air when it is bald or white because of the

part that you bore in a great discovery? Do you want--"

With a fierce flap of his swinging gloves Bingham turned

impatiently to the door, but in passing out of it found it

blocked. Dr Colman was coming in.

"Forgive me, gentlemen," he said, in a nervous, confidential voice,

"the fact is, Mr Grant, I--er--have made a most disturbing

discovery about Mr Chadd."

"No," said Dr Colman sharply; "the fact is, Mr Grant, my discovery

is of a different character. The awful thing about him is--"

"What on earth can it mean? Can't we make him listen?" said Mr

Bingham. "Can none get into any kind of communication with him?"

"Well," said Basil, "like this." And he suddenly sprang a foot

into the air, coming down with crashing boots, and then stood on

one leg.

His face was stern, though this effect was slightly spoiled by the

fact that one of his feet was making wild circles in the air.

The sensitive face of Bingham took on an extra expression of

distress as of one anticipating some disgraceful disclosure.

"Anything painful, of course--" he began.

"Idiots!" he cried. "Have you seen the man? Have you looked at

James Chadd going dismally to and fro from his dingy house to

your miserable library, with his futile books and his confounded

umbrella, and never seen that he has the eyes of a fanatic? Have

you never noticed, stuck casually behind his spectacles and above

his seedy old collar, the face of a man who might have burned

heretics, or died for the philosopher's stone? It is all my

fault, in a way: I lit the dynamite of his deadly faith. I argued

against him on the score of his famous theory about language--the

theory that language was complete in certain individuals and was

picked up by others simply by watching them. I also chaffed him

about not understanding things in rough and ready practice. What

has this glorious bigot done? He has answered me. He has worked

out a system of language of his own (it would take too long to

explain); he has made up, I say, a language of his own. And he

has sworn that till people understand it, till he can speak to us

in this language, he will not speak in any other. And he shall

not. I have understood, by taking careful notice; and, by heaven,

so shall the others. This shall not be blown upon. He shall

finish his experiment. He shall have L800 a year from somewhere

till he has stopped dancing. To stop him now is an infamous war

on a great idea. It is religious persecution."

"I thank you, Mr Grant," he said. "I hope I shall be able to answer

for the source of the L800 and I fancy that I shall. Will you come

in my cab?"

"No, thank you very much, Mr Bingham," said Grant heartily. "I

think I will go and have a chat with the professor in the garden."

In the 1600s, Balthasar Gracian, a jesuit priest wrote 300 aphorisms on living life called "The Art of Worldly Wisdom." Join our newsletter below and read them all, one at a time.