Out in the street the chauffeur helped me into my car, and soon we were away from London and bowling merrily along the Great North Road towards this, my other house, which is only ninety-five miles from Town anyway.
The next two days I spent in gloating. I mooned around in a dream of ecstasy, half drowned in my own complacency and filled with a sense of pleasure so great that it constantly gave me pins and needles all along the lower parts of my legs. It wasn’t until this morning when Gladys Ponsonby called me on the phone that I suddenly came to my senses and realized I was not a hero at all but an outcast. She informed me – with what I thought was just a trace of relish – that everybody was up in arms, that all of them, all my old and loving friends were saying the most terrible things about me and had sworn never never to speak to me again. Except her, she kept saying. Everybody except her. And didn’t I think it would be rather cosy, she asked, if she were to come down and stay with me a few days to cheer me up?
I’m afraid I was too upset by that time even to answer her politely. I put the phone down and went away to weep.
Then at noon today came the final crushing blow. The post arrived, and with it – I can hardly bring myself to write about it, I am so ashamed – came a letter, the sweetest, most tender little note imaginable from none other than Janet de Pelagia herself. She forgave me completely, she wrote, for everything I had done. She knew it was only a joke and I must not listen to the horrid things other people were saying about me. She loved me as she always had and always would to her dying day.
Oh, what a cad, what a brute I felt when I read this! The more so when I found that she had actually sent me by the same post a small present as an added sign of her affection – a half-pound jar of my favourite food of all, fresh caviare.
I can never under any circumstances resist good caviare. It is perhaps my greatest weakness. So although I naturally had no appetite whatsoever for food at dinner-time this evening, I must confess I took a few spoonfuls of the stuff in an effort to console myself in my misery. It is even possible that I took a shade too much, because I haven’t been feeling any too chipper this last hour or so. Perhaps I ought to go up right away and get myself some bicarbonate of soda. I can easily come back and finish this later, when I’m in better trim.
You know – now I come to think of it, I really do feel rather ill all of a sudden.
The Great Automatic Grammatizator
‘Well, Knipe, my boy. Now that it’s all finished, I just called you in to tell you I think you’ve done a fine job.’
Adolph Knipe stood still in front of Mr Bohlen’s desk. There seemed to be no enthusiasm in him at
all.
‘Aren’t you pleased?’
‘Oh yes, Mr Bohlen.’
‘Did you see what the papers said this morning?’
‘No sir, I didn’t.’
The man behind the desk pulled a folded newspaper towards him, and began to read: ‘The building of the great automatic computing engine, ordered by the government some time ago, is now complete. It is probably the fastest electronic calculating machine in the world today. Its function is to satisfy the ever-increasing need of science, industry, and administration for rapid mathematical calculation which, in the past, by traditional methods, would have been physically impossible, or would have required more time than the problems justified. The speed with which the new engine works, said Mr John Bohlen, head of the firm of electrical engineers mainly responsible for its construction, may be grasped by the fact that it can provide the correct answer in five seconds to a problem that would occupy a mathematician for a month. In three minutes, it can produce a calculation that by hand (if it were possible) would fill half a million sheets of foolscap paper. The automatic computing engine uses pulses of electricity, generated at the rate of a million a second, to solve all calculations that resolve themselves into addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. For practical purposes there is no limit to what it can do…’
Mr Bohlen glanced up at the long, melancholy face of the younger man. ‘Aren’t you proud, Knipe? Aren’t you pleased.’
‘Of course, Mr Bohlen.’
‘I don’t think I have to remind you that your own contribution, especially to the original plans, was an important one. In fact, I might go so far as to say that without you and some of your ideas, this project might still be on the drawing-boards today.’
Adolph Knipe moved his feet on the carpet, and he watched the two small white hands of his chief, the nervous fingers playing with a paper-clip, unbending it, straightening out the hairpin curves. He didn’t like the man’s hands. He didn’t like his face either, with the tiny mouth and the narrow purple-coloured lips. It was unpleasant the way only the lower lip moved when he talked.
‘Is anything bothering you, Knipe? Anything on your mind?’
‘Oh no, Mr Bohlen. No.’
‘How would you like to take a week’s holiday? Do you good. You’ve earned it.’
‘Oh, I don’t know, sir.’
The older man waited, watching this tall, thin person who stood so sloppily before him. He was a difficult boy. Why couldn’t he stand up straight? Always drooping and untidy, with spots on his jacket, and hair falling all over his face.
‘I’d like you to take a holiday, Knipe. You need it.’
‘All right, sir. If you wish.’
‘Take a week. Two weeks if you like. Go somewhere warm. Get some sunshine. Swim. Relax. Sleep. Then come back, and we’ll have another talk about the future.’
Adolph Knipe went home by bus to his two-room apartment. He threw his coat on the sofa, poured himself a drink of whisky, and sat down in front of the typewriter that was on the table. Mr Bohlen was right. Of course he was right. Except that he didn’t know the half of it. He probably thought it was a woman. Whenever a young man gets depressed, everybody thinks it’s a woman.
He leaned forward and began to read through the half-finished sheet of typing still in the machine. It was headed ‘A Narrow Escape’, and it began ‘The night was dark and stormy, the wind whistled in the trees, the rain poured down like cats and dogs…’