Wise Child

Dr. Solway folded his napkin, put it neatly beside his place and rose from the table, leaving his wife and his assistant still seated there.

"I think I'll put in an hour or two in the lab," he announced as he left the room.

"Just"--said Helen Solway--"just as if he didn't always 'put in an hour or two' every evening."

The assistant looked at her for a moment, then, with a little shake of his head: "He is annoy I think I get sack now."

Helen Solway frowned.

"Oh, no, Marcel! Not as bad as that, surely?"

"But yes, I think. We have big row this afternoon. He is much--how you say--bouleversé? Is not first time, you know, but is more serious."

"Oh, dear. Marcel, why can't you be more tactful with him?"

The assistant shrugged.

"Is not matter for tact--is time for truth."

"You don't mean you've lost faith in his work--in his ideas?"

"Non, non." The young man's headshake was emphatic. "His ideas is good. Is proved. But zis"--he waved a comprehensive hand--"is not right milieu, setup, now. Is too little. No good."

He paused.

"Aussi," he went on, "is not good for me--for me (continued on page 175) Wise Child (continued from page 125) professional, you understand. Last month the docteur read a paper to the Société. 'Observations on the In'eritance of Acquired Abilities,' he call it. La matière--ze stuff--she is good. But ze manner--mon Dieu! Maladroit--not make them to understand what he say. They listen polite, but afterward they shake the heads and laugh. 'Is Lysenko-ism,' they say. 'Why he not go to Russia? Is crackpot.'"

Marcel paused again and shook his head sadly.

"Le docteur is not crackpot. Is clever man. Is great thing he does--very great, formidable! But he is tout à fait égoïste--you say, ver', ver' selfish. Do it 'imself. No one else. So all glory, all éclat is for him."

Mrs. Solway did not disagree with that. She said:

"But I thought you said he has proved his ideas, Marcel?"

"Oh, yes. Little proofs. But necessary now is big proofs--big-scale tests. Such is not possible here. With big tests they take notice. Is way of common sense.

"These things I tell 'im. 'Put your work to Société,' I say, 'to Université to make test, then you have prestige, official standing. Then they listen.' He do not like. Is not my business, he say. I say his discovery is my business--is every man's business. Is important, too important for small thinking. Is pity 'e do not speak French. I explain then more gentiment--more tactful, per'aps." He shrugged. "Or maybe not so. Anyway, so we 'ave big row. So I think I get sack."

"Oh, I am sorry, Marcel. Perhaps he will have cooled off by tomorrow."

"Me, I am sorry, too. But I do not think he cool off zis time. He is great man, your husband--also very little man ... Alors ..." He shrugged his shoulders. "So four, five weeks, perhaps, and I think I go away ..." He brooded for a moment, then his tone lightened:

"But now is enough of this... Let us to talk of other things more interesting than sacks..."

• • •

Dr. Solway's "hour or two" was, as usual, more nearly four, so that it was after 12 when he came upstairs. He found his wife in bed, but still with the light on, reading. He sat down on the side of the bed and started to unfasten his shoes.

"The children all right?" he inquired. "I thought I heard David cough as I came past."

"It's nothing," she told him. "Just the vestige of his cold. Not a peep out of them the whole evening." She considered him. "You're looking tired, Donald. You work too hard. You really ought to ease off, you know."

"I am tired," he admitted. "But it's really finished--the important part of it--now. Just a matter of checking and cross-checking results so that none of my dear colleagues can pick holes in them. What I must have is evidence that is accurate, plain and indisputable. Something that can't be ignored--that, and the opportunity of a fair hearing..."

He sat moodily swinging his shoe on a finger hooked inside the heel.

"If only I could make a start by knocking into their thick heads what I'm talking about ..." he muttered more to himself than to her. "Every time I attempt a public explanation, it's the same old story: A lot of dimwits who've not been listening to what I've been telling them dismiss the whole thing with parrot cries of 'Lysenko! Lysenko!'--and a number of still dimmer wits rally round to congratulate me because Lysenko is a Russian, and Russians are wonderful, so he must be right; and off they launch into dissertations on the inheritance of acquired characteristics... And after a bit I lose my temper and shout at them, and everyone thinks it's uproariously funny, and all that happens is that they go away more convinced than ever that I'm cracked ...

"They won't one day. I can promise them that. But in the meantime, the result is that they're all too prejudiced to give my evidence a fair hearing--damn them!"

Helen, regarding him thoughtfully, said:

"But you do have enough evidence, Donald?"

"Plenty--for a fair-minded man. The trouble is they can't clear their addled brains enough to be fair. Again and again I've explained to them that it's not acquired characteristics I'm concerned with--it's the inheritance of acquired abilities, which is utterly different, and they ought to have the wits to see it is..."

"Well, to someone like me, it does sound like rather a fine distinction, Donald."

"They're not supposed to be someone like you, my dear. Their job is to think about such things, professionally--only they don't.

"The difference is as wide as an ocean, Helen. Look, everyone knows that if you were to amputate a mouse's right foreleg for ten, twenty, fifty generations, its offspring still would not have acquired the characteristic of being born without a right foreleg--and never would... But compare the case of a bird that builds a particular kind of nest. Somewhere back along the line, its ancestors learned to build their nests like that, and the present bird builds nests that are absolutely the same in construction--nobody taught it; it inherited the ability that its ancestors had acquired.

"Very well, then, some species can do that--then why not others? Is it not utterly preposterous that while a spider can endow its offspring with the ability to construct such a complicated engineering proposition as a web, a man should not have the power to hand on to his son even the ability to do simple arithmetic? Of course it is. It was quite clear to me that there must be some way of inducing such a capacity.

"Look at the waste that's caused by lack of it! No conservation or progress. Every child having to begin exactly where its parents began; generation after generation tediously having to learn its A, B, C, and two-plus-two, and cat-sat-on-the-mat over and over again, just as if no one had ever learned it before. It's a nonsensical way of going on. It simply can't be more difficult to hand on the rudiments of reading, writing and figuring than it is for a bee to hand on the complicated social knowledge required to run a hive.

"I argued that there must be a reason why in some species the capacity to hand on an acquired characteristic was very strong--even though it may have ossified later--while in others it is virtually indiscernible. Do you follow me?"

"Yes, I think so, Donald. It really amounts to asking why some kinds of creatures have very, very complex instincts and others only the simplest, doesn't it?"

"Roughly, yes--though 'instinct' is a treacherous word--but it is, in effect, what I asked, and what I set out to discover. Well, I admit I've not discovered the why--though I may do so yet. But on the way I did come across something else: I found the means of producing a result, while still not understanding the cause. And now I am able to show that it is possible, even with mammals, to induce the capacity to transmit an ability to the offspring. I can prove it with the results of a dozen experiments."

"I don't quite see--I mean, how do you prove a thing like that?" Helen asked, with a frown.

"Well, one quite simple way was with rats. I taught a male rat and a female rat to find their way through a maze to reach their food. Just a simple maze at first, which I gradually made quite complicated. I practiced them until they could find their way to the food with never a false turn or a hesitation. Then I treated both of them and mated them. When the offspring were a few weeks old, I let them get hungry, then I took each in turn and set it down at the entrance to the maze. One after another, they bolted through it to get the food--not one of them took a single wrong turning. They knew their way, although they'd never seen the maze before... Later on, I mated two of the young ones, and their offspring tackled the maze first shot, just as well as their parents had. Well, you see what that means?"

His wife ignored the question to put one of her own.

"You said you 'treated' the original two. How did you do that?"

"I doubt if you'd understand the details, my dear--and in any case, they're my own secret at present, but the administration is quite simple. It can be done either by direct injection or by introducing the agent into the diet--the latter is slightly preferable on account of the more gradual assimilation into the system. But you do see what it means, don't you?" he repeated.

"If it were to be applied to human beings, their child would not have to start right from the beginning like other children. He'd be born with a--a sort of built-in background. Think of the pointless drudgery that that would spare him. The rudiments, at least, of all the things we've had to learn one generation after another would be there already. He'd be able to read as soon as he was born--well, not quite that, but as soon as he had learned the physical control of his eyesight--talk as soon as he could manage his tongue, and count, too. Just think where he might get to with such a flying start over his contemporaries. School over in a few years, university by the time he was nine or ten. He'd be a wonder child... And in the face of evidence like that, any doubts about the transmissibility of acquired abilities would simply be swept away..."

He paused and glanced at his wife. She was regarding the open pages of her book with a curiously fixed intensity. He went on:

"One can't tell in advance, of course, to what extent actual knowledge would be transmitted. That's going to be one of the interesting things to find out. That the abilities that have become almost unconscious skills would be inherited, I have little doubt, but it might go further... It isn't impossible that he would find himself already equipped to the extent of what we consider to be average education----"

"Oh, yes," his wife broke in unexpectedly, "and perhaps he'd be equipped with a taste for cigarettes, for sherry before dinner--and what about built-in political loyalties?" she suggested.

Dr. Solway blinked.

"Well, why not?" she demanded. "Have you any method of selecting what is to be transmitted from what is not?"

He frowned, a little put out.

"Possibly one would have to be careful," he admitted, "but I imagine that if, when one was under treatment, one took trouble to practice only those abilities that are desirable and have, as I said, become almost unconscious skills----"

"You imagine!" his wife interrupted scornfully. "Donald, you never gave a thought to the extent of the inheritance until now. Well, I can do some imagining, too--and the answer is 'No!' Quite definitely and comprehensively, 'No!'"

Dr. Solway blinked again.

"My dear, I don't know what you mean..."

"Oh, don't pretend, Donald. Do you think after these years I don't know you well enough to see what you're working up to? It's a positively revolting suggestion. No man who had any respect for his wife would even think of it. I wonder you're not ashamed to make it."

"But, my dear. I've not made any suggestion. I only said----"

"Oh, it might have taken you another ten minutes or so to get round to it. But it was coming. And I must say, I never heard of anything more sordid and disgusting. Putting me, your own wife, on a level with your guinea pigs and rats. Perhaps you'd like me to go into a cage in the lab, with the rest of the experimental material..."

"Now really, Helen, there's no need to take it like that. I admit I was going to ask you what you thought about it... After all, to become world-famous: the first parents of a new race of, well, geniuses wouldn't be overstating it, I should think----"

"Indeed. Well, now you know just what I think--and that is that it is a shameful as well as a revolting idea. Only this evening Marcel was telling me that people are saying you're a crackpot, and I must say after hearing this, I'm not surprised."

The doctor frowned.

"Oh, so Marcel thinks----"

"No, he doesn't. Marcel believes in your work. He says you are a great man. Though what he'd say if he heard about this idea I don't know--at least, I do."

"Whatever that may mean--but since he is not likely to know about it unless you tell him, does it matter?"

"Of course it matters. How would you like it if someone you'd promised to love, honor and obey suddenly wanted to put you in with the laboratory animals?"

"I wasn't saying that that didn't matter. It was about Marcel knowing--I mean, not knowing--oh, Lord, what's he got to do with it, anyway? Look, I'd no idea it would upset you like this. I thought the opportunity to take a part in the launching of a world-shaking discovery--oh, well, clearly that isn't how you see it."

"It certainly isn't. I think it's the most----"

"Yes, yes, you told me that. I can't say that I understand your point of view--after all, I would be just as much in the experiment, and I'm prepared to play my part--but, of course, if the idea doesn't appeal to you, there's no more to be said."

"Doesn't appeal, indeed! There's a whole lot more I could say. Never did I think----"

"My dear, I've told you I didn't mean to upset you. I'm sorry I did. I apologize for it. The whole idea was obviously a mistake. Do you think we could agree to wash it right out and forget about it?" He looked at her with such earnest appeal that she was somewhat mollified.

"Well, I don't know," she said. "It wasn't at all a nice suggestion to have made, not an easy thing to forget. But I suppose a man wouldn't properly understand. Now, if you were a woman----"

"If I were a woman, the proposition could scarcely have arisen," he pointed out.

"I dare say. But all the same..."

"But you will try to consider it all unsaid?"

"I--oh, very well, I'll do my best. But really, Donald...!"

Later, when he had finished preparing for bed and was in the act of climbing in, she said:

"Marcel seems to think you are going to dismiss him."

"Marcel is perfectly right," he told her.

"Oh, dear," she said. "And he is so much nicer than those oafs we had before. Is it just because you had a bit of a row this afternoon?"

"It is not. I employ Marcel to assist me--not to direct me. We've got to a point where we differ on a matter of policy. I can't keep him here if he is going to pull a different way all the time, so I shall tell him he can pack up at the end of next month. That'll give him nearly seven weeks to find something else. He'll not have any difficulty with that these days."

"It seems a pity. You've nothing against his work?"

"Certainly not. He's a good worker. He should do well--if he can bring himself to stop interfering in matters of policy that are not his concern. No, I've had enough of it. I'm giving him formal notice tomorrow--and there'll be a good reference if he wants one ..."

• • •

The weeks went by. Dr. Solway's thought of extending his experiment from the laboratorial to the domestic field took its place with other little lapses that could be forgiven, though recorded. Marcel bestirred himself to seek other jobs, and was pleased to be accepted for one in France. Helen Solway drove him to the station on the last day of the following month.

"He was quite cheerful--no hard feelings at all," she reported. "I think he's happy at the prospect of getting home again. I doubt whether he would ever have settled properly here. He says it makes him tired trying to express himself in English--or what he thinks is English--and he doesn't like English weather, or tea, and he doesn't think English food has been suiting him, so what with one thing and another----" She broke off as she caught a sudden expression on her husband's face. "Oh, he was quite nice about it--nothing personal. After all, a lot of people who've been brought up all their lives on one kind of food do find it difficult to get used to another. Plenty of Englishmen regard all French dishes as 'concoctions.'"

"H'm," said her husband. "All the same, it's a piece of damned impertinence for him to criticize our cook to you."

"He really didn't mean it that way, Donald. Though, as a matter of fact, I don't think things have been quite up to her usual standard lately. I must look into it."

Dr. Solway shook his head.

"I can't see any need for that. Her meals always seem perfectly good to me."

"All the same, I think just a word wouldn't come amiss."

"Better not to risk upsetting her. Cooks of any kind are pretty hard to come by nowadays," he suggested.

"Harder than assistants are? No, this, at least, is my department, Donald."

"Yes, of course, my dear. It's only that cooks are so touchy..."

• • •

Curiously, it was quite some little time later--a week or so, in fact, after Helen had discovered herself to be pregnant again--that an appalling thought struck her. It came from nowhere and impinged with a vivid clarity on her half-awake mind in the small hours of one morning. A revelation-type thought: Once it had struck, she knew with a positive conviction that it was right. It caused her to lift herself on one elbow, switch on the light and thump her sleeping husband hard on the back, so that he started up, dazzled and bewildered.

"You cad!" she told him. "You dirty cheat! It's she meanest, most despicable trick I ever heard of. I'll--I'll----"

Words deserted her while her husband screwed up his eyes at her. His own temper had risen.

"How dare you do that!" he exclaimed. "It's a most dangerous thing to startle a sleeping man like----"

"How dare I! That's good. I suppose you're going to deny it."

"Deny what?" he inquired.

"Yes, I thought you would. Well, let me tell you it's no good. I know when you're lying, Donald."

He peered at her more closely.

"For heaven's sake! What on earth is all this about?"

"You know very well".

"But I----"

"Oh, yes you do. No wonder cook gave notice. It was you all the time. You were doing something to the food--'treating' it, as you called it. And of all the low-down, repulsive, rotten, sly things to do! You knew just what I thought about your idea, and you deliberately sneaked in and did it behind my back, and left cook to carry the blame."

"I never blamed anyone. I said----"

"Don't you try to justify it. I'm not listening. How dare you do your beastly experiments on me! Oh, I was never so humiliated!"

Dr.Solway gave it up and ceased to dissemble.

"All right, then. I did. But it wasn't just on you, it was on us--me, too. And to call it a 'beastly experiment' is simply emotional nonsense. It is immensely important: The outcome of it may enable the whole human race to take a great leap forward."

"What do I care Whether it leaps? I'm interested in me and my baby. You knew perfectly well what my feelings were, and you didn't care a damn. You just cold-bloodedly cheated ... All right, if that's all you care about me, we've come to the end ... I shall leave you ... I shall get a divorce ... I shall----"

"Ah!" said her husband.

She checked, suddenly.

"What do you mean, 'Ah!' like that?" she demanded.

"I was thinking of the publicity. It will be bound to arouse great interest in the results."

She glared at him.

"Well, then, I probably shan't get a divorce. Though if treating one's wife like a laboratory animal isn't good grounds for divorce, there must be something very wrong with the law ...

"But I shall go. I shall certainly go--and take the children with me. Who knows what you might do with them after this. I shall go this very morning. I can't bear to be in the same house with you another day ... "

But, somehow, with the coming of daylight and the familiar routine, the need to shake off the dust did not seem quite so urgent. There were the difficulties to knowing where to go, and what to do about the children's schools, and getting things packed, and not having enough ready cash available, and one thing and another that caused her to decide that next week would have to do. So she only got as far as moving herself into the spare bedroom for the few days it would take to make the arrangements. Then what had looked like a simple, decisive action seemed to sprout complications. The matter of the coming baby presented an additional problem, making the whole thing seem too much to cope with just then, and she decided she would have to postpone it till that was over, So presently she moved herself back into the best bedroom and banished Donald to the spare room, making it quite clear that she had no intention of forgiving him, and keeping him aware of it.

"It's the underhandedness, the disloyalty of it more than anything," she complained. "How can I ever trust you again after an unforgivable thing like that? And what sort of a marriage is it when people don't trust each other? You've simply broken up our life together by trying to cheat me into furthering your own career, It was a low, nasty thing to even think of doing, and I pray every night that you'll be disappointed in the end. If there's any justice, you will ... "

• • •

In due course, the baby arrived.

When Helen Solway had left for the nursing home, her misgivings--though she determinedly disguised them from her husband under a confident nonchalance--had been considerable. When he visited her there, her anxieties had already been relaxed, and when she returned home, it was in a mood of triumphant satisfaction. She lot no time at all in dimming any hopes he might still have.

"And so," she concluded, "all you silly scheming was simply wasted after all. You made all that unpleasantness for nothing. It serves you right. He's a lovely baby. I had the doctor there give him a specially careful examination, and he says he's a very fine baby, and perfectly normal in every way."

Dr. Solway looked down at the baby as she held it. He opened his mouth to reply, thought better of it and contented himself with inspecting the small countenance closely. It looked, he found, quite disappointingly like almost any other baby.

The household settled down again, and the new baby took its place in it.

Doctor Solway's hopes had undoubtedly flickered low, but he would not let them die. He adopted a habit of visiting the baby several times a day for the purpose of studying it lengthily and intently.

After a fortnight or so of this, his wife forbade the practice on the grounds that it disturbed the baby and made it nervous.

"It frightens him so that he gets restless," she declared. "Just think how you'd feel if you were his size and had to look up at a great solemn face staring down at you for hours a day. It isn't fair on him."

So Dr. Solway saw less of the baby. And by degrees it somehow came about that he was scarcely seeing anything of it at all. One day it occurred to him that his wife was looking a little peaky, and that led him on to notice that she was unusually quiet and a little distrait in manner. A slight suspicion began to take a firmer hold. He made a forthright approach:

"Just why are you keeping the baby hidden away so much now?" he inquired, covering his sudden hope with artificial calmness of manner.

"Hidden away!" she repeated. "Why, Donald, what nonsense! It's just that he's better when he's quiet. He so easily gets upset. I think he must be very sensitive."

Her husband regarded her for a moment.

"That doesn't sound very convincing, my dear."

"Well, really! I don't think I quite understand you, Donald."

"No? Then I'd better explain, hadn't I? I rather think you don't want me to see the baby--not for more than a moment at a time. Now why could that be? Could it, perhaps, be because you don't want me to perceive certain signs that our experiment was not entirely unsuccessful after all? Could it be that?"

"Of course not, Donald. What rubbish! I told you the doctor said he was a perfectly normal----"

"Ah, yes. But that was several weeks ago, my dear. Come to think of it, one was perhaps a little too eager. An unusual ability could not very well be perceptible until some means to express it had developed, could it?"

"You're talking silly nonsense, Donald. He's just a nice, perfectly normal, happy little baby."

"I thought you said he was sensitive and easily upset?"

"Well, I mean he could easily be upset. It's better not to disturb him."

"All the same, I think I'll go up and take a look at him."

"I'd rather you didn't, Donald. He's just gone to sleep."

"You are anxious to keep me away from him. I'm sorry, my dear. It's no good standing in my way like that. I intend to see what this is all about. You come, too, by all means, if you wish to."

He went past her into the hall and started up the stairs. Helen stood for a moment clenching her hands, working them wretchedly together, then she turned and followed him with a dragging step.

Dr. Solway's imposed calmness was breaking down. Excitement surged up in him as he approached the door of the baby's nursery. Helen's reluctance had been so transparent that she might almost as well have confirmed his deductions in words. He no longer had any doubt that the experiment had not completely failed, but the extent of its success--whether it would be decisive enough to let him face his critics with his own son as living evidence in support of his theories--that was what he was about to find out...

His hand shook as he reached for the knob and let himself into the room.

The baby was not asleep. He was lying on his back, blue eyes very wide open, making quiet baby noises. He became aware of them as they approached the cot and stood beside it. The blue eyes focused, and he smiled up at Dr. Solway. Then he rolled his head on his pillow so that he was looking at his mother. The smile widened and then disappeared. The little lips opened and shut.

Dr. Solway was tense with excitement. He was convinced in that moment that the baby was trying to speak.

He bent closer, determined to catch anything that might sound even remotely like an attempt at a word. Helen Solway stood with her hands still clasped tightly together, an imploring look on her face.

"Ma----" said the baby, but got no further.

The tiny lips opened and shut again, as if, it seemed to Dr. Solway, working up for another try. Then the mouth pursed. The baby's blue eyes looked up yearningly at his mother. Then the lips opened once more. The articulation was not sharp, for lack of teeth, but he spoke, the words were quite clear:

"Maman," said the baby, "j'ai faim."