Nothing So Strange Read Online Free PDF Page A

it—”
    “But perhaps a hotel—I wondered if you could tell me any particular
place they like.”
    My father liked Claridge’s and my mother the Berkeley, either of which
would have cost him at least a week’s pay. So I said: “They really don’t care
much for dining at hotels at all…. Why don’t you ask them to tea? I know
they’d love that.”
    “Tea?… That’s an idea. Just afternoon tea—like the English?”
    “My mother is English.”
    “Tea and crumpets, then.”
    “Not crumpets in the middle of June. Just tea.”
    “And what hotel?”
    “Does it have to be any hotel? Why don’t you make tea in your lab? Mathews
does.”
    “Mathews? You know him? We might invite him too.” I didn’t know what he
meant by “we” till he added: “Would you help?”
    “With the tea? Why yes, of course.”
    It was fun making preparations. I had never been inside his laboratory
before, or even seen what “Dr. Mark Bradley” looked like on his letter box.
It was an ugly room on the top story of the Physics Building, with less
scientific equipment in it than I had expected and a rather pervasive smell
that I didn’t comment on because there was nothing to be said in its favor
and doubtless nothing that could be done about it. I tidied the place up a
bit, dusted the chairs, and soon had the kettle boiling on a tripod over a
Bunsen burner. Mathews came, talked, drank tea, and had to leave for a
lecture. My parents had promised to be there by four, and I was a little
peeved by their lateness, not because it really mattered but because I could
see it was making Brad nervous. He kept pacing up and down and looking out of
the window. Suddenly he cried “They’re here!” and rushed out and down the
stairs. But when he came back there was only my mother with him. She was full
of apologies; she had been shopping and hadn’t noticed the time; and also my
father couldn’t come owing to a meeting in the City that had lasted longer
than usual. “Of course you shouldn’t have waited for me.” Then she looked
appraisingly round the room, sniffing just as I had. “What a jolly little
place! How secluded you must be here—almost on the roof! And all those
wonderful-looking instruments—you simply must tell me about
them.”
    There were only a couple of microscopes, a chemical balance, and a Liebig
condenser, but he went round with her, exhibiting and explaining, answering
in patient detail even the most trivial of her questions, and all without the
slightest trace of nervousness or reticence. It looked to me like a miracle,
till I remembered that Mathews had said he was a good lecturer.
    Then we had tea, and I knew that it was a miracle, because all at
once he was actually chatting . She asked him most of the questions I
had wanted to ask him, and he answered them all. About his early life in
North Dakota, the farm near the Canadian border, droughts, blizzards, hard
times, bankruptcy, the death of both his parents before he was out of grade
school, and his own career since. She asked him such personal
things—had he left a girl in America, did he have enough money? He said
there was no girl and he had enough money to live on.
    “But not enough to marry on?”
    “I don’t want to marry.”
    “You might—someday.”
    “No.”
    “How can you be certain?”
    “Because of my work. It takes up so much of my time that it wouldn’t be
fair to any woman to marry her.”
    “She mightn’t let it take up so much of your time.”
    “Then it wouldn’t be fair to my work.”
    “Isn’t that rather … inhuman?”
    “Not when you feel about your work as I do.”
    “You mean as a sort of priesthood—with a vow of celibacy
attached?”
    He thought a moment. “I don’t know. I hadn’t figured it out quite like
that.”
    But the oddest thing was yet to come. About six o’clock a boy put his head
in at the doorway, grinned cheerfully, and asked if he could go home. “I’ve