“Really, you know,” he said, rubbing his hands together and laughing nervously, “it has more than a theoretical interest.
“For example,” he confided, bringing his face close to the Professor’s and dropping to an undertone, “it would perhaps, if suitably handled, sell…
“Precisely,” he said, walking away, – “as a Food. Or at least a food ingredient.
“Assuming of course that it is palatable. A thing we cannot know till we have prepared it.”
He turned upon the hearthrug, and studied the carefully designed slits upon his cloth shoes.
“Name?” he said, looking up in response to an inquiry. “For my part I incline to the good old classical allusion. It – it makes Science rest. Gives it a touch of old-fashioned dignity. I have been thinking… I don’t know if you will think it absurd of me… A little fancy is surely occasionally permissible… Herakleophorbia. Eh? The nutrition of a possible Hercules? You know it might…
“Of course if you think not —”
Redwood reflected with his eyes on the fire and made no objection.
“You think it would do?”
Redwood moved his head gravely.
“It might be Titanophorbia, you know. Food of Titans… You prefer the former?”
“You’re quite sure you don’t think it a little too —” “No.”
“Ah! I’m glad.”
And so they called it Herakleophorbia throughout their investigations, and in their report, – the report that was never published, because of the unexpected developments that upset all their arrangements, – it is invariably written in that way. There were three kindred substances prepared before they hit on the one their speculations had foretolds and these they spoke of as Herakleophorbia I, Herakleophorbia II, and Herakleophorbia III. It is Herakleophorbia IV which I – insisting upon Bensington’s original name – call here the Food of the Gods.
III
The idea was Mr. Bensington’s. But as it was suggested to him by one of Professor Redwood’s contributions to the Philosophical Transactions, he very properly consulted that gentleman before he carried it further. Besides which it was, as a research, a physiological, quite as much as a chemical inquiry.
Professor Redwood was one of those scientific men who are addicted to tracings and curves. You are familiar – if you are at all the sort of reader I like – with the sort of scientific paper I mean. It is a paper you cannot make head nor tail of[5], and at the end come five or six long folded diagrams that open out and show peculiar zigzag tracings, flashes of lightning overdone, or sinuous inexplicable things called “smoothed curves” set up on ordinates and rooting in abscissae – and things like that. You puzzle over the thing for a long time and end with the suspicion that not only do you not understand it but that the author does not understand it either. But really you know many of these scientific people understand the meaning of their own papers quite well: it is simply a defect of expression that raises the obstacle between us.
I am inclined to think that Redwood thought in tracings and curves. And after his monumental work upon Reaction Times (the unscientific reader is exhorted to stick to it for a little bit longer and everything will be as clear as daylight[6]) Redwood began to turn out smoothed curves and sphygmographeries upon Growth, and it was one of his papers upon Growth that really gave Mr. Bensington his idea.
Redwood, you know, had been measuring growing things of all sorts, kittens, puppies, sunflowers, mushrooms, bean plants, and (until his wife put a stop to it) his baby, and he showed that growth went out not at a regular pace, or, as he put it, so,
but with bursts and intermissions of this sort
and that apparently nothing grew regularly and steadily, and so far as he could make out nothing could grow regularly and steadily: it was as if every living thing had just to accumulate force to grow, grew with vigour only for a time, and then had to wait for a space before it could go on growing again. And in the muffled and highly technical language of the really careful “scientist,” Redwood suggested that the process of growth probably demanded the presence of a considerable quantity of some necessary substance in the blood that was only formed very slowly, and that when this substance was used up by growth, it was only very slowly replaced, and that meanwhile the organism had to mark time. He compared his unknown substance to oil in machinery. A growing animal was rather like an engine, he suggested, that can move a certain distance and must then be oiled before it can run again. (“But why shouldn’t one oil the engine from without?” said Mr. Bensington, when he read the paper.) And all this, said Redwood, with the delightful nervous inconsecutiveness of his class, might very probably be found to throw a light upon the mystery of certain of the ductless glands. As though they had anything to do with it at all!
In a subsequent communication Redwood went further. He gave a perfect Brock’s benefit of diagrams – exactly like rocket trajectories they were; and the gist of it – so far as it had any gist – was that the blood of puppies and kittens and the sap of sunflowers and the juice of mushrooms in what he called the “growing phase” differed in the proportion of certain elements from their blood and sap on the days when they were not particularly growing.
And when Mr. Bensington, after holding the diagrams sideways and upside down, began to see what this difference was, a great amazement came upon him. Because, you see, the difference might probably be due to the presence of just the very substance he had recently been trying to isolate in his researches upon such alkaloids as are most stimulating to the nervous system. He put down Redwood’s paper on the patent reading-desk that swung inconveniently from his armchair, took off his gold-rimmed spectacles, breathed on them and wiped them very carefully.
“By Jove!” said Mr. Bensington.
Then replacing his spectacles again he turned to the patent reading-desk, which immediately, as his elbow came against its arm, gave a coquettish squeak and deposited the paper, with all its diagrams in a dispersed and crumpled state, on the floor. “By Jove!” said Mr. Bensington, straining his stomach over the arm-chair with a patient disregard of the habits of this convenience, and then, finding the pamphlet still out of reach, he went down on all fours in pursuit. It was on the floor that the idea of calling it the Food of the Gods came to him…
For you see, if he was right and Redwood was right, then by injecting or administering this new substance of his in food, he would do away with[7] the “resting phase,” and instead of growth going on in this fashion,
it would (if you follow me) go thus —
IV
The night after his conversation with Redwood Mr. Bensington could scarcely sleep a wink[8]. He did seem once to get into a sort of doze, but it was only for a moment, and then he dreamt he had dug a deep hole into the earth and poured in tons and tons of the Food of the Gods, and the earth was swelling and swelling, and all the boundaries of the countries were bursting, and the Royal Geographical Society was all at work like one great guild of tailors letting out the equator…
That of course was a ridiculous dream, but it shows the state of mental excitement into which Mr. Bensington got and the real value he attached to his idea, much better than any of the things he said or did when he was awake and on his guard. Or I should not have mentioned it, because as a general rule I do not think it is at all interesting for people to tell each other about their dreams.