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Updated: June 20, 2025
He retorted with some futile argument, and we went on exchanging letters, until his invitation and my acceptance concluded the correspondence." McCurdie, still bending his black brows on him, asked him why he had not declined. The Professor screwed up his face till it looked more like a cuneiform than ever. He, too, found the question difficult to answer, but he showed a bold front.
Lord Doyne said nothing, but tugged at his moustache and looked out of the window as the frozen meadows and bits of river and willows raced past. A dead silence fell on them. McCurdie broke it with another laugh and took a whiskey flask from his hand-bag. "Have a nip?" "Thanks, no," said the Professor. "I have to keep to a strict dietary, and I only drink hot milk and water and of that sparingly.
He opened the door, peeped in, and then, returning for the lamp, disappeared, leaving McCurdie and Biggleswade in the pitch darkness, with the dead man on the floor. "For heaven's sake, give me a drop of whiskey," said the Professor, "or I shall faint." Presently the door opened and Lord Doyne appeared in the shaft of light. He beckoned to his companions.
The windows steamed, but here and there through a wiped patch of pane a white world was revealed. The snow was falling. As they passed through Westbury, McCurdie looked mechanically for the famous white horse carved into the chalk of the down; but it was not visible beneath the thick covering of snow. "It'll be just like this all the way to Gehenna Trehenna, I mean," said McCurdie. Doyne nodded.
The eastern sky had cleared somewhat, and they faced a loose rack through which one pale star was dimly visible. "I'm a man of science," said McCurdie as they trudged through the snow, "and I dismiss the supernatural as contrary to reason; but I have Highland blood in my veins that plays me exasperating tricks.
"For God's sake let us get away from this," cried Biggleswade. "And leave the child to die, like the others?" said Doyne. "We must see it through," said McCurdie. A silence fell upon them as they sat round in the blaze with the new-born babe wrapped in its odd swaddling clothes asleep on the pile of fur coats, and it lasted until Sir Angus McCurdie looked at his watch.
Professor Biggleswade suddenly remembered the popular story of the great scientist's antecedents, and reflected that as McCurdie had once run, a barefoot urchin, through the Glasgow mud, he was likely to have little kith or kin. He himself envied McCurdie. He was always praying to be delivered from his sisters and nephews and nieces, whose embarrassing demands no calculated coldness could repress.
"It's not the dying that worries me," said McCurdie. "That's a mere mechanical process which every organic being from a king to a cauliflower has to pass through. It's the being forced against my will and my reason to come on this accursed journey, which something tells me will become more and more accursed as we go on, that is driving me to distraction." "What will be, will be," said Doyne.
He unshipped a lamp and examined the car, which had wedged itself against a great drift of snow on the off side. Meanwhile McCurdie and Biggleswade had alighted. "Yes, it's the axle," said the chauffeur. "Then we're done," remarked Doyne. "I'm afraid so, my lord." "What's the matter? Can't we get on?" asked Biggleswade in his querulous voice. McCurdie laughed.
Professor Biggleswade, who had heard vaguely of and rather looked down upon such new-fangled toys as radium and thorium and helium and argon for the latest astonishing developments in the theory of radio-activity had brought Sir Angus McCurdie his world-wide fame said somewhat ironically: "If the experiments were so important, why didn't you lock yourself up with your test tubes and electric batteries and finish them alone?"
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