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Updated: May 18, 2025
Then he went to Kipling, and found he "proved nothing," besides being irreverent and vulgar. These scientific people have their limitations. Then unhappily, he tried Besant's "Inner House," and the opening chapter set his mind upon learned societies and Pawkins at once. So Hapley turned to chess, and found it a little more soothing.
"Geologically, it's not very interesting," said Pawkins. "I'm afraid prehistoric antiquity doesn't make my pulses beat faster." "That's the advantage of it." "One might just as well be a fossil oneself." "Much better," said Pawkins, who had read Schopenhauer. "You are not exhilarating to a depressed woman," said Zora with a laugh. "I am sorry," he replied stiffly. "I was trying to entertain you."
In an elaborate critique he rent Pawkins to tatters one can fancy the man's disordered black hair, and his queer dark eyes flashing as he went for his antagonist and Pawkins made a reply, halting, ineffectual, with painful gaps of silence, and yet malignant. There was no mistaking his will to wound Hapley, nor his incapacity to do it.
Among the ladies, there were Mrs Pawkins, who was very straight, bony, and silent; and a wiry-faced old damsel, who held strong sentiments touching the rights of women, and had diffused the same in lectures; but the rest were strangely devoid of individual traits of character, insomuch that any one of them might have changed minds with the other, and nobody would have found it out.
He determined to make a fight for it, and started by trying to read novels. But he could not get his mind off Pawkins, white in the face and making his last speech every sentence a beautiful opening for Hapley. He turned to fiction and found it had no grip on him. He read the "Island Nights' Entertainments" until his "sense of causation" was shocked beyond endurance by the Bottle Imp.
That night Hapley found the moth crawling over his counterpane. He sat on the edge of the bed in his shirt-sleeves and reasoned with himself. Was it pure hallucination? He knew he was slipping, and he battled for his sanity with the same silent energy he had formerly displayed against Pawkins. So persistent is mental habit, that he felt as if it were still a struggle with Pawkins.
But in 1891 Pawkins, whose health had been bad for some time, published some work upon the "mesoblast" of the Death's Head Moth. What the mesoblast of the Death's Head Moth may be, does not matter a rap in this story. But the work was far below his usual standard, and gave Hapley an opening he had coveted for years. He must have worked night and day to make the most of his advantage.
Major Pawkins then reserved his fire, and looking upward, said, with a peculiar air of quiet weariness, like a man who had been up all night an air which Martin had already observed both in the colonel and Mr Jefferson Brick 'Well, colonel! 'Here is a gentleman from England, major, the colonel replied, 'who has concluded to locate himself here if the amount of compensation suits him.
Then rage, the old rage the rage he had so often felt against Pawkins came upon him again. He went on, leaping and striking at the eddying insect. Suddenly he trod on nothing, and fell headlong. There was a gap in his sensations, and Hapley found himself sitting on the heap of flints in front of the opening of the chalkpits, with a leg twisted back under him.
The very people who had most gleefully cheered on those gladiators became serious at the consequence. There could be no reasonable doubt the fret of the defeat had contributed to the death of Pawkins. There was a limit even to scientific controversy, said serious people. Another crushing attack was already in the press and appeared on the day before the funeral.
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