My Uncle Oswald Part 5

"I shall try one," she said, uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the bottle top and tipping out a pill. She popped it into her mouth and washed it down with champagne. Then she continued putting on her clothes.

She was fully dressed and was adjusting her hat in front of the looking-gla.s.s when suddenly she froze. She turned and faced me. I lay where I was, sipping my drink, but I was now watching her closely and with some trepidation.

She remained frozen for maybe thirty seconds, staring at me with a cold hard dangerous stare. Then all at once, she reached both hands up to her neckline and ripped her silk dress clean off her body. She tore off her underclothes. She flung her hat across the room. She crouched. She began to move forward. She came softly across the room toward me with the slow deliberate tread of a tigress stalking an antelope.

"What's up?" I said. But by now I knew very well what was up. Nine minutes had gone by and the pill had hit her.

"Steady on," I said.

She kept coming.

"Go away," I said.

Still she kept coming.

Then she sprang, and all I could see in those first few moments was a blurred flurry of legs and arms and mouth and hands and fingers. She went quite mad. She was wild with l.u.s.t. I hauled in my canvas and lay there trying to ride out the storm. That wasn't good enough for her. She began to throw me around all over the place, snorting and grunting as she did so. I didn't like it. I'd had my fill. This must stop, I decided. But I still had a terrific job pinning her down. In the end, I got her wrists locked behind her back and I carried her kicking and screaming into my bathroom and held her under the cold shower. She tried to bite me but I gave her an uppercut to the chin with my elbow. I held her under that freezing shower for at least twenty minutes while she went on yelling and swearing in Russian all the time.

"Had enough?" I said at last. She was half-drowned and pretty cold.

"I want you!" she spluttered.

"No," I said. "I'm going to keep you here until you cool down."

Finally she gave in. I let her go. Poor girl, she was s.h.i.+vering terribly and she looked a sight. I got a towel and gave her a good rub down. Then a gla.s.s of brandy.

"It was that red pill," she said.

"I know it was."

"I want some of them to take home."

"Those are too strong for ladies," I said. "I will make you some that are just right."

"Now?"

"No. Come back tomorrow and they'll be ready." Because her dress was ruined, I wrapped her in my overcoat and drove her home in the De Dion. Actually, she had done me a good turn. She had demonstrated that my pill worked just as well on the female as it did on the male. Probably better. I immediately set about making some ladies' pills. I made them half the strength of the men's pills, and I turned out one hundred of them, antic.i.p.ating a ready market. But the market was even more ready than I had antic.i.p.ated. When the Russian woman came back the next afternoon, she demanded five hundred of them on the spot!

"But they cost two hundred and fifty francs each."

"I don't care about that. All my girl friends want them. I told them what happened to me yesterday and now they all want them."

"I can give you a hundred, that's all. The rest later. Do you have money?"

"Of course I have money."

"May I make a suggestion, madame?"

"What is it?"

"If a lady takes one of these pills on her own, I fear she may appear unduly aggressive. Men don't like that. I didn't like it yesterday."

"What is your suggestion?"

"I suggest that any lady who intends taking one of these pills should persuade her partner also to take one. And at exactly the same time. Then they'll be all square."

"That makes good sense," she said.

It not only made good sense, it would also double the sales.

"The partner," I said, "could take a larger pill. It's called the men's pill. That's simply because men are bigger than women and need a bigger dose."

"Always a.s.suming," she said, smiling a little, "that the partner is a male."

"Whatever you like," I said.

She shrugged her shoulders and said, "Very well, then, give me also one hundred of these men's pills."

By gum, I thought, there's going to be some fun and frolics around the boudoirs of Paris tonight. Things were hot enough with just the man getting himself all pilled up, but I shuddered to think what was going to happen when both parties took the medicine.

It was a howling success. Sales doubled. They trebled. By the time my twelve months in Paris were up, I had around two million francs in the bank! That was one hundred thousand pounds! I was now nearly eighteen. I was rich. But I was not rich enough. My year in France had shown me very clearly the path I wanted to follow in my life. I was a sybarite. I wished to lead a life of luxury and leisure. I would never get bored. That was not my style. But I would never be completely satisfied unless the luxury was intensely luxurious and the leisure was unlimited. One hundred thousand pounds was not enough for that. I needed more. I needed a million pounds at least. I felt sure I would find a way to earn it. Meanwhile, I had not made a bad start.

I had enough sense to realize that first of all I must continue my education. Education is everything. I have a horror of uneducated people. And so, in the summer of 1913, I transferred my money to a London bank and returned to the land of my fathers. In September, I went up to Cambridge to begin my undergraduate studies. I was a scholar remember, a scholar of Trinity College, and as such, I had a number of privileges and was well treated by those in authority.

It was here at Cambridge that the second and final phase of my fortune-making began. Bear with me a little longer and you shall hear all about it in the pages to come.

7.

MY CHEMISTRY TUTOR at Cambridge was called A. R. Woresley. He was a middle-aged, shortish man, paunchy, untidily dressed, and with a grey moustache whose edges were stained yellow ochre by the nicotine from his pipe. In appearance, therefore, a typical university don. But he struck me as being exceptionally able. His lectures were never routine. His mind was always darting about in search of the unusual. Once he said to us, "And now we need as it were a tompion to protect the contents of this flask from invading bacteria. I presume you know what a tompion is, Cornelius?"

"I can't say I do, sir," I said.

"Can anyone give me a definition of that common English noun?" A. R. Woresley said.

n.o.body could.

"Then you'd better look it up," he said. "It is not my business to teach you elementary English."

"Oh, come on, sir," someone said. "Tell us what it means."

"A tompion," A. R. Woresley said, "is a small pellet made out of mud and saliva which a bear inserts into his a.n.u.s before hibernating for the winter, to stop the ants getting in."

A strange fellow, A. R. Woresley, a mixture of many att.i.tudes, occasionally witty, more often pompous and sombre, but underneath everything there was a curiously complex mind. I began to like him very much after that little tompion episode. We struck up a pleasant studenttutor relations.h.i.+p. I was invited to his house for sherry. He was a bachelor. He lived with his sister, who was called Emmaline of all names. She was dumpy and frowsy and seemed to have something greenish on her teeth that looked like verdigris. She had a kind of surgery in the house where she did things to people's feet. A pedicurist, I think she called herself.

Then the Great War broke out. It was 1914 and I was nineteen years old. I joined the army. I had to, and for the next four years I concentrated all my efforts on trying to survive. I am not going to talk about my wartime experiences. Trenches, mud, mutilation, and death have no place in these journals. I did my bit. Actually, I did well, and by November 1918, when it all came to an end, I was a twenty-three-year-old captain in the infantry with a Military Cross. I had survived.

At once, I returned to Cambridge to resume my education. The survivors were allowed to do that, though heaven knows there weren't many of us. A. R. Woresley had also survived. He had remained in Cambridge doing some sort of wartime scientific work and had had a fairly quiet war. Now he was back at his old job of teaching chemistry to undergraduates, and we were pleased to see one another again. Our friends.h.i.+p picked up where it had left off four years before.

One evening in February 1919, in the middle of the Lent term, A. R. Woresley invited me to supper at his house. The meal was not good. We had cheap food and cheap wine, and we had his pedicurist sister with verdigris on her teeth. I would have thought they could have lived in slightly better style than they did, but when I broached this delicate subject rather cautiously to my host, he told me that they were still struggling to pay off the mortgage on the house. After supper, A. R. Woresley and I retired to his study to drink a good bottle of port that I had brought him as a present. It was a Croft 1890, if I remember rightly.

"Don't often taste stuff like this," he said. He was very comfortable in an old armchair with his pipe lit and a gla.s.s of port in his hand. What a thoroughly decent man he was, I thought. And what a terribly dull life he leads. I decided to liven things up a bit by telling him about my time in Paris six years before in 1913 when I had made one hundred thousand pounds out of Blister Beetle pills. I started at the beginning. Very quickly I got caught up in the fun of story-telling. I remembered everything, but in deference to my tutor, I left out the more salacious details. It took me nearly an hour to tell.

A. R. Woresley was enraptured by the whole escapade. "By gad, Cornelius!" he cried. "What a nerve you've got! What a splendid nerve! And now you are a very wealthy young man!"

"Not wealthy enough," I said. "I want to make a million pounds before I'm thirty."

"And I believe you will," he said. "I believe you will. You have a flair for the outrageous. You have a nose for the successful stunt. You have the courage to act swiftly. And what's more, you are totally unscrupulous. In other words, you have all the qualities of the nouveau riche millionaire."

"Thank you," I said.

"Yes, but how many boys of seventeen would have gone all the way out to Khartoum on their own to look for a powder that might not even have existed? Precious few."

"I wasn't going to miss a chance like that," I said.

"You have a great flair, Cornelius. A very great flair. I am envious of you."

We sat there drinking our port. I was enjoying a small Havana cigar. I had offered one to my host but he preferred his stinking pipe. That pipe of his made more smoke than any other pipe I had ever seen. It was like a miniature wars.h.i.+p laying a smokescreen in front of his face. And behind the smokescreen, A. R. Woresley was brooding on my Paris story. He kept snorting and grunting and mumbling things like "Remarkable exploit! . . . What a nerve! . . . What panache! . . . Good chemistry, too, making those pills."

Then there was silence. The smoke billowed around his head. The gla.s.s of port disappeared through the smokescreen as he put it to his lips. Then it reappeared, empty. I had talked enough, so I kept my peace.

"Well, Cornelius," A. R. Woresley said at last. "You have just given me your confidence. Perhaps I had better give you mine in return."

He paused. I waited. What's coming, I wondered.

"You see," he said. "I myself have also had a little bit of a coup in the last few years."

"You have?"

"I'm going to write a paper on it when I get the time. And I might even be successful in getting it published."

"Chemistry?" I asked.

"A bit of chemistry," he said. "And a good deal of biochemistry. It's a mixture."

"I'd love to hear about it."

"Would you really?" He was longing to tell it.

"Of course." I poured him another gla.s.s of port. "You've got plenty of time," I said, "because we're going to finish this bottle tonight."

"Good," he said. Then he began his story.

"Exactly fourteen years ago," he said, "in the winter of 1905, I observed a goldfish frozen solid in the ice in my garden pond. Nine days later there was a thaw. The ice melted and the goldfish swam away, apparently none the worse. That set me thinking. A fish is cold-blooded. So what other forms of cold-blooded life could be preserved at low temperatures? Quite a few, I guessed. And from there, I began speculating about preserving _bloodless_ life at low temperatures. By bloodless I mean bacteria, et cetera. Then I said to myself, 'Who wants to preserve bacteria? Not me.' So then I asked myself another question. 'What living organism above all others would you like to see kept alive for very long periods?' And the answer came back, spermatozoa!"

"Why spermatozoa?" I asked.

"I'm not quite sure why," he said, "especially as I'm a chemist, not a bio man. But I had a feeling that somehow it would be a valuable contribution. So I started my experiments."

"What with?" I asked.

"With sperm, of course. Living sperm."

"Whose?"

"My own."

In the little silence that followed, I felt a twinge of embarra.s.sment. Whenever someone tells me he has done something, no matter what it is, I simply cannot help conjuring up a vivid picture of the scene. It's only a flash, but it always happens and I was doing it now. I was looking at scruffy old A. R. Woresley in his lab as he did what he had to do for the sake of his experiments, and I felt embarra.s.sed.

"In the cause of science everything is permissible," he said, sensing my discomfort.

"Oh, I agree. I absolutely agree."

"I worked alone," he said, "and mostly late at night. n.o.body knew what I was up to."

His face disappeared again behind the smokescreen, then swam back into view.

"I won't recite the hundreds of failed experiments I did," he said. "I shall speak instead of my successes. I think you may find them interesting. For example, the first important thing I discovered was that exceedingly low temperatures were required to keep spermatozoa alive for any length of time. I kept freezing the s.e.m.e.n to lower and still lower temperatures, and with each lowering of the temp I got a longer and longer life span. By using solid carbon dioxide, I was able to freeze my s.e.m.e.n down to --97 Centigrade. But even that wasn't enough. At minus ninetyseven the sperm lived for about a month but no more. 'I must go lower,' I told myself. But how could I do that? Then I hit upon a way to freeze the stuff all the way down to --197 Centigrade."

"Impossible," I said.

"What do you think I used?"

"I haven't the foggiest."

"I used liquid nitrogen. That did it."

"But liquid nitrogen is tremendously volatile," I said. "How could you prevent it from vapourizing? What did you store it in?"

"I devised special containers," he said. "Very strong and rather elaborate vacuum flasks. In these, the nitrogen remained liquid at minus one nine seven degrees virtually forever. A little topping up was required now and again, but that was all."

"Not forever, surely."

"Oh, yes," he said. "You are forgetting that nitrogen is a gas. If you liquefy a gas, it will stay liquid for a thousand years if you don't allow it to vapourize. And you do this simply by making sure that the flask is completely sealed and efficiently insulated."

"I see. And the sperm stayed alive?"

"Yes and no," he said. "They stayed alive long enough to tell me I'd got the right temperature. But they did not stay alive indefinitely. There was still something wrong. I pondered this and in the end I decided that what the sperm needed was some sort of a buffer, an overcoat if you like, to cus.h.i.+on them from the intense cold. And after experimenting with about eighty different substances, I at last hit on the perfect one."

"What was it?"

"Glycerol."