To Jimmy Blake, mathematics were as the Greek of Socrates to the unlearned senator. As for the calculi, they would have filled him with awe and wonder, if he had had any idea of their functions.
When, in the days of his extreme youth, Jimmy had been asked to prove that a circle was equal in area to a triangle whose base was equal to the circumference, and whose height was equal to the radius of the circle, Jimmy magnanimously accepted his master's word that it was so, and passed on to something more human, Though by some extraordinary means he scraped through school with a certificate and emerged from Oxford with a sort of degree, his mathematical paper would have caused Archimedes to turn in his grave.
It was his fate to live in the closest contact with the scientific mind. Jimmy Blake was a rich man and by some accounted eccentric, though the beginning and end of his eccentricity was to be found in his dislike for work and his choice of Blackheath as a desirable residential quarter. He had inherited from his father a beautiful old Georgian house facing the heath, which an enterprising auctioneer would have truthfully described as “standing in extensive and parklike grounds.”
Such an agent might have gone on to rhapsodize over the old-world gardens of Blake's Priory, the comfort of the accommodation, the Adam decorations, and when he had exhausted its esthetic and sylvan charms, his utilitarian mind would probably have descended to such mundane advantages as the central heating, electric installation, and the character of the soil.
Within these grounds there had once been a veritable priory. At some period of the seventeenth century when Greenwich and Blackheath were fashionable rendezvous for the elite and fashion of Elizabeth's court, and when the stately palace by the river saw Raleigh and Leicester, and the grand gentlemen and dames of society strolling on the grassy slopes of the Royal Park, a Major Blake had acquired the property and had erected a pleasure house for himself and his friends. The house no longer existed, but the gardens he had planned still sent forth their ancient fragrance.
To Jimmy the priory was home and, though he maintained a modest flat at the back of Park Lane, he spent very little of his time there. The glories of Elizabeth's Greenwich had departed definitely and completely and were one with the Court of Jamshid. Aged pensioners shuffled along the marble halls where the bucks of the Virgin Queen had pranced and prinked and a heavy-footed Drake had stalked with news of victories on the Spanish Main. Incidentally Jimmy came from a long line of adventurers and could trace his descent from an uncle of the great Blake.
“It is a standing wonder to me, Jimmy,” said Van Roon one night, “why a man like you, with the blood of filibusters in your veins, should be content to loaf through life behind the steering wheel of a Rolls, having no other objective than the satisfaction of your unscientific curiosity.”
“No curiosity is unscientific,” said Jimmy lazily. “I'm surprised at you, Jerry! Didn't Huxley or one of those Johnnies say”
Van Roon groaned. His was the scientific mind, against which Jimmy's intelligence was forever rubbing. Gerald van Roon was Jimmy's cousin, a brilliant genius to whom the world was a great laboratory, alternating with a small bedroom, with the furnishing of which he had never become acquainted, because he had not remained in the room long enough.
A tall, angular man with large, bony hands, a big, bulging forehead, two small, deep-set eyes which even his immense and powerful spectacles did not magnify, Gerald van Roon seemed the least suitable of companions for a man of Jimmy's tastes. He was exact, precise, orderly, had no human interests and absolutely no tastes in common with his happy-go-lucky cousin. And yet to the surprise of all who knew them, they lived together in the greatest harmony. Gerald amused Jimmy in one way and impressed him in another. The man's high principles, his almost fanatical passion for the truth which is, after all, the basic layer of the scientific mind, his childlike innocence in all worldly matters, his contempt for commerce and the rewards which commercial success brings, his extraordinary idealism—all these were very endearing qualities, which appealed strongly to the younger man.
“You're a funny devil,” said Jimmy throwing his napkin in a heap on the table. Gerald van Roon rolled his precisely and fitted the napkin ring exactly over the center of the roll. “I suppose you're going to that stink shop of yours?”
“I'm going to the laboratory,” said Gerald with a faint smile.