His intelligence struggled against this mood and struggled for a time in vain.  He reassured himself against the invasion of this disconcerting idea that he was something strange and inhuman, a loose wanderer from the flock returning with evil gifts from his sustained unnatural excursions amidst the darknesses and phosphorescences beneath the fair surfaces of life.  Man had not been always thus; the instincts and desires of the little home, the little plot, was not all his nature; also he was an adventurer, an experimenter, an unresting curiosity, an insatiable desire.  For a few thousand generations indeed he had tilled the earth and followed the seasons, saying his prayers, grinding his corn and trampling the October winepress, yet not for so long but that he was still full of restless stirrings.

‘If there have been home and routine and the field,’ thought Holsten, ‘there have also been wonder and the sea.’

He turned his head and looked up over the back of the seat at the great hotels above him, full of softly shaded lights and the glow and colour and stir of feasting.  Might his gift to mankind mean simply more of that? . . .

He got up and walked out of the garden, surveyed a passing tram-car, laden with warm light, against the deep blues of evening, dripping and trailing long skirts of shining reflection; he crossed the Embankment and stood for a time watching the dark river and turning ever and again to the lit buildings and bridges.  His mind began to scheme conceivable replacements of all those clustering arrangements. . . .

‘It has begun,’ he writes in the diary in which these things are recorded.  ’It is not for me to reach out to consequences I cannot foresee.  I am a part, not a whole; I am a little instrument in the armoury of Change.  If I were to burn all these papers, before a score of years had passed, some other man would be doing this. . .

Section 3

Holsten, before he died, was destined to see atomic energy dominating every other source of power, but for some years yet a vast network of difficulties in detail and application kept the new discovery from any effective invasion of ordinary life.  The path from the laboratory to the workshop is sometimes a tortuous one; electro-magnetic radiations were known and demonstrated for twenty years before Marconi made them practically available, and in the same way it was twenty years before induced radio-activity could be brought to practical utilisation.  The thing, of course, was discussed very much, more perhaps at the time of its discovery than during the interval of technical adaptation, but with very little realisation of the huge economic revolution that impended.  What chiefly impressed the journalists of 1933 was the production of gold from bismuth and the realisation albeit upon unprofitable lines of the alchemist’s dreams; there was a considerable amount of discussion and expectation in that more intelligent section of the educated publics of the various civilised countries which followed scientific development; but for the most part the world went about its business—­as the inhabitants of those Swiss villages which live under the perpetual threat of overhanging rocks and mountains go about their business—­just as though the possible was impossible, as though the inevitable was postponed for ever because it was delayed.