‘The President of the Zoological Institute presents his compliments to Professor Challenger, and would take it as a personal favor if he would do them the honor to come to their next meeting.’ The answer was unprintable.”
“You don’t say?”
“Well, a bowdlerized version of it would run: ‘Professor Challenger presents his compliments to the President of the Zoological Institute, and would take it as a personal favor if he would go to the devil.’ ”
“Good Lord!”
“Yes, I expect that’s what old Wadley said. I remember his wail at the meeting, which began: ‘In fifty years experience of scientific intercourse—’ It quite broke the old man up.”
“Anything more about Challenger?”
“Well, I’m a bacteriologist, you know. I live in a nine-hundred-diameter microscope. I can hardly claim to take serious notice of anything that I can see with my naked eye. I’m a frontiersman from the extreme edge of the knowable, and I feel quite out of place when I leave my study and come into touch with all you great, rough, hulking creatures. I’m too detached to talk scandal, and yet at scientific conversaziones I have heard something of Challenger, for he is one of those men whom nobody can ignore. He’s as clever as they make ’em—a full-charged battery of force and vitality, but a quarrelsome, ill-conditioned faddist, and unscrupulous at that. He had gone the length of faking some photographs over the South American business.”
“You say he is a faddist. What is his particular fad?”
“He has a thousand, but the latest is something about Weissmann and Evolution. He had a fearful row about it in Vienna, I believe.”