In Pursuit of the Gene

138 ¨ MENDEL WARS
soon as he had finished his presentation the bickering began. 57 Unlike
Hurst, who was enlivened by the thrill of battle, Bateson had a tendency to
come undone in the face of confrontation. Even under the best circumstance,
Bateson would have found the prospect of direct confrontation with
Weldon draining and debilitating, but the last-minute jolt of anxiety provided
by the hansom ride seemed to push him over the brink. Weldon
listed a host of exceptions, far more cases than Bateson had anticipated,
drawn from a large number of volumes of the studbook. In the heat of the
argument, Bateson brought out a poultry skin to illustrate a point, and his
opponents objected on the grounds that it was a discussion about horses.
The chairman of the meeting concurred. This was the final straw for
Bateson, who slammed the skin back into his bag, announced that he was
withdrawing the paper, and returned to his seat.
Hurst, who was far more sanguine, stepped up to assure Weldon that
the “alleged exceptions were mere errors of entry.” 58 Later Hurst recalled
that the shocked, stricken faces of Miss Saunders and Punnett in the audience
encouraged him to hold on. To refute the specific claims would take a
great deal of study of each individual case and was clearly impossible on the
spot, but Hurst’s direct denial and stout defense seemed to quiet the opposition,
and before he had finished, Hurst had extracted an agreement from
Weldon that both sides should put the facts down on paper. 59 In the coat
room on the way out, Hurst encountered Pearson, who said in a fury, “One
thing, you shall never be Fellow here as long as I live.” 60
After the meeting, Bateson went out to dinner with Punnett and Miss
Saunders. Punnett recalled the walk to a restaurant where they had planned
to celebrate afterward as “grim and silent” and dinner that followed as
“glum.” Later that night Bateson wrote Hurst that he felt “utterly collapsed”
and that Weldon had inflicted “a bad wound, that won’t heal for a
long time.” Nonetheless, he had been “filled with admiration” at Hurst’s
pluck, and his own fundamental conviction that they were in the right had
not been shaken. It was now incumbent on Hurst to become half horse
himself and “get back into the collar and pull us out of the mud.” 61
In his return letter, Hurst apologized for getting them all into the mud
in the first place, but he expressed his doubt that Weldon would be able to