Produced by Jeroen Hellingman and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net/ for Project
Gutenberg (This file was produced from images generously
made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)









                        THE HAMPDENSHIRE WONDER

                                   BY

                            J. D. BERESFORD
              AUTHOR OF "THE EARLY HISTORY OF JACOB STAHL"



                                 LONDON
                        SIDGWICK & JACKSON, Ltd.
                         3 ADAM STREET, ADELPHI
                                  1911







                                   To

                          MY FRIEND AND CRITIC

                           ARTHUR SCOTT CRAVEN







CONTENTS


PART I

MY EARLY ASSOCIATIONS WITH GINGER STOTT

    CHAP.                                           PAGE

       I. THE MOTIVE                                   3
      II. NOTES FOR A BIOGRAPHY OF GINGER STOTT       14
     III. THE DISILLUSIONMENT OF GINGER STOTT         52


PART II

THE CHILDHOOD OF THE WONDER

      IV. THE MANNER OF HIS BIRTH                     65
       V. HIS DEPARTURE FROM STOKE-UNDERHILL          86
      VI. HIS FATHER'S DESERTION                     101
     VII. HIS DEBT TO HENRY CHALLIS                  113
    VIII. HIS FIRST VISIT TO CHALLIS COURT           139


INTERLUDE                                            145


PART II (continued)

THE WONDER AMONG BOOKS

      IX. HIS PASSAGE THROUGH THE PRISON OF
          KNOWLEDGE                                  151
       X. HIS PASTORS AND MASTERS                    175
      XI. HIS EXAMINATION                            189
     XII. FUGITIVE                                   213


PART III

MY ASSOCIATION WITH THE WONDER

    XIII. HOW I WENT TO PYM TO WRITE A BOOK          219
     XIV. THE INCIPIENCE OF MY SUBJECTION TO
          THE WONDER                                 230
      XV. THE PROGRESS AND RELAXATION OF MY
          SUBJECTION                                 251
     XVI. RELEASE                                    268
    XVII. IMPLICATIONS                               283


EPILOGUE: THE USES OF MYSTERY                        289







PART I

MY EARLY ASSOCIATIONS WITH GINGER STOTT


CHAPTER I

THE MOTIVE


I

I could not say at which station the woman and her baby entered
the train.

Since we had left London I had been engrossed in Henri Bergson's
"Time and Free Will," as it is called in the English translation. I
had been conscious of various stoppages and changes of passengers,
but my attention had been held by Bergson's argument. I agreed with
his conclusion in advance, but I wished to master his reasoning.

I looked up when the woman entered my compartment, though I did not
notice the name of the station. I caught sight of the baby she was
carrying, and turned back to my book. I thought the child was a freak,
an abnormality; and such things disgust me.

I returned to the study of my Bergson and read: "It is at the great
and solemn crisis, decisive of our reputation with others, that we
choose in defiance of what is conventionally called a motive, and
this absence of any tangible reason is the more striking the deeper
our freedom goes."

I kept my eyes on the book--the train had started again--but the next
passage conveyed no meaning to my mind, and as I attempted to re-read
it an impression was interposed between me and the work I was studying.

I saw projected on the page before me an image which I mistook at first
for the likeness of Richard Owen. It was the conformation of the head
that gave rise to the mistake, a head domed and massive, white and
smooth--it was a head that had always interested me. But as I looked,
my mind already searching for the reason of this hallucination, I saw
that the lower part of the face was that of an infant. My eyes wandered
from the book, and my gaze fluttered along the four persons seated
opposite to me, till they rested on the reality of my vision. Even
as these acts were being performed, I found myself foolishly saying,
"I don't call this freedom."

For several seconds the eyes of the infant held mine. Its gaze was
steady and clear as that of a normal child, but what differentiated
it was the impression one received of calm intelligence. The head
was completely bald, and there was no trace of eyebrows, but the eyes
themselves were protected by thick, short lashes.

The child turned its head, and I felt my muscles relax. Until then
I had not been conscious that they had been stiffened. My gaze was
released, pushed aside as it were, and I found myself watching the
object of the child's next scrutiny.

This object was a man of forty or so, inclined to corpulence,
and untidy. He bore the evidences of failure in the process of
becoming. He wore a beard that was scanty and ragged, there were
bare patches of skin on the jaw; one inferred that he wore that beard
only to save the trouble of shaving. He was sitting next to me, the
middle passenger of the three on my side of the carriage, and he was
absorbed in the pages of a half-penny paper--I think he was reading
the Police News--which was interposed between him and the child in
the corner diagonally opposite to that which I occupied.

The man was hunched up, slouching, his legs crossed, his elbows seeking
support against his body; he held with both hands his paper, unfolded,
close to his eyes. He had the appearance of being very myopic, but
he did not wear glasses.

As I watched him, he began to fidget. He uncrossed his legs and hunched
his body deeper into the back of his seat. Presently his eyes began
to creep up the paper in front of him. When they reached the top,
he hesitated a moment, making a survey under cover, then he dropped
his hands and stared stupidly at the infant in the corner, his mouth
slightly open, his feet pulled in under the seat of the carriage.

As the child let him go, his head drooped, and then he turned and
looked at me with a silly, vacuous smile. I looked away hurriedly;
this was not a man with whom I cared to share experience.

The process was repeated. The next victim was a big, rubicund,
healthy-looking man, clean shaved, with light-blue eyes that were
slightly magnified by the glasses of his gold-mounted spectacles. He,
too, had been reading a newspaper--the Evening Standard--until the
child's gaze claimed his attention, and he, too, was held motionless by
that strange, appraising stare. But when he was released, his surprise
found vent in words. "This," I thought, "is the man accustomed to act."

"A very remarkable child, ma'am" he said, addressing the thin,
ascetic-looking mother.



II

The mother's appearance did not convey the impression of poverty. She
was, indeed, warmly, decently, and becomingly clad. She wore a long
black coat, braided and frogged; it had the air of belonging to an
older fashion, but the material of it was new. And her bonnet, trimmed
with jet ornaments growing on stalks that waved tremulously--that,
also, was a modern replica of an older mode. On her hands were black
thread gloves, somewhat ill-fitting.

Her face was not that of a country woman. The thin, high-bridged
nose, the fallen cheeks, the shadows under eyes gloomy and
retrospective--these were marks of the town; above all, perhaps,
that sallow greyness of the skin which speaks of confinement....

The child looked healthy enough. Its great bald head shone
resplendently like a globe of alabaster.

"A very remarkable child, ma'am," said the rubicund man who sat facing
the woman.

The woman twitched her untidy-looking black eyebrows, her head trembled
slightly and set the jet fruit of her bonnet dancing and nodding.

"Yes, sir," she replied.

"Very remarkable," said the man, adjusting his spectacles and leaning
forward. His action had an air of deliberate courage; he was justifying
his fortitude after that temporary aberration.

I watched him a little nervously. I remembered my feelings when,
as a child, I had seen some magnificent enter the lion's den in a
travelling circus. The failure on my right was, also, absorbed in
the spectacle; he stared, open-mouthed, his eyes blinking and shifting.

The other three occupants of the compartment, sitting on the same side
as the woman, back to the engine, dropped papers and magazines and
turned their heads, all interest. None of these three had, so far as
I had observed, fallen under the spell of inspection by the infant,
but I noticed that the man--an artisan apparently--who sat next to
the woman had edged away from her, and that the three passengers
opposite to me were huddled towards my end of the compartment.

The child had abstracted its gaze, which was now directed down the
aisle of the carriage, indefinitely focussed on some point outside the
window. It seemed remote, entirely unconcerned with any human being.

I speak of it asexually. I was still uncertain as to its sex. It is
true that all babies look alike to me; but I should have known that
this child was male, the conformation of the skull alone should have
told me that. It was its dress that gave me cause to hesitate. It
was dressed absurdly, not in "long-clothes," but in a long frock that
hid its feet and was bunched about its body.



III

"Er--does it--er--can it--talk?" hesitated the rubicund man, and I
grew hot at his boldness. There seemed to be something disrespectful
in speaking before the child in this impersonal way.

"No, sir, he's never made a sound," replied the woman, twitching and
vibrating. Her heavy, dark eyebrows jerked spasmodically, nervously.

"Never cried?" persisted the interrogator.

"Never once, sir."

"Dumb, eh?" He said it as an aside, half under his breath.

"'E's never spoke, sir."

"Hm!" The man cleared his throat and braced himself with a deliberate
and obvious effort. "Is it--he--not water on the brain--what?"

I felt that a rigour of breathless suspense held every occupant of
the compartment. I wanted, and I know that every other person there
wanted, to say, "Look out! Don't go too far." The child, however,
seemed unconscious of the insult: he still stared out through the
window, lost in profound contemplation.

"No, sir, oh no!" replied the woman. "'E's got more sense than a
ordinary child." She held the infant as if it were some priceless
piece of earthenware, not nursing it as a woman nurses a baby, but
balancing it with supreme attention in her lap.

"How old is he?"

We had been awaiting this question.

"A year and nine munse, sir."

"Ought to have spoken before that, oughtn't he?"

"Never even cried, sir," said the woman. She regarded the child
with a look into which I read something of apprehension. If it were
apprehension it was a feeling that we all shared. But the rubicund
man was magnificent, though, like the lion tamer of my youthful
experience, he was doubtless conscious of the aspect his temerity
wore in the eyes of beholders. He must have been showing off.

"Have you taken opinion?" he asked; and then, seeing the woman's lack
of comprehension, he translated the question--badly, for he conveyed
a different meaning--thus,

"I mean, have you had a doctor for him?"

The train was slackening speed.

"Oh! yes, sir."

"And what do they say?"

The child turned its head and looked the rubicund man full in the
eyes. Never in the face of any man or woman have I seen such an
expression of sublime pity and contempt....

I remembered a small urchin I had once seen at the Zoological
Gardens. Urged on by a band of other urchins, he was throwing pebbles
at a great lion that lolled, finely indifferent, on the floor of its
playground. Closer crept the urchin; he grew splendidly bold; he threw
larger and larger pebbles, until the lion rose suddenly with a roar,
and dashed fiercely down to the bars of its cage.

I thought of that urchin's scared, shrieking face now, as the rubicund
man leant quickly back into his corner.

Yet that was not all, for the infant, satisfied, perhaps, with its
victim's ignominy, turned and looked at me with a cynical smile. I was,
as it were, taken into its confidence. I felt flattered, undeservedly
yet enormously flattered. I blushed, I may have simpered.

The train drew up in Great Hittenden station.

The woman gathered her priceless possession carefully into her arms,
and the rubicund man adroitly opened the door for her.

"Good day, sir," she said, as she got out.

"Good day," echoed the rubicund man with relief, and we all drew
a deep breath of relief with him in concert, as though we had just
witnessed the safe descent of some over-daring aviator.



IV

As the train moved on, we six, who had been fellow-passengers for some
thirty or forty minutes before the woman had entered our compartment,
we who had not till then exchanged a word, broke suddenly into general
conversation.

"Water on the brain; I don't care what any one says," asserted the
rubicund man.

"My sister had one very similar", put in the failure, who was
sitting next to me. "It died," he added, by way of giving point to
his instance.

"Ought not to exhibit freaks like that in public," said an old man
opposite to me.

"You're right, sir," was the verdict of the artisan, and he spat
carefully and scraped his boot on the floor; "them things ought to
be kep' private."

"Mad, of course, that's to say imbecile", repeated the rubicund man.

"Horrid head he'd got," said the failure, and shivered histrionically.

They continued to demonstrate their contempt for the infant by many
asseverations. The reaction grew. They were all bold now and all
wanted to speak. They spoke as the survivors from some common peril;
they were increasingly anxious to demonstrate that they had never
suffered intimidation and in their relief they were anxious to laugh
at the thing which had for a time subdued them. But they never named
it as a cause for fear. Their speech was merely innuendo.

At the last, however, I caught an echo of the true feeling.

It was the rubicund man, who, most daring during the crisis was now
bold enough to admit curiosity.

"What's your opinion, sir?" he said to me. The train was running
into Wenderby; he was preparing to get out; and he leaned forward,
his fingers on the handle of the door.

I was embarrassed. Why had I been singled out by the child? I had
taken no part in the recent interjectory conversation. Was this a
consequence of the notice that had been paid to me?

"I?" I stammered and then reverted to the rubicund man's original
phrase, "It--it was certainly a very remarkable child," I said.

The rubicund man nodded and pursed his lips. "Very," he muttered as
he alighted, "Very remarkable. Well, good day to you."

I returned to my book and was surprised to find that my index finger
was still marking the place at which I had been interrupted some
fifteen minutes before. My arm felt stiff and cramped.

I read "... this absence of any tangible reason is the more striking
the deeper our freedom goes."







CHAPTER II

NOTES FOR A BIOGRAPHY OF GINGER STOTT


I

Ginger Stott is a name that was once as well known as any in
England. Stott has been the subject of leading articles in every daily
paper; his life has been written by an able journalist who interviewed
Stott himself, during ten crowded minutes, and filled three hundred
pages with details, seventy per cent. of which were taken from the
journals, and the remainder supplied by a brilliant imagination. Ten
years ago Ginger Stott was on a pinnacle, there was a Stott vogue. You
found his name at the bottom of signed articles written by members of
the editorial staff; you bought Stott collars, although Stott himself
did not wear collars; there was a Stott waltz which is occasionally
hummed by clerks, and whistled by errand-boys to this day; there was a
periodical which lived for ten months, entitled Ginger Stott's Weekly;
in brief, during one summer there was a Stott apotheosis.

But that was ten years ago, and the rising generation has almost
forgotten the once well-known name. One rarely sees him mentioned in
the morning paper now, and then it is but the briefest reference; some
such note as this "Pickering was at the top of his form, recalling
the finest achievements of Ginger Stott at his best," or "Flack is
a magnificent find for Kent: he promises to completely surpass the
historic feats of Ginger Stott." These journalistic superlatives
only irritate those who remember the performances referred to. We who
watched the man's career know that Pickering and Flack are but tyros
compared to Stott; we know that none of his successors has challenged
comparison with him. He was a meteor that blazed across the sky,
and if he ever has a true successor, such stars as Pickering and
Flack will shine pale and dim in comparison.

It makes one feel suddenly old to recall that great matinée at
the Lyceum, given for Ginger Stott's benefit after he met with his
accident. In ten years so many great figures in that world have died
or fallen into obscurity. I can count on my fingers the number of
those who were then, and are still, in the forefront of popularity. Of
the others poor Captain Wallis, for instance, is dead--and no modern
writer, in my opinion, can equal the brilliant descriptiveness of
Wallis's articles in the Daily Post. Bobby Maisefield, again, Stott's
colleague, is a martyr to rheumatism, and keeps a shop in Ailesworth,
the scene of so many of his triumphs. What a list one might make, but
how uselessly. It is enough to note how many names have dropped out,
how many others are the names of those we now speak of as veterans. In
ten years! It certainly makes one feel old.



II

No apology is needed for telling again the story of Stott's
career. Certain details will still be familiar, it is true, the
historic details that can never be forgotten while cricket holds
place as our national game. But there are many facts of Stott's life
familiar to me, which have never been made public property. If I
must repeat that which is known, I can give the known a new setting;
perhaps a new value.

He came of mixed races. His mother was pure Welsh, his father a
Yorkshire collier; but when Ginger was nine years old his father died,
and Mrs. Stott came to live in Ailesworth where she had immigrant
relations, and it was there that she set up the little paper-shop,
the business by which she maintained herself and her boy. That shop
is still in existence, and the name has not been altered. You may
find it in the little street that runs off the market place, going
down towards the Borstal Institution.

There are many people alive in Ailesworth today who can remember
the sturdy, freckled, sandy-haired boy who used to go round with the
morning and evening papers; the boy who was to change the fortunes
of a county.

Ginger was phenomenally thorough in all he undertook. It was one of
the secrets of his success. It was this thoroughness that kept him
engaged in his mother's little business until he was seventeen. Up to
that age he never found time for cricket--he certainly had remarkable
and very unusual qualities.

It was sheer chance, apparently, that determined his choice of
a career.

He had walked into Stoke-Underhill to deliver a parcel, and on his way
back his attention was arrested by the sight of a line of vehicles
drawn up to the boarded fencing that encloses the Ailesworth County
Ground. The occupants of these vehicles were standing up, struggling
to catch a sight of the match that was being played behind the screen
erected to shut out non-paying sightseers. Among the horses' feet,
squirming between the spokes of wheels, utterly regardless of all
injury, small boys glued their eyes to knot-holes in the fence, while
others climbed surreptitiously, and for the most part unobserved,
on to the backs of tradesmen's carts. All these individuals were in
a state of tremendous excitement, and even the policeman whose duty
it was to move them on, was so engrossed in watching the game that
he had disappeared inside the turnstile, and had given the outside
spectators full opportunity for eleemosynary enjoyment.

That tarred fence has since been raised some six feet, and now
encloses a wider sweep of ground--alterations that may be classed
among the minor revolutions effected by the genius of that thick-set,
fair-haired youth of seventeen, who paused on that early September
afternoon to wonder what all the fuss was about. The Ailesworth County
Ground was not famous in those days; not then was accommodation needed
for thirty thousand spectators, drawn from every county in England
to witness the unparalleled.

Ginger stopped. The interest of the spectacle pierced his absorption
in the business he had in hand. Such a thing was almost unprecedented.

"What's up?" he asked of Puggy Phillips.

Puggy Phillips--hazarding his life by standing on the
shiny, slightly curved top of his butcher's cart--made
no appropriate answer. "Yah--ah--AH!" he screamed in
ecstasy. "Oh! played! Pla-a-a-ayed!!"

Ginger wasted no more breath, but laid hold of the little brass rail
that encircled Puggy's platform, and with a sudden hoist that lifted
the shafts and startled the pony, raised himself to the level of
a spectator.

"'Ere!" shouted the swaying, tottering Puggy, "What the ... are yer
rup to?"

The well-drilled pony, however, settled down again quietly to maintain
his end of the see-saw, and, finding himself still able to preserve
his equilibrium, Puggy instantly forgot the presence of the intruder.

"What's up?" asked Ginger again.

"Oh! Well 'it, WELL 'IT!" yelled Puggy. "Oh! Gow on, gow on agen! Run
it aht. Run it AH-T."

Ginger gave it up, and turned his attention to the match.

It was not any famous struggle that was being fought out on the old
Ailesworth Ground; it was only second-class cricket, the deciding match
of the Minor Counties championship. Hampdenshire and Oxfordshire,
old rivals, had been neck-and-neck all through the season, and, as
luck would have it, the engagement between them had been the last
fixture on the card.

When Ginger rose to the level of spectator, the match was anybody's
game. Bobby Maisefield was batting. He was then a promising young
colt who had not earned a fixed place in the Eleven. Ginger knew
him socially, but they were not friends, they had no interests in
common. Bobby had made twenty-seven. He was partnered by old Trigson,
the bowler, (he has been dead these eight years,) whose characteristic
score of "Not out ... O," is sufficiently representative of his
methods.

It was the fourth innings, and Hampdenshire with only one more
wicket to fall, still required nineteen runs to win. Trigson could
be relied upon to keep his wicket up, but not to score. The hopes
of Ailesworth centred in the ability of that almost untried colt
Bobby Maisefield--and he seemed likely to justify the trust reposed
in him. A beautiful late cut that eluded third man and hit the fence
with a resounding bang, nearly drove Puggy wild with delight.

"Only fifteen more," he shouted. "Oh! Played; pla-a-a-yed!"

But as the score crept up, the tensity grew. As each ball was
delivered, a chill, rigid silence held the onlookers in its grip. When
Trigson, with the field collected round him, almost to be covered
with a sheet, stonewalled the most tempting lob, the click of the
ball on his bat was an intrusion on the stillness. And always it
was followed by a deep breath of relief that sighed round the ring
like a faint wind through a plantation of larches. When Bobby scored,
the tumult broke out like a crash of thunder; but it subsided again,
echoless, to that intense silence so soon as the ball was "dead."

Curiously, it was not Bobby who made the winning hit but Trigson. "One
to tie, two to win," breathed Puggy as the field changed over,
and it was Trigson who had to face the bowling. The suspense was
torture. Oxford had put on their fast bowler again, and Trigson,
intimidated, perhaps, did not play him with quite so straight a bat
as he had opposed to the lob-bowler. The ball hit Trigson's bat and
glanced through the slips. The field was very close to the wicket,
and the ball was travelling fast. No one seemed to make any attempt to
stop it. For a moment the significance of the thing was not realised;
for a moment only, then followed uproar, deafening, stupendous.

Puggy was stamping fiercely on the top of his cart; the tears were
streaming down his face; he was screaming and yelling incoherent
words. He was representative of the crowd. Thus men shouted and stamped
and cried when news came of the relief of Kimberley, or when that
false report of victory was brought to Paris in the August of 1870....

The effect upon Ginger was a thing apart. He did not join in the
fierce acclamation; he did not wait to see the chairing of Bobby
and Trigson. The greatness of Stott's character, the fineness of his
genius is displayed in his attitude towards the dramatic spectacle
he had just witnessed.

As he trudged home into Ailesworth, his thoughts found vent in a
muttered sentence which is peculiarly typical of the effect that had
been made upon him.

"I believe I could have bowled that chap," he said.


III

In writing a history of this kind, a certain licence must be
claimed. It will be understood that I am filling certain gaps in
the narrative with imagined detail. But the facts are true. My added
detail is only intended to give an appearance of life and reality to
my history. Let me, therefore, insist upon one vital point. I have not
been dependent on hearsay for one single fact in this story. Where
my experience does not depend upon personal experience, it has
been received from the principals themselves. Finally, it should be
remembered that when I have, imaginatively, put words into the mouths
of the persons of this story, they are never essential words which
affect the issue. The essential speeches are reported from first-hand
sources. For instance, Ginger Stott himself has told me on more than
one occasion that the words with which I closed the last section, were
the actual words spoken by him on the occasion in question. It was not
until six years after the great Oxfordshire match that I myself first
met the man, but what follows is literally true in all essentials.

There was a long, narrow strip of yard, or alley, at the back of
Mrs. Stott's paper-shop, a yard that, unfortunately, no longer
exists. It has been partly built over, and another of England's
memorials has thus been destroyed by the vandals of modern commerce....

This yard was fifty-three feet long, measuring from Mrs. Stott's back
door to the door of the coal-shed, which marked the alley's extreme
limit. This measurement, an apparently negligible trifle, had an
important effect upon Stott's career. For it was in this yard that he
taught himself to bowl, and the shortness of the pitch precluded his
taking any run. From those long studious hours of practice he emerged
with a characteristic that was--and still remains--unique. Stott
never took more than two steps before delivering the ball; frequently
he bowled from a standing position, and batsmen have confessed that
of all Stott's puzzling mannerisms, this was the one to which they
never became accustomed. S. R. L. Maturin, the finest bat Australia
ever sent to this country, has told me that to this peculiarity of
delivery he attributed his failure ever to score freely against
Stott. It completely upset one's habit of play, he said: one had
no time to prepare for the flight of the ball; it came at one so
suddenly. Other bowlers have since attempted some imitation of this
method without success. They had not Stott's physical advantages.

Nevertheless, the shortness of that alley threw Stott back for
two years. When he first emerged to try conclusions on the field,
he found his length on the longer pitch utterly unreliable, and the
effort necessary to throw the ball another six yards, at first upset
his slowly acquired methods.

It was not until he was twenty years old that Ginger Stott played in
his first Colts' match.

The three years that had intervened had not been prosperous years
for Hampdenshire. Their team was a one-man team. Bobby Maisefield
was developing into a fine bat (and other counties were throwing out
inducements to him, trying to persuade him to qualify for first-class
cricket), but he found no support, and Hampdenshire was never looked
upon as a coming county. The best of the minor counties in those
years were Staffordshire and Norfolk.

In the Colts' match Stott's analysis ran:


                    overs   maidens   runs   wickets
                     11.3         7     16         7


and reference to the score-sheet, which is still preserved among the
records of the County Club, shows that six of the seven wickets were
clean bowled. The Eleven had no second innings; the match was drawn,
owing to rain. Stott has told me that the Eleven had to bat on a
drying wicket, but after making all allowances, the performance was
certainly phenomenal.

After this match Stott was, of course, played regularly. That
year Hampdenshire rose once more to their old position at the
head of the minor counties, and Maisefield, who had been seriously
considering Surrey's offer of a place in their Eleven after two years'
qualification by residence, decided to remain with the county which
had given him his first chance.

During that season Stott did not record any performance so remarkable
as his feat in the Colts' match, but his record for the year was
eighty-seven wickets with an average of 9.31; and it is worthy of
notice that Yorkshire made overtures to him, as he was qualified by
birth to play for the northern county.

I think there must have been a wonderful esprit de corps among the
members of that early Hampdenshire Eleven. There are other evidences
beside this refusal of its two most prominent members to join the ranks
of first-class cricket. Lord R----, the president of the H.C.C.C.,
has told me that this spirit was quite as marked as in the earlier
case of Kent. He himself certainly did much to promote it, and his
generosity in making good the deficits of the balance sheet, had a
great influence on the acceleration of Hampdenshire's triumph.

In his second year, though Hampdenshire were again champions of the
second-class counties, Stott had not such a fine average as in the
preceding season. Sixty-one wickets for eight hundred and sixty-eight
(average 14.23) seems to show a decline in his powers, but that was
a wonderful year for batsmen (Maisefield scored seven hundred and
forty-two runs, with an average of forty-two) and, moreover, that
was the year in which Stott was privately practising his new theory.

It was in this year that three very promising recruits, all since
become famous, joined the Eleven, viz.: P. H. Evans, St. John
Townley, and Flower the fast bowler. With these five cricketers
Hampdenshire fully deserved their elevation into the list of
first-class counties. Curiously enough, they took the place of the
old champions, Gloucestershire, who, with Somerset, fell back into
the obscurity of the second-class that season.



IV

I must turn aside for a moment at this point in order to explain
the "new theory" of Stott's, to which I have referred, a theory
which became in practice one of the elements of his most astounding
successes.

Ginger Stott was not a tall man. He stood only 5 ft. 5 1/4 in. in
his socks, but he was tremendously solid; he had what is known as a
"stocky" figure, broad and deep-chested. That was where his muscular
power lay, for his abnormally long arms were rather thin, though his
huge hands were powerful enough.

Even without his "new theory," Stott would have been an exceptional
bowler. His thoroughness would have assured his success. He studied
his art diligently, and practised regularly in a barn through the
winter. His physique, too, was a magnificent instrument. That long,
muscular body was superbly steady on the short, thick legs. It gave
him a fulcrum, firm, apparently immovable. And those weirdly long, thin
arms could move with lightning rapidity. He always stood with his hands
behind him, and then--as often as not without even one preliminary
step--the long arm would flash round and the ball be delivered,
without giving the batsman any opportunity of watching his hand; you
could never tell which way he was going to break. It was astonishing,
too, the pace he could get without any run. Poor Wallis used to call
him the "human catapult"; Wallis was always trying to find new phrases.

The theory first came to Stott when he was practising at the nets. It
was a windy morning, and he noticed that several times the balls he
bowled swerved in the air. When those swerving balls came they were
almost unplayable.

Stott made no remark to any one--he was bowling to the groundsman--but
the ambition to bowl "swerves," as they were afterwards called, took
possession of him from that morning. It is true that he never mastered
the theory completely; on a perfectly calm day he could never depend
upon obtaining any swerve at all, but, within limits, he developed
his theory until he had any batsman practically at his mercy.

He might have mastered the theory completely, had it not been for
his accident--we must remember that he had only three seasons of
first-class cricket--and, personally, I believe he would have achieved
that complete mastery. But I do not believe, as Stott did, that he
could have taught his method to another man. That belief became an
obsession with him, and will be dealt with later.

My own reasons for doubting that Stott's "swerve" could have been
taught, is that it would have been necessary for the pupil to have had
Stott's peculiarities, not only of method, but of physique. He used
to spin the ball with a twist of his middle finger and thumb,--just
as you may see a billiard professional spin a billiard ball. To do
this in his manner, it is absolutely necessary not only to have a
very large and muscular hand, but to have very lithe and flexible
arm muscles, for the arm is moving rapidly while the twist is given,
and there must be no antagonistic muscular action. Further, I believe
that part of the secret was due to the fact that Stott bowled from a
standing position. Given these things, the rest is merely a question
of long and assiduous practice. The human mechanism is marvellously
adaptable. I have seen Stott throw a cricket ball half across the
room with sufficient spin on the ball to make it shoot back to him
along the carpet.

I have mentioned the wind as a factor in obtaining the swerve. It
was a head-wind that Stott required. I have seen him, for sport,
toss a cricket ball into the teeth of a gale, and make it describe the
trajectory of a badly sliced golf-ball. This is why the big pavilion at
Ailesworth is set at such a curious angle to the ground. It was built
in the winter following Hampdenshire's second season of first-class
cricket, and it was so placed that when the wickets were pitched in
a line with it, they might lie south-west and north-east, or in the
direction of the prevailing winds.


V

The first time I ever saw Ginger Stott, was on the occasion of the
historic encounter with Surrey; Hampdenshire's second engagement in
first-class cricket. The match with Notts, played at Trent Bridge
a few days earlier, had not foreshadowed any startling results. The
truth of the matter is that Stott had been kept, deliberately, in the
background; and as matters turned out his services were only required
to finish off Notts' second innings. Stott was even then a marked man,
and the Hampdenshire captain did not wish to advertise his methods
too freely before the Surrey match. Neither Archie Findlater, who was
captaining the team that year, nor any other person, had the least
conception of how unnecessary such a reservation was to prove. In his
third year, when Stott had been studied by every English, Australian,
and South African batsman of any note, he was still as unplayable as
when he made his début in first-class cricket.

I was reporting the Surrey match for two papers, and in company with
poor Wallis interviewed Stott before the first innings.

His appearance made a great impression on me. I have, of course,
met him, and talked with him many times since then, but my most vivid
memory of him is the picture recorded in the inadequate professional
dressing-room of the old Ailesworth pavilion.

I have turned up the account of my interview in an old press-cutting
book, and I do not know that I can do better than quote that part of
it which describes Stott's personal appearance. I wrote the account
on the off chance of being able to get it taken. It was one of my
lucky hits. After that match, finished in a single day, my interview
afforded copy that any paper would have paid heavily for, and gladly.

Here is the description:


    "Stott--he is known to every one in Ailesworth as 'Ginger'
    Stott--is a short, thick-set young man, with abnormally long arms
    that are tanned a rich red up to the elbow. The tan does not,
    however, obliterate the golden freckles with which arm and face
    are richly speckled. There is no need to speculate as to the raison
    d'être of his nickname. The hair of his head, a close, short crop,
    is a pale russet, and the hair on his hands and arms is a yellower
    shade of the same colour. 'Ginger' is, indeed, a perfectly apt
    description. He has a square chin and a thin-lipped, determined
    mouth. His eyes are a clear, but rather light blue, his forehead
    is good, broad, and high, and he has a well-proportioned head. One
    might have put him down as an engineer, essentially intelligent,
    purposeful, and reserved."


The description is journalistic, but I do not know that I could improve
upon the detail of it. I can see those queer, freckled, hairy arms
of his as I write--the combination of colours in them produced an
effect that was almost orange. It struck one as unusual....

Surrey had the choice of innings, and decided to bat, despite the
fact that the wicket was drying after rain, under the influence of
a steady south-west wind and occasional bursts of sunshine. Would
any captain in Stott's second year have dared to take first innings
under such conditions? The question is farcical now, but not a single
member of the Hampdenshire Eleven had the least conception that the
Surrey captain was deliberately throwing away his chances on that
eventful day.

Wallis and I were sitting together in the reporters' box. There were
only four of us; two specials,--Wallis and myself,--a news-agency
reporter, and a local man.

"Stott takes first over," remarked Wallis, sharpening his pencil and
arranging his watch and score-sheet--he was very meticulous in his
methods. "They've put him to bowl against the wind. He's medium right,
isn't he?"

"Haven't the least idea," I said. "He volunteered no information;
Hampdenshire have been keeping him dark."

Wallis sneered. "Think they've got a find, eh?" he said. "We'll wait
and see what he can do against first-class batting."

We did not have to wait long.

As usual, Thorpe and Harrison were first wicket for Surrey, and Thorpe
took the first ball.

It bowled him. It made his wicket look as untidy as any wicket I
have ever seen. The off stump was out of the ground, and the other
two were markedly divergent.

"Damn it, I wasn't ready for him," we heard Thorpe say in the
professionals' room. Thorpe always had some excuse, but on this
occasion it was justified.

C. V. Punshon was the next comer, and he got his first ball through
the slips for four, but Wallis looked at me with a raised eyebrow.

"Punshon didn't know a lot about that," he said, and then he added,
"I say, what a queer delivery the chap has. He stands and shoots 'em
out. It's uncanny. He's a kind of human catapult." He made a note of
the phrase on his pad.

Punshon succeeded in hitting the next ball, also, but it simply ran
up his bat into the hands of short slip.

"Well, that's a sitter, if you like," said Wallis. "What's the matter
with 'em?"

I was beginning to grow enthusiastic.

"Look here, Wallis," I said, "this chap's going to break records."

Wallis was still doubtful.

He was convinced before the innings was over.

There must be many who remember the startling poster that heralded
the early editions of the evening papers:


                                 SURREY
                                ALL OUT
                              FOR 13 RUNS.


For once sub-editors did not hesitate to give the score on the contents
bill. That was a proclamation which would sell. Inside, the headlines
were rich and varied. I have an old paper by me, yellow now, and
brittle, that may serve as a type for the rest. The headlines are
as follows:--


                        SURREY AND HAMPDENSHIRE.

                            ---------------

                   EXTRAORDINARY BOWLING PERFORMANCE.

                            ---------------

                           DOUBLE HAT-TRICK.

                            ---------------

               SURREY ALL OUT IN 35 MINUTES FOR 13 RUNS.

                            ---------------

                     STOTT TAKES 10 WICKETS FOR 5.


The "double hat-trick" was six consecutive wickets, the last six,
all clean bowled.

"Good God!" Wallis said, when the last wicket fell, and he looked at
me with something like fear in his eyes. "This man will have to be
barred; it means the end of cricket."

I need not detail the remainder of the match. Hampdenshire hit up
ninety-three--P. H. Evans was top scorer with twenty-seven--and then
got Surrey out a second time for forty-nine.

I believe Stott did not bowl his best in the second innings. He was
quite clever enough to see that he must not overdo it. As Wallis had
said, if he were too effective he might have to be barred. As it was,
he took seven wickets for twenty-three.



VI

That was Stott's finest performance. On eight subsequent occasions
he took all ten wickets in a single innings, once he took nineteen
wickets in one match (Hampdenshire v. Somerset at Taunton), twice he
took five wickets with consecutive balls, and any number of times he
did the "hat-trick," but he never afterwards achieved so amazing a
performance as that of the celebrated Surrey match.

I am still of opinion that Stott deliberately bowled carelessly in
the second innings of that match, but, after watching him on many
fields, and after a careful analysis of his methods--and character--I
am quite certain that his comparative failures in later matches were
not due to any purpose on Stott's part.

Take, for instance, the match which Hampdenshire lost to Kent in
Stott's second season--their first loss as a first-class county; their
record up to that time was thirteen wins and six drawn games. It is
incredible to me that Stott should have deliberately allowed Kent to
make the necessary one hundred and eighty-seven runs required in the
fourth innings. He took five wickets for sixty-three; if he could
have done better, I am sure he would have made the effort. He would
not have sacrificed his county. I have spoken of the esprit de corps
which held the Hampdenshire Eleven together, and they were notably
proud of their unbeaten record.

No; we must find another reason for Stott's comparative failures. I
believe that I am the only person who knows that reason, and I say that
Stott was the victim of an obsession. His "swerve" theory dominated
him, he was always experimenting with it, and when, as in the Kent
match I have cited, the game was played in a flat calm, his failure
to influence the trajectory of the ball in his own peculiar manner,
puzzled and upset him. He would strive to make the ball swerve, and
in the effort he lost his length and became playable. Moreover, when
Stott was hit he lost his temper, and then he was useless. Findlater
always took him off the moment he showed signs of temper. The usual
sign was a fast full pitch at the batsman's ribs.

I have one more piece of evidence, the best possible, which upholds
this explanation of mine, but it must follow the account of Stott's
accident.

That accident came during the high flood of Hampdenshire success. For
two years they had held undisputed place as champion county, a place
which could not be upset by the most ingenious methods of calculating
points. They had three times defeated Australia, and were playing
four men in the test matches. As a team they were capable of beating
any Eleven opposed to them. Not even the newspaper critics denied that.

In this third year of Hampdenshire's triumph, Australia had sent
over the finest eleven that had ever represented the colony, but
they had lost the first two test matches, and they had lost to
Hampdenshire. Nevertheless, they won the rubber, and took back the
"ashes." No one has ever denied, I believe, that this was due to
Stott's accident. There is in this case no room for any one to argue
that the argument is based on the fallacy of post and propter.

The accident appeared insignificant at the time. The match was against
Notts on the Trent Bridge ground. I was reporting for three papers;
Wallis was not there.

Stott had been taken off. Notts were a poor lot that year and
I think Findlater did not wish to make their defeat appear too
ignominious. Flower was bowling; it was a fast, true wicket, and Stott,
who was a safe field, was at cover.

G. L. Mallinson was batting and making good use of his opportunity;
he was, it will be remembered, a magnificent though erratic
hitter. Flower bowled him a short-pitched, fast ball, rather wide
of the off-stump. Many men might have left it alone, for the ball
was rising, and the slips were crowded, but Mallinson timed the ball
splendidly, and drove it with all his force. He could not keep it on
the ground, however, and Stott had a possible chance. He leaped for
it and just touched the ball with his right hand. The ball jumped
the ring at its first bound, and Mallinson never even attempted to
run. There was a big round of applause from the Trent Bridge crowd.

I noticed that Stott had tied a handkerchief round his finger, but I
forgot the incident until I saw Findlater beckon to his best bowler,
a few overs later. Notts had made enough runs for decency; it was
time to get them out.

I saw Stott walk up to Findlater and shake his head, and through my
glasses I saw him whip the handkerchief from his finger and display
his hand. Findlater frowned, said something and looked towards the
pavilion, but Stott shook his head. He evidently disagreed with
Findlater's proposal. Then Mallinson came up, and the great bulk of
his back hid the faces of the other two. The crowd was beginning to
grow excited at the interruption. Every one had guessed that something
was wrong. All round the ring men were standing up, trying to make
out what was going on.

I drew my inferences from Mallinson's face, for when he turned round
and strolled back to his wicket, he was wearing a broad smile. Through
my field glasses I could see that he was licking his lower lip with
his tongue. His shoulders were humped and his whole expression one of
barely controlled glee. (I always see that picture framed in a circle;
a bioscopic presentation.) He could hardly refrain from dancing. Then
little Beale, who was Mallinson's partner, came up and spoke to him,
and I saw Mallinson hug himself with delight as he explained the
situation.

When Stott unwillingly came into the pavilion, a low murmur ran round
the ring, like the buzz of a great crowd of disturbed blue flies. In
that murmur I could distinctly trace the signs of mixed feelings. No
doubt the crowd had come there to witness the performances of the
phenomenon--the abnormal of every kind has a wonderful attraction
for us--but, on the other hand, the majority wanted to see their
own county win. Moreover, Mallinson was giving them a taste of his
abnormal powers of hitting, and the batsman appeals to the spectacular,
more than the bowler.

I ran down hurriedly to meet Stott.

"Only a split finger, sir," he said carelessly, in answer to my
question; "but Mr. Findlater says I must see to it."

I examined the finger, and it certainly did not seem to call for
surgical aid. Evidently it had been caught by the seam of the new
ball; there was a fairly clean cut about half an inch long on the
fleshy underside of the second joint of the middle finger.

"Better have it seen to," I said. "We can't afford to lose you,
you know, Stott."

Stott gave a laugh that was more nearly a snarl. "Ain't the first
time I've 'ad a cut finger," he said scornfully.

He had the finger bound up when I saw him again, but it had been
done by an amateur. I learnt afterwards that no antiseptic had been
used. That was at lunch time, and Notts had made a hundred and
sixty-eight for one wicket; Mallinson was not out, a hundred and
three. I saw that the Notts Eleven were in magnificent spirits.

But after lunch Stott came out and took the first over. I don't
know what had passed between him and Findlater, but the captain had
evidently been over-persuaded.

We must not blame Findlater. The cut certainly appeared trifling, it
was not bad enough to prevent Stott from bowling, and Hampdenshire
seemed powerless on that wicket without him. It is very easy to
distribute blame after the event, but most people would have done
what Findlater did in those circumstances.

The cut did not appear to inconvenience Stott in the least degree. He
bowled Mallinson with his second ball, and the innings was finished up
in another fifty-seven minutes for the addition of thirty-eight runs.

Hampdenshire made two hundred and thirty-seven for three wickets before
the drawing of stumps, and that was the end of the match, for the
weather changed during the night and rain prevented any further play.

I, of course, stayed on in Nottingham to await results. I saw Stott on
the next day, Friday, and asked him about his finger. He made light
of it, but that evening Findlater told me over the bridge-table that
he was not happy about it. He had seen the finger, and thought it
showed a tendency to inflammation. "I shall take him to Gregory in
the morning if it's not all right," he said. Gregory was a well-known
surgeon in Nottingham.

Again one sees, now, that the visit to Gregory should not have been
postponed, but at the time one does not take extraordinary precautions
in such a case as this. A split finger is such an everyday thing,
and one is guided by the average of experience. After all, if one
were constantly to make preparation for the abnormal, ordinary life
could not go on....

I heard that Gregory pursed his lips over that finger when he had
learned the name of his famous patient. "You'll have to be very careful
of this, young man," was Findlater's report of Gregory's advice. It
was not sufficient. I often wonder now whether Gregory might not have
saved the finger. If he had performed some small operation at once,
cut away the poison, it seems to me that the tragedy might have been
averted. I am, I admit, a mere layman in these matters, but it seems
to me that something might have been done.

I left Nottingham on Saturday after lunch--the weather was
hopeless--and I did not make use of the information I had for the
purposes of my paper. I was never a good journalist. But I went down
to Ailesworth on Monday morning, and found that Findlater and Stott
had already gone to Harley Street to see Graves, the King's surgeon.

I followed them, and arrived at Graves's house while Stott was
in the consulting-room. I hocussed the butler and waited with the
patients. Among the papers, I came upon the famous caricature of Stott
in the current number of Punch--the "Stand-and-Deliver" caricature,
in which Stott is represented with an arm about ten feet long, and the
batsman is looking wildly over his shoulder to square leg, bewildered,
with no conception from what direction the ball is coming. Underneath
is written "Stott's New Theory--the Ricochet. Real Ginger." While I
was laughing over the cartoon, the butler came in and nodded to me. I
followed him out of the room and met Findlater and Stott in the hall.

Findlater was in a state of profanity. I could not get a sensible
word out of him. He was in a white heat of pure rage. The butler, who
seemed as anxious as I to learn the verdict, was positively frightened.

"Well, for God's sake tell me what Graves said," I protested.

Findlater's answer is unprintable, and told me nothing.

Stott, however, quite calm and self-possessed, volunteered the
information. "Finger's got to come off, sir," he said quietly. "Doctor
says if it ain't off to-day or to-morrer, he won't answer for my 'and."

This was the news I had to give to England. It was a great coup from
the journalistic point of view, but I made up my three columns with
a heavy heart, and the congratulations of my editor only sickened
me. I had some luck, but I should never have become a good journalist.

The operation was performed successfully that evening, and Stott's
career was closed.



VII

I have already referred to the obsession which dominated Stott after
his accident, and I must now deal with that overweening anxiety of
his to teach his method to another man.

I did not see Stott again till August, and then I had a long talk
with him on the Ailesworth County Ground, as together we watched the
progress of Hampdenshire's defeat by Lancashire.

"Oh! I can't learn him nothing," he broke out, as Flower was hit to
the four corners of the ground, "'alf vollies and long 'ops and then
a full pitch--'e's a disgrace."

"They've knocked him off his length," I protested. "On wicket like
this...."

Stott shook his head. "I've been trying to learn 'im," he said, "but
he can't never learn. 'E's got 'abits what you can't break 'im of."

"I suppose it is difficult," I said vaguely.

"Same with me," went on Stott, "I've been trying to learn myself
to bowl without my finger"--he held up his mutilated hand--"or
left-'anded; but I can't. If I'd started that way.... No! I'm always
feeling for that finger as is gone. A second-class bowler I might be
in time, not better nor that."

"It's early days yet," I ventured, intending encouragement, but Stott
frowned and shook his head.

"I'm not going to kid myself," he said, "I know. But I'm going to
find a youngster and learn 'im. On'y he must be young."

"No 'abits, you know," he explained.

The next time I met Stott was in November. I ran up against him,
literally, one Friday afternoon in Ailesworth.

When he recognised me he asked me if I would care to walk out to
Stoke-Underhill with him. "I've took a cottage there," he explained,
"I'm to be married in a fortnight's time."

His circumstances certainly warranted such a venture. The proceeds of
matinee and benefit, invested for him by the Committee of the County
Club, produced an income of nearly two pounds a week, and in addition
to this he had his salary as groundsman. I tendered my congratulations.

"Oh! well, as to that, better wait a bit," said Stott.

He walked with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground. He
had the air of a man brooding over some project.

"It is a lottery, of course ..." I began, but he interrupted me.

"Oh that!" he said, and kicked a stone into the ditch; "take my
chances of that. It's the kid I'm thinking on."

"The kid?" I repeated, doubtful whether he spoke of his fiancée,
or whether his nuptials pointed an act of reparation.

"What else 'ud I tie myself up for?" asked Stott. "I must 'ave a kid
of my own and learn 'im from his cradle. It's come to that."

"Oh! I understand," I said; "teach him to bowl."

"Ah!" replied Stott as an affirmative. "Learn 'im to bowl from his
cradle; before 'e's got 'abits. When I started I'd never bowled a
ball in my life, and by good luck I started right. But I can't find
another kid over seven years old in England as ain't never bowled a
ball o' some sort and started 'abits. I've tried...."

"And you hope with your own boys...?" I said.

"Not 'ope, it's a cert;" said Stott. "I'll see no boy of mine touches
a ball afore he's fourteen, and then 'e'll learn from me; and learn
right. From the first go off." He was silent for a few seconds, and
then he broke out in a kind of ecstasy. "My Gawd, 'e'll be a bowler
such as 'as never been, never in this world. He'll start where I left
orf. He'll...." Words failed him, he fell back on the expletive he
had used, repeating it with an awed fervour. "My Gawd!"

I had never seen Stott in this mood before. It was a revelation to
me of the latent potentialities of the man, the remarkable depth and
quality of his ambitions....



VIII

I intended to be present at Stott's wedding, but I was not in England
when it took place; indeed, for the next two years and a half I was
never in England for more than a few days at a time. I sent him a
wedding-present, an inkstand in the guise of a cricket ball, with
a pen-rack that was built of little silver wickets. They were still
advertised that Christmas as "Stott inkstands."

Two years and a half of American life broke up many of my old habits
of thought. When I first returned to London I found that the cricket
news no longer held the same interest for me, and this may account
for the fact that I did not trouble for some time to look up my old
friend Stott.

In July, however, affairs took me to Ailesworth, and the associations
of the place naturally led me to wonder how Stott's marriage
had turned out, and whether the much-desired son had been born to
him. When my business in Ailesworth was done, I decided to walk out
to Stoke-Underhill.

The road passes the County Ground, and a match was in progress,
but I walked by without stopping. I was wool-gathering. I was not
thinking of the man I was going to see, or I should have turned in at
the County Ground, where he would inevitably have been found. Instead,
I was thinking of the abnormal child I had seen in the train that day;
uselessly speculating and wondering.

When I reached Stoke-Underhill I found the cottage which Stott had
shown me. I had by then so far recovered my wits as to know that I
should not find Stott himself there, but from the look of the cottage I
judged that it was untenanted, so I made inquiries at the post-office.

"No; he don't live here, now, sir," said the postmistress; "he lives
at Pym, now, sir, and rides into Ailesworth on his bike." She was
evidently about to furnish me with other particulars, but I did not
care to hear them. I was moody and distrait. I was wondering why I
should bother my head about so insignificant a person as this Stott.

"You'll be sure to find Mr. Stott at the cricket ground," the
postmistress called after me.

Another two months of English life induced a return to my old habits
of thought. I found myself reverting to old tastes and interests. The
reversion was a pleasant one. In the States I had been forced out of my
groove, compelled to work, to strive, to think desperately if I would
maintain any standing among my contemporaries. But when the perpetual
stimulus was removed, I soon fell back to the less strenuous methods
of my own country. I had time, once more, for the calm reflection that
is so unlike the urgent, forced, inventive thought of the American
journalist. I was braced by that thirty months' experience, perhaps
hardened a little, but by September my American life was fading into
the background; I had begun to take an interest in cricket again.

With the revival of my old interests, revived also my curiosity as
to Ginger Stott, and one Sunday in late September I decided to go
down to Pym.

It was a perfect day, and I thoroughly enjoyed my four-mile walk from
Great Hittenden Station.

Pym is a tiny hamlet made up of three farms and a dozen scattered
cottages. Perched on one of the highest summits of the Hampden Hills
and lost in the thick cover of beech woods, without a post-office or a
shop, Pym is the most perfectly isolated village within a reasonable
distance of London. As I sauntered up the mile-long lane that climbs
the steep hill, and is the only connection between Pym and anything
approaching a decent road, I thought that this was the place to
which I should like to retire for a year, in order to write the book
I had so often contemplated, and never found time to begin. This,
I reflected, was a place of peace, of freedom from all distraction,
the place for calm, contemplative meditation.

I met no one in the lane, and there was no sign of life when I reached
what I must call the village, though the word conveys a wrong idea, for
there is no street, merely a cottage here and there, dropped haphazard,
and situated without regard to its aspect. These cottages lie all on
one's left hand; to the right a stretch of grass soon merges into
bracken and bush, and then the beech woods enclose both, and surge
down into the valley and rise up again beyond, a great wave of green;
as I saw it then, not yet touched with the first flame of autumn.

I inquired at the first cottage and received my direction to Stott's
dwelling. It lay up a little lane, the further of two cottages joined
together.

The door stood open, and after a moment's hesitation and a light knock,
I peered in.

Sitting in a rocking-chair was a woman with black, untidy eyebrows,
and on her knee, held with rigid attention, was the remarkable baby
I had seen in the train two months before. As I stood, doubtful and,
I will confess it, intimidated, suddenly cold and nervous, the child
opened his eyes and honoured me with a cold stare. Then he nodded,
a reflective, recognisable nod.

"'E remembers seein' you in the train, sir," said the woman, "'e
never forgets any one. Did you want to see my 'usband? 'E's upstairs."

So this was the boy who was designed by Stott to become the greatest
bowler the world had ever seen....







CHAPTER III

THE DISILLUSIONMENT OF GINGER STOTT


I

Stott maintained an obstinate silence as we walked together up to the
Common, a stretch of comparatively open ground on the plateau of the
hill. He walked with his hands in his pockets and his head down, as he
had walked out from Ailesworth with me nearly three years before, but
his mood was changed. I was conscious that he was gloomy, depressed,
perhaps a little unstrung. I was burning with curiosity. Now that I
was released from the thrall of the child's presence, I was eager to
hear all there was to tell of its history.

Presently we sat down under an ash-tree, one of three that guarded
a shallow, muddy pond skimmed with weed. Stott accepted my offer of
a cigarette, but seemed disinclined to break the silence.

I found nothing better to say than a repetition of the old
phrase. "That's a very remarkable baby of yours, Stott," I said.

"Ah!" he replied, his usual substitute for "yes," and he picked up
a piece of dead wood and threw it into the little pond.

"How old is he?" I asked.

"Nearly two year."

"Can he ..." I paused; my imagination was reconstructing the scene
of the railway carriage, and I felt a reflex of the hesitation shown
by the rubicund man when he had asked the same question. "Can he
... can he talk?" It seemed so absurd a question to ask, yet it was
essentially a natural question in the circumstances.

"He can, but he won't."

This was startling enough, and I pressed my enquiry.

"How do you know? Are you sure he can?"

"Ah!" Only that aggravating, monosyllabic assent.

"Look here, Stott," I said, "don't you want to talk about the child?"

He shrugged his shoulders and threw more wood into the pond with a
strained attentiveness as though he were peculiarly anxious to hit
some particular wafer of the vivid, floating weed. For a full five
minutes we maintained silence. I was trying to subdue my impatience
and my temper. I knew Stott well enough to know that if I displayed
signs of either, I should get no information from him. My self-control
was rewarded at last.

"I've 'eard 'im speak," he said, "speak proper, too, not like a baby."

He paused, and I grunted to show that I was listening, but as he
volunteered no further remark, I said: "What did you hear him say?"

"I dunno," replied Stott, "somethin' about learnin' and talkin'. I
didn't get the rights of it, but the missus near fainted--she thinks
'e's Gawd A'mighty or suthing."

"But why don't you make him speak?" I asked deliberately.

"Make 'im!" said Stott, with a curl of his lip, "make 'im! You try
it on!"

I knew I was acting a part, but I wanted to provoke more
information. "Well! Why not?" I said.

"'Cos 'e'd look at you--that's why not," replied Stott, "and you
can't no more face 'im than a dog can face a man. I shan't stand it
much longer."

"Curious," I said, "very curious."

"Oh! he's a blarsted freak, that's what 'e is," said Stott, getting
to his feet and beginning to pace moodily up and down.

I did not interrupt him. I was thinking of this man who had drawn
huge crowds from every part of England, who had been a national hero,
and who, now, was unable to face his own child. Presently Stott broke
out again.

"To think of all the trouble I took when 'e was comin'," he said,
stopping in front of me. "There was nothin' the missus fancied as
I wouldn't get. We was livin' in Stoke then." He made a movement of
his head in the direction of Ailesworth. "Not as she was difficult,"
he went on thoughtfully. "She used to say 'I mussent get 'abits,
George,' Caught that from me; I was always on about that--then. You
know, thinkin' of learnin' 'im bowlin'. Things was different then;
afore 'e came." He paused again, evidently thinking of his troubles.

Sympathetically, I was wondering how far the child had separated
husband and wife. There was the making of a tragedy here, I thought;
but when Stott, after another period of pacing up and down, began to
speak again I found that his tragedy was of another kind.

"Learn 'im bowling!" he said, and laughed a mirthless laugh. "My
Gawd! it 'ud take something. No fear; that little game's off. And
I could a' done it if he'd been a decent or'nery child, 'stead of a
blarsted freak. There won't never be another, neither. This one pretty
near killed the missus. Doctor said it'd be 'er last.... With an
'ead like that, whacher expect?"

"Can he walk?" I asked.

"Ah! Gets about easy enough for all 'is body and legs is so small. When
the missus tries to stop 'im--she's afraid 'e'll go over--'e just
looks at 'er and she 'as to let 'im 'ave 'is own way."



II

Later, I reverted to that speech of the child's, that intelligent,
illuminating speech that seemed to prove that there was indeed a
powerful, thoughtful mind behind those profoundly speculative eyes.

"That time he spoke, Stott," I said, "was he alone?"

"Ah!" assented Stott. "In the garden, practisin' walkin' all by
'imself."

"Was that the only time?"

"Only time I've 'eard 'im."

"Was it lately?"

"'Bout six weeks ago."

"And he has never made a sound otherwise, cried, laughed?"

"'Ardly. 'E gives a sort o' grunt sometimes, when e' wants
anything--and points."

"He's very intelligent."

"Worse than that, 'e's a freak, I tell you."

With the repetition of this damning description, Stott fell back
into his moody pacing, and this time I failed to rouse him from his
gloom. "Oh! forget it," he broke out once, when I asked him another
question, and I saw that he was not likely to give me any more
information that day.

We walked back together, and I said good-bye to him at the end of
the lane which led up to his cottage.

"Not comin' up?" he asked, with a nod of his head towards his home.

"Well! I have to catch that train ..." I prevaricated, looking at my
watch. I did not wish to see that child again; my distaste was even
stronger than my curiosity.

Stott grinned. "We don't 'ave many visitors," he said. "Well, I'll
come a bit farther with you."

He came to the bottom of the hill, and after he left me he took the
road that goes over the hill to Wenderby. It would be about seven
miles back to Pym by that road....



III

I spent the next afternoon in the Reading Room of the British Museum. I
was searching for a precedent, and at last I found one in the story of
Christian Heinrich Heinecken, [1] who was born at Lübeck on February 6,
1721. There were marked points of difference between the development of
Heinecken and that of Stott's child. Heinecken was physically feeble;
at the age of three he was still being fed at the breast. The Stott
precocity appeared to be physically strong; his body looked small and
undeveloped, it is true, but this was partly an illusion produced
by the abnormal size of the head. Again Heinecken learned to speak
very early; at ten months old he was asking intelligent questions, at
eighteen months he was studying history, geography, Latin and anatomy;
whereas the Stott child had only once been heard to speak at the age
of two years, and had not, apparently, begun any study at all.

From this comparison it might seem at first that the balance of
precocity lay in the Heinecken scale. I drew another inference. I
argued that the genius of the Stott child far outweighed the genius
of Christian Heinecken.

Little Heinecken in his four years of life suffered the mental
experience--with certain necessary limitations--of a developed
brain. He gathered knowledge as an ordinary child gathers knowledge,
the only difference being that his rate of assimilation was as ten
to one.

But little Stott had gathered no knowledge from books. He had been
born of ignorant parents, he was being brought up among uneducated
people. Yet he had wonderful intellectual gifts: surely he must
have one above all others--the gift of reason. His brain must be
constructive, logical; he must have the power of deduction. He must
even at an extraordinarily early age, say six months, have developed
some theory of life. He must be withholding his energy, deliberately;
declining to exhibit his powers, holding his marvellous faculties in
reserve. Here was surely a case of genius which, comparable in some
respects to the genius of Heinecken, yet far exceeded it.

As I developed my theory, my eagerness grew. And then suddenly an
inspiration came to me. In my excitement I spoke aloud and smacked the
desk in front of me with my open hand. "Why, of course!" I said. "That
is the key."

An old man in the next seat scowled fiercely. The attendants in the
central circular desk all looked up. Other readers turned round and
stared at me. I had violated the sacred laws of the Reading Room. I
saw one of the librarians make a sign to an attendant and point to me.

I gathered up my books quickly and returned them at the central
desk. My self-consciousness had returned, and I was anxious to be
away from the observation of the many dilettante readers who found
my appearance more engrossing than the books with which they were
dallying on some pretext or another.

Yet, curiously, when I reached the street, the theory which had come
to me in the Museum with the force and vividness of an illuminating
dream had lost some of its glamour. Nevertheless, I set it out as it
then shaped itself in my mind.

The great restraining force in the evolution of man, so I thought,
has been the restriction imposed by habit. What we call instinct is
a hereditary habit. This is the first guiding principle in the life
of the human infant. Upon this instinct we immediately superimpose
the habits of reason, all the bodily and intellectual conventions
that have been handed down from generation to generation. We learn
everything we know as children by the hereditary, simian habit of
imitation. The child of intellectual, cultured parents, born into
savage surroundings, becomes the slave of this inherited habit--call
it tendency, if you will, the intention is the same. I elaborated
the theory by instance and introspection, and found no flaw in it....

And here, by some freak of nature, was a child born without these
habits. During the period of gestation, one thought had dominated the
minds of both parents--the desire to have a son born without habits. It
does not seriously affect the theory that the desire had a peculiar end
in view; the wish, the urgent, controlling, omnipotent will had been
there, and the result included far more than the specific intention.

Already some of my distaste for the Stott child had vanished. It
was accountable, and therefore no longer fearful. The child
was supernormal, a cause of fear to the normal man, as all truly
supernormal things are to our primitive, animal instincts. This is
the fear of the wild thing; when we can explain and give reasons,
the horror vanishes. We are men again.

I did not quite recover the glow of my first inspiration, but the
theory remained with me; I decided to make a study of the child,
to submit knowledge to his reason. I would stand between him and the
delimiting training of the pedagogue, I thought.

Then I reached home, and my life was changed.

This story is not of my own life, and I have no wish to enter into
the curious and saddening experiences which stood between me and the
child of Ginger Stott for nearly six years. In that time my thoughts
strayed now and again to that cottage in the little hamlet on those
wooded hills. Often I thought "When I have time I will go and see
that child again if he is alive." But as the years passed, the memory
of him grew dim, even the memory of his father was blurred over by a
thousand new impressions. So it chanced that for nearly six years I
heard no word of Stott and his supernormal infant, and then chance
again intervened. My long period of sorrow came to an end almost
as suddenly as it had begun, and by a coincidence I was once more
entangled in the strange web of the phenomenal.

In this story of Victor Stott I have bridged these six years in the
pages that follow. In doing this I have been compelled to draw to a
certain extent on my imagination, but the main facts are true. They
have been gathered from first-hand authority only, from Henty Challis,
from Mrs. Stott, and from her husband; though none, I must confess,
has been checked by that soundest of all authorities, Victor Stott
himself, who might have given me every particular in accurate detail,
had it not been for those peculiarities of his which will be explained
fully in the proper place.







PART II

THE CHILDHOOD OF THE WONDER


CHAPTER IV

THE MANNER OF HIS BIRTH


I

Stoke-Underhill lies in the flat of the valley that separates
the Hampden from the Quainton Hills. The main road from London to
Ailesworth does not pass through Stoke, but from the highway you
can see the ascent of the bridge over the railway, down the vista of
the straight mile of side road; and, beyond, a glimpse of scattered
cottages. That is all, and as a matter of fact, no one who is not
keeping a sharp look-out would ever notice the village, for the eye
is drawn to admire the bluff of Deane Hill, the highest point of the
Hampdens, which lowers over the little hamlet of Stoke and gives it
a second name; and to the church tower of Chilborough Beacon, away
to the right, another landmark.

The attraction which Stoke-Underhill held for Stott, lay not in its
seclusion or its picturesqueness but in its nearness to the County
Ground. Stott could ride the two flat miles which separated him from
the scene of his work in ten minutes, and Ailesworth station is only a
mile beyond. So when he found that there was a suitable cottage to let
in Stoke, he looked no farther for a home; he was completely satisfied.

Stott's absorption in any matter that was occupying his mind, made
him exceedingly careless about the detail of his affairs. He took
the first cottage that offered when he looked for a home, he took
the first woman who offered when he looked for a wife.

Stott was not an attractive man to women. He was short and plain,
and he had an appearance of being slightly deformed, a "monkeyish"
look, due to his build and his long arms. Still, he was famous, and
might, doubtless, have been accepted by a dozen comely young women for
that reason, even after his accident. But if Stott was unattractive
to women, women were even more unattractive to Stott. "No opinion
of women?" he used to say. "Ever seen a gel try to throw a cricket
ball? You 'ave? Well, ain't that enough to put you off women?" That
was Stott's intellectual standard; physically, he had never felt
drawn to women.

Ellen Mary Jakes exhibited no superiority over her sisters in the
matter of throwing a cricket ball. She was a friend of Ginger's mother,
and she was a woman of forty-two, who had long since been relegated
to some remote shelf of the matrimonial exchange. But her physical
disadvantages were outbalanced by her mental qualities. Ellen Mary was
not a book-worm, she read nothing but the evening and Sunday papers,
but she had a reasoning and intelligent mind.

She had often contemplated the state of matrimony, and had made more
than one tentative essay in that direction. She had walked out with
three or four sprigs of the Ailesworth bourgeoisie in her time, and
the shadow of middle-age had crept upon her before she realised that
however pliant her disposition, her lack of physical charm put her at
the mercy of the first bright-eyed rival. At thirty-five Ellen had
decided, with admirable philosophy, that marriage was not for her,
and had assumed, with apparent complacency, the outward evidences of
a dignified spinsterhood. She had discarded gay hats and ribbons,
imitation jewellery, unreliable cheap shoes, and chill diaphanous
stockings, and had found some solace for her singleness in more
comfortable and suitable apparel.

When Ellen, a declared spinster of seven years' standing, was first
taken into the confidence of Ginger Stott's mother, the scheme
which she afterwards elaborated immediately presented itself to
her mind. This fact is a curious instance of Ellen Mary's mobility
of intellect, and the student of heredity may here find matter for
careful thought. [2]

The confidence in question was Ginger's declared intention of becoming
the father of the world's greatest bowler. Mrs. Stott was a dark,
garrulous, rather deaf little woman, with a keen eye for the main
chance; she might have become a successful woman of business if she had
not been by nature both stingy and a cheat. When her son presented his
determination, her first thought was to find some woman who would not
dissipate her son's substance, and in her opinion--not expressed to
Ginger--the advertised purpose of the contemplated marriage evidenced
a wasteful disposition.

Mrs. Stott did not think of Ellen Mary as a possible daughter-in-law,
but she did hold forth for an hour and three-quarters on the
contemptible qualities of the young maidens, first of Ailesworth,
and then with a wider swoop that was not justified by her limited
experience, of the girls of England, Scotland, and Ireland at large.

It required the flexible reasoning powers of Ellen Mary to find a
solution of the problem. Any ordinary, average woman of forty-two, a
declared spinster of seven years' standing, who had lived all her life
in a provincial town, would have been mentally unable to realise the
possibilities of the situation. Such a representative of the decaying
sexual instinct would have needed the stimulus of courtship, at the
least of some hint of preference displayed by the suitor. Ruled by
the conventions which hold her sex in bondage, she would have deemed
it unwomanly to make advances by any means other than innuendo, the
subtle suggestions which are the instruments of her sex, but which
are often too delicate to pierce the understanding of the obtuse and
slow-witted male.

Ellen Mary stood outside the ruck that determines the destinies of all
such typical representatives. She considered the idea presented to
her by Mrs. Stott with an open and mobile intelligence. She weighed
the character of Ginger, the possibilities of rejection, and the
influence of Mrs. Stott; and she gave no thought to the conventions,
nor to the criticisms of Ailesworth society. When she had decided
that such chances as she could calculate were in her favour, Ellen
made up her mind, walked out to the County Ground one windy October
forenoon, and discovered Ginger experimenting with grass seed in a
shed off the pavilion.

In this shed she offered herself, while Ginger worked on, attentive
but unresponsive. Perhaps she did not make an offer so much as state a
case. A masterly case, without question; for who can doubt that Stott,
however procrastinating and unwilling to make a definite overture, must
already have had some type of womanhood in his mind; some conception,
the seed of an ideal.

I find a quality of romance in this courageous and unusual wooing of
Ellen Mary's; but more, I find evidences of the remarkable quality of
her intelligence. In other circumstances the name of Ellen Mary Jakes
might have stood for individual achievement, instead, she is remembered
as a common woman who happened to be the mother of Victor Stott. But
when the facts are examined, can we say that chance entered? If ever
the birth of a child was deliberately designed by both parents, it
was in the case under consideration. And what a strange setting to
the inception.

Ellen Mary, a gaunt, tall, somewhat untidy woman, stood at the narrow
door of the little shed off the Ailesworth pavilion; with one hand,
shoulder-high, she steadied herself against the door frame, with
the other she continually pushed forward the rusty bonnet which had
been loosened during her walk by the equinoctial gale that now tore
at the door of the shed, and necessitated the employment of a wary
foot to keep the door from slamming. With all these distractions she
still made good her case, though she had to raise her voice above the
multitudinous sounds of the wind, and though she had to address the
unresponsive shoulders of a man who bent over shallow trays of earth
set on a trestle table under the small and dirty window. It is heroic,
but she had her reward in full measure. Presently her voice ceased,
and she waited in silence for the answer that should decide her
destiny. There was an interval broken only by the tireless passion
of the wind, and then Ginger Stott, the best-known man in England,
looked up and stared through the incrusted pane of glass before him
at the dim vision of grass and swaying hedge. Unconsciously his hands
strayed to his pockets, and then he said in a low, thoughtful voice:
"Well! I dunno why not."



II

Dr. O'Connell's face was white and drawn, and the redness of his
eyelids more pronounced than ever as he faced Stott in the pale October
dawn. He clutched at his beard with a nervous, combing movement,
as he shook his head decidedly in answer to the question put to him.

"If it's not dead, now, 'twill be in very few hours," he said.

Stott was shaken by the feeble passion of a man who has spent many
weary hours of suspense. His anger thrilled out in a feeble stream
of hackneyed profanities.

O'Connell looked down on him with contempt. At sunrise, after a
sleepless night, a man is a creature of unrealised emotions.

"Damn it, control yourself, man!" growled O'Connell, himself
uncontrolled, "your wife'll pull through with care, though she'll
never have another child." O'Connell did not understand; he was an
Irishman, and no cricketer; he had been called in because he had a
reputation for his skill in obstetrics.

Stott stared at him fiercely. The two men seemed as if about to
grapple desperately for life in the windy, grey twilight.

O'Connell recovered his self-control first, and began again to claw
nervously at his beard. "Don't be a fool," he said, "it's only what
you could expect. Her first child, and her a woman of near fifty." He
returned to the upstairs room; Stott seized his cap and went out into
the chill world of sunrise.

"She'll do, if there are no complications," said O'Connell
to the nurse, as he bent over the still, exhausted figure of
Mrs. Stott. "She's a wonderful woman to have delivered such a child
alive."

The nurse shivered, and avoiding any glance at the huddle that lay
on an improvised sofa-bed, she said: "It can't live, can it?"

O'Connell, still intent on his first patient, shook his head. "Never
cried after delivery," he muttered "--the worst sign." He was silent
for a moment and then he added: "But, to be sure, it's a freak
of some kind." His scientific curiosity led him to make a further
investigation. He left the bed and began to examine the huddle on
the sofa-couch. Victor Stott owed his life, in the first instance,
to this scientific curiosity of O'Connell's.

The nurse, a capable, but sentimental woman, turned to the window
and looked out at the watery trickle of feeble sunlight that now
illumined the wilderness of Stott's garden.

"Nurse!" The imperative call startled her; she turned nervously.

"Yes, doctor?" she said, making no movement towards him.

"Come here!" O'Connell was kneeling by the sofa. "There seems to be
complete paralysis of all the motor centres," he went on; "but the
child's not dead. We'll try artificial respiration."

The nurse overcame her repugnance by a visible effort. "Is it ... is
it worth while?" she asked, regarding the flaccid, tumbled, wax-like
thing, with its bloated, white globe of a skull. Every muscle of it
was relaxed and limp, its eyes shut, its tiny jaw hanging. "Wouldn't
it be better to let it die...?"

O'Connell did not seem to hear her. He waved an impatient hand for
her assistance. "Outside my experience," he muttered, "no heart-beat
discernible, no breath ... yet it is indubitably alive." He depressed
the soft, plastic ribs and gave the feeble heart a gentle squeeze.

"It's beating," he ejaculated, after a pause, with an ear close to
the little chest, "but still no breath! Come!"

The diminutive lungs were as readily open to suggestion as the wee
heart: a few movements of the twigs they called arms, and the breath
came. O'Connell closed the mouth and it remained closed, adjusted the
limbs, and they stayed in the positions in which they were placed. At
last he gently lifted the lids of the eyes.

The nurse shivered and drew back. Even O'Connell was startled, for
the eyes that stared into his own seemed to be heavy with a brooding
intelligence....

Stott came back at ten o'clock, after a morose trudge through the
misty rain. He found the nurse in the sitting-room.

"Doctor gone?"  he asked.

The nurse nodded.

"Dead, I suppose?" Stott gave an upward twist of his head towards
the room above.

The nurse shook her head.

"Can't live though?" There was a note of faint hope in his voice.

The nurse drew herself together and sighed deeply. "Yes! we believe
it'll live, Mr. Stott," she said. "But ... it's a very remarkable
baby."

How that phrase always recurred!



III

There were no complications, but Mrs. Stott's recovery was not a
rapid one. It was considered advisable that she should not see the
child. She thought that they were lying to her, that the child was
dead and, so, resigned herself. But her husband saw it.

He had never seen so young an infant before, and, just for one moment,
he believed that it was a normal child.

"What an 'ead!" was his first ejaculation, and then he realised the
significance of that sign. Fear came into his eyes, and his mouth
fell open. "'Ere, I say, nurse, it's ... it's a wrong 'un, ain't
it?" he gasped.

"I'm sure I can't tell you, Mr. Stott," broke out the nurse
hysterically. She had been feeding and tending that curious baby
for three hours, and she was on the verge of a break-down. There was
no wet-nurse to be had, but a woman from the village had been sent
for. She was expected every moment.

"More like a tadpole than anything," mused the unhappy father.

"Oh! Mr. Stott, for goodness' sake, don't," cried the nurse. "If you
only knew...."

"Knew what?" questioned Stott, still staring at the motionless figure
of his son, who lay with closed eyes, apparently unconscious.

"There's something--I don't know," began the nurse, and then after
a pause, during which she seemed to struggle for some means of
expression, she continued with a sigh of utter weariness, "You'll
know when it opens its eyes. Oh! Why doesn't that woman come, the
woman you sent for?"

"She'll be 'ere directly," replied Stott. "What d'you mean about
there bein' something ... something what?"

"Uncanny," said the nurse without conviction. "I do wish that woman
would come. I've been up the best part of the night, and now...."

"Uncanny? As how?" persisted Stott.

"Not normal," explained the nurse. "I can't tell you more than that."

"But 'ow? What way?"

He did not receive an answer then; for the long expected relief came
at last, a great hulk of a woman, who became voluble when she saw
the child she had come to nurse.

"Oh! dear, oh! dear," the stream began. "How unforchnit, and 'er first,
too. It'll be a idjit, I'm afraid. Mrs. 'Arrison's third was the very
spit of it...."

The stream ran on, but Stott heard no more. An idiot! He had fathered
an idiot! That was the end of his dreams and ambitions! He had had
an hour's sleep on the sitting-room sofa. He went out to his work at
the County Ground with a heart full of blasphemy.

When he returned at four o'clock he met the stout woman on the
doorstep. She put up a hand to her rolling breast, closed her eyes
tightly, and gasped as though completely overcome by this trifling
rencounter.

"'Ow is it?" questioned the obsessed Stott.

"Oh dear! Oh dear!" panted the stout woman, "the leas' thing upsets
me this afternoon...." She wandered away into irrelevant fluency, but
Stott was autocratic; his insistent questions overcame the inertia
of even Mrs. Reade at last. The substance of her information, freed
from extraneous matter, was as follows:

"Oh! 'ealthy? It'll live, I've no doubt, if that's what you mean;
but 'elpless...! There, 'elpless is no word.... Learn 'im to take the
bottle, learn 'im to close 'is 'ands, learn 'im to go to sleep, learn
'im everythink. I've never seen nothink like it, never in all my days,
and I've 'elped to bring a few into the world.... I can't begin to tell
you about it, Mr. Stott, and that's the solemn truth. When 'e first
looked at me, I near 'ad a faint. A old-fashioned, wise sort of look as
'e might 'a been a 'undred. 'Lord 'elp us, nurse,' I says, 'Lord help
us.' I was that opset, I didn't rightly know what I was a-saying...."

Stott pushed past the agitated Mrs. Reade, and went into the
sitting-room. He had had neither breakfast nor lunch; there was no
sign of any preparation for his tea, and the fireplace was grey with
the cinders of last night's fire. For some minutes he sat in deep
despondency, a hero faced with the uncompromising detail of domestic
neglect. Then he rose and called to the nurse.

She appeared at the head of the steep, narrow staircase. "Sh!" she
warned, with a finger to her lips.

"I'm goin' out again," said Stott in a slightly modulated voice.

"Mrs. Reade's coming back presently," replied the nurse, and looked
over her shoulder.

"Want me to wait?" asked Stott.

The nurse came down a few steps. "It's only in case any one was
wanted," she began, "I've got two of 'em on my hands, you see. They're
both doing well as far as that goes. Only...." She broke off and
drifted into small talk. Ever and again she stopped and listened
intently, and looked back towards the half-open door of the upstairs
room.

Stott fidgeted, and then, as the flow of conversation gave no sign
of running dry, he damned it abruptly. "Look 'ere, miss," he said,
"I've 'ad nothing to eat since last night."

"Oh! dear!" ejaculated the nurse. "If--perhaps, if you'd just stay
here and listen, I could get you something." She seemed relieved to
have some excuse for coming down.

While she bustled about the kitchen, Stott, half-way upstairs,
stayed and listened. The house was very silent, the only sound was
the hushed clatter made by the nurse in the kitchen. There was an
atmosphere of wariness about the place that affected even so callous a
person as Stott. He listened with strained attention, his eyes fixed
on the half-open door. He was not an imaginative man, but he was
beset with apprehension as to what lay behind that door. He looked
for something inhuman that might come crawling through the aperture,
something grotesque, preternaturally wise and threatening--something
horribly unnatural.

The window of the upstairs room was evidently open, and now and
again the door creaked faintly. When that happened Stott gripped
the handrail, and grew damp and hot. He looked always at the shadows
under the door--if it crawled....

The nurse stood at the door of the sitting-room while Stott ate,
and presently Mrs. Reade came grunting and panting up the brick path.

"I'm going out, now," said Stott resolutely, and he rose to his feet,
though his meal was barely finished.

"You'll be back before Mrs. Reade goes?" asked the nurse, and passed
a hand over her tired eyes. "She'll be here till ten o'clock. I'm
going to lie down."

"I'll be back by ten," Stott assured her as he went out.

He did come back at ten o'clock, but he was stupidly drunk.



IV

The Stotts' cottage was no place to live in during the next few days,
but the nurse made one stipulation; Mr. Stott must come home to
sleep. He slept on an improvised bed in the sitting-room, and during
the night the nurse came down many times and listened to the sound
of his snores. She would put her ear against the door, and rest her
nerves with the thought of human companionship. Sometimes she opened
the door quietly and watched him as he slept. Except at night, when
he was rarely quite sober, Stott only visited his cottage once a day,
at lunch time; from seven in the morning till ten at night he remained
in Ailesworth save for this one call of inquiry.

It was such a still house. Ellen Mary only spoke when speech was
absolutely required, and then her words were the fewest possible, and
were spoken in a whisper. The child made no sound of any kind. Even
Mrs. Reade tried to subdue her stertorous breathing, to move with
less ponderous quakings. The neighbours told her she looked thinner.

Little wonder that during the long night vigil the nurse, moving
silently between the two upstairs rooms, should pause on the landing
and lean over the handrail; little wonder that she should give a long
sigh of relief when she heard the music of Stott's snore ascend from
the sitting-room.

O'Connell called twice every day during the first week, not because
it was necessary for him to visit his two patients, but because the
infant fascinated him. He would wait for it to open its eyes, and
then would get up and leave the room hurriedly. Always he intended to
return the infant's stare, but when the opportunity was given to him,
he always rose and left the room--no matter how long and deliberately
he had braced himself to another course of action.

It was on a Thursday that the baby was born, and it was on the
following Thursday that the circumstance of the household was reshaped.

O'Connell came in the morning, full of resolution. After he had
pronounced Mrs. Stott well on the way to recovery, he paid the usual
visit to his younger patient. The child lay, relaxed, at full length,
in the little cot which had been provided for him. His eyes were,
as usual, closed, and he had all the appearance of the ordinary
hydrocephalic idiot.

O'Connell sat down by the cot, listened to the child's breathing
and heart-beat, lifted and let fall again the lax wrist, turned
back the eyelid, revealing only the white of the upturned eyeball,
and then composed himself to await the natural waking of the child,
if it were asleep--always a matter of uncertainty.

The nurse stood near him, silent, but she looked away from the cot.

"Hydrocephalus!" murmured O'Connell, staring at his tiny patient,
"hydrocephalus, without a doubt. Eh? nurse!"

"Yes, perhaps! I don't know, doctor."

"Oh, not a doubt of it, not a doubt," repeated O'Connell, and then came
a flicker of the child's eyelids and a weak crumpling of the tiny hand.

O'Connell caught his breath and clawed at his beard; "Hydrocephalus,"
he muttered with set jaw and drawn eyebrows.

The tiny hand straightened with a movement that suggested the
recovery of crushed grass, the mouth opened with a microscopic yawn,
and then the eyelids were slowly raised and a steady unwavering stare
of profoundest intelligence met O'Connell's gaze.

He clenched his hands, shifted in his chair, and then rose abruptly
and turned to the window.

"I--it won't be necessary for me to come again, nurse," he said curtly;
"they are both doing perfectly well."

"Not come again?" There was dismay in the nurse's question.

"No! No! It's unnecessary...." He broke off, and made for the door
without another glance in the direction of the cot.

Nurse followed him downstairs.

"If I'm wanted--you can easily send for me," said O'Connell, as
he went out. As he moved away he dragged at his beard and murmured
"Hydrocephalus, not a doubt of it."

Following his departure, Mrs. Reade heard curious and most unwonted
laughter, and cautiously blundered downstairs to investigate. She
found the nurse in an advanced condition of hysteria, laughing,
gurgling, weeping, and intermittently crying in a shrill voice:
"Oh! Lord have mercy; Lord ha' mercy!"

"Now, see you 'ere, my dear," said Mrs. Reade, when nurse had been
recovered to a red-eyed sanity, "it's time she was told. I've never
'eld with keepin' it from 'er, myself, and I've 'ad more experience
than many...." Mrs. Reade argued with abundant recourse to parenthesis.

"Is she strog edough?" asked the nurse, still with tears in her voice;
"cad she bear the sight of hib?" She blew her nose vigorously, and then
continued with greater clearness: "I'm afraid it may turn her head."

Out of her deep store of wisdom, Mrs. Reade produced a fact which
she elaborated and confirmed by apt illustration, adducing more
particularly the instance of Mrs. Harrison's third. "She's 'is
mother," was the essence of her argument, a fact of deep and strange
significance.

The nurse yielded, and so the circumstance of Stott's household was
changed, and Stott himself was once more able to come home to meals.

The nurse, wisely, left all diplomacy to the capable Mrs. Reade,
a woman specially fitted by nature for the breaking of news. She
delivered a long, a record-breaking circumlocution, and it seemed
that Ellen Mary, who lay with closed eyes, gathered no hint of its
import. But when the impressive harangue was slowly rustling to
collapse like an exhausted balloon, she opened her eyes and said
quite clearly,

"What's wrong with 'im, then?"

The question had the effect of reinflation, but at last the child
itself was brought, and it was open-eyed.

The supreme ambition of all great women--and have not all women
the potentialities of greatness?--is to give birth to a god. That
ambition it is which is marred by the disappointing birth of a female
child--when the man-child is born, there is always hope, and slow
is the realisation of failure. That realisation never came to Ellen
Mary. She accepted her child with the fear that is adoration. When
she dropped her eyes before her god's searching glance, she did it
in reverence. She hid her faith from the world, but in her heart
she believed that she was blessed above all women. In secret, she
worshipped the inscrutable wonder that had used her as the instrument
of his incarnation. Perhaps she was right....







CHAPTER V

HIS DEPARTURE FROM STOKE-UNDERHILL


I

The village of Stoke was no whit intimidated by the news that
Mrs. Reade sowed abroad. The women exclaimed and chattered, the men
gaped and shook their heads, the children hung about the ruinous gate
that shut them out from the twenty-yard strip of garden which led up
to Stott's cottage. Curiosity was the dominant emotion. Any excuse
was good enough to make friendly overtures, but the babe remained
invisible to all save Mrs. Reade; and the village community kept open
ears while the lust of its eyes remained, perforce, unsatisfied. If
Stott's gate slammed in the wind, every door that commanded a view
of that gate was opened, and heads appeared, and bare arms--the
indications of women who nodded to each other, shook their heads,
pursed their lips and withdrew for the time to attend the pressure
of household duty. Later, even that gate slamming would reinvigorate
the gossip of backyards and front doorways.

The first stranger to force an entry was the rector. He was an Oxford
man who, in his youth, had been an ardent disciple of the school
that attempts the reconciliation of Religion and Science. He had
been ambitious, but nature had predetermined his career by giving
him a head of the wrong shape. At Oxford his limitations had not
been clearly defined, and on the strength of a certain speech at the
Union, he crept into a London west-end curacy. There he attempted
to demonstrate the principle of reconciliation from the pulpit, but
his vicar and his bishop soon recognised that excellent as were his
intentions, he was doing better service to agnosticism than to his
own religion. In consequence he was vilely marooned on the savage
island of Stoke-Underhill, where he might preach as much science as
he would to the natives, for there was no fear of their comprehending
him. Fifteen years of Stoke had brought about a reaction. Nature
had made him a feeble fanatic, and he was now as ardent an opponent
of science as he had once been a defender. In his little mind he
believed that his early reading had enabled him to understand all
the weaknesses of the scientific position. His name was Percy Crashaw.

Mrs. Stott could not deny her rector the right of entry, and he
insisted on seeing the infant, who was not yet baptised--a shameful
neglect, according to Crashaw, for the child was nearly six weeks
old. Nor had Mrs. Stott been "churched." Crashaw had good excuse for
pressing his call.

Mrs. Stott refused to face the village. She knew that the place was
all agape, eager to stare at what they considered some "new kind of
idiot." Let them wait, was Ellen Mary's attitude. Her pride was a
later development. In those early weeks she feared criticism.

But she granted Crashaw's request to see the child, and after the
interview (the term is precise) the rector gave way on the question of
a private ceremony, though he had indignantly opposed the scheme when
it was first mooted. It may be that he conceived an image of himself
with that child in his arms, the cynosure of a packed congregation....

Crashaw was one of the influences that hastened the Stotts' departure
from Stoke. He was so indiscreet. After the christening he would
talk. His attitude is quite comprehensible. He, the lawgiver of Stoke,
had been thwarted. He had to find apology for the private baptism
he had denied to many a sickly infant. Moreover, the Stotts had
broken another of his ordinances, for father and mother had stood as
god-parents to their own child, and Crashaw himself had been the second
godfather ordained as necessary by the rubric. He had given way on
these important points so weakly; he had to find excuse, and he talked
himself into a false belief with regard to the child he had baptised.

He began with his wife. "I would allow more latitude to medical men,"
he said. "In such a case as this child of the Stotts, for instance;
it becomes a burden on the community, I might say a danger, yes, a
positive danger. I am not sure whether I was right in administering
the holy sacrament of baptism...."

"Oh! Percy! Surely ..." began Mrs. Crashaw.

"One moment, my dear," protested the rector, "I have not fully
explained the circumstances of the case." And as he warmed to his
theme the image of Victor Stott grew to a fearful grotesqueness. It
loomed as a threat over the community and the church. Crashaw quoted,
inaccurately, statistics of the growth of lunacy, and then went off
at a tangent into the theory of possession by evil spirits. Since his
rejection of science, he had lapsed into certain forms of mediævalism,
and he now began to dally with a theory of a malign incarnation which
he elaborated until it became an article of his faith.

To his poorer parishioners he spoke in vague terms, but he changed
their attitude; he filled them with overawed terror. They were
intensely curious still, but, now, when the gate was slammed, one saw
a face pressed to the window, the door remained fast; and the children
no longer clustered round that gate, but dared each other to run past
it; which they did, the girls with a scream, the boys with a jeering
"Yah--ah!" a boast of intrepidity.

This change of temper was soon understood by the persons most
concerned. Stott grumbled and grew more morose. He had never been
intimate with the villagers, and now he avoided any intercourse
with them. His wife kept herself aloof, and her child sheltered from
profane observation. Naturally, this attitude of the Stotts fostered
suspicion. Even the hardiest sceptic in the taproom of the Challis Arms
began to shake his head, to concede that there "moight be soomething
in it."

Yet the departure from Stoke might have been postponed indefinitely,
if it had not been for another intrusion. Both Stott and his wife
were ready to take up a new idea, but they were slow to conceive it.



II

The intruder was the local magnate, the landlord of Stoke, Wenderby,
Chilborough, a greater part of Ailesworth, two or three minor parishes,
and, incidentally, of Pym.

This magnate, Henry Challis, was a man of some scholarship, whose
ambition had been smothered by the heaviness of his possessions. He
had a remarkably fine library at Challis Court, but he made little
use of it, for he spent the greater part of his time in travel. In
appearance he was rather an ungainly man; his great head and the bulk
of his big shoulders were something too heavy for his legs.

Crashaw regarded his patron with mixed feelings. For Challis, the man
of property, the man of high connections, of intimate associations
with the world of science and letters, Crashaw had a feeling of awed
respect; but in private he inveighed against the wickedness of Challis,
the agnostic, the decadent.

When Victor Stott was nearly three months old, the rector met his
patron one day on the road between Chilborough and Stoke. It was
three years since their last meeting, and Crashaw noticed that in
the interval Challis's pointed beard had become streaked with grey.

"Hallo! How d'ye do, Crashaw?" was the squire's casual greeting. "How
is the Stoke microcosm?"

Crashaw smiled subserviently; he was never quite at his ease in
Challis's presence. "Rari nantes in gurgite vasto," was the tag he
found in answer to the question put. However great his contempt for
Challis's way of life, in his presence Crashaw was often oppressed
with a feeling of inferiority, a feeling which he fought against but
could not subdue. The Latin tag was an attempt to win appreciation,
it represented a boast of equality.

Challis correctly evaluated the rector's attitude; it was with
something of pity in his mind that he turned and walked beside him.

There was but one item of news from Stoke, and it soon came to the
surface. Crashaw phrased his description of Victor Stott in terms other
than those he used in speaking to his wife or to his parishioners;
but the undercurrent of his virulent superstition did not escape
Challis, and the attitude of the villagers was made perfectly plain.

"Hm!" was Challis's comment, when the flow of words ceased, "nigroque
simillima cygno, eh?"

"Ah! of course, you sneer at our petty affairs," said Crashaw.

"By no means. I should like to see this black swan of Stoke," replied
Challis. "Anything so exceptional interests me."

"No doubt Mrs. Stott would be proud to exhibit the horror," said
Crashaw. He had a gleam of satisfaction in the thought that even the
great Henry Challis might be scared. That would, indeed, be a triumph.

"If Mrs. Stott has no objection, of course," said Challis. "Shall we
go there, now?"



III

The visit of Henry Challis marked the first advent of Ellen Mary's
pride in the exhibition of her wonder. After the King and the Royal
Family--superhuman beings, infinitely remote--the great landlord of
the neighbourhood stood as a symbol of temporal power to the whole
district. The budding socialist of the taproom might sneer, and make
threat that the time was coming when he, the boaster, and Challis,
the landlord, would have equal rights; but in public the socialist
kow-towed to his master with a submission no less obsequious than
that of the humblest conservative on the estate.

Mrs. Stott dropped a deep curtsy when, opening the door to the
autocratic summons of Crashaw's rat-a-tat, she saw the great man of
the district at her threshold. Challis raised his hat. Crashaw did
not imitate his example; he was all officiousness, he had the air of
a chief superintendent of police.

"Oh! Mrs. Stott, we should like to come in for a few
minutes. Mr. Challis would like to see your child."

"Damn the fool!" was Challis's thought, but he gave it less abrupt
expression. "That is, of course, if it is quite convenient to you,
Mrs. Stott. I can come at some other time...."

"Please walk in, sir," replied Mrs. Stott, and curtsied again as she
stood aside.

Superintendent Crashaw led the way....

Challis called again next day, by himself this time; and the day
after he dropped in at six o'clock while Mr. and Mrs. Stott were at
tea. He put them at their ease by some magic of his personality, and
insisted that they should continue their meal while he sat among the
collapsed springs of the horsehair armchair. He leaned forward and
swung his stick between his knees as it were a pendulum, and shot
out questions as to the Stotts' relations with the neighbours. And
always he had an attentive eye on the cradle that stood near the fire.

"The neighbours are not highly intelligent, I suspect," said
Challis. "Even Mr. Crashaw, I fancy, does not appreciate
the--peculiarities of the situation."

"He's worse than any," interpolated Stott. Ellen Mary sat in shadow;
there was a new light in her eyes, a foretaste of glory.

"Ah! a little narrow, a little dogmatic, no doubt," replied Challis. "I
was going to propose that you might prefer to live at Pym."

"Much farther for me," muttered Stott. He had mixed with nobility on
the cricket field, and was not overawed.

"No doubt; but you have other interests to consider, interests of
far greater importance." Challis shifted his gaze from the cradle,
and looked Stott in the face. "I understand that Mrs. Stott does not
care to take her child out in the village. Isn't that so?"

"Yes, sir," replied Ellen, to whom this question was addressed. "I
don't care to make an exhibition of 'im."

"Quite right, quite right," went on Challis, "but it is very necessary
that the child should have air. I consider it very necessary, a
matter of the first importance that the child should have air," he
repeated. His gaze had shifted back to the cradle again. The child
lay with open eyes, staring up at the ceiling.

"Now, there is an excellent cottage at Pym which I will have put in
repair for you at once," continued Challis. "It is one of two together,
but next door there are only old Metcalfe and his wife and daughter,
who will give you no trouble. And really, Mrs. Stott," he tore his
regard from the cradle for a moment, "there is no reason in the
world why you should fear the attention of your neighbours. Here,
in Stoke, I admit, they have been under a complete misapprehension,
but I fancy that there were special reasons for that. In Pym you will
have few neighbours, and you need not, I'm sure, fear their criticism."

"They got one idiot there, already," Stott remarked somewhat sulkily.

"You surely do not regard your own child as likely to develop into
an idiot, Stott!" Challis's tone was one of rebuke.

Stott shifted in his chair and his eyes flickered uncertainly in the
direction of the cradle. "Dr. O'Connell says 'twill," he said.

"When did he see the child last?" asked Challis.

"Not since 'twere a week old, sir," replied Ellen.

"In that case his authority goes for nothing, and, then, by the way,
I suppose the child has not been vaccinated?"

"Not yet, sir."

"Better have that done. Get Walters. I'll make myself responsible. I'll
get him to come."

Before Challis left, it was decided that the Stotts should move to
Pym in February.

When the great landowner had gone, Mrs. Stott looked wistfully at
her husband.

"You ain't fair to the child, George," she said. "There's more than
you or any one sees, more than Mr. Challis, even."

Stott stared moodily into the fire.

"And it won't be so out of the way far for you, at Pym, with your
bike," she continued; "and we can't stop 'ere."

"We might 'a took a place in Ailesworth," said Stott.

"But it'll be so much 'ealthier for 'im up at Pym," protested
Ellen. "It'll be fine air up there for 'im."

"Oh! 'im. Yes, all right for 'im," said Stott, and spat into the
fire. Then he took his cap and went out. He kept his eyes away from
the cradle.



IV

Harvey Walters lived in Wenderby, but his consulting-rooms were in
Harley Street, and he did not practise in his own neighbourhood;
nevertheless he vaccinated Victor Stott to oblige Challis.

"Well?" asked Challis a few days later, "what do you make of him,
Walters? No clichés, now, and no professional jargon."

"Candidly, I don't know," replied Walters, after a thoughtful interval.

"How many times have you seen him?"

"Four, altogether."

"Good patient? Healthy flesh and that sort of thing?"

"Splendid."

"Did he look you in the eyes?"

"Once, only once, the first time I visited the house."

Challis nodded. "My own experience, exactly. And did you return that
look of his?"

"Not willingly. It was, I confess, not altogether a pleasant
experience."

"Ah!"

Challis was silent for a few moments, and it was Walters who took up
the interrogatory.

"Challis!"

"Yes?"

"Have you, now, some feeling of, shall I say, distaste for the
child? Do you feel that you have no wish to see it again?"

"Is it that exactly?" parried Challis.

"If not, what is it?" asked Walters.

"In my own case," said Challis, "I can find an analogy only in my
attitude towards my 'head' at school. In his presence I was always
intimidated by my consciousness of his superior learning. I felt
unpleasantly ignorant, small, negligible. Curiously enough, I see
something of the same expression of feeling in the attitude of that
feeble Crashaw to myself. Well, one makes an attempt at self-assertion,
a kind of futile bragging; and one knows the futility of it--at the
time. But, afterwards, one finds excuse and seeks to belittle the
personality and attainment of the person one feared. At school we
did not love the 'head,' and, as schoolboys will, we were always
trying to run him down. 'Next time he rags me, I'll cheek him,'
was our usual boast--but we never did. Let's be honest, Walters,
are not you and I exhibiting much the same attitude towards this
extraordinary child? Didn't he produce the effect upon you that I've
described? Didn't you have a little of the 'fifth form' feeling,--a
boy under examination?"

Walters smiled and screwed his mouth on one side. "The thing is so
absurd," he said.

"That is what we used to say at school," replied Challis.



V

The Stotts' move to Pym was not marked by any incident. Mrs. Stott and
her boy were not unduly stared upon as they left Stoke--the children
were in school--and their entry into the new cottage was uneventful.

They moved on a Thursday. On Sunday morning they had their first
visitor.

He came mooning round the fence that guarded the Stotts' garden from
the little lane--it was hardly more than a footpath. He had a great
shapeless head that waggled heavily on his shoulders, his eyes were
lustreless, and his mouth hung open, frequently his tongue lagged
out. He made strange, inhuman noises. "A-ba-ba," was his nearest
approach to speech.

"Now, George," called Mrs. Stott, "look at that. It's Mrs. 'Arrison's
boy what Mrs. Reade's spoke about. Now, is 'e anythink like ..." she
paused, "any think like 'im?" and she indicated the cradle in the
sitting-room.

"What's 'e want, 'angin' round 'ere?" replied Stott, disregarding the
comparison. "'Ere, get off," he called, and he went into the garden
and picked up a stick.

The idiot shambled away.







CHAPTER VI

HIS FATHER'S DESERTION


I

The strongest of all habits is that of acquiescence. It is this habit
of submission which explains the admired patience and long-suffering
of the abjectly poor. The lower the individual falls, the more
unconquerable becomes the inertia of mind which interferes between
him and revolt against his condition. All the miseries of the flesh,
even starvation, seem preferable to the making of an effort great
enough to break this habit of submission.

Ginger Stott was not poor. For a man in his station of life he was
unusually well provided for, but in him the habit of acquiescence
was strongly rooted. Before his son was a year old, Stott had grown
to loathe his home, to dread his return to it, yet it did not occur
to him until another year had passed that he could, if he would,
set up another establishment on his own account; that he could, for
instance, take a room in Ailesworth, and leave his wife and child in
the cottage. For two years he did not begin to think of this idea,
and then it was suddenly forced upon him.

Ever since they had overheard those strangely intelligent
self-communings, the Stotts had been perfectly aware that their
wonderful child could talk if he would. Ellen Mary, pondering that
single expression, had read a world of meaning into her son's murmurs
of "learning." In her simple mind she understood that his deliberate
withholding of speech was a reserve against some strange manifestation.

The manifestation, when it came, was as remarkable as it was
unexpected.

The arm-chair in which Henry Challis had once sat was a valued
possession, dedicated by custom to the sole use of George Stott. Ever
since he had been married, Stott had enjoyed the full and undisputed
use of that chair. Except at his meals, he never sat in any other,
and he had formed a fixed habit of throwing himself into that chair
immediately on his return from his work at the County Ground.

One evening in November, however, when his son was just over two years
old, Stott found his sacred chair occupied. He hesitated a moment,
and then went in to the kitchen to find his wife.

"That child's in my chair," he said.

Ellen was setting the tray for her husband's tea. "Yes ... I know,"
she replied. "I--I did mention it, but 'e 'asn't moved."

"Well, take 'im out," ordered Stott, but he dropped his voice.

"Does it matter?" asked his wife. "Tea's just ready. Time that's done
'e'll be ready for 'is bath."

"Why can't you move 'im?" persisted Stott gloomily. "'E knows it's
my chair."

"There! kettle's boilin', come in and 'ave your tea," equivocated
the diplomatic Ellen.

During the progress of the meal, the child still sat quietly in his
father's chair, his little hands resting on his knees, his eyes wide
open, their gaze abstracted, as usual, from all earthly concerns.

But after tea Stott was heroic. He had reached the limit of his
endurance. One of his deep-seated habits was being broken, and with
it snapped his habit of acquiescence. He rose to his feet and faced
his son with determination, and Stott had a bull-dog quality about
him that was not easily defeated.

"Look 'ere! Get out!" he said. "That's my chair!"

The child very deliberately withdrew his attention from infinity and
regarded the dogged face and set jaw of his father. Stott returned
the stare for the fraction of a second, and then his eyes wavered
and dropped, but he maintained his resolution.

"You got to get out," he said, "or I'll lift you."

Ellen Mary gripped the edge of the table, but she made no attempt
to interfere.

There was a tense, strained silence. Then Stott began to breathe
heavily. He lifted his long arms for a moment and raised his eyes,
he even made a tentative step towards the usurped chair.

The child sat calm, motionless; his eyes were fixed upon his father's
face with a sublime, unalterable confidence.

Stott's arms fell to his sides again, he shuffled his feet. One
more effort he made, a sudden, vicious jerk, as though he would do
the thing quickly and be finished with it; then he shivered, his
resolution broke, and he shambled evasively to the door.

"God damn," he muttered. At the door he turned for an instant, swore
again in the same words, and went out into the night.

To Stott, moodily pacing the Common, this thing was incomprehensible,
some horrible infraction of the law of normal life, something to be
condemned; altered, if possible. It was unprecedented, and it was,
therefore, wrong, unnatural, diabolic, a violation of the sound
principles which uphold human society.

To Ellen Mary it was merely a miracle, the foreshadowing of greater
miracles to come. And to her was manifested, also, a minor miracle,
for when his father had gone, the child looked at his mother and gave
out his first recorded utterance.

"'Oo is God?" he said.

Ellen Mary tried to explain, but before she had stammered out many
words, her son abstracted his gaze, climbed down out of the chair, and
intimated with his usual grunt that he desired his bath and his bed.



II

The depths of Stott were stirred that night. He had often said that
"he wouldn't stand it much longer," but the words were a mere formula:
he had never even weighed their intention. As he paced the Common,
he muttered them again to the night, with new meaning; he saw new
possibilities, and saw that they were practicable. "I've 'ad enough,"
was his new phrase, and he added another that evidenced his new
attitude. "Why not?" he said again and again. "And why not?"

Stott's mind was not analytical. He did not examine his problem,
weigh this and that and draw a balanced deduction. He merely saw a
picture of peace and quiet, in a room at Ailesworth, in convenient
proximity to his work (he made an admirable groundsman and umpire,
his work absorbed him) and, perhaps, he conceived some dim ideal of
pleasant evenings spent in the companionship of those who thought
in the same terms as himself; whose speech was of form, averages,
the preparation of wickets, and all the detail of cricket; who shared
in his one interest.

Stott's ambition to have a son and to teach him the mysteries of his
father's success had been dwindling for some time past. On this night
it was finally put aside. Stott's "I've 'ad enough" may be taken to
include that frustrated ideal. No more experiments for him, was the
pronouncement that summed up his decision.

Still there were difficulties. Economically he was free, he could allow
his wife thirty shillings a week, more than enough for her support
and that of her child; but--what would she say, how would she take
his determination? A determination it was, not a proposal. And the
neighbours, what would they say? Stott anticipated a fuss. "She'll
say I've married 'er, and it's my duty to stay by 'er," was his
anticipation of his wife's attitude. He did not profess to understand
the ways of the sex, but some rumours of misunderstandings between
husbands and wives of his own class had filtered through his absorption
in cricket.

He stumbled home with a mind prepared for dissension.

He found his wife stitching by the fire. The door at the foot of the
stairs was closed. The room presented an aspect of cleanly, cheerful
comfort; but Stott entered with dread, not because he feared to meet
his wife, but because there was a terror sleeping in that house.

His armchair was empty now, but he hesitated before he sat down in
it. He took off his cap and rubbed the seat and back of the chair
vigorously: a child of evil had polluted it, the chair might still
hold enchantment....

"I've 'ad enough," was his preface, and there was no need for any
further explanation.

Ellen Mary let her hands fall into her lap, and stared dreamily at
the fire.

"I'm sorry it's come to this, George," she said, "but it 'asn't been
my fault no more'n it's been your'n. Of course I've seen it a-comin',
and I knowed it 'ad to be, some time; but I don't think there need
be any 'ard words over it. I don't expec' you to understand 'im, no
more'n I do myself--it isn't in nature as you should, but all said
and done, there's no bones broke, and if we 'ave to part, there's no
reason as we shouldn't part peaceable."

That speech said nearly everything. Afterwards it was only a question
of making arrangements, and in that there was no difficulty.

Another man might have felt a little hurt, a little neglected by the
absence of any show of feeling on his wife's part, but Stott passed it
by. He was singularly free from all sentimentality; certain primitive,
human emotions seem to have played no part in his character. At this
moment he certainly had no thought that he was being carelessly
treated; he wanted to be free from the oppression of that horror
upstairs--so he figured it--and the way was made easy for him.

He nodded approval, and made no sign of any feeling.

"I shall go to-morrer," he said, and then, "I'll sleep down 'ere
to-night." He indicated the sofa upon which he had slept for so many
nights at Stoke, after his tragedy had been born to him.

Ellen Mary had said nearly everything, but when she had made up a
bed for her husband in the sitting-room, she paused, candle in hand,
before she bade him good-night.

"Don't wish 'im 'arm, George," she said. "'E's different from us,
and we don't understand 'im proper, but some day----"

"I don't wish 'im no 'arm," replied Stott, and shuddered. "I don't
wish 'im no 'arm," he repeated, as he kicked off the boot he had
been unlacing.

"You mayn't never see 'im again," added Ellen Mary.

Stott stood upright. In his socks, he looked noticeably shorter
than his wife. "I suppose not," he said, and gave a deep sigh of
relief. "Well, thank Gawd for that, anyway."

Ellen Mary drew her lips together. For some dim, unrealised reason,
she wished her husband to leave the cottage with a feeling of goodwill
towards the child, but she saw that her wish was little likely to
be fulfilled.

"Well, good-night, George," she said, after a few seconds of silence,
and she added pathetically, as she turned at the foot of the stairs:
"Don't wish 'im no harm."

"I won't," was all the assurance she received.

When she had gone, and the door was closed behind her, Stott padded
silently to the window and looked out. A young moon was dipping into
a bank of cloud, and against the feeble brightness he could see an
uncertain outline of bare trees. He pulled the curtain across the
window, and turned back to the warm cheerfulness of the room.

"Shan't never see 'im again," he murmured, "thank Gawd!" He
undressed quietly, blew out the lamp and got between the sheets of
his improvised bed. For some minutes he stared at the leaping shadows
on the ceiling. He was wondering why he had ever been afraid of the
child. "After all, 'e's only a blarsted freak," was the last thought
in his mind before he fell asleep.

With that pronouncement Stott passes out of the history of the
Hampdenshire Wonder. He was in many ways an exceptional man, and
his name will always be associated with the splendid successes
of Hampdenshire cricket, both before and after the accident
that destroyed his career as a bowler. He was not spoiled by his
triumphs: those two years of celebrity never made Stott conceited,
and there are undoubtedly many traits in his character which call
for our admiration. He is still in his prime, an active agent in
finding talent for his county, and in developing that talent when
found. Hampdenshire has never come into the field with weak bowling,
and all the credit belongs to Ginger Stott.

One sees that he was not able to appreciate the wonderful gifts of
his own son, but Stott was an ignorant man, and men of intellectual
attainment failed even as Stott failed in this respect. Ginger Stott
was a success in his own walk of life, and that fact should command
our admiration. It is not for us to judge whether his attainments
were more or less noble than the attainments of his son.



III

One morning, two days after Stott had left the cottage, Ellen Mary was
startled by the sudden entrance of her child into the sitting-room. He
toddled in hastily from the garden, and pointed with excitement
through the window.

Ellen Mary was frightened; she had never seen her child other than
deliberate, calm, judicial, in all his movements. In a sudden spasm
of motherly love she bent to pick him up, to caress him.

"No," said the Wonder, with something that approached disgust in his
tone and attitude. "No," he repeated. "What's 'e want 'angin' round
'ere? Send 'im off." He pointed again to the window.

Ellen Mary looked out and saw a grinning, slobbering obscenity at
the gate. Stott had scared the idiot away, but in some curious,
inexplicable manner he had learned that his persecutor and enemy had
gone, and he had returned, and had made overtures to the child that
walked so sedately up and down the path of the little garden.

Ellen Mary went out. "You be off," she said.

"A-ba, a-ba-ba," bleated the idiot, and pointed at the house.

"Be off, I tell you!" said Ellen Mary fiercely. But still the idiot
babbled and pointed.

Ellen Mary stooped to pick up a stick. The idiot blenched; he
understood that movement well enough, though it was a stone he
anticipated, not a stick; with a foolish cry he dropped his arms and
slouched away down the lane.







CHAPTER VII

HIS DEBT TO HENRY CHALLIS


I

Challis was out of England for more than three years after that one
brief intrusion of his into the affairs of Mr. and Mrs. Stott. During
the interval he was engaged upon those investigations, the results
of which are embodied in his monograph on the primitive peoples of
the Melanesian Archipelago. It may be remembered that he followed
Dr. W. H. R. Rivers' and Dr. C. G. Seligmann's inquiry into the
practice and theory of native customs. Challis developed his study
more particularly with reference to the earlier evolution of Totemism,
and he was able by his patient work among the Polynesians of Tikopia
and Ontong Java, and his comparisons of those sporadic tribes with the
Papuasians of Eastern New Guinea, to correct some of the inferences
with regard to the origins of exogamy made by Dr. J. G. Frazer in his
great work on that subject, published some years before. A summary
of Challis's argument may be found in vol. li. of the Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute.

When he returned to England, Challis shut himself up at Chilborough. He
had engaged a young Cambridge man, Gregory Lewes, as his secretary and
librarian, and the two devoted all their time to planning, writing,
and preparing the monograph referred to.

In such circumstances it is hardly remarkable that Challis should
have completely forgotten the existence of the curious child which had
intrigued his interest nearly four years earlier, and it was not until
he had been back at Challis Court for more than eight months, that
the incursion of Percy Crashaw revived his memory of the phenomenon.

The library at Challis Court occupies a suite of three rooms. The
first and largest of the three is part of the original structure of
the house. Its primitive use had been that of a chapel, a one-storey
building jutting out from the west wing. This Challis had converted
into a very practicable library with a continuous gallery running
round at a height of seven feet from the floor, and in it he had
succeeded in arranging some 20,000 volumes. But as his store of
books grew--and at one period it had grown very rapidly--he had
been forced to build, and so he had added first one and then the
other of the two additional rooms which became necessary. Outside,
the wing had the appearance of an unduly elongated chapel, as he had
continued the original roof over his addition, and copied the style
of the old chapel architecture. The only external alteration he had
made had been the lowering of the sills of the windows.

It was in the furthest of these three rooms that Challis and his
secretary worked, and it was from here that they saw the gloomy figure
of the Rev. Percy Crashaw coming up the drive.

This was the third time he had called. His two former visits had been
unrewarded, but that morning a letter had come from him, couched
in careful phrases, the purport of which had been a request for an
interview on a "matter of some moment."

Challis frowned, and rose from among an ordered litter of manuscripts.

"I shall have to see this man," he said to Lewes, and strode hastily
out of the library.

Crashaw was perfunctorily apologetic, and Challis, looking somewhat
out of place, smoking a heavy wooden pipe in the disused, bleak
drawing-room, waited, almost silent, until his visitor should come
to the point.

" ... and the--er--matter of some moment, I mentioned," Crashaw mumbled
on, "is, I should say, not altogether irrelevant to the work you are
at present engaged upon."

"Indeed!" commented Challis, with a lift of his thick eyebrows,
"no Polynesians come to settle in Stoke, I trust?"

"On broad lines, relevant on broad, anthropological lines, I mean,"
said Crashaw.

Challis grunted. "Go on!" he said.

"You may remember that curious--er--abnormal child of the
Stotts?" asked Crashaw.

"Stotts? Wait a minute. Yes! Curious infant with an abnormally
intelligent expression and the head of a hydrocephalic?"

Crashaw nodded. "It's development has upset me in a most unusual
way," he continued. "I must confess that I am entirely at a loss,
and I really believe that you are the only person who can give me
any intelligent assistance in the matter."

"Very good of you," murmured Challis.

"You see," said Crashaw, warming to his subject and interlacing his
fingers, "I happen, by the merest accident, I may say, to be the
child's godfather."

"Ah! you have responsibilities!" commented Challis, with the first
glint of amusement in his eyes.

"I have," said Crashaw, "undoubtedly I have." He leaned forward
with his hands still clasped together, and rested his forearms on
his thighs. As he talked he worked his hands up and down from the
wrists, by way of emphasis. "I am aware," he went on, "that on one
point I can expect little sympathy from you, but I make an appeal
to you, nevertheless, as a man of science and--and a magistrate;
for ... for assistance."

He paused and looked up at Challis, received a nod of encouragement
and developed his grievance.

"I want to have the child certified as an idiot, and sent to an
asylum."

"On what grounds?"

"He is undoubtedly lacking mentally," said Crashaw, "and his influence
is, or may be, malignant."

"Explain," suggested Challis.

For a few seconds Crashaw paused, intent on the pattern of the carpet,
and working his hands slowly. Challis saw that the man's knuckles
were white, that he was straining his hands together.

"He has denied God," he said at last with great solemnity.

Challis rose abruptly, and went over to the window; the next words
were spoken to his back.

"I have, myself, heard this infant of four years use the most abhorrent
blasphemy."

Challis had composed himself. "Oh! I say; that's bad," he said as he
turned towards the room again.

Crashaw's head was still bowed. "And whatever may be your own
philosophic doubts," he said, "I think you will agree with me that in
such a case as this, something should be done. To me it is horrible,
most horrible."

"Couldn't you give me any details?" asked Challis.

"They are most repugnant to me," answered Crashaw.

"Quite, quite! I understand. But if you want any assistance.... Or
do you expect me to investigate?"

"I thought it my duty, as his godfather, to see to the child's
spiritual welfare," said Crashaw, ignoring the question put to him,
"although he is not, now, one of my parishioners. I first went to
Pym some few months ago, but the mother interposed between me and the
child. I was not permitted to see him. It was not until a few weeks
back that I met him--on the Common; alone. Of course, I recognised
him at once. He is quite unmistakable."

"And then?" prompted Challis.

"I spoke to him, and he replied with, with--an abstracted air,
without looking at me. He has not the appearance in any way of a
normal child. I made a few ordinary remarks to him, and then I asked
him if he knew his catechism. He replied that he did not know the word
'catechism.' I may mention that he speaks the dialect of the common
people, but he has a much larger vocabulary. His mother has taught
him to read, it appears."

"He seems to have a curiously apt intelligence," interpolated Challis.

Crashaw wrung his clasped hands and put the comment on one side. "I
then spoke to him of some of the broad principles of the Church's
teaching," he continued. "He listened quietly, without interruption,
and when I stopped, he prompted me with questions."

"One minute!" said Challis. "Tell me; what sort of questions? That
is most important."

"I do not remember precisely," returned Crashaw, "but one, I think,
was as to the sources of the Bible. I did not read anything beyond
simple and somewhat unusual curiosity into those questions, I may
say.... I talked to him for some considerable time--I dare say for
more than an hour...."

"No signs of idiocy, apparently, during all this?"

"I consider it less a case of idiocy than one of possession, maleficent
possession," replied Crashaw. He did not see his host's grim smile.

"Well, and the blasphemy?" prompted Challis.

"At the end of my instruction, the child, still looking away from
me, shook his head and said that what I had told him was not true, I
confess that I was staggered. Possibly I lost my temper, somewhat. I
may have grown rather warm in my speech. And at last...." Crashaw
clenched his hands and spoke in such a low voice that Challis could
hardly hear him. "At last he turned to me and said things which I
could not possibly repeat, which I pray that I may never hear again
from the mouth of any living being."

"Profanities, obscenities, er--swear-words," suggested Challis.

"Blasphemy, blasphemy," cried Crashaw. "Oh! I wonder that I did not
injure the child."

Challis moved over to the window again. For more than a minute there
was silence in that big, neglected-looking room. Then Crashaw's
feelings began to find vent in words, in a long stream of insistent
asseverations, pitched on a rising note that swelled into a diapason
of indignation. He spoke of the position and power of his Church, of
its influence for good among the uneducated, agricultural population
among which he worked. He enlarged on the profound necessity for a
living religion among the poorer classes; and on the revolutionary
tendency towards socialism, which would be encouraged if the great
restraining power of a creed that enforced subservience to temporal
power was once shaken. And, at last, he brought his arguments to
a head by saying that the example of a child of four years old,
openly defying a minister of the Church, and repudiating the very
conception of the Deity, was an example which might produce a profound
effect upon the minds of a slow-thinking people; that such an example
might be the leaven which would leaven the whole lump; and that for
the welfare of the whole neighbourhood it was an instant necessity
that the child should be put under restraint, his tongue bridled,
and any opportunity to proclaim his blasphemous doctrines forcibly
denied to him. Long before he had concluded, Crashaw was on his feet,
pacing the room, declaiming, waving his arms.

Challis stood, unanswering, by the window. He did not seem to hear;
he did not even shrug his shoulders. Not till Crashaw had brought
his argument to a culmination, and boomed into a dramatic silence,
did Challis turn and look at him.

"But you cannot confine a child in an asylum on those grounds,"
he said; "the law does not permit it."

"The Church is above the law," replied Crashaw.

"Not in these days," said Challis; "it is by law established!"

Crashaw began to speak again, but Challis waved him down. "Quite,
quite. I see your point," he said, "but I must see this child
myself. Believe me, I will see what can be done. I will, at least,
try to prevent his spreading his opinions among the yokels." He smiled
grimly. "I quite agree with you that that is a consummation which is
not to be desired."

"You will see him soon?" asked Crashaw.

"To-day," returned Challis.

"And you will let me see you again, afterwards?"

"Certainly."

Crashaw still hesitated for a moment. "I might, perhaps, come with
you," he ventured.

"On no account," said Challis.



II

Gregory Lewes was astonished at the long absence of his chief; he
was more astonished when his chief returned.

"I want you to come up with me to Pym, Lewes," said Challis; "one of
my tenants has been confounding the rector of Stoke. It is a matter
that must be attended to."

Lewes was a fair-haired, hard-working young man, with a bent for
science in general that had not yet crystallised into any special
study. He had a curious sense of humour, that proved something of
an obstacle in the way of specialisation. He did not take Challis's
speech seriously.

"Are you going as a magistrate?" he asked; "or is it a matter for
scientific investigation?"

"Both," said Challis. "Come along!"

"Are you serious, sir?" Lewes still doubted.

"Intensely. I'll explain as we go," said Challis.

It is not more than a mile and a half from Challis Court to Pym. The
nearest way is by a cart track through the beech woods, that winds
up the hill to the Common. In winter this track is almost impassable,
over boot-top in heavy mud; but the early spring had been fairly dry,
and Challis chose this route.

As they walked, Challis went through the early history of Victor
Stott, so far as it was known to him. "I had forgotten the child,"
he said; "I thought it would die. You see, it is by way of being
an extraordinary freak of nature. It has, or had, a curious look of
intelligence. You must remember that when I saw it, it was only a few
months old. But even then it conveyed in some inexplicable way a sense
of power. Every one felt it. There was Harvey Walters, for instance--he
vaccinated it; I made him confess that the child made him feel like
a school-boy. Only, you understand, it had not spoken then----"

"What conveyed that sense of power?" asked Lewes.

"The way it had of looking at you, staring you out of countenance,
sizing you up and rejecting you. It did that, I give you my word;
it did all that at a few months old, and without the power of
speech. Only, you see, I thought it was merely a freak of some kind,
some abnormality that disgusted one in an unanalysed way. And I
thought it would die. I certainly thought it would die. I am most
eager to see this new development."

"I haven't heard. It confounded Crashaw, you say? And it cannot be
more than four or five years old now?"

"Four; four and a half," returned Challis, and then the conversation
was interrupted by the necessity of skirting a tiny morass of wet
leaf-mould that lay in a hollow.

"Confounded Crashaw? I should think so," Challis went on, when they
had found firm going again. "The good man would not soil his devoted
tongue by any condescension to oratio recta, but I gathered that the
child had made light of his divine authority."

"Great Cæsar!" ejaculated Lewes; "but that is immense. What did
Crashaw do--shake him?"

"No; he certainly did not lay hands on him at all. His own expression
was that he did not know how it was he did not do the child an
injury. That is one of the things that interest me enormously. That
power I spoke of must have been retained. Crashaw must have been
blue with anger; he could hardly repeat the story to me, he was so
agitated. It would have surprised me less if he had told me he had
murdered the child. That I could have understood, perfectly!"

"It is, of course, quite incomprehensible to me, as yet," commented
Lewes.

When they came out of the woods on to the stretch of common from which
you can see the great swelling undulations of the Hampden Hills,
Challis stopped. A spear of April sunshine had pierced the load of
cloud towards the west, and the bank of wood behind them gave shelter
from the cold wind that had blown fiercely all the afternoon.

"It is a fine prospect," said Challis, with a sweep of his hand. "I
sometimes feel, Lewes, that we are over-intent on our own little narrow
interests. Here are you and I, busying ourselves in an attempt to throw
some little light--a very little it must be--on some petty problems
of the origin of our race. We are looking downwards, downwards always;
digging in old muck-heaps; raking up all kinds of unsavoury rubbish to
prove that we are born out of the dirt. And we have never a thought
for the future in all our work,--a future that may be glorious, who
knows? Here, perhaps in this village, insignificant from most points
of view, but set in a country that should teach us to raise our
eyes from the ground; here, in this tiny hamlet, is living a child
who may become a greater than Socrates or Shakespeare, a child who
may revolutionise our conceptions of time and space. There have been
great men in the past who have done that, Lewes; there is no reason
for us to doubt that still greater men may succeed them."

"No; there is no reason for us to doubt that," said Lewes, and they
walked on in silence towards the Stotts' cottage.



III

Challis knocked and walked in. They found Ellen Mary and her son at
the tea-table.

The mother rose to her feet and dropped a respectful curtsy. The boy
glanced once at Gregory Lewes and then continued his meal as if he
were unaware of any strange presence in the room.

"I'm sorry. I am afraid we are interrupting you," Challis
apologised. "Pray sit down, Mrs. Stott, and go on with your tea."

"Thank you, sir. I'd just finished, sir," said Ellen Mary, and remained
standing with an air of quiet deference.

Challis took the celebrated armchair, and motioned Lewes to the
window-sill, the nearest available seat for him. "Please sit down,
Mrs. Stott," he said, and Ellen Mary sat, apologetically.

The boy pushed his cup towards his mother, and pointed to the teapot;
he made a grunting sound to attract her attention.

"You'll excuse me, sir," murmured Ellen Mary, and she refilled
the cup and passed it back to her son, who received it without any
acknowledgment. Challis and Lewes were observing the boy intently,
but he took not the least notice of their scrutiny. He discovered no
trace of self-consciousness; Henry Challis and Gregory Lewes appeared
to have no place in the world of his abstraction.

The figure the child presented to his two observers was worthy of
careful scrutiny.

At the age of four and a half years, the Wonder was bald, save for
a few straggling wisps of reddish hair above the ears and at the
base of the skull, and a weak, sparse down, of the same colour, on
the crown. The eyebrows, too, were not marked by any line of hair,
but the eyelashes were thick, though short, and several shades darker
than the hair on the skull.

The face is not so easily described. The mouth and chin were relatively
small, overshadowed by that broad cliff of forehead, but they were
firm, the chin well moulded, the lips thin and compressed. The nose
was unusual when seen in profile. There was no sign of a bony bridge,
but it was markedly curved and jutted out at a curious angle from
the line of the face. The nostrils were wide and open. None of these
features produced any effect of childishness; but this effect was
partly achieved by the contours of the cheeks, and by the fact that
there was no indication of any lines on the face.

The eyes nearly always wore their usual expression of abstraction. It
was very rarely that the Wonder allowed his intelligence to be
exhibited by that medium. When he did, the effect was strangely
disconcerting, blinding. One received an impression of extraordinary
concentration: it was as though for an instant the boy was able to give
one a glimpse of the wonderful force of his intellect. When he looked
one in the face with intention, and suddenly allowed one to realise,
as it were, all the dominating power of his brain, one shrank into
insignificance, one felt as an ignorant, intelligent man may feel when
confronted with some elaborate theorem of the higher mathematics. "Is
it possible that any one can really understand these things?" such a
man might think with awe, and in the same way one apprehended some
vast, inconceivable possibilities of mind-function when the Wonder
looked at one with, as I have said, intention.

He was dressed in a little jacket-suit, and wore a linen collar; the
knickerbockers, loose and badly cut, fell a little below the knees. His
stockings were of worsted, his boots clumsy and thick-soled, though
relatively tiny. One had the impression always that his body was
fragile and small, but as a matter of fact the body and limbs were,
if anything, slightly better developed than those of the average
child of four and a half years.

Challis had ample opportunity to make these observations at various
periods. He began them as he sat in the Stotts' cottage. At first he
did not address the boy directly.

"I hear your son has been having a religious controversy with
Mr. Crashaw," was his introduction to the object of his visit.

"Indeed, sir!" Plainly this was not news to Mrs. Stott.

"Your son told you?" suggested Challis.

"Oh! no, sir, 'e never told me," replied Mrs. Stott, "'twas
Mr. Crashaw. 'E's been 'ere several times lately."

Challis looked sharply at the boy, but he gave no sign that he heard
what was passing.

"Yes; Mr. Crashaw seems rather upset about it."

"I'm sorry, sir, but----"

"Yes; speak plainly," prompted Challis. "I assure you, that you will
have no cause to regret any confidence you may make to me."

"I can't see as it's any business of Mr. Crashaw's, sir, if you'll
forgive me for sayin' so."

"He has been worrying you?"

"'E 'as, sir, but 'e ... " she glanced at her son--she laid a stress
on the pronoun always when she spoke of him that differentiated its
significance--"'e 'asn't seen Mr. Crashaw again, sir."

Challis turned to the boy. "You are not interested in Mr. Crashaw,
I suppose?" he asked.

The boy took no notice of the question.

Challis was piqued. If this extraordinary child really had an
intelligence, surely it must be possible to appeal to that intelligence
in some way. He made another effort, addressing Mrs. Stott.

"I think we must forgive Mr. Crashaw, you know, Mrs. Stott. As I
understand it, your boy at the age of four years and a half has
defied--his cloth, if I may say so." He paused, and as he received
no answer, continued: "But I hope that matter may be easily arranged."

"Thank you, sir," said Mrs. Stott. "It's very kind of you. I'm sure,
I'm greatly obliged to you, sir."

"That's only one reason of my visit to you, however." Challis
hesitated. "I've been wondering whether I might not be able to help
you and your son in some other way. I understand that he has unusual
power of--of intelligence."

"Indeed 'e 'as, sir," responded Mrs. Stott.

"And he can read, can't he?"

"I've learned 'im what I could, sir: it isn't much."

"Well, perhaps I could lend him a few books."

Challis made a significant pause, and again he looked at the boy;
but there was no response, so he continued: "Tell me what he has read."

"We've no books, sir, and we never 'ardly see a paper now. All we
'ave in the 'ouse is a Bible and two copies of Lillywhite's cricket
annual as my 'usband left be'ind."

Challis smiled. "Has he read those?" he asked.

"The Bible 'e 'as, I believe," replied Mrs. Stott.

It was a conversation curious in its impersonality. Challis was
conscious of the anomaly that he was speaking in the boy's presence,
crediting him with a remarkable intelligence, and yet addressing a
frankly ignorant woman as though the boy was not in the room. Yet how
could he break that deliberate silence? It seemed to him as though
there must, after all, be some mistake; yet how account for Crashaw's
story if the boy were indeed an idiot?

With a slight show of temper he turned to the Wonder.

"Do you want to read?" he asked. "I have between forty and fifty
thousand books in my library. I think it possible that you might find
one or two which would interest you."

The Wonder lifted his hand as though to ask for silence. For a minute,
perhaps, no one spoke. All waited, expectant; Challis and Lewes with
intent eyes fixed on the detached expression of the child's face,
Ellen Mary with bent head. It was a strange, yet very logical question
that came at last:

"What should I learn out of all them books?" asked the Wonder. He
did not look at Challis as he spoke.



IV

Challis drew a deep breath and looked at Lewes.

"A difficult question, that, Lewes," he said.

Lewes lifted his eyebrows and pulled at his fair moustache. "If you
take the question literally," he muttered.

"You might learn--the essential part ... of all the knowledge that
has been ... discovered by mankind," said Challis. He phrased his
sentence carefully, as though he were afraid of being trapped.

"Should I learn what I am?" asked the Wonder.

Challis understood the question in its metaphysical acceptation. He
had the sense of a powerful but undirected intelligence working from
the simple premises of experience; of a cloistered mind that had
functioned profoundly; a mind unbound by the tradition of all the
speculations and discoveries of man, the essential conclusions of
which were contained in that library at Challis Court.

"No!" said Challis, after a perceptible interval, "that you will
not learn from any books in my possession, but you will find grounds
for speculation."

"Grounds for speculation?" questioned the Wonder. He repeated the
words quite clearly.

"Material--matter from which you can--er--formulate theories of your
own," explained Challis.

The Wonder shook his head. It was evident that Challis's sentence
conveyed little or no meaning to him.

He got down from his chair and took up an old cricket cap of his
father's, a cap which his mother had let out by the addition of another
gore of cloth that did not match the original material. He pulled
this cap carefully over his bald head, and then made for the door.

At the threshold the strange child paused, and without looking at
any one present said: "I'll coom to your library," and went out.

Challis joined Lewes at the window, and they watched the boy make
his deliberate way along the garden path and up the lane towards the
fields beyond.

"You let him go out by himself?" asked Challis.

"He likes to be in the air, sir," replied Ellen Mary.

"I suppose you have to let him go his own way?"

"Oh! yes, sir."

"I will send the governess cart up for him to-morrow morning," said
Challis, "at ten o'clock. That is, of course, if you have no objection
to his coming."

"'E said 'e'd coom, sir," replied Ellen Mary. Her tone implied that
there was no appeal possible against her son's statement of his wishes.



V

"His methods do not lack terseness," remarked Lewes, when he and
Challis were out of earshot of the cottage.

"His methods and manners are damnable," said Challis, "but----"

"You were going to say?" prompted Lewes.

"Well, what is your opinion?"

"I am not convinced, as yet," said Lewes.

"Oh, surely," expostulated Challis.

"Not from objective, personal evidence. Let us put Crashaw out of
our minds for the moment."

"Very well; go on, state your case."

"He has, so far, made four remarks in our presence," said Lewes,
gesticulating with his walking stick. "Two of them can be neglected;
his repetition of your words, which he did not understand, and his
condescending promise to study your library."

"Yes; I'm with you, so far."

"Now, putting aside the preconception with which we entered the
cottage, was there really anything in the other two remarks? Were
they not the type of simple, unreasoning questions which one may often
hear from the mouth of a child of that age? 'What shall I learn from
your books?' Well, it is the natural question of the ignorant child,
who has no conception of the contents of books, no experience which
would furnish material for his imagination."

"Well?"

"The second remark is more explicable still. It is a remark we all
make in childhood, in some form or another. I remember quite well at
the age of six or seven asking my mother: 'Which is me, my soul or
my body?' I was brought up on the Church catechism. But you at once
accepted these questions--which, I maintain, were questions possible
in the mouth of a simple, ignorant child--in some deep, metaphysical
acceptation. Don't you think, sir, we should wait for further evidence
before we attribute any phenomenal intelligence to this child?"

"Quite the right attitude to take, Lewes--the scientific attitude,"
replied Challis. "Let's go by the lane," he added, as they reached
the entrance to the wood.

For some few minutes they walked in silence; Challis with his head
down, his heavy shoulders humped. His hands were clasped behind
him, dragging his stick as it were a tail, which he occasionally
cocked. He walked with a little stumble now and again, his eyes on the
ground. Lewes strode with a sure foot, his head up, and he slashed
at the tangle of last year's growth on the bank whenever he passed
some tempting butt for the sword-play of his stick.

"Do you think, then," said Challis at last, "that much of
the atmosphere--you must have marked the atmosphere--of the
child's personality, was a creation of our own minds, due to our
preconceptions?"

"Yes, I think so," Lewes replied, a touch of defiance in his tone.

"Isn't that what you want to believe?" asked Challis.

Lewes hit at a flag of dead bracken and missed. "You mean...?" he
prevaricated.

"I mean that that is a much stronger influence than any preconception,
my dear Lewes. I'm no pragmatist, as you know; but there can be no
doubt that with the majority of us the wish to believe a thing is
true constitutes the truth of that thing for us. And that is, in my
opinion, the wrong attitude for either scientist or philosopher. Now,
in the case we are discussing, I suppose, at bottom I should like
to agree with you. One does not like to feel that a child of four
and a half has greater intellectual powers than oneself. Candidly,
I do not like it at all."

"Of course not! But I can't think that----"

"You can if you try; you would at once if you wished to," returned
Challis, anticipating the completion of Lewes's sentence.

"I'll admit that there are some remarkable facts in the case of
this child," said Lewes, "but I do not see why we should, as yet,
take the whole proposition for granted."

"No! I am with you there," returned Challis. And no more was said
until they were nearly home.

Just before they turned into the drive, however, Challis stopped. "Do
you know, Lewes," he said, "I am not sure that I am doing a wise
thing in bringing that child here!"

Lewes did not understand. "No, sir? Why not?" he asked.

"Why, think of the possibilities of that child, if he has all the
powers I credit him with," said Challis. "Think of his possibilities
for original thought if he is kept away from all the traditions
of this futile learning." He waved an arm in the direction of the
elongated chapel.

"Oh! but surely," remonstrated Lewes, "that is a necessary
groundwork. Knowledge is built up step by step."

"Is it? I wonder. I sometimes doubt," said Challis. "Yes, I sometimes
doubt whether we have ever learned anything at all that is worth
knowing. And, perhaps, this child, if he were kept away from
books.... However, the thing is done now, and in any case he would
never have been able to dodge the School attendance officer."







CHAPTER VIII

HIS FIRST VISIT TO CHALLIS COURT


I

"Shall you be able to help me in collating your notes of the Tikopia
observations this morning, sir?" Lewes asked. He rose from the
breakfast-table and lit a cigarette. There was no ceremony between
Challis and his secretary.

"You forget our engagement for ten o'clock," said Challis.

"Need that distract us?"

"It need not, but doesn't it seem to you that it may furnish us with
valuable material?"

"Hardly pertinent, sir, is it?"

"What line do you think of taking up, Lewes?" asked Challis with
apparent irrelevance.

"With regard to this--this phenomenon?"

"No, no. I was speaking of your own ambitions." Challis had sauntered
over to the window; he stood, with his back to Lewes, looking out at
the blue and white of the April sky.

Lewes frowned. He did not understand the gist of the question. "I
suppose there is a year's work on this book before me yet," he said.

"Quite, quite," replied Challis, watching a cloud shadow swarm up the
slope of Deane Hill. "Yes, certainly a year's work. I was thinking
of the future."

"I have thought of laboratory work in connection with psychology,"
said Lewes, still puzzled.

"I thought I remembered your saying something of the kind," murmured
Challis absently. "We are going to have more rain. It will be a late
spring this year."

"Had the question any bearing on our engagement of this morning?" Lewes
was a little anxious, uncertain whether this inquiry as to his
future had not some particular significance; a hint, perhaps, that
his services would not be required much longer.

"Yes; I think it had," said Challis. "I saw the governess cart go up
the road a few minutes since."

"I suppose the boy will be here in a quarter of an hour?" said Lewes
by way of keeping up the conversation. He was puzzled; he did not know
Challis in this mood. He did not conceive it possible that Challis
could be nervous about the arrival of so insignificant a person as
this Stott child.

"It's all very ridiculous," broke out Challis suddenly; and he
turned away from the window, and joined Lewes by the fire. "Don't
you think so?"

"I'm afraid I don't follow you, sir."

Challis laughed. "I'm not surprised," he said; "I was a trifle
inconsecutive. But I wish you were more interested in this child,
Lewes. The thought of him engrosses me, and yet I don't want to meet
him. I should be relieved to hear that he wasn't coming. Surely you,
as a student of psychology ..." he broke off with a lift of his
heavy shoulders.

"Oh! Yes! I am interested, certainly, as you say, as a student of
psychology. We ought to take some measurements. The configuration
of the skull is not abnormal otherwise than in its relation to the
development of the rest of his body, but ..." Lewes meandered off
into somewhat abstruse speculation with regard to the significance
of craniology.

Challis nodded his head and murmured: "Quite, quite," occasionally. He
seemed glad that Lewes should continue to talk.

The lecture was interrupted by the appearance of the governess cart.

"By Jove, he has come," ejaculated Challis in the middle of one of
Lewes's periods. "You'll have to see me through this, my boy. I'm
damned if I know how to take the child."

Lewes flushed, annoyed at the interruption of his lecture. He had
believed that he had been interesting. "Curse the kid," was the
thought in his mind as he followed Challis to the window.



II

Jessop, the groom deputed to fetch the Wonder from Pym, looked a
little uneasy, perhaps a little scared. When he drew up at the porch,
the child pointed to the door of the cart and indicated that it was to
be opened for him. He was evidently used to being waited upon. When
this command had been obeyed, he descended deliberately and then
pointed to the front door.

"Open!" he said clearly, as Jessop hesitated. The Wonder knew nothing
of bells or ceremony.

Jessop came down from the cart and rang.

The butler opened the door. He was an old servant and accustomed to
his master's eccentricities, but he was not prepared for the vision
of that strange little figure, with a large head in a parti-coloured
cricket-cap, an apparition that immediately walked straight by him
into the hall, and pointed to the first door he came to.

"Oh, dear! Well, to be sure," gasped Heathcote. "Why, whatever----"

"Open!" commanded the Wonder, and Heathcote obeyed, weak-kneed.

The door chanced to be the right one, the door of the breakfast-room,
and the Wonder walked in, still wearing his cap.

Challis came forward to meet him with a conventional greeting. "I'm
glad you were able to come ..." he began, but the child took no notice;
he looked rapidly round the room, and not finding what he wanted,
signified his desire by a single word.

"Books," he said, and looked at Challis.

Heathcote stood at the door, hesitating between amazement and
disapproval. "I've never seen the like," was how he phrased his
astonishment later, in the servants' hall, "never in all my born
days. To see that melon-'eaded himp in a cricket-cap hordering the
master about. Well, there----"

"Jessop says he fair got the creeps drivin' 'im over," said the
cook. "'E says the child's not right in 'is 'ead."

Much embroidery followed in the servants' hall.







INTERLUDE


This brief history of the Hampdenshire Wonder is marked by a
stereotyped division into three parts, an arbitrary arrangement
dependent on the experience of the writer. The true division becomes
manifest at this point. The life of Victor Stott was cut into two
distinct sections, between which there is no correlation. The first
part should tell the story of his mind during the life of experience,
the time occupied in observation of the phenomena of life presented to
him in fact, without any specific teaching on the theories of existence
and progress, or on the speculation as to ultimate destiny. The second
part should deal with his entry into the world of books; into that
account of a long series of collated experiments and partly verified
hypotheses we call science; into the imperfectly developed system
of inductive and deductive logic which determines mathematics and
philosophy; into the long, inaccurate and largely unverifiable account
of human blindness and error known as history; and into the realm of
idealism, symbol, and pitiful pride we find in the story of poetry,
letters, and religion.

I will confess that I once contemplated the writing of such a
history. It was Challis who, in his courtly, gentle way, pointed out
to me that no man living had the intellectual capacity to undertake
so profound a work.

For some three months before I had this conversation with Challis,
I had been wrapped in solitude, dreaming, speculating. I had been
uplifted in thought, I had come to believe myself inspired as a result
of my separation from the world of men, and of the deep introspection
and meditation in which I had been plunged. I had arrived at a point,
perhaps not far removed from madness, at which I thought myself
capable of setting out the true history of Victor Stott.

Challis broke the spell. He cleared away the false glamour which was
blinding and intoxicating me, and brought me back to a condition of
open-eyed sanity. To Challis I owe a great debt.

Yet at the moment I was sunk in depression. All the glory of my vision
had faded; the afterglow was quenched in the blackness of the night
that drew out of the east and fell from the zenith as a curtain of
utter darkness.

Again Challis came to my rescue. He brought me a great sheaf of notes.

"Look here," he said, "if you can't write a true history of that
strange child, I see no reason why you should not write his story
as it is known to you, as it impinges on your own life. After all,
you, in many ways, know more of him than any one. You came nearest
to receiving his confidence."

"But only during the last few months," I said.

"Does that matter?" said Challis with an upheaval of his
shoulders--"shrug" is far too insignificant a word for that mountainous
humping. "Is any biography founded on better material than you have
at command?"

He unfolded his bundle of notes. "See here," he said, "here is some
magnificent material for you--first-hand observations made at the
time. Can't you construct a story from that?"

Even then I began to cast my story in a slightly biographical form. I
wrote half a dozen chapters, and read them to Challis.

"Magnificent, my dear fellow," was his comment, "magnificent; but no
one will believe it."

I had been carried away by my own prose, and with the natural vanity
of the author, I resented intensely his criticism.

For some weeks I did not see Challis again, and I persisted in my
futile endeavour, but always as I wrote that killing suggestion
insinuated itself: "No one will believe you." At times I felt as a
man may feel who has spent many years in a lunatic asylum, and after
his release is for ever engaged in a struggle to allay the doubts of
a leering suspicion.

I gave up the hopeless task at last, and sought out Challis again.

"Write it as a story," he suggested, "and give up the attempt to
carry conviction."

And in that spirit, adopting the form of a story, I did begin, and
in that form I hope to finish.

But here as I reach the great division, the determining factor of
Victor Stott's life, I am constrained to pause and apologise. I have
become uncomfortably conscious of my own limitations, and the feeble,
ephemeral methods I am using. I am trifling with a wonderful story,
embroidering my facts with the tawdry detail of my own imagining.

I saw--I see--no other way.

This is, indeed, a preface, yet I prefer to put it in this place,
since it was at this time I wrote it.



On the Common a faint green is coming again like a mist among the
ash-trees, while the oak is still dead and bare. Last year the oak
came first.

They say we shall have a wet summer.







PART II (continued)

THE WONDER AMONG BOOKS


CHAPTER IX

HIS PASSAGE THROUGH THE PRISON OF KNOWLEDGE


I

Challis led the way to the library; Lewes, petulant and mutinous,
hung in the rear.

The Wonder toddled forward, unabashed, to enter his new world. On
the threshold, however, he paused. His comprehensive stare took in a
sweeping picture of enclosing walls of books, and beyond was a vista
of further rooms, of more walls all lined from floor to ceiling with
records of human discovery, endeavour, doubt, and hope.

The Wonder stayed and stared. Then he took two faltering steps into
the room and stopped again, and, finally, he looked up at Challis with
doubt and question; his gaze no longer quelling and authoritative,
but hesitating, compliant, perhaps a little childlike.

"'Ave you read all these?" he asked.

It was a curious picture. The tall figure of Challis, stooping,
as always, slightly forward; Challis, with his seaman's eyes and
scholar's head, his hands loosely clasped together behind his back,
paying such scrupulous attention to that grotesque representative
of a higher intellectuality, clothed in the dress of a villager, a
patched cricket-cap drawn down over his globular skull, his little
arms hanging loosely at his sides; who, nevertheless, even in this
new, strange aspect of unwonted humility bore on his face the promise
of some ultimate development which differentiated him from all other
humanity, as the face of humanity is differentiated from the face of
its prognathous ancestor.

The scene is set in a world of books, and in the background lingers
the athletic figure and fair head of Lewes, the young Cambridge
undergraduate, the disciple of science, hardly yet across the threshold
which divides him from the knowledge of his own ignorance.

"'Ave you read all these?" asked the Wonder.

"A greater part of them--in effect," replied Challis. "There is
much repetition, you understand, and much record of experiment which
becomes, in a sense, worthless when the conclusions are either finally
accepted or rejected."

The eyes of the Wonder shifted and their expression became abstracted;
he seemed to lose consciousness of the outer world; he wore the look
which you may see in the eyes of Jakob Schlesinger's portrait of the
mature Hegel, a look of profound introspection and analysis.

There was an interval of silence, and then the Wonder unknowingly
gave expression to a quotation from Hamlet. "Words," he whispered
reflectively, and then again "words."



II

Challis understood him. "You have not yet learned the meaning of
words?" he asked.

The brief period--the only one recorded--of amazement and submission
was over. It may be that he had doubted during those few minutes of
time whether he was well advised to enter into that world of books,
whether he would not by so doing stunt his own mental growth. It may be
that the decision of so momentous a question should have been postponed
for a year--two years; to a time when his mind should have had further
possibilities for unlettered expansion. However that may be, he decided
now and finally. He walked to the table and climbed up on a chair.

"Books about words," he commanded, and pointed at Challis and Lewes.

They brought him the latest production of the twentieth century in
many volumes, the work of a dozen eminent authorities on the etymology
of the English language, and they seated him on eight volumes of the
Encyclopædia Britannica (India paper edition) in order that he might
reach the level of the table.

At first they tried to show him how his wonderful dictionary should be
used, but he pushed them on one side, neither then nor at any future
time would he consent to be taught--the process was too tedious for
him, his mind worked more fluently, rapidly, and comprehensively than
the mind of the most gifted teacher that could have been found for him.

So Challis and Lewes stood on one side and watched him, and he was no
more embarrassed by their presence than if they had been in another
world, as, possibly, they were.

He began with volume one, and he read the title page and the
introduction, the list of abbreviations, and all the preliminary
matter in due order.

Challis noted that when the Wonder began to read, he read no faster
than the average educated man, but that he acquired facility at a
most astounding rate, and that when he had been reading for a few
days his eye swept down the column, as it were at a single glance.

Challis and Lewes watched him for, perhaps, half an hour, and then,
seeing that their presence was of an entirely negligible value to
the Wonder, they left him and went into the farther room.

"Well?" asked Challis, "what do you make of him?"

"Is he reading or pretending to read?" parried Lewes. "Do you think
it possible that he could read so fast? Moreover, remember that he
has admitted that he knows few words of the English language, yet he
does not refer from volume to volume; he does not look up the meanings
of the many unknown words which must occur in every definition."

"I know. I had noticed that."

"Then you think he is humbugging--pretending to read?"

"No; that solution seems to me altogether unlikely. He could not,
for one thing, simulate that look of attention. Remember, Lewes,
the child is not yet five years old."

"What is your explanation, then?"

"I am wondering whether the child has not a memory beside which the
memory of a Macaulay would appear insignificant."

Lewes did not grasp Challis's intention. "Even so ..." he began.

"And," continued Challis, "I am wondering whether, if that is the case,
he is, in effect, prepared to learn the whole dictionary by heart,
and, so to speak, collate its contents later, in his mind."

"Oh! Sir!" Lewes smiled. The supposition was too outrageous to be
taken seriously. "Surely, you can't mean that." There was something
in Lewes's tone which carried a hint of contempt for so far-fetched
a hypothesis.

Challis was pacing up and down the library, his hands clasped behind
him. "Yes, I mean it," he said, without looking up. "I put it forward
as a serious theory, worthy of full consideration."

Lewes sneered. "Oh, surely not, sir," he said.

Challis stopped and faced him. "Why not, Lewes; why not?" he
asked, with a kindly smile. "Think of the gap which separates your
intellectual powers from those of a Polynesian savage. Why, after
all, should it be impossible that this child's powers should equally
transcend our own? A freak, if you will, an abnormality, a curious
effect of nature's, like the giant puff-ball--but still----"

"Oh! yes, sir, I grant you the thing is not impossible from a
theoretical point of view," argued Lewes, "but I think you are
theorising on altogether insufficient evidence. I am willing to admit
that such a freak is theoretically possible, but I have not yet found
the indications of such a power in the child."

Challis resumed his pacing. "Quite, quite," he assented; "your method
is perfectly correct--perfectly correct. We must wait."

At twelve o'clock Challis brought a glass of milk and some biscuits,
and set them beside the Wonder--he was at the letter "B."

"Well, how are you getting on?" asked Challis.

The Wonder took not the least notice of the question, but he stretched
out a little hand and took a biscuit and ate it, without looking up
from his reading.

"I wish he'd answer questions," Challis remarked to Lewes, later.

"I should prescribe a sound shaking," returned Lewes.

Challis smiled. "Well, see here, Lewes," he said, "I'll take the
responsibility; you go and experiment, go and shake him."

Lewes looked through the folding doors at the picture of the Wonder,
intent on his study of the great dictionary. "Since you've franked
me," he said, "I'll do it--but not now. I'll wait till he gives me
some occasion."

"Good," replied Challis, "my offer holds ... and, by the way, I have
no doubt that an occasion will present itself. Doesn't it strike you
as likely, Lewes, that we shall see a good deal of the child here?"

They stood for some minutes, watching the picture of that intent
student, framed in the written thoughts of his predecessors.



III

The Wonder ignored an invitation to lunch; he ignored, also, the tray
that was sent in to him. He read on steadily till a quarter to six,
by which time he was at the end of "L," and then he climbed down
from his Encyclopædia, and made for the door. Challis, working in
the farther room, saw him and came out to open the door.

"Are you going now?" he asked.

The child nodded.

"I will order the cart for you, if you will wait ten minutes,"
said Challis.

The child shook his head. "It's very necessary to have air," he said.

Something in the tone and pronunciation struck Challis, and awoke a
long dormant memory. The sentence spoken, suddenly conjured up a vision
of the Stotts' cottage at Stoke, of the Stotts at tea, of a cradle in
the shadow, and of himself, sitting in an uncomfortable armchair and
swinging his stick between his knees. When the child had gone--walking
deliberately, and evidently regarding the mile-and-a-half walk through
the twilight wood and over the deserted Common as a trivial incident
in the day's business--Challis set himself to analyse that curious
association.

As he strolled back across the hall to the library, he tried to
reconstruct the scene of the cottage at Stoke, and to recall the
outline of the conversation he had had with the Stotts.

"Lewes!" he said, when he reached the room in which his secretary was
working, "Lewes, this is curious," and he described the associations
called up by the child's speech. "The curious thing is," he continued,
"that I had gone to advise Mrs. Stott to take a cottage at Pym, because
the Stoke villagers were hostile, in some way, and she did not care
to take the child out in the street. It is more than probable that
I used just those words, 'It is very necessary to have air,' very
probable. Now, what about my memory theory? The child was only six
months old at that time."

Lewes appeared unconvinced. "There is nothing very unusual in the
sentence," he said.

"Forgive me," replied Challis, "I don't agree with you. It is not
phrased as a villager would phrase it, and, as I tell you, it was
not spoken with the local accent."

"You may have spoken the sentence to-day," suggested Lewes.

"I may, of course, though I don't remember saying anything of the sort,
but that would not account for the curiously vivid association which
was conjured up."

Lewes pursed his lips. "No, no, no," he said. "But that is hardly
ground for argument, is it?"

"I suppose not," returned Challis thoughtfully; "but when you take up
psychology, Lewes, I should much like you to specialise in a careful
inquiry into association in connection with memory. I feel certain that
if one can reproduce, as nearly as may be, any complex sensation one
has experienced, no matter how long ago, one will stimulate what I may
call an abnormal memory of all the associations connected with that
experience. Just now I saw the interior of that room in the Stotts'
cottage so clearly that I had an image of a dreadful oleograph of
Disraeli hanging on the wall. But, now, I cannot for the life of me
remember whether there was such an oleograph or not. I do not remember
noticing it at the time."

"Yes, that's very interesting," replied Lewes. "There is certainly
a wide field for research in that direction."

"You might throw much light on our mental processes," replied Challis.

(It was as the outcome of this conversation that Gregory Lewes did,
two years afterwards, take up this line of study. The only result up
to the present time is his little brochure Reflexive Associations,
which has hardly added to our knowledge of the subject.)



IV

Challis's anticipation that he and Lewes would be greatly favoured
by the Wonder's company was fully realised.

The child put in an appearance at half-past nine the next morning,
just as the governess cart was starting out to fetch him. When he was
admitted he went straight to the library, climbed on to the chair,
upon which the volumes of the Encyclopædia still remained, and
continued his reading where he had left off on the previous evening.

He read steadily throughout the day without giving utterance to speech
of any kind.

Challis and Lewes went out in the afternoon, and left the child deep
in study. They came in at five o'clock, and went to the library. The
Wonder, however, was not there.

Challis rang the bell.

"Has little Stott gone?" he asked when Heathcote came.

"I 'aven't seen 'im, sir," said Heathcote.

"Just find out if any one opened the door for him, will you?" said
Challis. "He couldn't possibly have opened that door for himself."

"No one 'asn't let Master Stott hout, sir," Heathcote reported on
his return.

"Are you sure?"

"Quite sure, sir. I've made full hinquiries," said Heathcote with
dignity.

"Well, we'd better find him," said Challis.

"The window is open," suggested Lewes.

"He would hardly ..." began Challis, walking over to the low sill
of the open window, but he broke off in his sentence and continued,
"By Jove, he did, though; look here!"

It was, indeed, quite obvious that the Wonder had made his exit by
the window; the tiny prints of his feet were clearly marked in the
mould of the flowerbed; he had, moreover, disregarded all results of
early spring floriculture.

"See how he has smashed those daffodils," said Lewes. "What an
infernally cheeky little brute he is!"

"What interests me is the logic of the child," returned Challis. "I
would venture to guess that he wasted no time in trying to attract
attention. The door was closed, so he just got out of the window. I
rather admire the spirit; there is something Napoleonic about
him. Don't you think so?"

Lewes shrugged his shoulders. Heathcote's expression was quite
non-committal.

"You'd better send Jessop up to Pym, Heathcote,"  said Challis. "Let
him find out whether the child is safe at home."

Jessop reported an hour afterwards that Master Stott had arrived home
quite safely, and Mrs. Stott was much obliged.



V

"What can I give that child to read to-day?" asked Challis at breakfast
next morning.

"I should reverse the arrangement; let him sit on the Dictionary and
read the Encyclopædia." Lewes always approached the subject of the
Wonder with a certain supercilious contempt.

"You are not convinced yet that he isn't humbugging?"

"No! Frankly, I'm not."

"Well, well, we must wait for more evidence, before we argue about
it," said Challis, but they sat on over the breakfast-table, waiting
for the child to put in an appearance, and their conversation hovered
over the topic of his intelligence.

"Half-past ten?" Challis ejaculated at last, with surprise. "We are
getting into slack habits, Lewes." He rose and rang the bell.

"Apparently the Stott infant has had enough of it," suggested
Lewes. "Perhaps he has exhausted the interest of dictionary
illustrations."

"We shall see," replied Challis, and then to a deferentially appearing
Heathcote he said: "Has Master Stott come this morning?"

"No, sir. Leastways, no one 'asn't let 'im in, sir."

"It may be that he is mentally collating the results of the past
two days' reading," said Challis, as he and Lewes made their way to
the library.

"Oh!" was all Lewes's reply, but it conveyed much of impatient contempt
for his employer's attitude.

Challis only smiled.

When they entered the library they found the Wonder hard at work, and
he had, of his own initiative, adopted the plan ironically suggested
by Lewes, for he had succeeded in transferring the Dictionary volumes
to the chair, and he was deep in volume one, of the eleventh edition
of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

The library was never cleared up by any one except Challis or his
deputy, but an early housemaid had been sent to dust, and she had
left the casement of one of the lower lights of the window open. The
means of the Wonder's entrance was thus clearly in evidence.

"It's Napoleonic," murmured Challis.

"It's most infernal cheek," returned Lewes in a loud voice, "I
should not be at all surprised if that promised shaking were not
administered to-day."

The Wonder took no notice. Challis says that on that morning his eyes
were travelling down the page at about the rate at which one could
count the lines.

"He isn't reading," said Lewes. "No one could read as fast as that,
and most certainly not a child of four and a half."

"If he would only answer questions...." hesitated Challis.

"Oh! of course he won't do that," said Lewes. "He's clever enough
not to give himself away."

The two men went over to the table and looked down over the child's
shoulder. He was in the middle of the article on algebra.

Lewes made a gesture. "Now do you believe he's humbugging?" he asked
confidently, and made no effort to modulate his voice.

Challis drew his eyebrows together. "My boy," he said, and laid his
hand lightly on Victor Stott's shoulder, "can you understand what
you are reading there?"

But no answer was vouchsafed. Challis sighed. "Come along, Lewes,"
he said; "we must waste no more time."

Lewes wore a look of smug triumph as they went to the farther room, but
he was clever enough to refrain from expressing his triumph in speech.



VI

Challis gave directions that the window which the Wonder had found to
be his most convenient method of entry and exit should be kept open,
except at night; and a stool was placed under the sill inside the
room, and a low bench was fixed outside to facilitate the child's
goings and comings. Also, a little path was made across the flowerbed.

The Wonder gave no trouble. He arrived at nine o'clock every morning,
Sunday included, and left at a quarter to six in the evening. On
wet days he was provided with a waterproof which had evidently been
made by his mother out of a larger garment. This he took off when he
entered the room and left on the stool under the window.

He was given a glass of milk and a plate of bread-and-butter at twelve
o'clock; and except for this he demanded and received no attention.

For three weeks he devoted himself exclusively to the study of the
Encyclopædia.

Lewes was puzzled.

Challis spoke little of the child during these three weeks, but
he often stood at the entrance to the farther rooms and watched
the Wonder's eyes travelling so rapidly yet so intently down the
page. That sight had a curious fascination for him; he returned to
his own work by an effort, and an hour afterwards he would be back
again at the door of the larger room. Sometimes Lewes would hear
him mutter: "If he would only answer a few questions...." There was
always one hope in Challis's mind. He hoped that some sort of climax
might be reached when the Encyclopædia was finished. The child must,
at least, ask then for another book. Even if he chose one for himself,
his choice might furnish some sort of a test.

So Challis waited and said little; and Lewes was puzzled, because
he was beginning to doubt whether it were possible that the child
could sustain a pose so long. That, in itself, would be evidence
of extraordinary abnormality. Lewes fumbled in his mind for another
hypothesis.

This reading craze may be symptomatic of some form of idiocy, was his
thought; "and I don't believe he does read," was the inevitable rider.

Mrs. Stott usually came to meet her son, and sometimes she would come
early in the afternoon and stand at the window watching him at his
work; but neither Challis nor Lewes ever saw the Wonder display by
any sign that he was aware of his mother's presence.

During those three weeks the Wonder held himself completely detached
from any intercourse with the world of men. At the end of that period
he once more manifested his awareness of the human factor in existence.

Challis, if he spoke little to Lewes of the Wonder during this time,
maintained a strict observation of the child's doings.

The Wonder began his last volume of the Encyclopædia one Wednesday
afternoon soon after lunch, and on Thursday morning, Challis was
continually in and out of the room watching the child's progress, and
noting his nearness to the end of the colossal task he had undertaken.

At a quarter to twelve he took up his old position in the doorway,
and with his hands clasped behind his back he watched the reading of
the last forty pages.

There was no slackening and no quickening in the Wonder's rate of
progress. He read the articles under "Z" with the same attention he
had given to the remainder of the work, and then, arrived at the last
page, he closed the volume and took up the Index.

Challis suffered a qualm; not so much on account of the possible
postponement of the crisis he was awaiting, as because he saw that
the reading of the Index could only be taken as a sign that the
whole study had been unintelligent. No one could conceivably have
any purpose in reading through an index.

And at this moment Lewes joined him in the doorway.

"What volume has he got to now?" asked Lewes.

"The Index," returned Challis.

Lewes was no less quick in drawing his inference than Challis had been.

"Well, that settles it, I should think," was Lewes's comment.

"Wait, wait," returned Challis.

The Wonder turned a dozen pages at once, glanced at the new opening,
made a further brief examination of two or three headings near the
end of the volume, closed the book, and looked up.

"Have you finished?" asked Challis.

The Wonder shook his head. "All this," he said--he indicated with
a small and dirty hand the pile of volumes that were massed round
him--"all this ..." he repeated, hesitated for a word, and again
shook his head with that solemn, deliberate impressiveness which
marked all his actions.

Challis came towards the child, leaned over the table for a moment,
and then sat down opposite to him. Between the two protagonists
hovered Lewes, sceptical, inclined towards aggression.

"I am most interested," said Challis. "Will you try to tell me,
my boy, what you think of--all this?"

"So elementary ... inchoate ... a disjunctive ... patchwork" replied
the Wonder. His abstracted eyes were blind to the objective world of
our reality; he seemed to be profoundly analysing the very elements
of thought.



VII

Then that almost voiceless child found words. Heathcote's announcement
of lunch was waved aside, the long afternoon waned, and still that
thin trickle of sound flowed on.

The Wonder spoke in odd, pedantic phrases; he used the technicalities
of every science; he constructed his sentences in unusual ways, and
often he paused for a word and gave up the search, admitting that
his meaning could not be expressed through the medium of any language
known to him.

Occasionally Challis would interrupt him fiercely, would even rise
from his chair and pace the room, arguing, stating a point of view,
combating some suggestion that underlay the trend of that pitiless
wisdom which in the end bore him down with its unanswerable insistence.

During those long hours much was stated by that small, thin voice
which was utterly beyond the comprehension of the two listeners;
indeed, it is doubtful whether even Challis understood a tithe of
the theory that was actually expressed in words.

As for Lewes, though he was at the time non-plussed, quelled, he was
in the outcome impressed rather by the marvellous powers of memory
exhibited than by the far finer powers shown in the superhuman logic
of the synthesis.

One sees that Lewes entered upon the interview with a mind predisposed
to criticise, to destroy. There can be no doubt that as he listened
his uninformed mind was endeavouring to analyse, to weigh, and to
oppose; and this antagonism and his own thoughts continually interposed
between him and the thought of the speaker. Lewes's account of what
was spoken on that afternoon is utterly worthless.

Challis's failure to comprehend was not, at the outset, due to his
antagonistic attitude. He began with an earnest wish to understand:
he failed only because the thing spoken was beyond the scope of his
intellectual powers. But he did, nevertheless, understand the trend of
that analysis of progress; he did in some half-realised way apprehend
the gist of that terrible deduction of a final adjustment.

He must have apprehended, in part, for he fiercely combated the
argument, only to quaver, at last, into a silence which permitted
again that trickle of hesitating, pedantic speech, which was yet so
overwhelming, so conclusive.

As the afternoon wore on, however, Challis's attitude must have
changed; he must have assumed an armour of mental resistance not
unlike the resistance of Lewes. Challis perceived, however dimly,
that life would hold no further pleasure for him if he accepted that
theory of origin, evolution, and final adjustment; he found in this
cosmogony no place for his own idealism; and he feared to be convinced
even by that fraction of the whole argument which he could understand.

We see that Challis, with all his apparent devotion to science, was
never more than a dilettante. He had another stake in the world which,
at the last analysis, he valued more highly than the acquisition of
knowledge. Those means of ease, of comfort, of liberty, of opportunity
to choose his work among various interests, were the ruling influence
of his life. With it all Challis was an idealist, and unpractical. His
genial charity, his refinement of mind, his unthinking generosity,
indicate the bias of a character which inclined always towards a
picturesque optimism. It is not difficult to understand that he
dared not allow himself to be convinced by Victor Stott's appalling
synthesis.

At last, when the twilight was deepening into night, the voice ceased,
the child's story had been told, and it had not been understood. The
Wonder never again spoke of his theory of life. He realised from that
time that no one could comprehend him.

As he rose to go, he asked one question that, simple as was its
expression, had a deep and wonderful significance.

"Is there none of my kind?" he said. "Is this," and he laid a hand
on the pile of books before him, "is this all?"

"There is none of your kind," replied Challis; and the little figure
born into a world that could not understand him, that was not ready
to receive him, walked to the window and climbed out into the darkness.



(Henry Challis is the only man who could ever have given any account
of that extraordinary analysis of life, and he made no effort to
recall the fundamental basis of the argument, and so allowed his
memory of the essential part to fade. Moreover, he had a marked
disinclination to speak of that afternoon or of anything that was said
by Victor Stott during those six momentous hours of expression. It is
evident that Challis's attitude to Victor Stott was not unlike the
attitude of Captain Wallis to Victor Stott's father on the occasion
of Hampdenshire's historic match with Surrey. "This man will have to
be barred," Wallis said. "It means the end of cricket." Challis, in
effect, thought that if Victor Stott were encouraged, it would mean
the end of research, philosophy, all the mystery, idealism, and joy
of life. Once, and once only, did Challis give me any idea of what
he had learned during that afternoon's colloquy, and the substance
of what Challis then told me will be found at the end of this volume.)







CHAPTER X

HIS PASTORS AND MASTERS


I

For many months after that long afternoon in the library, Challis
was affected with a fever of restlessness, and his work on the book
stood still. He was in Rome during May, and in June he was seized by
a sudden whim and went to China by the Trans-Siberian railway. Lewes
did not accompany him. Challis preferred, one imagines, to have no
intercourse with Lewes while the memory of certain pronouncements was
still fresh. He might have been tempted to discuss that interview,
and if, as was practically certain, Lewes attempted to pour contempt
on the whole affair, Challis might have been drawn into a defence
which would have revived many memories he wished to obliterate.

He came back to London in September--he made the return journey by
steamer--and found his secretary still working at the monograph on
the primitive peoples of Melanesia.

Lewes had spent the whole summer in Challis's town house in Eaton
Square, whither all the material had been removed two days after that
momentous afternoon in the library of Challis Court.

"I have been wanting your help badly for some time, sir," Lewes said on
the evening of Challis's return. "Are you proposing to take up the work
again? If not...." Gregory Lewes thought he was wasting valuable time.

"Yes, yes, of course; I am ready to begin again now, if you care to
go on with me," said Challis. He talked for a few minutes of the book
without any great show of interest. Presently they came to a pause,
and Lewes suggested that he should give some account of how his time
had been spent.

"To-morrow," replied Challis, "to-morrow will be time enough. I shall
settle down again in a few days." He hesitated a moment, and then said:
"Any news from Chilborough?"

"N-no, I don't think so," returned Lewes. He was occupied with his
own interests; he doubted Challis's intention to continue his work
on the book--the announcement had been so half-hearted.

"What about that child?" asked Challis.

"That child?" Lewes appeared to have forgotten the existence of
Victor Stott.

"That abnormal child of Stott's?" prompted Challis.

"Oh! Of course, yes. I believe he still goes nearly every day to the
library. I have been down there two or three times, and found him
reading. He has learned the use of the index-catalogue. He can get
any book he wants. He uses the steps."

"Do you know what he reads?"

"No; I can't say I do."

"What do you think will become of him?"

"Oh! these infant prodigies, you know," said Lewes with a large air
of authority, "they all go the same way. Most of them die young,
of course, the others develop into ordinary commonplace men rather
under than over the normal ability. After all, it is what one
would expect. Nature always maintains her average by some means or
another. If a child like this with his abnormal memory were to go on
developing, there would be no place for him in the world's economy. The
idea is inconceivable."

"Quite, quite," murmured Challis, and after a short silence he added:
"You think he will deteriorate, that his faculties will decay
prematurely?"

"I should say there could be no doubt of it," replied Lewes.

"Ah! well. I'll go down and have a look at him, one day next week,"
said Challis; but he did not go till the middle of October.

The direct cause of his going was a letter from Crashaw, who offered
to come up to town, as the matter was one of "really peculiar urgency."

"I wonder if young Stott has been blaspheming again," Challis remarked
to Lewes. "Wire the man that I'll go down and see him this afternoon. I
shall motor. Say I'll be at Stoke about half-past three."



II

Challis was ushered into Crashaw's study on his arrival, and found
the rector in company with another man--introduced as Mr. Forman--a
jolly-looking, high-complexioned man of sixty or so, with a great
quantity of white hair on his head and face; he was wearing an
old-fashioned morning-coat and grey trousers that were noticeably
too short for him.

Crashaw lost no time in introducing the subject of "really peculiar
urgency," but he rambled in his introduction.

"You have probably forgotten," he said, "that last spring I had to
bring a most horrible charge against a child called Victor Stott,
who has since been living, practically, as I may say, under your
ægis, that is, he has, at least, spent a greater part of his day,
er--playing in your library at Challis Court."

"Quite, quite; I remember perfectly," said Challis. "I made myself
responsible for him up to a certain point. I gave him an occupation. It
was intended, was it not, to divert his mind from speaking against
religion to the yokels?"

"Quite a character, if I may say so," put in Mr. Forman cheerfully.

Crashaw was seated at his study table; the affair had something the
effect of an examining magistrate taking the evidence of witnesses.

"Yes, yes," he said testily; "I did ask your help, Mr. Challis,
and I did, in a way, receive some assistance from you. That is,
the child has to some extent been isolated by spending so much of
his time at your house."

"Has he broken out again?" asked Challis.

"If I understand you to mean has the child been speaking openly
on any subject connected with religion, I must say 'No,'" said
Crashaw. "But he never attends any Sunday school, or place of worship;
he has received no instruction in--er--any sacred subject, though
I understand he is able to read; and his time is spent among books
which, pardon me, would not, I suppose, be likely to give a serious
turn to his thoughts."

"Serious?" questioned Challis.

"Perhaps I should say 'religious,'" replied Crashaw. "To me the two
words are synonymous."

Mr. Forman bowed his head slightly with an air of reverence, and
nodded two or three times to express his perfect approval of the
rector's sentiments.

"You think the child's mind is being perverted by his intercourse
with the books in the library where he--he--'plays' was your word,
I believe?"

"No, not altogether," replied Crashaw, drawing his eyebrows
together. "We can hardly suppose that he is able at so tender an
age to read, much less to understand, those works of philosophy and
science which would produce an evil effect on his mind. I am willing
to admit, since I, too, have had some training in scientific reading,
that writers on those subjects are not easily understood even by the
mature intelligence."

"Then why, exactly, do you wish me to prohibit the child from coming
to Challis Court?"

"Possibly you have not realised that the child is now five years
old?" said Crashaw with an air of conferring illumination.

"Indeed! Yes. An age of some discretion, no doubt," returned Challis.

"An age at which the State requires that he should receive the elements
of education," continued Crashaw.

"Eh?" said Challis.

"Time he went to school," explained Mr. Forman. "I've been after him,
you know. I'm the attendance officer for this district."

Challis for once committed a breach of good manners. The import of the
thing suddenly appealed to his sense of humour: he began to chuckle
and then he laughed out a great, hearty laugh, such as had not been
stirred in him for twenty years.

"Oh! forgive me, forgive me," he said, when he had recovered his
self-control. "But you don't know; you can't conceive the utter,
childish absurdity of setting that child to recite the multiplication
table with village infants of his own age. Oh! believe me, if
you could only guess, you would laugh with me. It's so funny, so
inimitably funny."

"I fail to see, Mr. Challis," said Crashaw, "that there is anything
in any way absurd or--or unusual in the preposition."

"Five is the age fixed by the State," said Mr. Forman. He had relaxed
into a broad smile in sympathy with Challis's laugh, but he had now
relapsed into a fair imitation of Crashaw's intense seriousness.

"Oh! How can I explain?" said Challis. "Let me take an instance. You
propose to teach him, among other things, the elements of arithmetic?"

"It is a part of the curriculum," replied Mr. Forman.

"I have only had one conversation with this child," went on
Challis--and at the mention of that conversation his brows drew
together and he became very grave again; "but in the course of that
conversation this child had occasion to refer, by way of illustration,
to some abstruse theorem of the differential calculus. He did it,
you will understand, by way of making his meaning clear--though the
illustration was utterly beyond me: that reference represented an
act of intellectual condescension."

"God bless me, you don't say so?" said Mr. Forman.

"I cannot see," said Crashaw, "that this instance of yours,
Mr. Challis, has any real bearing on the situation. If the child is
a mathematical genius--there have been instances in history, such as
Blaise Pascal--he would not, of course, receive elementary instruction
in a subject with which he was already acquainted."

"You could not find any subject, believe me, Crashaw, in which he
could be instructed by any teacher in a Council school."

"Forgive me, I don't agree with you," returned Crashaw. "He is sadly
in need of some religious training."

"He would not get that at a Council school," said Challis, and
Mr. Forman shook his head sadly, as though he greatly deprecated
the fact.

"He must learn to recognise authority," said Crashaw. "When he has
been taught the necessity of submitting himself to all his governors,
teachers, spiritual pastors, and masters: ordering himself lowly and
reverently to all his betters; when, I say, he has learnt that lesson,
he may be in a fit and proper condition to receive the teachings of
the Holy Church."

Mr. Forman appeared to think he was attending divine service. If the
rector had said "Let us pray," there can be no doubt that he would
immediately have fallen on his knees.

Challis shook his head. "You can't understand, Crashaw," he said.

"I do understand," said Crashaw, rising to his feet, "and I intend
to see that the statute is not disobeyed in the case of this child,
Victor Stott."

Challis shrugged his shoulders; Mr. Forman assumed an expression of
stern determination.

"In any case, why drag me into it?" asked Challis.

Crashaw sat down again. The flush which had warmed his sallow
skin subsided as his passion died out. He had worked himself into a
condition of righteous indignation, but the calm politeness of Challis
rebuked him. If Crashaw prided himself on his devotion to the Church,
he did not wish that attitude to overshadow the pride he also took in
the belief that he was Challis's social equal. Crashaw's father had
been a lawyer, with a fair practice in Derby, but he had worked his
way up to a partnership from the position of office-boy, and Percy
Crashaw seldom forgot to be conscious that he was a gentleman by
education and profession.

"I did not wish to drag you into this business," he said quietly,
putting his elbows on the writing-table in front of him, and reassuming
the judicial attitude he had adopted earlier; "but I regard this
child as, in some sense, your protégé." Crashaw put the tips of his
fingers together, and Mr. Forman watched him warily, waiting for
his cue. If this was to be a case for prayer, Mr. Forman was ready,
with a clean white handkerchief to kneel upon.

"In some sense, perhaps," returned Challis. "I haven't seen him for
some months."

"Cannot you see the necessity of his attending school?" asked Crashaw,
this time with an insinuating suavity; he believed that Challis was
coming round.

"Oh!" Challis sighed with a note of expostulation. "Oh! the thing's
grotesque, ridiculous."

"If that's so," put in Mr. Forman, who had been struck by a brilliant
idea, "why not bring the child here, and let the Reverend Mr. Crashaw,
or myself, put a few general questions to 'im?"

"Ye-es," hesitated Crashaw, "that might be done; but, of course,
the decision does not rest with us."

"It rests with the Local Authority," mused Challis. He was running
over three or four names of members of that body who were known to him.

"Certainly," said Crashaw, "the Local Education Authority alone has the
right to prosecute, but----" He did not state his antithesis. They had
come to the crux which Crashaw had wished to avoid. He had no weight
with the committee of the L.E.A., and Challis's recommendation would
have much weight. Crashaw intended that Victor Stott should attend
school, but he had bungled his preliminaries: he had rested on his
own authority, and forgotten that Challis had little respect for that
influence. Conciliation was the only card to play now.

"If I brought him, he wouldn't answer your questions," sighed
Challis. "He's very difficult to deal with."

"Is he, indeed?" sympathised Mr. Forman. "I've 'ardly seen 'im myself;
not to speak to, that is."

"He might come with his mother," suggested Crashaw.

Challis shook his head. "By the way, it is the mother whom you would
proceed against?" he asked.

"The parent is responsible," said Mr. Forman. "She will be brought
before a magistrate and fined for the first offence."

"I shan't fine her if she comes before me," replied Challis.

Crashaw smiled. He meant to avoid that eventuality.

The little meeting lapsed into a brief silence. There seemed to be
nothing more to say.

"Well," said Crashaw, at last, with a rising inflexion that had a
conciliatory, encouraging, now-my-little-man kind of air, "We-ll, of
course, no one wishes to proceed to extremes. I think, Mr. Challis,
I think I may say that you are the person who has most influence
in this matter, and I cannot believe that you will go against the
established authority both of the Church and the State. If it were
only for the sake of example."

Challis rose deliberately. He shook his head, and unconsciously his
hands went behind his back. There was hardly room for him to pace up
and down, but he took two steps towards Mr. Forman, who immediately
rose to his feet; and then he turned and went over to the window. It
was from there that he pronounced his ultimatum.

"Regulations, laws, religious and lay authorities," he said, "come
into existence in order to deal with the rule, the average. That
must be so. But if we are a reasoning, intellectual people we must
have some means of dealing with the exception. That means rests
with a consensus of intelligent opinion strong enough to set the
rule upon one side. In an overwhelming majority of cases there
is no such consensus of opinion, and the exceptional individual
suffers by coming within the rule of a law which should not apply
to him. Now, I put it to you, as reasoning, intelligent men" ('ear,
'ear, murmured Mr. Forman automatically), "are we, now that we have
the power to perform a common act of justice, to exempt an unfortunate
individual exception who has come within the rule of a law that holds
no application for him, or are we to exhibit a crass stupidity by
enforcing that law? Is it not better to take the case into our own
hands, and act according to the dictates of common sense?"

"Very forcibly put," murmured Mr. Forman.

"I'm not finding any fault with the law or the principle of the law,"
continued Challis; "but it is, it must be, framed for the average. We
must use our discretion in dealing with the exception--and this
is an exception such as has never occurred since we have had an
Education Act."

"I don't agree with you," said Crashaw, stubbornly. "I do not consider
this an exception."

"But you must agree with me, Crashaw. I have a certain amount of
influence and I shall use it."

"In that case," replied Crashaw, rising to his feet, "I shall fight
you to the bitter end. I am determined"--he raised his voice and
struck the writing-table with his fist--"I am determined that this
infidel child shall go to school. I am prepared, if necessary, to
spend all my leisure in seeing that the law is carried out."

Mr. Forman had also risen. "Very right, very right, indeed," he said,
and he knitted his mild brows and stroked his patriarchal white beard
with a simulation of stern determination.

"I think you would be better advised to let the matter rest,"
said Challis.

Mr. Forman looked inquiringly at the representative of the Church.

"I shall fight," replied Crashaw, stubbornly, fiercely.

"Ha!" said Mr. Forman.

"Very well, as you think best," was Challis's last word.

As Challis walked down to the gate, where his motor was awaiting him,
Mr. Forman trotted up from behind and ranged himself alongside.

"More rain wanted yet for the roots, sir," he said. "September was
a grand month for 'arvest, but we want rain badly now."

"Quite, quite," murmured Challis, politely. He shook hands with
Mr. Forman before he got into the car.

Mr. Forman, standing politely bareheaded, saw that Mr. Challis's car
went in the direction of Ailesworth.







CHAPTER XI

HIS EXAMINATION


I

Challis's first visit was paid to Sir Deane Elmer, that man of many
activities, whose name inevitably suggests his favourite phrase of
"Organised Progress"--with all its variants.

This is hardly the place in which to criticise a man of such
diverse abilities as Deane Elmer, a man whose name still figures so
prominently in the public press in connection with all that is most
modern in eugenics; with the Social Reform programme of the moderate
party; with the reconstruction of our penal system; with education,
and so many kindred interests; and, finally, of course, with colour
photography and process printing. This last Deane Elmer always spoke
of as his hobby, but we may doubt whether all his interests were
not hobbies in the same sense. He is the natural descendant of those
earlier amateur scientists--the adjective conveys no reproach--of the
nineteenth century, among whom we remember such striking figures as
those of Lord Avebury and Sir Francis Galton.

In appearance Deane Elmer was a big, heavy, rather corpulent man, with
a high complexion, and his clean-shaven jowl and his succession of
chins hung in heavy folds. But any suggestion of material grossness
was contradicted by the brightness of his rather pale-blue eyes,
by his alertness of manner, and by his ready, whimsical humour.

As chairman of the Ailesworth County Council, and its most prominent
unpaid public official--after the mayor--Sir Deane Elmer was certainly
the most important member of the Local Authority, and Challis wisely
sought him at once. He found him in the garden of his comparatively
small establishment on the Quainton side of the town. Elmer was very
much engaged in photographing flowers from nature through the ruled
screen and colour filter--in experimenting with the Elmer process,
in fact; by which the intermediate stage of a coloured negative is
rendered unnecessary. His apparatus was complicated and cumbrous.

"Show Mr. Challis out here," he commanded the man who brought the
announcement.

"You must forgive me, Challis," said Elmer, when Challis appeared. "We
haven't had such a still day for weeks. It's the wind upsets us in
this process. Screens create a partial vacuum."

He was launched on a lecture upon his darling process before Challis
could get in a word. It was best to let him have his head, and Challis
took an intelligent interest.

It was not until the photographs were taken, and his two assistants
could safely be trusted to complete the mechanical operations,
that Elmer could be divorced from his hobby. He was full of
jubilation. "We should have excellent results," he boomed--he had a
tremendous voice--"but we shan't be able to judge until we get the
blocks made. We do it all on the spot. I have a couple of platens in
the shops here; but we shan't be able to take a pull until to-morrow
morning, I'm afraid. You shall have a proof, Challis. We should get
magnificent results." He looked benignantly at the vault of heaven,
which had been so obligingly free from any current of air.

Challis was beginning to fear that even now he would be allowed no
opportunity to open the subject of his mission. But quite suddenly
Elmer dropped the shutter on his preoccupation, and with that ready
adaptability which was so characteristic of the man, forgot his hobby
for the time being, and turned his whole attention to a new subject.

"Well?" he said, "what is the latest news in anthropology?"

"A very remarkable phenomenon," replied Challis. "That is what I have
come to see you about."

"I thought you were in Paraguay pigging it with the Guaranis----"

"No, no; I don't touch the Americas," interposed Challis. "I want
all your attention, Elmer. This is important."

"Come into my study," said Elmer, "and let us have the facts. What
will you have--tea, whisky, beer?"

Challis's résumé of the facts need not be reported. When it was
accomplished, Elmer put several keen questions, and finally delivered
his verdict thus:

"We must see the boy, Challis. Personally I am, of course, satisfied,
but we must not give Crashaw opportunity to raise endless questions,
as he can and will. There is Mayor Purvis, the grocer, to be reckoned
with, you must remember. He represents a powerful Nonconformist
influence. Crashaw will get hold of him--and work him if we see
Purvis first. Purvis always stiffens his neck against any breach of
conventional procedure. If Crashaw saw him first, well and good, Purvis
would immediately jump to the conclusion that Crashaw intended some
subtle attack on the Nonconformist position, and would side with us."

"I don't think I know Purvis," mused Challis.

"Purvis & Co. in the Square," prompted Elmer. "Black-and-white fellow;
black moustache and side whiskers, black eyes and white face. There's
a suggestion of the Methodist pulpit about him. Doesn't appear in the
shop much, and when he does, always looks as if he'd sooner sell you
a Bible than a bottle of whisky."

"Ah, yes! I know," said Challis. "I daresay you're right, Elmer; but
it will be difficult to persuade this child to answer any questions
his examiners may put to him."

"Surely he must be open to reason," roared Elmer. "You tell me he has
an extraordinary intelligence, and in the next sentence you imply
that the child's a fool who can't open his mouth to serve his own
interests. What's your paradox?"

"Sublimated material. Intellectual insight and absolute spiritual
blindness," replied Challis, getting to his feet. "The child has gone
too far in one direction--in another he has made not one step. His
mind is a magnificent, terrible machine. He has the imagination
of a mathematician and a logician developed beyond all conception,
he has not one spark of the imagination of a poet. And so he cannot
deal with men; he can't understand their weaknesses and limitations;
they are geese and hens to him, creatures to be scared out of his
vicinity. However, I will see what I can do. Could you arrange for
the members of the Authority to come to my place?"

"I should think so. Yes," said Elmer. "I say, Challis, are you sure
you're right about this child? Sounds to me like some--some freak."

"You'll see," returned Challis. "I'll try and arrange an
interview. I'll let you know."

"And, by the way," said Elmer, "you had better invite Crashaw to
be present. He will put Purvis's back up, and that'll enlist the
difficult grocer on our side probably."

When Challis had gone, Elmer stood for a few minutes, thoughtfully
scratching the ample red surface of his wide, clean-shaven cheek. "I
don't know," he ejaculated at last, addressing his empty study, "I
don't know." And with that expression he put all thought of Victor
Stott away from him, and sat down to write an exhaustive article on
the necessity for a broader basis in primary education.



II

Challis called at the rectory of Stoke-Underhill on his way back to
his own house.

"I give way," was the characteristic of his attitude to Crashaw, and
the rector suppled his back again, remembered the Derby office-boy's
tendency to brag, and made the amende honorable. He even overdid
his magnanimity and came too near subservience--so lasting is the
influence of the lessons of youth.

Crashaw did not mention that in the interval between the two interviews
he had called upon Mr. Purvis in the Square. The ex-mayor had refused
to commit himself to any course of action.

Challis forgot the rectory and all that it connoted before he was well
outside the rectory's front door. Challis had a task before him that he
regarded with the utmost distaste. He had warmly championed a cause;
he had been heated by the presentation of a manifest injustice which
was none the less tyrannical because it was ridiculous. But now he
realised that it was only the abstract question which had aroused his
enthusiastic advocacy, and he shrank from the interview with Victor
Stott--that small, deliberate, intimidating child.

Henry Challis, the savant, the man of repute in letters, the respected
figure in the larger world; Challis, the proprietor and landlord;
Challis, the power among known men, knew that he would have to
plead, to humble himself, to be prepared for a rebuff--worst of all,
to acknowledge the justice of taking so undignified a position. Any
aristocrat may stoop with dignity when he condescends of his own free
will; but there are few who can submit gracefully to deserved contempt.

Challis was one of the few. He had many admirable
qualities. Nevertheless, during that short motor ride from Stoke to
his own house, he resented the indignity he anticipated, resented it
intensely--and submitted.



III

He was allowed no respite. Victor Stott was emerging from the library
window as Challis rolled up to the hall door. It was one of Ellen
Mary's days--she stood respectfully in the background while her son
descended; she curtsied to Challis as he came forward.

He hesitated a moment. He would not risk insult in the presence of
his chauffeur and Mrs. Stott. He confronted the Wonder; he stood
before him, and over him like a cliff.

"I must speak to you for a moment on a matter of some importance,"
said Challis to the little figure below him, and as he spoke he
looked over the child's head at the child's mother. "It is a matter
that concerns your own welfare. Will you come into the house with me
for a few minutes?"

Ellen Mary nodded, and Challis understood. He turned and led
the way. At the door, however, he stood aside and spoke again to
Mrs. Stott. "Won't you come in and have some tea, or something?" he
asked.

"No, sir, thank you, sir," replied Ellen Mary; "I'll just wait 'ere
till 'e's ready."

"At least come in and sit down," said Challis, and she came in and sat
in the hall. The Wonder had already preceded them into the house. He
had walked into the morning-room--probably because the door stood open,
though he was now tall enough to reach the handles of the Challis
Court doors. He stood in the middle of the room when Challis entered.

"Won't you sit down?" said Challis.

The Wonder shook his head.

"I don't know if you are aware," began Challis, "that there is a system
of education in England at the present time, which requires that every
child should attend school at the age of five years, unless the parents
are able to provide their children with an education elsewhere."

The Wonder nodded.

Challis inferred that he need proffer no further information with
regard to the Education Act.

"Now, it is very absurd," he continued, "and I have, myself, pointed
out the absurdity; but there is a man of some influence in this
neighbourhood who insists that you should attend the elementary
school." He paused, but the Wonder gave no sign.

"I have argued with this man," continued Challis, "and I have also
seen another member of the Local Education Authority--a man of some
note in the larger world--and it seems that you cannot be exempted
unless you convince the Authority that your knowledge is such that
to give you a Council school education would be the most absurd farce."

"Cannot you stand in loco parentis?" asked the Wonder suddenly,
in his still, thin voice.

"You mean," said Challis, startled by this outburst, "that I am in
a sense providing you with an education? Quite true; but there is
Crashaw to deal with."

"Inform him," said the Wonder.

Challis sighed. "I have," he said, "but he can't understand." And
then, feeling the urgent need to explain something of the motives that
govern this little world of ours--the world into which this strangely
logical exception had been born--Challis attempted an exposition.

"I know," he said, "that these things must seem to you utterly absurd,
but you must try to realise that you are an exception to the world
about you; that Crashaw or I, or, indeed, the greatest minds of the
present day, are not ruled by the fine logic which you are able to
exercise. We are children compared to you. We are swayed even in
the making of our laws by little primitive emotions and passions,
self-interests, desires. And at the best we are not capable of
ordering our lives and our government to those just ends which we
may see, some of us, are abstractly right and fine. We are at the
mercy of that great mass of the people who have not yet won to an
intellectual and discriminating judgment of how their own needs may
best be served, and whose representatives consider the interests
of a party, a constituency, and especially of their own personal
ambitions and welfare, before the needs of humanity as a whole,
or even the humanity of these little islands.

"Above all, we are divided man against man. We are split into parties
and factions, by greed and jealousies, petty spites and self-seeking,
by unintelligence, by education, and by our inability--a mental
inability--'to see life steadily and see it whole,' and lastly, perhaps
chiefly, by our intense egotisms, both physical and intellectual.

"Try to realise this. It is necessary, because whatever your wisdom,
you have to live in a world of comparative ignorance, a world which
cannot appreciate you, but which can and will fall back upon the
compelling power of the savage--the resort to physical, brute force."

The Wonder nodded. "You suggest----?" he said.

"Merely that you should consent to answer certain elementary questions
which the members of the Local Authority will put to you," replied
Challis. "I can arrange that these questions be asked here--in the
library. Will you consent?"

The Wonder nodded, and made his way into the hall, without another
word. His mother rose and opened the front door for him.

As Challis watched the curious couple go down the drive, he sighed
again, perhaps with relief, perhaps at the impotence of the world
of men.



IV

There were four striking figures on the Education Committee selected
by the Ailesworth County Council.

The first of these was Sir Deane Elmer, who was also chairman of the
Council at this time. The second was the vice-chairman, Enoch Purvis,
the ex-mayor, commonly, if incorrectly, known as "Mayor" Purvis.

The third was Richard Standing, J.P., who owned much property on
the Quainton side of the town. He was a bluff, hearty man, devoted
to sport and agriculture; a Conservative by birth and inclination,
a staunch upholder of the Church and the Tariff Reform movement.

The fourth was the Rev. Philip Steven, a co-opted member of the
Committee, head master of the Ailesworth Grammar School. Steven was
a tall, thin man with bent shoulders, and he had a long, thin face,
the length of which was exaggerated by his square brown beard. He wore
gold-mounted spectacles which, owing to his habit of dropping his head,
always needed adjustment whenever he looked up. The movement of lifting
his head and raising his hand to his glasses had become so closely
associated, that his hand went up even when there was no apparent
need for the action. Steven spoke of himself as a Broad Churchman,
and in his speech on prize-day he never omitted some allusion to the
necessity for "marching" or "keeping step" with the times. But Elmer
was inclined to laugh at this assumption of modernity. "Steven,"
he said, on one occasion, "marks time and thinks he is keeping
step. And every now and then he runs a little to catch up." The point
of Elmer's satire lay in the fact that Steven was usually to be seen
either walking very slowly, head down, lost in abstraction; or--when
aroused to a sense of present necessity--going with long strides as
if intent on catching up with the times without further delay. Very
often, too, he might be seen running across the school playground,
his hand up to those elusive glasses of his. "There goes Mr. Steven,
catching up with the times," had become an accepted phrase.

There were other members of the Education Committee, notably
Mrs. Philip Steven, but they were subordinate. If those four
striking figures were unanimous, no other member would have dreamed
of expressing a contrary opinion. But up to this time they had not
yet been agreed upon any important line of action.

This four, Challis and Crashaw met in the morning-room of Challis
Court one Thursday afternoon in early June. Elmer had brought a
stenographer with him for scientific purposes.

"Well," said Challis, when they were all assembled. "The--the
subject--I mean, Victor Stott is in the library. Shall we
adjourn?" Challis had not felt so nervous since the morning before
he had sat for honours in the Cambridge Senate House.

In the library they found a small child, reading.



V

He did not look up when the procession entered, nor did he remove
his cricket cap. He was in his usual place at the centre table.

Challis found chairs for the Committee, and the members ranged
themselves round the opposite side of the table. Curiously, the effect
produced was that of a class brought up for a viva voce examination,
and when the Wonder raised his eyes and glanced deliberately down the
line of his judges, this effect was heightened. There was an audible
fidgeting, a creak of chairs, an indication of small embarrassments.

"Her--um!" Deane Elmer cleared his throat with noisy vigour;
looked at the Wonder, met his eyes and looked hastily away again;
"Hm!--her--rum!" he repeated, and then he turned to Challis. "So this
little fellow has never been to school?" he said.

Challis frowned heavily. He looked exceedingly uncomfortable and
unhappy. He was conscious that he could take neither side in this
controversy--that he was in sympathy with no one of the seven other
persons who were seated in his library.

He shook his head impatiently in answer to Sir Deane Elmer's question,
and the chairman turned to the Rev. Philip Steven, who was gazing
intently at the pattern of the carpet.

"I think, Steven," said Elmer, "that your large experience will
probably prompt you to a more efficient examination than we could
conduct. Will you initiate the inquiry?"

Steven raised his head slightly, put a readjusting hand up to
his glasses, and then looked sternly at the Wonder over the top
of them. Even the sixth form quailed when the head master assumed
this expression, but the small child at the table was gazing out of
the window.

Doubtless Steven was slightly embarrassed by the detachment of the
examinee, and blundered. "What is the square root of 226?" he asked--he
probably intended to say 225.

"15·03329--to five places," replied the Wonder.

Steven started. Neither he nor any other member of the Committee was
capable of checking that answer without resort to pencil and paper.

"Dear me!" ejaculated Squire Standing.

Elmer scratched the superabundance of his purple jowl, and looked
at Challis, who thrust his hands into his pockets and stared at
the ceiling.

Crashaw leaned forward and clasped his hands together. He was biding
his time.

"Mayor" Purvis alone seemed unmoved. "What's that book he's got open
in front of him?" he asked.

"May I see?" interposed Challis hurriedly, and he rose from his chair,
picked up the book in question, glanced at it for a moment, and then
handed it to the grocer. The book was Van Vloten's Dutch text and
Latin translation of Spinoza's Short Treatise.

The grocer turned to the
title-page. "Ad--beany--dick--ti--de--Spy--nozer," he read aloud
and then: "What's it all about, Mr. Challis?" he asked. "German or
something, I take it?"

"In any case it has nothing to do with elementary arithmetic," replied
Challis curtly, "Mr. Steven will set your mind at ease on that point."

"Certainly, certainly," murmured Steven.

Grocer Purvis closed the book carefully and replaced it on the
desk. "What does half a stone o' loaf sugar at two-three-farthings
come to?" he asked.

The Wonder shook his head. He did not understand the grocer's
phraseology.

"What is seven times two and three quarters?" translated Challis.

"19·25," answered the Wonder.

"What's that in shillin's?" asked Purvis.

"1·60416."

"Wrong!" returned the grocer triumphantly.

"Er--excuse me, Mr. Purvis," interposed Steven, "I think
not. The--the--er--examinee has given the correct mathematical
answer to five places of decimals--that is, so far as I can check
him mentally."

"Well, it seems to me," persisted the grocer, "as he's gone a long
way round to answer a simple question what any fifth-standard child
could do in his head. I'll give him another."

"Cast it in another form," put in the chairman. "Give it as a
multiplication sum."

Purvis tucked his fingers carefully into his waistcoat pockets. "I
put the question, Mr. Chairman," he said, "as it'll be put to the
youngster when he has to tot up a bill. That seems to be a sound and
practical form for such questions to be put in."

Challis sighed impatiently. "I thought Mr. Steven had been delegated
to conduct the first part of the examination," he said. "It seems to
me that we are wasting a lot of time."

Elmer nodded. "Will you go on, Mr. Steven?" he said.

Challis was ashamed for his compeers. "What children we are,"
he thought.

Steven got to work again with various arithmetical questions, which
were answered instantly, and then he made a sudden leap and asked:
"What is the binomial theorem?"

"A formula for writing down the coefficient of any stated term in the
expansion of any stated power of a given binomial," replied the Wonder.

Elmer blew out his cheeks and looked at Challis, but met the gaze of
Mr. Steven, who adjusted his glasses and said, "I am satisfied under
this head."

"It's all beyond me," remarked Squire Standing frankly.

"I think, Mr. Chairman, that we've had enough theoretical arithmetic,"
said Purvis. "There's a few practical questions I'd like to put."

"No more arithmetic, then," assented Elmer, and Crashaw exchanged a
glance of understanding with the grocer.

"Now, how old was our Lord when He began His ministry?" asked the
grocer.

"Uncertain," replied the Wonder.

Mr. Purvis smiled. "Any Sunday-school child knows that!" he said.

"Of course, of course," murmured Crashaw.

But Steven looked uncomfortable. "Are you sure you understand the
purport of the answer, Mr. Purvis?" he asked.

"Can there be any doubt about it?" replied the grocer. "I asked how
old our Lord was when He began His ministry, and he"--he made an
indicative gesture with one momentarily released hand towards the
Wonder--"and he says he's 'uncertain.'"

"No, no," interposed Challis impatiently, "he meant that the answer
to your question was uncertain."

"How's that?" returned the grocer. "I've always understood----"

"Quite, quite," interrupted Challis. "But what we have always
understood does not always correspond to the actual fact."

"What did you intend by your answer?" put in Elmer quickly, addressing
the Wonder.

"The evidence rests mainly on Luke's Gospel," answered the Wonder,
"but the phrase 'archomenos hôsei etôn triakonta' is vague--it allows
latitude in either direction. According to the chronology of John's
Gospel the age might have been about thirty-two."

"It says 'thirty' in the Bible, and that's good enough for me," said
the grocer, and Crashaw muttered "Heresy, heresy," in an audible
under tone.

"Sounds very like blarsphemy to me," said Purvis, "like doubtin'
the word of God. I'm for sending him to school."

Deane Elmer had been regarding the face of the small abstracted child
with considerable interest. He put aside for the moment the grocer's
intimation of his voting tendency.

"How many elements are known to chemists?" asked Elmer of the examinee.

"Eighty-one well characterised; others have been described," replied
the Wonder.

"Which has the greatest atomic weight?" asked Elmer.

"Uranium."

"And that weight is?"

"On the oxygen basis of 16--238·5."

"Extraordinary powers of memory," muttered Elmer, and there was
silence for a moment, a silence broken by Squire Standing, who,
in a loud voice, asked suddenly and most irrelevantly, "What's your
opinion of Tariff Reform?"

"An empirical question that cannot be decided from a theoretical
basis," replied the Wonder.

Elmer laughed out, a great shouting guffaw. "Quite right, quite
right," he said, his cheeks shaking with mirth. "What have you to
say to that, Standing?"

"I say that Tariff Reform's the only way to save the country,"
replied Squire Standing, looking very red and obstinate, "and if
this Government----"

Challis rose to his feet. "Oh! aren't you all satisfied?" he said. "Is
this Committee here to argue questions of present politics? What more
evidence do you need?"

"I'm not satisfied," put in Purvis resolutely, "nor is the
Rev. Mr. Crashaw, I fancy."

"He has no vote," said Challis. "Elmer, what do you say?"

"I think we may safely say that the child has been, and is being,
provided with an education elsewhere, and that he need not therefore
attend the elementary school," replied Elmer, still chuckling.

"On a point of order, Mr. Chairman, is that what you put to the
meeting?" asked Purvis.

"This is quite informal," replied Elmer. "Unless we are all agreed,
the question must be put to the full Committee."

"Shall we argue the point in the other room?" suggested Challis.

"Certainly, certainly," said Elmer. "We can return, if necessary."

And the four striking figures of the Education Committee filed out,
followed by Crashaw and the stenographer.

Challis, coming last, paused at the door and looked back.

The Wonder had returned to his study of Spinoza.

Challis waved a hand to the unconscious figure. "I must join my
fellow-children," he said grimly, "or they will be quarrelling."



VI

But when he joined his fellow-children, Challis stood at the window
of the morning-room, attending little to the buzz of voices and the
clatter of glasses which marked the relief from the restraint of the
examination-room. Even the stenographer was talking; he had joined
Crashaw and Purvis--a lemonade group; the other three were drinking
whisky. The division, however, is arbitrary, and in no way significant.

Challis caught a fragment of the conversation here and there: a
bull-roar from Elmer or Squire Standing; an occasional blatancy
from Purvis; a vibrant protest from Crashaw; a hesitating tenor
pronouncement from Steven.

"Extraordinary powers of memory.... It isn't facts, but what they
stand for that I.... Don't know his Bible--that's good enough for
me.... Heresy, heresy.... A phenomenal memory, of course, quite
phenomenal, but----"

The simple exposition of each man's theme was dogmatically asserted,
and through it all Challis, standing alone, hardly conscious of
each individual utterance, was still conscious that the spirits of
those six men were united in one thing, had they but known it. Each
was endeavouring to circumscribe the powers of the child they had
just left--each was insistent on some limitation he chose to regard
as vital.

They came to no decision that afternoon. The question as to whether the
Authority should prosecute or not had to be referred to the Committee.

At the last, Crashaw entered his protest and announced once more that
he would fight the point to the bitter end.

Crashaw's religious hatred was not, perhaps, altogether free from
a sense of affronted dignity, but it was nevertheless a force to be
counted; and he had that obstinacy of the bigot which has in the past
contributed much fire and food to the pyre of martyrdom. He had, too,
a power of initiative within certain limits. It is true that the bird
on a free wing could avoid him with contemptuous ease, but along his
own path he was a terrifying juggernaut. Crashaw, thus circumscribed,
was a power, a moving force.

But now he was seeking to crush, not some paralysed rabbit on the
road, but an elusive spirit of swiftness which has no name, but may be
figured as the genius of modernity. The thing he sought to obliterate
ran ahead of him with a smiling facility and spat rearwards a vaporous
jet of ridicule.

Crashaw might crush his clerical wideawake over his frowning eyebrows,
arm himself with a slightly dilapidated umbrella, and seek with long,
determined strides the members of the Local Education Authority,
but far ahead of him had run an intelligence that represented the
instructed common sense of modernity.

It was for Crashaw to realise--as he never could and never did
realise--that he was no longer the dominant force of progress; that
he had been outstripped, left toiling and shouting vain words on a
road that had served its purpose, and though it still remained and was
used as a means of travel, was becoming year by year more antiquated
and despised.

Crashaw toiled to the end, and no one knows how far his personal
purpose and spite were satisfied, but he could never impede any more
that elusive spirit of swiftness; it had run past him.







CHAPTER XII

FUGITIVE


Meanwhile a child of five--all unconscious that he was being
represented to various members of the Local Education Authority as a
protégé under the especial care and tutelage of the greatest of local
magnates--ran through a well-kept index of the books in the library
of Challis Court--an index written clearly on cards that occupied a
great nest of accessible drawers; two cards with a full description
to each book, alphabetically arranged, one card under the title of
the work and one under the author's name.

The child made no notes as he studied--he never wrote a single line
in all his life; but when a drawer of that delightful index had
been searched, he would walk here and there among the three rooms
at his disposal, and by the aid of the flight of framed steps that
ran smoothly on rubber-tyred wheels, he would take down now and again
some book or another until, returning to the table at last to read, he
sat in an enceinte of piled volumes that had been collected round him.

Sometimes he read a book from beginning to end, more often he glanced
through it, turning a dozen pages at a time, and then pushed it on
one side with a gesture displaying the contempt that was not shown
by any change of expression.

On many afternoons the sombrely clad figure of a tall, gaunt woman
would stand at the open casement of a window in the larger room, and
keep a mystic vigil that sometimes lasted for hours. She kept her gaze
fixed on that strange little figure whenever it roved up and down the
suite of rooms or clambered the pyramid of brown steps that might have
made such a glorious plaything for any other child. And even when her
son was hidden behind the wall of volumes he had built, the woman would
still stare in his direction, but then her eyes seemed to look inwards;
at such times she appeared to be wrapped in an introspective devotion.

Very rarely, the heavy-shouldered figure of a man would come to the
doorway of the larger room, and also keep a silent vigil--a man who
would stand for some minutes with thoughtful eyes and bent brows
and then sigh, shake his head and move away, gently closing the door
behind him.

There were few other interruptions to the silence of that chapel-like
library. Half a dozen times in the first few months a fair-haired,
rather supercilious young man came and fetched away a few volumes;
but even he evidenced an inclination to walk on tip-toe, a tendency
that mastered him whenever he forgot for a moment his self-imposed
rôle of scorn....

Outside, over the swelling undulations of rich grass the sheep came
back with close-cropped, ungainly bodies to a land that was yellow
with buttercups. But when one looked again, their wool hung about
them, and they were snatching at short turf that was covered at the
wood-side by a sprinkle of brown leaves. Then the sheep have gone,
and the wood is black with February rain, and again the unfolding
of the year is about us; a thickening of high twigs in the wood,
a glint of green on the blackthorn....

Nearly three cycles of death and birth have run their course,
and then the strange little figure comes no more to the library at
Challis Court.







PART III

MY ASSOCIATION WITH THE WONDER


CHAPTER XIII

HOW I WENT TO PYM TO WRITE A BOOK


I

The circumstance that had intrigued me for so long was determined with
an abruptness only less remarkable than the surprise of the onset. Two
deaths within six months brought to me, the first, a competence,
the second, release from gall and bitterness. For the first time
in my life I was a free man. At forty one can still look forward,
and I put the past behind me and made plans for the future. There
was that book of mine still waiting to be written.

It was wonderful how the detail of it all came back to me--the
plan of it, the thread of development, even the very phrases that
I had toyed with. The thought of the book brought back a train of
associations. There was a phrase I had coined as I had walked out
from Ailesworth to Stoke-Underhill; a chapter I had roughed out
the day I went to see Ginger Stott at Pym. It seemed to me that the
whole conception of the book was associated in some way with that
neighbourhood. I remembered at last that I had first thought of
writing it after my return from America, on the day that I had had
that curious experience with the child in the train. It occurred to
me that by a reversal of the process, I might regain many more of
my original thoughts; that by going to live, temporarily perhaps,
in the neighbourhood of Ailesworth, I might revive other associations.

The picture of Pym presented itself to me very clearly. I remembered
that I had once thought that Pym was a place to which I might retire
one day in order to write the things I wished to write. I decided to
make the dream a reality, and I wrote to Mrs. Berridge at the Wood
Farm, asking her if she could let me have her rooms for the spring,
summer, and autumn.



II

I was all aglow with excitement on the morning that I set out for the
Hampden Hills. This was change, I thought, freedom, adventure. This
was the beginning of life, my real entry into the joy of living.

The world was alight with the fire of growth. May had come with
a clear sky and a torrent of green was flowing over field, hedge,
and wood. I remember that I thanked "whatever gods there be," that
one could live so richly in the enjoyment of these things.



III

Farmer Bates met me at Great Hittenden Station. His was the only
available horse and cart at Pym, for the Berridges were in a very
small way, and it is doubtful if they could have made both ends meet
if Mrs. Berridge had not done so well by letting her two spare rooms.

I have a great admiration for Farmer Bates and Mrs. Berridge. I regret
intensely that they should both have been unhappily married. If they
had married each other they would undoubtedly have made a success
of life.

Bates was a Cockney by birth, but always he had had an ambition to take
a farm, and after twenty years of work as a skilled mechanic he had
thrown up a well-paid job, and dared the uncertainties which beset the
English farmer. That venture was a constant bone of strife between him
and his wife. Mrs. Bates preferred the town. It has always seemed to
me that there was something fine about Bates and his love for the land.

"Good growing weather, Mr. Bates," I said, as I climbed up into
the cart.

"Shouldn't be sorry to see some more rain," replied Bates, and damped
my ardour for a moment.

Just before we turned into the lane that leads up the long hill to Pym,
we passed a ramshackle cart, piled up with a curious miscellany of
ruinous furniture. A man was driving, and beside him sat a slatternly
woman and a repulsive-looking boy of ten or twelve years old, with
a great swollen head and an open, slobbering mouth.

I was startled. I jumped to the conclusion that this was the child
I had seen in the train, the son of Ginger Stott.

As we slowed down to the ascent of the long hill, I said to Bates:
"Is that Stott's boy?"

Bates looked at me curiously. "Why, no," he said. "Them's the
'Arrisons. 'Arrison's dead now; he was a wrong 'un, couldn't make
a job of it, nohow. They used to live 'ere, five or six year ago,
and now 'er 'usband's dead, Mrs. 'Arrison's coming back with the boy
to live. Worse luck! We thought we was shut of 'em."

"Oh!" I said. "The boy's an idiot, I suppose."

"'Orrible," replied Bates, shaking his head, "'orrible; can't speak
nor nothing; goes about bleating and baa-ing like an old sheep."

I looked round, but the ramshackle cart was hidden by the turn of
the road. "Does Stott still live at Pym?" I asked.

"Not Ginger," replied Bates. "He lives at Ailesworth. Mrs. Stott and
'er son lives here."

"The boy's still alive then?" I asked.

"Yes," said Bates.

"Intelligent child?" I asked.

"They say," replied Bates. "Book-learnin' and such. They say 'e's
read every book in Mr. Challis's librairy."

"Does he go to school?"

"No. They let 'im off. Leastways Mr. Challis did. They say the Reverend
Crashaw, down at Stoke, was fair put out about it."

I thought that Bates emphasised the "on dit" nature of his information
rather markedly. "What do you think of him?" I asked.

"Me?" said Bates. "I don't worry my 'ead about him. I've got too much
to do." And he went off into technicalities concerning the abundance
of charlock on the arable land of Pym. He called it "garlic." I saw
that it was typical of Bates that he should have too much to do. I
reflected that his was the calling which begot civilisation.



IV

The best and surest route from Pym to the Wood Farm is, appropriately,
by way of the wood; but in wet weather the alternative of various
cart tracks that wind among the bracken and shrub of the Common, is
preferable in many ways. May had been very dry that year, however,
and Farmer Bates chose the wood. The leaves were still light on the
beeches. I remember that as I tried to pierce the vista of stems
that dipped over the steep fall of the hill, I promised myself many
a romantic exploration of the unknown mysteries beyond.

Everything was so bright that afternoon that nothing, I believe,
could have depressed me. When I looked round the low, dark room with
its one window, a foot from the ground and two from the ceiling,
I only thought that I should be out-of-doors all the time. It amused
me that I could touch the ceiling with my head by standing on tiptoe,
and I laughed at the framed "presentation plates" from old Christmas
numbers on the walls. These things are merely curious when the sun
is shining and it is high May, and one is free to do the desired work
after twenty years in a galley.



V

At a quarter to eight that evening I saw the sun set behind the
hills. As I wandered reflectively down the lane that goes towards
Challis Court, a blackbird was singing ecstatically in a high elm; here
and there a rabbit popped out and sat up, the picture of precocious
curiosity. Nature seemed to be standing in her doorway for a careless
half-hour's gossip, before putting up the shutters to bar the robbers
who would soon be about their work of the night.

It was still quite light as I strolled back over the Common, and I
chose a path that took me through a little spinney of ash, oak, and
beech, treading carefully to avoid crushing the tender crosiers of
bracken that were just beginning to break their way through the soil.

As I emerged from the little clump of wood, I saw two figures going
away from me in the direction of Pym.

One was that of a boy wearing a cricket-cap; he was walking
deliberately, his hands hanging at his sides; the other figure was a
taller boy, and he threw out his legs in a curious, undisciplined way,
as though he had little control over them. At first sight I thought
he was not sober.

The two passed out of sight behind a clump of hawthorn, but once I
saw the smaller figure turn and face the other, and once he made a
repelling gesture with his hands.

It occurred to me that the smaller boy was trying to avoid his
companion; that he was, in one sense, running away from him, that
he walked as one might walk away from some threatening animal,
deliberately--to simulate the appearance of courage.

I fancied the bigger boy was the idiot Harrison I had seen that
afternoon, and Farmer Bates's "We hoped we were shut of him," recurred
to me. I wondered if the idiot were dangerous or only a nuisance.

I took the smaller boy to be one of the villagers' children. I noticed
that his cricket-cap had a dark patch as though it had been mended
with some other material.

The impression which I received from this trivial affair was one
of disappointment. The wood and the Common had been so deserted by
humanity, so given up to nature, that I felt the presence of the
idiot to be a most distasteful intrusion. "If that horrible thing is
going to haunt the Common there will be no peace or decency," was the
idea that presented itself. "I must send him off, the brute," was the
rider. But I disliked the thought of being obliged to drive him away.



VI

The next morning I did not go on the Common; I was anxious to avoid
a meeting with the Harrison idiot. I had been debating whether I
should drive him away if I met him. Obviously I had no more right
on the Common than he had--on the other hand, he was a nuisance,
and I did not see why I should allow him to spoil all my pleasure
in that ideal stretch of wild land which pressed on three sides of
the Wood Farm. It was a stupid quandary of my own making; but I am
afraid it was rather typical of my mental attitude. I am prone to set
myself tasks, such as this eviction of the idiot from common ground,
and equally prone to avoid them by a process of procrastination.

By way of evasion I walked over to Deane Hill and surveyed the
wonderful panorama of neat country that fills the basin between the
Hampden and the Quainton Hills. Seen from that height, it has something
the effect of a Dutch landscape, it all looks so amazingly tidy. Away
to the left I looked over Stoke-Underhill. Ailesworth was a blur in the
hollow, but I could distinguish the high fence of the County Ground.

I sat all the morning on Deane Hill, musing and smoking, thinking of
such things as Ginger Stott, and the match with Surrey. I decided that
I must certainly go and see Stott's queer son, the phenomenon who had,
they say, read all the books in Mr. Challis's library. I wondered
what sort of a library this Challis had, and who he was. I had never
heard of him before. I think I must have gone to sleep for a time.

When Mrs. Berridge came to clear away my dinner--I dined, without
shame, at half-past twelve--I detained her with conversation. Presently
I asked about little Stott.

"He's a queer one, that's what he is," said Mrs. Berridge. She was
a neat, comely little woman, rather superior to her station, and it
seemed to me, certainly superior to her clod of a husband.

"A great reader, Farmer Bates tells me," I said.

Mrs. Berridge passed that by. "His mother's in trouble about him
this morning," she said. "She's such a nice, respectable woman, and
has all her milk and eggs and butter off of us. She was here this
morning while you were out, sir, and, what I could make of it that
'Arrison boy had been chasing her boy on the Common last night."

"Oh!" I said with sudden enlightenment. "I believe I saw them." At
the back of my mind I was struggling desperately with a vague
remembrance. It may sound incredible, but I had only the dimmest
memory of my later experience of the child. The train incident was
still fresh in my mind, but I could not remember what Stott had told
me when I talked with him by the pond. I seemed to have an impression
that the child had some strange power of keeping people at a distance;
or was I mixing up reality with some Scandinavian fairy tale?

"Very likely, sir," Mrs. Berridge went on. "What upset Mrs. Stott
was that her boy's never upset by anything--he has a curious way
of looking at you, sir, that makes you wish you wasn't there; but
from what Mrs. Stott says, this 'Arrison boy wasn't to be drove off,
anyhow, and her son came in quite flurried like. Mrs. Stott seemed
quite put out about it."

Doubtless I might have had more information from my landlady, but I
was struggling to reconstruct that old experience which had slipped
away from me, and I turned back to the book I had been pretending to
read. Mrs. Berridge was one of those unusual women--for her station
in life--who know when to be silent, and she finished her clearing
away without initiating any further remarks.

When she had finished I went out on to the Common and looked for the
pond where I had talked with Ginger Stott.

I found it after a time, and then I began to gather up the threads
I had dropped.

It all came back to me, little by little. I remembered that talk I
had had with him, his very gestures; I remembered how he had spoken of
habits, or the necessity for the lack of them, and that took me back
to the scene in the British Museum Reading-Room, and to my theory. I
was suddenly alive to that old interest again.

I got up and walked eagerly in the direction of Mrs. Stott's cottage.







CHAPTER XIV

THE INCIPIENCE OF MY SUBJECTION TO THE WONDER


I

Victor Stott was in his eighth year when I met him for the third
time. I must have stayed longer than I imagined by the pond on
the Common, for Mrs. Stott and her son had had tea, and the boy was
preparing to go out. He stopped when he saw me coming; an unprecedented
mark of recognition, so I have since learned.

As I saw him then, he made a remarkable, but not a repulsively abnormal
figure. His baldness struck one immediately, but it did not give him
a look of age. Then one noticed that his head was unmistakably out
of proportion to his body, yet the disproportion was not nearly so
marked as it had been in infancy. These two things were conspicuous;
the less salient peculiarities were observed later; the curious
little beaky nose that jutted out at an unusual angle from the face,
the lips that were too straight and determined for a child, the laxity
of the limbs when the body was in repose--lastly, the eyes.

When I met Victor Stott on this, third, occasion, there can be no
doubt that he had lost something of his original power. This may
have been due to his long sojourn in the world of books, a sojourn
that had, perhaps, altered the strange individuality of his thought;
or it may have been due, in part at least, to his recent recognition
of the fact that the power of his gaze exercised no influence over
creatures such as the Harrison idiot. Nevertheless, though something
of the original force had abated, he still had an extraordinary, and,
so far as I can learn, altogether unprecedented power of enforcing
his will without word or gesture; and I may say here that in those
rare moments when Victor Stott looked me in the face, I seemed to see
a rare and wonderful personality peering out through his eyes. That
was the personality which had, no doubt, spoken to Challis and Lewes
through that long afternoon in the library of Challis Court. Normally
one saw a curious, unattractive, rather repulsive figure of a child;
when he looked at one with that rare look of intention, the man that
lived within that unattractive body was revealed, his insight, his
profundity, his unexampled wisdom. If we mark the difference between
man and animals by a measure of intelligence, then surely this child
was a very god among men.



II

Victor Stott did not look at me when I entered his mother's cottage;
I saw only the unattractive exterior of him, and I blundered into an
air of patronage.

"Is this your boy?" I said, when I had greeted her. "I hear he is a
great scholar."

"Yes, sir," replied Ellen Mary quietly. She never boasted to strangers.

"You don't remember me, I suppose?" I went on, foolishly; trying,
however, to speak as to an equal. "You were in petticoats the last
time I saw you."

The Wonder was standing by the window, his arms hanging loosely at
his sides; he looked out aslant up the lane; his profile was turned
towards me. He made no answer to my question.

"Oh yes, sir, he remembers," replied Ellen Mary. "He never forgets
anything."

I paused, uncomfortably. I was slightly huffed by the boy's silence.

"I have come to spend the summer here," I said at last. "I hope
he will come to see me. I have brought a good many books with me;
perhaps he might care to read some of them."

I had to talk at the boy; there was no alternative. Inwardly I was
thinking that I had Kant's Critique and Hegel's Phenomenology among
my books. "He may put on airs of scholarship," I thought; "but I
fancy that he will find those two works rather above the level of
his comprehension as yet." I did not recognise the fact that it was
I who was putting on airs, not Victor Stott.

"'E's given up reading the past six weeks, sir," said Ellen Mary,
"but I daresay he will come and see your books."

She spoke demurely, and she did not look at her son; I received
the impression that her statements were laid before him to take up,
reject, or pass unnoticed as he pleased.

I was slightly exasperated. I turned to the Wonder. "Would you care
to come?" I asked.

He nodded without looking at me, and walked out of the cottage.

I hesitated.

"'E'll go with you now, sir," prompted Ellen Mary. "That's what
'e means."

I followed the Wonder in a condition of suppressed irritation. "His
mother might be able to interpret his rudeness," I thought, "but I
would teach him to convey his intentions more clearly. The child had
been spoilt."



III

The Wonder chose the road over the Common. I should have gone by
the wood, but when we came to the entrance of the wood, he turned up
on to the Common. He did not ask me which way I preferred. Indeed,
we neither of us spoke during the half-mile walk that separated the
Wood Farm from the last cottage in Pym.

I was fuming inwardly. I had it in my mind at that time to put the
Wonder through some sort of an examination. I was making plans to
contribute towards his education, to send him to Oxford, later. I
had adumbrated a scheme to arouse interest in his case among certain
scholars and men of influence with whom I was slightly acquainted. I
had been very much engrossed with these plans as I had made my way
to the Stotts' cottage. I was still somewhat exalted in mind with
my dreams of a vicarious brilliance. I had pictured the Wonder's
magnificent passage though the University; I had acted, in thought, as
the generous and kindly benefactor.... It had been a grandiose dream,
and the reality was so humiliating. Could I make this mannerless
child understand his possibilities? Had he any ambition?

Thinking of these things, I had lagged behind as we crossed the
Common, and when I came to the gate of the farmyard, the Wonder was
at the door of the house. He did not wait for me, but walked straight
into my sitting-room. When I entered, I found him seated on the low
window-sill, turning over the top layer of books in the large case
which had been opened, but not unpacked. There was no place to put
the books; in fact, I was proposing to have some shelves put up,
if Mrs. Berridge had no objection.

I entered the room in a condition of warm indignation. "Cheek" was the
word that was in my mind. "Confounded cheek," I muttered. Nevertheless
I did not interrupt the boy; instead, I lit a cigarette, sat down
and watched him.

I was sceptical at first. I noted at once the sure touch with which
the boy handled my books, the practised hand that turned the pages,
the quick examination of title-page and the list of contents,
the occasional swift reference to the index, but I did not believe
it possible that any one could read so fast as he read when he did
condescend for a few moments to give his attention to a few consecutive
pages. "Was it a pose?" I thought, yet he was certainly an adept in
handling the books. I was puzzled, yet I was still sceptical--the habit
of experience was towards disbelief--a boy of seven and a half could
not possibly have the mental equipment to skim all that philosophy....

My books were being unpacked very quickly. Kant, Hegel, Schelling,
Fichte, Leibnitz, Nietzsche, Hume, Bradley, William James had all
been rejected and were piled on the floor, but he had hesitated longer
over Bergson's Creative Evolution. He really seemed to be giving that
some attention, though he read it--if he were reading it--so fast that
the hand which turned the pages hardly rested between each movement.

When Bergson was sent to join his predecessors, I determined that I
would get some word out of this strange child--I had never yet heard
him speak, not a single syllable. I determined to brave all rebuffs. I
was prepared for that.

"Well?" I said, when Bergson was laid down. "Well! What do you make
of that?"

He turned and looked out of the window.

I came and sat on the end of the table within a few feet of him. From
that position I, too, could see out of the window, and I saw the
figure of the Harrison idiot slouching over the farmyard gate.

A gust of impatience whirled over me. I caught up my stick and went
out quickly.

"Now then," I said, as I came within speaking distance of the idiot,
"get away from here. Out with you!"

The idiot probably understood no word of what I said, but like a dog
he was quick to interpret my tone and gesture. He made a revoltingly
inhuman sound as he shambled away, a kind of throaty yelp. I walked
back to the house. I could not avoid the feeling that I had been
unnecessarily brutal.

When I returned the Wonder was still staring out of the window; but
though I did not guess it then, the idiot had served my purpose better
than my determination. It was to the idiot that I owed my subsequent
knowledge of Victor Stott. The Wonder had found a use for me. He was
resigned to bear with my feeble mental development, because I was
strong enough to keep at bay that half-animal creature who appeared
to believe that Victor Stott was one of his own kind--the only one
he had ever met. The idiot in some unimaginable way had inferred
a likeness between himself and the Wonder--they both had enormous
heads--and the idiot was the only human being over whom the Wonder
was never able to exercise the least authority.



IV

I went in and sat down again on the end of the table. I was rather
heated. I lit another cigarette and stared at the Wonder, who was
still looking out of the window.

There was silence for a few seconds, and then he spoke of his own
initiative.

"Illustrates the weakness of argument from history and analogy," he
said in a clear, small voice, addressing no one in particular. "Hegel's
limitations are qualitatively those of Harrison, who argues that I
and he are similar in kind."

The proposition was so astounding that I could find no answer
immediately. If the statement had been made in boyish language I
should have laughed at it, but the phraseology impressed me.

"You've read Hegel, then?" I asked evasively.

"Subtract the endeavour to demonstrate a preconceived hypothesis
from any known philosophy," continued the Wonder, without heeding my
question, "and the remainder, the only valuable material, is found
to be distorted." He paused as if waiting for my reply.

How could one answer such propositions as these offhand? I tried,
however, to get at the gist of the sentence, and, as the silence
continued, I said with some hesitation: "But it is impossible,
surely, to approach the work of writing, say a philosophy, without
some apprehension of the end in view?"

"Illogical," replied the Wonder, "not philosophy; a system of trial
and error--to evaluate a complex variable function." He paused a
moment, and then glanced down at the pile of books on the floor. "More
millions," he said.

I think he meant that more millions of books might be written on this
system without arriving at an answer to the problem, but I admit
that I am at a loss, that I cannot interpret his remarks. I wrote
them down within an hour or two after they were uttered, but I may
have made mistakes. The mathematical metaphor is beyond me. I have
no acquaintance with higher mathematics.

The Wonder had a very expressionless face, but I thought at this
moment that he wore a look of sadness; and that look was one of the
factors which helped me to understand the unbridgeable gulf that lay
between his intellect and mine. I think it was at this moment that
I first began to change my opinion. I had been regarding him as an
unbearable little prig, but it flashed across me as I watched him now,
that his mind and my own might be so far differentiated that he was
unable to convey his thoughts to me. "Was it possible," I wondered,
"that he had been trying to talk down to my level?"

"I am afraid I don't quite follow you," I said. I had intended to
question him further, to urge him to explain, but it came to me
that it would be quite hopeless to go on. How can one answer the
unreasoning questions of a child? Here I was the child, though a
child of slightly advanced development. I could appreciate that it was
useless to persist in a futile "Why, why?" when the answer could only
be given in terms that I could not comprehend. Therefore I hesitated,
sighed, and then with that obstinacy of vanity which creates an image
of self-perfection and refuses to relinquish it, I said:

"I wish you could explain yourself; not on this particular point of
philosophy, but your life----" I stopped, because I did not know how
to phrase my demand. What was it, after all, that I wanted to learn?

"That I can't explain," said the Wonder. "There are no data."

I saw that he had accepted my request for explanation in a much wider
sense than I had intended, and I took him up on this.

"But haven't you any hypothesis?"

"I cannot work on the system of trial and error," replied the Wonder.

Our conversation went no further this afternoon, for Mrs. Berridge
came in to lay the cloth. She looked askance, I thought, at the figure
on the window-sill, but she ventured no remark save to ask if I was
ready for my supper.

"Yes, oh! yes!" I said.

"Shall I lay for two, sir?" asked Mrs. Berridge.

"Will you stay and have supper?" I said to the Wonder, but he shook
his head, got up and walked out of the room. I watched him cross the
farmyard and make his way over the Common.

"Well!" I said to Mrs. Berridge, when the boy was out of sight,
"that child is what in America they call 'the limit,' Mrs. Berridge."

My landlady put her lips together, shook her head, and shivered
slightly. "He gives me the shudders," she said.



V

I neither read nor wrote that evening. I forgot to go out for a
walk at sunset. I sat and pondered until it was time for bed, and
then I pondered myself to sleep. No vision came to me, and I had no
relevant dreams.

The next morning at seven o'clock I saw Mrs. Stott come over the Common
to fetch her milk from the farm. I waited until her business was done,
and then I went out and walked back with her.

"I want to understand about your son," I said by way of making
an opening.

She looked at me quickly. "You know, 'e 'ardly ever speaks to me,
sir," she said.

I was staggered for a moment. "But you understand him?" I said.

"In some ways, sir," was her answer.

I recognised the direction of the limitation. "Ah! we none of us
understand him in all ways," I said, with a touch of patronage.

"No, sir," replied Ellen Mary. She evidently agreed to that statement
without qualification.

"But what is he going to do?" I asked. "When he grows up, I mean?"

"I can't say, sir. We must leave that to 'im."

I accepted the rebuke more mildly than I should have done on the
previous day. "He never speaks of his future?" I said feebly.

"No, sir."

There seemed to be nothing more to say. We had only gone a couple
of hundred yards, but I paused in my walk. I thought I might as well
go back and get my breakfast. But Mrs. Stott looked at me as though
she had something more to say. We stood facing each other on the
cart track.

"I suppose I can't be of any use?" I asked vaguely.

Ellen Mary broke suddenly into volubility.

"I 'ope I'm not askin' too much, sir," she said, "but there is a way
you could 'elp if you would. 'E 'ardly ever speaks to me, as I've
said, but I've been opset about that 'Arrison boy. 'E's a brute
beast, sir, if you know what I mean, and 'e" (she differentiated
her pronouns only by accent, and where there is any doubt I have
used italics to indicate that her son is referred to) "doesn't seem
to 'ave the same 'old on 'im as 'e does over others. It's truth,
I am not easy in my mind about it, sir, although 'e 'as never said
a word to me, not being afraid of anything like other children, but
'e seems to have took a sort of a fancy to you, sir" (I think this
was intended as the subtlest flattery), "and if you was to go with
'im when 'e takes 'is walks--'e's much in the air, sir, and a great
one for walkin'--I think 'e'd be glad of your cump'ny, though maybe
'e won't never say it in so many words. You mustn't mind 'im being
silent, sir; there's some things we can't understand, and though,
as I say, 'e 'asn't said anything to me, it's not that I'm scheming
be'ind 'is back, for I know 'is meaning without words being necessary."

She might have said more, but I interrupted her at this
point. "Certainly, I will come and fetch him,"--I lapsed unconsciously
into her system of denomination--"this morning, if you are sure he
would like to come out with me."

"I'm quite sure, sir," she said.

"About nine o'clock?" I asked.

"That would do nicely, sir," she answered.

As I walked back to the farm I was thinking of the life of those two
occupants of the Stotts' cottage. The mother who watched her son in
silence, studying his every look and action in order to gather his
meaning; who never asked her son a question nor expected from him
any statement of opinion; and the son wrapped always in that profound
speculation which seemed to be his only mood. What a household!

It struck me while I was having breakfast that I seemed to have let
myself in for a duty that might prove anything but pleasant.



VI

There is nothing to say of that first walk of mine with the Wonder. I
spoke to him once or twice and he answered by nodding his head;
even this notice I now know to have been a special mark of favour,
a condescension to acknowledge his use for me as a guardian. He did
not speak at all on this occasion.

I did not call for him in the afternoon; I had made other plans. I
wanted to see the man Challis, whose library had been at the disposal
of this phenomenal child. Challis might be able to give me further
information. The truth of the matter is that I was in two minds as to
whether I would stay at Pym through the summer, as I had originally
intended. I was not in love with the prospect which the sojourn now
held out for me. If I were to be constituted head nursemaid to Master
Victor Stott, there would remain insufficient time for the progress of
my own book on certain aspects of the growth of the philosophic method.

I see now, when I look back, that I was not convinced at that time,
that I still doubted the Wonder's learning. I may have classed it as
a freakish pedantry, the result of a phenomenal memory.

Mrs. Berridge had much information to impart on the subject of Henry
Challis. He was her husband's landlord, of course, and his was a
hallowed name, to be spoken with decency and respect. I am afraid
I shocked Mrs. Berridge at the outset by my casual "Who's this man
Challis?" She certainly atoned by her own manner for my irreverence;
she very obviously tried to impress me. I professed submission,
but was not intimidated, rather my curiosity was aroused.

Mrs. Berridge was not able to tell me the one thing I most desired
to know, whether the lord of Challis Court was in residence; but it
was not far to walk, and I set out about two o'clock.



VII

Challis was getting into his motor as I walked up the drive. I hurried
forward to catch him before the machine was started. He saw me coming
and paused on the doorstep.

"Did you want to see me?" he asked, as I came up.

"Mr. Challis?" I asked.

"Yes," he said.

"I won't keep you now," I said, "but perhaps you could let me know
some time when I could see you."

"Oh, yes," he said, with the air of a man who is constantly subjected
to annoyance by strangers. "But perhaps you wouldn't mind telling me
what it is you wish to see me about? I might be able to settle it now,
at once."

"I am staying at the Wood Farm," I began. "I am interested in a very
remarkable child----"

"Ah! take my advice, leave him alone," interrupted Challis quickly.

I suppose I looked my amazement, for Challis laughed. "Oh, well," he
said, "of course you won't take such spontaneous advice as that. I'm
in no hurry. Come in." He took off his heavy overcoat and threw it into
the tonneau. "Come round again in an hour," he said to the chauffeur.

"It's very good of you," I protested, "I could come quite well at
any other time."

"I'm in no hurry," he repeated. "You had better come to the scene
of Victor Stott's operations. He hasn't been here for six weeks,
by the way. Can you throw any light on his absence?"

I made a friend that afternoon. When the car came back at four o'clock,
Challis sent it away again. "I shall probably stay down here to-night,"
he said to the butler, and to me: "Can you stay to dinner? I must
convince you about this child."

"I have dined once to-day," I said. "At half-past twelve. I have no
other excuse."

"Oh! well," said Challis, "you needn't eat, but I must. Get us
something, Heathcote," he said to the butler, "and bring tea here."

Much of our conversation after dinner was not relevant to the subject
of the Wonder; we drifted into a long argument upon human origins
which has no place here. But by that time I had been very well
informed as to all the essential facts of the Wonder's childhood,
of his entry into the world of books, of his earlier methods, and
of the significance of that long speech in the library. But at that
point Challis became reserved. He would give me no details.

"You must forgive me; I can't go into that," he said.

"But it is so incomparably important," I protested.

"That may be, but you must not question me. The truth of the matter
is that I have a very confused memory of what the boy said, and the
little I might remember, I prefer to leave undisturbed."

He piqued my curiosity, but I did not press him. It was so evident
that he did not wish to speak on that head.

He walked up with me to the farm at ten o'clock and came into my room.

"We need not keep you out of bed, Mrs. Berridge," he said to my
flustered landlady. "I daresay we shall be up till all hours. We
promise to see that the house is locked up." Mr. Berridge stood a
figure of subservience in the background.

My books were still heaped on the floor. Challis sat down on the
window-sill and looked over some of them. "Many of these Master Stott
probably read in my library" he remarked, "in German. Language is
no bar to him. He learns a language as you or I would learn a page
of history."

Later on, I remember that we came down to essentials. "I must try and
understand something of this child's capacities," I said in answer to
a hint of Challis's that I should leave the Wonder alone. "It seems
to me that here we have something which is of the first importance,
of greater importance, indeed, than anything else in the history of
the world."

"But you can't make him speak," said Challis.

"I shall try," I said. "I recognise that we cannot compel him, but I
have a certain hold over him. I see from what you have told me that he
has treated me with most unusual courtesy. I assure you that several
times when I spoke to him this morning he nodded his head."

"A good beginning," laughed Challis.

"I can't understand," I went on, "how it is that you are not more
interested. It seems to me that this child knows many things which
we have been patiently attempting to discover since the dawn of
civilisation."

"Quite," said Challis. "I admit that, but ... well, I don't think I
want to know."

"Surely," I said, "this key to all knowledge----"

"We are not ready for it," replied Challis. "You can't teach
metaphysics to children."

Nevertheless my ardour was increased, not abated, by my long talk
with Challis.

"I shall go on," I said, as I went out to the farm gate with him at
half-past two in the morning.

"Ah! well," he answered, "I shall come over and see you when I come
back." He had told me earlier that he was going abroad for some months.

We hesitated a moment by the gate, and instinctively we both looked
up at the vault of the sky and the glimmering dust of stars.

The same thought was probably in both our minds, the thought of
the insignificance of this little system that revolves round one of
the lesser lights of the Milky Way, but that thought was not to be
expressed save by some banality, and we did not speak.

"I shall certainly look you up when I come back," said Challis.

"Yes; I hope you will," I said lamely.

I watched the loom of his figure against the vague background till
I could distinguish it no longer.







CHAPTER XV

THE PROGRESS AND RELAXATION OF MY SUBJECTION


I

The memory of last summer is presented to me now as a series of
pictures, some brilliant, others vague, others again so uncertain that
I cannot be sure how far they are true memories of actual occurrences,
and how far they are interwoven with my thoughts and dreams. I have,
for instance, a recollection of standing on Deane Hill and looking
down over the wide panorama of rural England, through a driving mist
of fine rain. This might well be counted among true memories, were
it not for the fact that clearly associated with the picture is an
image of myself grown to enormous dimensions, a Brocken spectre that
threatened the world with titanic gestures of denouncement, and I
seem to remember that this figure was saying: "All life runs through
my fingers like a handful of dry sand." And yet the remembrance has
not the quality of a dream.

I was, undoubtedly, overwrought at times. There were days when the
sight of a book filled me with physical nausea, with contempt for the
littleness, the narrow outlook, that seemed to me to characterise
every written work. I was fiercely, but quite impotently, eager at
such times to demonstrate the futility of all the philosophy ranged
on the rough wooden shelves in my gloomy sitting-room. I would walk
up and down and gesticulate, struggling, fighting to make clear
to myself what a true philosophy should set forth. I felt at such
times that all the knowledge I needed for so stupendous a task was
present with me in some inexplicable way, was even pressing upon
me, but that my brain was so clogged and heavy that not one idea of
all that priceless wisdom could be expressed in clear thought. "I
have never been taught to think," I would complain, "I have never
perfected the machinery of thought," and then some dictum thrown out
haphazard by the Wonder--his conception of light conversation--would
recur to me, and I would realise that however well I had been trained,
my limitations would remain, that I was an undeveloped animal, only
one stage higher than a totem-fearing savage, a creature of small
possibilities, incapable of dealing with great problems.

Once the Wonder said to me, in a rare moment of lucid condescension to
my feeble intellect, "You figure space as a void in three dimensions,
and time as a line that runs across it, and all other conceptions
you relegate to that measure." He implied that this was a cumbrous
machinery which had no relation to reality, and could define
nothing. He told me that his idea of force, for example, was a pure
abstraction, for which there was no figure in my mental outfit.

Such pronouncements as these left me struggling like a drowning
man in deep water. I felt that it must be possible for me to come
to the surface, but I could do nothing but flounder; beat fiercely
with limbs that were so powerful and yet so utterly useless. I saw
that my very metaphors symbolised my feebleness; I had no terms for
my own mental condition; I was forced to resort to some inapplicable
physical analogy.

These fits of revolt against the limitations of human thought grew more
frequent as the summer progressed. Day after day my self-sufficiency
and conceit were being crushed out of me. I was always in the society
of a boy of seven whom I was forced to regard as immeasurably my
intellectual superior. There was no department of useful knowledge
in which I could compete with him. Compete indeed! I might as well
speak of a third-standard child competing with Macaulay in a general
knowledge paper.

"Useful knowledge," I have written, but the phrase needs definition. I
might have taught the Wonder many things, no doubt; the habits of men
in great cities, the aspects of foreign countries, or the subtleties
of cricket; but when I was with him I felt--and my feelings must have
been typical--that such things as these were of no account.

Towards the end of the summer, the occasions upon which I was able
to stimulate myself into a condition of bearable complacency were
very rare. I often thought of Challis's advice to leave the Wonder
alone. I should have gone away if I had been free, but Victor Stott
had a use for me, and I was powerless to disobey him. I feared him,
but he controlled me at his will. I feared him as I had once feared
an imaginary God, but I did not hate him.

One curious little fragment of wisdom came to me as the result of
my experience--a useless fragment perhaps, but something that has
in one way altered my opinion of my fellow-men. I have learnt that
a measure of self-pride, of complacency, is essential to every human
being. I judge no man any more for displaying an overweening vanity,
rather do I envy him this representative mark of his humanity. The
Wonder was completely and quite inimitably devoid of any conceit,
and the word ambition had no meaning for him. It was inconceivable
that he should compare himself with any of his fellow-creatures,
and it was inconceivable that any honour they might have lavished
upon him would have given him one moment's pleasure. He was entirely
alone among aliens who were unable to comprehend him, aliens who
could not flatter him, whose opinions were valueless to him. He had
no more common ground on which to air his knowledge, no more grounds
for comparison by which to achieve self-conceit than a man might have
in a world tenanted only by sheep. From what I have heard him say on
the subject of our slavery to preconceptions, I think the metaphor
of sheep is one which he might have approved.

But the result of all this, so far as I am concerned, is a feeling of
admiration for those men who are capable of such magnificent approval
for themselves, the causes they espouse, their family, their country,
and their species; it is an approval which I fear I can never again
attain in full measure.

I have seen possibilities which have enforced a humbleness that is not
good for my happiness or conducive to my development. Henceforward I
will espouse the cause of vanity. It is only the vain who deprecate
vanity in others.

But there were times in the early period of my association with Victor
Stott when I rebelled vigorously against his complacent assumption
of my ignorance.



II

May was a gloriously fine month, and we were much out of
doors. Unfortunately, except for one fortnight in August, that was
all the settled weather we had that summer.

I remember sitting one afternoon staring at the same pond that Ginger
Stott had stared at when he told me that the boy now beside me was a
"blarsted freak."

The Wonder had said nothing that day, but now he began to enunciate
some of his incomprehensible commonplaces in that thin, clear voice
of his. I wrote down what I could remember of his utterances when I
went home, but now I read them over again I am exceedingly doubtful
whether I reported him correctly. There is, however, one dictum which
seems clearly phrased, and when I recall the scene, I remember trying
to push the induction he had started. The pronouncement, as I have
it written, is as follows:

"Pure deduction from a single premise, unaided by previous knowledge
of the functions of the terms used in the expansion of the argument,
is an act of creation, incontrovertible, and outside the scope of
human reasoning."

I believe he meant to say--but my notes are horribly confused--that
logic and philosophy were only relative, being dependent always in
a greater or less degree upon the test of a material experiment for
verification.

Here, as always, I find the Wonder's pronouncements very elusive. In
one sense I see that what I have quoted here is a self-evident
proposition, but I have the feeling that behind it there lies some
gleam of wisdom which throws a faint light on the profound problem
of existence.

I remember that in my own feeble way I tried to analyse this statement,
and for a time I thought I had grasped one significant aspect of it. It
seemed to me that the possibility of conceiving a philosophy that was
not dependent for verification upon material experiment--that is to
say, upon evidence afforded by the five senses--indicates that there
is something which is not matter; but that since the development of
such a philosophy is not possible to our minds, we must argue that
our dependence upon matter is so intimate that it is almost impossible
to conceive that we are actuated by any impulse which does not arise
out of a material complex.

At the back of my mind there seemed to be a thought that I could
not focus, I trembled on the verge of some great revelation that
never came.

Through my thoughts there ran a thread of reverence for the
intelligence that had started my speculations. If only he could speak
in terms that I could understand.

I looked round at the Wonder. He was, as usual, apparently lost in
abstraction, and quite unconscious of my regard.

The wind was strong on the Common, and he sniffed once or twice and
then wiped his nose. He did not use a handkerchief.

It came to me at the moment that he was no more than a vulgar little
village boy.



III

There were few incidents to mark the progress of that summer. I marked
the course of time by my own thoughts and feelings, especially by my
growing submission to the control of the Wonder.

It was curious to recall that I had once thought of correcting the
Wonder's manners, of administering, perhaps, a smacking. That was
a fault of ignorance. I had often erred in the same way in other
experiences of life, but I had not taken the lesson to heart. I
remember at school our "head" taking us--I was in the lower fifth
then--in Latin verse. He rebuked me for a false quantity, and I,
very cocksure, disputed the point and read my line. The head pointed
out very gravely that I had been misled by an English analogy in my
pronunciation of the word "maritus," and I grew very hot and ashamed
and apologetic. I feel much the same now when I think of my early
attitude towards the Wonder. But this time, I think, I have profited
by my experience.

There is, however, one incident which in the light of subsequent
events it seems worth while to record.

One afternoon in early July, when the sky had lifted sufficiently
for us to attempt some sort of a walk, we made our way down through
the sodden woods in the direction of Deane Hill.

As we were emerging into the lane at the foot of the slope, I saw the
Harrison idiot lurking behind the trunk of a big beech. This was only
the third time I had seen him since I drove him away from the farm,
and on the two previous occasions he had not come close to us.

This time he had screwed up his courage to follow us. As we climbed
the lane I saw him slouching up the hedge-side behind us.

The Wonder took no notice, and we continued our way in silence.

When we reached the prospect at the end of the hill, where the ground
falls away like a cliff and you have a bird's-eye view of two counties,
we sat down on the steps of the monument erected in honour of those
Hampdenshire men whose lives were thrown away in the South-African war.

That view always has a soothing effect upon me, and I gave myself
up to an ecstasy of contemplation and forgot, for a few moments, the
presence of the Wonder, and the fact that the idiot had followed us.

I was recalled to existence by the sound of a foolish, conciliatory
mumbling, and looked round to see the leering face of the Harrison
idiot ogling the Wonder from the corner of the plinth. The Wonder was
between me and the idiot, but he was apparently oblivious of either
of us.

I was about to rise and drive the idiot away, but the Wonder, still
staring out at some distant horizon, said quietly, "Let him be."

I was astonished, but I sat still and awaited events.

The idiot behaved much as I have seen a very young and nervous
puppy behave.

He came within a few feet of us, gurgling and crooning, flapping his
hands and waggling his great head; his uneasy eyes wandered from the
Wonder to me and back again, but it was plainly the Wonder whom he
wished to propitiate. Then he suddenly backed as if he had dared
too much, flopped on to the wet grass and regarded us both with
foolish, goggling eyes. For a few seconds he lay still, and then he
began to squirm along the ground towards us, a few inches at a time,
stopping every now and again to bleat and gurgle with that curious,
crooning note which he appeared to think would pacificate the object
of his overtures.

I stood by, as it were, ready to obey the first hint that the presence
of this horrible creature was distasteful to the Wonder, but he gave
no sign.

The idiot had come within five or six feet of us, wriggling himself
along the wet grass, before the Wonder looked at him. The look when
it came was one of those deliberate, intentional stares which made
one feel so contemptible and insignificant.

The idiot evidently regarded this look as a sign of encouragement. He
knelt up, began to flap his hands and changed his crooning note to
a pleased, emphatic bleat.

"A-ba-ba," he blattered, and made uncouth gestures, by which I think he
meant to signify that he wanted the Wonder to come and play with him.

Still the Wonder gave no sign, but his gaze never wavered, and though
the idiot was plainly not intimidated, he never met that gaze for
more than a second or two. Nevertheless he came on, walking now on
his knees, and at last stretched out a hand to touch the boy he so
curiously desired for a playmate.

That broke the spell. The Wonder drew back quickly--he never allowed
one to touch him--got up and climbed two or three steps higher up
the base of the monument. "Send him away," he said to me.

"That'll do," I said threateningly to the idiot, and at the sound of
my voice and the gesture of my hand, he blenched, yelped, rolled over
away from me, and then got to his feet and shambled off for several
yards before stopping to regard us once more with his pacificatory,
disgusting ogle.

"Send him away," repeated the Wonder, as I hesitated, and I rose to
my feet and pretended to pick up a stone.

That was enough. The idiot yelped again and made off. This time he
did not stop, though he looked over his shoulder several times as
he lolloped away among the low gorse, to which look I replied always
with the threat of an imaginary stone.

The Wonder made no comment on the incident as we walked home. He had
shown no sign of fear. It occurred to me that my guardianship of him
was merely a convenience, not a protection from any danger.



IV

As time went on it became increasingly clear to me that my chance of
obtaining the Wonder's confidence was becoming more and more remote.

At first he had replied to my questions; usually, it is true, by no
more than an inclination of his head, but he soon ceased to make even
this acknowledgment of my presence.

So I fell by degrees into a persistent habit of silence, admitted my
submission by obtruding neither remark nor question upon my constant
companion, and gave up my intention of using the Wonder as a means
to gratify my curiosity concerning the problem of existence.

Once or twice I saw Crashaw at a distance. He undoubtedly recognised
the Wonder, and I think he would have liked to come up and rebuke
him--perhaps me, also; but probably he lacked the courage. He would
hover within sight of us for a few minutes, scowling, and then stalk
away. He gave me the impression of being a dangerous man, a thwarted
fanatic, brooding over his defeat. If I had been Mrs. Stott, I should
have feared the intrusion of Crashaw more than the foolish overtures of
the Harrison idiot. But there was, of course, the Wonder's compelling
power to be reckoned with, in the case of Crashaw.



V

Challis came back in early September, and it was he who first coaxed,
and then goaded me into rebellion.

Challis did not come too soon.

At the end of August I was seeing visions, not pleasant, inspiriting
visions, but the indefinite, perplexing shapes of delirium.

I think it must have been in August that I stood on Deane Hill, through
an afternoon of fine, driving rain, and had a vision of myself playing
tricks with the sands of life.

I had begun to lose my hold on reality. Silence, contemplation,
a long-continued wrestle with the profound problems of life, were
combining to break up the intimacy of life and matter, and my brain
was not of the calibre to endure the strain.

Challis saw at once what ailed me.

He came up to the farm one morning at twelve o'clock. The date was,
I believe, the twelfth of September. It was a brooding, heavy morning,
with half a gale of wind blowing from the south-west, but it had not
rained, and I was out with the Wonder when Challis arrived.

He waited for me and talked to the flattered Mrs. Berridge,
remonstrated kindly with her husband for his neglect of the farm,
and incidentally gave him a rebate on the rent.

When I came in, he insisted that I should come to lunch with him at
Challis Court.

I consented, but stipulated that I must be back at Pym by three
o'clock to accompany the Wonder for his afternoon walk.

Challis looked at me curiously, but allowed the stipulation.

We hardly spoke as we walked down the hill--the habit of silence had
grown upon me, but after lunch Challis spoke out his mind.

On that occasion I hardly listened to him, but he came up to the
farm again after tea and marched me off to dinner at the Court. I
was strangely plastic when commanded, but when he suggested that I
should give up my walks with the Wonder, go away.... I smiled and said
"Impossible," as though that ended the matter.

Challis, however, persisted, and I suppose I was not too far gone to
listen to him. I remember his saying: "That problem is not for you
or me or any man living to solve by introspection. Our work is to add
knowledge little by little, data here and there, for future evidence."

The phrase struck me, because the Wonder had once said "There are no
data," when in the early days I had asked him whether he could say
definitely if there was any future existence possible for us?

Now Challis put it to me that our work was to find data, that
every little item of real knowledge added to the feeble store man
has accumulated in his few thousand years of life, was a step, the
greatest step any man could possibly make.

"But could we not get, not a small but a very important item, from
Victor Stott?"

Challis shook his head. "He is too many thousands of years ahead of
us," he said. "We can only bridge the gap by many centuries of patient
toil. If a revelation were made to us, we should not understand it."

So, by degrees, Challis's influence took possession of me and roused
me to self-assertion.

One morning, half in dread, I stayed at home and read a novel--no other
reading could hold my attention--philosophy had become nauseating.

I expected to see the strange little figure of the Wonder come across
the Common, but he never came, nor did I receive any reproach from
Ellen Mary. I think she had forgotten her fear of the Harrison idiot.

Nevertheless, I did not give up my guardianship all at once. Three
times after that morning I took the Wonder for a walk. He made no
allusion to my defalcations. Indeed he never spoke. He relinquished
me as he had taken me up, without comment or any expression of feeling.



VI

On the twenty-ninth of September I went down to Challis Court and
stayed there for a week. Then I returned for a few days to Wood Farm
in order to put my things together and pack my books. I had decided
to go to Cairo for the winter with Challis.

At half-past one o'clock on Thursday, the eighth of October, I was in
the sitting-room, when I saw the figure of Mrs. Stott coming across
the Common. She came with a little stumbling run. I could see that
she was agitated even before she reached the farmyard gate.







CHAPTER XVI

RELEASE


I

She opened the front door without knocking, and came straight into
my sitting-room.

"'E's not 'ere," she said in a manner that left it doubtful whether
she made an assertion or asked a question.

"Your son?" I said. I had risen when she came into the room. "No;
I haven't seen him to-day."

Ellen Mary was staring at me, but it was clear that she neither saw
nor heard me. She had a look of intense concentration. One could see
that she was calculating, thinking, thinking....

I went over to her and took her by the arm. I gently shook her. "Now,
tell me what's the matter? What has happened?" I asked.

She made an effort to collect herself, loosened her arm from my
hold and with an instinctive movement pushed forward the old bonnet,
which had slipped to the back of her head.

"'E 'asn't been in to 'is dinner," she said hurriedly. "I've been on
the Common looking for 'im."

"He may have made a mistake in the time," I suggested.

She made a movement as though to push me on one side, and turned
towards the door. She was calculating again. Her expression said
quite plainly, "Could he be there, could he be there?"

"Come, come," I said, "there is surely no need to be anxious yet."

She turned on me. "'E never makes a mistake in the time," she said
fiercely, "'e always knows the time to the minute without clock or
watch. Why did you leave 'im alone?"

She broke off in her attack upon me and continued: "'E's never been
late before, not a minute, and now it's a hour after 'is time."

"He may be at home by now," I said. She took the hint instantly and
started back again with the same stumbling little run.

I picked up my hat and followed her.



II

The Wonder was not at the cottage.

"Now, my dear woman, you must keep calm," I said. "There is absolutely
no reason to be disturbed. You had better go to Challis Court and
see if he is in the library, I----"

"I'm a fool," broke in Ellen Mary with sudden decision, and she set
off again without another word. I followed her back to the Common and
watched her out of sight. I was more disturbed about her than about
the non-appearance of the Wonder. He was well able to take care of
himself, but she.... How strange that with all her calculations she had
not thought of going to Challis Court, to the place where her son had
spent so many days. I began to question whether the whole affair was
not, in some way, a mysterious creation of her own disordered brain.

Nevertheless, I took upon myself to carry out that part of the
programme which I had not been allowed to state in words to Mrs. Stott,
and set out for Deane Hill. It was just possible that the Wonder might
have slipped down that steep incline and injured himself. Possible,
but very unlikely; the Wonder did not take the risks common to boys
of his age, he did not disport himself on dangerous slopes.

As I walked I felt a sense of lightness, of relief from depression. I
had not been this way by myself since the end of August. It was good
to be alone and free.

The day was fine and not cold, though the sun was hidden. I noticed
that the woods showed scarcely a mark of autumn decline.

There was not a soul to be seen by the monument. I scrambled down the
slope and investigated the base of the hill and came back another way
through the woods. I saw no one. I stopped continually and whistled
loudly. If he is anywhere near at hand, I thought, and in trouble,
he will hear that and answer me. I did not call him by name. I did
not know what name to call. It would have seemed absurd to have called
"Victor." No one ever addressed him by name.

My return route brought me back to the south edge of the Common, the
point most remote from the farm. There I met a labourer whom I knew
by sight, a man named Hawke. He was carrying a stick, and prodding
with it foolishly among the furze and gorse bushes. The bracken was
already dying down.

"What are you looking for?" I asked.

"It's this 'ere Master Stott, sir," he said, looking up. "'E's got
loarst seemingly."

I felt a sudden stab of self-reproach. I had been taking things too
easily. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to four.

"Mr. Challis 'ave told me to look for 'un," added the man, and
continued his aimless prodding of the gorse.

"Where is Mr. Challis?" I asked.

"'E's yonder, soomewheres." He made a vague gesture in the direction
of Pym.

The sun had come out, and the Common was all aglow. I hastened towards
the village.

On the way I met Farmer Bates and two or three labourers. They, too,
were beating among the gorse and brown bracken. They told me that
Mr. Challis was at the cottage and I hurried on. All the neighbourhood,
it seems, were searching for the Wonder. In the village I saw three
or four women standing with aprons over their heads, talking together.

I had never seen Pym so animated.



III

I met Challis in the lane. He was coming away from Mrs. Stott's
cottage.

"Have you found him?" I asked stupidly. I knew quite well that
the Wonder was not found, and yet I had a fond hope that I might,
nevertheless, be mistaken.

Challis shook his head. "There will be a mad woman in that cottage
if he doesn't come back by nightfall," he remarked with a jerk of
his head. "I've done what I can for her."

I explained that I had been over to Deane Hill, searching and calling.

"You didn't see anything?" asked Challis, echoing my foolish query
of a moment before. I shook my head.

We were both agitated without doubt.

We soon came up with Farmer Bates and his men. They stopped and
touched their hats when they saw us, and we put the same silly question
to them.

"You haven't found him?" We knew perfectly well that they would have
announced the fact at once if they had found him.

"One of you go over to the Court and get any man you can find to come
and help," said Challis. "Tell Heathcote to send every one."

One of the labourers touched his cap again, and started off at once
with a lumbering trot.

Challis and I walked on in silence, looking keenly about us and
stopping every now and then and calling. We called "Hallo! Hallo-o!" It
was an improvement upon my whistle.

"He's such a little chap," muttered Challis once; "it would be so
easy to miss him if he were unconscious."

It struck me that the reference to the Wonder was hardly sufficiently
respectful. I had never thought of him as "a little chap." But Challis
had not known him so intimately as I had.

The shadows were fast creeping over the Common. At the woodside it
was already twilight. The whole of the western sky right up to the
zenith was a finely shaded study in brilliant orange and yellow. "More
rain," I thought instinctively, and paused for a moment to watch
the sunset. The black distance stood clearly silhouetted against
the sky. One could discern the sharp outline of tiny trees on the
distant horizon.

We met Heathcote and several other men in the lane.

"Shan't be able to do much to-night, sir," said Heathcote. "It'll be
dark in 'alf an hour, sir."

"Well, do what you can in half an hour," replied Challis, and to me
he said, "You'd better come back with me. We've done what we can."

I had a picture of him then as the magnate; I had hardly thought of him
in that light before. The arduous work of the search he could delegate
to his inferiors. Still, he had come out himself, and I doubt not that
he had been altogether charming to the bewildered, distraught mother.

I acquiesced in his suggestion. I was beginning to feel very tired.

Mrs. Heathcote was at the gate when we arrived at the Court. "'Ave
they found 'im, sir?" she asked.

"Not yet," replied Challis.

I followed him into the house.



IV

As I walked back at ten o'clock it was raining steadily. I had refused
the offer of a trap. I went through the dark and sodden wood, and
I lingered and listened. The persistent tap, tap, tap of the rain
on the leaves irritated me. How could one hear while that noise
was going on? There was no other sound. There was not a breath of
wind. Only that perpetual tap, tap, tap, patter, patter, drip, tap,
tap. It seemed as if it might go on through eternity....

I went to the Stotts' cottage, though I knew there could be no
news. Challis had given strict instructions that any news should be
brought to him immediately. If it was bad news it was to be brought
to him before the mother was told.

There was a light burning in the cottage, and the door was set
wide open.

I went up to the door but I did not go in.

Ellen Mary was sitting in a high chair, her hands clasped together,
and she rocked continually to and fro. She made no sound; she merely
rocked herself with a steady, regular persistence.

She did not see me standing at the open door, and I moved quietly away.

As I walked over the Common--I avoided the wood deliberately--I
wondered what was the human limit of endurance. I wondered whether
Ellen Mary had not reached that limit.

Mrs. Berridge had not gone to bed, and there were some visitors in
the kitchen. I heard them talking. Mrs. Berridge came out when I
opened the front door.

"Any news, sir?" she asked.

"No; no news," I said. I had been about to ask her the same question.



V

I did not go to sleep for some time. I had a picture of Ellen Mary
before my eyes, and I could still hear that steady pat, patter, drip,
of the rain on the beech leaves.

In the night I awoke suddenly, and thought I heard a long, wailing
cry out on the Common. I got up and looked out of the window, but I
could see nothing. The rain was still falling, but there was a blur
of light that showed where the moon was shining behind the clouds. The
cry, if there had been a cry, was not repeated.

I went back to bed and soon fell asleep again.

I do not know whether I had been dreaming, but I woke suddenly with
a presentation of the little pond on the Common very clear before me.

"We never looked in the pond," I thought, and then--"but he could
not have fallen into the pond; besides, it's not two feet deep."

It was full daylight, and I got up and found that it was nearly
seven o'clock.

The rain had stopped, but there was a scurry of low, threatening
cloud that blew up from the south.

I dressed at once and went out. I made my way directly to the Stotts'
cottage.

The lamp was still burning and the door open, but Ellen Mary had
fallen forward on to the table; her head was pillowed on her arms.

"There is a limit to our endurance," I reflected, "and she has
reached it."

I left her undisturbed.

Outside I met two of Farmer Bates's labourers going back to work.

"I want you to come up with me to the pond," I said.



VI

The pond was very full.

On the side from which we approached, the ground sloped gradually,
and the water was stretching out far beyond its accustomed limits.

On the farther side the gorse among the trunks of the three ash-trees
came right to the edge of the bank. On that side the bank was three
or four feet high.

We came to the edge of the pond, and one of the labourers waded in
a little way--the water was very shallow on that side--but we could
see nothing for the scum of weed, little spangles of dirty green,
and a mass of some other plant that had borne a little white flower
in the earlier part of the year--stuff like dwarf hemlock.

Under the farther bank, however, I saw one comparatively clear space
of black water.

"Let's go round," I said, and led the way.

There was a tiny path which twisted between the gorse roots and came
out at the edge of the farther bank by the stem of the tallest ash. I
had seen tiny village boys pretending to fish from this point with a
stick and a piece of string. There was a dead branch of ash some five
or six feet long, with the twigs partly twisted off; it was lying among
the bushes. I remembered that I had seen small boys using this branch
to clear away the surface weed. I picked it up and took it with me.

I wound one arm round the trunk of the ash, and peered over into the
water under the bank.

I caught sight of something white under the water. I could not see
distinctly. I thought it was a piece of broken ware--the bottom of a
basin. I had picked up the ash stick and was going to probe the deeper
water with it. Then I saw that the dim white object was globular.

The end of my stick was actually in the water. I withdrew it quickly,
and threw it behind me.

My heart began to throb painfully.

I turned my face away and leaned against the ash-tree.

"Can you see anythin'?" asked one of the labourers who had come up
behind me.

"Oh! Christ!" I said. I turned quickly from the pond and pressed a
way through the gorse.

I was overwhelmingly and disgustingly sick.



VII

By degrees the solid earth ceased to wave and sway before me like
a rolling heave of water, and I looked up, pressing my hands to my
head--my hands were as cold as death.

My clothes were wet and muddy where I had lain on the sodden ground. I
got to my feet and instinctively began to brush at the mud.

I was still a little giddy, and I swayed and sought for support.

I could see the back of one labourer. He was kneeling by the ash-tree
bending right down over the water. The other man was standing in the
pond, up to his waist in water and mud. I could just see his head
and shoulders....

I staggered away in the direction of the village.



VIII

I found Ellen Mary still sitting in the same chair. The lamp was
fluttering to extinction, the flame leaping spasmodically, dying
down till it seemed that it had gone out, and then again suddenly
flickering up with little clicking bursts of flame. The air reeked
intolerably of paraffin.

I blew the lamp out and pushed it on one side.

There was no need to break the news to Ellen Mary. She had known last
night, and now she was beyond the reach of information.

She sat upright in her chair and stared out into the immensity. Her
hands alone moved, and they were not still for an instant. They lay
in her lap, and her fingers writhed and picked at her dress.

I spoke to her once, but I knew that her mind was beyond the reach
of my words.

"It is just as well," I thought; "but we must get her away."

I went out and called to the woman next door.

She was in her kitchen, but the door was open. She came out when
I knocked.

"Poor thing," she said, when I told her. "It 'as been a shock, no
doubt. She was so wrapped hup in the boy."

She could hardly have said less if her neighbour had lost half-a-crown.

"Get her into your cottage before they come," I said harshly, and
left her.

I wanted to get out of the lane before the men came back, but I had
hardly started before I saw them coming.

They had made a chair of their arms, and were carrying him between
them. They had not the least fear of him, now.



IX

The Harrison idiot suddenly jumped out of the hedge.

I put my hand to my throat. I wanted to cry out, to stop him, but I
could not move. I felt sick again, and utterly weak and powerless,
and I could not take my gaze from that little doll with the great
drooping head that rolled as the men walked.

I was reminded, disgustingly, of children with a guy.

The idiot ran shambling down the lane. He knew the two men, who
tolerated him and laughed at him. He was not afraid of them nor
their burden.

He came right up to them. I heard one of the men say gruffly, "Now
then, you cut along off!"

I believe the idiot must have touched the dead body.

I was gripping my throat in my hand; I was trying desperately to
cry out.

Whether the idiot actually touched the body or not I cannot say, but he
must have realised in his poor, bemused brain that the thing was dead.

He cried out with his horrible, inhuman cry, turned, and ran up the
lane towards me. He fell on his face a few yards from me, scrambled
wildly to his feet again and came on yelping and shrieking. He was
wildly, horribly afraid. I caught sight of his face as he passed me,
and his mouth was distorted into a square, his upper lip horribly drawn
up over his ragged, yellow teeth. Suddenly he dashed at the hedge and
clawed his way through. I heard him still yelping appallingly as he
rushed away across the field....







CHAPTER XVII

IMPLICATIONS


I

The jury returned a verdict of "Accidental death."

If there had been any traces of a struggle, I had not noticed them
when I came to the edge of the pond. There may have been marks as if
a foot had slipped. I was not thinking of evidence when I looked into
the water.

There were marks enough when the police came to investigate, but
they were the marks made by a twelve-stone man in hobnail boots,
who had scrambled into, and out of, the pond. As the inspector said,
it was not worth while wasting any time in looking for earlier traces
of footsteps below those marks.

Nor were there any signs of violence on the body. It was in no way
disfigured, save by the action of the water, in which it had lain
for eighteen hours.

There was, indeed, only one point of any significance from the jury's
point of view, and that they put on one side, if they considered it
at all; the body was pressed into the mud.

The Coroner asked a few questions about this fact.

Was the mud very soft? Yes, very soft, liquid on top.

How was the body lying? Face downwards.

What part of the body was deepest in the mud? The chest. The witness
said he had hard work to get the upper part of the body released; the
head was free, but the mud held the rest. "The mooad soocked like,"
was the expressive phrase of the witness.

The Coroner passed on to other things. Had any one a spite against
the child? and such futilities. Only once more did he revert to
that solitary significant fact. "Would it be possible," he asked of
the abashed and self-conscious labourer, "would it be possible for
the body to have worked its way down into the soft mud as you have
described it to have been found?"

"We-el," said the witness, "'twas in the stacky mooad, 'twas through
the sarft stoof."

"But this soft mud would suck any solid body down, would it
not?" persisted the Coroner.

And the witness recalled the case of a duck that had been sucked into
the same soft pond mud the summer before, and cited the instance. He
forgot to add that on that occasion the mud had not been under water.

The Coroner accepted the instance. There can be no question that both
he and the jury were anxious to accept the easier explanation.



II

But I know perfectly well that the Wonder did not fall into the pond
by accident.

I should have known, even if that conclusive evidence with regard to
his being pushed into the mud had never come to light.

He may have stood by the ash-tree and looked into the water, but
he would never have fallen. He was too perfectly controlled; and,
with all his apparent abstraction, no one was ever more alive to the
detail of his surroundings. He and I have walked together perforce
in many slippery places, but I have never known him to fall or even
begin to lose his balance, whereas I have gone down many times.

Yes; I know that he was pushed into the pond, and I know that he
was held down in the mud, most probably by the aid of that ash stick
I had held. But it was not for me to throw suspicion on any one at
that inquest, and I preferred to keep my thoughts and my inferences
to myself. I should have done so, even if I had been in possession
of stronger evidence.

I hope that it was the Harrison idiot who was to blame. He was
not dangerous in the ordinary sense, but he might quite well have
done the thing in play--as he understood it. Only I cannot quite
understand his pushing the body down after it fell. That seems to
argue vindictiveness--and a logic which I can hardly attribute to
the idiot. Still, who can tell what went on in the distorted mind of
that poor creature? He is reported to have rescued the dead body of
a rabbit from the undergrowth on one occasion, and to have blubbered
when he could not bring it back to life.

There is but one other person who could have been implicated, and I
hesitate to name him in this place. Yet one remembers what terrific
acts of misapplied courage and ferocious brutality the fanatics of
history have been capable of performing when their creed and their
authority have been set at naught.



III

Ellen Mary never recovered her sanity. She died a few weeks ago in
the County Asylum. I hear that her husband attended the funeral. When
she lost her belief in the supernal wisdom and power of her god, her
world must have fallen about her. The thing she had imagined to be
solid, real, everlasting, had proved to be friable and destructible
like all other human building.



IV

The Wonder is buried in Chilborough churchyard.

You may find the place by its proximity to the great marble mausoleum
erected over the remains of Sir Edward Bigg, the well-known brewer
and philanthropist.

The grave of Victor Stott is marked by a small stone, some six inches
high, which is designed to catch the foot rather than the eye of
the seeker.

The stone bears the initials "V. S.," and a date--no more.



V

I saw the Wonder before he was buried.

I went up into the little bedroom and looked at him in his tiny coffin.

I was no longer afraid of him. His power over me was dissipated. He
was no greater and no less than any other dead thing.

It was the same with every one. He had become that "poor little
boy of Mrs. Stott's." No one spoke of him with respect now. No one
seemed to remember that he had been in any way different from other
"poor little fellows" who had died an untimely death.

One thing did strike me as curious. The idiot, the one person who had
never feared him living, had feared him horribly when he was dead....







EPILOGUE

THE USES OF MYSTERY


Something Challis has told me; something I have learned for myself;
and there is something which has come to me from an unknown source.

But here again we are confronted with the original difficulty--the
difficulty that for some conceptions there is no verbal figure.

It is comprehensible, it is, indeed, obvious that the deeper abstract
speculation of the Wonder's thought cannot be set out by any metaphor
that would be understood by a lesser intelligence.

We see that many philosophers, whose utterances have been recorded
in human history--that record which floats like a drop of oil on
the limitless ocean of eternity--have been confronted with this
same difficulty, and have woven an intricate and tedious design
of words in their attempt to convey some single conception--some
conception which themselves could see but dimly when disguised in the
masquerade of language; some figure that as it was limned grew ever
more confused beneath the wrappings of metaphor, so that we who read
can glimpse scarce a hint of its original shape and likeness. We see,
also, that the very philosophers who caricatured their own eidolon,
became intrigued with the logical abstraction of words and were led
away into a wilderness of barren deduction--their one inspired vision
of a stable premiss distorted and at last forgotten.

How then shall we hope to find words to adumbrate a philosophy
which starts by the assumption that we can have no impression of
reality until we have rid ourselves of the interposing and utterly
false concepts of space and time, which delimit the whole world of
human thought.

I admit that one cannot even begin to do this thing; within our present
limitations our whole machinery of thought is built of these two
original concepts. They are the only gauges wherewith we may measure
every reality, every abstraction; wherewith we may give outline to
any image or process of the mind. Only when we endeavour to grapple
with that indeterminable mystery of consciousness can we conceive,
however dimly, some idea of a pure abstraction uninfluenced by and
independent of, those twin bases of our means of thought.

Here it is that Challis has paused. Here he says that we must wait,
that no revelation can reveal what we are incapable of understanding,
that only by the slow process of evolution can we attain to any
understanding of the mystery we have sought to solve by our futile
and primitive hypotheses.

"But then," I have pressed him, "why do you hesitate to speak of what
you heard on that afternoon?"

And once he answered me:

"I glimpsed a finality," he said, "and that appalled me. Don't you
see that ignorance is the means of our intellectual pleasure? It is
the solving of the problem that brings enjoyment--the solved problem
has no further interest. So when all is known, the stimulus for action
ceases; when all is known there is quiescence, nothingness. Perfect
knowledge implies the peace of death, implies the state of being
one--our pleasures are derived from action, from differences, from
heterogeneity.

"Oh! pity the child," said Challis, "for whom there could be no
mystery. Is not mystery the first and greatest joy of life? Beyond the
gate there is unexplored mystery for us in our childhood. When that is
explored, there are new and wonderful possibilities beyond the hills,
then beyond the seas, beyond the known world, in the everyday chances
and movements of the unknown life in which we are circumstanced.

"Surely we should all perish through sheer inanity, or die desperately
by suicide if no mystery remained in the world. Mystery takes a
thousand beautiful shapes; it lurks even in the handiwork of man, in
a stone god, or in some mighty, intricate machine, incomprehensibly
deliberate and determined. The imagination endows the man-made thing
with consciousness and powers, whether of reservation or aloofness;
the similitude of meditation and profundity is wrought into stone. Is
there not source for mystery to the uninstructed in the great machine
registering the progress of its own achievement with each solemn,
recurrent beat of its metal pulse?

"Behind all these things is the wonder of the imagination that never
approaches more nearly to the creation of a hitherto unknown image
than when it thus hesitates on the verge of mystery.

"There is yet so much, so very much cause for wondering
speculation. Science gains ground so slowly. Slowly it has outlined,
however vaguely, the uncertainties of our origin so far as this world
is concerned, while the mystic has fought for his entrancing fairy
tales one by one.

"The mystic still holds his enthralling belief in the succession
of peoples who have risen and died--the succeeding world-races,
red, black, yellow, and white, which have in turn dominated this
planet. Science with its hammer and chisel may lay bare evidence, may
collate material, date man's appearance, call him the most recent of
placental mammals, trace his superstitions and his first conceptions
of a god from the elemental fears of the savage. But the mystic turns
aside with an assumption of superior knowledge; he waves away objective
evidence; he has a certainty impressed upon his mind.

"The mystic is a power; he compels a multitude of followers, because
he offers an attraction greater than the facts of science; he tells of
a mystery profounder than any problem solved by patient investigation,
because his mystery is incomprehensible even by himself; and in fear
lest any should comprehend it, he disguises the approach with an
array of lesser mysteries, man-made; with terminologies, symbologies
and high talk of esotericism too fearful for any save the initiate.

"But we must preserve our mystic in some form against the awful time
when science shall have determined a limit; when the long history of
evolution shall be written in full, and every stage of world-building
shall be made plain. When the cycle of atomic dust to atomic dust
is demonstrated, and the detail of the life-process is taught and
understood, we shall have a fierce need for the mystic to save us
from the futility of a world we understand, to lie to us if need
be, to inspirit our material and regular minds with some breath of
delicious madness. We shall need the mystic then, or the completeness
of our knowledge will drive us at last to complete the dusty circle
in our eagerness to escape from a world we understand....

"See how man clings to his old and useless traditions; see how he
opposes at every step the awful force of progress. At each stage
he protests that the thing that is, is good, or that the thing that
was and has gone, was better. He despises new knowledge and fondly
clings to the belief that once men were greater than they now are. He
looks back to the more primitive, and endows it with that mystery he
cannot find in his own times. So have men ever looked lingeringly
behind them. It is an instinct, a great and wonderful inheritance
that postpones the moment of disillusionment.

"We are still mercifully surrounded with the countless mysteries
of every-day experience, all the evidences of the unimaginable
stimulus we call life. Would you take them away? Would you resolve
life into a disease of the ether--a disease of which you and I, all
life and all matter, are symptoms? Would you teach that to the child,
and explain to him that the wonder of life and growth is no wonder,
but a demonstrable result of impeded force, to be evaluated by the
application of an adequate formula?

"You and I," said Challis, "are children in the infancy of the
world. Let us to our play in the nursery of our own times. The day
will come, perhaps, when humanity shall have grown and will have to
take upon itself the heavy burden of knowledge. But you need not fear
that that will be in our day, nor in a thousand years.

"Meanwhile leave us our childish fancies, our little imaginings,
our hope--children that we are--of those impossible mysteries beyond
the hills ... beyond the hills."







                               PRINTED BY
                     HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
                         LONDON AND AYLESBURY.







NOTES


[1] See the Deutsche Bibliothek and Schöneich's account of the child
of Lübeck.

[2] A study of genius shows that in a percentage of cases so large
as to exclude the possibility of coincidence, the exceptional man,
whether in the world of action, of art, or of letters, seems to
inherit his magnificent powers through the female line. Mr. Galton,
it is true, did not make a great point of this curious observation,
but the tendency of more recent analyses is all in the direction of
confirming the hypothesis; and it would seem to hold good in the
converse proposition, namely, that the exceptional woman inherits
her qualities from her father.






End of Project Gutenberg's The Hampdenshire Wonder, by John Davys Beresford