How that phrase always recurred!

III

There were no complications, but Mrs. Stott's recovery was not rapid. 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 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 open his mouth, 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 'elp 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 dammed 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 he 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 in 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....

FOOTNOTES:

[3] 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. Sir Francis 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.



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 baby 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. As a result of this clerical intrigue 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 godparents 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 mediaevalism, and he now began to dally with the 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 crushed by the weight 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, swinging his stick as a pendulum between his knees, 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 the 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 cliches, 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, "anythink 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 that 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 armchair 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 make 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 throne.

The child sat calm, motionless; his eyes were fixed upon his father's face with a sublime, undeviating 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 gave evidence of a 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; who shared in his one interest; whose speech was of form, averages, the preparation of wickets, and all the detail of cricket.

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.

And 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. "Its 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 worked 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 Caesar!" 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 top of his head. 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 as there was no response, 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 turned towards 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 premisses 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 to-day, sir?" Lewes asked next morning. 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 a 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 TWO (Continued)

THE WONDER AMONG BOOKS



PART TWO (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 child-like.

"'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 Encyclopaedia 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 even in the introduction."

"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 apparently making excellent progress with the letter "A."

"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 "B," and then he climbed down from his Encyclopaedia, 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 on 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 added little 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 Encyclopaedia 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 six 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 flower-bed; 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.