Everything was so bright that afternoon that nothing, I believe, could have depressed me. When I had reached the farm and looked round the low, dark room with its one window, a foot from the ground and two from the ceiling, I only thought that I should be out-of-doors all the time. It amused me that I could touch the ceiling with my head by standing on tiptoe, and I laughed at the framed "presentation plates" from old Christmas numbers on the walls. These things are merely curious when the sun is shining and it is high May, and one is free to do the desired work after twenty years in a galley.

V

At a quarter to eight that evening I saw the sun set behind the hills. As I wandered reflectively down the lane that goes towards Challis Court, a blackbird was singing ecstatically in a high elm; here and there a rabbit popped out and sat up, the picture of precocious curiosity. Nature seemed to be standing in her doorway for a careless half-hour's gossip, before putting up the shutters to bar the robbers who would soon be about their work of the night.

It was still quite light as I strolled back over the Common, and I chose a path that took me through a little spinney of ash, oak, and beech, treading carefully to avoid crushing the tender crosiers of bracken that were just beginning to break their way through the soil.

As I emerged from the little clump of wood, I saw two figures going away from me in the direction of Pym.

One was that of a boy wearing a cricket-cap; he was walking deliberately, his hands hanging at his sides; the other figure was a taller boy, and he threw out his legs in a curious, undisciplined way, as though he had little control over them. At first sight I thought he was not sober.

The two passed out of sight behind a clump of hawthorn, but once I saw the smaller figure turn and face the other, and once he made a repelling gesture with his hands.

It occurred to me that the smaller boy was trying to avoid his companion; that he was, in one sense, running away from him, that he walked as one might walk away from some threatening animal, deliberately—to simulate the appearance of courage.

I fancied the bigger boy was the idiot Harrison I had seen that afternoon, and Farmer Bates's "We hoped we were shut of him" recurred to me. I wondered if the idiot were dangerous or only a nuisance.

I took the smaller boy to be one of the villagers' children. I noticed that his cricket-cap had a dark patch as though it had been mended with some other material.

The impression which I received from this trivial affair was one of disappointment. The wood and the Common had been so deserted by humanity, so given up to nature, that I felt the presence of the idiot to be a most distasteful intrusion. "If that horrible thing is going to haunt the Common there will be no peace or decency," was the idea that presented itself. "I must send him off, the brute," was the corollary. But I disliked the thought of being obliged to drive him away.

VI

The next morning I did not go on the Common; I was anxious to avoid a meeting with the Harrison idiot. I had been debating whether I should drive him away if I met him. Obviously I had no more right on the Common than he had—on the other hand, he was a nuisance, and I did not see why I should allow him to spoil all my pleasure in that ideal stretch of wild land which pressed on three sides of the Wood Farm. It was a stupid quandary of my own making; but I am afraid it was rather typical of my mental attitude. I am prone to set myself tasks, such as this eviction of the idiot from common ground, and equally prone to avoid them by a process of procrastination.

By way of evasion I walked over to Deane Hill and surveyed the wonderful panorama of neat country that fills the basin between the Hampden and the Quainton Hills. Seen from that height, it has something the effect of a Dutch landscape, it all looks so amazingly tidy. Away to the left I looked over Stoke-Underhill. Ailesworth was a blur in the hollow, but I could distinguish the high fence of the County Ground.

I sat all the morning on Deane Hill, musing and smoking, thinking of such things as Ginger Stott, and the match with Surrey. I decided that I must certainly go and see Stott's queer son, the phenomenon who had, they say, read all the books in Mr. Challis's library. I wondered what sort of a library this Challis had, and who he was. I had never heard of him before. I think I must have gone to sleep for a time.

When Mrs. Berridge came to clear away my dinner—I dined, without shame, at half-past twelve—I detained her with conversation. Presently I asked about little Stott.

"He's a queer one, that's what he is," said Mrs. Berridge. She was a neat, comely little woman, rather superior to her station, and it seemed to me, certainly superior to her clod of a husband.

"A great reader, Farmer Bates tells me," I said.

Mrs. Berridge passed that by. "His mother's in trouble about him this morning," she said. "She's such a nice, respectable woman, and has all her milk and eggs and butter off of us. She was here this morning while you were out, sir, and, what I could make of it that 'Arrison boy had been chasing her boy on the Common last night."

"Oh!" I said with sudden enlightenment. "I believe I saw them." At the back of my mind I was struggling desperately with a vague remembrance. It may sound incredible, but I had only the dimmest memory of my later experience of the child. The train incident was still fresh in my mind, but I could not remember what Stott had told me when I talked with him by the pond. I seemed to have an impression that the child had some strange power of keeping people at a distance; or was I mixing up reality with some Scandinavian fairy tale?

"Very likely, sir," Mrs. Berridge went on. "What upset Mrs. Stott was that her boy's never upset by anything—he has a curious way of looking at you, sir, that makes you wish you wasn't there; but from what Mrs. Stott says, this 'Arrison boy wasn't to be drove off, anyhow, and her son came in quite flurried like. Mrs. Stott seemed quite put out about it."

Doubtless I might have had more information from my landlady, but I was struggling to reconstruct that old experience which had slipped away from me, and I nodded and turned back to the book I had been pretending to read. Mrs. Berridge was one of those unusual women—for her station in life—who know when to be silent, and she finished her clearing away without initiating any further remarks.

When she had finished I went out onto the Common and looked for the pond where I had talked with Ginger Stott.

I found it after a time, and then I began to gather up the threads I had dropped.

It all came back to me, little by little. I remembered that talk I had had with him, his very gestures; I remembered how he had spoken of habits, or the necessity for the lack of them, and that took me back to the scene in the British Museum Reading Room, and to my theory. I was suddenly alive to that old interest again.

I got up and walked eagerly in the direction of Mrs. Stott's cottage.



CHAPTER XV

THE INCIPIENCE OF MY SUBJECTION TO THE WONDER

I

Victor Stott was in his eighth year when I met him for the third time. I must have stayed longer than I imagined by the pond on the Common, for Mrs. Stott and her son had had tea, and the boy was preparing to go out. He stopped when he saw me coming; an unprecedented mark of recognition, so I have since learned.

As I saw him then, he made a remarkable, but not a repulsively abnormal figure. His baldness struck one immediately, but it did not give him a look of age. Then one noticed that his head was unmistakably out of proportion to his body, yet the disproportion was not nearly so marked as it had been in infancy. These two things were conspicuous; the less salient peculiarities were observed later; the curious little beaky nose that jutted out at an unusual angle from the face, the lips that were too straight and determined for a child, the laxity of the limbs when the body was in repose—lastly, the eyes.

When I met Victor Stott on this, third, occasion, there can be no doubt that he had lost something of his original power. This may have been due to his long sojourn in the world of books, a sojourn that had, perhaps, altered the strange individuality of his thought; or it may have been due, in part at least, to his recent recognition of the fact that the power of his gaze exercised no influence over creatures such as the Harrison idiot. Nevertheless, though something of the original force had abated, he still had an extraordinary, and, so far as I can learn, altogether unprecedented power of enforcing his will without word or gesture; and I may say here that in those rare moments when Victor Stott looked me in the face, I seemed to see a rare and wonderful personality peering out through his eyes,—the personality which had, no doubt, spoken to Challis and Lewes through that long afternoon in the library of Challis Court. Normally one saw a curious, unattractive, rather repulsive figure of a child; when he looked at one with that rare look of intention, the man that lived within that unattractive body was revealed, his insight, his profundity, his unexampled wisdom. If we mark the difference between man and animals by a measure of intelligence, then surely this child was a very god among men.

II

Victor Stott did not look at me when I entered his mother's cottage; I saw only the unattractive exterior of him, and I blundered into an air of patronage.

"Is this your boy?" I said, when I had greeted her. "I hear he is a great scholar."

"Yes, sir," replied Ellen Mary quietly. She never boasted to strangers.

"You don't remember me, I suppose?" I went on, foolishly; trying, however, to speak as to an equal. "You were in petticoats the last time I saw you."

The Wonder was standing by the window, his arms hanging loosely at his sides; he looked out aslant up the lane; his profile was turned towards me. He made no answer to my question.

"Oh yes, sir, he remembers," replied Ellen Mary. "He never forgets anything."

I paused, uncomfortably. I was slightly huffed by the boy's silence.

"I have come to spend the summer here," I said at last. "I hope he will come to see me. I have brought a good many books with me; perhaps he might care to read some of them."

I had to talk at the boy; there was no alternative. Inwardly I was thinking that I had Kant's Critique and Hegel's Phenomenology among my books. "He may put on airs of scholarship," I thought; "but I fancy that he will find those two works rather above the level of his comprehension as yet." I did not recognise the fact that it was I who was putting on airs, not Victor Stott.

"'E's given up reading the past six weeks, sir," said Ellen Mary, "but I daresay he will come and see your books."

She spoke demurely, and she did not look at her son; I received the impression that her statements were laid before him to take up, reject, or pass unnoticed as he pleased.

I was slightly exasperated. I turned to the Wonder. "Would you care to come?" I asked.

He nodded without looking at me, and walked out of the cottage.

I hesitated.

"'E'll go with you now, sir," prompted Ellen Mary. "That's what 'e means."

I followed the Wonder in a condition of suppressed irritation. "His mother might be able to interpret his rudeness," I thought, "but I would teach him to convey his intentions more clearly. The child had been spoilt."

III

The Wonder chose the road over the Common. I should have gone by the wood, but when we came to the entrance of the wood, he turned up on to the Common. He did not ask me which way I preferred. Indeed, we neither of us spoke during the half-mile walk that separated the Wood Farm from the last cottage in Pym.

I was fuming inwardly. I had it in my mind at that time to put the Wonder through some sort of an examination. I was making plans to contribute towards his education, to send him to Oxford, later. I had adumbrated a scheme to arouse interest in his case among certain scholars and men of influence with whom I was slightly acquainted. I had been very much engrossed with these plans as I had made my way to the Stotts' cottage. I was still somewhat exalted in mind with my dreams of a vicarious brilliance. I had pictured the Wonder's magnificent passage through the University; I had acted, in thought, as the generous and kindly benefactor.... It had been a grandiose dream, and the reality was so humiliating. Could I make this mannerless child understand his possibilities? Had he any ambition?

Thinking of these things, I had lagged behind as we crossed the Common, and when I came to the gate of the farmyard, the Wonder was at the door of the house. He did not wait for me, but walked straight into my sitting-room. When I entered, I found him seated on the low window-sill, turning over the top layer of books in the large case which had been opened, but not unpacked. There was no place to put the books; in fact, I was proposing to have some shelves put up, if Mrs. Berridge had no objection.

I entered the room in a condition of warm indignation. "Cheek" was the word that was in my mind. "Confounded cheek," I muttered. Nevertheless I did not interrupt the boy; instead, I lit a cigarette, sat down and watched him.

I was sceptical at first. I noted at once the sure touch with which the boy handled my books, the practised hand that turned the pages, the quick examination of title-page and the list of contents, the occasional swift reference to the index, but I did not believe it possible that any one could read so fast as he read when he did condescend for a few moments to give his attention to a few consecutive pages. "Was it a pose?" I thought, yet he was certainly an adept in handling the books. I was puzzled, yet I was still sceptical—the habit of experience was towards disbelief—a boy of seven and a half could not possibly have the mental equipment to skim all that philosophy....

My books were being unpacked very quickly. Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, Leibnitz, Nietzsche, Hume, Bradley, William James had all been rejected and were piled on the floor, but he had hesitated longer over Bergson's Creative Evolution. He really seemed to be giving that some attention, though he read it—if he were reading it—so fast that the hand which turned the pages hardly rested between each movement.

When Bergson was sent to join his predecessors, I determined that I would get some word out of this strange child—I had never yet heard him speak, not a single syllable. I determined to brave all rebuffs. I was prepared for that.

"Well?" I said, when Bergson was laid down. "Well! What do you make of that?"

He turned and looked out of the window.

I came and sat on the end of the table within a few feet of him. From that position I, too, could see out of the window, and I saw the figure of the Harrison idiot slouching over the farmyard gate.

A gust of impatience whirled over me. I caught up my stick and went out quickly.

"Now then," I said, as I came within speaking distance of the idiot, "get away from here. Out with you!"

The idiot probably understood no word of what I said, but like a dog he was quick to interpret my tone and gesture. He made a revoltingly inhuman sound as he shambled away, a kind of throaty yelp. I walked back to the house. I could not avoid the feeling that I had been unnecessarily brutal.

When I returned the Wonder was still staring out of the window; but though I did not guess it then, the idiot had served my purpose better than my determination. It was to the idiot that I owed my subsequent knowledge of Victor Stott. The Wonder had found a use for me. He was resigned to bear with my feeble mental development, because I was strong enough to keep at bay that half-animal creature who appeared to believe that Victor Stott was one of his own kind—the only one he had ever met. The idiot in some unimaginable way had inferred a likeness between himself and the Wonder—they both had enormous heads—and the idiot was the only human being over whom the Wonder was never able to exercise the least authority.

IV

I went in and sat down again on the end of the table. I was rather heated. I lit another cigarette and stared at the Wonder, who was still looking out of the window.

There was silence for a few seconds, and then he spoke of his own initiative.

"Illustrates the weakness of argument from history and analogy," he said in a clear, small voice, addressing no one in particular. "Hegel's limitations are qualitatively those of Harrison, who argues that I and he are similar in kind."

The proposition was so astounding that I could find no answer immediately. If the statement had been made in boyish language I should have laughed at it, but the phraseology impressed me.

"You've read Hegel, then?" I asked evasively.

"Subtract the endeavour to demonstrate a preconceived hypothesis from any known philosophy," continued the Wonder, without heeding my question, "and the remainder, the only valuable material, is found to be distorted." He paused as if waiting for my reply.

How could one answer such propositions as these offhand? I tried, however, to get at the gist of the sentence, and, as the silence continued, I said with some hesitation: "But it is impossible, surely, to approach the work of writing, say a philosophy, without some apprehension of the end in view?"

"Illogical," replied the Wonder, "not philosophy; a system of trial and error—to evaluate a complex variable function." He paused a moment, and then glanced down at the pile of books on the floor. "More millions," he said.

I think he meant that more millions of books might be written on this system without arriving at an answer to the problem, but I admit that I am at a loss, that I cannot interpret his remarks. I wrote them down an hour or two after they were uttered, but I may have made mistakes. The mathematical metaphor is beyond me. I have no acquaintance with the higher mathematics.

The Wonder had a very expressionless face, but I thought at this moment that he wore a look of sadness; and that look was one of the factors which helped me to understand the unbridgeable gulf that lay between his intellect and mine. I think it was at this moment that I first began to change my opinion. I had been regarding him as an unbearable little prig, but it flashed across me as I watched him now, that his mind and my own might be so far differentiated that he was unable to convey his thoughts to me. "Was it possible," I wondered, "that he had been trying to talk down to my level?"

"I am afraid I don't quite follow you," I said. I had intended to question him further, to urge him to explain, but it came to me that it would be quite hopeless to go on. How can one answer the unreasoning questions of a child? Here I was the child, though a child of slightly advanced development. I could appreciate that it was useless to persist in a futile "Why, why?" when the answer could only be given in terms that I could not comprehend. Therefore I hesitated, sighed, and then with that obstinacy of vanity which creates an image of self-protection and refuses to relinquish it, I said:

"I wish you could explain yourself; not on this particular point of philosophy, but your life——" I stopped, because I did not know how to phrase my demand. What was it, after all, that I wanted to learn?

"That I can't explain," said the Wonder. "There are no data."

I saw that he had accepted my request for explanation in a much wider sense than I had intended, and I took him up on this.

"But haven't you any hypothesis?"

"I cannot work on the system of trial and error," replied the Wonder.

Our conversation went no further this afternoon, for Mrs. Berridge came in to lay the cloth. She looked askance, I thought, at the figure on the window-sill, but she ventured no remark save to ask if I was ready for my supper.

"Yes, oh! yes!" I said.

"Shall I lay for two, sir?" asked Mrs. Berridge.

"Will you stay and have supper?" I said to the Wonder, but he shook his head, got up and walked out of the room. I watched him cross the farmyard and make his way over the Common.

"Well!" I said to Mrs. Berridge, when the boy was out of sight, "that child is what in America they call 'the limit,' Mrs. Berridge."

My landlady put her lips together, shook her head, and shivered slightly. "He gives me the shudders," she said.

V

I neither read nor wrote that evening. I forgot to go out for a walk at sunset. I sat and pondered until it was time for bed, and then I pondered myself to sleep. No vision came to me, and I had no relevant dreams.

The next morning at seven o'clock I saw Mrs. Stott come over the Common to fetch her milk from the farm. I waited until her business was done, and then I went out and walked back with her.

"I want to understand about your son," I said by way of making an opening.

She looked at me quickly. "You know, 'e 'ardly ever speaks to me, sir," she said.

I was staggered for a moment. "But you understand him?" I said.

"In some ways, sir," was her answer.

I recognised the direction of the limitation. "Ah! we none of us understand him in all ways," I said, with a touch of patronage.

"No, sir," replied Ellen Mary. She evidently agreed to that statement without qualification.

"But what is he going to do?" I asked. "When he grows up, I mean?"

"I can't say, sir. We must leave that to 'im."

I accepted the rebuke more mildly than I should have done on the previous day. "He never speaks of his future?" I said feebly.

"No, sir."

There seemed to be nothing more to say. We had only gone a couple of hundred yards, but I paused in my walk. I thought I might as well go back and get my breakfast. But Mrs. Stott looked at me as though she had something more to say. We stood facing each other on the cart track.

"I suppose I can't be of any use?" I asked vaguely.

Ellen Mary became suddenly voluble.

"I 'ope I'm not askin' too much, sir," she said, "but there is a way you could 'elp if you would. 'E 'ardly ever speaks to me, as I've said, but I've been opset about that 'Arrison boy. 'E's a brute beast, sir, if you know what I mean, and 'e" (she differentiated her pronouns only by accent, and where there is any doubt I have used italics to indicate that her son is referred to) "doesn't seem to 'ave the same 'old on 'im as 'e does over others. It's truth, I am not easy in my mind about it, sir, although 'e 'as never said a word to me, not being afraid of anything like other children, but 'e seems to have took a sort of a fancy to you, sir" (I think this was intended as the subtlest flattery), "and if you was to go with 'im when 'e takes 'is walks—'e's much in the air, sir, and a great one for walkin'—I think 'e'd be glad of your cump'ny, though maybe 'e won't never say it in so many words. You mustn't mind 'im being silent, sir; there's some things we can't understand, and though, as I say, 'e 'asn't said anything to me, it's not that I'm scheming be'ind 'is back, for I know 'is meaning without words being necessary."

She might have said more, but I interrupted her at this point. "Certainly, I will come and fetch him,"—I lapsed unconsciously into her system of denomination—"this morning, if you are sure he would like to come out with me."

"I'm quite sure, sir," she said.

"About nine o'clock?" I asked.

"That would do nicely, sir," she answered.

As I walked back to the farm I was thinking of the life of those two occupants of the Stotts' cottage. The mother who watched her son in silence, studying his every look and action in order to gather his meaning; who never asked her son a question nor expected from him any statement of opinion; and the son wrapped always in that profound speculation which seemed to be his only mood. What a household!

It struck me while I was having breakfast that I seemed to have let myself in for a duty that might prove anything but pleasant.

VI

There is nothing to say of that first walk of mine with the Wonder. I spoke to him once or twice and he answered by nodding his head; even this notice I now know to have been a special mark of favour, a condescension to acknowledge his use for me as a guardian. He did not speak at all on this occasion.

I did not call for him in the afternoon; I had made other plans. I wanted to see the man Challis, whose library had been at the disposal of this astonishing child. Challis might be able to give me further information. The truth of the matter is that I was in two minds as to whether I would stay at Pym through the summer, as I had originally intended. I was not in love with the prospect which the sojourn now held out for me. If I were to be constituted head nursemaid to Master Victor Stott, there would remain insufficient time for the progress of my own book on certain aspects of the growth of the philosophic method.

I see now, when I look back, that I was not convinced at that time, that I still doubted the Wonder's learning. I may have classed it as a freakish pedantry, the result of an unprecedented memory.

Mrs. Berridge had much information to impart on the subject of Henry Challis. He was her husband's landlord, of course, and his was a hallowed name, to be spoken with decency and respect. I am afraid I shocked Mrs. Berridge at the outset by my casual "Who's this man Challis?" She certainly atoned by her own manner for my irreverence; she very obviously tried to impress me. I professed submission, but was not intimidated, rather my curiosity was aroused.

Mrs. Berridge was not able to tell me the one thing I most desired to know, whether the lord of Challis Court was in residence; but it was not far to walk, and I set out about two o'clock.

VII

Challis was getting into his motor as I walked up the drive. I hurried forward to catch him before the machine was started. He saw me coming and paused on the doorstep.

"Did you want to see me?" he asked, as I came up.

"Mr. Challis?" I asked.

"Yes," he said.

"I won't keep you now," I said, "but perhaps you could let me know some time when I could see you."

"Oh, yes," he said, with the air of a man who is constantly subjected to annoyance by strangers. "But perhaps you wouldn't mind telling me what it is you wish to see me about? I might be able to settle it now, at once."

"I am staying at the Wood Farm," I began. "I am interested in a very remarkable child——"

"Ah! take my advice, leave him alone," interrupted Challis quickly.

I suppose I looked my amazement, for Challis laughed. "Oh, well," he said, "of course you won't take such spontaneous advice as that. I'm in no hurry. Come in." He took off his heavy overcoat and threw it into the tonneau. "Come round again in an hour," he said to the chauffeur.

"It's very good of you," I protested, "I could come quite well at any other time."

"I'm in no hurry," he repeated. "You had better come to the scene of Victor Stott's operations. He hasn't been here for six weeks, by the way. Can you throw any light on his absence?"

I made a friend that afternoon. When the car came back at four o'clock, Challis sent it away again. "I shall probably stay down here to-night," he said to the butler, and to me: "Can you stay to dinner? I must convince you about this child."

"I have dined once to-day," I said. "At half-past twelve. I have no other excuse."

"Oh! well," said Challis, "you needn't eat, but I must. Get us something, Heathcote," he said to the butler, "and bring tea here."

Much of our conversation after dinner was not relevant to the subject of the Wonder; we drifted into a long argument upon human origins which has no place here. But by that time I had been very well informed as to all the essential facts of the Wonder's childhood, of his entry into the world of books, of his earlier methods, and of the significance of that long speech in the library. But at that point Challis became reserved. He would give me no details.

"You must forgive me; I can't go into that," he said.

"But it is so incomparably important," I protested.

"That may be, but you must not question me. The truth of the matter is that I have a very confused memory of what the boy said, and the little I might remember, I prefer to leave undisturbed."

He piqued my curiosity, but I did not press him. It was so evident that he did not wish to speak on that head.

He walked up with me to the farm at ten o'clock and came into my room.

"We need not keep you out of bed, Mrs. Berridge," he said to my flustered landlady. "I daresay we shall be up till all hours. We promise to see that the house is locked up." Mr. Berridge stood a figure of subservience in the background.

My books were still heaped on the floor. Challis sat down on the window-sill and looked over some of them. "Many of these Master Stott probably read in my library," he remarked, "in German. Language is no bar to him. He learns a language as you or I would learn a page of history."

Later on, I remember that we came down to essentials. "I must try and understand something of this child's capacities," I said in answer to a hint of Challis's that I should leave the Wonder alone. "It seems to me that here we have something which is of the first importance, of greater importance, indeed, than anything else in the history of the world."

"But you can't make him speak," said Challis.

"I shall try," I said. "I recognise that we cannot compel him, but I have a certain hold over him. I see from what you have told me that he has treated me with most unusual courtesy. I assure you that several times when I spoke to him this morning he nodded his head."

"A good beginning," laughed Challis.

"I can't understand," I went on, "how it is that you are not more interested. It seems to me that this child knows many things which we have been patiently attempting to discover since the dawn of civilisation."

"Quite," said Challis. "I admit that, but ... well, I don't think I want to know."

"Surely," I said, "this key to all knowledge——"

"We are not ready for it," replied Challis. "You can't teach metaphysics to children."

Nevertheless my ardour was increased, not abated, by my long talk with Challis.

"I shall go on," I said, as I went out to the farm gate with him at half-past two in the morning.

"Ah! well," he answered, "I shall come over and see you when I get back." He had told me earlier that he was going abroad for some months.

We hesitated a moment by the gate, and instinctively we both looked up at the vault of the sky and the glimmering dust of stars.

The same thought was probably in both our minds, the thought of the insignificance of this little system that revolves round one of the lesser lights of the Milky Way, but that thought was not to be expressed save by some banality, and we did not speak.

"I shall certainly look you up when I come back," said Challis.

"Yes; I hope you will," I said lamely.

I watched the loom of his figure against the vague background till I could distinguish it no longer.



CHAPTER XVI

THE PROGRESS AND RELAXATION OF MY SUBJECTION

I

The memory of last summer is presented to me now as a series of pictures, some brilliant, others vague, others again so uncertain that I cannot be sure how far they are true memories of actual occurrences, and how far they are interwoven with my thoughts and dreams. I have, for instance, a recollection of standing on Deane Hill and looking down over the wide panorama of rural England, through a driving mist of fine rain. This might well be counted among true memories, were it not for the fact that clearly associated with the picture is an image of myself grown to enormous dimensions, a Brocken spectre that threatened the world with titanic gestures of denouncement, and I seem to remember that this figure was saying: "All life runs through my fingers like a handful of dry sand." And yet the remembrance has not the quality of a dream.

I was, undoubtedly, overwrought at times. There were days when the sight of a book filled me with physical nausea, with contempt for the littleness, the narrow outlook, that seemed to me to characterise every written work. I was fiercely, but quite impotently, eager at such times to demonstrate the futility of all the philosophy ranged on the rough wooden shelves in my gloomy sitting-room. I would walk up and down and gesticulate, struggling, fighting to make clear to myself what a true philosophy should set forth. I felt at such times that all the knowledge I needed for so stupendous a task was present with me in some inexplicable way, was even pressing upon me, but that my brain was so clogged and heavy that not one idea of all that priceless wisdom could be expressed in clear thought. "I have never been taught to think," I would complain, "I have never perfected the machinery of thought," and then some dictum thrown out haphazard by the Wonder—his conception of light conversation—would recur to me, and I would realise that however well I had been trained, my limitations would remain, that I was an undeveloped animal, only one stage higher than a totem-fearing savage, a creature of small possibilities, incapable of dealing with great problems.

Once the Wonder said to me, in a rare moment of lucid condescension to my feeble intellect, "You figure space as a void in three dimensions, and time as a line that runs across it, and all other conceptions you relegate to that measure." He implied that this was a cumbrous machinery which had no relation to reality, and could define nothing. He told me that his idea of force, for example, was a pure abstraction, for which there was no figure in my mental outfit.

Such pronouncements as these left me struggling like a drowning man in deep water. I felt that it must be possible for me to come to the surface, but I could do nothing but flounder; beating fiercely with limbs that were so powerful and yet so utterly useless. I saw that my very metaphors symbolised my feebleness; I had no terms for my own mental condition; I was forced to resort to some inapplicable physical analogy.

These fits of revolt against the limitations of human thought grew more frequent as the summer progressed. Day after day my self-sufficiency and conceit were being crushed out of me. I was always in the society of a boy of seven whom I was forced to regard as immeasurably my intellectual superior. There was no department of useful knowledge in which I could compete with him. Compete indeed! I might as well speak of a third-standard child competing with Macaulay in a general knowledge paper.

"Useful knowledge," I have written, but the phrase needs definition. I might have taught the Wonder many things, no doubt; the habits of men in great cities, the aspects of foreign countries, or the subtleties of cricket; but when I was with him I felt—and my feelings must have been typical—that such things as these were of no account.

Towards the end of the summer, the occasions upon which I was able to stimulate myself into a condition of bearable complacency were very rare. I often thought of Challis's advice to leave the Wonder alone. I should have gone away if I had been free, but Victor Stott had a use for me, and I was powerless to disobey him. I feared him, but he controlled me at his will. I feared him as I had once feared an imaginary God, but I did not hate him.

One curious little fragment of wisdom came to me as the result of my experience—a useless fragment perhaps, but something that has in one way altered my opinion of my fellow-men. I have learnt that a measure of self-pride, of complacency, is essential to every human being. I judge no man any more for displaying an overweening vanity, rather do I envy him this representative mark of his humanity. The Wonder was completely and quite inimitably devoid of any conceit, and the word ambition had no meaning for him. It was inconceivable that he should compare himself with any of his fellow-creatures, and it was inconceivable that any honour they might have lavished upon him would have given him one moment's pleasure. He was entirely alone among aliens who were unable to comprehend him, aliens who could not flatter him, whose opinions were valueless to him. He had no more common ground on which to air his knowledge, no more grounds for comparison by which to achieve self-conceit than a man might have in a world tenanted only by sheep. From what I have heard him say on the subject of our slavery to preconceptions, I think the metaphor of sheep is one which he might have approved.

But the result of all this, so far as I am concerned, is a feeling of admiration for those men who are capable of such magnificent approval for themselves, the causes they espouse, their family, their country, and their species; it is an approval which I fear I can never again attain in full measure.

I have seen possibilities which have enforced a humbleness that is not good for my happiness nor conducive to my development. Henceforward I will espouse the cause of vanity. It is only the vain who deprecate vanity in others.

But there were times in the early period of my association with Victor Stott when I rebelled vigorously against his complacent assumption of my ignorance.

II

May was a gloriously fine month, and we were much out of doors. Unfortunately, except for one fortnight in August, that was all the settled weather we had that summer.

I remember sitting one afternoon staring at the same pond that Ginger Stott had stared at when he told me that the boy now beside me was a "blarsted freak."

The Wonder had said nothing that day, but now he began to enunciate some of his incomprehensible commonplaces in that thin, clear voice of his. I wrote down what I could remember of his utterances when I went home, but now I read them over again I am exceedingly doubtful whether I reported him correctly. There is, however, one dictum which seems clearly phrased, and when I recall the scene, I remember trying to push the induction he had started. The pronouncement, as I have it written, is as follows:

"Pure deduction from a single premiss, unaided by previous knowledge of the functions of the terms used in the expansion of the argument, is an act of creation, incontrovertible, and outside the scope of human reasoning."

I believe he meant to say—but my notes are horribly confused—that logic and philosophy were only relative, being dependent always in a greater or less degree upon the test of a material experiment for verification.

Here, as always, I find the Wonder's pronouncements very elusive. In one sense I see that what I have quoted here is a self-evident proposition, but I have the feeling that behind it there lies some gleam of wisdom which throws a faint light on the profound problem of existence.

I remember that in my own feeble way I tried to analyse this statement, and for a time I thought I had grasped one significant aspect of it. It seemed to me that the possibility of conceiving a philosophy that was not dependent for verification upon material experiment—that is to say, upon evidence afforded by the five senses—indicates that there is something which is not matter; but that since the development of such a philosophy is not possible to our minds, we must argue that our dependence upon matter is so intimate that it is almost impossible to conceive that we are actuated by any impulse which does not arise out of a material complex.

At the back of my mind there seemed to be a thought that I could not focus, I trembled on the verge of some great revelation that never came.

Through my thoughts there ran a thread of reverence for the intelligence that had started my speculations. If only he could speak in terms that I could understand.

I looked round at the Wonder. He was, as usual, apparently lost in abstraction, and quite unconscious of my regard.

The wind was strong on the Common, and he sniffed once or twice and then wiped his nose. He did not use a handkerchief.

It came to me at the moment that he was no more than a vulgar little village boy.

III

There were few incidents to mark the progress of that summer. I marked the course of time by my own thoughts and feelings, especially by my growing submission to the control of the Wonder.

It was curious to recall that I had once thought of correcting the Wonder's manners, of administering, perhaps, a smacking. That was a fault of ignorance. I had often erred in the same way in other experiences of life, but I had not taken the lesson to heart. I remember at school our "head" taking us—I was in the lower fifth then—in Latin verse. He rebuked me for a false quantity, and I, very cocksure, disputed the point and read my line. The head pointed out very gravely that I had been misled by an English analogy in my pronunciation of the word "maritus," and I grew very hot and ashamed and apologetic. I feel much the same now when I think of my early attitude towards the Wonder. But this time, I think, I have profited by my experience.

There is, however, one incident which in the light of subsequent events it seems worth while to record.

One afternoon in early July, when the sky had lifted sufficiently for us to attempt some sort of a walk, we made our way down through the sodden woods in the direction of Deane Hill.

As we were emerging into the lane at the foot of the slope, I saw the Harrison idiot lurking behind the trunk of a big beech. This was only the third time I had seen him since I drove him away from the farm, and on the two previous occasions he had not come close to us.

This time he had screwed up his courage to follow us. As we climbed the lane I saw him slouching up the hedge-side behind us.

The Wonder took no notice, and we continued our way in silence.

When we reached the prospect at the end of the hill, where the ground falls away like a cliff and you have a bird's-eye view of two counties, we sat down on the steps of the monument erected in honour of those Hampdenshire men whose lives were thrown away in the South-African war.

That view always has a soothing effect upon me, and I gave myself up to an ecstasy of contemplation and forgot, for a few moments, the presence of the Wonder, and the fact that the idiot had followed us.

I was recalled to existence by the sound of a foolish, conciliatory mumbling, and looked round to see the leering face of the Harrison idiot ogling the Wonder from the corner of the plinth. The Wonder was between me and the idiot, but he was apparently oblivious of either of us.

I was about to rise and drive the idiot away, but the Wonder, still staring out at some distant horizon, said quietly, "Let him be."

I was astonished, but I sat still and awaited events.

The idiot behaved much as I have seen a very young and nervous puppy behave.

He came within a few feet of us, gurgling and crooning, flapping his hands and waggling his great head; his uneasy eyes wandered from the Wonder to me and back again, but it was plainly the Wonder whom he wished to propitiate. Then he suddenly backed as if he had dared too much, flopped on to the wet grass and regarded us both with foolish, goggling eyes. For a few seconds he lay still, and then he began to squirm along the ground towards us, a few inches at a time, stopping every now and again to bleat and gurgle with that curious, crooning note which he appeared to think would pacificate the object of his overtures.

I stood by, as it were; ready to obey the first hint that the presence of this horrible creature was distasteful to the Wonder, but he gave no sign.

The idiot had come within five or six feet of us, wriggling himself along the wet grass, before the Wonder looked at him. The look when it came was one of those deliberate, intentional stares which made one feel so contemptible and insignificant.

The idiot evidently regarded this look as a sign of encouragement. He knelt up, began to flap his hands and changed his crooning note to a pleased, emphatic bleat.

"A-ba-ba," he blattered, and made uncouth gestures, by which I think he meant to signify that he wanted the Wonder to come and play with him.

Still the Wonder gave no sign, but his gaze never wavered, and though the idiot was plainly not intimidated, he never met that gaze for more than a second or two. Nevertheless he came on, walking now on his knees, and at last stretched out a hand to touch the boy he so curiously desired for a playmate.

That broke the spell. The Wonder drew back quickly—he never allowed one to touch him—got up and climbed two or three steps higher up the base of the monument. "Send him away," he said to me.

"That'll do," I said threateningly to the idiot, and at the sound of my voice and the gesture of my hand, he blenched, yelped, rolled over away from me, and then got to his feet and shambled off for several yards before stopping to regard us once more with his pacificatory, disgusting ogle.

"Send him away," repeated the Wonder, as I hesitated, and I rose to my feet and pretended to pick up a stone.

That was enough. The idiot yelped again and made off. This time he did not stop, though he looked over his shoulder several times as he lolloped away among the low gorse, to which look I replied always with the threat of an imaginary stone.

The Wonder made no comment on the incident as we walked home. He had shown no sign of fear. It occurred to me that my guardianship of him was merely a convenience, not a protection from any danger.

IV

As time went on it became increasingly clear to me that my chance of obtaining the Wonder's confidence was becoming more and more remote.

At first he had replied to my questions; usually, it is true, by no more than an inclination of his head, but he soon ceased to make even this acknowledgment of my presence.

So I fell by degrees into a persistent habit of silence, admitted my submission by obtruding neither remark nor question upon my constant companion, and gave up my intention of using the Wonder as a means to gratify my curiosity concerning the problem of existence.

Once or twice I saw Crashaw at a distance. He undoubtedly recognised the Wonder, and I think he would have liked to come up and rebuke him—perhaps me, also; but probably he lacked the courage. He would hover within sight of us for a few minutes, scowling, and then stalk away. He gave me the impression of being a dangerous man, a thwarted fanatic, brooding over his defeat. If I had been Mrs. Stott, I should have feared the intrusion of Crashaw more than the foolish overtures of the Harrison idiot. But there was, of course, the Wonder's compelling power to be reckoned with, in the case of Crashaw.

V

Challis came back in early September, and it was he who first coaxed, and then goaded me into rebellion.

Challis did not come too soon.

At the end of August I was seeing visions, not pleasant, inspiriting visions, but the indefinite, perplexing shapes of delirium.

I think it must have been in August that I stood on Deane Hill, through an afternoon of fine, driving rain, and had a vision of myself playing tricks with the sands of life.

I had begun to lose my hold on reality. Silence, contemplation, a long-continued wrestle with the profound problems of life, were combining to break up the intimacy of life and matter, and my brain was not of the calibre to endure the strain.

Challis saw at once what ailed me.

He came up to the farm one morning at twelve o'clock. The date was, I believe, the twelfth of September. It was a brooding, heavy morning, with half a gale of wind blowing from the south-west, but it had not rained, and I was out with the Wonder when Challis arrived.

He waited for me and talked to the flattered Mrs. Berridge, remonstrated kindly with her husband for his neglect of the farm, and incidentally gave him a rebate on the rent.

When I came in, he insisted that I should come to lunch with him at Challis Court.

I consented, but stipulated that I must be back at Pym by three o'clock to accompany the Wonder for his afternoon walk.

Challis looked at me curiously, but allowed the stipulation.

We hardly spoke as we walked down the hill—the habit of silence had grown upon me, but after lunch Challis spoke out his mind.

On that occasion I hardly listened to him, but he came up to the farm again after tea and marched me off to dinner at the Court. I was strangely plastic when commanded, but when he suggested that I should give up my walks with the Wonder, go away ... I smiled and said "Impossible," as though that ended the matter.

Challis, however, persisted, and I suppose I was not too far gone to listen to him. I remember his saying: "That problem is not for you or me or any man living to solve by introspection. Our work is to add knowledge little by little, data here and there, for future evidence."

The phrase struck me, because the Wonder had once said "There are no data," when in the early days I had asked him whether he could say definitely if there was any future existence possible for us?

Now Challis put it to me that our work was to find data, that every little item of real knowledge added to the feeble store man has accumulated in his few thousand years of life, was a step, the greatest step any man could possibly make.

"But could we not get, not a small but a very important item, from Victor Stott?"

Challis shook his head. "He is too many thousands of years ahead of us," he said. "We can only bridge the gap by many centuries of patient toil. If a revelation were made to us, we should not understand it."

So, by degrees, Challis's influence took possession of me and roused me to self-assertion.

One morning, half in dread, I stayed at home and read a novel—no other reading could hold my attention—philosophy had become nauseating.

I expected to see the strange little figure of the Wonder come across the Common, but he never came, nor did I receive any reproach from Ellen Mary. I think she had forgotten her fear of the Harrison idiot.

Nevertheless, I did not give up my guardianship all at once. Three times after that morning I took the Wonder for a walk. He made no allusion to my defalcations. Indeed he never spoke. He relinquished me as he had taken me up, without comment or any expression of feeling.

VI

On the twenty-ninth of September I went down to Challis Court and stayed there for a week. Then I returned for a few days to Wood Farm in order to put my things together and pack my books. I had decided to go to Cairo for the winter with Challis.

At half-past one o'clock on Thursday, the eighth of October, I was in the sitting-room, when I saw the figure of Mrs. Stott coming across the Common. She came with a little stumbling run. I could see that she was agitated even before she reached the farmyard gate.



CHAPTER XVII

RELEASE

I

She opened the front door without knocking, and came straight into my sitting-room.

"'E's not 'ere," she said in a manner that left it doubtful whether she made an assertion or asked a question.

"Your son?" I said. I had risen when she came into the room, "No; I haven't seen him to-day."

Ellen Mary was staring at me, but it was clear that she neither saw nor heard me. She had a look of intense concentration. One could see that she was calculating, thinking, thinking....

I went over to her and took her by the arm. I gently shook her. "Now, tell me what's the matter? What has happened?" I asked.

She made an effort to collect herself, loosened her arm from my hold and with an instinctive movement pushed forward the old bonnet, which had slipped to the back of her head.

"'E 'asn't been in to 'is dinner," she said hurriedly. "I've been on the Common looking for 'im."

"He may have made a mistake in the time," I suggested.

She made a movement as though to push me on one side, and turned towards the door. She was calculating again. Her expression said quite plainly, "Could he be there, could he be there?"

"Come, come," I said, "there is surely no need to be anxious yet."

She turned on me. "'E never makes a mistake in the time," she said fiercely, "'e always knows the time to the minute without clock or watch. Why did you leave 'im alone?"

She broke off in her attack upon me and continued: "'E's never been late before, not a minute, and now it's a hour after 'is time."

"He may be at home by now," I said. She took the hint instantly and started back again with the same stumbling little run.

I picked up my hat and followed her.

II

The Wonder was not at the cottage.

"Now, my dear woman, you must keep calm," I said. "There is absolutely no reason to be disturbed. You had better go to Challis Court and see if he is in the library, I——"

"I'm a fool," broke in Ellen Mary with sudden decision, and she set off again without another word. I followed her back to the Common and watched her out of sight. I was more disturbed about her than about the non-appearance of the Wonder. He was well able to take care of himself, but she.... How strange that with all her calculations she had not thought of going to Challis Court, to the place where her son had spent so many days. I began to question whether the whole affair was not, in some way, a mysterious creation of her own disordered brain.

Nevertheless, I took upon myself to carry out that part of the programme which I had not been allowed to state in words to Mrs. Stott, and set out for Deane Hill. It was just possible that the Wonder might have slipped down that steep incline and injured himself. Possible, but very unlikely; the Wonder did not take the risks common to boys of his age, he did not disport himself on dangerous slopes.

As I walked I felt a sense of lightness, of relief from depression. I had not been this way by myself since the end of August. It was good to be alone and free.

The day was fine and not cold, though the sun was hidden. I noticed that the woods showed scarcely a mark of autumn decline.

There was not a soul to be seen by the monument. I scrambled down the slope and investigated the base of the hill and came back another way through the woods. I saw no one. I stopped continually and whistled loudly. If he is anywhere near at hand, I thought, and in trouble, he will hear that and answer me. I did not call him by name. I did not know what name to call. It would have seemed absurd to have called "Victor." No one ever addressed him by name.

My return route brought me back to the south edge of the Common, the point most remote from the farm. There I met a labourer whom I knew by sight, a man named Hawke. He was carrying a stick, and prodding with it foolishly among the furze and gorse bushes. The bracken was already dying down.

"What are you looking for?" I asked.

"It's this 'ere Master Stott, sir," he said, looking up. "'E's got loarst seemingly."

I felt a sudden stab of self-reproach. I had been taking things too easily. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to four.

"Mr. Challis 'ave told me to look for 'un," added the man, and continued his aimless prodding of the gorse.

"Where is Mr. Challis?" I asked.

"'E's yonder, soomewheres." He made a vague gesture in the direction of Pym.

The sun had come out, and the Common was all aglow. I hastened towards the village.

On the way I met Farmer Bates and two or three labourers. They, too, were beating among the gorse and brown bracken. They told me that Mr. Challis was at the cottage and I hurried on. All the neighbourhood, it seems, was searching for the Wonder. In the village I saw three or four women standing with aprons over their heads, talking together.

I had never seen Pym so animated.

III

I met Challis in the lane. He was coming away from Mrs. Stott's cottage.

"Have you found him?" I asked stupidly. I knew quite well that the Wonder was not found, and yet I had a fond hope that I might, nevertheless, be mistaken.

Challis shook his head. "There will be a mad woman in that cottage if he doesn't come back by nightfall," he remarked with a jerk of his head. "I've done what I can for her."

I explained that I had been over to Deane Hill, searching and calling.

"You didn't see anything?" asked Challis, echoing my foolish query of a moment before. I shook my head.

We were both agitated without doubt.

We soon came up with Farmer Bates and his men. They stopped and touched their hats when they saw us, and we put the same silly question to them.

"You haven't found him?" We knew perfectly well that they would have announced the fact at once if they had found him.

"One of you go over to the Court and get any man you can find to come and help," said Challis. "Tell Heathcote to send every one."

One of the labourers touched his cap again, and started off at once with a lumbering trot.

Challis and I walked on in silence, looking keenly about us and stopping every now and then and calling. We called "Hallo! Hallo-o!" It was an improvement upon my whistle.

"He's such a little chap," muttered Challis once; "it would be so easy to miss him if he were unconscious."

It struck me that the reference to the Wonder was hardly sufficiently respectful. I had never thought of him as "a little chap." But Challis had not known him so intimately as I had.

The shadows were fast creeping over the Common. At the woodside it was already twilight. The whole of the western sky right up to the zenith was a finely shaded study in brilliant orange and yellow. "More rain," I thought instinctively, and paused for a moment to watch the sunset. The black distance stood clearly silhouetted against the sky. One could discern the sharp outline of tiny trees on the distant horizon.

We met Heathcote and several other men in the lane.

"Shan't be able to do much to-night, sir," said Heathcote. "It'll be dark in 'alf an hour, sir."

"Well, do what you can in half an hour," replied Challis, and to me he said, "You'd better come back with me. We've done what we can."

I had a picture of him then as the magnate; I had hardly thought of him in that light before. The arduous work of the search he could delegate to his inferiors. Still, he had come out himself, and I doubt not that he had been altogether charming to the bewildered, distraught mother.

I acquiesced in his suggestion. I was beginning to feel very tired.

Mrs. Heathcote was at the gate when we arrived at the Court. "'Ave they found 'im, sir?" she asked.

"Not yet," replied Challis.

I followed him into the house.

IV

As I walked back at ten o'clock it was raining steadily. I had refused the offer of a trap. I went through the dark and sodden wood, and lingered and listened. The persistent tap, tap, tap of the rain on the leaves irritated me. How could one hear while that noise was going on? There was no other sound. There was not a breath of wind. Only that perpetual tap, tap, tap, patter, patter, drip, tap, tap. It seemed as if it might go on through eternity....

I went to the Stotts' cottage, though I knew there could be no news. Challis had given strict instructions that any news should be brought to him immediately. If it was bad news it was to be brought to him before the mother was told.

There was a light burning in the cottage, and the door was set wide open.

I went up to the door but I did not go in.

Ellen Mary was sitting in a high chair, her hands clasped together, and she rocked continually to and fro. She made no sound; she merely rocked herself with a steady, regular persistence.

She did not see me standing at the open door, and I moved quietly away.

As I walked over the Common—I avoided the wood deliberately—I wondered what was the human limit of endurance. I wondered whether Ellen Mary had not reached that limit.

Mrs. Berridge had not gone to bed, and there were some visitors in the kitchen. I heard them talking. Mrs. Berridge came out when I opened the front door.

"Any news, sir?" she asked.

"No; no news," I said. I had been about to ask her the same question.

V

I did not go to sleep for some time. I had a picture of Ellen Mary before my eyes, and I could still hear that steady pat, patter, drip, of the rain on the beech leaves.

In the night I awoke suddenly, and thought I heard a long, wailing cry out on the Common. I got up and looked out of the window, but I could see nothing. The rain was still falling, but there was a blur of light that showed where the moon was shining behind the clouds. The cry, if there had been a cry, was not repeated.

I went back to bed and soon fell asleep again.

I do not know whether I had been dreaming, but I woke suddenly with a presentation of the little pond on the Common very clear before me.

"We never looked in the pond," I thought, and then—"but he could not have fallen into the pond; besides, it's not two feet deep."

It was full daylight, and I got up and found that it was nearly seven o'clock.

The rain had stopped, but there was a scurry of low, threatening cloud that blew up from the south.

I dressed at once and went out. I made my way directly to the Stotts' cottage.

The lamp was still burning and the door open, but Ellen Mary had fallen forward on to the table; her head was pillowed on her arms.

"There is a limit to our endurance," I reflected, "and she has reached it."

I left her undisturbed.

Outside I met two of Farmer Bates's labourers going back to work.

"I want you to come up with me to the pond," I said.

VI

The pond was very full.

On the side from which we approached, the ground sloped gradually, and the water was stretching out far beyond its accustomed limits.

On the farther side the gorse among the trunks of the three ash-trees came right to the edge of the bank. On that side the bank was three or four feet high.

We came to the edge of the pond, and one of the labourers waded in a little way—the water was very shallow on that side—but we could see nothing for the scum of weed, little spangles of dirty green, and a mass of some other plant that had borne a little white flower in the earlier part of the year—stuff like dwarf hemlock.

Under the farther bank, however, I saw one comparatively clear space of black water.

"Let's go round," I said, and led the way.

There was a tiny path which twisted between the gorse roots and came out at the edge of the farther bank by the stem of the tallest ash. I had seen tiny village boys pretending to fish from this point with a stick and a piece of string. There was a dead branch of ash some five or six feet long, with the twigs partly twisted off; it was lying among the bushes. I remembered that I had seen small boys using this branch to clear away the surface weed. I picked it up and took it with me.

I wound one arm round the trunk of the ash, and peered over into the water under the bank.

I caught sight of something white under the water. I could not see distinctly. I thought it was a piece of broken ware—the bottom of a basin. I had picked up the ash stick and was going to probe the deeper water with it. Then I saw that the dim white object was globular.

The end of my stick was actually in the water. I withdrew it quickly, and threw it behind me.

My heart began to throb painfully.

I turned my face away and leaned against the ash-tree.

"Can you see anythin'?" asked one of the labourers who had come up behind me.

"Oh! Christ!" I said. I turned quickly from the pond and pressed a way through the gorse.

I was overwhelmingly and disgustingly sick.

VII

By degrees the solid earth ceased to wave and sway before me like a rolling heave of water, and I looked up, pressing my hands to my head—my hands were as cold as death.

My clothes were wet and muddy where I had lain on the sodden ground. I got to my feet and instinctively began to brush at the mud.

I was still a little giddy, and I swayed and sought for support.

I could see the back of one labourer. He was kneeling by the ash-tree bending right down over the water. The other man was standing in the pond, up to his waist in water and mud. I could just see his head and shoulders....

I staggered away in the direction of the village.

VIII

I found Ellen Mary still sitting in the same chair. The lamp was fluttering to extinction, the flame leaping spasmodically, dying down till it seemed that it had gone out, and then again suddenly flickering up with little clicking bursts of flame. The air reeked intolerably of paraffin.

I blew the lamp out and pushed it on one side.

There was no need to break the news to Ellen Mary. She had known last night, and now she was beyond the reach of information.

She sat upright in her chair and stared out into the immensity. Her hands alone moved, and they were not still for an instant. They lay in her lap, and her fingers writhed and picked at her dress.

I spoke to her once, but I knew that her mind was beyond the reach of my words.

"It is just as well," I thought; "but we must get her away."

I went out and called to the woman next door.

She was in her kitchen, but the door was open. She came out when I knocked.

"Poor thing," she said, when I told her. "It 'as been a shock, no doubt. She was so wrapped hup in the boy."

She could hardly have said less if her neighbour had lost half-a-crown.

"Get her into your cottage before they come," I said harshly, and left her.

I wanted to get out of the lane before the men came back, but I had hardly started before I saw them coming.

They had made a chair of their arms, and were carrying him between them. They had not the least fear of him, now.

IX

The Harrison idiot suddenly jumped out of the hedge.

I put my hand to my throat. I wanted to cry out, to stop him, but I could not move. I felt sick again, and utterly weak and powerless, and I could not take my gaze from that little doll with the great drooping head that rolled as the men walked.

I was reminded, disgustingly, of children with a guy.

The idiot ran shambling down the lane. He knew the two men, who tolerated him and laughed at him. He was not afraid of them nor their burden.

He came right up to them. I heard one of the men say gruffly, "Now then, you cut along off!"

I believe the idiot must have touched the dead body.

I was gripping my throat in my hand; I was trying desperately to cry out.

Whether the idiot actually touched the body or not I cannot say, but he must have realised in his poor, bemused brain that the thing was dead.

He cried out with his horrible, inhuman cry, turned, and ran up the lane towards me. He fell on his face a few yards from me, scrambled wildly to his feet again and came on yelping and shrieking. He was wildly, horribly afraid. I caught sight of his face as he passed me, and his mouth was distorted into a square, his upper lip horribly drawn up over his ragged, yellow teeth. Suddenly he dashed at the hedge and clawed his way through. I heard him still yelping appallingly as he rushed away across the field....



CHAPTER XVIII

IMPLICATIONS

I

The jury returned a verdict of "Accidental death."

If there had been any traces of a struggle, I had not noticed them when I came to the edge of the pond. There may have been marks as if a foot had slipped. I was not thinking of evidence when I looked into the water.

There were marks enough when the police came to investigate, but they were the marks made by a twelve-stone man in hobnail boots, who had scrambled into, and out of, the pond. As the inspector said, it was not worth while wasting any time in looking for earlier traces of footsteps below those marks.

Nor were there any signs of violence on the body. It was in no way disfigured, save by the action of the water, in which it had lain for perhaps eighteen hours.

There was, indeed, only one point of any significance from the jury's point of view, and that they put on one side, if they considered it at all; the body was pressed into the mud.

The Coroner asked a few questions about this fact.

Was the mud very soft? Yes, very soft, liquid on top.

How was the body lying? Face downwards.

What part of the body was deepest in the mud? The chest. The witness said he had hard work to get the upper part of the body released; the head was free, but the mud held the rest. "The mooad soocked like," was the expressive phrase of the witness.

The Coroner passed on to other things. Had any one a spite against the child? and such futilities. Only once more did he revert to that solitary significant fact. "Would it be possible," he asked of the abashed and self-conscious labourer, "would it be possible for the body to have worked its way down into the soft mud as you have described it to have been found?"

"We-el," said the witness, "'twas in the stacky mooad, 'twas through the sarft stoof."

"But this soft mud would suck any solid body down, would it not?" persisted the Coroner.

And the witness recalled the case of a duck that had been sucked into the same soft pond mud the summer before, and cited the instance. He forgot to add that on that occasion the mud had not been under water.

The Coroner accepted the instance. There can be no question that both he and the jury were anxious to accept the easier explanation.

II

But I know perfectly well that the Wonder did not fall into the pond by accident.

I should have known, even if that conclusive evidence with regard to his being pushed into the mud had never come to light.

He may have stood by the ash-tree and looked into the water, but he would never have fallen. He was too perfectly controlled; and, with all his apparent abstraction, no one was ever more alive to the detail of his surroundings. He and I have walked together perforce in many slippery places, but I have never known him to fall or even begin to lose his balance, whereas I have gone down many times.

Yes; I know that he was pushed into the pond, and I know that he was held down in the mud, most probably by the aid of that ash stick I had held. But it was not for me to throw suspicion on any one at that inquest, and I preferred to keep my thoughts and my inferences to myself. I should have done so, even if I had been in possession of stronger evidence.

I hope that it was the Harrison idiot who was to blame. He was not dangerous in the ordinary sense, but he might quite well have done the thing in play—as he understood it. Only I cannot quite understand his pushing the body down after it fell. That seems to argue vindictiveness—and a logic which I can hardly attribute to the idiot. Still, who can tell what went on in the distorted mind of that poor creature? He is reported to have rescued the dead body of a rabbit from the undergrowth on one occasion, and to have blubbered when he could not bring it back to life.

There is but one other person who could have been implicated, and I hesitate to name him in this place. Yet one remembers what terrific acts of misapplied courage and ferocious brutality the fanatics of history have been capable of performing when their creed and their authority have been set at naught.

III

Ellen Mary never recovered her sanity. She died a few weeks ago in the County Asylum. I hear that her husband attended the funeral. When she lost her belief in the supernal wisdom and power of her god, her world must have fallen about her. The thing she had imagined to be solid, real, everlasting, had proved to be friable and destructible like all other human building.

IV

The Wonder is buried in Chilborough churchyard.

You may find the place by its proximity to the great marble mausoleum erected over the remains of Sir Edward Bigg, the well-known brewer and philanthropist.

The grave of Victor Stott is marked by a small stone, some six inches high, which is designed to catch the foot rather than the eye of the seeker.

The stone bears the initials "V. S.," and a date—no more.

V

I saw the Wonder before he was buried.

I went up into the little bedroom and looked at him in his tiny coffin.

I was no longer afraid of him. His power over me was dissipated. He was no greater and no less than any other dead thing.

It was the same with every one. He had become that "poor little boy of Mrs. Stott's." No one spoke of him with respect now. No one seemed to remember that he had been in any way different from other "poor little fellows" who had died an untimely death.

One thing did strike me as curious. The idiot, the one person who had never feared him living, had feared him horribly when he was dead....



CHAPTER XIX

EPILOGUE

THE USES OF MYSTERY

Something Challis has told me; something I have learned for myself; and there is something which has come to me from an unknown source.

But here again we are confronted with the original difficulty—the difficulty that for some conceptions there is no verbal figure.

It is comprehensible, it is, indeed, obvious that the deeper abstract speculation of the Wonder's thought cannot be set out by any metaphor that would be understood by a lesser intelligence.

We see that many philosophers, whose utterances have been recorded in human history—that record which floats like a drop of oil on the limitless ocean of eternity—have been confronted with this same difficulty, and have woven an intricate and tedious design of words in their attempt to convey some single conception—some conception which themselves could see but dimly when disguised in the masquerade of language; some figure that as it was limned grew ever more confused beneath the wrappings of metaphor, so that we who read can glimpse scarce a hint of its original shape and likeness. We see, also, that the very philosophers who caricatured their own eidolon, became intrigued with the logical abstraction of words and were led away into a wilderness of barren deduction—their one inspired vision of a stable premiss distorted and at last forgotten.

How then shall we hope to find words to adumbrate a philosophy which starts by the assumption that we can have no impression of reality until we have rid ourselves of the interposing and utterly false concepts of space and time, which delimit the whole world of human thought.

I admit that one cannot even begin to do this thing; within our present limitations our whole machinery of thought is built of these two original concepts. They are the only gauges wherewith we may measure every reality, every abstraction; wherewith we may give outline to any image or process of the mind. Only when we endeavour to grapple with that indeterminable mystery of consciousness can we conceive, however dimly, some idea of a pure abstraction uninfluenced by and independent of, those twin bases of our means of thought.

Here it is that Challis has paused. Here he says that we must wait, that no revelation can reveal what we are incapable of understanding, that only by the slow process of evolution can we attain to any understanding of the mystery we have sought to solve by our futile and primitive hypotheses.

"But then," I have pressed him, "why do you hesitate to speak of what you heard on that afternoon?"

And once he answered me:

"I glimpsed a finality," he said, "and that appalled me. Don't you see that ignorance is the means of our intellectual pleasure? It is the solving of the problem that brings enjoyment—the solved problem has no further interest. So when all is known, the stimulus for action ceases; when all is known there is quiescence, nothingness. Perfect knowledge implies the peace of death, implies the state of being one—our pleasures are derived from action, from differences, from heterogeneity.

"Oh! pity the child," said Challis, "for whom there could be no mystery. Is not mystery the first and greatest joy of life? Beyond the gate there is unexplored mystery for us in our childhood. When that is explored, there are new and wonderful possibilities beyond the hills, then beyond the seas, beyond the known world, in the everyday chances and movements of the unknown life in which we are circumstanced.

"Surely we should all perish through sheer inanity, or die desperately by suicide if no mystery remained in the world. Mystery takes a thousand beautiful shapes; it lurks even in the handiwork of man, in a stone god, or in some mighty, intricate machine, incomprehensibly deliberate and determined. The imagination endows the man-made thing with consciousness and powers, whether of reservation or aloofness; the similitude of meditation and profundity is wrought into stone. Is there not source for mystery to the uninstructed in the great machine registering the progress of its own achievement with each solemn, recurrent beat of its metal pulse?

"Behind all these things is the wonder of the imagination that never approaches more nearly to the creation of a hitherto unknown image than when it thus hesitates on the verge of mystery.

"There is yet so much, so very much cause for wondering speculation. Science gains ground so slowly. Slowly it has outlined, however vaguely, the uncertainties of our origin so far as this world is concerned, while the mystic has fought for his entrancing fairy tales one by one.

"The mystic still holds his enthralling belief in the succession of peoples who have risen and died—the succeeding world-races, red, black, yellow, and white, which have in turn dominated this planet. Science with its hammer and chisel may lay bare evidence, may collate material, date man's appearance, call him the most recent of placental mammals, trace his superstitions and his first conceptions of a god from the elemental fears of the savage. But the mystic turns aside with an assumption of superior knowledge; he waves away objective evidence; he has a certainty impressed upon his mind.

"And the mystic is a power. He compels a multitude of followers, because he offers an attraction greater than the facts of science. He tells of a mystery profounder than any problem solved by patient investigation, because his mystery is incomprehensible even by himself; and in fear lest any should comprehend it, he disguises the approach with an array of lesser mysteries, man-made; with terminologies, symbologies and high talk of esotericism too fearful for any save the initiate.

"But we must preserve our mystic in some form against the awful time when science shall have determined a limit; when the long history of evolution shall be written in full, and every stage of world-building shall be made plain. When the cycle of atomic dust to atomic dust is demonstrated, and the detail of the life-process is taught and understood, we shall have a fierce need for the mystic to save us from the futility of a world we understand, to lie to us if need be, to inspirit our material and regular minds with some breath of delicious madness. We shall need the mystic then, or the completeness of our knowledge will drive us at last to complete the dusty circle in our eagerness to escape from a world we understand....

"See how man clings to his old and useless traditions; see how he opposes at every step the awful force of progress. At each stage he protests that the thing that is, is good, or that the thing that was and has gone, was better. He despises new knowledge and fondly clings to the belief that once men were greater than they now are. He looks back to the more primitive, and endows it with that mystery he cannot find in his own times. So have men ever looked lingeringly behind them. It is an instinct, a great and wonderful inheritance that postpones the moment of disillusionment.

"We are still mercifully surrounded with the countless mysteries of everyday experience, all the evidences of the unimaginable stimulus we call life. Would you take them away? Would you resolve life into a disease of the ether—a disease of which you and I, all life and all matter, are symptoms? Would you teach that to the child, and explain to him that the wonder of life and growth is no wonder, but a demonstrable result of impeded force, to be evaluated by the application of an adequate formula?

"You and I," said Challis, "are children in the infancy of the world. Let us to our play in the nursery of our own times. The day will come, perhaps, when humanity shall have grown and will have to take upon itself the heavy burden of knowledge. But you need not fear that that will be in our day, nor in a thousand years.

"Meanwhile leave us our childish fancies, our little imaginings, our hope—children that we are—of those impossible mysteries beyond the hills...."

THE END