THE FOOD IN THE VILLAGE.
CHAPTER THE FIRST.
THE COMING OF THE FOOD.
I.
Our theme, which began so compactly in Mr. Bensington's study, has
already spread and branched, until it points this way and that, and
henceforth our whole story is one of dissemination. To follow the Food
of the Gods further is to trace the ramifications of a perpetually
branching tree; in a little while, in the quarter of a lifetime, the
Food had trickled and increased from its first spring in the little farm
near Hickleybrow until it had spread,--it and the report and shadow of
its power,--throughout the world. It spread beyond England very
speedily. Soon in America, all over the continent of Europe, in Japan,
in Australia, at last all over the world, the thing was working towards
its appointed end. Always it worked slowly, by indirect courses and
against resistance. It was bigness insurgent. In spite of prejudice, in
spite of law and regulation, in spite of all that obstinate conservatism
that lies at the base of the formal order of mankind, the Food of the
Gods, once it had been set going, pursued its subtle and invincible
progress.
The children of the Food grew steadily through all these years; that was
the cardinal fact of the time. But it is the leakages make history. The
children who had eaten grew, and soon there were other children growing;
and all the best intentions in the world could not stop further leakages
and still further leakages. The Food insisted on escaping with the
pertinacity of a thing alive. Flour treated with the stuff crumbled in
dry weather almost as if by intention into an impalpable powder, and
would lift and travel before the lightest breeze. Now it would be some
fresh insect won its way to a temporary fatal new development, now some
fresh outbreak from the sewers of rats and such-like vermin. For some
days the village of Pangbourne in Berkshire fought with giant ants.
Three men were bitten and died. There would be a panic, there would be a
struggle, and the salient evil would be fought down again, leaving
always something behind, in the obscurer things of life--changed for
ever. Then again another acute and startling outbreak, a swift upgrowth
of monstrous weedy thickets, a drifting dissemination about the world of
inhumanly growing thistles, of cockroaches men fought with shot guns, or
a plague of mighty flies.
There were some strange and desperate struggles in obscure places. The
Food begot heroes in the cause of littleness ...
And men took such happenings into their lives, and met them by the
expedients of the moment, and told one another there was "no change in
the essential order of things." After the first great panic, Caterham,
in spite of his power of eloquence, became a secondary figure in the
political world, remained in men's minds as the exponent of an extreme
view.
Only slowly did he win a way towards a central position in affairs.
"There was no change in the essential order of things,"--that eminent
leader of modern thought, Doctor Winkles, was very clear upon this,--and
the exponents of what was called in those days Progressive Liberalism
grew quite sentimental upon the essential insincerity of their progress.
Their dreams, it would appear, ran wholly on little nations, little
languages, little households, each self-supported on its little farm. A
fashion for the small and neat set in. To be big was to be "vulgar," and
dainty, neat, mignon, miniature, "minutely perfect," became the
key-words of critical approval....
Meanwhile, quietly, taking their time as children must, the children of
the Food, growing into a world that changed to receive them, gathered
strength and stature and knowledge, became individual and purposeful,
rose slowly towards the dimensions of their destiny. Presently they
seemed a natural part of the world; all these stirrings of bigness
seemed a natural part of the world, and men wondered how things had been
before their time. There came to men's ears stories of things the giant
boys could do, and they said "Wonderful!"--without a spark of wonder.
The popular papers would tell of the three sons of Cossar, and how these
amazing children would lift great cannons, hurl masses of iron for
hundreds of yards, and leap two hundred feet. They were said to be
digging a well, deeper than any well or mine that man had ever made,
seeking, it was said, for treasures hidden in the earth since ever the
earth began.
These Children, said the popular magazines, will level mountains, bridge
seas, tunnel your earth to a honeycomb. "Wonderful!" said the little
folks, "isn't it? What a lot of conveniences we shall have!" and went
about their business as though there was no such thing as the Food of
the Gods on earth. And indeed these things were no more than the first
hints and promises of the powers of the Children of the Food. It was
still no more than child's play with them, no more than the first use of
a strength in which no purpose had arisen. They did not know themselves
for what they were. They were children--slow-growing children of a new
race. The giant strength grew day by day--the giant will had still to
grow into purpose and an aim.
Looking at it in a shortened perspective of time, those years of
transition have the quality of a single consecutive occurrence; but
indeed no one saw the coming of Bigness in the world, as no one in all
the world till centuries had passed saw, as one happening, the Decline
and Fall of Rome. They who lived in those days were too much among these
developments to see them together as a single thing. It seemed even to
wise men that the Food was giving the world nothing but a crop of
unmanageable, disconnected irrelevancies, that might shake and trouble
indeed, but could do no more to the established order and fabric of
mankind.
To one observer at least the most wonderful thing throughout that period
of accumulating stress is the invincible inertia of the great mass of
people, their quiet persistence in all that ignored the enormous
presences, the promise of still more enormous things, that grew among
them. Just as many a stream will be at its smoothest, will look most
tranquil, running deep and strong, at the very verge of a cataract, so
all that is most conservative in man seemed settling quietly into a
serene ascendency during these latter days. Reaction became popular:
there was talk of the bankruptcy of science, of the dying of Progress,
of the advent of the Mandarins,--talk of such things amidst the echoing
footsteps of the Children of the Food. The fussy pointless Revolutions
of the old time, a vast crowd of silly little people chasing some silly
little monarch and the like, had indeed died out and passed away; but
Change had not died out. It was only Change that had changed. The New
was coming in its own fashion and beyond the common understanding of the
world.
To tell fully of its coming would be to write a great history, but
everywhere there was a parallel chain of happenings. To tell therefore
of the manner of its coming in one place is to tell something of the
whole. It chanced one stray seed of Immensity fell into the pretty,
petty village of Cheasing Eyebright in Kent, and from the story of its
queer germination there and of the tragic futility that ensued, one may
attempt--following one thread, as it were--to show the direction in
which the whole great interwoven fabric of the thing rolled off the loom
of Time.
II.
Cheasing Eyebright had of course a Vicar. There are vicars and vicars,
and of all sorts I love an innovating vicar--a piebald progressive
professional reactionary--the least. But the Vicar of Cheasing Eyebright
was one of the least innovating of vicars, a most worthy, plump, ripe,
and conservative-minded little man. It is becoming to go back a little
in our story to tell of him. He matched his village, and one may figure
them best together as they used to be, on the sunset evening when Mrs.
Skinner--you will remember her flight!--brought the Food with her all
unsuspected into these rustic serenities.
The village was looking its very best just then, under that western
light. It lay down along the valley beneath the beechwoods of the
Hanger, a beading of thatched and red-tiled cottages--cottages with
trellised porches and pyracanthus-lined faces, that clustered closer and
closer as the road dropped from the yew trees by the church towards the
bridge. The vicarage peeped not too ostentatiously between the trees
beyond the inn, an early Georgian front ripened by time, and the spire
of the church rose happily in the depression made by the valley in the
outline of the hills. A winding stream, a thin intermittency of sky blue
and foam, glittered amidst a thick margin of reeds and loosestrife and
overhanging willows, along the centre of a sinuous pennant of meadow.
The whole prospect had that curiously English quality of ripened
cultivation--that look of still completeness--that apes perfection,
under the sunset warmth.
And the Vicar too looked mellow. He looked habitually and essentially
mellow, as though he had been a mellow baby born into a mellow class, a
ripe and juicy little boy. One could see, even before he mentioned it,
that he had gone to an ivy-clad public school in its anecdotage, with
magnificent traditions, aristocratic associations, and no chemical
laboratories, and proceeded thence to a venerable college in the very
ripest Gothic. Few books he had younger than a thousand years; of these,
Yarrow and Ellis and good pre-Methodist sermons made the bulk. He was a
man of moderate height, a little shortened in appearance by his
equatorial dimensions, and a face that had been mellow from the first
was now climacterically ripe. The beard of a David hid his redundancy of
chin; he wore no watch chain out of refinements and his modest clerical
garments were made by a West End tailor.... And he sat with a hand on
either shin, blinking at his village in beatific approval. He waved a
plump palm towards it. His burthen sang out again. What more could any
one desire?
"We are fortunately situated," he said, putting the thing tamely.
"We are in a fastness of the hills," he expanded.
He explained himself at length. "We are out of it all."
For they had been talking, he and his friend, of the Horrors of the Age,
of Democracy, and Secular Education, and Sky Scrapers, and Motor Cars,
and the American Invasion, the Scrappy Reading of the Public, and the
disappearance of any Taste at all.
"We are out of it all," he repeated, and even as he spoke the footsteps
of some one coming smote upon his ear, and he rolled over and regarded
her.
You figure the old woman's steadfastly tremulous advance, the bundle
clutched in her gnarled lank hand, her nose (which was her countenance)
wrinkled with breathless resolution. You see the poppies nodding
fatefully on her bonnet, and the dust-white spring-sided boots beneath
her skimpy skirts, pointing with an irrevocable slow alternation east
and west. Beneath her arm, a restive captive, waggled and slipped a
scarcely valuable umbrella. What was there to tell the Vicar that this
grotesque old figure was--so far as his village was concerned at any
rate--no less than Fruitful Chance and the Unforeseen, the Hag weak men
call Fate. But for us, you understand, no more than Mrs. Skinner.
As she was too much encumbered for a curtsey, she pretended not to see
him and his friend at all, and so passed, flip-flop, within three yards
of them, onward down towards the village. The Vicar watched her slow
transit in silence, and ripened a remark the while....
The incident seemed to him of no importance whatever. Old womankind,
_aere perennius_, has carried bundles since the world began. What
difference has it made?
"We are out of it all," said the Vicar. "We live in an atmosphere of
simple and permanent things, Birth and Toil, simple seed-time and simple
harvest. The Uproar passes us by." He was always very great upon what he
called the permanent things. "Things change," he would say, "but
Humanity--_aere perennius_."
Thus the Vicar. He loved a classical quotation subtly misapplied. Below,
Mrs. Skinner, inelegant but resolute, had involved herself curiously
with Wilmerding's stile.
III.
No one knows what the Vicar made of the Giant Puff-Balls.
No doubt he was among the first to discover them. They were scattered at
intervals up and down the path between the near down and the village
end--a path he frequented daily in his constitutional round. Altogether,
of these abnormal fungi there were, from first to last, quite thirty.
The Vicar seems to have stared at each severally, and to have prodded
most of them with his stick once or twice. One he attempted to measure
with his arms, but it burst at his Ixion embrace.
He spoke to several people about them, and said they were "marvellous!"
and he related to at least seven different persons the well-known story
of the flagstone that was lifted from the cellar floor by a growth of
fungi beneath. He looked up his Sowerby to see if it was _Lycoperdon
coelatum_ or _giganteum_--like all his kind since Gilbert White became
famous, he Gilbert-Whited. He cherished a theory that _giganteum_ is
unfairly named.
One does not know if he observed that those white spheres lay in the
very track that old woman of yesterday had followed, or if he noted that
the last of the series swelled not a score of yards from the gate of the
Caddles' cottage. If he observed these things, he made no attempt to
place his observation on record. His observation in matters botanical
was what the inferior sort of scientific people call a "trained
observation"--you look for certain definite things and neglect
everything else. And he did nothing to link this phenomenon with the
remarkable expansion of the Caddles' baby that had been going on now for
some weeks, indeed ever since Caddles walked over one Sunday afternoon a
month or more ago to see his mother-in-law and hear Mr. Skinner (since
defunct) brag about his management of hens.
IV.
The growth of the puff-balls following on the expansion of the Caddles'
baby really ought to have opened the Vicar's eyes. The latter fact had
already come right into his arms at the christening--almost
over-poweringly....
The youngster bawled with deafening violence when the cold water that
sealed its divine inheritance and its right to the name of "Albert
Edward Caddles" fell upon its brow. It was already beyond maternal
porterage, and Caddles, staggering indeed, but grinning triumphantly at
quantitatively inferior parents, bore it back to the free-sitting
occupied by his party.
"I never saw such a child!" said the Vicar. This was the first public
intimation that the Caddles' baby, which had begun its earthly career a
little under seven pounds, did after all intend to be a credit to its
parents. Very soon it was clear it meant to be not only a credit but a
glory. And within a month their glory shone so brightly as to be, in
connection with people in the Caddles' position, improper.
The butcher weighed the infant eleven times. He was a man of few words,
and he soon got through with them. The first time he said, "E's a good
un;" the next time he said, "My word!" the third time he said, "_Well_,
mum," and after that he simply blew enormously each time, scratched his
head, and looked at his scales with an unprecedented mistrust. Every one
came to see the Big Baby--so it was called by universal consent--and
most of them said, "E's a Bouncer," and almost all remarked to him,
"_Did_ they?" Miss Fletcher came and said she "never _did_," which was
perfectly true.
Lady Wondershoot, the village tyrant, arrived the day after the third
weighing, and inspected the phenomenon narrowly through glasses that
filled it with howling terror. "It's an unusually Big child," she told
its mother, in a loud instructive voice. "You ought to take unusual care
of it, Caddles. Of course it won't go on like this, being bottle fed,
but we must do what we can for it. I'll send you down some more
flannel."
The doctor came and measured the child with a tape, and put the figures
in a notebook, and old Mr. Drifthassock, who farmed by Up Marden,
brought a manure traveller two miles out of their way to look at it. The
traveller asked the child's age three times over, and said finally that
he was blowed. He left it to be inferred how and why he was blowed;
apparently it was the child's size blowed him. He also said it ought to
be put into a baby show. And all day long, out of school hours, little
children kept coming and saying, "Please, Mrs. Caddles, mum, may we have
a look at your baby, please, mum?" until Mrs. Caddles had to put a stop
to it. And amidst all these scenes of amazement came Mrs. Skinner, and
stood and smiled, standing somewhat in the background, with each sharp
elbow in a lank gnarled hand, and smiling, smiling under and about her
nose, with a smile of infinite profundity.
"It makes even that old wretch of a grandmother look quite pleasant,"
said Lady Wondershoot. "Though I'm sorry she's come back to the
village."
Of course, as with almost all cottagers' babies, the eleemosynary
element had already come in, but the child soon made it clear by
colossal bawling, that so far as the filling of its bottle went, it
hadn't come in yet nearly enough.
The baby was entitled to a nine days' wonder, and every one wondered
happily over its amazing growth for twice that time and more. And then
you know, instead of its dropping into the background and giving place
to other marvels, it went on growing more than ever!
Lady Wondershoot heard Mrs. Greenfield, her housekeeper, with infinite
amazement.
"Caddles downstairs again. No food for the child! My dear Greenfield,
it's impossible. The creature eats like a hippopotamus! I'm sure it
can't be true."
"I'm sure I hope you're not being imposed upon, my lady," said Mrs.
Greenfield.
"It's so difficult to tell with these people," said Lady Wondershoot.
"Now I do wish, my good Greenfield, that you'd just go down there
yourself this afternoon and _see_--see it have its bottle. Big as it is,
I cannot imagine that it needs more than six pints a day."
"It hasn't no business to, my lady," said Mrs. Greenfield.
The hand of Lady Wondershoot quivered, with that C.O.S. sort of emotion,
that suspicious rage that stirs in all true aristocrats, at the thought
that possibly the meaner classes are after all--as mean as their
betters, and--where the sting lies--scoring points in the game.
But Mrs. Greenfield could observe no evidence of peculation, and the
order for an increasing daily supply to the Caddles' nursery was issued.
Scarcely had the first instalment gone, when Caddles was back again at
the great house in a state abjectly apologetic.
"We took the greates' care of 'em, Mrs. Greenfield, I do assure you,
mum, but he's regular bust 'em! They flew with such vilence, mum, that
one button broke a pane of the window, mum, and one hit me a regular
stinger jest 'ere, mum."
Lady Wondershoot, when she heard that this amazing child had positively
burst out of its beautiful charity clothes, decided that she must speak
to Caddles herself. He appeared in her presence with his hair hastily
wetted and smoothed by hand, breathless, and clinging to his hat brim as
though it was a life-belt, and he stumbled at the carpet edge out of
sheer distress of mind.
Lady Wondershoot liked bullying Caddles. Caddles was her ideal
lower-class person, dishonest, faithful, abject, industrious, and
inconceivably incapable of responsibility. She told him it was a serious
matter, the way his child was going on. "It's 'is appetite, my
ladyship," said Caddles, with a rising note.
"Check 'im, my ladyship, you can't," said Caddles. "There 'e lies, my
ladyship, and kicks out 'e does, and 'owls, that distressin'. We 'aven't
the 'eart, my ladyship. If we 'ad--the neighbours would interfere...."
Lady Wondershoot consulted the parish doctor.
"What I want to know," said Lady Wondershoot, "is it _right_ this child
should have such an extraordinary quantity of milk?"
"The proper allowance for a child of that age," said the parish doctor,
"is a pint and a half to two pints in the twenty-four hours. I don't see
that you are called upon to provide more. If you do, it is your own
generosity. Of course we might try the legitimate quantity for a few
days. But the child, I must admit, seems for some reason to be
physiologically different. Possibly what is called a Sport. A case of
General Hypertrophy."
"It isn't fair to the other parish children," said Lady Wondershoot. "I
am certain we shall have complaints if this goes on."
"I don't see that any one can be expected to give more than the
recognised allowance. We might insist on its doing with that, or if it
wouldn't, send it as a case into the Infirmary."
"I suppose," said Lady Wondershoot, reflecting, "that apart from the
size and the appetite, you don't find anything else abnormal--nothing
monstrous?"
"No. No, I don't. But no doubt if this growth goes on, we shall find
grave moral and intellectual deficiencies. One might almost prophesy
that from Max Nordau's law. A most gifted and celebrated philosopher,
Lady Wondershoot. He discovered that the abnormal is--abnormal, a most
valuable discovery, and well worth bearing in mind. I find it of the
utmost help in practice. When I come upon anything abnormal, I say at
once, This is abnormal." His eyes became profound, his voice dropped,
his manner verged upon the intimately confidential. He raised one hand
stiffly. "And I treat it in that spirit," he said.
V.
"Tut, tut!" said the Vicar to his breakfast things--the day after the
coming of Mrs. Skinner. "Tut, tut! what's this?" and poised his glasses
at his paper with a general air of remonstrance.
"Giant wasps! What's the world coming to? American journalists, I
suppose! Hang these Novelties! Giant gooseberries are good enough for
me.
"Nonsense!" said the Vicar, and drank off his coffee at a gulp, eyes
steadfast on the paper, and smacked his lips incredulously.
"Bosh!" said the Vicar, rejecting the hint altogether.
But the next day there was more of it, and the light came.
Not all at once, however. When he went for his constitutional that day
he was still chuckling at the absurd story his paper would have had him
believe. Wasps indeed--killing a dog! Incidentally as he passed by the
site of that first crop of puff-balls he remarked that the grass was
growing very rank there, but he did not connect that in any way with the
matter of his amusement. "We should certainly have heard something of
it," he said; "Whitstable can't be twenty miles from here."
Beyond he found another puff-ball, one of the second crop, rising like
a roc's egg out of the abnormally coarsened turf.
The thing came upon him in a flash.
He did not take his usual round that morning. Instead he turned aside by
the second stile and came round to the Caddles' cottage. "Where's that
baby?" he demanded, and at the sight of it, "Goodness me!"
He went up the village blessing his heart, and met the doctor full tilt
coming down. He grasped his arm. "What does this _mean_?" he said. "Have
you seen the paper these last few days?"
The doctor said he had.
"Well, what's the matter with that child? What's the matter with
everything--wasps, puff-balls, babies, eh? What's making them grow so
big? This is most unexpected. In Kent too! If it was America now--"
"It's a little difficult to say just what it is," said the doctor. "So
far as I can grasp the symptoms--"
"Yes?"
"It's Hypertrophy--General Hypertrophy."
"Hypertrophy?"
"Yes. General--affecting all the bodily structures--all the organism. I
may say that in my own mind, between ourselves, I'm very nearly
convinced it's that.... But one has to be careful."
"Ah," said the Vicar, a good deal relieved to find the doctor equal to
the situation. "But how is it it's breaking out in this fashion, all
over the place?"
"That again," said the doctor, "is difficult to say."
"Urshot. Here. It's a pretty clear case of spreading."
"Yes," said the doctor. "Yes. I think so. It has a strong resemblance at
any rate to some sort of epidemic. Probably Epidemic Hypertrophy will
meet the case."
"Epidemic!" said the Vicar. "You don't mean it's contagious?"
The doctor smiled gently and rubbed one hand against the other. "That I
couldn't say," he said.
"But---!" cried the Vicar, round-eyed. "If it's _catching_--it--it
affects _us!_"
He made a stride up the road and turned about.
"I've just been there," he cried. "Hadn't I better---? I'll go home at
once and have a bath and fumigate my clothes."
The doctor regarded his retreating back for a moment, and then turned
about and went towards his own house....
But on the way he reflected that one case had been in the village a
month without any one catching the disease, and after a pause of
hesitation decided to be as brave as a doctor should be and take the
risks like a man.
And indeed he was well advised by his second thoughts. Growth was the
last thing that could ever happen to him again. He could have eaten--and
the Vicar could have eaten--Herakleophorbia by the truckful. For growth
had done with them. Growth had done with these two gentlemen for
evermore.
VI.
It was a day or so after this conversation--a day or so, that is, after
the burning of the Experimental Farm--that Winkles came to Redwood and
showed him an insulting letter. It was an anonymous letter, and an
author should respect his character's secrets. "You are only taking
credit for a natural phenomenon," said the letter, "and trying to
advertise yourself by your letter to the _Times_. You and your Boomfood!
Let me tell you, this absurdly named food of yours has only the most
accidental connection with those big wasps and rats. The plain fact is
there is an epidemic of Hypertrophy--Contagious Hypertrophy--which you
have about as much claim to control as you have to control the solar
system. The thing is as old as the hills. There was Hypertrophy in the
family of Anak. Quite outside your range, at Cheasing Eyebright, at the
present time there is a baby--"
"Shaky up and down writing. Old gentleman apparently," said Redwood.
"But it's odd a baby--"
He read a few lines further, and had an inspiration.
"By Jove!" said he. "That's my missing Mrs. Skinner!"
He descended upon her suddenly in the afternoon of the following day.
She was engaged in pulling onions in the little garden before her
daughter's cottage when she saw him coming through the garden gate. She
stood for a moment "consternated," as the country folks say, and then
folded her arms, and with the little bunch of onions held defensively
under her left elbow, awaited his approach. Her mouth opened and shut
several times; she mumbled her remaining tooth, and once quite suddenly
she curtsied, like the blink of an arc-light.
"I thought I should find you," said Redwood.
"I thought you might, sir," she said, without joy.
"Where's Skinner?"
"'E ain't never written to me, Sir, not once, nor come nigh of me since
I came here. Sir."
"Don't you know what's become of him?"
"Him not having written, no, Sir," and she edged a step towards the left
with an imperfect idea of cutting off Redwood from the barn door.
"No one knows what has become of him," said Redwood.
"I dessay '_e_ knows," said Mrs. Skinner.
"He doesn't tell."
"He was always a great one for looking after 'imself and leaving them
that was near and dear to 'im in trouble, was Skinner. Though clever as
could be," said Mrs. Skinner....
"Where's this child?" asked Redwood abruptly.
She begged his pardon.
"This child I hear about, the child you've been giving our stuff to--the
child that weighs two stone."
Mrs. Skinner's hands worked, and she dropped the onions. "Reely, Sir,"
she protested, "I don't hardly know, Sir, what you mean. My daughter,
Sir, Mrs. Caddles, '_as_ a baby, Sir." And she made an agitated curtsey
and tried to look innocently inquiring by tilting her nose to one side.
"You'd better let me see that baby, Mrs. Skinner," said Redwood.
Mrs. Skinner unmasked an eye at him as she led the way towards the barn.
"Of course, Sir, there may 'ave been a _little_, in a little can of
Nicey I give his father to bring over from the farm, or a little perhaps
what I happened to bring about with me, so to speak. Me packing in a
hurry and all ..."
"Um!" said Redwood, after he had cluckered to the infant for a space.
"Oom!"
He told Mrs. Caddles the baby was a very fine child indeed, a thing
that was getting well home to her intelligence--and he ignored her
altogether after that. Presently she left the barn--through sheer
insignificance.
"Now you've started him, you'll have to keep on with him, you know," he
said to Mrs. Skinner.
He turned on her abruptly. "Don't splash it about _this_ time," he said.
"Splash it about, Sir?"
"Oh! _you_ know."
She indicated knowledge by convulsive gestures.
"You haven't told these people here? The parents, the squire and so on
at the big house, the doctor, no one?"
Mrs. Skinner shook her head.
"I wouldn't," said Redwood....
He went to the door of the barn and surveyed the world about him. The
door of the barn looked between the end of the cottage and some disused
piggeries through a five-barred gate upon the highroad. Beyond was a
high, red brick-wall rich with ivy and wallflower and pennywort, and set
along the top with broken glass. Beyond the corner of the wall, a sunlit
notice-board amidst green and yellow branches reared itself above the
rich tones of the first fallen leaves and announced that "Trespassers in
these Woods will be Prosecuted." The dark shadow of a gap in the hedge
threw a stretch of barbed wire into relief.
"Um," said Redwood, then in a deeper note, "Oom!"
There came a clatter of horses and the sound of wheels, and Lady
Wondershoot's greys came into view. He marked the faces of coachman and
footman as the equipage approached. The coachman was a very fine
specimen, full and fruity, and he drove with a sort of sacramental
dignity. Others might doubt their calling and position in the world, he
at any rate was sure--he drove her ladyship. The footman sat beside him
with folded arms and a face of inflexible certainties. Then the great
lady herself became visible, in a hat and mantle disdainfully inelegant,
peering through her glasses. Two young ladies protruded necks and peered
also.
The Vicar passing on the other side swept off the hat from his David's
brow unheeded....
Redwood remained standing in the doorway for a long time after the
carriage had passed, his hands folded behind him. His eyes went to the
green, grey upland of down, and into the cloud-curdled sky, and came
back to the glass-set wall. He turned upon the cool shadows within, and
amidst spots and blurs of colour regarded the giant child amidst that
Rembrandtesque gloom, naked except for a swathing of flannel, seated
upon a huge truss of straw and playing with its toes.
"I begin to see what we have done," he said.
He mused, and young Caddles and his own child and Cossar's brood mingled
in his musing.
He laughed abruptly. "Good Lord!" he said at some passing thought.
He roused himself presently and addressed Mrs. Skinner. "Anyhow he
mustn't be tortured by a break in his food. That at least we can
prevent. I shall send you a can every six months. That ought to do for
him all right."
Mrs. Skinner mumbled something about "if you think so, Sir," and
"probably got packed by mistake.... Thought no harm in giving him a
little," and so by the aid of various aspen gestures indicated that she
understood.
So the child went on growing.
And growing.
"Practically," said Lady Wondershoot, "he's eaten up every calf in the
place. If I have any more of this sort of thing from that man Caddles--"
VII.
But even so secluded a place as Cheasing Eyebright could not rest for
long in the theory of Hypertrophy--Contagious or not--in view of the
growing hubbub about the Food. In a little while there were painful
explanations for Mrs. Skinner--explanations that reduced her to
speechless mumblings of her remaining tooth--explanations that probed
her and ransacked her and exposed her--until at last she was driven to
take refuge from a universal convergence of blame in the dignity of
inconsolable widowhood. She turned her eye--which she constrained to be
watery--upon the angry Lady of the Manor, and wiped suds from her hands.
"You forget, my lady, what I'm bearing up under."
And she followed up this warning note with a slightly defiant:
"It's 'IM I think of, my lady, night _and_ day."
She compressed her lips, and her voice flattened and faltered: "Bein'
et, my lady."
And having established herself on these grounds, she repeated the
affirmation her ladyship had refused before. "I 'ad no more idea what I
was giving the child, my lady, than any one _could_ 'ave...."
Her ladyship turned her mind in more hopeful directions, wigging Caddles
of course tremendously by the way. Emissaries, full of diplomatic
threatenings, entered the whirling lives of Bensington and Redwood.
They presented themselves as Parish Councillors, stolid and clinging
phonographically to prearranged statements. "We hold you responsible,
Mister Bensington, for the injury inflicted upon our parish, Sir. We
hold you responsible."
A firm of solicitors, with a snake of a style--Banghurst, Brown, Flapp,
Codlin, Brown, Tedder, and Snoxton, they called themselves, and appeared
invariably in the form of a small rufous cunning-looking gentleman with
a pointed nose--said vague things about damages, and there was a
polished personage, her ladyship's agent, who came in suddenly upon
Redwood one day and asked, "Well, Sir, and what do you propose to do?"
To which Redwood answered that he proposed to discontinue supplying the
food for the child, if he or Bensington were bothered any further about
the matter. "I give it for nothing as it is," he said, "and the child
will yell your village to ruins before it dies if you don't let it have
the stuff. The child's on your hands, and you have to keep it. Lady
Wondershoot can't always be Lady Bountiful and Earthly Providence of her
parish without sometimes meeting a responsibility, you know."
"The mischief's done," Lady Wondershoot decided when they told her--with
expurgations--what Redwood had said.
"The mischief's done," echoed the Vicar.
Though indeed as a matter of fact the mischief was only beginning.
CHAPTER THE SECOND.
THE BRAT GIGANTIC.
I.
The giant child was ugly--the Vicar would insist. "He always had been
ugly--as all excessive things must be." The Vicar's views had carried
him out of sight of just judgment in this matter. The child was much
subjected to snapshots even in that rustic retirement, and their net
testimony is against the Vicar, testifying that the young monster was at
first almost pretty, with a copious curl of hair reaching to his brow
and a great readiness to smile. Usually Caddles, who was slightly built,
stands smiling behind the baby, perspective emphasising his relative
smallness.
After the second year the good looks of the child became more subtle and
more contestable. He began to grow, as his unfortunate grandfather would
no doubt have put it, "rank." He lost colour and developed an increasing
effect of being somehow, albeit colossal, yet slight. He was vastly
delicate. His eyes and something about his face grew finer--grew, as
people say, "interesting." His hair, after one cutting, began to tangle
into a mat. "It's the degenerate strain coming out in him," said the
parish doctor, marking these things, but just how far he was right in
that, and just how far the youngster's lapse from ideal healthfulness
was the result of living entirely in a whitewashed barn upon Lady
Wondershoot's sense of charity tempered by justice, is open to question.
The photographs of him that present him from three to six show him
developing into a round-eyed, flaxen-haired youngster with a truncated
nose and a friendly stare. There lurks about his lips that never very
remote promise of a smile that all the photographs of the early giant
children display. In summer he wears loose garments of ticking tacked
together with string; there is usually one of those straw baskets upon
his head that workmen use for their tools, and he is barefooted. In one
picture he grins broadly and holds a bitten melon in his hand.
The winter pictures are less numerous and satisfactory. He wears huge
sabots--no doubt of beechwoods and (as fragments of the inscription
"John Stickells, Iping," show) sacks for socks, and his trousers and
jacket are unmistakably cut from the remains of a gaily patterned
carpet. Underneath that there were rude swathings of flannel; five or
six yards of flannel are tied comforter-fashion about his neck. The
thing on his head is probably another sack. He stares, sometimes
smiling, sometimes a little ruefully, at the camera. Even when he was
only five years old, one sees that half whimsical wrinkling over his
soft brown eyes that characterised his face.
He was from the first, the Vicar always declared, a terrible nuisance
about the village. He seems to have had a proportionate impulse to play,
much curiosity and sociability, and in addition there was a certain
craving within him--I grieve to say--for more to eat. In spite of what
Mrs. Greenfield called an "_excessively_ generous" allowance of food
from Lady Wondershoot, he displayed what the doctor perceived at once
was the "Criminal Appetite." It carries out only too completely Lady
Wondershoot's worst experiences of the lower classes--that in spite of
an allowance of nourishment inordinately beyond what is known to be the
maximum necessity even of an adult human being, the creature was found
to steal. And what he stole he ate with an inelegant voracity. His great
hand would come over garden walls; he would covet the very bread in the
bakers' carts. Cheeses went from Marlow's store loft, and never a pig
trough was safe from him. Some farmer walking over his field of swedes
would find the great spoor of his feet and the evidence of his nibbling
hunger--a root picked here, a root picked there, and the holes, with
childish cunning, heavily erased. He ate a swede as one devours a
radish. He would stand and eat apples from a tree, if no one was about,
as normal children eat blackberries from a bush. In one way at any rate
this shortness of provisions was good for the peace of Cheasing
Eyebright--for many years he ate up every grain very nearly of the Food
of the Gods that was given him....
Indisputably the child was troublesome and out of place, "He was always
about," the Vicar used to say. He could not go to school; he could not
go to church by virtue of the obvious limitations of its cubical
content. There was some attempt to satisfy the spirit of that "most
foolish and destructive law"--I quote the Vicar--the Elementary
Education Act of 1870, by getting him to sit outside the open window
while instruction was going on within. But his presence there destroyed
the discipline of the other children. They were always popping up and
peering at him, and every time he spoke they laughed together. His voice
was so odd! So they let him stay away.
Nor did they persist in pressing him to come to church, for his vast
proportions were of little help to devotion. Yet there they might have
had an easier task; there are good reasons for guessing there were the
germs of religious feeling somewhere in that big carcase. The music
perhaps drew him. He was often in the churchyard on a Sunday morning,
picking his way softly among the graves after the congregation had gone
in, and he would sit the whole service out beside the porch, listening
as one listens outside a hive of bees.
At first he showed a certain want of tact; the people inside would hear
his great feet crunch restlessly round their place of worship, or become
aware of his dim face peering in through the stained glass, half
curious, half envious, and at times some simple hymn would catch him
unawares, and he would howl lugubriously in a gigantic attempt at
unison. Whereupon little Sloppet, who was organ-blower and verger and
beadle and sexton and bell-ringer on Sundays, besides being postman and
chimney-sweep all the week, would go out very briskly and valiantly and
send him mournfully away. Sloppet, I am glad to say, felt it--in his
more thoughtful moments at any rate. It was like sending a dog home when
you start out for a walk, he told me.
But the intellectual and moral training of young Caddles, though
fragmentary, was explicit. From the first, Vicar, mother, and all the
world, combined to make it clear to him that his giant strength was not
for use. It was a misfortune that he had to make the best of. He had to
mind what was told him, do what was set him, be careful never to break
anything nor hurt anything. Particularly he must not go treading on
things or jostling against things or jumping about. He had to salute the
gentlefolks respectful and be grateful for the food and clothing they
spared him out of their riches. And he learnt all these things
submissively, being by nature and habit a teachable creature and only by
food and accident gigantic.
For Lady Wondershoot, in these early days, he displayed the profoundest
awe. She found she could talk to him best when she was in short skirts
and had her dog-whip, and she gesticulated with that and was always a
little contemptuous and shrill. But sometimes the Vicar played master--a
minute, middle-aged, rather breathless David pelting a childish Goliath
with reproof and reproach and dictatorial command. The monster was now
so big that it seems it was impossible for any one to remember he was
after all only a child of seven, with all a child's desire for notice
and amusement and fresh experience, with all a child's craving for
response, attention and affection, and all a child's capacity for
dependence and unrestricted dulness and misery.
The Vicar, walking down the village road some sunlit morning, would
encounter an ungainly eighteen feet of the Inexplicable, as fantastic
and unpleasant to him as some new form of Dissent, as it padded fitfully
along with craning neck, seeking, always seeking the two primary needs
of childhood--something to eat and something with which to play.
There would come a look of furtive respect into the creature's eyes and
an attempt to touch the matted forelock.
In a limited way the Vicar had an imagination--at any rate, the remains
of one--and with young Caddles it took the line of developing the huge
possibilities of personal injury such vast muscles must possess. Suppose
a sudden madness--! Suppose a mere lapse into disrespect--! However, the
truly brave man is not the man who does not feel fear but the man who
overcomes it. Every time and always the Vicar got his imagination under.
And he used always to address young Caddles stoutly in a good clear
service tenor.
"Being a good boy, Albert Edward?"
And the young giant, edging closer to the wall and blushing deeply,
would answer, "Yessir--trying."
"Mind you do," said the Vicar, and would go past him with at most a
slight acceleration of his breathing. And out of respect for his manhood
he made it a rule, whatever he might fancy, never to look back at the
danger, when once it was passed.
In a fitful manner the Vicar would give young Caddles private tuition.
He never taught the monster to read--it was not needed; but he taught
him the more important points of the Catechism--his duty to his
neighbour for example, and of that Deity who would punish Caddles with
extreme vindictiveness if ever he ventured to disobey the Vicar and Lady
Wondershoot. The lessons would go on in the Vicar's yard, and passers-by
would hear that great cranky childish voice droning out the essential
teachings of the Established Church.
"To onner 'n 'bey the King and allooer put 'nthority under 'im. To
s'bmit meself t'all my gov'ners, teachers, spir'shall pastors an'
masters. To order myself lowly 'n rev'rently t'all my betters--"
Presently it became evident that the effect of the growing giant on
unaccustomed horses was like that of a camel, and he was told to keep
off the highroad, not only near the shrubbery (where the oafish smile
over the wall had exasperated her ladyship extremely), but altogether.
That law he never completely obeyed, because of the vast interest the
highroad had for him. But it turned what had been his constant resort
into a stolen pleasure. He was limited at last almost entirely to old
pasture and the Downs.
I do not know what he would have done if it had not been for the Downs.
There there were spaces where he might wander for miles, and over these
spaces he wandered. He would pick branches from trees and make insane
vast nosegays there until he was forbidden, take up sheep and put them
in neat rows, from which they immediately wandered (at this he
invariably laughed very heartily), until he was forbidden, dig away the
turf, great wanton holes, until he was forbidden....
He would wander over the Downs as far as the hill above Wreckstone, but
not farther, because there he came upon cultivated land, and the people,
by reason of his depredations upon their root-crops, and inspired
moreover by a sort of hostile timidity his big unkempt appearance
frequently evoked, always came out against him with yapping dogs to
drive him away. They would threaten him and lash at him with cart whips.
I have heard that they would sometimes fire at him with shot guns. And
in the other direction he ranged within sight of Hickleybrow. From above
Thursley Hanger he could get a glimpse of the London, Chatham, and Dover
railway, but ploughed fields and a suspicious hamlet prevented his
nearer access.
And after a time there came boards--great boards with red letters that
barred him in every direction. He could not read what the letters said:
"Out of Bounds," but in a little while he understood. He was often to be
seen in those days, by the railway passengers, sitting, chin on knees,
perched up on the Down hard by the Thursley chalk pits, where afterwards
he was set working. The train seemed to inspire a dim emotion of
friendliness in him, and sometimes he would wave an enormous hand at it,
and sometimes give it a rustic incoherent hail.
"Big," the peering passenger would say. "One of these Boom children.
They say, Sir, quite unable to do anything for itself--little better
than an idiot in fact, and a great burden on the locality."
"Parents quite poor, I'm told."
"Lives on the charity of the local gentry."
Every one would stare intelligently at that distant squatting monstrous
figure for a space.
"Good thing that was put a stop to," some spacious thinking mind would
suggest. "Nice to 'ave a few thousand of _them_ on the rates, eh?"
And usually there was some one wise enough to tell this philosopher:
"You're about Right there, Sir," in hearty tones.
II.
He had his bad days.
There was, for example, that trouble with the river.
He made little boats out of whole newspapers, an art he learnt by
watching the Spender boy, and he set them sailing down the stream--great
paper cocked-hats. When they vanished under the bridge which marks the
boundary of the strictly private grounds about Eyebright House, he
would give a great shout and run round and across Tormat's new
field--Lord! how Tormat's pigs did scamper, to be sure, and turn their
good fat into lean muscle!--and so to meet his boats by the ford. Right
across the nearer lawns these paper boats of his used to go, right in
front of Eyebright House, right under Lady Wondershoot's eyes!
Disorganising folded newspapers! A pretty thing!
Gathering enterprise from impunity, he began babyish hydraulic
engineering. He delved a huge port for his paper fleets with an old shed
door that served him as a spade, and, no one chancing to observe his
operations just then, he devised an ingenious canal that incidentally
flooded Lady Wondershoot's ice-house, and finally he dammed the river.
He dammed it right across with a few vigorous doorfuls of earth--he must
have worked like an avalanche--and down came a most amazing spate
through the shrubbery and washed away Miss Spinks and her easel and the
most promising water-colour sketch she had ever begun, or, at any rate,
it washed away her easel and left her wet to the knees and dismally
tucked up in flight to the house, and thence the waters rushed through
the kitchen garden, and so by the green door into the lane and down into
the riverbed again by Short's ditch.
Meanwhile, the Vicar, interrupted in conversation with the blacksmith,
was amazed to see distressful stranded fish leaping out of a few
residual pools, and heaped green weed in the bed of the stream, where
ten minutes before there had been eight feet and more of clear cool
water.
After that, horrified at his own consequences, young Caddles fled his
home for two days and nights. He returned only at the insistent call of
hunger, to bear with stoical calm an amount of violent scolding that was
more in proportion to his size than anything else that had ever before
fallen to his lot in the Happy Village.
III.
Immediately after that affair Lady Wondershoot, casting about for
exemplary additions to the abuse and fastings she had inflicted, issued
a Ukase. She issued it first to her butler, and very suddenly, so that
she made him jump. He was clearing away the breakfast things, and she
was staring out of the tall window on the terrace where the fawns would
come to be fed. "Jobbet," she said, in her most imperial voice--"Jobbet,
this Thing must work for its living."
And she made it quite clear not only to Jobbet (which was easy), but to
every one else in the village, including young Caddles, that in this
matter, as in all things, she meant what she said.
"Keep him employed," said Lady Wondershoot. "That's the tip for Master
Caddles."
"It's the Tip, I fancy, for all Humanity," said the Vicar. "The simple
duties, the modest round, seed-time and harvest--"
"Exactly," said Lady Wondershoot. "What _I_ always say. Satan finds some
mischief still for idle hands to do. At any rate among the labouring
classes. We bring up our under-housemaids on that principle, always.
What shall we set him to do?"
That was a little difficult. They thought of many things, and meanwhile
they broke him in to labour a bit by using him instead of a horse
messenger to carry telegrams and notes when extra speed was needed, and
he also carried luggage and packing-cases and things of that sort very
conveniently in a big net they found for him. He seemed to like
employment, regarding it as a sort of game, and Kinkle, Lady
Wondershoot's agent, seeing him shift a rockery for her one day, was
struck by the brilliant idea of putting him into her chalk quarry at
Thursley Hanger, hard by Hickleybrow. This idea was carried out, and it
seemed they had settled his problem.
He worked in the chalk pit, at first with the zest of a playing child,
and afterwards with an effect of habit--delving, loading, doing all the
haulage of the trucks, running the full ones down the lines towards the
siding, and hauling the empty ones up by the wire of a great
windlass--working the entire quarry at last single-handed.
I am told that Kinkle made a very good thing indeed out of him for Lady
Wondershoot, consuming as he did scarcely anything but his food, though
that never restrained her denunciation of "the Creature" as a gigantic
parasite upon her charity....
At that time he used to wear a sort of smock of sacking, trousers of
patched leather, and iron-shod sabots. Over his head was sometimes a
queer thing--a worn-out beehive straw chair it was, but usually he went
bareheaded. He would be moving about the pit with a powerful
deliberation, and the Vicar on his constitutional round would get there
about midday to find him shamefully eating his vast need of food with
his back to all the world.
His food was brought to him every day, a mess of grain in the husk, in a
truck--a small railway truck, like one of the trucks he was perpetually
filling with chalk, and this load he used to char in an old limekiln and
then devour. Sometimes he would mix with it a bag of sugar. Sometimes he
would sit licking a lump of such salt as is given to cows, or eating a
huge lump of dates, stones and all, such as one sees in London on
barrows. For drink he walked to the rivulet beyond the burnt-out site of
the Experimental Farm at Hickleybrow and put down his face to the
stream. It was from his drinking in that way after eating that the Food
of the Gods did at last get loose, spreading first of all in huge weeds
from the river-side, then in big frogs, bigger trout and stranding carp,
and at last in a fantastic exuberance of vegetation all over the little
valley.
And after a year or so the queer monstrous grub things in the field
before the blacksmith's grew so big and developed into such frightful
skipjacks and cockchafers--motor cockchafers the boys called them--that
they drove Lady Wondershoot abroad.
IV.
But soon the Food was to enter upon a new phase of its work in him. In
spite of the simple instructions of the Vicar--instructions intended to
round off the modest natural life befitting a giant peasant, in the most
complete and final manner--he began to ask questions, to inquire into
things, to _think_. As he grew from boyhood to adolescence it became
increasingly evident that his mind had processes of its own--out of the
Vicar's control. The Vicar did his best to ignore this distressing
phenomenon, but still--he could feel it there.
The young giant's material for thought lay about him. Quite
involuntarily, with his spacious views, his constant overlooking of
things, he must have seen a good deal of human life, and as it grew
clearer to him that he too, save for this clumsy greatness of his, was
also human, he must have come to realise more and more just how much was
shut against him by his melancholy distinction. The sociable hum of the
school, the mystery of religion that was partaken in such finery, and
which exhaled so sweet a strain of melody, the jovial chorusing from the
Inn, the warmly glowing rooms, candle-lit and fire-lit, into which he
peered out of the darkness, or again the shouting excitement, the vigour
of flannelled exercise upon some imperfectly understood issue that
centred about the cricket-field--all these things must have cried aloud
to his companionable heart. It would seem that as his adolescence crept
upon him, he began to take a very considerable interest in the
proceedings of lovers, in those preferences and pairings, those close
intimacies that are so cardinal in life.
One Sunday, just about that hour when the stars and the bats and the
passions of rural life come out, there chanced to be a young couple
"kissing each other a bit" in Love Lane, the deep hedged lane that runs
out back towards the Upper Lodge. They were giving their little emotions
play, as secure in the warm still twilight as any lovers could be. The
only conceivable interruption they thought possible must come pacing
visibly up the lane; the twelve-foot hedge towards the silent Downs
seemed to them an absolute guarantee.
Then suddenly--incredibly--they were lifted and drawn apart.
They discovered themselves held up, each with a finger and thumb under
the armpits, and with the perplexed brown eyes of young Caddles scanning
their warm flushed faces. They were naturally dumb with the emotions of
their situation.
"_Why_ do you like doing that?" asked young Caddles.
I gather the embarrassment continued until the swain remembering his
manhood, vehemently, with loud shouts, threats, and virile blasphemies,
such as became the occasion, bade young Caddles under penalties put them
down. Whereupon young Caddles, remembering his manners, did put them
down politely and very carefully, and conveniently near for a resumption
of their embraces, and having hesitated above them for a while, vanished
again into the twilight ...
"But I felt precious silly," the swain confided to me. "We couldn't
'ardly look at one another--bein' caught like that.
"Kissing we was--_you_ know.
"And the cur'ous thing is, she blamed it all on to me," said the swain.
"Flew out something outrageous, and wouldn't 'ardly speak to me all the
way 'ome...."
The giant was embarking upon investigations, there could be no doubt.
His mind, it became manifest, was throwing up questions. He put them to
few people as yet, but they troubled him. His mother, one gathers,
sometimes came in for cross-examination.
He used to come into the yard behind his mother's cottage, and, after a
careful inspection of the ground for hens and chicks, he would sit down
slowly with his back against the barn. In a minute the chicks, who liked
him, would be pecking all over him at the mossy chalk-mud in the seams
of his clothing, and if it was blowing up for wet, Mrs. Caddles' kitten,
who never lost her confidence in him, would assume a sinuous form and
start scampering into the cottage, up to the kitchen fender, round, out,
up his leg, up his body, right up to his shoulder, meditative moment,
and then scat! back again, and so on. Sometimes she would stick her
claws in his face out of sheer gaiety of heart, but he never dared to
touch her because of the uncertain weight of his hand upon a creature so
frail. Besides, he rather liked to be tickled. And after a time he would
put some clumsy questions to his mother.
"Mother," he would say, "if it's good to work, why doesn't every one
work?"
His mother would look up at him and answer, "It's good for the likes of
us."
He would meditate, "_Why_?"
And going unanswered, "What's work _for_, mother? Why do I cut chalk and
you wash clothes, day after day, while Lady Wondershoot goes about in
her carriage, mother, and travels off to those beautiful foreign
countries you and I mustn't see, mother?"
"She's a lady," said Mrs. Caddles.
"Oh," said young Caddles, and meditated profoundly.
"If there wasn't gentlefolks to make work for us to do," said Mrs.
Caddles, "how should we poor people get a living?"
This had to be digested.
"Mother," he tried again; "if there wasn't any gentlefolks, wouldn't
things belong to people like me and you, and if they did--"
"Lord sakes and _drat_ the Boy!" Mrs. Caddles would say--she had with
the help of a good memory become quite a florid and vigorous
individuality since Mrs. Skinner died. "Since your poor dear grandma was
took, there's no abiding you. Don't you arst no questions and you won't
be told no lies. If once I was to start out answerin' you _serious_, y'r
father 'd 'ave to go' and arst some one else for 'is supper--let alone
finishing the washin'."
"All right, mother," he would say, after a wondering stare at her. "I
didn't mean to worry."
And he would go on thinking.
V.
He was thinking too four years after, when the Vicar, now no longer ripe
but over-ripe, saw him for the last time of all. You figure the old
gentleman visibly a little older now, slacker in his girth, a little
coarsened and a little weakened in his thought and speech, with a
quivering shakiness in his hand and a quivering shakiness in his
convictions, but his eye still bright and merry for all the trouble the
Food had caused his village and himself. He had been frightened at times
and disturbed, but was he not alive still and the same still? and
fifteen long years--a fair sample of eternity--had turned the trouble
into use and wont.
"It was a disturbance, I admit," he would say, "and things are
different--different in many ways. There was a time when a boy could
weed, but now a man must go out with axe and crowbar--in some places
down by the thickets at least. And it's a little strange still to us
old-fashioned people for all this valley, even what used to be the river
bed before they irrigated, to be under wheat--as it is this
year--twenty-five feet high. They used the old-fashioned scythe here
twenty years ago, and they would bring home the harvest on a
wain--rejoicing--in a simple honest fashion. A little simple
drunkenness, a little frank love-making, to conclude ... poor dear Lady
Wondershoot--she didn't like these Innovations. Very conservative, poor
dear lady! A touch of the eighteenth century about her, I always said.
Her language for example ... Bluff vigour ...
"She died comparatively poor. These big weeds got into her garden. She
was not one of these gardening women, but she liked her garden in
order--things growing where they were planted and as they were
planted--under control ... The way things grew was unexpected--upset her
ideas ... She didn't like the perpetual invasion of this young
monster--at last she began to fancy he was always gaping at her over her
wall ... She didn't like his being nearly as high as her house ...
Jarred with her sense of proportion. Poor dear lady! I had hoped she
would last my time. It was the big cockchafers we had for a year or so
that decided her. They came from the giant larvae--nasty things as big
as rats--in the valley turf ...
"And the ants no doubt weighed with her also.
"Since everything was upset and there was no peace and quietness
anywhere now, she said she thought she might just as well be at Monte
Carlo as anywhere else. And she went.
"She played pretty boldly, I'm told. Died in a hotel there. Very sad
end... Exile... Not--not what one considers meet... A natural leader of
our English people... Uprooted. So I...
"Yet after all," harped the Vicar, "it comes to very little. A nuisance
of course. Children cannot run about so freely as they used to do, what
with ant bites and so forth. Perhaps it's as well ... There used to be
talk--as though this stuff would revolutionise everything ... But there
is something that defies all these forces of the New ... I don't know
of course. I'm not one of your modern philosophers--explain everything
with ether and atoms. Evolution. Rubbish like that. What I mean is
something the 'Ologies don't include. Matter of reason--not
understanding. Ripe wisdom. Human nature. _Aere perennius._ ... Call it
what you will."
And so at last it came to the last time.
The Vicar had no intimation of what lay so close upon him. He did his
customary walk, over by Farthing Down, as he had done it for more than a
score of years, and so to the place whence he would watch young Caddles.
He did the rise over by the chalk-pit crest a little puffily--he had
long since lost the Muscular Christian stride of early days; but Caddles
was not at his work, and then, as he skirted the thicket of giant
bracken that was beginning to obscure and overshadow the Hanger, he came
upon the monster's huge form seated on the hill--brooding as it were
upon the world. Caddles' knees were drawn up, his cheek was on his hand,
his head a little aslant. He sat with his shoulder towards the Vicar, so
that those perplexed eyes could not be seen. He must have been thinking
very intently--at any rate he was sitting very still ...
He never turned round. He never knew that the Vicar, who had played so
large a part in shaping his life, looked then at him for the very last
of innumerable times--did not know even that he was there. (So it is so
many partings happen.) The Vicar was struck at the time by the fact
that, after all, no one on earth had the slightest idea of what this
great monster thought about when he saw fit to rest from his labours.
But he was too indolent to follow up that new theme that day; he fell
back from its suggestion into his older grooves of thought.
"_Aere-perennius,"_ he whispered, walking slowly homeward by a path that
no longer ran straight athwart the turf after its former fashion, but
wound circuitously to avoid new sprung tussocks of giant grass. "No!
nothing is changed. Dimensions are nothing. The simple round, the common
way--"
And that night, quite painlessly, and all unknowing, he himself went the
common way--out of this Mystery of Change he had spent his life in
denying.
They buried him in the churchyard of Cheasing Eyebright, near to the
largest yew, and the modest tombstone bearing his epitaph--it ended
with: _Ut in Principio, nunc est et semper_--was almost immediately
hidden from the eye of man by a spread of giant, grey tasselled grass
too stout for scythe or sheep, that came sweeping like a fog over the
village out of the germinating moisture of the valley meadows in which
the Food of the Gods had been working.