IMPLICATIONS
I
The jury returned a verdict of "Accidental death."
If there had been any traces of a struggle, I had not noticed them
when I came to the edge of the pond. There may have been marks as if
a foot had slipped. I was not thinking of evidence when I looked into
the water.
There were marks enough when the police came to investigate, but
they were the marks made by a twelve-stone man in hobnail boots,
who had scrambled into, and out of, the pond. As the inspector said,
it was not worth while wasting any time in looking for earlier traces
of footsteps below those marks.
Nor were there any signs of violence on the body. It was in no way
disfigured, save by the action of the water, in which it had lain
for eighteen hours.
There was, indeed, only one point of any significance from the jury's
point of view, and that they put on one side, if they considered it
at all; the body was pressed into the mud.
The Coroner asked a few questions about this fact.
Was the mud very soft? Yes, very soft, liquid on top.
How was the body lying? Face downwards.
What part of the body was deepest in the mud? The chest. The witness
said he had hard work to get the upper part of the body released; the
head was free, but the mud held the rest. "The mooad soocked like,"
was the expressive phrase of the witness.
The Coroner passed on to other things. Had any one a spite against
the child? and such futilities. Only once more did he revert to
that solitary significant fact. "Would it be possible," he asked of
the abashed and self-conscious labourer, "would it be possible for
the body to have worked its way down into the soft mud as you have
described it to have been found?"
"We-el," said the witness, "'twas in the stacky mooad, 'twas through
the sarft stoof."
"But this soft mud would suck any solid body down, would it
not?" persisted the Coroner.
And the witness recalled the case of a duck that had been sucked into
the same soft pond mud the summer before, and cited the instance. He
forgot to add that on that occasion the mud had not been under water.
The Coroner accepted the instance. There can be no question that both
he and the jury were anxious to accept the easier explanation.
II
But I know perfectly well that the Wonder did not fall into the pond
by accident.
I should have known, even if that conclusive evidence with regard to
his being pushed into the mud had never come to light.
He may have stood by the ash-tree and looked into the water, but
he would never have fallen. He was too perfectly controlled; and,
with all his apparent abstraction, no one was ever more alive to the
detail of his surroundings. He and I have walked together perforce
in many slippery places, but I have never known him to fall or even
begin to lose his balance, whereas I have gone down many times.
Yes; I know that he was pushed into the pond, and I know that he
was held down in the mud, most probably by the aid of that ash stick
I had held. But it was not for me to throw suspicion on any one at
that inquest, and I preferred to keep my thoughts and my inferences
to myself. I should have done so, even if I had been in possession
of stronger evidence.
I hope that it was the Harrison idiot who was to blame. He was
not dangerous in the ordinary sense, but he might quite well have
done the thing in play--as he understood it. Only I cannot quite
understand his pushing the body down after it fell. That seems to
argue vindictiveness--and a logic which I can hardly attribute to
the idiot. Still, who can tell what went on in the distorted mind of
that poor creature? He is reported to have rescued the dead body of
a rabbit from the undergrowth on one occasion, and to have blubbered
when he could not bring it back to life.
There is but one other person who could have been implicated, and I
hesitate to name him in this place. Yet one remembers what terrific
acts of misapplied courage and ferocious brutality the fanatics of
history have been capable of performing when their creed and their
authority have been set at naught.
III
Ellen Mary never recovered her sanity. She died a few weeks ago in
the County Asylum. I hear that her husband attended the funeral. When
she lost her belief in the supernal wisdom and power of her god, her
world must have fallen about her. The thing she had imagined to be
solid, real, everlasting, had proved to be friable and destructible
like all other human building.
IV
The Wonder is buried in Chilborough churchyard.
You may find the place by its proximity to the great marble mausoleum
erected over the remains of Sir Edward Bigg, the well-known brewer
and philanthropist.
The grave of Victor Stott is marked by a small stone, some six inches
high, which is designed to catch the foot rather than the eye of
the seeker.
The stone bears the initials "V. S.," and a date--no more.
V
I saw the Wonder before he was buried.
I went up into the little bedroom and looked at him in his tiny coffin.
I was no longer afraid of him. His power over me was dissipated. He
was no greater and no less than any other dead thing.
It was the same with every one. He had become that "poor little
boy of Mrs. Stott's." No one spoke of him with respect now. No one
seemed to remember that he had been in any way different from other
"poor little fellows" who had died an untimely death.
One thing did strike me as curious. The idiot, the one person who had
never feared him living, had feared him horribly when he was dead....
EPILOGUE
THE USES OF MYSTERY
Something Challis has told me; something I have learned for myself;
and there is something which has come to me from an unknown source.
But here again we are confronted with the original difficulty--the
difficulty that for some conceptions there is no verbal figure.
It is comprehensible, it is, indeed, obvious that the deeper abstract
speculation of the Wonder's thought cannot be set out by any metaphor
that would be understood by a lesser intelligence.
We see that many philosophers, whose utterances have been recorded
in human history--that record which floats like a drop of oil on
the limitless ocean of eternity--have been confronted with this
same difficulty, and have woven an intricate and tedious design
of words in their attempt to convey some single conception--some
conception which themselves could see but dimly when disguised in the
masquerade of language; some figure that as it was limned grew ever
more confused beneath the wrappings of metaphor, so that we who read
can glimpse scarce a hint of its original shape and likeness. We see,
also, that the very philosophers who caricatured their own eidolon,
became intrigued with the logical abstraction of words and were led
away into a wilderness of barren deduction--their one inspired vision
of a stable premiss distorted and at last forgotten.
How then shall we hope to find words to adumbrate a philosophy
which starts by the assumption that we can have no impression of
reality until we have rid ourselves of the interposing and utterly
false concepts of space and time, which delimit the whole world of
human thought.
I admit that one cannot even begin to do this thing; within our present
limitations our whole machinery of thought is built of these two
original concepts. They are the only gauges wherewith we may measure
every reality, every abstraction; wherewith we may give outline to
any image or process of the mind. Only when we endeavour to grapple
with that indeterminable mystery of consciousness can we conceive,
however dimly, some idea of a pure abstraction uninfluenced by and
independent of, those twin bases of our means of thought.
Here it is that Challis has paused. Here he says that we must wait,
that no revelation can reveal what we are incapable of understanding,
that only by the slow process of evolution can we attain to any
understanding of the mystery we have sought to solve by our futile
and primitive hypotheses.
"But then," I have pressed him, "why do you hesitate to speak of what
you heard on that afternoon?"
And once he answered me:
"I glimpsed a finality," he said, "and that appalled me. Don't you
see that ignorance is the means of our intellectual pleasure? It is
the solving of the problem that brings enjoyment--the solved problem
has no further interest. So when all is known, the stimulus for action
ceases; when all is known there is quiescence, nothingness. Perfect
knowledge implies the peace of death, implies the state of being
one--our pleasures are derived from action, from differences, from
heterogeneity.
"Oh! pity the child," said Challis, "for whom there could be no
mystery. Is not mystery the first and greatest joy of life? Beyond the
gate there is unexplored mystery for us in our childhood. When that is
explored, there are new and wonderful possibilities beyond the hills,
then beyond the seas, beyond the known world, in the everyday chances
and movements of the unknown life in which we are circumstanced.
"Surely we should all perish through sheer inanity, or die desperately
by suicide if no mystery remained in the world. Mystery takes a
thousand beautiful shapes; it lurks even in the handiwork of man, in
a stone god, or in some mighty, intricate machine, incomprehensibly
deliberate and determined. The imagination endows the man-made thing
with consciousness and powers, whether of reservation or aloofness;
the similitude of meditation and profundity is wrought into stone. Is
there not source for mystery to the uninstructed in the great machine
registering the progress of its own achievement with each solemn,
recurrent beat of its metal pulse?
"Behind all these things is the wonder of the imagination that never
approaches more nearly to the creation of a hitherto unknown image
than when it thus hesitates on the verge of mystery.
"There is yet so much, so very much cause for wondering
speculation. Science gains ground so slowly. Slowly it has outlined,
however vaguely, the uncertainties of our origin so far as this world
is concerned, while the mystic has fought for his entrancing fairy
tales one by one.
"The mystic still holds his enthralling belief in the succession
of peoples who have risen and died--the succeeding world-races,
red, black, yellow, and white, which have in turn dominated this
planet. Science with its hammer and chisel may lay bare evidence, may
collate material, date man's appearance, call him the most recent of
placental mammals, trace his superstitions and his first conceptions
of a god from the elemental fears of the savage. But the mystic turns
aside with an assumption of superior knowledge; he waves away objective
evidence; he has a certainty impressed upon his mind.
"The mystic is a power; he compels a multitude of followers, because
he offers an attraction greater than the facts of science; he tells of
a mystery profounder than any problem solved by patient investigation,
because his mystery is incomprehensible even by himself; and in fear
lest any should comprehend it, he disguises the approach with an
array of lesser mysteries, man-made; with terminologies, symbologies
and high talk of esotericism too fearful for any save the initiate.
"But we must preserve our mystic in some form against the awful time
when science shall have determined a limit; when the long history of
evolution shall be written in full, and every stage of world-building
shall be made plain. When the cycle of atomic dust to atomic dust
is demonstrated, and the detail of the life-process is taught and
understood, we shall have a fierce need for the mystic to save us
from the futility of a world we understand, to lie to us if need
be, to inspirit our material and regular minds with some breath of
delicious madness. We shall need the mystic then, or the completeness
of our knowledge will drive us at last to complete the dusty circle
in our eagerness to escape from a world we understand....
"See how man clings to his old and useless traditions; see how he
opposes at every step the awful force of progress. At each stage
he protests that the thing that is, is good, or that the thing that
was and has gone, was better. He despises new knowledge and fondly
clings to the belief that once men were greater than they now are. He
looks back to the more primitive, and endows it with that mystery he
cannot find in his own times. So have men ever looked lingeringly
behind them. It is an instinct, a great and wonderful inheritance
that postpones the moment of disillusionment.
"We are still mercifully surrounded with the countless mysteries
of every-day experience, all the evidences of the unimaginable
stimulus we call life. Would you take them away? Would you resolve
life into a disease of the ether--a disease of which you and I, all
life and all matter, are symptoms? Would you teach that to the child,
and explain to him that the wonder of life and growth is no wonder,
but a demonstrable result of impeded force, to be evaluated by the
application of an adequate formula?
"You and I," said Challis, "are children in the infancy of the
world. Let us to our play in the nursery of our own times. The day
will come, perhaps, when humanity shall have grown and will have to
take upon itself the heavy burden of knowledge. But you need not fear
that that will be in our day, nor in a thousand years.
"Meanwhile leave us our childish fancies, our little imaginings,
our hope--children that we are--of those impossible mysteries beyond
the hills ... beyond the hills."
PRINTED BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.
NOTES
[1] See the Deutsche Bibliothek and Schöneich's account of the child
of Lübeck.
[2] A study of genius shows that in a percentage of cases so large
as to exclude the possibility of coincidence, the exceptional man,
whether in the world of action, of art, or of letters, seems to
inherit his magnificent powers through the female line. Mr. Galton,
it is true, did not make a great point of this curious observation,
but the tendency of more recent analyses is all in the direction of
confirming the hypothesis; and it would seem to hold good in the
converse proposition, namely, that the exceptional woman inherits
her qualities from her father.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Hampdenshire Wonder, by John Davys Beresford