I
An hour and a half later Doctor Allingham and Gregg had their tea
together in the sitting room of the former's residence. Bay windows
looked out upon the broad High Street, already thronged with Saturday
evening excursionists. An unusually large crowd was gathered around
the entrance to the "Blue Lion," just over the way, for the news had
soon spread about the town. Wild rumours passed from ear to ear as to
the identity of the strange individual whose behaviour had resulted
in so disturbing a conclusion of the cricket match. Those among the
townspeople who had actually witnessed not only this event but also the
rapid flight of the Clockwork man, related their version of the affair,
adding a little each time and altering their theories, so that in the
end those who listened were more frightened and impressed than those
who had seen.
Allingham sat in stony silence, sipping tea at intervals and cutting
pieces of cake into neat little squares, which he slipped into his
mouth spasmodically. Now and again he passed a hand across his big
tawny moustache and pulled it savagely. His state of tense nervous
irritation was partly due to the fact that he had been obliged to wait
so long for his tea; but he had also violently disagreed with Gregg in
their discussion about the Clockwork man. At the present moment the
young student stood by the window, watching the animated crowd outside
the inn. He had finished his tea, and he had no wish to push his own
theory about the mysterious circumstance to the extent of quarrelling
with his friend.
After the disaster there had been much to do. Four times had
Allingham's car travelled between the cricket ground and the local
hospital, and it was half past six before the eleven players and the
two umpires had been conveyed thither, treated for their wounds and
discharged. No one was seriously injured, but in each case the abrasion
on the side of the head had been severe enough to demand treatment.
One or two had been a long while recovering full consciousness, and
all were in a condition of mental confusion and gave wildly incoherent
reports of the incident.
There had been times, during those journeys to and fro, when Gregg
found it difficult to save himself from outbursts of laughter. He had
to bite his lip hard in the effort to hold in check an imagination that
was apt to run to extremes. From one point of view it had certainly
been absurd that this awkward being, with his apparently limited range
of movement, should have managed in a few seconds to lay out so many
healthy, active men. By comparison, his batting performance, singular
as it had seemed, faded into insignificance. The breathless swiftness
of the action, the unerring aim, the immense force behind each blow,
the incredible audacity of the act, almost persuaded Gregg that the
thing was too exquisitely comic to be true. But when he forced himself
to look at the matter seriously, he felt that there were little grounds
for the explanation that the Clockwork man was simply a dangerous
lunatic. The flight at a preposterous speed, the flying leap over the
hurdle, the subsequent acceleration of his run to a pace altogether
beyond human possibility, convinced the young undergraduate, who
was level-headed enough, although impressionable, that some other
explanation would have to be found for the extraordinary occurrence.
Besides, there was Arthur Wither's story about the flapping ears and
the queer conversation of the Clockwork man, his peculiar jerky
movements, his sudden exhibitions of uncanny efficiency contrasted
with appalling lapses. Once you had grasped the idea of his mechanical
origin, it was difficult to thrust the Clockwork man out of your head.
He became something immensely exciting and suggestive. If Gregg's sense
of humour had not been so violently tickled by the ludicrous side of
the affair, he would have felt already that some great discovery was
about to be revealed to the modern world. It had never occurred to him
before that abnormal phenomena might be presented to human beings in
the form of a sort of practical joke. Somehow, one expected this sort
of thing to happen in solemn earnest and in the dead of night. But the
event had taken place in broad daylight, and already there was mixed
up with its queer unreality the most ridiculous tangle of purely human
circumstance.
Allingham had an explanation for everything. He said that the loud
noise was due to some kind of machine that this ingenious lunatic
carried in his pocket. He argued that the rapid flight was probably to
be accounted for by a sort of electric shoe. Nothing was impossible
so long as you could adduce some explanation that was just humanly
credible. And the strange antics of the Clockwork man, his sudden
stoppings and beginnings, his "Anglo-Saxon" gestures and his staccato
gait, all came under the heading of locomotor ataxia in an advanced
form.
* * * * *
As the doctor concentrated upon a delayed tea, his mind lapsed into its
usual condition of fretful scepticism. Gregg's idea that the Clockwork
man represented a mystery, if not a miracle, enraged him. At forty a
man does not readily welcome discoveries that may upset his own world
of accepted facts, and Allingham had long since given up the habit of
following the latest results of scientific investigation. Years ago he
had made his own small researches, only to discover that others were
making them at the same time. He had had his gleamings in common with
all the other students of his year. Everybody was having gleamings then
of vast possibilities in medical science, especially in the direction
of nervous pathology and the study of morbid diseases resulting from
highly complex methods of living. There had been much sound work, a
good deal of irresponsible mud-raking, and, in Allingham's case, a
growing suspicion that the human organism was not standing very well
the strains imposed upon it by modern civilisation. He had wondered
then if some experiments would not be made some day in the pursuit of
evolutionary doctrines as applied to physiological progress--but that
had been the most ephemeral of all his gleams.
He had been glad to abandon the hospitals in favour of a comfortable
practice and the leisured life of a country town. Great Wymering had
offered him plenty of distractions that soothed the slight wound to
his vanity caused by the discovery that he had over-estimated his
originality. In a few years much had happened that helped to confirm
his new view of himself as a social creature with a taste for the
amenities of existence. And then he had been able to keep up his
cricket. In the winter there were bridge parties, amateur theatricals,
dinner parties with quite ordinary but agreeable people, local affairs
into which a man whose health was under suspicion and whose sympathies
were just perceptibly narrowing, could plunge without too much effort
being required in order to rise to such occasions. And he had the witty
temperament. Quite easily, he maintained a reputation for turning out
a bon-mot on the spur of the moment, something with a faint element of
paradox. He would say such things as, "Only those succeed in life who
have brains and can forget the fact," or "To be idle is the goal of all
men, but only the industrious achieve it." When taunted by a young
lady who suspected him of wasted talents, even genius, he retorted that
"Genius is only an accumulation of neglected diseases."
Latterly he had suffered from strange irritations not easily to be
ascribed to liver, misgivings, a sense of having definitely accepted a
secondary edition of himself. An old acquaintance would have detected
at once the change in his character, the marked leaning towards
conservatism in politics and a certain reactionary tendency in his
general ideas. He was becoming fixed in his views, and believed in
a stable universe. His opinions, in fact, were as automatic as his
Swedish exercises in the morning and his apple before breakfast. There
was a slight compensatory increase in his sense of humour, and there
was his approaching marriage to Lilian Payne, the gifted daughter of a
wealthy town councillor.
That last fact occupied a central place in his mind just at present,
but it was also another source of irritation. Lilian was intellectual
as well as fascinating, and the former attribute became more marked
as they grew more intimate. Instead of charming little notes inviting
him to tea he now received long, and, he was obliged to admit, quite
excellent essays upon the true place of woman in modern life. He was
bound to applaud, but such activity of mind was by no means to his
taste. He liked a woman to have thoughts; but a thinking woman was a
nuisance.
All these clamouring reforms represented to him merely a disinclination
to bother about the necessary affairs of life, an evasion of inevitable
evils, a refusal to accept life as a school of learning by trial and
error. Besides, if women got hold of the idea of efficiency there
would be an end to all things. They would make a worse muddle of the
"mad dream" than the men. Women made fewer mistakes and they were
temperamentally inclined towards the pushing of everything that they
undertook to the point of violent and uncomfortable success.
Efficiency! How he hated the word! It reminded him of his own
heart-breaking struggles, not only with the difficulties of an exacting
science, but with the complexities of the time in which his youth had
been spent, a time when all the intelligent young men had been trying
to find some way out of the social evils that then existed--and still
existed, as an ironical memorial to their futile efforts. In those
days one scarcely dared to move in intellectual circles without having
evolved one's personal solution of the social problem, an achievement
that implied a great deal of hard reading, attendance at Fabian
meetings, and a certain amount of voluntary thinking.
If necessary, one could brush all that up again. How different
life was, when it came to be lived; how unlike the sagacious
prognostications of doubting youth! There was a substratum underneath
all that surge of enquiry and inquisitiveness, all that worry and
distress; and that was life itself, known and valued, something that
one clung to with increasing strength. The mind grew out of its
speculative stage and settled down to a careful consideration of
concrete existence.
And then, with a sharp jar, his thoughts reverted to the consideration
of another irritating circumstance, this ridiculous Clockwork man,
in whom Gregg believed even to the extent of thinking it worth while
stating the case for the incredible before a man years his senior in
experience and rational thought.