[Illustration: He sat down in a garden, with his back to a house thatoverlooked all London. ]

THE FOOD OF THE GODS AND HOW IT CAME TO EARTH

H. G. WELLS

[Illustration]

CONTENTS. 

BOOK I. 

THE DAWN OF THE FOOD. 

I. THE DISCOVERY OF THE FOOD

II. THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM

III. THE GIANT RATS

IV. THE GIANT CHILDREN

V. THE MINIMIFICENCE OF MR. BENSINGTON

BOOK II. 

THE FOOD IN THE VILLAGE. 

I. THE COMING OF THE FOOD

II. THE BRAT GIGANTIC

BOOK III. 

THE HARVEST OF THE FOOD. 

I. THE ALTERED WORLD

II. THE GIANT LOVERS

III. YOUNG CADDLES IN LONDON

IV. REDWOOD'S TWO DAYS

V. THE GIANT LEAGUER

BOOK I. 

THE DAWN OF THE FOOD. 

THE FOOD OF THE GODS. 

 * * * * *

CHAPTER THE FIRST. 

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FOOD. 

I. 

In the middle years of the nineteenth century there first becameabundant in this strange world of ours a class of men, men tending forthe most part to become elderly, who are called, and who are veryproperly called, but who dislike extremely to be called--"Scientists. "They dislike that word so much that from the columns of _Nature_, whichwas from the first their distinctive and characteristic paper, it is ascarefully excluded as if it were--that other word which is the basis ofall really bad language in this country. But the Great Public and itsPress know better, and "Scientists" they are, and when they emerge toany sort of publicity, "distinguished scientists" and "eminentscientists" and "well-known scientists" is the very least we call them. 

Certainly both Mr. Bensington and Professor Redwood quite merited any ofthese terms long before they came upon the marvellous discovery of whichthis story tells. Mr. Bensington was a Fellow of the Royal Society anda former president of the Chemical Society, and Professor Redwood wasProfessor of Physiology in the Bond Street College of the LondonUniversity, and he had been grossly libelled by the anti-vivisectioniststime after time. And they had led lives of academic distinction fromtheir very earliest youth. 

They were of course quite undistinguished looking men, as indeed alltrue Scientists are. There is more personal distinction about themildest-mannered actor alive than there is about the entire RoyalSociety. Mr. Bensington was short and very, very bald, and he stoopedslightly; he wore gold-rimmed spectacles and cloth boots that wereabundantly cut open because of his numerous corns, and Professor Redwoodwas entirely ordinary in his appearance. Until they happened upon theFood of the Gods (as I must insist upon calling it) they led lives ofsuch eminent and studious obscurity that it is hard to find anythingwhatever to tell the reader about them. 

Mr. Bensington won his spurs (if one may use such an expression of agentleman in boots of slashed cloth) by his splendid researches upon theMore Toxic Alkaloids, and Professor Redwood rose to eminence--I do notclearly remember how he rose to eminence! I know he was very eminent, and that's all. Things of this sort grow. I fancy it was a voluminouswork on Reaction Times with numerous plates of sphygmograph tracings (Iwrite subject to correction) and an admirable new terminology, that didthe thing for him. 

The general public saw little or nothing of either of these gentlemen. Sometimes at places like the Royal Institution and the Society of Artsit did in a sort of way see Mr. Bensington, or at least his blushingbaldness and something of his collar and coat, and hear fragments of alecture or paper that he imagined himself to be reading audibly; andonce I remember--one midday in the vanished past--when the BritishAssociation was at Dover, coming on Section C or D, or some such letter, which had taken up its quarters in a public-house, and following two, serious-looking ladies with paper parcels, out of mere curiosity, through a door labelled "Billiards" and "Pool" into a scandalousdarkness, broken only by a magic-lantern circle of Redwood's tracings. 

I watched the lantern slides come and go, and listened to a voice (Iforget what it was saying) which I believe was the voice of ProfessorRedwood, and there was a sizzling from the lantern and another soundthat kept me there, still out of curiosity, until the lights wereunexpectedly turned up. And then I perceived that this sound was thesound of the munching of buns and sandwiches and things that theassembled British Associates had come there to eat under cover of themagic-lantern darkness. 

And Redwood I remember went on talking all the time the lights were upand dabbing at the place where his diagram ought to have been visible onthe screen--and so it was again so soon as the darkness was restored. Iremember him then as a most ordinary, slightly nervous-looking dark man, with an air of being preoccupied with something else, and doing what hewas doing just then under an unaccountable sense of duty. 

I heard Bensington also once--in the old days--at an educationalconference in Bloomsbury. Like most eminent chemists and botanists, Mr. Bensington was very authoritative upon teaching--though I am certain hewould have been scared out of his wits by an average Board School classin half-an-hour--and so far as I can remember now, he was propounding animprovement of Professor Armstrong's Heuristic method, whereby at thecost of three or four hundred pounds' worth of apparatus, a totalneglect of all other studies and the undivided attention of a teacher ofexceptional gifts, an average child might with a peculiar sort of thumbythoroughness learn in the course of ten or twelve years almost as muchchemistry as one could get in one of those objectionable shillingtext-books that were then so common.... 

Quite ordinary persons you perceive, both of them, outside theirscience. Or if anything on the unpractical side of ordinary. And thatyou will find is the case with "scientists" as a class all the worldover. What there is great of them is an annoyance to their fellowscientists and a mystery to the general public, and what is not isevident. 

There is no doubt about what is not great, no race of men have suchobvious littlenesses. They live in a narrow world so far as their humanintercourse goes; their researches involve infinite attention and analmost monastic seclusion; and what is left over is not very much. Towitness some queer, shy, misshapen, greyheaded, self-important, littlediscoverer of great discoveries, ridiculously adorned with the wideribbon of some order of chivalry and holding a reception of hisfellow-men, or to read the anguish of _Nature_ at the "neglect ofscience" when the angel of the birthday honours passes the Royal Societyby, or to listen to one indefatigable lichenologist commenting on thework of another indefatigable lichenologist, such things force one torealise the unfaltering littleness of men. 

And withal the reef of Science that these little "scientists" built andare yet building is so wonderful, so portentous, so full of mysterioushalf-shapen promises for the mighty future of man! They do not seem torealise the things they are doing! No doubt long ago even Mr. Bensington, when he chose this calling, when he consecrated his life tothe alkaloids and their kindred compounds, had some inkling of thevision, --more than an inkling. Without some such inspiration, for suchglories and positions only as a "scientist" may expect, what young manwould have given his life to such work, as young men do? No, they _must_have seen the glory, they must have had the vision, but so near that ithas blinded them. The splendour has blinded them, mercifully, so thatfor the rest of their lives they can hold the lights of knowledge incomfort--that we may see!

And perhaps it accounts for Redwood's touch of preoccupation, that--there can be no doubt of it now--he among his fellows wasdifferent, he was different inasmuch as something of the vision stilllingered in his eyes. 

II. 

The Food of the Gods I call it, this substance that Mr. Bensington andProfessor Redwood made between them; and having regard now to what ithas already done and all that it is certainly going to do, there issurely no exaggeration in the name. So I shall continue to call ittherefore throughout my story. But Mr. Bensington would no more havecalled it that in cold blood than he would have gone out from his flatin Sloane Street clad in regal scarlet and a wreath of laurel. Thephrase was a mere first cry of astonishment from him. He called it theFood of the Gods, in his enthusiasm and for an hour or so at the mostaltogether. After that he decided he was being absurd. When he firstthought of the thing he saw, as it were, a vista of enormouspossibilities--literally enormous possibilities; but upon this dazzlingvista, after one stare of amazement, he resolutely shut his eyes, evenas a conscientious "scientist" should. After that, the Food of the Godssounded blatant to the pitch of indecency. He was surprised he had usedthe expression. Yet for all that something of that clear-eyed momenthung about him and broke out ever and again.... 

"Really, you know, " he said, rubbing his hands together and laughingnervously, "it has more than a theoretical interest. 

"For example, " he confided, bringing his face close to the Professor'sand dropping to an undertone, "it would perhaps, if suitably handled, _sell_.... 

"Precisely, " he said, walking away, --"as a Food. Or at least a foodingredient. 

"Assuming of course that it is palatable. A thing we cannot know till wehave prepared it. "

He turned upon the hearthrug, and studied the carefully designed slitsupon his cloth shoes. 

"Name?" he said, looking up in response to an inquiry. "For my part Iincline to the good old classical allusion. It--it makes Science res--. Gives it a touch of old-fashioned dignity. I have been thinking ... Idon't know if you will think it absurd of me.... A little fancy issurely occasionally permissible.... Herakleophorbia. Eh? The nutritionof a possible Hercules? You know it _might_ ... 

"Of course if you think _not_--"

Redwood reflected with his eyes on the fire and made no objection. 

"You think it would do?"

Redwood moved his head gravely. 

"It might be Titanophorbia, you know. Food of Titans.... You prefer theformer?

"You're quite sure you don't think it a little _too_--"

"No. "

"Ah! I'm glad. "

And so they called it Herakleophorbia throughout their investigations, and in their report, --the report that was never published, because ofthe unexpected developments that upset all their arrangements, --it isinvariably written in that way. There were three kindred substancesprepared before they hit on the one their speculations had foretolds andthese they spoke of as Herakleophorbia I, Herakleophorbia II, andHerakleophorbia III. It is Herakleophorbia IV. Which I--insisting uponBensington's original name--call here the Food of the Gods. 

III. 

The idea was Mr. Bensington's. But as it was suggested to him by one ofProfessor Redwood's contributions to the Philosophical Transactions, hevery properly consulted that gentleman before he carried it further. Besides which it was, as a research, a physiological, quite as much as achemical inquiry. 

Professor Redwood was one of those scientific men who are addicted totracings and curves. You are familiar--if you are at all the sort ofreader I like--with the sort of scientific paper I mean. It is a paperyou cannot make head nor tail of, and at the end come five or six longfolded diagrams that open out and show peculiar zigzag tracings, flashesof lightning overdone, or sinuous inexplicable things called "smoothedcurves" set up on ordinates and rooting in abscissae--and things likethat. You puzzle over the thing for a long time and end with thesuspicion that not only do you not understand it but that the authordoes not understand it either. But really you know many of thesescientific people understand the meaning of their own papers quite well:it is simply a defect of expression that raises the obstacle between us. 

I am inclined to think that Redwood thought in tracings and curves. Andafter his monumental work upon Reaction Times (the unscientific readeris exhorted to stick to it for a little bit longer and everything willbe as clear as daylight) Redwood began to turn out smoothed curves andsphygmographeries upon Growth, and it was one of his papers upon Growththat really gave Mr. Bensington his idea. 

Redwood, you know, had been measuring growing things of all sorts, kittens, puppies, sunflowers, mushrooms, bean plants, and (until hiswife put a stop to it) his baby, and he showed that growth went out notat a regular pace, or, as he put it, so, [Illustration]

but with bursts and intermissions of this sort. 

[Illustration]

and that apparently nothing grew regularly and steadily, and so far ashe could make out nothing could grow regularly and steadily: it was asif every living thing had just to accumulate force to grow, grew withvigour only for a time, and then had to wait for a space before it couldgo on growing again. And in the muffled and highly technical language ofthe really careful "scientist, " Redwood suggested that the process ofgrowth probably demanded the presence of a considerable quantity of somenecessary substance in the blood that was only formed very slowly, andthat when this substance was used up by growth, it was only very slowlyreplaced, and that meanwhile the organism had to mark time. He comparedhis unknown substance to oil in machinery. A growing animal was ratherlike an engine, he suggested, that can move a certain distance and mustthen be oiled before it can run again. ("But why shouldn't one oil theengine from without?" said Mr. Bensington, when he read the paper. ) Andall this, said Redwood, with the delightful nervous inconsecutiveness ofhis class, might very probably be found to throw a light upon themystery of certain of the ductless glands. As though they had anythingto do with it at all!

In a subsequent communication Redwood went further. He gave a perfectBrock's benefit of diagrams--exactly like rocket trajectories they were;and the gist of it--so far as it had any gist--was that the blood ofpuppies and kittens and the sap of sunflowers and the juice of mushroomsin what he called the "growing phase" differed in the proportion ofcertain elements from their blood and sap on the days when they were notparticularly growing. 

And when Mr. Bensington, after holding the diagrams sideways and upsidedown, began to see what this difference was, a great amazement came uponhim. Because, you see, the difference might probably be due to thepresence of just the very substance he had recently been trying toisolate in his researches upon such alkaloids as are most stimulating tothe nervous system. He put down Redwood's paper on the patentreading-desk that swung inconveniently from his arm-chair, took off hisgold-rimmed spectacles, breathed on them and wiped them very carefully. 

"By Jove!" said Mr. Bensington. 

Then replacing his spectacles again he turned to the patentreading-desk, which immediately, as his elbow came against its arm, gavea coquettish squeak and deposited the paper, with all its diagrams in adispersed and crumpled state, on the floor. "By Jove!" said Mr. Bensington, straining his stomach over the armchair with a patientdisregard of the habits of this convenience, and then, finding thepamphlet still out of reach, he went down on all fours in pursuit. Itwas on the floor that the idea of calling it the Food of the Gods cameto him.... 

For you see, if he was right and Redwood was right, then by injecting oradministering this new substance of his in food, he would do away withthe "resting phase, " and instead of growth going on in this fashion, [Illustration] it would (if you follow me) go thus--

[Illustration]

IV. 

The night after his conversation with Redwood Mr. Bensington couldscarcely sleep a wink. He did seem once to get into a sort of doze, butit was only for a moment, and then he dreamt he had dug a deep hole intothe earth and poured in tons and tons of the Food of the Gods, and theearth was swelling and swelling, and all the boundaries of the countrieswere bursting, and the Royal Geographical Society was all at work likeone great guild of tailors letting out the equator.... 

That of course was a ridiculous dream, but it shows the state of mentalexcitement into which Mr. Bensington got and the real value he attachedto his idea, much better than any of the things he said or did when hewas awake and on his guard. Or I should not have mentioned it, becauseas a general rule I do not think it is at all interesting for people totell each other about their dreams. 

By a singular coincidence Redwood also had a dream that night, and hisdream was this:--

[Illustration] It was a diagram done in fire upon a long scroll of theabyss. And he (Redwood) was standing on a planet before a sort of blackplatform lecturing about the new sort of growth that was now possible, to the More than Royal Institution of Primordial Forces--forces whichhad always previously, even in the growth of races, empires, planetarysystems, and worlds, gone so:--

[Illustration]

And even in some cases so:--

[Illustration]

And he was explaining to them quite lucidly and convincingly that theseslow, these even retrogressive methods would be very speedily quite putout of fashion by his discovery. 

Ridiculous of course! But that too shows--

That either dream is to be regarded as in any way significant orprophetic beyond what I have categorically said, I do not for one momentsuggest. 

CHAPTER THE SECOND. 

THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM. 

I. 

Mr. Bensington proposed originally to try this stuff, so soon as he wasreally able to prepare it, upon tadpoles. One always does try this sortof thing upon tadpoles to begin with; this being what tadpoles are for. And it was agreed that he should conduct the experiments and notRedwood, because Redwood's laboratory was occupied with the ballisticapparatus and animals necessary for an investigation into the DiurnalVariation in the Butting Frequency of the Young Bull Calf, aninvestigation that was yielding curves of an abnormal and veryperplexing sort, and the presence of glass globes of tadpoles wasextremely undesirable while this particular research was in progress. 

But when Mr. Bensington conveyed to his cousin Jane something of what hehad in mind, she put a prompt veto upon the importation of anyconsiderable number of tadpoles, or any such experimental creatures, into their flat. She had no objection whatever to his use of one of therooms of the flat for the purposes of a non-explosive chemistry that, sofar as she was concerned, came to nothing; she let him have a gasfurnace and a sink and a dust-tight cupboard of refuge from the weeklystorm of cleaning she would not forego. And having known people addictedto drink, she regarded his solicitude for distinction in learnedsocieties as an excellent substitute for the coarser form of depravity. But any sort of living things in quantity, "wriggly" as they were boundto be alive and "smelly" dead, she could not and would not abide. Shesaid these things were certain to be unhealthy, and Bensington wasnotoriously a delicate man--it was nonsense to say he wasn't. And whenBensington tried to make the enormous importance of this possiblediscovery clear, she said that it was all very well, but if sheconsented to his making everything nasty and unwholesome in the place(and that was what it all came to) then she was certain he would be thefirst to complain. 

And Mr. Bensington went up and down the room, regardless of his corns, and spoke to her quite firmly and angrily without the slightest effect. He said that nothing ought to stand in the way of the Advancement ofScience, and she said that the Advancement of Science was one thing andhaving a lot of tadpoles in a flat was another; he said that in Germanyit was an ascertained fact that a man with an idea like his would atonce have twenty thousand properly-fitted cubic feet of laboratoryplaced at his disposal, and she said she was glad and always had beenglad that she was not a German; he said that it would make him famousfor ever, and she said it was much more likely to make him ill to have alot of tadpoles in a flat like theirs; he said he was master in his ownhouse, and she said that rather than wait on a lot of tadpoles she'd goas matron to a school; and then he asked her to be reasonable, and sheasked _him_ to be reasonable then and give up all this about tadpoles;and he said she might respect his ideas, and she said not if they weresmelly she wouldn't, and then he gave way completely and said--in spiteof the classical remarks of Huxley upon the subject--a bad word. Not avery bad word it was, but bad enough. 

And after that she was greatly offended and had to be apologised to, andthe prospect of ever trying the Food of the Gods upon tadpoles in theirflat at any rate vanished completely in the apology. 

So Bensington had to consider some other way of carrying out theseexperiments in feeding that would be necessary to demonstrate hisdiscovery, so soon as he had his substance isolated and prepared. Forsome days he meditated upon the possibility of boarding out his tadpoleswith some trustworthy person, and then the chance sight of the phrase ina newspaper turned his thoughts to an Experimental Farm. 

And chicks. Directly he thought of it, he thought of it as a poultryfarm. He was suddenly taken with a vision of wildly growing chicks. Heconceived a picture of coops and runs, outsize and still more outsizecoops, and runs progressively larger. Chicks are so accessible, soeasily fed and observed, so much drier to handle and measure, that forhis purpose tadpoles seemed to him now, in comparison with them, quitewild and uncontrollable beasts. He was quite puzzled to understand whyhe had not thought of chicks instead of tadpoles from the beginning. Among other things it would have saved all this trouble with his cousinJane. And when he suggested this to Redwood, Redwood quite agreed withhim. 

Redwood said that in working so much upon needlessly small animals hewas convinced experimental physiologists made a great mistake. It isexactly like making experiments in chemistry with an insufficientquantity of material; errors of observation and manipulation becomedisproportionately large. It was of extreme importance just at presentthat scientific men should assert their right to have their material_big_. That was why he was doing his present series of experiments atthe Bond Street College upon Bull Calves, in spite of a certain amountof inconvenience to the students and professors of other subjects causedby their incidental levity in the corridors. But the curves he wasgetting were quite exceptionally interesting, and would, when published, amply justify his choice. For his own part, were it not for theinadequate endowment of science in this country, he would never, if hecould avoid it, work on anything smaller than a whale. But a PublicVivarium on a sufficient scale to render this possible was, he feared, at present, in this country at any rate, a Utopian demand. InGermany--Etc. 

As Redwood's Bull calves needed his daily attention, the selection andequipment of the Experimental Farm fell largely on Bensington. Theentire cost also, was, it was understood, to be defrayed by Bensington, at least until a grant could be obtained. Accordingly he alternated hiswork in the laboratory of his flat with farm hunting up and down thelines that run southward out of London, and his peering spectacles, hissimple baldness, and his lacerated cloth shoes filled the owners ofnumerous undesirable properties with vain hopes. And he advertised inseveral daily papers and _Nature_ for a responsible couple (married), punctual, active, and used to poultry, to take entire charge of anExperimental Farm of three acres. 

He found the place he seemed in need of at Hickleybrow, near Urshot, inKent. It was a little queer isolated place, in a dell surrounded by oldpine woods that were black and forbidding at night. A humped shoulder ofdown cut it off from the sunset, and a gaunt well with a shatteredpenthouse dwarfed the dwelling. The little house was creeperless, several windows were broken, and the cart shed had a black shadow atmidday. It was a mile and a half from the end house of the village, andits loneliness was very doubtfully relieved by an ambiguous family ofechoes. 

The place impressed Bensington as being eminently adapted to therequirements of scientific research. He walked over the premisessketching out coops and runs with a sweeping arm, and he found thekitchen capable of accommodating a series of incubators and fostermothers with the very minimum of alteration. He took the place there andthen; on his way back to London he stopped at Dunton Green and closedwith an eligible couple that had answered his advertisements, and thatsame evening he succeeded in isolating a sufficient quantity ofHerakleophorbia I. To more than justify these engagements. 

The eligible couple who were destined under Mr. Bensington to be thefirst almoners on earth of the Food of the Gods, were not only veryperceptibly aged, but also extremely dirty. This latter point Mr. Bensington did not observe, because nothing destroys the powers ofgeneral observation quite so much as a life of experimental science. They were named Skinner, Mr. And Mrs. Skinner, and Mr. Bensingtoninterviewed them in a small room with hermetically sealed windows, aspotted overmantel looking-glass, and some ailing calceolarias. 

Mrs. Skinner was a very little old woman, capless, with dirty white hairdrawn back very very tightly from a face that had begun by beingchiefly, and was now, through the loss of teeth and chin, and thewrinkling up of everything else, ending by being almostexclusively--nose. She was dressed in slate colour (so far as her dresshad any colour) slashed in one place with red flannel. She let him inand talked to him guardedly and peered at him round and over her nose, while Mr. Skinner she alleged made some alteration in his toilette. Shehad one tooth that got into her articulations and she held her two longwrinkled hands nervously together. She told Mr. Bensington that she hadmanaged fowls for years; and knew all about incubators; in fact, theythemselves had run a Poultry Farm at one time, and it had only failed atlast through the want of pupils. "It's the pupils as pay, " said Mrs. Skinner. 

Mr. Skinner, when he appeared, was a large-faced man, with a lisp and asquint that made him look over the top of your head, slashed slippersthat appealed to Mr. Bensington's sympathies, and a manifest shortnessof buttons. He held his coat and shirt together with one hand and tracedpatterns on the black-and-gold tablecloth with the index finger of theother, while his disengaged eye watched Mr. Bensington's sword ofDamocles, so to speak, with an expression of sad detachment. "You don'twant to run thith Farm for profit. No, Thir. Ith all the thame, Thir. Ekthperimenth! Prethithely. "

He said they could go to the farm at once. He was doing nothing atDunton Green except a little tailoring. "It ithn't the thmart plathe Ithought it wath, and what I get ithent thkarthely worth having, " hesaid, "tho that if it ith any convenienth to you for uth to come.... "

And in a week Mr. And Mrs. Skinner were installed in the farm, and thejobbing carpenter from Hickleybrow was diversifying the task of erectingruns and henhouses with a systematic discussion of Mr. Bensington. 

"I haven't theen much of 'im yet, " said Mr. Skinner. "But as far as Ican make 'im out 'e theems to be a thtewpid o' fool. "

"_I_ thought 'e seemed a bit Dotty, " said the carpenter fromHickleybrow. 

"'E fanthieth 'imself about poultry, " said Mr. Skinner. "O my goodneth!You'd think nobody knew nothin' about poultry thept 'im. "

"'E _looks_ like a 'en, " said the carpenter from Hickleybrow; "what withthem spectacles of 'is. "

Mr. Skinner came closer to the carpenter from Hickleybrow, and spoke ina confidential manner, and one sad eye regarded the distant village, andone was bright and wicked. "Got to be meathured every blethed day--everyblethed 'en, 'e thays. Tho as to thee they grow properly. What oh ... Eh? Every blethed 'en--every blethed day. "

And Mr. Skinner put up his hand to laugh behind it in a refined andcontagious manner, and humped his shoulders very much--and only theother eye of him failed to participate in his laughter. Then doubting ifthe carpenter had quite got the point of it, he repeated in apenetrating whisper; "_Meathured_!"

"'E's worse than our old guvnor; I'm dratted if 'e ain't, " said thecarpenter from Hickleybrow. 

II. 

Experimental work is the most tedious thing in the world (unless it bethe reports of it in the _Philosophical Transactions_), and it seemed along time to Mr. Bensington before his first dream of enormouspossibilities was replaced by a crumb of realisation. He had taken theExperimental Farm in October, and it was May before the first inklingsof success began. Herakleophorbia I. And II. And III. Had to be tried, and failed; there was trouble with the rats of the Experimental Farm, and there was trouble with the Skinners. The only way to get Skinner todo anything he was told to do was to dismiss him. Then he would nib hisunshaven chin--he was always unshaven most miraculously and yet neverbearded--with a flattened hand, and look at Mr. Bensington with one eye, and over him with the other, and say, "Oo, of courthe, Thir--if you're_theriouth_!"

But at last success dawned. And its herald was a letter in the longslender handwriting of Mr. Skinner. 

"The new Brood are out, " wrote Mr. Skinner, "and don't quite like thelook of them. Growing very rank--quite unlike what the similar lot wasbefore your last directions was given. The last, before the cat gotthem, was a very nice, stocky chick, but these are Growing likethistles. I never saw. They peck so hard, striking above boot top, thatam unable to give exact Measures as requested. They are regular Giants, and eating as such. We shall want more com very soon, for you never sawsuch chicks to eat. Bigger than Bantams. Going on at this rate, theyought to be a bird for show, rank as they are. Plymouth Rocks won't bein it. Had a scare last night thinking that cat was at them, and when Ilooked out at the window could have sworn I see her getting in under thewire. The chicks was all awake and pecking about hungry when I went out, but could not see anything of the cat. So gave them a peck of corn, andfastened up safe. Shall be glad to know if the Feeding to be continuedas directed. Food you mixed is pretty near all gone, and do not like tomix any more myself on account of the accident with the pudding. Withbest wishes from us both, and soliciting continuance of esteemedfavours, "Respectfully yours, "ALFRED NEWTON SKINNER. "

The allusion towards the end referred to a milk pudding with which someHerakleophorbia II. Had got itself mixed with painful and very nearlyfatal results to the Skinners. 

But Mr. Bensington, reading between the lines saw in this rankness ofgrowth the attainment of his long sought goal. The next morning healighted at Urshot station, and in the bag in his hand he carried, sealed in three tins, a supply of the Food of the Gods sufficient forall the chicks in Kent. 

It was a bright and beautiful morning late in May, and his corns were somuch better that he resolved to walk through Hickleybrow to his farm. Itwas three miles and a half altogether, through the park and villages andthen along the green glades of the Hickleybrow preserves. The trees wereall dusted with the green spangles of high spring, the hedges were fullof stitchwort and campion and the woods of blue hyacinths and purpleorchid; and everywhere there was a great noise of birds--thrushes, blackbirds, robins, finches, and many more--and in one warm corner ofthe park some bracken was unrolling, and there was a leaping and rushingof fallow deer. 

These things brought back to Mr. Bensington his early and forgottendelight in life; before him the promise of his discovery grew bright andjoyful, and it seemed to him that indeed he must have come upon thehappiest day in his life. And when in the sunlit run by the sandy bankunder the shadow of the pine trees he saw the chicks that had eaten thefood he had mixed for them, gigantic and gawky, bigger already than manya hen that is married and settleds and still growing, still in theirfirst soft yellow plumage (just faintly marked with brown along theback), he knew indeed that his happiest day had come. 

At Mr. Skinner's urgency he went into the runs but after he had beenpecked through the cracks in his shoes once or twice he got out again, and watched these monsters through the wire netting. He peered close tothe netting, and followed their movements as though he had never seen achick before in his life. 

"Whath they'll be when they're grown up ith impothible to think, " saidMr. Skinner. 

"Big as a horse, " said Mr. Bensington. 

"Pretty near, " said Mr. Skinner. 

"Several people could dine off a wing!" said Mr. Bensington. "They'd cutup into joints like butcher's meat. "

"They won't go on growing at thith pathe though, " said Mr. Skinner. 

"No?" said Mr. Bensington. 

"No, " said Mr. Skinner. "I know thith thort. They begin rank, but theydon't go on, bleth you! No. "

There was a pause. 

"Itth management, " said Mr. Skinner modestly. 

Mr. Bensington turned his glasses on him suddenly. 

"We got 'em almoth ath big at the other plathe, " said Mr. Skinner, withhis better eye piously uplifted and letting himself go a little; "me andthe mithith. "

Mr. Bensington made his usual general inspection of the premises, but hespeedily returned to the new run. It was, you know, in truth ever somuch more than he had dared to expect. The course of science is sotortuous and so slow; after the clear promises and before the practicalrealisation arrives there comes almost always year after year ofintricate contrivance, and here--here was the Foods of the Gods arrivingafter less than a year of testing! It seemed too good--too good. ThatHope Deferred which is the daily food of the scientific imagination wasto be his no more! So at least it seemed to him then. He came back andstared at these stupendous chicks of his, time after time. 

"Let me see, " he said. "They're ten days old. And by the side of anordinary chick I should fancy--about six or seven times as big.... "

"Itth about time we artht for a rithe in thkrew, " said Mr. Skinner tohis wife. "He'th ath pleathed ath Punth about the way we got thothechickth on in the further run--pleathed ath Punth he ith. "

He bent confidentially towards her. "Thinkth it'th that old food ofhith, " he said behind his hands and made a noise of suppressed laughterin his pharyngeal cavity.... 

Mr. Bensington was indeed a happy man that day. He was in no mood tofind fault with details of management. The bright day certainly broughtout the accumulating slovenliness of the Skinner couple more vividlythan he had ever seen it before. But his comments were of the gentlest. The fencing of many of the runs was out of order, but he seemed toconsider it quite satisfactory when Mr. Skinner explained that it was a"fokth or a dog or thomething" did it. He pointed out that the incubatorhad not been cleaned. 

"That it _asn't_, Sir, " said Mrs. Skinner with her arms folded, smilingcoyly behind her nose. "We don't seem to have had time to clean it notsince we been 'ere.... "

He went upstairs to see some rat-holes that Skinner said would justify atrap--they certainly were enormous--and discovered that the room inwhich the Food of the Gods was mixed with meal and bran was in a quitedisgraceful order. The Skinners were the sort of people who find a usefor cracked saucers and old cans and pickle jars and mustard boxes, andthe place was littered with these. In one corner a great pile of applesthat Skinner had saved was decaying, and from a nail in the sloping partof the ceiling hung several rabbit skins, upon which he proposed to testhis gift as a furrier. ("There ithn't mutth about furth and thingth that_I_ don't know, " said Skinner. )

Mr. Bensington certainly sniffed critically at this disorder, but hemade no unnecessary fuss, and even when he found a wasp regaling itselfin a gallipot half full of Herakleophorbia IV, he simply remarked mildlythat his substance was better sealed from the damp than exposed to theair in that manner. 

And he turned from these things at once to remark--what had been forsome time in his mind--"I _think_, Skinner--you know, I shall kill oneof these chicks--as a specimen. I think we will kill it this afternoon, and I will take it back with me to London. "

He pretended to peer into another gallipot and then took off hisspectacles to wipe them. 

"I should like, " he said, "I should like very much, to have somerelic--some memento--of this particular brood at this particular day. "

"By-the-bye, " he said, "you don't give those little chicks meat?"

"Oh! _no_, Thir, " said Skinner, "I can athure you, Thir, we know far toomuch about the management of fowlth of all dethcriptionth to do anythingof that thort. "

"Quite sure you don't throw your dinner refuse--I thought I noticed thebones of a rabbit scattered about the far corner of the run--"

But when they came to look at them they found they were the larger bonesof a cat picked very clean and dry. 

III. 

"_That's_ no chick, " said Mr. Bensington's cousin Jane. 

"Well, I should _think_ I knew a chick when I saw it, " said Mr. Bensington's cousin Jane hotly. 

"It's too big for a chick, for one thing, and besides you can _see_perfectly well it isn't a chick. 

"It's more like a bustard than a chick. "

"For my part, " said Redwood, reluctantly allowing Bensington to drag himinto the argument, "I must confess that, considering all the evidence--"

"Oh I if you do _that_, " said Mr. Bensington's cousin Jane, "instead ofusing your eyes like a sensible person--"

"Well, but really, Miss Bensington--!"

"Oh! Go _on!_" said Cousin Jane. "You men are all alike. "

"Considering all the evidence, this certainly falls within thedefinition--no doubt it's abnormal and hypertrophied, butstill--especially since it was hatched from the egg of a normalhen--Yes, I think, Miss Bensington, I must admit--this, so far as onecan call it anything, is a sort of chick. "

"You mean it's a chick?" said cousin Jane. 

"I _think_ it's a chick, " said Redwood. 

"What NONSENSE!" said Mr. Bensington's cousin Jane, and "Oh!" directedat Redwood's head, "I haven't patience with you, " and then suddenly sheturned about and went out of the room with a slam. 

"And it's a very great relief for me to see it too, Bensington, " saidRedwood, when the reverberation of the slam had died away. "In spite ofits being so big. "

Without any urgency from Mr. Bensington he sat down in the low arm-chairby the fire and confessed to proceedings that even in an unscientificman would have been indiscreet. "You will think it very rash of me, Bensington, I know, " he said, "but the fact is I put a little--not verymuch of it--but some--into Baby's bottle, very nearly a week ago!"

"But suppose--!" cried Mr. Bensington. 

"I know, " said Redwood, and glanced at the giant chick upon the plate onthe table. 

"It's turned out all right, thank goodness, " and he felt in his pocketfor his cigarettes. 

He gave fragmentary details. "Poor little chap wasn't putting onweight... Desperately anxious. --Winkles, a frightful duffer ... Formerpupil of mine ... No good.... Mrs. Redwood--unmitigated confidence inWinkles.... _You_ know, man with a manner like a cliff--towering.... Noconfidence in _me_, of course.... Taught Winkles.... Scarcely allowed inthe nursery.... Something had to be done.... Slipped in while the nursewas at breakfast ... Got at the bottle. "

"But he'll grow, " said Mr. Bensington. 

"He's growing. Twenty-seven ounces last week.... You should hearWinkles. It's management, he said. "

"Dear me! That's what Skinner says!"

Redwood looked at the chick again. "The bother is to keep it up, " hesaid. "They won't trust me in the nursery alone, because I tried to geta growth curve out of Georgina Phyllis--you know--and how I'm to givehim a second dose--"

"Need you?"

"He's been crying two days--can't get on with his ordinary food again, anyhow. He wants some more now. "

"Tell Winkles. "

"Hang Winkles!" said Redwood. 

"You might get at Winkles and give him powders to give the child--"

"That's about what I shall have to do, " said Redwood, resting his chinon his fist and staring into the fire. 

Bensington stood for a space smoothing the down on the breast of thegiant chick. "They will be monstrous fowls, " he said. 

"They will, " said Redwood, still with his eyes on the glow. 

"Big as horses, " said Bensington. 

"Bigger, " said Redwood. "That's just it!"

Bensington turned away from the specimen. "Redwood, " he said, "thesefowls are going to create a sensation. "

Redwood nodded his head at the fire. 

"And by Jove!" said Bensington, coming round suddenly with a flash inhis spectacles, "so will your little boy!"

"That's just what I'm thinking of, " said Redwood. 

He sat back, sighed, threw his unconsumed cigarette into the fire andthrust his hands deep into his trousers pockets. "That's precisely whatI'm thinking of. This Herakleophorbia is going to be queer stuff tohandle. The pace that chick must have grown at--!"

"A little boy growing at that pace, " said Mr. Bensington slowly, andstared at the chick as he spoke. 

"I _Say_!" said Bensington, "he'll be Big. "

"I shall give him diminishing doses, " said Redwood. "Or at any rateWinkles will. "

"It's rather too much of an experiment. "

"Much. "

"Yet still, you know, I must confess--... Some baby will sooner or laterhave to try it. "

"Oh, we'll try it on _some_ baby--certainly. "

"Exactly so, " said Bensington, and came and stood on the hearthrug andtook off his spectacles to wipe them. 

"Until I saw these chicks, Redwood, I don't think I _began_ torealise--anything--of the possibilities of what we were making. It'sonly beginning to dawn upon me ... The possible consequences.... "

And even then, you know, Mr. Bensington was far from any conception ofthe mine that little train would fire. 

IV. 

That happened early in June. For some weeks Bensington was kept fromrevisiting the Experimental Farm by a severe imaginary catarrh, and onenecessary flying visit was made by Redwood. He returned an even moreanxious-looking parent than he had gone. Altogether there were sevenweeks of steady, uninterrupted growth.... 

And then the Wasps began their career. 

It was late in July and nearly a week before the hens escaped fromHickleybrow that the first of the big wasps was killed. The report of itappeared in several papers, but I do not know whether the news reachedMr. Bensington, much less whether he connected it with the generallaxity of method that prevailed in the Experimental Farm. 

There can be but little doubt now, that while Mr. Skinner was plying Mr. Bensington's chicks with Herakleophorbia IV, a number of wasps were justas industriously--perhaps more industriously--carrying quantities of thesame paste to their early summer broods in the sand-banks beyond theadjacent pine-woods. And there can be no dispute whatever that theseearly broods found just as much growth and benefit in the substance asMr. Bensington's hens. It is in the nature of the wasp to attain toeffective maturity before the domestic fowl--and in fact of all thecreatures that were--through the generous carelessness of theSkinners--partaking of the benefits Mr. Bensington heaped upon his hens, the wasps were the first to make any sort of figure in the world. 

It was a keeper named Godfrey, on the estate of Lieutenant-ColonelRupert Hick, near Maidstone, who encountered and had the luckto kill the first of these monsters of whom history has anyrecord. He was walking knee high in bracken across an open space in thebeechwoods that diversify Lieutenant-Colonel Hick's park, and he wascarrying his gun--very fortunately for him a double-barrelled gun--overhis shoulder, when he first caught sight of the thing. It was, he says, coming down against the light, so that he could not see it verydistinctly, and as it came it made a drone "like a motor car. " He admitshe was frightened. It was evidently as big or bigger than a barn owl, and, to his practised eye, its flight and particularly the misty whirlof its wings must have seemed weirdly unbirdlike. The instinct ofself-defence, I fancy, mingled with long habit, when, as he says, he"let fly, right away. "

The queerness of the experience probably affected his aim; at any ratemost of his shot missed, and the thing merely dropped for a moment withan angry "Wuzzzz" that revealed the wasp at once, and then rose again, with all its stripes shining against the light. He says it turned onhim. At any rate, he fired his second barrel at less than twenty yardsand threw down his gun, ran a pace or so, and ducked to avoid it. 

It flew, he is convinced, within a yard of him, struck the ground, roseagain, came down again perhaps thirty yards away, and rolled over withits body wriggling and its sting stabbing out and back in its lastagony. He emptied both barrels into it again before he ventured to gonear. 

When he came to measure the thing, he found it was twenty-seven and ahalf inches across its open wings, and its sting was three inches long. The abdomen was blown clean off from its body, but he estimated thelength of the creature from head to sting as eighteen inches--which isvery nearly correct. Its compound eyes were the size of penny pieces. 

That is the first authenticated appearance of these giant wasps. The dayafter, a cyclist riding, feet up, down the hill between Sevenoaks andTonbridge, very narrowly missed running over a second of these giantsthat was crawling across the roadway. His passage seemed to alarm it, and it rose with a noise like a sawmill. His bicycle jumped the footpathin the emotion of the moment, and when he could look back, the wasp wassoaring away above the woods towards Westerham. 

After riding unsteadily for a little time, he put on his brake, dismounted--he was trembling so violently that he fell over his machinein doing so--and sat down by the roadside to recover. He had intended toride to Ashford, but he did not get beyond Tonbridge that day.... 

After that, curiously enough, there is no record of any big wasps beingseen for three days. I find on consulting the meteorological record ofthose days that they were overcast and chilly with local showers, whichmay perhaps account for this intermission. Then on the fourth day cameblue sky and brilliant sunshine and such an outburst of wasps as theworld had surely never seen before. 

How many big wasps came out that day it is impossible to guess. Thereare at least fifty accounts of their apparition. There was one victim, agrocer, who discovered one of these monsters in a sugar-cask and veryrashly attacked it with a spade as it rose. He struck it to the groundfor a moment, and it stung him through the boot as he struck at itagain and cut its body in half. He was first dead of the two.... 

The most dramatic of the fifty appearances was certainly that of thewasp that visited the British Museum about midday, dropping out of theblue serene upon one of the innumerable pigeons that feed in thecourtyard of that building, and flying up to the cornice to devour itsvictim at leisure. After that it crawled for a time over the museumroof, entered the dome of the reading-room by a skylight, buzzed aboutinside it for some little time--there was a stampede among thereaders--and at last found another window and vanished again with asudden silence from human observation. 

Most of the other reports were of mere passings or descents. A picnicparty was dispersed at Aldington Knoll and all its sweets and jamconsumed, and a puppy was killed and torn to pieces near Whitstableunder the very eyes of its mistress.... 

The streets that evening resounded with the cry, the newspaper placardsgave themselves up exclusively in the biggest of letters to the"Gigantic Wasps in Kent. " Agitated editors and assistant editors ran upand down tortuous staircases bawling things about "wasps. " And ProfessorRedwood, emerging from his college in Bond Street at five, flushed froma heated discussion with his committee about the price of bull calves, bought an evening paper, opened it, changed colour, forgot about bullcalves and committee forthwith, and took a hansom headlong forBensington's flat. 

V. 

The flat was occupied, it seemed to him--to the exclusion of all othersensible objects--by Mr. Skinner and his voice, if indeed you can calleither him or it a sensible object!

The voice was up very high slopping about among the notes of anguish. "Itth impothible for uth to thtop, Thir. We've thtopped on hopingthingth would get better and they've only got worth, Thir. It ithn'ton'y the waptheth, Thir--thereth big earwigth, Thir--big ath that, Thir. " (He indicated all his hand and about three inches of fat dirtywrist. ) "They pretty near give Mithith Thkinner fitth, Thir. And thethtinging nettleth by the runth, Thir, _they're_ growing, Thir, and thecanary creeper, Thir, what we thowed near the think, Thir--it put itthtendril through the window in the night, Thir, and very nearly caughtMithith Thkinner by the legth, Thir. Itth that food of yourth, Thir. Wherever we thplathed it about, Thir, a bit, it'th thet everythinggrowing ranker, Thir, than I ever thought anything could grow. Itthimpothible to thtop a month, Thir. Itth more than our liveth are worth, Thir. Even if the waptheth don't thting uth, we thall be thuffocated bythe creeper, Thir. You can't imagine, Thir--unleth you come down tothee, Thir--"

He turned his superior eye to the cornice above Redwood's head. "'Ow dowe know the ratth 'aven't got it, Thir! That 'th what I think of motht, Thir. I 'aven't theen any big ratth, Thir, but 'ow do I know, Thir. Webeen frightened for dayth becauth of the earwigth we've theen--likelobthters they wath--two of 'em, Thir--and the frightful way the canarycreeper wath growing, and directly I heard the waptheth--directly I'eard 'em, Thir, I underthood. I didn't wait for nothing exthept to thowon a button I'd lortht, and then I came on up. Even now, Thir, I'm arfwild with angthiety, Thir. 'Ow do _I_ know watth happenin' to MithithThkinner, Thir! Thereth the creeper growing all over the plathe like athnake, Thir--thwelp me but you 'ave to watch it, Thir, and jump out ofitth way!--and the earwigth gettin' bigger and bigger, and thewaptheth--. She 'athen't even got a Blue Bag, Thir--if anything thouldhappen, Thir!"

"But the hens, " said Mr. Bensington; "how are the hens?"

"We fed 'em up to yethterday, thwelp me, " said Mr. Skinner, "But thithmorning we didn't _dare_, Thir. The noithe of the wapthethwath--thomething awful, Thir. They wath coming ont--dothenth. Ath bigath 'enth. I thayth, to 'er, I thayth you juth thow me on a button ortwo, I thayth, for I can't go to London like thith, I thayth, and I'llgo up to Mithter Benthington, I thayth, and ekthplain thingth to 'im. And you thtop in thith room till I come back to you, I thayth, and keepthe windowth thhut jutht ath tight ath ever you can, I thayth. "

"If you hadn't been so confoundedly untidy--" began Redwood. 

"Oh! don't thay _that_, Thir, " said Skinner. "Not now, Thir. Not with metho diththrethed, Thir, about Mithith Thkinner, Thir! Oh, _don't, _ Thir!I 'aven't the 'eart to argue with you. Thwelp me, Thir, I 'aven't! Itththe ratth I keep a thinking of--'Ow do I know they 'aven't got atMithith Thkinner while I been up 'ere?"

"And you haven't got a solitary measurement of all these beautifulgrowth curves!" said Redwood. 

"I been too upthet, Thir, " said Mr. Skinner. "If you knew what we beenthrough--me and the mithith! All thith latht month. We 'aven't knownwhat to make of it, Thir. What with the henth gettin' tho rank, and theearwigth, and the canary creeper. I dunno if I told you, Thir--thecanary creeper ... "

"You've told us all that, " said Redwood. "The thing is, Bensington, whatare we to do?"

"What are _we_ to do?" said Mr. Skinner. 

"You'll have to go back to Mrs. Skinner, " said Redwood. "You can't leaveher there alone all night. "

"Not alone, Thir, I don't. Not if there wath a dothen MithithThkinnerth. Itth Mithter Benthington--"

"Nonsense, " said Redwood. "The wasps will be all right at night. And theearwigs will get out of your way--"

"But about the ratth?"

"There aren't any rats, " said Redwood. 

VI. 

Mr. Skinner might have foregone his chief anxiety. Mrs. Skinner did notstop out her day. 

About eleven the canary creeper, which had been quietly active all themorning, began to clamber over the window and darken it very greatly, and the darker it got the more and more clearly Mrs. Skinner perceivedthat her position would speedily become untenable. And also that she hadlived many ages since Skinner went. She peered out of the darklingwindow, through the stirring tendrils, for some time, and then went verycautiously and opened the bedroom door and listened.... 

Everything seemed quiet, and so, tucking her skirts high about her, Mrs. Skinner made a bolt for the bedroom, and having first looked under thebed and locked herself in, proceeded with the methodical rapidity of anexperienced woman to pack for departure. The bed had not been made, andthe room was littered with pieces of the creeper that Skinner had hackedoff in order to close the window overnight, but these disorders she didnot heed. She packed in a decent sheet. She packed all her own wardrobeand a velveteen jacket that Skinner wore in his finer moments, and shepacked a jar of pickles that had not been opened, and so far she wasjustified in her packing. But she also packed two of the hermeticallyclosed tins containing Herakleophorbia IV. That Mr. Bensington hadbrought on his last visit. (She was honest, good woman--but she was agrandmother, and her heart had burned within her to see such good growthlavished on a lot of dratted chicks. )

And having packed all these things, she put on her bonnet, took off herapron, tied a new boot-lace round her umbrella, and after listening fora long time at door and window, opened the door and sallied out into aperilous world. The umbrella was under her arm and she clutched thebundle with two gnarled and resolute hands. It was her best Sundaybonnet, and the two poppies that reared their heads amidst itssplendours of band and bead seemed instinct with the same tremulouscourage that possessed her. 

The features about the roots of her nose wrinkled with determination. She had had enough of it! All alone there! Skinner might come back thereif he liked. 

She went out by the front door, going that way not because she wanted togo to Hickleybrow (her goal was Cheasing Eyebright, where her marrieddaughter resided), but because the back door was impassable on accountof the canary creeper that had been, growing so furiously ever since sheupset the can of food near its roots. She listened for a space andclosed the front door very carefully behind her. 

At the corner of the house she paused and reconnoitred.... 

An extensive sandy scar upon the hillside beyond the pine-woods markedthe nest of the giant Wasps, and this she studied very earnestly. Thecoming and going of the morning was over, not a wasp chanced to be insight then, and except for a sound scarcely more perceptible than asteam wood-saw at work amidst the pines would have been, everything wasstill. As for earwigs, she could see not one. Down among the cabbageindeed something was stirring, but it might just as probably be a catstalking birds. She watched this for a time. 

She went a few paces past the corner, came in sight of the runcontaining the giant chicks and stopped again. "Ah!" she said, and shookher head slowly at the sight of them. They were at that time about theheight of emus, but of course much thicker in the body--a larger thingaltogether. They were all hens and five all told, now that the twocockerels had killed each other. She hesitated at their droopingattitudes. "Poor dears!" she said, and put down her bundle; "they've gotno water. And they've 'ad no food these twenty-four hours! And suchappetites, too, as they 'ave!" She put a lean finger to her lips andcommuned with herself. 

Then this dirty old woman did what seems to me a quite heroic deed ofmercy. She left her bundle and umbrella in the middle of the brick pathand went to the well and drew no fewer than three pailfuls of water forthe chickens' empty trough, and then while they were all crowding aboutthat, she undid the door of the run very softly. After which she becameextremely active, resumed her package, got over the hedge at the bottomof the garden, crossed the rank meadows (in order to avoid the wasps'nest) and toiled up the winding path towards Cheasing Eyebright. 

She panted up the hill, and as she went she paused ever and again, torest her bundle and get her breath and stare back at the little cottagebeside the pinewood below. And when at last, when she was near the crestof the hill, she saw afar off three several wasps dropping heavilywestward, it helped her greatly on her way. 

She soon got out of the open and in the high banked lane beyond (whichseemed a safer place to her), and so up by Hicklebrow Coombe to thedowns. There at the foot of the downs where a big tree gave an air ofshelter she rested for a space on a stile. 

Then on again very resolutely.... 

You figure her, I hope, with her white bundle, a sort of erect blackant, hurrying along the little white path-thread athwart the downlandslopes under the hot sun of the summer afternoon. On she struggled afterher resolute indefatigable nose, and the poppies in her bonnet quiveredperpetually and her spring-side boots grew whiter and whiter with thedownland dust. Flip-flap, flip-flap went her footfalls through the stillheat of the day, and persistently, incurably, her umbrella sought toslip from under the elbow that retained it. The mouth wrinkle under hernose was pursed to an extreme resolution, and ever and again she toldher umbrella to come up or gave her tightly clutched bundle avindictive jerk. And at times her lips mumbled with fragments of someforeseen argument between herself and Skinner. 

And far away, miles and miles away, a steeple and a hanger grewinsensibly out of the vague blue to mark more and more distinctly thequiet corner where Cheasing Eyebright sheltered from the tumult of theworld, recking little or nothing of the Herakleophorbia concealed inthat white bundle that struggled so persistently towards its orderlyretirement. 

VII. 

So far as I can gather, the pullets came into Hickleybrow about threeo'clock in the afternoon. Their coming must have been a brisk affair, though nobody was out in the street to see it. The violent bellowing oflittle Skelmersdale seems to have been the first announcement ofanything out of the way. Miss Durgan of the Post Office was at thewindow as usual, and saw the hen that had caught the unhappy child, inviolent flight up the street with its victim, closely pursued by twoothers. You know that swinging stride of the emancipated athleticlatter-day pullet! You know the keen insistence of the hungry hen! Therewas Plymouth Rock in these birds, I am told, and even withoutHerakleophorbia that is a gaunt and striding strain. 

Probably Miss Durgan was not altogether taken by surprise. In spite ofMr. Bensington's insistence upon secrecy, rumours of the great chickenMr. Skinner was producing had been about the village for some weeks. "Lor!" she cried, "it's what I expected. "

She seems to have behaved with great presence of mind. She snatched upthe sealed bag of letters that was waiting to go on to Urshot, andrushed out of the door at once. Almost simultaneously Mr. Skelmersdalehimself appeared down the village, gripping a watering-pot by the spout, and very white in the face. And, of course, in a moment or so every onein the village was rushing to the door or window. 

The spectacle of Miss Durgan all across the road, with the entire day'scorrespondence of Hickleybrow in her hand, gave pause to the pullet inpossession of Master Skelmersdale. She halted through one instant'sindecision and then turned for the open gates of Fulcher's yard. Thatinstant was fatal. The second pullet ran in neatly, got possession ofthe child by a well-directed peck, and went over the wall into thevicarage garden. 

"Charawk, chawk, chawk, chawk, chawk, chawk!" shrieked the hindmost hen, hit smartly by the watering-can Mr. Skelmersdale had thrown, andfluttered wildly over Mrs. Glue's cottage and so into the doctor'sfield, while the rest of those Gargantuan birds pursued the pullet, inpossession of the child across the vicarage lawn. 

"Good heavens!" cried the Curate, or (as some say) something much moremanly, and ran, whirling his croquet mallet and shouting, to head offthe chase. 

"Stop, you wretch!" cried the curate, as though giant hens were thecommonest facts in life. 

And then, finding he could not possibly intercept her, he hurled hismallet with all his might and main, and out it shot in a gracious curvewithin a foot or so of Master Skelmersdale's head and through the glasslantern of the conservatory. Smash! The new conservatory! The Vicar'swife's beautiful new conservatory!

It frightened the hen. It might have frightened any one. She dropped hervictim into a Portugal laurel (from which he was presently extracted, disordered but, save for his less delicate garments, uninjured), made aflapping leap for the roof of Fulcher's stables, put her foot through aweak place in the tiles, and descended, so to speak, out of the infiniteinto the contemplative quiet of Mr. Bumps the paralytic--who, it is nowproved beyond all cavil, did, on this one occasion in his life, get downthe entire length of his garden and indoors without any assistancewhatever, bolt the door after him, and immediately relapse again intoChristian resignation and helpless dependence upon his wife.... 

The rest of the pullets were headed off by the other croquet players, and went through the vicar's kitchen garden into the doctor's field, towhich rendezvous the fifth also came at last, clucking disconsolatelyafter an unsuccessful attempt to walk on the cucumber frames in Mr. Witherspoon's place. 

They seem to have stood about in a hen-like manner for a time, andscratched a little and chirrawked meditatively, and then one pecked atand pecked over a hive of the doctor's bees, and after that they set offin a gawky, jerky, feathery, fitful sort of way across the fieldstowards Urshot, and Hickleybrow Street saw them no more. Near Urshotthey really came upon commensurate food in a field of swedes; and peckedfor a space with gusto, until their fame overtook them. 

The chief immediate reaction of this astonishing irruption of giganticpoultry upon the human mind was to arouse an extraordinary passion towhoop and run and throw things, and in quite a little time almost allthe available manhood of Hickleybrows and several ladies, were out witha remarkable assortment of flappish and whangable articles in hand--tocommence the scooting of the giant hens. They drove them into Urshot, where there was a Rural Fete, and Urshot took them as the crowning gloryof a happy day. They began to be shot at near Findon Beeches, but atfirst only with a rook rifle. Of course birds of that size could absorban unlimited quantity of small shot without inconvenience. Theyscattered somewhere near Sevenoaks, and near Tonbridge one of them fledclucking for a time in excessive agitation, somewhat ahead of andparallel with the afternoon boat express--to the great astonishment ofevery one therein. 

And about half-past five two of them were caught very cleverly by acircus proprietor at Tunbridge Wells, who lured them into a cage, rendered vacant through the death of a widowed dromedary, by scatteringcakes and bread.... 

VIII. 

When the unfortunate Skinner got out of the South-Eastern train atUrshot that evening it was already nearly dusk. The train was late, butnot inordinately late--and Mr. Skinner remarked as much to thestation-master. Perhaps he saw a certain pregnancy in thestation-master's eye. After the briefest hesitation and with aconfidential movement of his hand to the side of his mouth he asked if"anything" had happened that day. 

"How d'yer _mean_?" said the station-master, a man with a hard, emphaticvoice. 

"Thethe 'ere waptheth and thingth. "

"We 'aven't 'ad much time to think of _waptheth_, " said thestation-master agreeably. "We've been too busy with your brasted 'ens, "and he broke the news of the pullets to Mr. Skinner as one might breakthe window of an adverse politician. 

"You ain't 'eard anything of Mithith Thkinner?" asked Skinner, amidstthat missile shower of pithy information and comment. 

"No fear!" said the station-master--as though even he drew the linesomewhere in the matter of knowledge. 

"I mutht make inquireth bout thith, " said Mr. Skinner, edging out ofreach of the station-master's concluding generalisations about theresponsibility attaching to the excessive nurture of hens.... 

Going through Urshot Mr. Skinner was hailed by a lime-burner from thepits over by Hankey and asked if he was looking for his hens. 

"You ain't 'eard anything of Mithith Thkinner?" he asked. 

The lime-burner--his exact phrases need not concern us--expressed hissuperior interest in hens.... 

It was already dark--as dark at least as a clear night in the EnglishJune can be--when Skinner--or his head at any rate--came into the bar ofthe Jolly Drovers and said: "Ello! You 'aven't 'eard anything of thith'ere thtory bout my 'enth, 'ave you?"

"Oh, _'aven't_ we!" said Mr. Fulcher. "Why, part of the story's been andbust into my stable roof and one chapter smashed a 'ole in MissisVicar's green 'ouse--I beg 'er pardon--Conservarratory. "

Skinner came in. "I'd like thomething a little comforting, " he said, "'ot gin and water'th about my figure, " and everybody began to tell himthings about the pullets. 

"_Grathuth_ me!" said Skinner. 

"You 'aven't 'eard anything about Mithith Thkinner, 'ave you?" he askedin a pause. 

"That we 'aven't!" said Mr. Witherspoon. "We 'aven't thought of 'er. Weain't thought nothing of either of you. "

"Ain't you been 'ome to-day?" asked Fulcher over a tankard. 

"If one of those brasted birds 'ave pecked 'er, " began Mr. Witherspoonsand left the full horror to their unaided imaginations.... 

It appeared to the meeting at the time that it would be an interestingend to an eventful day to go on with Skinner and see if anything _had_happened to Mrs. Skinner. One never knows what luck one may have whenaccidents are at large. But Skinner, standing at the bar and drinkinghis hot gin and water, with one eye roving over the things at the backof the bar and the other fixed on the Absolute, missed the psychologicalmoment. 

"I thuppothe there 'athen't been any trouble with any of thethe bigwaptheth to-day anywhere?" he asked, with an elaborate detachment ofmanner. 

"Been too busy with your 'ens, " said Fulcher. 

"I thuppothe they've all gone in now anyhow, " said Skinner. 

"What--the 'ens?"

"I wath thinking of the waptheth more particularly, " said Skinner. 

And then, with, an air of circumspection that would have awakenedsuspicion in a week-old baby, and laying the accent heavily on most ofthe words he chose, he asked, "I _thuppothe nobody_ 'athn't '_eard_ ofany other _big_ thingth, about, 'ave they? Big _dogth_ or _catth_ oranything of _that_ thort? Theemth to me if thereth big henth and bigwaptheth comin' on--"

He laughed with a fine pretence of talking idly. 

But a brooding expression came upon the faces of the Hickleybrow men. Fulcher was the first to give their condensing thought the concreteshape of words. 

"A cat to match them 'ens--" said Fulcher. 

"Ay!" said Witherspoon, "a cat to match they 'ens. "

"'Twould be a tiger, " said Fulcher. 

"More'n a tiger, " said Witherspoon.... 

When at last Skinner followed the lonely footpath over the swellingfield that separated Hickleybrow from the sombre pine-shaded hollow inwhose black shadows the gigantic canary-creeper grappled silently withthe Experimental Farm, he followed it alone. 

He was distinctly seen to rise against the sky-line, against the warmclear immensity of the northern sky--for so far public interest followedhim--and to descend again into the night, into an obscurity from whichit would seem he will nevermore emerge. He passed--into a mystery. Noone knows to this day what happened to him after he crossed the brow. When later on the two Fulchers and Witherspoon, moved by their ownimaginations, came up the hill and stared after him, the flight hadswallowed him up altogether. 

The three men stood close. There was not a sound out of the woodedblackness that hid the Farm from their eyes. 

"It's all right, " said young Fulcher, ending a silence. 

"Don't see any lights, " said Witherspoon. 

"You wouldn't from here. "

"It's misty, " said the elder Fulcher. 

They meditated for a space. 

"'E'd 'ave come back if anything was wrong, " said young Fulcher, andthis seemed so obvious and conclusive that presently old Fulcher said, "Well, " and the three went home to bed--thoughtfully I will admit.... 

A shepherd out by Huckster's Farm heard a squealing in the night that hethought was foxes, and in the morning one of his lambs had been killed, dragged halfway towards Hickleybrow and partially devoured.... 

The inexplicable part of it all is the absence of any indisputableremains of Skinner!

Many weeks after, amidst the charred ruins of the Experimental Farm, there was found something which may or may not have been a humanshoulder-blade and in another part of the ruins a long bone greatlygnawed and equally doubtful. Near the stile going up towards Eyebrightthere was found a glass eye, and many people discovered thereupon thatSkinner owed much of his personal charm to such a possession. It staredout upon the world with that same inevitable effect of detachment, thatsame severe melancholy that had been the redemption of his else worldlycountenance. 

And about the ruins industrious research discovered the metal rings andcharred coverings of two linen buttons, three shanked buttons entire, and one of that metallic sort which is used in the less conspicuoussutures of the human Oeconomy. These remains have been accepted bypersons in authority as conclusive of a destroyed and scattered Skinner, but for my own entire conviction, and in view of his distinctiveidiosyncrasy, I must confess I should prefer fewer buttons and morebones. 

The glass eye of course has an air of extreme conviction, but if itreally _is_ Skinner's--and even Mrs. Skinner did not certainly know ifthat immobile eye of his was glass--something has changed it from aliquid brown to a serene and confident blue. That shoulder-blade is anextremely doubtful document, and I would like to put it side by sidewith the gnawed scapulae of a few of the commoner domestic animalsbefore I admitted its humanity. 

And where were Skinner's boots, for example? Perverted and strange as arat's appetite must be, is it conceivable that the same creatures thatcould leave a lamb only half eaten, would finish up Skinner--hair, bones, teeth, and boots?

I have closely questioned as many as I could of those who knew Skinnerat all intimately, and they one and all agree that they cannot imagine_anything_ eating him. He was the sort of man, as a retired seafaringperson living in one of Mr. W. W. Jacobs' cottages at Dunton Green toldme, with a guarded significance of manner not uncommon in those parts, who would "get washed up anyhow, " and as regards _the_ devouring elementwas "fit to put a fire out. " He considered that Skinner would be as safeon a raft as anywhere. The retired seafaring man added that he wished tosay nothing whatever against Skinner; facts were facts. And rather thanhave his clothes made by Skinner, the retired seafaring man remarked hewould take his chance of being locked up. These observations certainlydo not present Skinner in the light of an appetising object. 

To be perfectly frank with the reader, I do not believe he ever wentback to the Experimental Farm. I believe he hovered through longhesitations about the fields of the Hickleybrow glebe, and finally, when that squealing began, took the line of least resistance out of hisperplexities into the Incognito. 

And in the Incognito, whether of this or of some other world unknown tous, he obstinately and quite indisputably has remained to this day.... 

CHAPTER THE THIRD. 

THE GIANT RATS. 

I. 

It was two nights after the disappearance of Mr. Skinner that thePodbourne doctor was out late near Hankey, driving in his buggy. He hadbeen up all night assisting another undistinguished citizen into thiscurious world of ours, and his task accomplished, he was drivinghomeward in a drowsy mood enough. It was about two o'clock in themorning, and the waning moon was rising. The summer night had gone cold, and there was a low-lying whitish mist that made things indistinct. Hewas quite alone--for his coachman was ill in bed--and there was nothingto be seen on either hand but a drifting mystery of hedge runningathwart the yellow glare of his lamps, and nothing to hear but theclitter-clatter of his horses and the gride and hedge echo of hiswheels. His horse was as trustworthy as himself, and one does not wonderthat he dozed.... 

You know that intermittent drowsing as one sits, the drooping of thehead, the nodding to the rhythm of the wheels then chin upon the breast, and at once the sudden start up again. 

_Pitter, litter, patter_. 

"What was that?"

It seemed to the doctor he had heard a thin shrill squeal close at hand. For a moment he was quite awake. He said a word or two of undeservedrebuke to his horse, and looked about him. He tried to persuade himselfthat he had heard the distant squeal of a fox--or perhaps a young rabbitgripped by a ferret. 

_Swish, swish, swish, pitter, patter, swish_--... 

What was that?

He felt he was getting fanciful. He shook his shoulders and told hishorse to get on. He listened, and heard nothing. 

Or was it nothing?

He had the queerest impression that something had just peeped over thehedge at him, a queer big head. With round ears! He peered hard, but hecould see nothing. 

"Nonsense, " said he. 

He sat up with an idea that he had dropped into a nightmare, gave hishorse the slightest touch of the whip, spoke to it and peered again overthe hedge. The glare of his lamp, however, together with the mist, rendered things indistinct, and he could distinguish nothing. It cameinto his head, he says, that there could be nothing there, because ifthere was his horse would have shied at it. Yet for all that his sensesremained nervously awake. 

Then he heard quite distinctly a soft pattering of feet in pursuit alongthe road. 

He would not believe his ears about that. He could not look round, forthe road had a sinuous curve just there. He whipped up his horse andglanced sideways again. And then he saw quite distinctly where a rayfrom his lamp leapt a low stretch of hedge, the curved back of--somebig animal, he couldn't tell what, going along in quick convulsiveleaps. 

He says he thought of the old tales of witchcraft--the thing was soutterly unlike any animal he knew, and he tightened his hold on thereins for fear of the fear of his horse. Educated man as he was, headmits he asked himself if this could be something that his horse couldnot see. 

Ahead, and drawing near in silhouette against the rising moon, was theoutline of the little hamlet of Hankey, comforting, though it showednever a light, and he cracked his whip and spoke again, and then in aflash the rats were at him!

He had passed a gate, and as he did so, the foremost rat came leapingover into the road. The thing sprang upon him out of vagueness into theutmost clearness, the sharp, eager, round-eared face, the long bodyexaggerated by its movement; and what particularly struck him, the pink, webbed forefeet of the beast. What must have made it more horrible tohim at the time was, that he had no idea the thing was any created beasthe knew. He did not recognise it as a rat, because of the size. Hishorse gave a bound as the thing dropped into the road beside it. Thelittle lane woke into tumult at the report of the whip and the doctor'sshout. The whole thing suddenly went fast. 

_Rattle-clatter, clash, clatter_. 

The doctor, one gathers, stood up, shouted to his horse, and slashedwith all his strength. The rat winced and swerved most reassuringly athis blow--in the glare of his lamp he could see the fur furrow under thelash--and he slashed again and again, heedless and unaware of the secondpursuer that gained upon his off side. 

He let the reins go, and glanced back to discover the third rat inpursuit behind.... 

His horse bounded forward. The buggy leapt high at a rut. For a franticminute perhaps everything seemed to be going in leaps and bounds.... 

It was sheer good luck the horse came down in Hankey, and not eitherbefore or after the houses had been passed. 

No one knows how the horse came down, whether it stumbled or whether therat on the off side really got home with one of those slashing downstrokes of the teeth (given with the full weight of the body); and thedoctor never discovered that he himself was bitten until he was insidethe brickmaker's house, much less did he discover when the biteoccurred, though bitten he was and badly--a long slash like the slash ofa double tomahawk that had cut two parallel ribbons of flesh from hisleft shoulder. 

He was standing up in his buggy at one moment, and in the next he hadleapt to the ground, with his ankle, though he did not know it, badlysprained, and he was cutting furiously at a third rat that was flyingdirectly at him. He scarcely remembers the leap he must have made overthe top of the wheel as the buggy came over, so obliteratingly hot andswift did his impressions rush upon him. I think myself the horse rearedup with the rat biting again at its throat, and fell sideways, andcarried the whole affair over; and that the doctor sprang, as it were, instinctively. As the buggy came down, the receiver of the lamp smashed, and suddenly poured a flare of blazing oil, a thud of white flame, intothe struggle. 

That was the first thing the brickmaker saw. 

He had heard the clatter of the doctor's approach and--though thedoctor's memory has nothing of this--wild shouting. He had got out ofbed hastily, and as he did so came the terrific smash, and up shot theglare outside the rising blind. "It was brighter than day, " he says. Hestood, blind cord in hand, and stared out of the window at a nightmaretransformation of the familiar road before him. The black figure of thedoctor with its whirling whip danced out against the flame. The horsekicked indistinctly, half hidden by the blaze, with a rat at its throat. In the obscurity against the churchyard wall, the eyes of a secondmonster shone wickedly. Another--a mere dreadful blackness with red-liteyes and flesh-coloured hands--clutched unsteadily on the wall coping towhich it had leapt at the flash of the exploding lamp. 

You know the keen face of a rat, those two sharp teeth, those pitilesseyes. Seen magnified to near six times its linear dimensions, and stillmore magnified by darkness and amazement and the leaping fancies of afitful blaze, it must have been an ill sight for the brickmaker--stillmore than half asleep. 

Then the doctor had grasped the opportunity, that momentary respite theflare afforded, and was out of the brickmaker's sight below batteringthe door with the butt of his whip.... 

The brickmaker would not let him in until he had got a light. 

There are those who have blamed the man for that, but until I know myown courage better, I hesitate to join their number. 

The doctor yelled and hammered.... 

The brickmaker says he was weeping with terror when at last the door wasopened. 

"Bolt, " said the doctor, "bolt"--he could not say "bolt the door. " Hetried to help, and was of no service. The brickmaker fastened the door, and the doctor had to sit on the chair beside the clock for a spacebefore he could go upstairs.... 

"I don't know what they _are_!" he repeated several times. "I don't knowwhat they _are_"--with a high note on the "are. "

The brickmaker would have got him whisky, but the doctor would not beleft alone with nothing but a flickering light just then. 

It was long before the brickmaker could get him to go upstairs.... 

And when the fire was out the giant rats came back, took the dead horse, dragged it across the churchyard into the brickfield and ate at it untilit was dawn, none even then daring to disturb them.... 

II. 

Redwood went round, to Bensington about eleven the next morning with the"second editions" of three evening papers in his hand. 

Bensington looked up from a despondent meditation over the forgottenpages of the most distracting novel the Brompton Road librarian had beenable to find him. "Anything fresh?" he asked. 

"Two men stung near Chartham. "

"They ought to let us smoke out that nest. They really did. It's theirown fault. "

"It's their own fault, certainly, " said Redwood. 

"Have you heard anything--about buying the farm?"

"The House Agent, " said Redwood, "is a thing with a big mouth and madeof dense wood. It pretends someone else is after the house--it alwaysdoes, you know--and won't understand there's a hurry. 'This is a matterof life and death, ' I said, 'don't you understand?' It drooped its eyeshalf shut and said, 'Then why don't you go the other two hundredpounds?' I'd rather live in a world of solid wasps than give in to thestonewalling stupidity of that offensive creature. I--"

He paused, feeling that a sentence like that might very easily bespoiled by its context. 

"It's too much to hope, " said Bensington, "that one of the wasps--"

"The wasp has no more idea of public utility than a--than a HouseAgent, " said Redwood. 

He talked for a little while about house agents and solicitors andpeople of that sort, in the unjust, unreasonable way that so many peopledo somehow get to talk of these business calculi ("Of all the crankythings in this cranky world, it is the most cranky to my mind of all, that while we expect honour, courage, efficiency, from a doctor or asoldier as a matter of course, a solicitor or a house agent is not onlypermitted but expected to display nothing but a sort of greedy, greasy, obstructive, over-reaching imbecility--" etc. )--and then, greatlyrelieved, he went to the window and stared out at the Sloane Streettraffic. 

Bensington had put the most exciting novel conceivable on the littletable that carried his electric standard. He joined the fingers of hisopposed hands very carefully and regarded them. "Redwood, " he said. "Dothey say much about _Us_?"

"Not so much as I should expect. "

"They don't denounce us at all?"

"Not a bit. But, on the other hand, they don't back up what I point outmust be done. I've written to the _Times_, you know, explaining thewhole thing--"

"We take the _Daily Chronicle_, " said Bensington. 

"And the _Times_ has a long leader on the subject--a very high-class, well-written leader, with three pieces of _Times_ Latin--_status quo_ isone--and it reads like the voice of Somebody Impersonal of the GreatestImportance suffering from Influenza Headache and talking through sheetsand sheets of felt without getting any relief from it whatever. Readingbetween the lines, you know, it's pretty clear that the _Times_considers that it is useless to mince matters, and that something(indefinite of course) has to be done at once. Otherwise still moreundesirable consequences--_Times_ English, you know, for more wasps andstings. Thoroughly statesmanlike article!"

"And meanwhile this Bigness is spreading in all sorts of ugly ways. "

"Precisely. "

"I wonder if Skinner was right about those big rats--"

"Oh no! That would be too much, " said Redwood. 

He came and stood by Bensington's chair. 

"By-the-bye, " he said, with a slightly lowered voice, "how does_she_--?"

He indicated the closed door. 

"Cousin Jane? She simply knows nothing about it. Doesn't connect us withit and won't read the articles. 'Gigantic wasps!' she says, 'I haven'tpatience to read the papers. '"

"That's very fortunate, " said Redwood. 

"I suppose--Mrs. Redwood--?"

"No, " said Redwood, "just at present it happens--she's terribly worriedabout the child. You know, he keeps on. "

"Growing?"

"Yes. Put on forty-one ounces in ten days. Weighs nearly four stone. Andonly six months old! Naturally rather alarming. "

"Healthy?"

"Vigorous. His nurse is leaving because he kicks so forcibly. Andeverything, of course, shockingly outgrown. Everything, you know, hashad to be made fresh, clothes and everything. Perambulator--lightaffair--broke one wheel, and the youngster had to be brought home on themilkman's hand-truck. Yes. Quite a crowd.... And we've put GeorginaPhyllis back into his cot and put him into the bed of Georgina Phyllis. His mother--naturally alarmed. Proud at first and inclined to praiseWinkles. Not now. Feels the thing _can't_ be wholesome. _You_ know. "

"I imagined you were going to put him on diminishing doses. "

"I tried it. "

"Didn't it work?"

"Howls. In the ordinary way the cry of a child is loud and distressing;it is for the good of the species that this should be so--but since hehas been on the Herakleophorbia treatment---"

"Mm, " said Bensington, regarding his fingers with more resignation thanhe had hitherto displayed. 

"Practically the thing _must_ come out. People will hear of this child, connect it up with our hens and things, and the whole thing will comeround to my wife.... How she will take it I haven't the remotest idea. "

"It _is_ difficult, " said Mr. Bensington, "to form any plan--certainly. "

He removed his glasses and wiped them carefully. 

"It is another instance, " he generalised, "of the thing that iscontinually happening. We--if indeed I may presume to theadjective--_scientific_ men--we work of course always for a theoreticalresult--a purely theoretical result. But, incidentally, we do set forcesin operation--_new_ forces. We mustn't control them--and nobody else_can_. Practically, Redwood, the thing is out of our hands. _We_ supplythe material--"

"And they, " said Redwood, turning to the window, "get the experience. "

"So far as this trouble down in Kent goes I am not disposed to worryfurther. "

"Unless they worry us. "

"Exactly. And if they like to muddle about with solicitors andpettifoggers and legal obstructions and weighty considerations of thetomfool order, until they have got a number of new gigantic species ofvermin well established--Things always _have_ been in a muddle, Redwood. "

Redwood traced a twisted, tangled line in the air. 

"And our real interest lies at present with your boy. "

Redwood turned about and came and stared at his collaborator. 

"What do you think of him, Bensington? You can look at this businesswith a greater detachment than I can. What am I to do about him?"

"Go on feeding him. "

"On Herakleophorbia?"

"On Herakleophorbia. "

"And then he'll grow. "

"He'll grow, as far as I can calculate from the hens and the wasps, tothe height of about five-and-thirty feet--with everything inproportion---"

"And then what'll he do?"

"That, " said Mr. Bensington, "is just what makes the whole thing sointeresting. "

"Confound it, man! Think of his clothes. "

"And when he's grown up, " said Redwood, "he'll only be one solitaryGulliver in a pigmy world. "

Mr. Bensington's eye over his gold rim was pregnant. 

"Why solitary?" he said, and repeated still more darkly, "_Why_solitary?"

"But you don't propose---?"

"I said, " said Mr. Bensington, with the self-complacency of a man whohas produced a good significant saying, "Why solitary?"

"Meaning that one might bring up other children---?"

"Meaning nothing beyond my inquiry. "

Redwood began to walk about the room. "Of course, " he said, "onemight--But still! What are we coming to?"

Bensington evidently enjoyed his line of high intellectual detachment. "The thing that interests me most, Redwood, of all this, is to thinkthat his brain at the top of him will also, so far as my reasoning goes, be five-and-thirty feet or so above our level.... What's the matter?"

Redwood stood at the window and stared at a news placard on a paper-cartthat rattled up the street. 

"What's the matter?" repeated Bensington, rising. 

Redwood exclaimed violently. 

"What is it?" said Bensington. 

"Get a paper, " said Redwood, moving doorward. 

"Why?"

"Get a paper. Something--I didn't quite catch--Gigantic rats--!"

"Rats?"

"Yes, rats. Skinner was right after all!"

"What do you mean?"

"How the Deuce am _I_ to know till I see a paper? Great Rats! Good Lord!I wonder if he's eaten!"

He glanced for his hat, and decided to go hatless. 

As he rushed downstairs two steps at a time, he could hear along thestreet the mighty howlings, to and fro of the Hooligan paper-sellersmaking a Boom. 

"'Orrible affair in Kent--'orrible affair in Kent. Doctor ... Eaten byrats. 'Orrible affair--'orrible affair--rats--eaten by Stchewpendousrats. Full perticulars--'orrible affair. "

III. 

Cossar, the well-known civil engineer, found them in the great doorwayof the flat mansions, Redwood holding out the damp pink paper, andBensington on tiptoe reading over his arm. Cossar was a large-bodied manwith gaunt inelegant limbs casually placed at convenient corners of hisbody, and a face like a carving abandoned at an early stage asaltogether too unpromising for completion. His nose had been leftsquare, and his lower jaw projected beyond his upper. He breathedaudibly. Few people considered him handsome. His hair was entirelytangential, and his voice, which he used sparingly, was pitched high, and had commonly a quality of bitter protest. He wore a grey clothjacket suit and a silk hat on all occasions. He plumbed an abysmaltrouser pocket with a vast red hand, paid his cabman, and came pantingresolutely up the steps, a copy of the pink paper clutched about themiddle, like Jove's thunderbolt, in his hand. 

"Skinner?" Bensington was saying, regardless of his approach. 

"Nothing about him, " said Redwood. "Bound to be eaten. Both of them. It's too terrible.... Hullo! Cossar!"

"This your stuff?" asked Cossar, waving the paper. 

"Well, why don't you stop it?" he demanded. 

"_Can't_ be jiggered!" said Cossar. 

"_Buy the place_?" he cried. "What nonsense! Burn it! I knew you chapswould fumble this. _What are you to do_? Why--what I tell you. 

"_You_? Do? Why! Go up the street to the gunsmith's, of course. _Why_?For guns. Yes--there's only one shop. Get eight guns! Rifles. Notelephant guns--no! Too big. Not army rifles--too small. Say it's tokill--kill a bull. Say it's to shoot buffalo! See? Eh? Rats? No! How thedeuce are they to understand that? Because we _want_ eight. Get a lot ofammunition. Don't get guns without ammunition--No! Take the lot in a cabto--where's the place? _Urshot_? Charing Cross, then. There's atrain---Well, the first train that starts after two. Think you can doit? All right. License? Get eight at a post-office, of course. Gunlicenses, you know. Not game. Why? It's rats, man. 

"You--Bensington. Got a telephone? Yes. I'll ring up five of my chapsfrom Ealing. _Why_ five? Because it's the right number!

"Where you going, Redwood? Get a hat! _Nonsense_. Have mine. You wantguns, man--not hats. Got money? Enough? All right. So long. 

"Where's the telephone, Bensington?"

Bensington wheeled about obediently and led the way. 

Cossar used and replaced the instrument. "Then there's the wasps, " hesaid. "Sulphur and nitre'll do that. Obviously. Plaster of Paris. You'rea chemist. Where can I get sulphur by the ton in portable sacks? _What_for? Why, Lord _bless_ my heart and soul!--to smoke out the nest, ofcourse! I suppose it must be sulphur, eh? You're a chemist. Sulphurbest, eh?"

"Yes, I should _think_ sulphur. "

"Nothing better?"

"Right. That's your job. That's all right. Get as much sulphur as youcan--saltpetre to make it burn. Sent? Charing Cross. Right away. Seethey do it. Follow it up. Anything?"

He thought a moment. 

"Plaster of Paris--any sort of plaster--bung up nest--holes--you know. That _I'd_ better get. "

"How much?"

"How much what?"

"Sulphur. "

"Ton. See?"

Bensington tightened his glasses with a hand tremulous withdetermination. "Right, " he said, very curtly. 

"Money in your pocket?" asked Cossar. 

"Hang cheques. They may not know you. Pay cash. Obviously. Where's yourbank? All right. Stop on the way and get forty pounds--notes and gold. "

Another meditation. "If we leave this job for public officials we shallhave all Kent in tatters, " said Cossar. "Now is there--anything? _No!HI_!"

He stretched a vast hand towards a cab that became convulsively eager toserve him ("Cab, Sir?" said the cabman. "Obviously, " said Cossar); andBensington, still hatless, paddled down the steps and prepared to mount. 

"I _think_, " he said, with his hand on the cab apron, and a suddenglance up at the windows of his flat, "I _ought_ to tell my cousinJane--"

"More time to tell her when you come back, " said Cossar, thrusting himin with a vast hand expanded over his back.... 

"Clever chaps, " remarked Cossar, "but no initiative whatever. CousinJane indeed! I know her. Rot, these Cousin Janes! Country infested with'em. I suppose I shall have to spend the whole blessed night, seeingthey do what they know perfectly well they ought to do all along. Iwonder if it's Research makes 'em like that or Cousin Jane or what?"

He dismissed this obscure problem, meditated for a space upon his watch, and decided there would be just time to drop into a restaurant and getsome lunch before he hunted up the plaster of Paris and took it toCharing Cross. 

The train started at five minutes past three, and he arrived at CharingCross at a quarter to three, to find Bensington in heated argumentbetween two policemen and his van-driver outside, and Redwood in theluggage office involved in some technical obscurity about thisammunition. Everybody was pretending not to know anything or to have anyauthority, in the way dear to South-Eastern officials when they catchyou in a hurry. 

"Pity they can't shoot all these officials and get a new lot, " remarkedCossar with a sigh. But the time was too limited for anythingfundamental, and so he swept through these minor controversies, disinterred what may or may not have been the station-master from someobscure hiding-place, walked about the premises holding him and givingorders in his name, and was out of the station with everybody andeverything aboard before that official was fully awake to the breachesin the most sacred routines and regulations that were being committed. 

"Who _was_ he?" said the high official, caressing the arm Cossar hadgripped, and smiling with knit brows. 

"'E was a gentleman, Sir, " said a porter, "anyhow. 'Im and all 'is partytravelled first class. "

"Well, we got him and his stuff off pretty sharp--whoever he was, " saidthe high official, rubbing his arm with something approachingsatisfaction. 

And as he walked slowly back, blinking in the unaccustomed daylight, towards that dignified retirement in which the higher officials atCharing Cross shelter from the importunity of the vulgar, he smiledstill at his unaccustomed energy. It was a very gratifying revelation ofhis own possibilities, in spite of the stiffness of his arm. He wishedsome of those confounded armchair critics of railway management couldhave seen it. 

IV. 

By five o'clock that evening this amazing Cossar, with no appearance ofhurry at all, had got all the stuff for his fight with insurgent Bignessout of Urshot and on the road to Hickleybrow. Two barrels of paraffinand a load of dry brushwood he had bought in Urshot; plentiful sacks ofsulphur, eight big game guns and ammunition, three light breechloaders, with small-shot ammunition for the wasps, a hatchet, two billhooks, apick and three spades, two coils of rope, some bottled beer, soda andwhisky, one gross of packets of rat poison, and cold provisions forthree days, had come down from London. All these things he had sent onin a coal trolley and a hay waggon in the most business-like way, exceptthe guns and ammunition, which were stuck under the seat of the Red Lionwaggonette appointed to bring on Redwood and the five picked men who hadcome up from Ealing at Cossar's summons. 

Cossar conducted all these transactions with an invincible air ofcommonplace, in spite of the fact that Urshot was in a panic about therats, and all the drivers had to be specially paid. All the shops wereshut in the place, and scarcely a soul abroad in the street, and when hebanged at a door a window was apt to open. He seemed to consider thatthe conduct of business from open windows was an entirely legitimate andobvious method. Finally he and Bensington got the Red Lion dogcart andset off with the waggonette, to overtake the baggage. They did this alittle beyond the cross-roads, and so reached Hickleybrow first. 

Bensington, with a gun between his knees, sitting beside Cossar in thedog-cart, developed a long germinated amazement. All they were doingwas, no doubt, as Cossar insisted, quite the obvious thing to do, only--! In England one so rarely does the obvious thing. He glanced fromhis neighbour's feet to the boldly sketched hands upon the reins. Cossarhad apparently never driven before, and he was keeping the line of leastresistance down the middle of the road by some no doubt quite obviousbut certainly unusual light of his own. 

"Why don't we all do the obvious?" thought Bensington. "How the worldwould travel if one did! I wonder for instance why I don't do such alot of things I know would be all right to do--things I _want_ to do. Iseverybody like that, or is it peculiar to me!" He plunged into obscurespeculation about the Will. He thought of the complex organisedfutilities of the daily life, and in contrast with them the plain andmanifest things to do, the sweet and splendid things to do, that someincredible influences will never permit us to do. Cousin Jane? CousinJane he perceived was important in the question, in some subtle anddifficult way. Why should we after all eat, drink, and sleep, remainunmarried, go here, abstain from going there, all out of deference toCousin Jane? She became symbolical without ceasing to beincomprehensible!

A stile and a path across the fields caught his eye and reminded him ofthat other bright day, so recent in time, so remote in its emotions, when he had walked from Urshot to the Experimental Farm to see the giantchicks. 

Fate plays with us. 

"Tcheck, tcheck, " said Cossar. "Get up. "

It was a hot midday afternoon, not a breath of wind, and the dust wasthick in the roads. Few people were about, but the deer beyond the parkpalings browsed in profound tranquillity. They saw a couple of big waspsstripping a gooseberry bush just outside Hickleybrow, and another wascrawling up and down the front of the little grocer's shop in thevillage street trying to find an entry. The grocer was dimly visiblewithin, with an ancient fowling-piece in hand, watching its endeavours. The driver of the waggonette pulled up outside the Jolly Drovers andinformed Redwood that his part of the bargain was done. In thiscontention he was presently joined by the drivers of the waggon and thetrolley. Not only did they maintain this, but they refused to let thehorses be taken further. 

"Them big rats is nuts on 'orses, " the trolley driver kept on repeating. 

Cossar surveyed the controversy for a moment. 

"Get the things out of that waggonette, " he said, and one of his men, atall, fair, dirty engineer, obeyed. 

"Gimme that shot gun, " said Cossar. 

He placed himself between the drivers. "We don't want _you_ to drive, "he said. 

"You can say what you like, " he conceded, "but we want these horses. "

They began to argue, but he continued speaking. 

"If you try and assault us I shall, in self-defence, let fly at yourlegs. The horses are going on. "

He treated the incident as closed. "Get up on that waggon, Flack, " hesaid to a thickset, wiry little man. "Boon, take the trolley. "

The two drivers blustered to Redwood. 

"You've done your duty to your employers, " said Redwood. "You stop inthis village until we come back. No one will blame you, seeing we've gotguns. We've no wish to do anything unjust or violent, but this occasionis pressing. I'll pay if anything happens to the horses, never fear. "

"_That's_ all right, " said Cossar, who rarely promised. 

They left the waggonette behind, and the men who were not driving wentafoot. Over each shoulder sloped a gun. It was the oddest littleexpedition for an English country road, more like a Yankee party, trekking west in the good old Indian days. 

They went up the road, until at the crest by the stile they came intosight of the Experimental Farm. They found a little group of men therewith a gun or so--the two Fulchers were among them--and one man, astranger from Maidstone, stood out before the others and watched theplace through an opera-glass. 

These men turned about and stared at Redwood's party. 

"Anything fresh?" said Cossar. 

"The waspses keeps a comin' and a goin', " said old Fulcher. "Can't seeas they bring anything. "

"The canary creeper's got in among the pine trees now, " said the manwith the lorgnette. "It wasn't there this morning. You can see it growwhile you watch it. "

He took out a handkerchief and wiped his object-glasses with carefuldeliberation. 

"I reckon you're going down there, " ventured Skelmersdale. 

"Will you come?" said Cossar. 

Skelmersdale seemed to hesitate. 

"It's an all-night job. "

Skelmersdale decided that he wouldn't. 

"Rats about?" asked Cossar. 

"One was up in the pines this morning--rabbiting, we reckon. "

Cossar slouched on to overtake his party. 

Bensington, regarding the Experimental Farm under his hand, was able togauge now the vigour of the Food. His first impression was that thehouse was smaller than he had thought--very much smaller; his second wasto perceive that all the vegetation between the house and the pine-woodhad become extremely large. The roof over the well peeped amidsttussocks of grass a good eight feet high, and the canary creeperwrapped about the chimney stack and gesticulated with stiff tendrilstowards the heavens. Its flowers were vivid yellow splashes, distinctlyvisible as separate specks this mile away. A great green cable hadwrithed across the big wire inclosures of the giant hens' run, and flungtwining leaf stems about two outstanding pines. Fully half as tall asthese was the grove of nettles running round behind the cart-shed. Thewhole prospect, as they drew nearer, became more and more suggestive ofa raid of pigmies upon a dolls' house that has been left in a neglectedcorner of some great garden. 

There was a busy coming and going from the wasps' nest, they saw. Aswarm of black shapes interlaced in the air, above the rusty hill-frontbeyond the pine cluster, and ever and again one of these would dart upinto the sky with incredible swiftness and soar off upon some distantquest. Their humming became audible at more than half a mile's distancefrom the Experimental Farm. Once a yellow-striped monster droppedtowards them and hung for a space watching them with its great compoundeyes, but at an ineffectual shot from Cossar it darted off again. Downin a corner of the field, away to the right, several were crawling aboutover some ragged bones that were probably the remains of the lamb therats had brought from Huxter's Farm. The horses became very restless asthey drew near these creatures. None of the party was an expert driver, and they had to put a man to lead each horse and encourage it with thevoice. 

They could see nothing of the rats as they came up to the house, andeverything seemed perfectly still except for the rising and falling"whoozzzzzzZZZ, whoooo-zoo-oo" of the wasps' nest. 

They led the horses into the yard, and one of Cossar's men, seeing thedoor open--the whole of the middle portion of the door had been gnawedout--walked into the house. Nobody missed him for the time, the restbeing occupied with the barrels of paraffin, and the first intimationthey had of his separation from them was the report of his gun and thewhizz of his bullet. "Bang, bang, " both barrels, and his first bullet itseems went through the cask of sulphur, smashed out a stave from thefurther side, and filled the air with yellow dust. Redwood had kept hisgun in hand and let fly at something grey that leapt past him. He had avision of the broad hind-quarters, the long scaly tail and long soles ofthe hind-feet of a rat, and fired his second barrel. He saw Bensingtondrop as the beast vanished round the corner. 

Then for a time everybody was busy with a gun. For three minutes liveswere cheap at the Experimental Farm, and the banging of guns filled theair. Redwood, careless of Bensington in his excitement, rushed inpursuit, and was knocked headlong by a mass of brick fragments, mortar, plaster, and rotten lath splinters that came flying out at him as abullet whacked through the wall. 

He found himself sitting on the ground with blood on his hands and lips, and a great stillness brooded over all about him. 

Then a flattish voice from within the house remarked: "Gee-whizz!"

"Hullo!" said Redwood. 

"Hullo there!" answered the voice. 

And then: "Did you chaps get 'im?"

A sense of the duties of friendship returned to Redwood. "Is Mr. Bensington hurt?" he said. 

The man inside heard imperfectly. "No one ain't to blame if I ain't, "said the voice inside. 

It became clearer to Redwood that he must have shot Bensington. Heforgot the cuts upon his face, arose and came back to find Bensingtonseated on the ground and rubbing his shoulder. Bensington looked overhis glasses. "We peppered him, Redwood, " he said, and then: "He tried tojump over me, and knocked me down. But I let him have it with bothbarrels, and my! how it has hurt my shoulder, to be sure. "

A man appeared in the doorway. "I got him once in the chest and once inthe side, " he said. 

"Where's the waggons?" said Cossar, appearing amidst a thicket ofgigantic canary-creeper leaves. 

It became evident, to Redwood's amazement, first, that no one had beenshot, and, secondly, that the trolley and waggon had shifted fiftyyards, and were now standing with interlocked wheels amidst the tangleddistortions of Skinner's kitchen garden. The horses had stopped theirplunging. Half-way towards them, the burst barrel of sulphur lay in thepath with a cloud of sulphur dust above it. He indicated this to Cossarand walked towards it. "Has any one seen that rat?" shouted Cossar, following. "I got him in between the ribs once, and once in the face ashe turned on me. "

They were joined by two men, as they worried at the locked wheels. 

"I killed that rat, " said one of the men. 

"Have they got him?" asked Cossar. 

"Jim Bates has found him, beyond the hedge. I got him jest as he cameround the corner.... Whack behind the shoulder.... "

When things were a little ship-shape again Redwood went and stared atthe huge misshapen corpse. The brute lay on its side, with its bodyslightly bent. Its rodent teeth overhanging its receding lower jaw gaveits face a look of colossal feebleness, of weak avidity. It seemed notin the least ferocious or terrible. Its fore-paws reminded him of lankemaciated hands. Except for one neat round hole with a scorched rim oneither side of its neck, the creature was absolutely intact. Hemeditated over this fact for some time. "There must have been two rats, "he said at last, turning away. 

"Yes. And the one that everybody hit--got away. "

"I am certain that my own shot--"

A canary-creeper leaf tendril, engaged in that mysterious search for aholdfast which constitutes a tendril's career, bent itself engaginglytowards his neck and made him step aside hastily. 

"Whoo-z-z z-z-z-z-Z-Z-Z, " from the distant wasps' nest, "whoo oozoo-oo. "

V. 

This incident left the party alert but not unstrung. 

They got their stores into the house, which had evidently been ransackedby the rats after the flight of Mrs. Skinner, and four of the men tookthe two horses back to Hickleybrow. They dragged the dead rat throughthe hedge and into a position commanded by the windows of the house, andincidentally came upon a cluster of giant earwigs in the ditch. Thesecreatures dispersed hastily, but Cossar reached out incalculable limbsand managed to kill several with his boots and gun-butt. Then two of themen hacked through several of the main stems of the canary creeper--hugecylinders they were, a couple of feet in diameter, that came out by thesink at the back; and while Cossar set the house in order for the night, Bensington, Redwood, and one of the assistant electricians wentcautiously round by the fowl runs in search of the rat-holes. 

They skirted the giant nettles widely, for these huge weeds threatenedthem with poison-thorns a good inch long. Then round beyond the gnawed, dismantled stile they came abruptly on the huge cavernous throat of themost westerly of the giant rat-holes, an evil-smelling profundity, thatdrew them up into a line together. 

"I _hope_ they'll come out, " said Redwood, with a glance at thepent-house of the well. 

"If they don't--" reflected Bensington. 

"They will, " said Redwood. 

They meditated. 

"We shall have to rig up some sort of flare if we _do_ go in, " saidRedwood. 

They went up a little path of white sand through the pine-wood andhalted presently within sight of the wasp-holes. 

The sun was setting now, and the wasps were coming home for good; theirwings in the golden light made twirling haloes about them. The three menpeered out from under the trees--they did not care to go right to theedge of the wood--and watched these tremendous insects drop and crawlfor a little and enter and disappear. "They will be still in a couple ofhours from now, " said Redwood.... "This is like being a boy again. "

"We can't miss those holes, " said Bensington, "even if the night isdark. By-the-bye--about the light--"

"Full moon, " said the electrician. "I looked it up. "

They went back and consulted with Cossar. 

He said that "obviously" they must get the sulphur, nitre, and plasterof Paris through the wood before twilight, and for that they broke bulkand carried the sacks. After the necessary shouting of the preliminarydirections, never a word was spoken, and as the buzzing of the wasps'nest died away there was scarcely a sound in the world but the noise offootsteps, the heavy breathing of burthened men, and the thud of thesacks. They all took turns at that labour except Mr. Bensington, who wasmanifestly unfit. He took post in the Skinners' bedroom with a rifle, towatch the carcase of the dead rat, and of the others, they took turns torest from sack-carrying and to keep watch two at a time upon therat-holes behind the nettle grove. The pollen sacs of the nettles wereripe, and every now and then the vigil would be enlivened by thedehiscence of these, the bursting of the sacs sounding exactly like thecrack of a pistol, and the pollen grains as big as buckshot pattered allabout them. 

Mr. Bensington sat at his window on a hard horse-hair-stuffed arm-chair, covered by a grubby antimacassar that had given a touch of socialdistinction to the Skinners' sitting-room for many years. Hisunaccustomed rifle rested on the sill, and his spectacles anon watchedthe dark bulk of the dead rat in the thickening twilight, anon wanderedabout him in curious meditation. There was a faint smell of paraffinwithout, for one of the casks leaked, and it mingled with a lessunpleasant odour arising from the hacked and crushed creeper. 

Within, when he turned his head, a blend of faint domestic scents, beer, cheese, rotten apples, and old boots as the leading _motifs_, was fullof reminiscences of the vanished Skinners. He regarded the dim room fora space. The furniture had been greatly disordered--perhaps by someinquisitive rat--but a coat upon a clothes-peg on the door, a razor andsome dirty scraps of paper, and a piece of soap that had hardenedthrough years of disuse into a horny cube, were redolent of Skinner'sdistinctive personality. It came to Bensington's mind with a completenovelty of realisation that in all probability the man had been killedand eaten, at least in part, by the monster that now lay dead there inthe darkling. 

To think of all that a harmless-looking discovery in chemistry may leadto!

Here he was in homely England and yet in infinite danger, sitting outalone with a gun in a twilit, ruined house, remote from every comfort, his shoulder dreadfully bruised from a gun-kick, and--by Jove!

He grasped now how profoundly the order of the universe had changed forhim. He had come right away to this amazing experience, _without evensaying a word to his cousin Jane_!

What must she be thinking of him?

He tried to imagine it and he could not. He had an extraordinary feelingthat she and he were parted for ever and would never meet again. He felthe had taken a step and come into a world of new immensities. What othermonsters might not those deepening shadows hide? The tips of the giantnettles came out sharp and black against the pale green and amber of thewestern sky. Everything was very still--very still indeed. He wonderedwhy he could not hear the others away there round the corner of thehouse. The shadow in the cart-shed was now an abysmal black. 

 * * * * *

_Bang ... Bang ... Bang_. 

A sequence of echoes and a shout. 

A long silence. 

_Bang_ and a _diminuendo_ of echoes. 

Stillness. 

Then, thank goodness! Redwood and Cossar were coming out of theinaudible darknesses, and Redwood was calling "Bensington!"

"Bensington! We've bagged another of the rats!"

"Cossar's bagged another of the rats!"

VI. 

When the Expedition had finished refreshment, the night had fully come. The stars were at their brightest, and a growing pallor towards Hankeyheralded the moon. The watch on the rat-holes had been maintained, butthe watchers had shifted to the hill slope above the holes, feeling thisa safer firing-point. They squatted there in a rather abundant dew, fighting the damp with whisky. The others rested in the house, and thethree leaders discussed the night's work with the men. The moon rosetowards midnight, and as soon as it was clear of the downs, every oneexcept the rat-hole sentinels started off in single file, led by Cossar, towards the wasps' nest. 

So far as the wasps' nest went, they found their task exceptionallyeasy--astonishingly easy. Except that it was a longer labour, it was nograver affair than any common wasps' nest might have been. Danger therewas, no doubt, danger to life, but it never so much as thrust its headout of that portentous hillside. They stuffed in the sulphur and nitre, they bunged the holes soundly, and fired their trains. Then with acommon impulse all the party but Cossar turned and ran athwart the longshadows of the pines, and, finding Cossar had stayed behind, came to ahalt together in a knot, a hundred yards away, convenient to a ditchthat offered cover. Just for a minute or two the moonlit night, allblack and white, was heavy with a suffocated buzz, that rose and mingledto a roar, a deep abundant note, and culminated and died, and thenalmost incredibly the night was still. 

"By Jove!" said Bensington, almost in a whisper, "_it's done!_"

All stood intent. The hillside above the black point-lace of the pineshadows seemed as bright as day and as colourless as snow. The settingplaster in the holes positively shone. Cossar's loose framework movedtowards them. 

"So far--" said Cossar. 

Crack--_bang_!

A shot from near the house and then--stillness. 

"What's _that_?" said Bensington. 

"One of the rats put its head out, " suggested one of the men. 

"By-the-bye, we left our guns up there, " said Redwood. 

"By the sacks. "

Every one began to walk towards the hill again. 

"That must be the rats, " said Bensington. 

"Obviously, " said Cossar, gnawing his finger nails. 

_Bang_!

"Hullo?" said one of the men. 

Then abruptly came a shout, two shots, a loud shout that was almost ascream, three shots in rapid succession and a splintering of wood. Allthese sounds were very clear and very small in the immense stillness ofthe night. Then for some moments nothing but a minute muffled confusionfrom the direction of the rat-holes, and then again a wild yell ... Eachman found himself running hard for the guns. 

Two shots. 

Bensington found himself, gun in hand, going hard through the pine treesafter a number of receding backs. It is curious that the thoughtuppermost in his mind at that moment was the wish that his cousin Janecould see him. His bulbous slashed boots flew out in wild strides, andhis face was distorted into a permanent grin, because that wrinkled hisnose and kept his glasses in place. Also he held the muzzle of his gunprojecting straight before him as he flew through the chequeredmoonlight. The man who had run away met them full tilt--he had droppedhis gun. 

"Hullo, " said Cossar, and caught him in his arms. "What's this?"

"They came out together, " said the man. 

"The rats?"

"Yes, six of them. "

"Where's Flack?"

"Down. "

"What's he say?" panted Bensington, coming up, unheeded. 

"Flack's down?"

"He fell down. "

"They came out one after the other. "

"What?"

"Made a rush. I fired both barrels first. "

"You left Flack?"

"They were on to us. " "Come on, " said Cossar. "You come with us. Where's Flack? Show us. "

The whole party moved forward. Further details of the engagement droppedfrom the man who had run away. The others clustered about him, exceptCossar, who led. 

"Where are they?"

"Back in their holes, perhaps. I cleared. They made a rush for theirholes. "

"What do you mean? Did you get behind them?"

"We got down by their holes. Saw 'em come out, you know, and tried tocut 'em off. They lolloped out--like rabbits. We ran down and let fly. They ran about wild after our first shot and suddenly came at us. _Went_for us. "

"How many?"

"Six or seven. "

Cossar led the way to the edge of the pine-wood and halted. 

"D'yer mean they _got_ Flack?" asked some one. 

"One of 'em was on to him. "

"Didn't you shoot?"

"Now _could_ I?"

"Every one loaded?" said Cossar over his shoulder. 

There was a confirmatory movement. 

"But Flack--" said one. 

"D'yer mean--Flack--" said another. 

"There's no time to lose, " said Cossar, and shouted "Flack!" as he ledthe way. The whole force advanced towards the rat-holes, the man who hadrun away a little to the rear. They went forward through the rankexaggerated weeds and skirted the body of the second dead rat. They wereextended in a bunchy line, each man with his gun pointing forward, andthey peered about them in the clear moonlight for some crumpled, ominous shape, some crouching form. They found the gun of the man whohad run away very speedily. 

"Flack!" cried Cossar. "Flack!"

"He ran past the nettles and fell down, " volunteered the man who ranaway. 

"Where?"

"Round about there. "

"Where did he fall?"

He hesitated and led them athwart the long black shadows for a space andturned judicially. "About here, I think. "

"Well, he's not here now. "

"But his gun---?"

"Confound it!" swore Cossar, "where's everything got to?" He strode astep towards the black shadows on the hillside that masked the holes andstood staring. Then he swore again. "If they _have_ dragged him in---!"

So they hung for a space tossing each other the fragments of thoughts. Bensington's glasses flashed like diamonds as he looked from one to theother. The men's faces changed from cold clearness to mysteriousobscurity as they turned them to or from the moon. Every one spoke, noone completed a sentence. Then abruptly Cossar chose his line. Heflapped limbs this way and that and expelled orders in pellets. It wasobvious he wanted lamps. Every one except Cossar was moving towards thehouse. 

"You're going into the holes?" asked Redwood. 

"Obviously, " said Cossar. 

He made it clear once more that the lamps of the cart and trolley wereto be got and brought to him. 

Bensington, grasping this, started off along the path by the well. Heglanced over his shoulder, and saw Cossar's gigantic figure standing outas if he were regarding the holes pensively. At the sight Bensingtonhalted for a moment and half turned. They were all leaving Cossar---!

Cossar was able to take care of himself, of course!

Suddenly Bensington saw something that made him shout a windless "HI!"In a second three rats had projected themselves from the dark tangle ofthe creeper towards Cossar. For three seconds Cossar stood unaware ofthem, and then he had become the most active thing in the world. Hedidn't fire his gun. Apparently he had no time to aim, or to think ofaiming; he ducked a leaping rat, Bensington saw, and then smashed at theback of its head with the butt of his gun. The monster gave one leap andfell over itself. 

Cossar's form went right down out of sight among the reedy grass, andthen he rose again, running towards another of the rats and whirling hisgun overhead. A faint shout came to Bensington's ears, and then heperceived the remaining two rats bolting divergently, and Cossar inpursuit towards the holes. 

The whole thing was an affair of misty shadows; all three fightingmonsters were exaggerated and made unreal by the delusive clearness ofthe light. At moments Cossar was colossal, at moments invisible. Therats flashed athwart the eye in sudden unexpected leaps, or ran with amovement of the feet so swift, they seemed to run on wheels. It was allover in half a minute. No one saw it but Bensington. He could hear theothers behind him still receding towards the house. He shouted somethinginarticulate and then ran back towards Cossar, while the rats vanished. He came up to him outside the holes. In the moonlight the distributionof shadows that constituted Cossar's visage intimated calm. "Hullo, "said Cossar, "back already? Where's the lamps? They're all back now intheir holes. One I broke the neck of as it ran past me ... See? There!"And he pointed a gaunt finger. 

Bensington was too astonished for conversation ... 

The lamps seemed an interminable time in coming. At last they appeared, first one unwinking luminous eye, preceded by a swaying yellow glare, and then, winking now and then, and then shining out again, two others. About them came little figures with little voices, and then enormousshadows. This group made as it were a spot of inflammation upon thegigantic dreamland of moonshine. 

"Flack, " said the voices. "Flack. "

An illuminating sentence floated up. "Locked himself in the attic. "

Cossar was continually more wonderful. He produced great handfuls ofcotton wool and stuffed them in his ears--Bensington wondered why. Thenhe loaded his gun with a quarter charge of powder. Who else could havethought of that? Wonderland culminated with the disappearance ofCossar's twin realms of boot sole up the central hole. 

Cossar was on all fours with two guns, one trailing on each side from astring under his chin, and his most trusted assistant, a little dark manwith a grave face, was to go in stooping behind him, holding a lanternover his head. Everything had been made as sane and obvious and properas a lunatic's dream. The wool, it seems, was on account of theconcussion of the rifle; the man had some too. Obviously! So long asthe rats turned tail on Cossar no harm could come to him, and directlythey headed for him he would see their eyes and fire between them. Sincethey would have to come down the cylinder of the hole, Cossar couldhardly fail to hit them. It was, Cossar insisted, the obvious method, alittle tedious perhaps, but absolutely certain. As the assistant stoopedto enter, Bensington saw that the end of a ball of twine had been tiedto the tail of his coat. By this he was to draw in the rope if it shouldbe needed to drag out the bodies of the rats. 

Bensington perceived that the object he held in his hand was Cossar'ssilk hat. 

How had it got there?

It would be something to remember him by, anyhow. 

At each of the adjacent holes stood a little group with a lantern on theground shining up the hole, and with one man kneeling and aiming at theround void before him, waiting for anything that might emerge. 

There was an interminable suspense. 

Then they heard Cossar's first shot, like an explosion in a mine.... 

Every one's nerves and muscles tightened at that, and bang! bang! bang!the rats had tried a bolt, and two more were dead. Then the man who heldthe ball of twine reported a twitching. "He's killed one in there, " saidBensington, "and he wants the rope. "

He watched the rope creep into the hole, and it seemed as though it hadbecome animated by a serpentine intelligence--for the darkness made thetwine invisible. At last it stopped crawling, and there was a longpause. Then what seemed to Bensington the queerest monster of all creptslowly from the hole, and resolved itself into the little engineeremerging backwards. After him, and ploughing deep furrows, Cossar'sboots thrust out, and then came his lantern-illuminated back.... 

Only one rat was left alive now, and this poor, doomed wretch cowered inthe inmost recesses until Cossar and the lantern went in again and slewit, and finally Cossar, that human ferret, went through all the runs tomake sure. 

"We got 'em, " he said to his nearly awe-stricken company at last. "Andif I hadn't been a mud-headed mucker I should have stripped to thewaist. Obviously. Feel my sleeves, Bensington! I'm wet through withperspiration. Jolly hard to think of everything. Only a half way-up ofwhisky can save me from a cold. "

VII. 

There were moments during that wonderful night when it seemed toBensington that he was planned by nature for a life of fantasticadventure. This was particularly the case for an hour or so after he hadtaken a stiff whisky. "Shan't go back to Sloane Street, " he confided tothe tall, fair, dirty engineer. 

"You won't, eh?"

"No fear, " said Bensington, nodding darkly. 

The exertion of dragging the seven dead rats to the funeral pyre by thenettle grove left him bathed in perspiration, and Cossar pointed out theobvious physical reaction of whisky to save him from the otherwiseinevitable chill. There was a sort of brigand's supper in the oldbricked kitchen, with the row of dead rats lying in the moonlightagainst the hen-runs outside, and after thirty minutes or so of rest, Cossar roused them all to the labours that were still to do. "Obviously, " as he said, they had to "wipe the place out. No litter--noscandal. See?" He stirred them up to the idea of making destructioncomplete. They smashed and splintered every fragment of wood in thehouse; they built trails of chopped wood wherever big vegetation wasspringing; they made a pyre for the rat bodies and soaked them inparaffin. 

Bensington worked like a conscientious navvy. He had a sort of climax ofexhilaration and energy towards two o'clock. When in the work ofdestruction he wielded an axe the bravest fled his neighbourhood. Afterwards he was a little sobered by the temporary loss of hisspectacles, which were found for him at last in his side coat-pocket. 

Men went to and fro about him--grimy, energetic men. Cossar movedamongst them like a god. 

Bensington drank that delight of human fellowship that comes to happyarmies, to sturdy expeditions--never to those who live the life of thesober citizen in cities. After Cossar had taken his axe away and set himto carry wood he went to and fro, saying they were all "good fellows. "He kept on--long after he was aware of fatigue. 

At last all was ready, and the broaching of the paraffin began. Themoon, robbed now of all its meagre night retinue of stars, shone highabove the dawn. 

"Burn everything, " said Cossar, going to and fro--"burn the ground andmake a clean sweep of it. See?"

Bensington became aware of him, looking now very gaunt and horrible inthe pale beginnings of the daylight, hurrying past with his lower jawprojected and a flaring torch of touchwood in his hand. 

"Come away!" said some one, pulling Bensington's arm. 

The still dawn--no birds were singing there--was suddenly full of atumultuous crackling; a little dull red flame ran about the base of thepyre, changed to blue upon the ground, and set out to clamber, leaf byleaf, up the stem of a giant nettle. A singing sound mingled with thecrackling.... 

They snatched their guns from the corner of the Skinners' living-room, and then every one was running. Cossar came after them with heavystrides.... 

Then they were standing looking back at the Experimental Farm. It wasboiling up; the smoke and flames poured out like a crowd in a panic, from doors and windows and from a thousand cracks and crevices in theroof. Trust Cossar to build a fire! A great column of smoke, shot withblood-red tongues and darting flashes, rushed up into the sky. It waslike some huge giant suddenly standing up, straining upward and abruptlyspreading his great arms out across the sky. It cast the night back uponthem, utterly hiding and obliterating the incandescence of the sun thatrose behind it. All Hickleybrow was soon aware of that stupendous pillarof smoke, and came out upon the crest, in various _deshabille_, to watchthem coming. 

Behind, like some fantastic fungus, this smoke pillar swayed andfluctuated, up, up, into the sky--making the Downs seem low and allother objects petty, and in the foreground, led by Cossar, the makers ofthis mischief followed the path, eight little black figures comingwearily, guns shouldered, across the meadow. 

As Bensington looked back there came into his jaded brain, and echoedthere, a familiar formula. What was it? "You have lit to-day--? You havelit today--?" Then he remembered Latimer's words: "We have lit this daysuch a candle in England as no man may ever put out again--"

What a man Cossar was, to be sure! He admired his back view for a space, and was proud to have held that hat. Proud! Although he was an eminentinvestigator and Cossar only engaged in applied science. 

Suddenly he fell shivering and yawning enormously and wishing he waswarmly tucked away in bed in his little flat that looked out upon SloaneStreet. (It didn't do even to think of Cousin Jane. ) His legs becamecotton strands, his feet lead. He wondered if any one would get themcoffee in Hickleybrow. He had never been up all night forthree-and-thirty years. 

VIII. 

And while these eight adventurers fought with rats about theExperimental Farm, nine miles away, in the village of CheasingEyebright, an old lady with an excessive nose struggled with greatdifficulties by the light of a flickering candle. She gripped a sardinetin opener in one gnarled hand, and in the other she held a tin ofHerakleophorbia, which she had resolved to open or die. She struggledindefatigably, grunting at each fresh effort, while through the flimsypartition the voice of the Caddles infant wailed. 

"Bless 'is poor 'art, " said Mrs. Skinner; and then, with her solitarytooth biting her lip in an ecstasy of determination, "Come _up_!"

And presently, "_Jab_!" a fresh supply of the Food of the Gods was letloose to wreak its powers of giantry upon the world. 

CHAPTER THE FOURTH. 

THE GIANT CHILDREN. 

I. 

For a time at least the spreading circle of residual consequences aboutthe Experimental Farm must pass out of the focus of our narrative--howfor a long time a power of bigness, in fungus and toadstool, in grassand weed, radiated from that charred but not absolutely obliteratedcentre. Nor can we tell here at any length how these mournful spinsters, the two surviving hens, made a wonder of and a show, spent theirremaining years in eggless celebrity. The reader who is hungry forfuller details in these matters is referred to the newspapers of theperiod--to the voluminous, indiscriminate files of the modern RecordingAngel. Our business lies with Mr. Bensington at the focus of thedisturbance. 

He had come back to London to find himself a quite terribly famous man. In a night the whole world had changed with respect to him. Everybodyunderstood. Cousin Jane, it seemed, knew all about it; the people in thestreets knew all about it; the newspapers all and more. To meet CousinJane was terrible, of course, but when it was over not so terrible afterall. The good woman had limits even to her power over facts; it wasclear that she had communed with herself and accepted the Food assomething in the nature of things. 

She took the line of huffy dutifulness. She disapproved highly, it wasevident, but she did not prohibit. The flight of Bensington, as she musthave considered it, may have shaken her, and her worst was to treat himwith bitter persistence for a cold he had not caught and fatigue he hadlong since forgotten, and to buy him a new sort of hygienic all-woolcombination underwear that was apt to get involved and turned partiallyinside out and partially not, and as difficult to get into for anabsent-minded man, as--Society. And so for a space, and as far as thisconvenience left him leisure, he still continued to participate in thedevelopment of this new element in human history, the Food of the Gods. 

The public mind, following its own mysterious laws of selection, hadchosen him as the one and only responsible Inventor and Promoter of thisnew wonder; it would hear nothing of Redwood, and without a protest itallowed Cossar to follow his natural impulse into a terribly prolificobscurity. Before he was aware of the drift of these things, Mr. Bensington was, so to speak, stark and dissected upon the hoardings. Hisbaldness, his curious general pinkness, and his golden spectacles hadbecome a national possession. Resolute young men with largeexpensive-looking cameras and a general air of complete authorisationtook possession of the flat for brief but fruitful periods, let offflash lights in it that filled it for days with dense, intolerablevapour, and retired to fill the pages of the syndicated magazines withtheir admirable photographs of Mr. Bensington complete and at home inhis second-best jacket and his slashed shoes. Other resolute-manneredpersons of various ages and sexes dropped in and told him things aboutBoomfood--it was _Punch_ first called the stuff "Boomfood"--andafterwards reproduced what they had said as his own originalcontribution to the Interview. The thing became quite an obsession withBroadbeam, the Popular Humourist. He scented another confounded thing hecould not understand, and he fretted dreadfully in his efforts to "laughthe thing down. " One saw him in clubs, a great clumsy presence with theevidences of his midnight oil burning manifest upon his largeunwholesome face, explaining to every one he could buttonhole: "TheseScientific chaps, you know, haven't a Sense of Humour, you know. That'swhat it is. This Science--kills it. " His jests at Bensington becamemalignant libels.... 

An enterprising press-cutting agency sent Bensington a long articleabout himself from a sixpenny weekly, entitled "A New Terror, " andoffered to supply one hundred such disturbances for a guinea, and twoextremely charming young ladies, totally unknown to him, called, and, tothe speechless indignation of Cousin Jane, had tea with him andafterwards sent him their birthday books for his signature. He wasspeedily quite hardened to seeing his name associated with the mostincongruous ideas in the public press, and to discover in the reviewsarticles written about Boomfood and himself in a tone of the utmostintimacy by people he had never heard of. And whatever delusions he mayhave cherished in the days of his obscurity about the pleasantness ofFame were dispelled utterly and for ever. 

At first--except for Broadbeam--the tone of the public mind was quitefree from any touch of hostility. It did not seem to occur to the publicmind as anything but a mere playful supposition that any moreHerakleophorbia was going to escape again. And it did not seem to occurto the public mind that the growing little band of babies now being fedon the food would presently be growing more "up" than most of us evergrow. The sort of thing that pleased the public mind was caricatures ofeminent politicians after a course of Boom-feeding, uses of the idea onhoardings, and such edifying exhibitions as the dead wasps that hadescaped the fire and the remaining hens. 

Beyond that the public did not care to look, until very strenuousefforts were made to turn its eyes to the remoter consequences, and eventhen for a while its enthusiasm for action was partial. "There's alwayssomethin' New, " said the public--a public so glutted with novelty thatit would hear of the earth being split as one splits an apple withoutsurprise, and, "I wonder what they'll do next. "

But there were one or two people outside the public, as it were, who didalready take that further glance, and some it seems were frightened bywhat they saw there. There was young Caterham, for example, cousin ofthe Earl of Pewterstone, and one of the most promising of Englishpoliticians, who, taking the risk of being thought a faddist, wrote along article in the _Nineteenth Century and After_ to suggest its totalsuppression. And--in certain of his moods, there was Bensington. 

"They don't seem to realise--" he said to Cossar. 

"No, they don't. "

"And do we? Sometimes, when I think of what it means--This poor child ofRedwood's--And, of course, your three... Forty feet high, perhaps!After all, _ought_ we to go on with it?"

"Go on with it!" cried Cossar, convulsed with inelegant astonishment andpitching his note higher than ever. "Of _course_ you'll go on with it!What d'you think you were made for? Just to loaf about betweenmeal-times?

"Serious consequences, " he screamed, "of course! Enormous. Obviously. Ob-viously. Why, man, it's the only chance you'll ever get of a seriousconsequence! And you want to shirk it!" For a moment his indignation wasspeechless, "It's downright Wicked!" he said at last, and repeatedexplosively, "Wicked!"

But Bensington worked in his laboratory now with more emotion than zest. He couldn't, tell whether he wanted serious consequences to his life ornot; he was a man of quiet tastes. It was a marvellous discovery, ofcourse, quite marvellous--but--He had already become the proprietor ofseveral acres of scorched, discredited property near Hickleybrow, at aprice of nearly £90 an acre, and at times he was disposed to think thisas serious a consequence of speculative chemistry as any unambitiousman, could wish. Of course he was Famous--terribly Famous. More thansatisfying, altogether more than satisfying, was the Fame he hadattained. 

But the habit of Research was strong in him.... 

And at moments, rare moments in the laboratory chiefly, he would findsomething else than habit and Cossar's arguments to urge him to hiswork. This little spectacled man, poised perhaps with his slashed shoeswrapped about the legs of his high stool and his hand upon the tweezerof his balance weights, would have again a flash of that adolescentvision, would have a momentary perception of the eternal unfolding ofthe seed that had been sown in his brain, would see as it were in thesky, behind the grotesque shapes and accidents of the present, thecoming world of giants and all the mighty things the future has instore--vague and splendid, like some glittering palace seen suddenly inthe passing of a sunbeam far away.... And presently it would be with himas though that distant splendour had never shone upon his brain, and hewould perceive nothing ahead but sinister shadows, vast declivities anddarknesses, inhospitable immensities, cold, wild, and terrible things. 

II. 

Amidst the complex and confused happenings, the impacts from the greatouter world that constituted Mr. Bensington's fame, a shining and activefigure presently became conspicuous--became almost, as it were, a leaderand marshal of these externalities in Mr. Bensington's eyes. This wasDr. Winkles, that convincing young practitioner, who has alreadyappeared in this story as the means whereby Redwood was able to conveythe Food to his son. Even before the great outbreak, it was evident thatthe mysterious powders Redwood had given him had awakened thisgentleman's interest immensely, and so soon as the first wasps came hewas putting two and two together. 

He was the sort of doctor that is in manners, in morals, in methods andappearance, most succinctly and finally expressed by the word "rising. "He was large and fair, with a hard, alert, superficial, aluminium-coloured eye, and hair like chalk mud, even-featured andmuscular about the clean-shaven mouth, erect in figure and energetic inmovement, quick and spinning on the heel, and he wore long frock coats, black silk ties and plain gold studs and chains and his silk hats had aspecial shape and brim that made him look wiser and better than anybody. He looked as young or old as anybody grown up. And after that firstwonderful outbreak he took to Bensington and Redwood and the Food of theGods with such a convincing air of proprietorship, that at times, inspite of the testimony of the Press to the contrary, Bensington wasdisposed to regard him as the original inventor of the whole affair. 

"These accidents, " said Winkles, when Bensington hinted at the dangersof further escapes, "are nothing. Nothing. The discovery is everything. Properly developed, suitably handled, sanely controlled, we have--wehave something very portentous indeed in this food of ours.... We mustkeep our eye on it ... We mustn't let it out of control again, and--wemustn't let it rest. "

He certainly did not mean to do that. He was at Bensington's now almostevery day. Bensington, glancing from the window, would see the faultlessequipage come spanking up Sloane Street and after an incredibly briefinterval Winkles would enter the room with a light, strong motion, andpervade it, and protrude some newspaper and supply information and makeremarks. 

"Well, " he would say, rubbing his hands, "how are we getting on?" and sopass to the current discussion about it. 

"Do you see, " he would say, for example, "that Caterham has been talkingabout our stuff at the Church Association?"

"Dear me!" said Bensington, "that's a cousin of the Prime Minister, isn't it?"

"Yes, " said Winkles, "a very able young man--very able. Quitewrong-headed; you know, violently reactionary--but thoroughly able. Andhe's evidently disposed to make capital out of this stuff of ours. Takesa very emphatic line. Talks of our proposal to use it in the elementaryschools---"

"Our proposal to use it in the elementary schools!"

"_I_ said something about that the other day--quite in passing--littleaffair at a Polytechnic. Trying to make it clear the stuff was reallyhighly beneficial. Not in the slightest degree dangerous, in spite ofthose first little accidents. Which cannot possibly occur again.... Youknow it _would_ be rather good stuff--But he's taken it up. "

"What did you say?"

"Mere obvious nothings. But as you see---! Takes it up with perfectgravity. Treats the thing as an attack. Says there is already asufficient waste of public money in elementary schools without this. Tells the old stories about piano lessons again--_you_ know. No one; hesays, wishes to prevent the children of the lower classes obtaining aneducation suited to their condition, but to give them a food of thissort will be to destroy their sense of proportion utterly. Expands thetopic. What Good will it do, he asks, to make poor people six-and-thirtyfeet high? He really believes, you know, that they _will_ be thirty-sixfeet high. "

"So they would _be_, " said Bensington, "if you gave them our food at allregularly. But nobody said anything---"

"_I_ said something. " "But, my dear Winkles--!"

"They'll be Bigger, of course, " interrupted Winkles, with an air ofknowing all about it, and discouraging the crude ideas of Bensington. "Bigger indisputably. But listen to what he says! Will it make themhappier? That's his point. Curious, isn't it? Will it make them better?Will they be more respectful to properly constituted authority? Is itfair to the children themselves?? Curious how anxious his sort are forjustice--so far as any future arrangements go. Even nowadays, he says, the cost, of feeding and clothing children is more than many of theirparents can contrive, and if this sort of thing is to be permitted--!Eh?

"You see he makes my mere passing suggestion into a positive proposal. And then he calculates how much a pair of breeches for a growing lad oftwenty feet high or so will cost. Just as though he really believed--Tenpounds, he reckons, for the merest decency. Curious this Caterham! Soconcrete! The honest, and struggling ratepayer will have to contributeto that, he says. He says we have to consider the Rights of the Parent. It's all here. Two columns. Every Parent has a right to have, hischildren brought up in his own Size.... 

"Then comes the question of school accommodation, cost of enlarged desksand forms for our already too greatly burthened National Schools. And toget what?--a proletariat of hungry giants. Winds up with a very seriouspassage, says even if this wild suggestion--mere passing fancy of mine, you know, and misinterpreted at that--this wild suggestion about theschools comes to nothing, that doesn't end the matter. This is a strangefood, so strange as to seem to him almost wicked. It has been scatteredrecklessly--so he says--and it may be scattered again. Once you've takenit, it's poison unless you go on with it. 'So it is, ' said Bensington. And in short he proposes the formation of a National Society for thePreservation of the Proper Proportions of Things. Odd? Eh? People arehanging on to the idea like anything. "

"But what do they propose to do?"

Winkles shrugged his shoulders and threw out his hands. "Form aSociety, " he said, "and fuss. They want to make it illegal tomanufacture this Herakleophorbia--or at any rate to circulate theknowledge of it. I've written about a bit to show that Caterham's ideaof the stuff is very much exaggerated--very much exaggerated indeed, butthat doesn't seem to check it. Curious how people are turning againstit. And the National Temperance Association, by-the-bye, has founded abranch for Temperance in Growth. "

"Mm, " said Bensington and stroked his nose. 

"After all that has happened there's bound to be this uproar. On theface of it the thing's--_startling_. "

Winkles walked about the room for a time, hesitated, and departed. 

It became evident there was something at the back of his mind, someaspect of crucial importance to him, that he waited to display. One dayswhen Redwood and Bensington were at the flat together he gave them aglimpse of this something in reserve. 

"How's it all going?" he said; rubbing his hands together. 

"We're getting together a sort of report. "

"For the Royal Society?"

"Yes. "

"Hm, " said. Winkles, very profoundly, and walked to the hearth-rug. "Hm. But--Here's the point. _Ought_ you?"

"Ought we--what?"

"Ought you to publish?"

"We're not in the Middle Ages, " said Redwood. 

"I know. "

"As Cossar says, swapping wisdom--that's the true scientific method. "

"In most cases, certainly. But--This is exceptional. "

"We shall put the whole thing before the Royal Society in the properway, " said Redwood. 

Winkles returned to that on a later occasion. 

"It's in many ways an Exceptional discovery. "

"That doesn't matter, " said Redwood. 

"It's the sort of knowledge that could easily be subject to graveabuse--grave dangers, as Caterham puts it. "

Redwood said nothing. 

"Even carelessness, you know--"

"If we were to form a committee of trustworthy people to control themanufacture of Boomfood--Herakleophorbia, I _should_ say--we might--"

He paused, and Redwood, with a certain private discomfort, pretendedthat he did not see any sort of interrogation.... 

Outside the apartments of Redwood and Bensington, Winkle, in spite ofthe incompleteness of his instructions, became a leading authority uponBoomfood. He wrote letters defending its use; he made notes and articlesexplaining its possibilities; he jumped up irrelevantly at the meetingsof the scientific and medical associations to talk about it; heidentified himself with it. He published a pamphlet called "The Truthabout Boomfood, " in which he minimised the whole of the Hickleybrowaffair almost to nothing. He said that it was absurd to say Boomfoodwould make people thirty-seven feet high. That was "obviouslyexaggerated. " It would make them Bigger, of course, but that was all.... 

Within that intimate circle of two it was chiefly evident that Winkleswas extremely anxious to help in the making of Herakleophorbia, help incorrecting any proofs there might be of any paper there might be inpreparation upon the subject--do anything indeed that might lead up tohis participation in the details of the making of Herakleophorbia. Hewas continually telling them both that he felt it was a Big Thing, thatit had big possibilities. If only they were--"safeguarded in some way. "And at last one day he asked outright to be told just how it was made. 

"I've been thinking over what you said, " said Redwood. 

"Well?" said Winkles brightly. 

"It's the sort of knowledge that could easily be subject to graveabuse, " said Redwood. 

"But I don't see how that applies, " said Winkles. 

"It does, " said Redwood. 

Winkles thought it over for a day or so. Then he came to Redwood andsaid that he doubted if he ought to give powders about which he knewnothing to Redwood's little boy; it seemed to him it was uncommonly liketaking responsibility in the dark. That made Redwood thoughtful. 

"You've seen that the Society for the Total Suppression of Boomfoodclaims to have several thousand members, " said Winkles, changing thesubject. "They've drafted a Bill, " said Winkles. "They've got youngCaterham to take it up--readily enough. They're in earnest. They'reforming local committees to influence candidates. They want to make itpenal to prepare and store Herakleophorbia without special license, andfelony--matter of imprisonment without option--to administerBoomfood--that's what they call it, you know--to any person underone-and-twenty. But there's collateral societies, you know. All sorts ofpeople. The Society for the Preservation of Ancient Statures is going tohave Mr. Frederic Harrison on the council, they say. You know he'swritten an essay about it; says it is vulgar, and entirely inharmoniouswith that Revelation of Humanity that is found in the teachings ofComte. It is the sort of thing the Eighteenth Century _couldn't_ haveproduced even in its worst moments. The idea of the Food never enteredthe head of Comte--which shows how wicked it really is. No one, he says, who really understood Comte.... "

"But you don't mean to say--" said Redwood, alarmed out of his disdainfor Winkles. 

"They'll not do all that, " said Winkles. "But public opinion is publicopinion, and votes are votes. Everybody can see you are up to adisturbing thing. And the human instinct is all against disturbance, youknow. Nobody seems to believe Caterham's idea of people thirty-sevenfeet high, who won't be able to get inside a church, or a meeting-house, or any social or human institution. But for all that they're not so easyin their minds about it. They see there's something--something more thana common discovery--"

"There is, " said Redwood, "in every discovery. "

"Anyhow, they're getting--restive. Caterham keeps harping on what mayhappen if it gets loose again. I say over and over again, it won't, andit can't. But--there it is!"

And he bounced about the room for a little while as if he meant toreopen the topic of the secret, and then thought better of it and went. 

The two scientific men looked at one another. For a space only theireyes spoke. 

"If the worst comes to the worst, " said Redwood at last, in astrenuously calm voice, "I shall give the Food to my little Teddy withmy own hands. "

III. 

It was only a few days after this that Redwood opened his paper to findthat the Prime Minister had promised a Royal Commission on Boomfood. This sent him, newspaper in hand, round to Bensington's flat. 

"Winkles, I believe, is making mischief for the stuff. He plays into thehands of Caterham. He keeps on talking about it, and what it is going todo, and alarming people. If he goes on, I really believe he'll hamperour inquiries. Even as it is--with this trouble about my little boy--"

Bensington wished Winkles wouldn't. 

"Do you notice how he has dropped into the way of calling it Boomfood?"

"I don't like that name, " said Bensington, with a glance over hisglasses. 

"It is just so exactly what it is--to Winkles. "

"Why does he keep on about it? It isn't his!"

"It's something called Booming, " said Redwood. "_I_ don't understand. Ifit isn't his, everybody is getting to think it is. Not that _that_matters. " "In the event of this ignorant, this ridiculous agitationbecoming--Serious, " began Bensington. 

"My little boy can't get on without the stuff, " said Redwood. "I don'tsee how I can help myself now. If the worst comes to the worst--"

A slight bouncing noise proclaimed the presence of Winkles. He becamevisible in the middle of the room rubbing his hands together. 

"I wish you'd knock, " said Bensington, looking vicious over the goldrims. 

Winkles was apologetic. Then he turned to Redwood. "I'm glad to find youhere, " he began; "the fact is--"

"Have you seen about this Royal Commission?" interrupted Redwood. 

"Yes, " said Winkles, thrown out. "Yes. "

"What do you think of it?"

"Excellent thing, " said Winkles. "Bound to stop most of this clamour. Ventilate the whole affair. Shut up Caterham. But that's not what I cameround for, Redwood. The fact is--"

"I don't like this Royal Commission, " said Bensington. 

"I can assure you it will be all right. I may say--I don't think it's abreach of confidence--that very possibly _I_ may have a place on theCommission--"

"Oom, " said Redwood, looking into the fire. 

"I can put the whole thing right. I can make it perfectly clear, first, that the stuff is controllable, and, secondly, that nothing short of amiracle is needed before anything like that catastrophe at Hickleybrowcan possibly happen again. That is just what is wanted, an authoritativeassurance. Of course, I could speak with more confidence if I knew--Butthat's quite by the way. And just at present there's something else, another little matter, upon which I'm wanting to consult you. Ahem. Thefact is--Well--I happen to be in a slight difficulty, and you can helpme out. "

Redwood raised his eyebrows, and was secretly glad. 

"The matter is--highly confidential. "

"Go on, " said Redwood. "Don't worry about that. "

"I have recently been entrusted with a child--the child of--of anExalted Personage. "

Winkles coughed. 

"You're getting on, " said Redwood. 

"I must confess it's largely your powders--and the reputation of mysuccess with your little boy--There is, I cannot disguise, a strongfeeling against its use. And yet I find that among the moreintelligent--One must go quietly in these things, you know--little bylittle. Still, in the case of Her Serene High--I mean this new littlepatient of mine. As a matter of fact--the suggestion came from theparent. Or I should never--"

He struck Redwood as being embarrassed. 

"I thought you had a doubt of the advisability of using these powders, "said Redwood. 

"Merely a passing doubt. "

"You don't propose to discontinue--"

"In the case of your little boy? Certainly not!"

"So far as I can see, it would be murder. "

"I wouldn't do it for the world. "

"You shall have the powders, " said Redwood. 

"I suppose you couldn't--"

"No fear, " said Redwood. "There isn't a recipe. It's no good, Winkles, if you'll pardon my frankness. I'll make you the powders myself. "

"Just as well, perhaps, " said Winkles, after a momentary hard stare atRedwood--"just as well. " And then: "I can assure you I really don't mindin the least. "

IV. 

When Winkles had gone Bensington came and stood on the hearth-rug andlooked down at Redwood. 

"Her Serene Highness!" he remarked. 

"Her Serene Highness!" said Redwood. 

"It's the Princess of Weser Dreiburg!"

"No further than a third cousin. "

"Redwood, " said Bensington; "it's a curious thing to say, I know, but--do you think Winkles understands?"

"What?"

"Just what it is we have made. 

"Does he really understand, " said Bensington, dropping his voice andkeeping his eye doorward, "that in the Family--the Family of his newpatient--"

"Go on, " said Redwood. 

"Who have always been if anything a little _under_--_under_--"

"The Average?"

"Yes. And so _very_ tactfully undistinguished in _any_ way, he is goingto produce a royal personage--an outsize royal personage--of _that_size. You know, Redwood, I'm not sure whether there is not somethingalmost--_treasonable_ ... "

He transferred his eyes from the door to Redwood. 

Redwood flung a momentary gesture--index finger erect--at the fire. "ByJove!" he said, "he _doesn't_ know!"

"That man, " said Redwood, "doesn't know anything. That was his mostexasperating quality as a student. Nothing. He passed all hisexaminations, he had all his facts--and he had just as muchknowledge--as a rotating bookshelf containing the _Times Encyclopedia_. And he doesn't know anything _now_. He's Winkles, and incapable ofreally assimilating anything not immediately and directly related to hissuperficial self. He is utterly void of imagination and, as aconsequence, incapable of knowledge. No one could possibly pass so manyexaminations and be so well dressed, so well done, and so successful asa doctor without that precise incapacity. That's it. And in spite of allhe's seen and heard and been told, there he is--he has no idea whateverof what he has set going. He has got a Boom on, he's working it well onBoomfood, and some one has let him in to this new Royal Baby--and that'sBoomier than ever! And the fact that Weser Dreiburg will presently haveto face the gigantic problem of a thirty-odd-foot Princess not onlyhasn't entered his head, but couldn't--it couldn't!"

"There'll be a fearful row, " said Bensington. 

"In a year or so. "

"So soon as they really see she is going on growing. "

"Unless after their fashion--they hush it up. "

"It's a lot to hush up. "

"Rather!"

"I wonder what they'll do?"

"They never do anything--Royal tact. "

"They're bound to do something. "

"Perhaps _she_ will. " "O Lord! Yes. "

"They'll suppress her. Such things have been known. "

Redwood burst into desperate laughter. "The redundant royalty--thebouncing babe in the Iron Mask!" he said. "They'll have to put her inthe tallest tower of the old Weser Dreiburg castle and make holes in theceilings as she grows from floor to floor! Well, I'm in the very samepickle. And Cossar and his three boys. And--Well, well. "

"There'll be a fearful row, " Bensington repeated, not joining in thelaughter. "A _fearful_ row. "

"I suppose, " he argued, "you've really thought it out thoroughly, Redwood. You're quite sure it wouldn't be wiser to warn Winkles, weanyour little boy gradually, and--and rely upon the Theoretical Triumph?"

"I wish to goodness you'd spend half an hour in my nursery when theFood's a little late, " said Redwood, with a note of exasperation in hisvoice; "then you wouldn't talk like that, Bensington. Besides--Fancywarning Winkles... No! The tide of this thing has caught us unawares, and whether we're frightened or whether we're not--_we've got to swim!_"

"I suppose we have, " said Bensington, staring at his toes. "Yes. We'vegot to swim. And your boy will have to swim, and Cossar's boys--he'sgiven it to all three of them. Nothing partial about Cossar--all ornothing! And Her Serene Highness. And everything. We are going on makingthe Food. Cossar also. We're only just in the dawn of the beginning, Redwood. It's evident all sorts of things are to follow. Monstrous greatthings. But I can't imagine them, Redwood. Except--"

He scanned his finger nails. He looked up at Redwood with eyes blandthrough his glasses. 

"I've half a mind, " he adventured, "that Caterham is right. At times. It's going to destroy the Proportions of Things. It's going todislocate--What isn't it going to dislocate?"

"Whatever it dislocates, " said Redwood, "my little boy must have theFood. "

They heard some one falling rapidly upstairs. Then Cossar put his headinto the fiat. "Hullo!" he said at their expressions, and entering, "Well?"

They told him about the Princess. 

"_Difficult question!_" he remarked. "Not a bit of it. _She'll_ grow. Your boy'll grow. All the others you give it to 'll grow. Everything. Like anything. What's difficult about that? That's all right. A childcould tell you that. Where's the bother?"

They tried to make it clear to him. 

"_Not go on with it!_" he shrieked. "But--! You can't help yourselvesnow. It's what you're for. It's what Winkles is for. It's all right. Often wondered what Winkles was for. _Now_ it's obvious. What's thetrouble?

"_Disturbance_? Obviously. _Upset things_? Upset everything. Finally--upset every human concern. Plain as a pikestaff. They're goingto try and stop it, but they're too late. It's their way to be too late. You go on and start as much of it as you can. Thank God He has a use foryou!"

"But the conflict!" said Bensington, "the stress! I don't know if youhave imagined--"

"You ought to have been some sort of little vegetable, Bensington, " saidCossar--"that's what you ought to have been. Something growing over arockery. Here you are, fearfully and wonderfully made, and all you thinkyou're made for is just to sit about and take your vittles. D'you thinkthis world was made for old women to mop about in? Well, anyhow, youcan't help yourselves now--you've _got_ to go on. "

"I suppose we must, " said Redwood. "Slowly--"

"No!" said Cossar, in a huge shout. "No! Make as much as you can and assoon as you can. Spread it about!"

He was inspired to a stroke of wit. He parodied one of Redwood's curveswith a vast upward sweep of his arm. 

"Redwood!" he said, to point the allusion, "make it SO!"

V. 

There is, it seems, an upward limit to the pride of maternity, and thisin the case of Mrs. Redwood was reached when her offspring completed hissixth month of terrestrial existence, broke down his high-classbassinet-perambulator, and was brought home, bawling, in the milk-truck. Young Redwood at that time weighed fifty-nine and a half pounds, measured forty-eight inches in height, and gripped about sixty pounds. He was carried upstairs to the nursery by the cook and housemaid. Afterthat, discovery was only a question of days. One afternoon Redwood camehome from his laboratory to find his unfortunate wife deep in thefascinating pages of _The Mighty Atom_, and at the sight of him she putthe book aside and ran violently forward and burst into tears on hisshoulder. 

"Tell me what you have _done_ to him, " she wailed. "Tell me what youhave done. " Redwood took her hand and led her to the sofa, while hetried to think of a satisfactory line of defence. 

"It's all right, my dear, " he said; "it's all right. You're only alittle overwrought. It's that cheap perambulator. I've arranged for abath-chair man to come round with something stouter to-morrow--"

Mrs. Redwood looked at him tearfully over the top of her handkerchief. 

"A baby in a bath-chair?" she sobbed. 

"Well, why not?"

"It's like a cripple. "

"It's like a young giant, my dear, and you've no cause to be ashamed ofhim. "

"You've done something to him, Dandy, " she said. "I can see it in yourface. "

"Well, it hasn't stopped his growth, anyhow, " said Redwood heartlessly. 

"I _knew_, " said Mrs. Redwood, and clenched her pocket-handkerchief ballfashion in one hand. She looked at him with a sudden change to severity. "What have you done to our child, Dandy?"

"What's wrong with him?"

"He's so big. He's a monster. "

"Nonsense. He's as straight and clean a baby as ever a woman had. What'swrong with him?"

"Look at his size. "

"That's all right. Look at the puny little brutes about us! He's thefinest baby--"

"He's _too_ fine, " said Mrs. Redwood. 

"It won't go on, " said Redwood reassuringly; "it's just a start he'staken. "

But he knew perfectly well it would go on. And it did. By the time thisbaby was twelve months old he tottered just one inch under five feethigh and scaled eight stone three; he was as big in fact as a St. Peter's _in Vaticano_ cherub, and his affectionate clutch at the hairand features of visitors became the talk of West Kensington. They had aninvalid's chair to carry him up and down to his nursery, and his specialnurse, a muscular young person just out of training, used to take himfor his airings in a Panhard 8 h. P. Hill-climbing perambulator speciallymade to meet his requirement? It was lucky in every way that Redwood hadhis expert witness connection in addition to his professorship. 

When one got over the shock of little Redwood's enormous size, he was, Iam told by people who used to see him almost daily teufteufing slowlyabout Hyde Park, a singularly bright and pretty baby. He rarely cried orneeded a comforter. Commonly he clutched a big rattle, and sometimes hewent along hailing the bus-drivers and policemen along the road outsidethe railings as "Dadda!" and "Babba!" in a sociable, democratic way. 

"There goes that there great Boomfood baby, " the bus-driver used to say. 

"Looks 'ealthy, " the forward passenger would remark. 

"Bottle fed, " the bus-driver would explain. "They say it 'olds a gallonand 'ad to be specially made for 'im. "

"Very 'ealthy child any'ow, " the forward passenger would conclude. 

When Mrs. Redwood realized that his growth was indeed going onindefinitely and logically--and this she really did for the first timewhen the motor-perambulator arrived--she gave way to a passion of grief. She declared she never wished to enter her nursery again, wished she wasdead, wished the child was dead, wished everybody was dead, wished shehad never married Redwood, wished no one ever married anybody, Ajaxed alittle, and retired to her own room, where she lived almost exclusivelyon chicken broth for three days. When Redwood came to remonstrate withher, she banged pillows about and wept and tangled her hair. 

"_He's_ all right, " said Redwood. "He's all the better for being big. You wouldn't like him smaller than other people's children. "

"I want him to be _like_ other children, neither smaller nor bigger. Iwanted him to be a nice little boy, just as Georgina Phyllis is a nicelittle girl, and I wanted to bring him up nicely in a nice way, and herehe is"--and the unfortunate woman's voice broke--"wearing number fourgrown-up shoes and being wheeled about by--booboo!--Petroleum!

"I can never love him, " she wailed, "never! He's too much for me! I cannever be a mother to him, such as I meant to be!"

But at last, they contrived to get her into the nursery, and there wasEdward Monson Redwood ("Pantagruel" was only a later nickname) swingingin a specially strengthened rocking-chair and smiling and talking "goo"and "wow. " And the heart of Mrs. Redwood warmed again to her child, andshe went and held him in her arms and wept. 

"They've done something to you, " she sobbed, "and you'll grow and grow, dear; but whatever I can do to bring you up nice I'll do for you, whatever your father may say. "

And Redwood, who had helped to bring her to the door, went down thepassage much relieved. (Eh! but it's a base job this being a man--withwomen as they are!)

VI. 

Before the year was out there were, in addition to Redwood's pioneervehicle, quite a number of motor-perambulators to be seen in the west ofLondon. I am told there were as many as eleven; but the most carefulinquiries yield trustworthy evidence of only six within the Metropolitanarea at that time. It would seem the stuff acted differently upondifferent types of constitution. At first Herakleophorbia was notadapted to injection, and there can be no doubt that quite aconsiderable proportion of human beings are incapable of absorbing thissubstance in the normal course of digestion. It was given, for example, to Winkles' youngest boy; but he seems to have been as incapable ofgrowth as, if Redwood was right, his father was incapable of knowledge. Others again, according to the Society for the Total Suppression ofBoomfood, became in some inexplicable way corrupted by it, and perishedat the onset of infantile disorders. The Cossar boys took to it withamazing avidity. 

Of course a thing of this kind never comes with absolute simplicity ofapplication into the life of man; growth in particular is a complexthing, and all generalisations must needs be a little inaccurate. Butthe general law of the Food would seem to be this, that when it could betaken into the system in any way it stimulated it in very nearly thesame degree in all cases. It increased the amount of growth from six toseven times, and it did not go beyond that, whatever amount of the Foodin excess was taken. Excess of Herakleophorbia indeed beyond thenecessary minimum led, it was found, to morbid disturbances ofnutrition, to cancer and tumours, ossifications, and the like. And oncegrowth upon the large scale had begun, it was soon evident that it couldonly continue upon that scale, and that the continuous administration ofHerakleophorbia in small but sufficient doses was imperative. 

If it was discontinued while growth was still going on, there was firsta vague restlessness and distress, then a period of voracity--as in thecase of the young rats at Hankey--and then the growing creature had asort of exaggerated anaemia and sickened and died. Plants suffered in asimilar way. This, however, applied only to the growth period. So soonas adolescence was attained--in plants this was represented by theformation of the first flower-buds--the need and appetite forHerakleophorbia diminished, and so soon as the plant or animal was fullyadult, it became altogether independent of any further supply of thefood. It was, as it were, completely established on the new scale. Itwas so completely established on the new scale that, as the thistlesabout Hickleybrow and the grass of the down side already demonstrated, its seed produced giant offspring after its kind. 

And presently little Redwood, pioneer of the new race, first child ofall who ate the food, was crawling about his nursery, smashingfurniture, biting like a horse, pinching like a vice, and bawlinggigantic baby talk at his "Nanny" and "Mammy" and the rather scared andawe-stricken "Daddy, " who had set this mischief going. 

The child was born with good intentions. "Padda be good, be good, " heused to say as the breakables flew before him. "Padda" was hisrendering of Pantagruel, the nickname Redwood imposed on him. AndCossar, disregarding certain Ancient Lights that presently led totrouble, did, after a conflict with the local building regulations, getbuilding on a vacant piece of ground adjacent to Redwood's home, acomfortable well-lit playroom, schoolroom, and nursery for their fourboys--sixty feet square about this room was, and forty feet high. 

Redwood fell in love with that great nursery as he and Cossar built it, and his interest in curves faded, as he had never dreamt it could fade, before the pressing needs of his son. "There is much, " he said, "infitting a nursery. Much. 

"The walls, the things in it, they will all speak to this new mind ofours, a little more, a little less eloquently, and teach it, or fail toteach it a thousand things. "

"Obviously, " said Cossar, reaching hastily for his hat. 

They worked together harmoniously, but Redwood supplied most of theeducational theory required ... 

They had the walls and woodwork painted with a cheerful vigour; for themost part a slightly warmed white prevailed, but there were bands ofbright clean colour to enforce the simple lines of construction. "Cleancolours we _must_ have, " said Redwood, and in one place had a neathorizontal band of squares, in which crimson and purple, orange andlemon, blues and greens, in many hues and many shades, did themselveshonour. These squares the giant children should arrange and rearrange totheir pleasure. "Decorations must follow, " said Redwood; "let them firstget the range of all the tints, and then this may go away. There is noreason why one should bias them in favour of any particular colour ordesign. "

Then, "The place must be full of interest, " said Redwood. "Interest isfood for a child, and blankness torture and starvation. He must havepictures galore. " There were no pictures hung about the room for anypermanent service, however, but blank frames were provided into whichnew pictures would come and pass thence into a portfolio so soon astheir fresh interest had passed. There was one window that looked downthe length of a street, and in addition, for an added interest, Redwoodhad contrived above the roof of the nursery a camera obscura thatwatched the Kensington High Street and not a little of the Gardens. 

In one corner that most worthy implement, an Abacus, four feet square, aspecially strengthened piece of ironmongery with rounded corners, awaited the young giants' incipient computations. There were few woollylambs and such-like idols, but instead Cossar, without explanation, hadbrought one day in three four-wheelers a great number of toys (all justtoo big for the coming children to swallow) that could be piled up, arranged in rows, rolled about, bitten, made to flap and rattle, smackedtogether, felt over, pulled out, opened, closed, and mauled andexperimented with to an interminable extent. There were many bricks ofwood in diverse colours, oblong and cuboid, bricks of polished china, bricks of transparent glass and bricks of india-rubber; there were slabsand slates; there were cones, truncated cones, and cylinders; there wereoblate and prolate spheroids, balls of varied substances, solid andhollow, many boxes of diverse size and shape, with hinged lids and screwlids and fitting lids, and one or two to catch and lock; there werebands of elastic and leather, and a number of rough and sturdy littleobjects of a size together that could stand up steadily and suggest theshape of a man. "Give 'em these, " said Cossar. "One at a time. "

These things Redwood arranged in a locker in one corner. Along one sideof the room, at a convenient height for a six-or eight-foot child, therewas a blackboard, on which the youngsters might flourish in white andcoloured chalk, and near by a sort of drawing block, from which sheetafter sheet might be torn, and on which they could draw in charcoal, anda little desk there was, furnished with great carpenter's pencils ofvarying hardness and a copious supply of paper, on which the boys mightfirst scribble and then draw more neatly. And moreover Redwood gaveorders, so far ahead did his imagination go, for specially large tubesof liquid paint and boxes of pastels against the time when they shouldbe needed. He laid in a cask or so of plasticine and modelling clay. "Atfirst he and his tutor shall model together, " he said, "and when he ismore skilful he shall copy casts and perhaps animals. And that remindsme, I must also have made for him a box of tools!

"Then books. I shall have to look out a lot of books to put in his way, and they'll have to be big type. Now what sort of books will he need?There is his imagination to be fed. That, after all, is the crown ofevery education. The crown--as sound habits of mind and conduct are thethrone. No imagination at all is brutality; a base imagination is lustand cowardice; but a noble imagination is God walking the earth again. He must dream too of a dainty fairy-land and of all the quaint littlethings of life, in due time. But he must feed chiefly on the splendidreal; he shall have stories of travel through all the world, travels andadventures and how the world was won; he shall have stories of beasts, great books splendidly and clearly done of animals and birds and plantsand creeping things, great books about the deeps of the sky and themystery of the sea; he shall have histories and maps of all the empiresthe world has seen, pictures and stories of all the tribes and habitsand customs of men. And he must have books and pictures to quicken hissense of beauty, subtle Japanese pictures to make him love the subtlerbeauties of bird and tendril and falling flower, and western picturestoo, pictures of gracious men and women, sweet groupings, and broadviews of land and sea. He shall have books on the building of houses andpalaces; he shall plan rooms and invent cities--

"I think I must give him a little theatre. 

"Then there is music!"

Redwood thought that over, and decided that his son might best beginwith a very pure-sounding harmonicon of one octave, to which afterwardsthere could be an extension. "He shall play with this first, sing to itand give names to the notes, " said Redwood, "and afterwards--?"

He stared up at the window-sill overhead and measured the size of theroom with his eye. 

"They'll have to build his piano in here, " he said. "Bring it in inpieces. "

He hovered about amidst his preparations, a pensive, dark, littlefigure. If you could have seen him there he would have looked to youlike a ten-inch man amidst common nursery things. A great rug--indeed itwas a Turkey carpet--four hundred square feet of it, upon which youngRedwood was soon to crawl--stretched to the grill-guarded electricradiator that was to warm the whole place. A man from Cossar's hungamidst scaffolding overhead, fixing the great frame that was to hold thetransitory pictures. A blotting-paper book for plant specimens as big asa house door leant against the wall, and from it projected a giganticstalk, a leaf edge or so and one flower of chickweed, all of thatgigantic size that was soon to make Urshot famous throughout thebotanical world ... 

A sort of incredulity came to Redwood as he stood among these things. 

"If it really _is_ going on--" said Redwood, staring up at the remoteceiling. 

From far away came a sound like the bellowing of a Mafficking bull, almost as if in answer. 

"It's going on all right, " said Redwood. "Evidently. "

There followed resounding blows upon a table, followed by a vast crowingshout, "Gooloo! Boozoo! Bzz ... "

"The best thing I can do, " said Redwood, following out some divergentline of thought, "is to teach him myself. "

That beating became more insistent. For a moment it seemed to Redwoodthat it caught the rhythm of an engine's throbbing--the engine he couldhave imagined of some great train of events that bore down upon him. Then a descendant flight of sharper beats broke up that effect, and wererepeated. 

"Come in, " he cried, perceiving that some one rapped, and the door thatwas big enough for a cathedral opened slowly a little way. The new winchceased to creak, and Bensington appeared in the crack, gleamingbenevolently under his protruded baldness and over his glasses. 

"I've ventured round to _see_, " he whispered in a confidentially furtivemanner. 

"Come in, " said Redwood, and he did, shutting the door behind him. 

He walked forward, hands behind his back, advanced a few steps, andpeered up with a bird-like movement at the dimensions about him. Herubbed his chin thoughtfully. 

"Every time I come in, " he said, with a subdued note in his voice, "itstrikes me as--'_Big_. '"

"Yes, " said Redwood, surveying it all again also, as if in an endeavourto keep hold of the visible impression. "Yes. They're going to be bigtoo, you know. "

"I know, " said Bensington, with a note that was nearly awe. "_Very_big. "

They looked at one another, almost, as it were, apprehensively. 

"Very big indeed, " said Bensington, stroking the bridge of his nose, andwith one eye that watched Redwood doubtfully for a confirmatoryexpression. "All of them, you know--fearfully big. I don't seem able toimagine--even with this--just how big they're all going to be. "

CHAPTER THE FIFTH. 

THE MINIMIFICENCE OF MR. BENSINGTON. 

I. 

It was while the Royal Commission on Boomfood was preparing its reportthat Herakleophorbia really began to demonstrate its capacity forleakage. And the earliness of this second outbreak was the moreunfortunate, from the point of view of Cossar at any rate, since thedraft report still in existence shows that the Commission had, under thetutelage of that most able member, Doctor Stephen Winkles (F. R. S. M. D. F. R. C. P. D. Sc. J. P. D. L. Etc. ), already quite made up its mind thataccidental leakages were impossible, and was prepared to recommend thatto entrust the preparation of Boomfood to a qualified committee (Winkleschiefly), with an entire control over its sale, was quite enough tosatisfy all reasonable objections to its free diffusion. This committeewas to have an absolute monopoly. And it is, no doubt, to be consideredas a part of the irony of life that the first and most alarming of thissecond series of leakages occurred within fifty yards of a littlecottage at Keston occupied during the summer months by Doctor Winkles. 

There can be little doubt now that Redwood's refusal to acquaint Winkleswith the composition of Herakleophorbia IV. Had aroused in thatgentleman a novel and intense desire towards analytical chemistry. Hewas not a very expert manipulator, and for that reason probably he sawfit to do his work not in the excellently equipped laboratories thatwere at his disposal in London, but without consulting any one, andalmost with an air of secrecy, in a rough little garden laboratory atthe Keston establishment. He does not seem to have shown either verygreat energy or very great ability in this quest; indeed one gathers hedropped the inquiry after working at it intermittently for about amonth. 

This garden laboratory, in which the work was done, was very roughlyequipped, supplied by a standpipe tap with water, and draining into apipe that ran down into a swampy rush-bordered pool under an alder treein a secluded corner of the common just outside the garden hedge. Thepipe was cracked, and the residuum of the Food of the Gods escapedthrough the crack into a little puddle amidst clumps of rushes, just intime for the spring awakening. 

Everything was astir with life in that scummy little corner. There wasfrog spawn adrift, tremulous with tadpoles just bursting theirgelatinous envelopes; there were little pond snails creeping out intolife, and under the green skin of the rush stems the larvae of a bigWater Beetle were struggling out of their egg cases. I doubt if thereader knows the larva of the beetle called (I know not why) Dytiscus. It is a jointed, queer-looking thing, very muscular and sudden in itsmovements, and given to swimming head downward with its tail out ofwater; the length of a man's top thumb joint it is, and more--twoinches, that is for those who have not eaten the Food--and it has twosharp jaws that meet in front of its head--tubular jaws with sharppoints--through which its habit is to suck its victim's blood ... 

The first things to get at the drifting grains of the Food were thelittle tadpoles and the little water snails; the little wrigglingtadpoles in particular, once they had the taste of it, took to it withzest. But scarcely did one of them begin to grow into a conspicuousposition in that little tadpole world and try a smaller brother or so asan aid to a vegetarian dietary, when nip! one of the Beetle larva hadits curved bloodsucking prongs gripping into his heart, and with thatred stream went Herakleophorbia IV, in a state of solution, into thebeing of a new client. The only thing that had a chance with thesemonsters to get any share of the Food were the rushes and slimy greenscum in the water and the seedling weeds in the mud at the bottom. Aclean up of the study presently washed a fresh spate of the Food intothe puddle, and overflowed it, and carried all this sinister expansionof the struggle for life into the adjacent pool under the roots of thealder... 

The first person to discover what was going on was a Mr. LukeyCarrington, a special science teacher under the London Education Board, and, in his leisure, a specialist in fresh-water algae, and he iscertainly not to be envied his discovery. He had come down to KestonCommon for the day to fill a number of specimen tubes for subsequentexamination, and he came, with a dozen or so of corked tubes clankingfaintly in his pocket, over the sandy crest and down towards the pool, spiked walking stick in hand. A garden lad standing on the top of thekitchen steps clipping Doctor Winkles' hedge saw him in thisunfrequented corner, and found him and his occupation sufficientlyinexplicable and interesting to watch him pretty closely. 

He saw Mr. Carrington stoop down by the side of the pool, with his handagainst the old alder stem, and peer into the water, but of course hecould not appreciate the surprise and pleasure with which Mr. Carringtonbeheld the big unfamiliar-looking blobs and threads of the algal scum atthe bottom. There were no tadpoles visible--they had all been killed bythat time--and it would seem Mr. Carrington saw nothing at all unusualexcept the excessive vegetation. He bared his arm to the elbow, leantforward, and dipped deep in pursuit of a specimen. His seeking hand wentdown. Instantly there flashed out of the cool shadow under the treeroots something--

Flash! It had buried its fangs deep into his arm--a bizarre shape itwas, a foot long and more, brown and jointed like a scorpion. 

Its ugly apparition and the sharp amazing painfulness of its bite weretoo much for Mr. Carrington's equilibrium. He felt himself going, andyelled aloud. Over he toppled, face foremost, splash! into the pool. 

The boy saw him vanish, and heard the splashing of his struggle in thewater. The unfortunate man emerged again into the boy's field of vision, hatless and streaming with water, and screaming!

Never before had the boy heard screams from a man. 

This astonishing stranger appeared to be tearing at something on theside of his face. There appeared streaks of blood there. He flung outhis arms as if in despair, leapt in the air like a frantic creature, ranviolently ten or twelve yards, and then fell and rolled on the groundand over and out of sight of the boy. The lad was down the steps andthrough the hedge in a trice--happily with the garden shears still inhand. As he came crashing through the gorse bushes, he says he was halfminded to turn back, fearing he had to deal with a lunatic, but thepossession of the shears reassured him. "I could 'ave jabbed his eyes, "he explained, "anyhow. " Directly Mr. Carrington caught sight of him, hisdemeanour became at once that of a sane but desperate man. He struggledto his feet, stumbled, stood up, and came to meet the boy. 

"Look!" he cried, "I can't get 'em off!"

And with a qualm of horror the boy saw that, attached to Mr. Carrington's cheek, to his bare arm, and to his thigh, and lashingfuriously with their lithe brown muscular bodies, were three of thesehorrible larvae, their great jaws buried deep in his flesh and suckingfor dear life. They had the grip of bulldogs, and Mr. Carrington'sefforts to detach the monsters from his face had only served to laceratethe flesh to which it had attached itself, and streak face and neck andcoat with living scarlet. 

"I'll cut 'im, " cried the boy; "'old on, Sir. "

And with the zest of his age in such proceedings, he severed one by onethe heads from the bodies of Mr. Carrington's assailants. "Yup, " saidthe boy with a wincing face as each one fell before him. Even then, sotough and determined was their grip that the severed heads remained fora space, still fiercely biting home and still sucking, with the bloodstreaming out of their necks behind. But the boy stopped that with a fewmore slashes of his scissors--in one of which Mr. Carrington wasimplicated. 

"I couldn't get 'em off!" repeated Carrington, and stood for a space, swaying and bleeding profusely. He dabbed feeble hands at his injuriesand examined the result upon his palms. Then he gave way at the kneesand fell headlong in a dead faint at the boy's feet, between the stillleaping bodies of his defeated foes. Very luckily it didn't occur to theboy to splash water on his face--for there were still more of thesehorrors under the alder roots--and instead he passed back by the pondand went into the garden with the intention of calling assistance. Andthere he met the gardener coachman and told him of the whole affair. 

When they got back to Mr. Carrington he was sitting up, dazed and weak, but able to warn them against the danger in the pool. 

II. 

Such were the circumstances by which the world had its firstnotification that the Food was loose again. In another week KestonCommon was in full operation as what naturalists call a centre ofdistribution. This time there were no wasps or rats, no earwigs and nonettles, but there were at least three water-spiders, several dragon-flylarvae which presently became dragon-flies, dazzling all Kent with theirhovering sapphire bodies, and a nasty gelatinous, scummy growth thatswelled over the pond margin, and sent its slimy green masses surginghalfway up the garden path to Doctor Winkles's house. And there began agrowth of rushes and equisetum and potamogeton that ended only with thedrying of the pond. 

It speedily became evident to the public mind that this time there wasnot simply one centre of distribution, but quite a number of centres. There was one at Ealing--there can be no doubt now--and from that camethe plague of flies and red spider; there was one at Sunbury, productiveof ferocious great eels, that could come ashore and kill sheep; andthere was one in Bloomsbury that gave the world a new strain ofcockroaches of a quite terrible sort--an old house it was in Bloomsbury, and much inhabited by undesirable things. Abruptly the world founditself confronted with the Hickleybrow experiences all over again, withall sorts of queer exaggerations of familiar monsters in the place ofthe giant hens and rats and wasps. Each centre burst out with its owncharacteristic local fauna and flora.... 

We know now that every one of these centres corresponded to one of thepatients of Doctor Winkles, but that was by no means apparent at thetime. Doctor Winkles was the last person to incur any odium in thematter. There was a panic quite naturally, a passionate indignation, butit was indignation not against Doctor Winkles but against the Food, andnot so much against the Food as against the unfortunate Bensington, whomfrom the very first the popular imagination had insisted upon regardingas the sole and only person responsible for this new thing. 

The attempt to lynch him that followed is just one of those explosiveevents that bulk largely in history and are in reality the leastsignificant of occurrences. 

The history of the outbreak is a mystery. The nucleus of the crowdcertainly came from an Anti-Boomfood meeting in Hyde Park organised byextremists of the Caterham party, but there seems no one in the worldwho actually first proposed, no one who ever first hinted a suggestionof the outrage at which so many people assisted. It is a problem for M. Gustave le Bon--a mystery in the psychology of crowds. The fact emergesthat about three o'clock on Sunday afternoon a remarkably big and uglyLondon crowd, entirely out of hand, came rolling down Thursday Streetintent on Bensington's exemplary death as a warning to all scientificinvestigators, and that it came nearer accomplishing its object than anyLondon crowd has ever come since the Hyde Park railings came down inremote middle Victorian times. This crowd came so close to its objectindeed, that for the space of an hour or more a word would have settledthe unfortunate gentleman's fate. 

The first intimation he had of the thing was the noise of the peopleoutside. He went to the window and peered, realising nothing of whatimpended. For a minute perhaps he watched them seething about theentrance, disposing of an ineffectual dozen of policemen who barredtheir way, before he fully realised his own importance in the affair. Itcame upon him in a flash--that that roaring, swaying multitude was afterhim. He was all alone in the flat--fortunately perhaps--his cousin Janehaving gone down to Ealing to have tea with a relation on her mother'sside, and he had no more idea of how to behave under such circumstancesthan he had of the etiquette of the Day of Judgment. He was stilldashing about the flat asking his furniture what he should do, turningkeys in locks and then unlocking them again, making darts at door andwindow and bedroom--when the floor clerk came to him. 

"There isn't a moment, Sir, " he said. "They've got your number from theboard in the hall! They're coming straight up!"

He ran Mr. Bensington out into the passage, already echoing with theapproaching tumult from the great staircase, locked the door behindthem, and led the way into the opposite flat by means of his duplicatekey. 

"It's our only chance now, " he said. 

He flung up a window which opened on a ventilating shaft, and showedthat the wall was set with iron staples that made the rudest and mostperilous of wall ladders to serve as a fire escape from the upper flats. He shoved Mr. Bensington out of the window, showed him how to cling on, and pursued him up the ladder, goading and jabbing his legs with a bunchof keys whenever he desisted from climbing. It seemed to Bensington attimes that he must climb that vertical ladder for evermore. Above, theparapet was inaccessibly remote, a mile perhaps, below--He did not careto think of things below. 

"Steady on!" cried the clerk, and gripped his ankle. It was quitehorrible having his ankle gripped like that, and Mr. Bensingtontightened his hold on the iron staple above to a drowning clutch, andgave a faint squeal of terror. 

It became evident the clerk had broken a window, and then it seemed hehad leapt a vast distance sideways, and there came the noise of awindow-frame sliding in its sash. He was bawling things. 

Mr. Bensington moved his head round cautiously until he could see theclerk. "Come down six steps, " the clerk commanded. 

All this moving about seemed very foolish, but very, very cautiously Mr. Bensington lowered a foot. 

"Don't pull me!" he cried, as the clerk made to help him from the openwindow. 

It seemed to him that to reach the window from the ladder would be avery respectable feat for a flying fox, and it was rather with the ideaof a decent suicide than in any hope of accomplishing it that he madethe step at last, and quite ruthlessly the clerk pulled him in. "You'llhave to stop here, " said the clerk; "my keys are no good here. It's anAmerican lock. I'll get out and slam the door behind me and see if I canfind the man of this floor. You'll be locked in. Don't go to the window, that's all. It's the ugliest crowd I've ever seen. If only they thinkyou're out they'll probably content themselves by breaking up yourstuff--"

"The indicator said In, " said Bensington. 

"The devil it did! Well, anyhow, I'd better not be found--"

He vanished with a slam of the door. 

Bensington was left to his own initiative again. 

It took him under the bed. 

There presently he was found by Cossar. 

Bensington was almost comatose with terror when he was found, for Cossarhad burst the door in with his shoulder by jumping at it across thebreadth of the passage. 

"Come out of it, Bensington, " he said. "It's all right. It's me. We'vegot to get out of this. They're setting the place on fire. The portersare all clearing out. The servants are gone. It's lucky I caught the manwho knew. 

"Look here!"

Bensington, peering from under the bed, became aware of someunaccountable garments on Cossar's arm, and, of all things, a blackbonnet in his hand!

"They're having a clear out, " said Cossar, "If they don't set the placeon fire they'll come here. Troops may not be here for an hour yet. Fiftyper cent. Hooligans in the crowd, and the more furnished flats they gointo the better they'll like it. Obviously.... They mean a clear out. You put this skirt and bonnet on, Bensington, and clear out with me. "

"D'you _mean_--?" began Bensington, protruding a head, tortoise fashion. 

"I mean, put 'em on and come! Obviously, " And with a sudden vehemence hedragged Bensington from under the bed, and began to dress him for hisnew impersonation of an elderly woman of the people. 

He rolled up his trousers and made him kick off his slippers, took offhis collar and tie and coat and vest, slipped a black skirt over hishead, and put on a red flannel bodice and a body over the same. He madehim take off his all too characteristic spectacles, and clapped thebonnet on his head. "You might have been born an old woman, " he said ashe tied the strings. Then came the spring-side boots--a terrible wrenchfor corns--and the shawl, and the disguise was complete. "Up and down, "said Cossar, and Bensington obeyed. 

"You'll do, " said Cossar. 

And in this guise it was, stumbling awkwardly over his unaccustomedskirts, shouting womanly imprecations upon his own head in a weirdfalsetto to sustain his part, and to the roaring note of a crowd bentupon lynching him, that the original discoverer of Herakleophorbia IV. Proceeded down the corridor of Chesterfield Mansions, mingled with thatinflamed disorderly multitude, and passed out altogether from the threadof events that constitutes our story. 

Never once after that escape did he meddle again with the stupendousdevelopment of the Food of the Gods he of all men had done most tobegin. 

III. 

This little man who started the whole thing passes out of the story, andafter a time he passed altogether out of the world of things, visibleand tellable. But because he started the whole thing it is seemly togive his exit an intercalary page of attention. One may picture him inhis later days as Tunbridge Wells came to know him. For it was atTunbridge Wells he reappeared after a temporary obscurity, so soon as hefully realised how transitory, how quite exceptional and unmeaning thatfury of rioting was. He reappeared under the wing of Cousin Jane, treating himself for nervous shock to the exclusion of all otherinterests, and totally indifferent, as it seemed, to the battles thatwere raging then about those new centres of distribution, and about thebaby Children of the Food. 

He took up his quarters at the Mount Glory Hydrotherapeutic Hotel, wherethere are quite extraordinary facilities for baths, Carbonated Baths, Creosote Baths, Galvanic and Faradic Treatment, Massage, Pine Baths, Starch and Hemlock Baths, Radium Baths, Light Baths, Heat Baths, Branand Needle Baths, Tar and Birdsdown Baths, --all sorts of baths; and hedevoted his mind to the development of that system of curative treatmentthat was still imperfect when he died. And sometimes he would go down ina hired vehicle and a sealskin trimmed coat, and sometimes, when hisfeet permitted, he would walk to the Pantiles, and there he would sipchalybeate water under the eye of his cousin Jane. 

His stooping shoulders, his pink appearance, his beaming glasses, becamea "feature" of Tunbridge Wells. No one was the least bit unkind to him, and indeed the place and the Hotel seemed very glad to have thedistinction of his presence. Nothing could rob him of that distinctionnow. And though he preferred not to follow the development of his greatinvention in the daily papers, yet when he crossed the Lounge of theHotel or walked down the Pantiles and heard the whisper, "There he is!That's him!" it was not dissatisfaction that softened his mouth andgleamed for a moment in his eye. 

This little figure, this minute little figure, launched the Food of theGods upon the world! One does not know which is the most amazing, thegreatness or the littleness of these scientific and philosophical men. You figure him there on the Pantiles, in the overcoat trimmed with fur. He stands under that chinaware window where the spring spouts, and holdsand sips the glass of chalybeate water in his hand. One bright eye overthe gilt rim is fixed, with an expression of inscrutable severity, onCousin Jane, "Mm, " he says, and sips. 

So we make our souvenir, so we focus and photograph this discoverer ofours for the last time, and leave him, a mere dot in our foreground, andpass to the greater picture that, has developed about him, to the storyof his Food, how the scattered Giant Children grew up day by day into aworld that was all too small for them, and how the net of Boomfood Lawsand Boomfood Conventions, which the Boomfood Commission was weaving eventhen, drew closer and closer upon them with every year of their growth, Until--

BOOK II

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, hasalready spread and branched, until it points this way and that, andhenceforth our whole story is one of dissemination. To follow the Foodof the Gods further is to trace the ramifications of a perpetuallybranching tree; in a little while, in the quarter of a lifetime, theFood had trickled and increased from its first spring in the little farmnear Hickleybrow until it had spread, --it and the report and shadow ofits power, --throughout the world. It spread beyond England veryspeedily. Soon in America, all over the continent of Europe, in Japan, in Australia, at last all over the world, the thing was working towardsits appointed end. Always it worked slowly, by indirect courses andagainst resistance. It was bigness insurgent. In spite of prejudice, inspite of law and regulation, in spite of all that obstinate conservatismthat lies at the base of the formal order of mankind, the Food of theGods, once it had been set going, pursued its subtle and invincibleprogress. 

The children of the Food grew steadily through all these years; that wasthe cardinal fact of the time. But it is the leakages make history. Thechildren who had eaten grew, and soon there were other children growing;and all the best intentions in the world could not stop further leakagesand still further leakages. The Food insisted on escaping with thepertinacity of a thing alive. Flour treated with the stuff crumbled indry weather almost as if by intention into an impalpable powder, andwould lift and travel before the lightest breeze. Now it would be somefresh insect won its way to a temporary fatal new development, now somefresh outbreak from the sewers of rats and such-like vermin. For somedays the village of Pangbourne in Berkshire fought with giant ants. Three men were bitten and died. There would be a panic, there would be astruggle, and the salient evil would be fought down again, leavingalways something behind, in the obscurer things of life--changed forever. Then again another acute and startling outbreak, a swift upgrowthof monstrous weedy thickets, a drifting dissemination about the world ofinhumanly growing thistles, of cockroaches men fought with shot guns, ora plague of mighty flies. 

There were some strange and desperate struggles in obscure places. TheFood begot heroes in the cause of littleness ... 

And men took such happenings into their lives, and met them by theexpedients of the moment, and told one another there was "no change inthe essential order of things. " After the first great panic, Caterham, in spite of his power of eloquence, became a secondary figure in thepolitical world, remained in men's minds as the exponent of an extremeview. 

Only slowly did he win a way towards a central position in affairs. "There was no change in the essential order of things, "--that eminentleader of modern thought, Doctor Winkles, was very clear upon this, --andthe exponents of what was called in those days Progressive Liberalismgrew quite sentimental upon the essential insincerity of their progress. Their dreams, it would appear, ran wholly on little nations, littlelanguages, little households, each self-supported on its little farm. Afashion for the small and neat set in. To be big was to be "vulgar, " anddainty, neat, mignon, miniature, "minutely perfect, " became thekey-words of critical approval.... 

Meanwhile, quietly, taking their time as children must, the children ofthe Food, growing into a world that changed to receive them, gatheredstrength and stature and knowledge, became individual and purposeful, rose slowly towards the dimensions of their destiny. Presently theyseemed a natural part of the world; all these stirrings of bignessseemed a natural part of the world, and men wondered how things had beenbefore their time. There came to men's ears stories of things the giantboys could do, and they said "Wonderful!"--without a spark of wonder. The popular papers would tell of the three sons of Cossar, and how theseamazing children would lift great cannons, hurl masses of iron forhundreds of yards, and leap two hundred feet. They were said to bedigging 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 theearth began. 

These Children, said the popular magazines, will level mountains, bridgeseas, tunnel your earth to a honeycomb. "Wonderful!" said the littlefolks, "isn't it? What a lot of conveniences we shall have!" and wentabout their business as though there was no such thing as the Food ofthe Gods on earth. And indeed these things were no more than the firsthints and promises of the powers of the Children of the Food. It wasstill no more than child's play with them, no more than the first use ofa strength in which no purpose had arisen. They did not know themselvesfor what they were. They were children--slow-growing children of a newrace. The giant strength grew day by day--the giant will had still togrow into purpose and an aim. 

Looking at it in a shortened perspective of time, those years oftransition have the quality of a single consecutive occurrence; butindeed no one saw the coming of Bigness in the world, as no one in allthe world till centuries had passed saw, as one happening, the Declineand Fall of Rome. They who lived in those days were too much among thesedevelopments to see them together as a single thing. It seemed even towise men that the Food was giving the world nothing but a crop ofunmanageable, disconnected irrelevancies, that might shake and troubleindeed, but could do no more to the established order and fabric ofmankind. 

To one observer at least the most wonderful thing throughout that periodof accumulating stress is the invincible inertia of the great mass ofpeople, their quiet persistence in all that ignored the enormouspresences, the promise of still more enormous things, that grew amongthem. Just as many a stream will be at its smoothest, will look mosttranquil, running deep and strong, at the very verge of a cataract, soall that is most conservative in man seemed settling quietly into aserene 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 echoingfootsteps of the Children of the Food. The fussy pointless Revolutionsof the old time, a vast crowd of silly little people chasing some sillylittle monarch and the like, had indeed died out and passed away; butChange had not died out. It was only Change that had changed. The Newwas coming in its own fashion and beyond the common understanding of theworld. 

To tell fully of its coming would be to write a great history, buteverywhere there was a parallel chain of happenings. To tell thereforeof the manner of its coming in one place is to tell something of thewhole. It chanced one stray seed of Immensity fell into the pretty, petty village of Cheasing Eyebright in Kent, and from the story of itsqueer germination there and of the tragic futility that ensued, one mayattempt--following one thread, as it were--to show the direction inwhich the whole great interwoven fabric of the thing rolled off the loomof 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 progressiveprofessional reactionary--the least. But the Vicar of Cheasing Eyebrightwas one of the least innovating of vicars, a most worthy, plump, ripe, and conservative-minded little man. It is becoming to go back a littlein our story to tell of him. He matched his village, and one may figurethem best together as they used to be, on the sunset evening when Mrs. Skinner--you will remember her flight!--brought the Food with her allunsuspected into these rustic serenities. 

The village was looking its very best just then, under that westernlight. It lay down along the valley beneath the beechwoods of theHanger, a beading of thatched and red-tiled cottages--cottages withtrellised porches and pyracanthus-lined faces, that clustered closer andcloser as the road dropped from the yew trees by the church towards thebridge. The vicarage peeped not too ostentatiously between the treesbeyond the inn, an early Georgian front ripened by time, and the spireof the church rose happily in the depression made by the valley in theoutline of the hills. A winding stream, a thin intermittency of sky blueand foam, glittered amidst a thick margin of reeds and loosestrife andoverhanging willows, along the centre of a sinuous pennant of meadow. The whole prospect had that curiously English quality of ripenedcultivation--that look of still completeness--that apes perfection, under the sunset warmth. 

And the Vicar too looked mellow. He looked habitually and essentiallymellow, as though he had been a mellow baby born into a mellow class, aripe 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, withmagnificent traditions, aristocratic associations, and no chemicallaboratories, and proceeded thence to a venerable college in the veryripest 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 aman of moderate height, a little shortened in appearance by hisequatorial dimensions, and a face that had been mellow from the firstwas now climacterically ripe. The beard of a David hid his redundancy ofchin; he wore no watch chain out of refinements and his modest clericalgarments were made by a West End tailor.... And he sat with a hand oneither shin, blinking at his village in beatific approval. He waved aplump palm towards it. His burthen sang out again. What more could anyone 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 thedisappearance of any Taste at all. 

"We are out of it all, " he repeated, and even as he spoke the footstepsof some one coming smote upon his ear, and he rolled over and regardedher. 

You figure the old woman's steadfastly tremulous advance, the bundleclutched in her gnarled lank hand, her nose (which was her countenance)wrinkled with breathless resolution. You see the poppies noddingfatefully on her bonnet, and the dust-white spring-sided boots beneathher skimpy skirts, pointing with an irrevocable slow alternation eastand west. Beneath her arm, a restive captive, waggled and slipped ascarcely valuable umbrella. What was there to tell the Vicar that thisgrotesque old figure was--so far as his village was concerned at anyrate--no less than Fruitful Chance and the Unforeseen, the Hag weak mencall Fate. But for us, you understand, no more than Mrs. Skinner. 

As she was too much encumbered for a curtsey, she pretended not to seehim and his friend at all, and so passed, flip-flop, within three yardsof them, onward down towards the village. The Vicar watched her slowtransit 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. Whatdifference has it made?

"We are out of it all, " said the Vicar. "We live in an atmosphere ofsimple and permanent things, Birth and Toil, simple seed-time and simpleharvest. The Uproar passes us by. " He was always very great upon what hecalled the permanent things. "Things change, " he would say, "butHumanity--_aere perennius_. "

Thus the Vicar. He loved a classical quotation subtly misapplied. Below, Mrs. Skinner, inelegant but resolute, had involved herself curiouslywith 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 atintervals up and down the path between the near down and the villageend--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 proddedmost of them with his stick once or twice. One he attempted to measurewith 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 storyof the flagstone that was lifted from the cellar floor by a growth offungi beneath. He looked up his Sowerby to see if it was _Lycoperdoncoelatum_ or _giganteum_--like all his kind since Gilbert White becamefamous, he Gilbert-Whited. He cherished a theory that _giganteum_ isunfairly named. 

'One does not know if he observed that those white spheres lay in thevery track that old woman of yesterday had followed, or if he noted thatthe last of the series swelled not a score of yards from the gate of theCaddles' cottage. If he observed these things, he made no attempt toplace his observation on record. His observation in matters botanicalwas what the inferior sort of scientific people call a "trainedobservation"--you look for certain definite things and neglecteverything else. And he did nothing to link this phenomenon with theremarkable expansion of the Caddles' baby that had been going on now forsome weeks, indeed ever since Caddles walked over one Sunday afternoon amonth or more ago to see his mother-in-law and hear Mr. Skinner (sincedefunct) 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 hadalready come right into his arms at the christening--almostover-poweringly.... 

The youngster bawled with deafening violence when the cold water thatsealed its divine inheritance and its right to the name of "AlbertEdward Caddles" fell upon its brow. It was already beyond maternalporterage, and Caddles, staggering indeed, but grinning triumphantly atquantitatively inferior parents, bore it back to the free-sittingoccupied by his party. 

"I never saw such a child!" said the Vicar. This was the first publicintimation that the Caddles' baby, which had begun its earthly career alittle under seven pounds, did after all intend to be a credit to itsparents. Very soon it was clear it meant to be not only a credit but aglory. And within a month their glory shone so brightly as to be, inconnection 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 goodun;" the next time he said, "My word!" the third time he said, "_Well_, mum, " and after that he simply blew enormously each time, scratched hishead, and looked at his scales with an unprecedented mistrust. Every onecame to see the Big Baby--so it was called by universal consent--andmost of them said, "E's a Bouncer, " and almost all remarked to him, "_Did_ they?" Miss Fletcher came and said she "never _did_, " which wasperfectly true. 

Lady Wondershoot, the village tyrant, arrived the day after the thirdweighing, and inspected the phenomenon narrowly through glasses thatfilled it with howling terror. "It's an unusually Big child, " she toldits mother, in a loud instructive voice. "You ought to take unusual careof 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 moreflannel. "

The doctor came and measured the child with a tape, and put the figuresin a notebook, and old Mr. Drift-hassock, who fanned by Up Marden, brought a manure traveller two miles out of their way to look at it. Thetraveller asked the child's age three times over, and said finally thathe 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 tobe put into a baby show. And all day long, out of school hours, littlechildren kept coming and saying, "Please, Mrs. Caddles, mum, may we havea look at your baby, please, mum?" until Mrs. Caddles had to put a stopto it. And amidst all these scenes of amazement came Mrs. Skinner, andstood and smiled, standing somewhat in the background, with each sharpelbow in a lank gnarled hand, and smiling, smiling under and about hernose, 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 thevillage. "

Of course, as with almost all cottagers' babies, the eleemosynaryelement had already come in, but the child soon made it clear bycolossal bawling, that so far as the filling of its bottle went, ithadn't come in yet nearly enough. 

The baby was entitled to a nine days' wonder, and every one wonderedhappily over its amazing growth for twice that time and more. And thenyou know, instead of its dropping into the background and giving placeto other marvels, it went on growing more than ever!

Lady Wondershoot heard Mrs. Greenfield, her housekeeper, with infiniteamazement. 

"Caddles downstairs again. No food for the child! My dear Greenfield, it's impossible. The creature eats like a hippopotamus! I'm sure itcan'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 thereyourself 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 thoughtthat possibly the meaner classes are after all--as mean as theirbetters, and--where the sting lies--scoring points in the game. 

But Mrs. Greenfield could observe no evidence of peculation, and theorder for an increasing daily supply to the Caddles' nursery was issued. Scarcely had the first instalment gone, when Caddles was back again atthe 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, thatone button broke a pane of the window, mum, and one hit me a regularstinger jest 'ere, mum. "

Lady Wondershoot, when she heard that this amazing child had positivelyburst out of its beautiful charity clothes, decided that she must speakto Caddles herself. He appeared in her presence with his hair hastilywetted and smoothed by hand, breathless, and clinging to his hat brim asthough it was a life-belt, and he stumbled at the carpet edge out ofsheer distress of mind. 

Lady Wondershoot liked bullying Caddles. Caddles was her ideallower-class person, dishonest, faithful, abject, industrious, andinconceivably incapable or responsibility. She told him it was a seriousmatter, the way his child was going on. "It's 'is appetite, myladyship, " said Caddles, with a rising note. 

"Check 'im, my ladyship, you can't, " said Caddles. "There 'e lies, myladyship, and kicks out 'e does, and 'owls, that distressin'. We 'aven'tthe '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 childshould 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 seethat you are called upon to provide more. If you do, it is your owngenerosity. Of course we might try the legitimate quantity for a fewdays. But the child, I must admit, seems for some reason to bephysiologically different. Possibly what is called a Sport. A case ofGeneral Hypertrophy. "

"It isn't fair to the other parish children, " said Lady Wondershoot. "Iam certain we shall have complaints if this goes on. "

"I don't see that any one can be expected to give more than therecognised allowance. We might insist on its doing with that, or if itwouldn't, send it as a case into the Infirmary. "

"I suppose, " said Lady Wondershoot, reflecting, "that apart from thesize and the appetite, you don't find anything else abnormal--nothingmonstrous?"

"No. No, I don't. But no doubt if this growth goes on, we shall findgrave moral and intellectual deficiencies. One might almost prophesythat from Max Nordau's law. A most gifted and celebrated philosopher, Lady Wondershoot. He discovered that the abnormal is--abnormal, a mostvaluable discovery, and well worth bearing in mind. I find it of theutmost help in practice. When I come upon anything abnormal, I say atonce, This is abnormal. " His eyes became profound, his voice dropped, his manner verged upon the intimately confidential. He raised one handstiffly. "And I treat it in that spirit, " he said. 

V. 

"Tut, tut!" said the Vicar to his breakfast things--the day after thecoming of Mrs. Skinner. "Tut, tut! what's this?" and poised his glassesat his paper with a general air of remonstrance. 

"Giant wasps! What's the world coming to? American journalists, Isuppose! Hang these Novelties! Giant gooseberries are good enough forme. 

"Nonsense!" said the Vicar, and drank off his coffee at a gulp, eyessteadfast 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 dayhe was still chuckling at the absurd story his paper would have had himbelieve. Wasps indeed--killing a dog! Incidentally as he passed by thesite of that first crop of puff-balls he remarked that the grass wasgrowing very rank there, but he did not connect that in any way with thematter of his amusement. "We should certainly have heard something ofit, " he said; "Whitstable can't be twenty miles from here. "

Beyond he found another puff-ball, one of the second crop, rising likea 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 bythe second stile and came round to the Caddles' cottage. "Where's thatbaby?" he demanded, and at the sight of it, "Goodness me!"

He went up the village blessing his heart, and met the doctor full tiltcoming down. He grasped his arm. "What does this _mean_?" he said. "Haveyou seen the paper these last few days?"

The doctor said he had. 

"Well, what's the matter with that child? What's the matter witheverything--wasps, puff-balls, babies, eh? What's making them grow sobig? 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. "Sofar as I can grasp the symptoms--"

"Yes?"

"It's Hypertrophy--General Hypertrophy. "

"Hypertrophy?"

"Yes. General--affecting all the bodily structures--all the organism. Imay say that in my own mind, between ourselves, I'm very nearlyconvinced it's that.... But one has to be careful. "

"Ah, " said the Vicar, a good deal relieved to find the doctor equal tothe situation. "But how is it it's breaking out in this fashion, allover 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 atany rate to some sort of epidemic. Probably Epidemic Hypertrophy willmeet 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 Icouldn't say, " he said. 

"But---!" cried the Vicar, round-eyed. "If it's _catching_--it--itaffects _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 atonce and have a bath and fumigate my clothes. "

The doctor regarded his retreating back for a moment, and then turnedabout and went towards his own house.... 

But on the way he reflected that one case had been in the village amonth without any one catching the disease, and after a pause ofhesitation decided to be as brave as a doctor should be and take therisks like a man. 

And indeed he was well advised by his second thoughts. Growth was thelast thing that could ever happen to him again. He could have eaten--andthe Vicar could have eaten--Herakleophorbia by the truckful. For growthhad done with them. Growth had done with these two gentlemen forevermore. 

VI. 

It was a day or so after this conversation--a day or so, that is, afterthe burning of the Experimental Farm--that Winkles came to Redwood andshowed him an insulting letter. It was an anonymous letter, and anauthor should respect his character's secrets. "You are only takingcredit for a natural phenomenon, " said the letter, "and trying toadvertise yourself by your letter to the _Times_. You and your Boomfood!Let me tell you, this absurdly named food of yours has only the mostaccidental connection with those big wasps and rats. The plain fact isthere is an epidemic of Hypertrophy--Contagious Hypertrophy--which youhave about as much claim to control as you have to control the solarsystem. The thing is as old as the hills. There was Hypertrophy in thefamily of Anak. Quite outside your range, at Cheasing Eyebright, at thepresent 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 herdaughter's cottage when she saw him coming through the garden gate. Shestood for a moment "consternated, " as the country folks say, and thenfolded her arms, and with the little bunch of onions held defensivelyunder her left elbow, awaited his approach. Her mouth opened and shutseveral times; she mumbled her remaining tooth, and once quite suddenlyshe 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 sinceI 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 leftwith 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 themthat was near and dear to 'im in trouble, was Skinner. Though clever ascould 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--thechild 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 curtseyand 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 ofNicey I give his father to bring over from the farm, or a little perhapswhat I happened to bring about with me, so to speak. Me packing in ahurry 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 thingthat was getting well home to her intelligence--and he ignored heraltogether after that. Presently she left the barn--through sheerinsignificance. 

"Now you've started him, you'll have to keep on with him, you know, " hesaid 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 onat 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. Thedoor of the barn looked between the end of the cottage and some disusedpiggeries through a five-barred gate upon the highroad. Beyond was ahigh, red brick-wall rich with ivy and wallflower and pennywort, and setalong the top with broken glass. Beyond the corner of the wall, a sunlitnotice-board amidst green and yellow branches reared itself above therich tones of the first fallen leaves and announced that "Trespassers inthese Woods will be Prosecuted. " The dark shadow of a gap in the hedgethrew 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 LadyWondershoot's greys came into view. He marked the faces of coachman andfootman as the equipage approached. The coachman was a very finespecimen, full and fruity, and he drove with a sort of sacramentaldignity. Others might doubt their calling and position in the world, heat any rate was sure--he drove her ladyship. The footman sat beside himwith folded arms and a face of inflexible certainties. Then the greatlady herself became visible, in a hat and mantle disdainfully inelegant, peering through her glasses. Two young ladies protruded necks and peeredalso. 

The Vicar passing on the other side swept off the hat from his David'sbrow unheeded.... 

Redwood remained standing in the doorway for a long time after thecarriage had passed, his hands folded behind him. His eyes went to thegreen, grey upland of down, and into the cloud-curdled sky, and cameback to the glass-set wall. He turned upon the cool shadows within, andamidst spots and blurs of colour regarded the giant child amidst thatRembrandtesque gloom, naked except for a swathing of flannel, seatedupon 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 mingledin his musing. 

He laughed abruptly. "Good Lord!" he said at some passing thought. 

He roused himself presently and addressed Mrs. Skinner. "Anyhow hemustn't be tortured by a break in his food. That at least we canprevent. I shall send you a can every six months. That ought to do forhim all right. "

Mrs. Skinner mumbled something about "if you think so, Sir, " and"probably got packed by mistake.... Thought no harm in giving him alittle, " and so by the aid of various aspen gestures indicated that sheunderstood. 

So the child went on growing. 

And growing. 

"Practically, " said Lady Wondershoot, "he's eaten up every calf in theplace. If I have any more of this sort of thing from that man Caddies--"

VII. 

But even so secluded a place as Cheasing Eyebright could not rest forlong in the theory of Hypertrophy--Contagious or not--in view of thegrowing hubbub about the Food. In a little while there were painfulexplanations for Mrs. Skinner--explanations that reduced her tospeechless mumblings of her remaining tooth--explanations that probedher and ransacked her and exposed her--until at last she was driven totake refuge from a universal convergence of blame in the dignity ofinconsolable widowhood. She turned her eye--which she constrained to bewatery--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 theaffirmation her ladyship had refused before. "I 'ad no more idea what Iwas giving the child, my lady, than any one _could_ 'ave.... "

Her ladyship turned her mind in more hopeful directions, wigging Caddlesof course tremendously by the way. Emissaries, full of diplomaticthreatenings, entered the whirling lives of Bensington and Redwood. They presented themselves as Parish Councillors, stolid and clingingphonographically to prearranged statements. "We hold you responsible, Mister Bensington, for the injury inflicted upon our parish, Sir. Wehold you responsible. "

A firm of solicitors, with a snake of a style--Banghurst, Brown, Flapp, Codlin, Brown, Tedder, and Snoxton, they called themselves, and appearedinvariably in the form of a small rufous cunning-looking gentleman witha pointed nose--said vague things about damages, and there was apolished personage, her ladyship's agent, who came in suddenly uponRedwood one day and asked, "Well, Sir, and what do you propose to do?"

To which Redwood answered that he proposed to discontinue supplying thefood for the child, if he or Bensington were bothered any further aboutthe matter. "I give it for nothing as it is, " he said, "and the childwill yell your village to ruins before it dies if you don't let it havethe stuff. The child's on your hands, and you have to keep it. LadyWondershoot can't always be Lady Bountiful and Earthly Providence of herparish without sometimes meeting a responsibility, you know. "

"The mischief's done, " Lady Wondershoot decided when they told her--withexpurgations--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 beenugly--as all excessive things must be. " The Vicar's views had carriedhim out of sight of just judgment in this matter. The child was muchsubjected to snapshots even in that rustic retirement, and their nettestimony is against the Vicar, testifying that the young monster was atfirst almost pretty, with a copious curl of hair reaching to his browand a great readiness to smile. Usually Caddles, who was slightly built, stands smiling behind the baby, perspective emphasising his relativesmallness. 

After the second year the good looks of the child became more subtle andmore contestable. He began to grow, as his unfortunate grandfather wouldno doubt have put it, "rank. " He lost colour and developed an increasingeffect of being somehow, albeit colossal, yet slight. He was vastlydelicate. His eyes and something about his face grew finer--grew, aspeople say, "interesting. " His hair, after one cutting, began to tangleinto a mat. "It's the degenerate strain coming out in him, " said theparish doctor, marking these things, but just how far he was right inthat, and just how far the youngster's lapse from ideal healthfulnesswas the result of living entirely in a whitewashed barn upon LadyWondershoot's sense of charity tempered by justice, is open to question. 

The photographs of him that present him from three to six show himdeveloping into a round-eyed, flaxen-haired youngster with a truncatednose and a friendly stare. There lurks about his lips that never veryremote promise of a smile that all the photographs of the early giantchildren display. In summer he wears loose garments of ticking tackedtogether with string; there is usually one of those straw baskets uponhis head that workmen use for their tools, and he is barefooted. In onepicture he grins broadly and holds a bitten melon in his hand. 

The winter pictures are less numerous and satisfactory. He wears hugesabots--no doubt of beechwoods and (as fragments of the inscription"John Stickells, Iping, " show) sacks for socks, and his trousers andjacket are unmistakably cut from the remains of a gaily patternedcarpet. Underneath that there were rude swathings of flannel; five orsix yards of flannel are tied comforter-fashion about his neck. Thething on his head is probably another sack. He stares, sometimessmiling, sometimes a little ruefully, at the camera. Even when he wasonly five years old, one sees that half whimsical wrinkling over hissoft brown eyes that characterised his face. 

He was from the first, the Vicar always declared, a terrible nuisanceabout the village. He seems to have had a proportionate impulse to play, much curiosity and sociability, and in addition there was a certaincraving within him--I grieve to say--for more to eat. In spite of whatMrs. Greenfield called an "_excessively_ generous" allowance of foodfrom Lady Wondershoot, he displayed what the doctor perceived at oncewas the "Criminal Appetite. " It carries out only too completely LadyWondershoot's worst experiences of the lower classes--that in spite ofan allowance of nourishment inordinately beyond what is known to be themaximum necessity even of an adult human being, the creature was foundto steal. And what he stole he ate with an inelegant voracity. His greathand would come over garden walls; he would covet the very bread in thebakers' carts. Cheeses went from Marlow's store loft, and never a pigtrough was safe from him. Some farmer walking over his field of swedeswould find the great spoor of his feet and the evidence of his nibblinghunger--a root picked here, a root picked there, and the holes, withchildish cunning, heavily erased. He ate a swede as one devours aradish. 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 ratethis shortness of provisions was good for the peace of CheasingEyebright--for many years he ate up every grain very nearly of the Foodof the Gods that was given him.... 

Indisputably the child was troublesome and out of place, "He was alwaysabout, " the Vicar used to say. He could not go to school; he could notgo to church by virtue of the obvious limitations of its cubicalcontent. There was some attempt to satisfy the spirit of that "mostfoolish and destructive law"--I quote the Vicar--the ElementaryEducation Act of 1870, by getting him to sit outside the open windowwhile instruction was going on within. But his presence there destroyedthe discipline of the other children. They were always popping up andpeering at him, and every time he spoke they laughed together. His voicewas so odd! So they let him stay away. 

Nor did they persist in pressing him to come to church, for his vastproportions were of little help to devotion. Yet there they might havehad an easier task; there are good reasons for guessing there were thegerms of religious feeling somewhere in that big carcase. The musicperhaps drew him. He was often in the churchyard on a Sunday morning, picking his way softly among the graves after the congregation had gonein, and he would sit the whole service out beside the porch, listeningas one listens outside a hive of bees. 

At first he showed a certain want of tact; the people inside would hearhis great feet crunch restlessly round their place of worship, or becomeaware of his dim face peering in through the stained glass, halfcurious, half envious, and at times some simple hymn would catch himunawares, and he would howl lugubriously in a gigantic attempt atunison. Whereupon little Sloppet, who was organ-blower and verger andbeadle and sexton and bell-ringer on Sundays, besides being postman andchimney-sweep all the week, would go out very briskly and valiantly andsend him mournfully away. Sloppet, I am glad to say, felt it--in hismore thoughtful moments at any rate. It was like sending a dog home whenyou start out for a walk, he told me. 

But the intellectual and moral training of young Caddles, thoughfragmentary, was explicit. From the first, Vicar, mother, and all theworld, combined to make it clear to him that his giant strength was notfor use. It was a misfortune that he had to make the best of. He had tomind what was told him, do what was set him, be careful never to breakanything nor hurt anything. Particularly he must not go treading onthings or jostling against things or jumping about. He had to salute thegentlefolks respectful and be grateful for the food and clothing theyspared him out of their riches. And he learnt all these thingssubmissively, being by nature and habit a teachable creature and only byfood and accident gigantic. 

For Lady Wondershoot, in these early days, he displayed the profoundestawe. She found she could talk to him best when she was in short skirtsand had her dog-whip, and she gesticulated with that and was always alittle contemptuous and shrill. But sometimes the Vicar played master--aminute, middle-aged, rather breathless David pelting a childish Goliathwith reproof and reproach and dictatorial command. The monster was nowso big that it seems it was impossible for any one to remember he wasafter all only a child of seven, with all a child's desire for noticeand amusement and fresh experience, with all a child's craving forresponse, attention and affection, and all a child's capacity fordependence and unrestricted dulness and misery. 

The Vicar, walking down the village road some sunlit morning, wouldencounter an ungainly eighteen feet of the Inexplicable, as fantasticand unpleasant to him as some new form of Dissent, as it padded fitfullyalong with craning neck, seeking, always seeking the two primary needsof childhood--something to eat and something with which to play. 

There would come a look of furtive respect into the creature's eyes andan attempt to touch the matted forelock. 

In a limited way the Vicar had an imagination--at any rate, the remainsof one--and with young Caddles it took the line of developing the hugepossibilities of personal injury such vast muscles must possess. Supposea sudden madness--! Suppose a mere lapse into disrespect--! However, thetruly brave man is not the man who does not feel fear but the man whoovercomes it. Every time and always the Vicar got his imagination under. And he used always to address young Caddles stoutly in a good clearservice 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 aslight acceleration of his breathing. And out of respect for his manhoodhe made it a rule, whatever he might fancy, never to look back at thedanger, 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 taughthim the more important points of the Catechism--his duty to hisneighbour for example, and of that Deity who would punish Caddles withextreme vindictiveness if ever he ventured to disobey the Vicar and LadyWondershoot. The lessons would go on in the Vicar's yard, and passers-bywould hear that great cranky childish voice droning out the essentialteachings of the Established Church. 

"To onner 'n 'bey the King and allooer put 'nthority under 'im. Tos'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 onunaccustomed horses was like that of a camel, and he was told to keepoff the highroad, not only near the shrubbery (where the oafish smileover the wall had exasperated her ladyship extremely), but altogether. That law he never completely obeyed, because of the vast interest thehighroad had for him. But it turned what had been his constant resortinto a stolen pleasure. He was limited at last almost entirely to oldpasture 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 thesespaces he wandered. He would pick branches from trees and make insanevast nosegays there until he was forbidden, take up sheep and put themin neat rows, from which they immediately wandered (at this heinvariably laughed very heartily), until he was forbidden, dig away theturf, great wanton holes, until he was forbidden.... 

He would wander over the Downs as far as the hill above Wreckstone, butnot farther, because there he came upon cultivated land, and the people, by reason of his depredations upon their root-crops, and inspiredmoreover by a sort of hostile timidity his big unkempt appearancefrequently evoked, always came out against him with yapping dogs todrive 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. Andin the other direction he ranged within sight of Hickleybrow. From aboveThursley Hanger he could get a glimpse of the London, Chatham, and Doverrailway, but ploughed fields and a suspicious hamlet prevented hisnearer access. 

And after a time there came boards--great boards with red letters thatbarred 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 beseen in those days, by the railway passengers, sitting, chin on knees, perched up on the Down hard by the Thursley chalk pits, where afterwardshe was set working. The train seemed to inspire a dim emotion offriendliness 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 betterthan 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 monstrousfigure for a space. 

"Good thing that was put a stop to, " some spacious thinking mind wouldsuggest. "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 bywatching the Spender boy, and he set them sailing down the stream--greatpaper cocked-hats. When they vanished under the bridge which marks theboundary of the strictly private grounds about Eyebright House, hewould give a great shout and run round and across Tormat's newfield--Lord! how Tormat's pigs did scamper, to be sure, and turn theirgood fat into lean muscle!--and so to meet his boats by the ford. Rightacross the nearer lawns these paper boats of his used to go, right infront of Eyebright House, right under Lady Wondershoot's eyes!Disorganising folded newspapers! A pretty thing!

Gathering enterprise from impunity, he began babyish hydraulicengineering. He delved a huge port for his paper fleets with an old sheddoor that served him as a spade, and, no one chancing to observe hisoperations just then, he devised an ingenious canal that incidentallyflooded Lady Wondershoot's ice-house, and finally he dammed the river. He dammed it right across with a few vigorous doorfuls of earth--he musthave worked like an avalanche--and down came a most amazing spatethrough the shrubbery and washed away Miss Spinks and her easel and themost 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 dismallytucked up in flight to the house, and thence the waters rushed throughthe kitchen garden, and so by the green door into the lane and down intothe 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 fewresidual pools, and heaped green weed in the bed of the stream, whereten minutes before there had been eight feet and more of clear coolwater. 

After that, horrified at his own consequences, young Caddles fled hishome for two days and nights. He returned only at the insistent call ofhunger, to bear with stoical calm an amount of violent scolding that wasmore in proportion to his size than anything else that had ever beforefallen to his lot in the Happy Village. 

III. 

Immediately after that affair Lady Wondershoot, casting about forexemplary additions to the abuse and fastings she had inflicted, issueda Ukase. She issued it first to her butler, and very suddenly, so thatshe made him jump. He was clearing away the breakfast things, and shewas staring out of the tall window on the terrace where the fawns wouldcome 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 toevery one else in the village, including young Caddles, that in thismatter, as in all things, she meant what she said. 

"Keep him employed, " said Lady Wondershoot. "That's the tip for MasterCaddles. "

"It's the Tip, I fancy, for all Humanity, " said the Vicar. "The simpleduties, the modest round, seedtime and harvest--"

"Exactly, " said Lady Wondershoot. "What _I_ always say. Satan finds somemischief still for idle hands to do. At any rate among the labouringclasses. 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 meanwhilethey broke him in to labour a bit by using him instead of a horsemessenger to carry telegrams and notes when extra speed was needed, andhe also carried luggage and packing-cases and things of that sort veryconveniently in a big net they found for him. He seemed to likeemployment, regarding it as a sort of game, and Kinkle, LadyWondershoot's agent, seeing him shift a rockery for her one day, wasstruck by the brilliant idea of putting him into her chalk quarry atThursley Hanger, hard by Hickleybrow. This idea was carried out, and itseemed 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 thehaulage of the trucks, running the full ones down the lines towards thesiding, and hauling the empty ones up by the wire of a greatwindlass--working the entire quarry at last single-handed. 

I am told that Kinkle made a very good thing indeed out of him for LadyWondershoot, consuming as he did scarcely anything but his food, thoughthat never restrained her denunciation of "the Creature" as a giganticparasite upon her charity.... 

At that time he used to wear a sort of smock of sacking, trousers ofpatched leather, and iron-shod sabots. Over his head was sometimes aqueer thing--a worn-out beehive straw chair it was, but usually he wentbareheaded. He would be moving about the pit with a powerfuldeliberation, and the Vicar on his constitutional round would get thereabout midday to find him shamefully eating his vast need of food withhis back to all the world. 

His food was brought to him every day, a mess of grain in the husk, in atruck--a small railway truck, like one of the trucks he was perpetuallyfilling with chalk, and this load he used to char in an old limekiln andthen devour. Sometimes he would mix with it a bag of sugar. Sometimes hewould sit licking a lump of such salt as is given to cows, or eating ahuge lump of dates, stones and all, such as one sees in London onbarrows. For drink he walked to the rivulet beyond the burnt-out site ofthe Experimental Farm at Hickleybrow and put down his face to thestream. It was from his drinking in that way after eating that the Foodof the Gods did at last get loose, spreading first of all in huge weedsfrom the river-side, then in big frogs, bigger trout and stranding carp, and at last in a fantastic exuberance of vegetation all over the littlevalley. 

And after a year or so the queer monstrous grub things in the fieldbefore the blacksmith's grew so big and developed into such frightfulskipjacks and cockchafers--motor cockchafers the boys called them--thatthey drove Lady Wondershoot abroad. 

IV. 

But soon the Food was to enter upon a new phase of its work in him. Inspite of the simple instructions of the Vicar--instructions intended toround off the modest natural life befitting a giant peasant, in the mostcomplete and final manner--he began to ask questions, to inquire intothings, to _think_. As he grew from boyhood to adolescence it becameincreasingly evident that his mind had processes of its own--out of theVicar's control. The Vicar did his best to ignore this distressingphenomenon, but still--he could feel it there. 

The young giant's material for thought lay about him. Quiteinvoluntarily, with his spacious views, his constant overlooking ofthings, he must have seen a good deal of human life, and as it grewclearer to him that he too, save for this clumsy greatness of his, wasalso human, he must have come to realise more and more just how much wasshut against him by his melancholy distinction. The sociable hum of theschool, the mystery of religion that was partaken in such finery, andwhich exhaled so sweet a strain of melody, the jovial chorusing from theInn, the warmly glowing rooms, candle-lit and fire-lit, into which hepeered out of the darkness, or again the shouting excitement, the vigourof flannelled exercise upon some imperfectly understood issue thatcentred about the cricket-field--all these things must have cried aloudto his companionable heart. It would seem that as his adolescence creptupon him, he began to take a very considerable interest in theproceedings of lovers, in those preferences and pairings, those closeintimacies that are so cardinal in life. 

One Sunday, just about that hour when the stars and the bats and thepassions 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 runsout back towards the Upper Lodge. They were giving their little emotionsplay, as secure in the warm still twilight as any lovers could be. Theonly conceivable interruption they thought possible must come pacingvisibly up the lane; the twelve-foot hedge towards the silent Downsseemed 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 underthe armpits, and with the perplexed brown eyes of young Caddles scanningtheir warm flushed faces. They were naturally dumb with the emotions oftheir situation. 

"_Why_ do you like doing that?" asked young Caddies. 

I gather the embarrassment continued until the swain remembering hismanhood, vehemently, with loud shouts, threats, and virile blasphemies, such as became the occasion, bade young Caddies under penalties put themdown. Whereupon young Caddies, remembering his manners, did put themdown politely and very carefully, and conveniently near for a resumptionof their embraces, and having hesitated above them for a while, vanishedagain 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 theway 'ome.... "

The giant was embarking upon investigations, there could be no doubt. His mind, it became manifest, was throwing up questions. He put them tofew 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 acareful inspection of the ground for hens and chicks, he would sit downslowly with his back against the barn. In a minute the chicks, who likedhim, would be pecking all over him at the mossy chalk-mud in the seamsof his clothing, and if it was blowing up for wet, Mrs. Caddies' kitten, who never lost her confidence in him, would assume a sinuous form andstart 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 herclaws in his face out of sheer gaiety of heart, but he never dared totouch her because of the uncertain weight of his hand upon a creature sofrail. Besides, he rather liked to be tickled. And after a time he wouldput some clumsy questions to his mother. 

"Mother, " he would say, "if it's good to work, why doesn't every onework?"

His mother would look up at him and answer, "It's good for the likes ofus. "

He would meditate, "_Why_?"

And going unanswered, "What's work _for_, mother? Why do I cut chalk andyou wash clothes, day after day, while Lady Wondershoot goes about inher carriage, mother, and travels off to those beautiful foreigncountries 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'tthings belong to people like me and you, and if they did--"

"Lord sakes and _drat_ the Boy!" Mrs. Caddles would say--she had withthe help of a good memory become quite a florid and vigorousindividuality since Mrs. Skinner died. "Since your poor dear grandma wastook, there's no abiding you. Don't you arst no questions and you won'tbe told no lies. If once I was to start out answerin' you _serious_, y'rfather 'd 'ave to go' and arst some one else for 'is supper--let alonefinishing the washin'. "

"All right, mother, " he would say, after a wondering stare at her. "Ididn't mean to worry. "

And he would go on thinking. 

V. 

He was thinking too four years after, when the Vicar, now no longer ripebut over-ripe, saw him for the last time of all. You figure the oldgentleman visibly a little older now, slacker in his girth, a littlecoarsened and a little weakened in his thought and speech, with aquivering shakiness in his hand and a quivering shakiness in hisconvictions, but his eye still bright and merry for all the trouble theFood had caused his village and himself. He had been frightened at timesand disturbed, but was he not alive still and the same still? andfifteen long years--a fair sample of eternity--had turned the troubleinto use and wont. 

"It was a disturbance, I admit, " he would say, "and things aredifferent--different in many ways. There was a time when a boy couldweed, but now a man must go out with axe and crowbar--in some placesdown by the thickets at least. And it's a little strange still to usold-fashioned people for all this valley, even what used to be the riverbed before they irrigated, to be under wheat--as it is thisyear--twenty-five feet high. They used the old-fashioned scythe heretwenty years ago, and they would bring home the harvest on awain--rejoicing--in a simple honest fashion. A little simpledrunkenness, a little frank love-making, to conclude ... Poor dear LadyWondershoot--she didn't like these Innovations. Very conservative, poordear 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. Shewas not one of these gardening women, but she liked her garden inorder--things growing where they were planted and as they wereplanted--under control ... The way things grew was unexpected--upset herideas ... She didn't like the perpetual invasion of this youngmonster--at last she began to fancy he was always gaping at her over herwall ... She didn't like his being nearly as high as her house ... Jarred with her sense of proportion. Poor dear lady! I had hoped shewould last my time. It was the big cockchafers we had for a year or sothat decided her. They came from the giant larvae--nasty things as bigas rats--in the valley turf ... 

"And the ants no doubt weighed with her also. 

"Since everything was upset and there was no peace and quietnessanywhere now, she said she thought she might just as well be at MonteCarlo as anywhere else. And she went. 

"She played pretty boldly, I'm told. Died in a hotel there. Very sadend... Exile... Not--not what one considers meet... A natural leader ofour English people... Uprooted. So I... 

"Yet after all, " harped the Vicar, "it comes to very little. A nuisanceof course. Children cannot run about so freely as they used to do, whatwith ant bites and so forth. Perhaps it's as well ... There used to betalk--as though this stuff would revolutionise every-thing ... But thereis something that defies all these forces of the New ... I don't knowof course. I'm not one of your modern philosophers--explain everythingwith ether and atoms. Evolution. Rubbish like that. What I mean issomething the 'Ologies don't include. Matter of reason--notunderstanding. Ripe wisdom. Human nature. _Aere perennius. _ ... Call itwhat 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 hiscustomary walk, over by Farthing Down, as he had done it for more than ascore of years, and so to the place whence he would watch young Caddies. He did the rise over by the chalk-pit crest a little puffily--he hadlong since lost the Muscular Christian stride of early days; but Caddieswas not at his work, and then, as he skirted the thicket of giantbracken that was beginning to obscure and overshadow the Hanger, he cameupon the monster's huge form seated on the hill--brooding as it wereupon the world. Caddies' knees were drawn up, his cheek was on his hand, his head a little aslant. He sat with his shoulder towards the Vicar, sothat those perplexed eyes could not be seen. He must have been thinkingvery intently--at any rate he was sitting very still ... 

He never turned round. He never knew that the Vicar, who had played solarge a part in shaping his life, looked then at him for the very lastof innumerable times--did not know even that he was there. (So it is somany partings happen. ) The Vicar was struck at the time by the factthat, after all, no one on earth had the slightest idea of what thisgreat 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 fellback from its suggestion into his older grooves of thought. 

"_Aere-perennius, "_ he whispered, walking slowly homeward by a path thatno longer ran straight athwart the turf after its former fashion, butwound circuitously to avoid new sprung tussocks of giant grass. "No!nothing is changed. Dimensions are nothing. The simple round, the commonway--"

And that night, quite painlessly, and all unknowing, he himself went thecommon way--out of this Mystery of Change he had spent his life indenying. 

They buried him in the churchyard of Cheasing Eyebright, near to thelargest yew, and the modest tombstone bearing his epitaph--it endedwith: _Ut in Principio, nunc est et semper_--was almost immediatelyhidden from the eye of man by a spread of giant, grey tasselled grasstoo stout for scythe or sheep, that came sweeping like a fog over thevillage out of the germinating moisture of the valley meadows in whichthe Food of the Gods had been working. 

BOOK III. 

THE HARVEST OF THE FOOD. 

CHAPTER THE FIRST. 

THE ALTERED WORLD. 

I. 

Change played in its new fashion with the world for twenty years. Tomost men the new things came little by little and day by day, remarkablyenough, but not so abruptly as to overwhelm. But to one man at least thefull accumulation of those two decades of the Food's work was to berevealed suddenly and amazingly in one day. For our purpose it isconvenient to take him for that one day and to tell something of thethings he saw. This man was a convict, a prisoner for life--his crime isno concern of ours--whom the law saw fit to pardon after twenty years. One summer morning this poor wretch, who had left the world a young manof three-and-twenty, found himself thrust out again from the greysimplicity of toil and discipline, that had become his life, into adazzling freedom. They had put unaccustomed clothes upon him; his hairhad been growing for some weeks, and he had parted it now for some days, and there he stood, in a sort of shabby and clumsy newness of body andmind, blinking with his eyes and blinking indeed with his soul, _outside_ again, trying to realise one incredible thing, that after allhe was again for a little while in the world of life, and for all otherincredible things, totally unprepared. He was so fortunate as to have abrother who cared enough for their distant common memories to come andmeet him and clasp his hand--a brother he had left a little lad, and whowas now a bearded prosperous man--whose very eyes were unfamiliar. Andtogether he and this stranger from his kindred came down into the townof Dover, saying little to one another and feeling many things. 

They sat for a space in a public-house, the one answering the questionsof the other about this person and that, reviving queer old points ofview, brushing aside endless new aspects and new perspectives, and thenit was time to go to the station and take the London train. Their namesand the personal things they had to talk of do not matter to our story, but only the changes and all the strangeness that this poor returningsoul found in the once familiar world. 

In Dover itself he remarked little except the goodness of beer frompewter--never before had there been such a draught of beer, and itbrought tears of gratitude to his eyes. "Beer's as good as ever, " saidhe, believing it infinitely better.... 

It was only as the train rattled them past Folkestone that he could lookout beyond his more immediate emotions, to see what had happened to theworld. He peered out of the window. "It's sunny, " he said for thetwelfth time. "I couldn't ha' had better weather. " And then for thefirst time it dawned upon him that there were novel disproportions inthe world. "Lord sakes, " he cried, sitting up and looking animated forthe first time, "but them's mortal great thissels growing out there onthe bank by that broom. If so be they _be_ thissels? Or 'ave I beenforgetting?" But they were thistles, and what he took for tall bushesof broom was the new grass, and amidst these things a company of Britishsoldiers--red-coated as ever--was skirmishing in accordance with thedirections of the drill book that had been partially revised after theBoer War. Then whack! into a tunnel, and then into Sandling Junction, which was now embedded and dark--its lamps were all alight--in a greatthicket of rhododendron that had crept out of some adjacent gardens andgrown enormously up the valley. There was a train of trucks on theSandgate siding piled high with rhododendron logs, and here it was thereturning citizen heard first of Boomfood. 

As they sped out into a country again that seemed absolutely unchanged, the two brothers were hard at their explanations. The one was full ofeager, dull questions; the other had never thought, had never troubledto see the thing as a single fact, and he was allusive and difficult tofollow. "It's this here Boomfood stuff, " he said, touching his bottomrock of knowledge. "Don't you know? 'Aven't they told you--any of 'em?Boomfood! You know--Boomfood. What all the election's about. Scientificsort of stuff. 'Asn't no one ever told you?"

He thought prison had made his brother a fearful duffer not to knowthat. 

They made wide shots at each other by way of question and answer. Between these scraps of talk were intervals of window-gazing. At firstthe man's interest in things was vague and general. His imagination hadbeen busy with what old so-and-so would say, how so-and-so would look, how he would say to all and sundry certain things that would present his"putting away" in a mitigated light. This Boomfood came in at first asit were a thing in an odd paragraph of the newspapers, then as a sourceof intellectual difficulty with his brother. But it came to himpresently that Boomfood was persistently coming in upon any topic hebegan. 

In those days the world was a patchwork of transition, so that thisgreat new fact came to him in a series of shocks of contrast. Theprocess of change had not been uniform; it had spread from one centre ofdistribution here and another centre there. The country was in patches:great areas where the Food was still to come, and areas where it wasalready in the soil and in the air, sporadic and contagious. It was abold new motif creeping in among ancient and venerable airs. 

The contrast was very vivid indeed along the line from Dover to Londonat that time. For a space they traversed just such a country-side as hehad known since his childhood, the small oblongs of field, hedge-lined, of a size for pigmy horses to plough, the little roads three cart-widthswide, the elms and oaks and poplars dotting these fields about, littlethickets of willow beside the streams; ricks of hay no higher than agiant's knees, dolls' cottages with diamond panes, brickfields, andstraggling village streets, the larger houses of the petty great, flower-grown railway banks, garden-set stations, and all the littlethings of the vanished nineteenth century still holding out againstImmensity. Here and there would be a patch of wind-sown, wind-tatteredgiant thistle defying the axe; here and there a ten-foot puff-ball orthe ashen stems of some burnt-out patch of monster grass; but that wasall there was to hint at the coming of the Food. 

For a couple of score of miles there was nothing else to foreshadow inany way the strange bigness of the wheat and of the weeds that werehidden from him not a dozen miles from his route just over the hills inthe Cheasing Eyebright valley. And then presently the traces of the Foodwould begin. The first striking thing was the great new viaduct atTonbridge, where the swamp of the choked Medway (due to a giant varietyof _Chara_) began in those days. Then again the little country, andthen, as the petty multitudinous immensity of London spread out underits haze, the traces of man's fight to keep out greatness becameabundant and incessant. 

In that south-eastern region of London at that time, and all about whereCossar and his children lived, the Food had become mysteriouslyinsurgent at a hundred points; the little life went on amidst dailyportents that only the deliberation of their increase, the slow parallelgrowth of usage to their presence, had robbed of their warning. But thisreturning citizen peered out to see for the first time the facts of theFood strange and predominant, scarred and blackened areas, big unsightlydefences and preparations, barracks and arsenals that this subtle, persistent influence had forced into the life of men. 

Here, on an ampler scale, the experience of the first Experimental Farmhad been repeated time and again. It had been in the inferior andaccidental things of life--under foot and in waste places, irregularlyand irrelevantly--that the coming of a new force and new issues hadfirst declared itself. There were great evil-smelling yards andenclosures where some invincible jungle of weed furnished fuel forgigantic machinery (little cockneys came to stare at its clangorousoiliness and tip the men a sixpence); there were roads and tracks forbig motors and vehicles--roads made of the interwoven fibres ofhypertrophied hemp; there were towers containing steam sirens that couldyell at once and warn the world against any new insurgence of vermin, or, what was queerer, venerable church towers conspicuously fitted witha mechanical scream. There were little red-painted refuge huts andgarrison shelters, each with its 300-yard rifle range, where theriflemen practised daily with soft-nosed ammunition at targets in theshape of monstrous rats. 

Six times since the day of the Skinners there had been outbreaks ofgiant rats--each time from the southwest London sewers, and now theywere as much an accepted fact there as tigers in the delta byCalcutta.... 

The man's brother had bought a paper in a heedless sort of way atSandling, and at last this chanced to catch the eye of the released man. He opened the unfamiliar sheets--they seemed to him to be smaller, morenumerous, and different in type from the papers of the times before--andhe found himself confronted with innumerable pictures about things sostrange as to be uninteresting, and with tall columns of printed matterwhose headings, for the most part, were as unmeaning as though they hadbeen written in a foreign tongue--"Great Speech by Mr. Caterham"; "TheBoomfood Laws. "

"Who's this here Caterham?" he asked, in an attempt to makeconversation. 

"_He's_ all right, " said his brother. 

"Ah! Sort of politician, eh?"

"Goin' to turn out the Government. Jolly well time he did. "

"Ah!" He reflected. "I suppose all the lot _I_ used toknow--Chamberlain, Rosebery--all that lot--_What_?"

His brother had grasped his wrist and pointed out of the window. 

"That's the Cossars!" The eyes of the released prisoner followed thefinger's direction and saw--

"My Gawd!" he cried, for the first time really overcome with amazement. The paper dropped into final forgottenness between his feet. Through thetrees he could see very distinctly, standing in an easy attitude, thelegs wide apart and the hand grasping a ball as if about to throw it, agigantic human figure a good forty feet high. The figure glittered inthe sunlight, clad in a suit of woven white metal and belted with abroad belt of steel. For a moment it focussed all attention, and thenthe eye was wrested to another more distant Giant who stood prepared tocatch, and it became apparent that the whole area of that great bay inthe hills just north of Sevenoaks had been scarred to gigantic ends. 

A hugely banked entrenchment overhung the chalk pit, in which stood thehouse, a monstrous squat Egyptian shape that Cossar had built for hissons when the Giant Nursery had served its turn, and behind was a greatdark shed that might have covered a cathedral, in which a splutteringincandescence came and went, and from out of which came a Titanichammering to beat upon the ear. Then the attention leapt back to thegiant as the great ball of iron-bound timber soared up out of his hand. 

The two men stood up and stared. The ball seemed as big as a cask. 

"Caught!" cried the man from prison, as a tree blotted out the thrower. 

The train looked on these things only for the fraction of a minute andthen passed behind trees into the Chislehurst tunnel. "My Gawd!" saidthe man from prison again, as the darkness closed about them. "Why! thatchap was as 'igh as a 'ouse. "

"That's them young Cossars, " said his brother, jerking his headallusively--"what all this trouble's about.... "

They emerged again to discover more siren-surmounted towers, more redhuts, and then the clustering villas of the outer suburbs. The art ofbill-sticking had lost nothing in the interval, and from countless tallhoardings, from house ends, from palings, and a hundred such points ofvantage came the polychromatic appeals of the great Boomfood election. "Caterham, " "Boomfood, " and "Jack the Giant-killer" again and again andagain, and monstrous caricatures and distortions--a hundred varieties ofmisrepresentations of those great and shining figures they had passed sonearly only a few minutes before.... 

II. 

It had been the purpose of the younger brother to do a very magnificentthing, to celebrate this return to life by a dinner at some restaurantof indisputable quality, a dinner that should be followed by all thatglittering succession of impressions the Music Halls of those days wereso capable of giving. It was a worthy plan to wipe off the moresuperficial stains of the prison house by this display of freeindulgence; but so far as the second item went the plan was changed. Thedinner stood, but there was a desire already more powerful than theappetite for shows, already more efficient in turning the man's mindaway from his grim prepossession with his past than any theatre couldbe, and that was an enormous curiosity and perplexity about thisBoomfood and these Boom children--this new portentous giantry thatseemed to dominate the world. "I 'aven't the 'ang of 'em, " he said. "They disturve me. "

His brother had that fineness of mind that can even set aside acontemplated hospitality. "It's _your_ evening, dear old boy, " he said. "We'll try to get into the mass meeting at the People's Palace. "

And at last the man from prison had the luck to find himself wedged intoa packed multitude and staring from afar at a little brightly litplatform under an organ and a gallery. The organist had been playingsomething that had set boots tramping as the people swarmed in; but thatwas over now. 

Hardly had the man from prison settled into place and done his quarrelwith an importunate stranger who elbowed, before Caterham came. Hewalked out of a shadow towards the middle of the platform, the mostinsignificant little pigmy, away there in the distance, a little blackfigure with a pink dab for a face, --in profile one saw his quitedistinctive aquiline nose--a little figure that trailed after it mostinexplicably--a cheer. A cheer it was that began away there and grew andspread. A little spluttering of voices about the platform at first thatsuddenly leapt up into a flame of sound and swept athwart the whole massof humanity within the building and without. How they cheered! Hooray!Hooray!

No one in all those myriads cheered like the man from prison. The tearspoured down his face, and he only stopped cheering at last because thething had choked him. You must have been in prison as long as he beforeyou can understand, or even begin to understand, what it means to a manto let his lungs go in a crowd. (But for all that he did not evenpretend to himself that he knew what all this emotion was about. )Hooray! O God!--Hoo-ray!

And then a sort of silence. Caterham had subsided to a conspicuouspatience, and subordinate and inaudible persons were saying and doingformal and insignificant things. It was like hearing voices through thenoise of leaves in spring. "Wawawawa---" What did it matter? People inthe audience talked to one another. "Wawawawawa---" the thing went on. Would that grey-headed duffer never have done? Interrupting? Of coursethey were interrupting. "Wa, wa, wa, wa---" But shall we hear Caterhamany better?

Meanwhile at any rate there was Caterham to stare at, and one couldstand and study the distant prospect of the great man's features. He waseasy to draw was this man, and already the world had him to study atleisure on lamp chimneys and children's plates, on Anti-Boomfood medalsand Anti-Boomfood flags, on the selvedges of Caterham silks and cottonsand in the linings of Good Old English Caterham hats. He pervades allthe caricature of that time. One sees him as a sailor standing to anold-fashioned gun, a port-fire labelled "New Boomfood Laws" in his hand;while in the sea wallows that huge, ugly, threatening monster, "Boomfood;" or he is _cap-a-pie_ in armour, St. George's cross on shieldand helm, and a cowardly titanic Caliban sitting amidst desecrations atthe mouth of a horrid cave declines his gauntlet of the "New BoomfoodRegulations;" or he comes flying down as Perseus and rescues a chainedand beautiful Andromeda (labelled distinctly about her belt as"Civilisation") from a wallowing waste of sea monster bearing upon itsvarious necks and claws "Irreligion, " "Trampling Egotism, " "Mechanism, ""Monstrosity, " and the like. But it was as "Jack the Giant-killer" thatthe popular imagination considered Caterham most correctly cast, and itwas in the vein of a Jack the Giant-killer poster that the man fromprison, enlarged that distant miniature. 

The "Wawawawa" came abruptly to an end. 

He's done. He's sitting down. Yes! No! Yes! It's Caterham! "Caterham!""Caterham!" And then came the cheers. 

It takes a multitude to make such a stillness as followed that disorderof cheering. A man alone in a wilderness;--it's stillness of a sort nodoubt, but he hears himself breathe, he hears himself move, he hears allsorts of things. Here the voice of Caterham was the one single thingheard, a thing very bright and clear, like a little light burning in ablack velvet recess. Hear indeed! One heard him as though he spoke atone's elbow. 

It was stupendously effective to the man from prison, that gesticulatinglittle figure in a halo of light, in a halo of rich and swaying sounds;behind it, partially effaced as it were, sat its supporters on theplatform, and in the foreground was a wide perspective of innumerablebacks and profiles, a vast multitudinous attention. That little figureseemed to have absorbed the substance from them all. 

Caterham spoke of our ancient institutions. "Earearear, " roared thecrowd. "Ear! ear!" said the man from prison. He spoke of our ancientspirit of order and justice. "Earearear!" roared the crowd. "Ear! Ear!"cried the man from prison, deeply moved. He spoke of the wisdom of ourforefathers, of the slow growth of venerable institutions, of moral andsocial traditions, that fitted our English national characteristics asthe skin fits the hand. "Ear! Ear!" groaned the man from prison, withtears of excitement on his cheeks. And now all these things were to gointo the melting pot. Yes, into the melting pot! Because three men inLondon twenty years ago had seen fit to mix something indescribable in abottle, all the order and sanctity of things--Cries of "No! No!"--Well, if it was not to be so, they must exert themselves, they must saygood-bye to hesitation--Here there came a gust of cheering. They mustsay good-bye to hesitation and half measures. 

"We have heard, gentlemen, " cried Caterham, "of nettles that becomegiant nettles. At first they are no more than other nettles--littleplants that a firm hand may grasp and wrench away; but if you leavethem--if you leave them, they grow with such a power of poisonousexpansion that at last you must needs have axe and rope, you must needshave danger to life and limb, you must needs have toil and distress--menmay be killed in their felling, men may be killed in their felling---"

There came a stir and interruption, and then the man from prison heardCaterham's voice again, ringing clear and strong: "Learn about Boomfoodfrom Boomfood itself and--" He paused--"_Grasp your nettle before it istoo late!_"

He stopped and stood wiping his lips. "A crystal, " cried some one, "acrystal, " and then came that same strange swift growth to thunderoustumult, until the whole world seemed cheering.... 

The man from prison came out of the hall at last, marvellously stirred, and with that in his face that marks those who have seen a vision. Heknew, every one knew; his ideas were no longer vague. He had come backto a world in crisis, to the immediate decision of a stupendous issue. He must play his part in the great conflict like a man--like a free, responsible man. The antagonism presented itself as a picture. On theone hand those easy gigantic mail-clad figures of the morning--one sawthem now in a different light--on the other this little black-cladgesticulating creature under the limelight, that pigmy thing with itsordered flow of melodious persuasion, its little, marvellouslypenetrating voice, John Caterham--"Jack the Giant-killer. " They must allunite to "grasp the nettle" before it was "too late. "

III. 

The tallest and strongest and most regarded of all the children of theFood were the three sons of Cossar. The mile or so of land nearSevenoaks in which their boyhood passed became so trenched, so dug outand twisted about, so covered with sheds and huge working models and allthe play of their developing powers, it was like no other place onearth. And long since it had become too little for the things theysought to do. The eldest son was a mighty schemer of wheeled engines; hehad made himself a sort of giant bicycle that no road in the world hadroom for, no bridge could bear. There it stood, a great thing of wheelsand engines, capable of two hundred and fifty miles an hour, uselesssave that now and then he would mount it and fling himself backwardsand forwards across that cumbered work-yard. He had meant to go aroundthe little world with it; he had made it with that intention, while hewas still no more than a dreaming boy. Now its spokes were rusted deepred like wounds, wherever the enamel had been chipped away. 

"You must make a road for it first, Sonnie, " Cossar had said, "beforeyou can do that. "

So one morning about dawn the young giant and his brothers had set towork to make a road about the world. They seem to have had an inkling ofopposition impending, and they had worked with remarkable vigour. Theworld had discovered them soon enough, driving that road as straight asa flight of a bullet towards the English Channel, already some miles ofit levelled and made and stamped hard. They had been stopped beforemidday by a vast crowd of excited people, owners of land, land agents, local authorities, lawyers, policemen, soldiers even. 

"We're making a road, " the biggest boy had explained. 

"Make a road by all means, " said the leading lawyer on the ground, "butplease respect the rights of other people. You have already infringedthe private rights of twenty-seven private proprietors; let alone thespecial privileges and property of an urban district board, nine parishcouncils, a county council, two gasworks, and a railway company.... "

"Goodney!" said the elder boy Cossar. 

"You will have to stop it. "

"But don't you want a nice straight road in the place of all theserotten rutty little lanes?" "I won't say it wouldn't be advantageous, but--"

"It isn't to be done, " said the eldest Cossar boy, picking up his tools. 

"Not in this way, " said the lawyer, "certainly. "

"How is it to be done?"

The leading lawyer's answer had been complicated and vague. 

Cossar had come down to see the mischief his children had done, andreproved them severely and laughed enormously and seemed to be extremelyhappy over the affair. "You boys must wait a bit, " he shouted up tothem, "before you can do things like that. "

"The lawyer told us we must begin by preparing a scheme, and gettingspecial powers and all sorts of rot. Said it would take us years. "

"_We'll_ have a scheme before long, little boy, " cried Cossar, hands tohis mouth as he shouted, "never fear. For a bit you'd better play aboutand make models of the things you want to do. "

They did as he told them like obedient sons. 

But for all that the Cossar lads brooded a little. 

"It's all very well, " said the second to the first, "but I don't alwayswant just to play about and plan, I want to do something _real_, youknow. We didn't come into this world so strong as we are, just to playabout in this messy little bit of ground, you know, and take littlewalks and keep out of the towns"--for by that time they were forbiddenall boroughs and urban districts, "Doing nothing's just wicked. Can't wefind out something the little people _want_ done and do it forthem--just for the fun of doing it?

"Lots of them haven't houses fit to live in, " said the second boy, "Let's go and build 'em a house close up to London, that will holdheaps and heaps of them and be ever so comfortable and nice, and let'smake 'em a nice little road to where they all go and do business--nicestraight little road, and make it all as nice as nice. We'll make it allso clean and pretty that they won't any of them be able to live grubbyand beastly like most of them do now. Water enough for them to washwith, we'll have--you know they're so dirty now that nine out of ten oftheir houses haven't even baths in them, the filthy little skunks! Youknow, the ones that have baths spit insults at the ones that haven't, instead of helping them to get them--and call 'em the GreatUnwashed--_-You_ know. We'll alter all that. And we'll make electricitylight and cook and clean up for them, and all. Fancy! They make theirwomen--women who are going to be mothers--crawl about and scrub floors!

"We could make it all beautifully. We could bank up a valley in thatrange of hills over there and make a nice reservoir, and we could make abig place here to generate our electricity and have it all simplylovely. Couldn't we, brother? And then perhaps they'd let us do someother things. "

"Yes, " said the elder brother, "we could do it _very_ nice for them. "

"Then _let's, "_ said the second brother. 

"_I_ don't mind, " said the elder brother, and looked about for a handytool. 

And that led to another dreadful bother. 

Agitated multitudes were at them in no time, telling them for a thousandreasons to stop, telling them to stop for no reason at all--babbling, confused, and varied multitudes. The place they were building was toohigh--it couldn't possibly be safe. It was ugly; it interfered with theletting of proper-sized houses in the neighbourhood; it ruined the toneof the neighbourhood; it was unneighbourly; it was contrary to the LocalBuilding Regulations; it infringed the right of the local authority tomuddle about with a minute expensive electric supply of its own; itinterfered with the concerns of the local water company. 

Local Government Board clerks roused themselves to judicial obstruction. The little lawyer turned up again to represent about a dozen threatenedinterests; local landowners appeared in opposition; people withmysterious claims claimed to be bought off at exorbitant rates; theTrades Unions of all the building trades lifted up collective voices;and a ring of dealers in all sorts of building material became a bar. Extraordinary associations of people with prophetic visions of aesthetichorrors rallied to protect the scenery of the place where they wouldbuild the great house, of the valley where they would bank up the water. These last people were absolutely the worst asses of the lot, the Cossarboys considered. That beautiful house of the Cossar boys was just like awalking-stick thrust into a wasps' nest, in no time. 

"I never did!" said the elder boy. 

"We can't go on, " said the second brother. 

"Rotten little beasts they are, " said the third of the brothers; "wecan't do _anything!_"

"Even when it's for their own comfort. Such a _nice_ place we'd havemade for them too. "

"They seem to spend their silly little lives getting in each other'sway, " said the eldest boy, "Rights and laws and regulations andrascalities; it's like a game of spellicans.... Well, anyhow, they'llhave to live in their grubby, dirty, silly little houses for a bitlonger. It's very evident _we_ can't go on with this. "

And the Cossar children left that great house unfinished, a mere hole offoundations and the beginning of a wall, and sulked back to their bigenclosure. After a time the hole was filled with water and withstagnation and weeds, and vermin, and the Food, either dropped there bythe sons of Cossar or blowing thither as dust, set growth going in itsusual fashion. Water voles came out over the country and did infinitehavoc, and one day a farmer caught his pigs drinking there, andinstantly and with great presence of mind--for he knew: of the great hogof Oakham--slew them all. And from that deep pool it was the mosquitoescame, quite terrible mosquitoes, whose only virtue was that the sons ofCossar, after being bitten for a little, could stand the thing nolonger, but chose a moonlight night when law and order were abed anddrained the water clean away into the river by Brook. 

But they left the big weeds and the big water voles and all sorts of bigundesirable things still living and breeding on the site they hadchosen--the site on which the fair great house of the little peoplemight have towered to heaven ... 

IV. 

That had been in the boyhood of the Sons, but now they were nearly men, And the chains had been tightening upon them and tightening with everyyear of growth. Each year they grew, and the Food spread and greatthings multiplied, each year the stress and tension rose. The Food hadbeen at first for the great mass of mankind a distant marvel, and nowIt was coming home to every threshold, and threatening, pressing againstand distorting the whole order of life. It blocked this, it overturnedthat; it changed natural products, and by changing natural products itstopped employments and threw men out of work by the hundred thousands;it swept over boundaries and turned the world of trade into a world ofcataclysms: no wonder mankind hated it. 

And since it is easier to hate animate than inanimate things, animalsmore than plants, and one's fellow-men more completely than any animals, the fear and trouble engendered by giant nettles and six-foot grassblades, awful insects and tiger-like vermin, grew all into one greatpower of detestation that aimed itself with a simple directness at thatscattered band of great human beings, the Children of the Food. Thathatred had become the central force in political affairs. The old partylines had been traversed and effaced altogether under the insistence ofthese newer issues, and the conflict lay now with the party of thetemporisers, who were for putting little political men to control andregulate the Food, and the party of reaction for whom Caterharn spoke, speaking always with a more sinister ambiguity, crystallising hisintention first in one threatening phrase and then another, now that menmust "prune the bramble growths, " now that they must find a "cure forelephantiasis, " and at last upon the eve of the election that they must"Grasp the nettle. "

One day the three sons of Cossar, who were now no longer boys but men, sat among the masses of their futile work and talked together aftertheir fashion of all these things. They had been working all day at oneof a series of great and complicated trenches their father had bid themmake, and now it was sunset, and they sat in the little garden spacebefore the great house and looked at the world and rested, until thelittle servants within should say their food was ready. 

You must figure these mighty forms, forty feet high the least of themwas, reclining on a patch of turf that would have seemed a stubble ofreeds to a common man. One sat up and chipped earth from his huge bootswith an iron girder he grasped in his hand; the second rested on hiselbow; the third whittled a pine tree into shape and made a smell ofresin in the air. They were clothed not in cloth but in under-garmentsof woven, rope and outer clothes of felted aluminium wire; they wereshod with timber and iron, and the links and buttons and belts of theirclothing were all of plated steel. The great single-storeyed house theylived in, Egyptian in its massiveness, half built of monstrous blocks ofchalk and half excavated from the living rock of the hill, had a front afull hundred feet in height, and beyond, the chimneys and wheels, thecranes and covers of their work sheds rose marvellously against the sky. Through a circular window in the house there was visible a spout fromwhich some white-hot metal dripped and dripped in measured drops into areceptacle out of sight. The place was enclosed and rudely fortified bymonstrous banks of earth, backed with steel both over the crests of theDowns above and across the dip of the valley. It needed something ofcommon size to mark the nature of the scale. The train that camerattling from Sevenoaks athwart their vision, and presently plunged intothe tunnel out of their sight, looked by contrast with them like somesmall-sized automatic toy. 

"They have made all the woods this side of Ightham out of bounds, " saidone, "and moved the board that was out by Knockholt two miles and morethis way. "

"It is the least they could do, " said the youngest, after a pause. "Theyare trying to take the wind out of Caterham's sails. "

"It's not enough for that, and--it is almost too much for us, " said thethird. 

"They are cutting us off from Brother Redwood. Last time I went to himthe red notices had crept a mile in, either way. The road to him alongthe Downs is no more than a narrow lane. "

The speaker thought. "What has come to our brother Redwood?"

"Why?" said the eldest brother. 

The speaker backed a bough from his pine. "He was like--as though hewasn't awake. He didn't seem to listen to what I had to say. And he saidsomething of--love. "

The youngest tapped his girder on the edge of his iron sole and laughed. "Brother Redwood, " he said, "has dreams. "

Neither spoke for a space. Then the eldest brother said, "This coopingup and cooping up grows more than I can bear. At last, I believe, theywill draw a line round our boots and tell us to live on that. "

The middle brother swept aside a heap of pine boughs with one hand andshifted his attitude. "What they do now is nothing to what they will dowhen Caterham has power. "

"If he gets power, " said the youngest brother, smiting the ground withhis girder. 

"As he will, " said the eldest, staring at his feet. 

The middle brother ceased his lopping, and his eye went to the greatbanks that sheltered them about. "Then, brothers, " he said, "our youthwill be over, and, as Father Redwood said to us long ago, we must quitourselves like men. "

"Yes, " said the eldest brother; "but what exactly does that mean? Justwhat does it mean--when that day of trouble comes?"

He too glanced at those rude vast suggestions of entrenchment aboutthem, looking not so much at them as through them and over the hills tothe innumerable multitudes beyond. Something of the same sort came intoall their minds--a vision of little people coming out to war, in aflood, the little people, inexhaustible, incessant, malignant.... 

"They are little, " said the youngest brother; "but they have numbersbeyond counting, like the sands of the sea. "

"They have arms--they have weapons even, that our brothers in Sunderlandhave made. "

"Besides, Brothers, except for vermin, except for little accidents withevil things, what have we seen of killing?"

"I know, " said the eldest brother. "For all that--we are what we are. When the day of trouble comes we must do the thing we have to do. "

He closed his knife with a snap--the blade was the length of a man--andused his new pine staff to help himself rise. He stood up and turnedtowards the squat grey immensity of the house. The crimson of thesunset caught him as he rose, caught the mail and clasps about his neckand the woven metal of his arms, and to the eyes of his brother itseemed as though he was suddenly suffused with blood ... 

As the young giant rose a little black figure became visible to himagainst that western incandescence on the top of the embankment thattowered above the summit of the down. The black limbs waved in ungainlygestures. Something in the fling of the limbs suggested haste to theyoung giant's mind. He waved his pine mast in reply, filled the wholevalley with his vast Hullo! threw a "Something's up" to his brothers, and set off in twenty-foot strides to meet and help his father. 

V. 

It chanced too that a young man who was not a giant was delivering hissoul about these sons of Cossar just at that same time. He had come overthe hills beyond Sevenoaks, he and his friend, and he it was did thetalking. In the hedge as they came along they had heard a pitifulsquealing, and had intervened to rescue three nestling tits from theattack of a couple of giant ants. That adventure it was had set himtalking. 

"Reactionary!" he was saying, as they came within sight of the Cossarencampment. "Who wouldn't be reactionary? Look at that square of ground, that space of God's earth that was once sweet and fair, torn, desecrated, disembowelled! Those sheds! That great wind-wheel! Thatmonstrous wheeled machine! Those dykes! Look at those three monsterssquatting there, plotting some ugly devilment or other! Look--look atall the land!"

His friend glanced at his face. "You have been listening to Caterham, "he said. 

"Using my eyes. Looking a little into the peace and order of the past weleave behind. This foul Food is the last shape of the Devil, still setas ever upon the ruin of our world. Think what the world must have beenbefore our days, what it was still when our mothers bore us, and see itnow! Think how these slopes once smiled under the golden harvest, howthe hedges, full of sweet little flowers, parted the modest portion ofthis man from that, how the ruddy farmhouses dotted the land, and thevoice of the church bells from yonder tower stilled the whole world eachSabbath into Sabbath prayer. And now, every year, still more and more ofmonstrous weeds, of monstrous vermin, and these giants growing all aboutus, straddling over us, blundering against all that is subtle and sacredin our world. Why here--Look!"

He pointed, and his friend's eyes followed the line of his white finger. 

"One of their footmarks. See! It has smashed itself three feet deep andmore, a pitfall for horse and rider, a trap to the unwary. There is abriar rose smashed to death; there is grass uprooted and a teazlecrushed aside, a farmer's drain pipe snapped and the edge of the pathwaybroken down. Destruction! So they are doing all over the world, all overthe order and decency the world of men has made. Trampling on allthings. Reaction! What else?"

"But--reaction. What do you hope to do?"

"Stop it!" cried the young man from Oxford. "Before it is too late. "

"But---"

"It's _not_ impossible, " cried the young man from Oxford, with a jumpin his voice. "We want the firm hand; we want the subtle plan, theresolute mind. We have been mealy-mouthed and weak-handed; we havetrifled and temporised and the Food has grown and grown. Yet even now--"

He stopped for a moment. "This is the echo of Caterham, " said hisfriend. 

"Even now. Even now there is hope--abundant hope, if only we make sureof what we want and what we mean to destroy. The mass of people are withus, much more with us than they were a few years ago; the law is withus, the constitution and order of society, the spirit of the establishedreligions, the customs and habits of mankind are with us--and againstthe Food. Why should we temporise? Why should we lie? We hate it, wedon't want it; why then should we have it? Do you mean to just grizzleand obstruct passively and do nothing--till the sands are out?"

He stopped short and turned about. "Look at that grove of nettles there. In the midst of them are homes--deserted--where once clean families ofsimple men played out their honest lives!

"And there!" he swung round to where the young Cossars muttered to oneanother of their wrongs. 

"Look at them! And I know their father, a brute, a sort of brute beastwith an intolerant loud voice, a creature who has ran amuck in our alltoo merciful world for the last thirty years and more. An engineer! Tohim all that we hold dear and sacred is nothing. Nothing! The splendidtraditions of our race and land, the noble institutions, the venerableorder, the broad slow march from precedent to precedent that has madeour English people great and this sunny island free--it is all an idletale, told and done with. Some claptrap about the Future is worth allthese sacred things.... The sort of man who would run a tramway over hismother's grave if he thought that was the cheapest line the tramwaycould take.... And you think to temporise, to make some scheme ofcompromise, that will enable you to live in your way while that--thatmachinery--lives in its. I tell you it is hopeless--hopeless. As wellmake treaties with a tiger! They want things monstrous--we want themsane and sweet. It is one thing or the other. "

"But what can you do?"

"Much! All! Stop the Food! They are still scattered, these giants; stillimmature and disunited. Chain them, gag them, muzzle them. At any coststop them. It is their world or ours! Stop the Food. Shut up these menwho make it. Do anything to stop Cossar! You don't seem to remember--onegeneration--only one generation needs holding down, and then--Then wecould level those mounds there, fill up their footsteps, take the uglysirens from our church towers, smash all our elephant guns, and turn ourfaces again to the old order, the ripe old civilisation for which thesoul of man is fitted. "

"It's a mighty effort. "

"For a mighty end. And if we don't? Don't you see the prospect before usclear as day? Everywhere the giants will increase and multiply;everywhere they will make and scatter the Food. The grass will growgigantic in our fields, the weeds in our hedges, the vermin in thethickets, the rats in the drains. More and more and more. This is only abeginning. The insect world will rise on us, the plant world, the veryfishes in the sea, will swamp and drown our ships. Tremendous growthswill obscure and hide our houses, smother our churches, smash anddestroy all the order of our cities, and we shall become no more than afeeble vermin under the heels of the new race. Mankind will be swampedand drowned in things of its own begetting! And all for nothing! Size!Mere size! Enlargement and _da capo_. Already we go picking our wayamong the first beginnings of the coming time. And all we do is to say'How inconvenient!' To grumble and do nothing. _No_!"

He raised his hand. 

"Let them do the thing they have to do! So also will I. I am forReaction--unstinted and fearless Reaction. Unless you mean to take thisFood also, what else is there to do in all the world? We have trifled inthe middle ways too long. You! Trifling in the middle ways is yourhabit, your circle of existence, your space and time. So, not I! I amagainst the Food, with all my strength and purpose against the Food. "

He turned on his companion's grunt of dissent. "Where are you?"

"It's a complicated business---"

"Oh!--Driftwood!" said the young man from Oxford, very bitterly, with afling of all his limbs. "The middle way is nothingness. It is one thingor the other. Eat or destroy. Eat or destroy! What else is there todo?"

CHAPTER THE SECOND. 

THE GIANT LOVERS. 

I. 

Now it chanced in the days when Caterham was campaigning against theBoom-children before the General Election that was--amidst the mosttragic and terrible circumstances--to bring him into power, that thegiant Princess, that Serene Highness whose early nutrition had played sogreat a part in the brilliant career of Doctor Winkles, had come fromthe kingdom of her father to England, on an occasion that was deemedimportant. She was affianced for reasons of state to a certainPrince--and the wedding was to be made an event of internationalsignificance. There had arisen mysterious delays. Rumour and Imaginationcollaborated in the story and many things were said. There weresuggestions of a recalcitrant Prince who declared he would not be madeto look like a fool--at least to this extent. People sympathised withhim. That is the most significant aspect of the affair. 

Now it may seem a strange thing, but it is a fact that the giantPrincess, when she came to England, knew of no other giants whatever. She had lived in a world where tact is almost a passion and reservationsthe air of one's life. They had kept the thing from her; they hadhedged her about from sight or suspicion of any gigantic form, until herappointed coming to England was due. Until she met young Redwood she hadno inkling that there was such a thing as another giant in the world. 

In the kingdom of the father of the Princess there were wild wastes ofupland and mountains where she had been accustomed to roam freely. Sheloved the sunrise and the sunset and all the great drama of the openheavens more than anything else in the world, but among a people at onceso democratic and so vehemently loyal as the English her freedom wasmuch restricted. People came in brakes, in excursion trains, inorganised multitudes to see her; they would cycle long distances tostare at her, and it was necessary to rise betimes if she would walk inpeace. It was still near the dawn that morning when young Redwood cameupon her. 

The Great Park near the Palace where she lodged stretched, for a scoreof miles and more, west and south of the western palace gates. Thechestnut trees of its avenues reached high above her head. Each one asshe passed it seemed to proffer a more abundant wealth of blossom. For atime she was content with sight and scent, but at last she was won overby these offers, and set herself so busily to choose and pick that shedid not perceive young Redwood until he was close upon her. 

She moved among the chestnut trees, with the destined lover drawing nearto her, unanticipated, unsuspected. She thrust her hands in among thebranches, breaking them and gathering them. She was alone in the world. Then---

She looked up, and in that moment she was mated. 

We must needs put our imaginations to his stature to see the beauty hesaw. That unapproachable greatness that prevents our immediate sympathywith her did not exist for him. There she stood, a gracious girl, thefirst created being that had ever seemed a mate for him, light andslender, lightly clad, the fresh breeze of the dawn moulding the subtlyfolding robe upon her against the soft strong lines of her form, andwith a great mass of blossoming chestnut branches in her hands. Thecollar of her robe opened to show the whiteness of her neck and a softshadowed roundness that passed out of sight towards her shoulders. Thebreeze had stolen a strand or so of her hair too, and strained itsred-tipped brown across her cheek. Her eyes were open blue, and her lipsrested always in the promise of a smile as she reached among thebranches. 

She turned upon him with a start, saw him, and for a space they regardedone another. For her, the sight of him was so amazing, so incredible, asto be, for some moments at least, terrible. He came to her with theshock of a supernatural apparition; he broke all the established law ofher world. He was a youth of one-and-twenty then, slenderly built, withhis father's darkness and his father's gravity. He was clad in a sobersoft brown leather, close-fitting easy garments, and in brown hose, thatshaped him bravely. His head went uncovered in all weathers. They stoodregarding one another--she incredulously amazed, and he with his heartbeating fast. It was a moment without a prelude, the cardinal meeting oftheir lives. 

For him there was less surprise. He had been seeking her, and yet hisheart beat fast. He came towards her, slowly, with his eyes upon herface. 

"You are the Princess, " he said. "My father has told me. You are thePrincess who was given the Food of the Gods. "

"I am the Princess--yes, " she said, with eyes of wonder. "But--what areyou?"

"I am the son of the man who made the Food of the Gods. "

"The Food of the Gods!"

"Yes, the Food of the Gods. "

"But--"

Her face expressed infinite perplexity. 

"What? I don't understand. The Food of the Gods?"

"You have not heard?"

"The Food of the Gods! _No_!"

She found herself trembling violently. The colour left her face. "I didnot know, " she said. "Do you mean--?"

He waited for her. 

"Do you mean there are other--giants?"

He repeated, "Did you not know?"

And she answered, with the growing amazement of realisation, "_No!_"

The whole world and all the meaning of the world was changing for her. Abranch of chestnut slipped from her hand. "Do you mean to say, " sherepeated stupidly, "that there are other giants in the world? That somefood--?"

He caught her amazement. 

"You know nothing?" he cried. "You have never heard of us? You, whom theFood has made akin to us!"

There was terror still in the eyes that stared at him. Her hand rosetowards her throat and fell again. She whispered, "_No_. "

It seemed to her that she must weep or faint. Then in a moment she hadrule over herself and she was speaking and thinking clearly. "All thishas been kept from me, " she said. "It is like a dream. I havedreamt--have dreamt such things. But waking--No. Tell me! Tell me! Whatare you? What is this Food of the Gods? Tell me slowly--and clearly. Whyhave they kept it from me, that I am not alone?"

II. 

"Tell me, " she said, and young Redwood, tremulous and excited, sethimself to tell her--it was poor and broken telling for a time--of theFood of the Gods and the giant children who were scattered over theworld. 

You must figure them both, flushed and startled in their bearing;getting at one another's meaning through endless half-heard, half-spokenphrases, repeating, making perplexing breaks and new departures--awonderful talk, in which she awakened from the ignorance of all herlife. And very slowly it became clear to her that she was no exceptionto the order of mankind, but one of a scattered brotherhood, who had alleaten the Food and grown for ever out of the little limits of the folkbeneath their feet. Young Redwood spoke of his father, of Cossar, of theBrothers scattered throughout the country, of the great dawn of widermeaning that had come at last into the history of the world. "We are inthe beginning of a beginning, " he said; "this world of theirs is onlythe prelude to the world the Food will make. 

"My father believes--and I also believe--that a time will come whenlittleness will have passed altogether out of the world of man, --whengiants shall go freely about this earth--their earth--doing continuallygreater and more splendid things. But that--that is to come. We are noteven the first generation of that--we are the first experiments. "

"And of these things, " she said, "I knew nothing!"

"There are times when it seems to me almost as if we had come too soon. Some one, I suppose, had to come first. But the world was all unpreparedfor our coming and for the coming of all the lesser great things thatdrew their greatness from the Food. There have been blunders; there havebeen conflicts. The little people hate our kind.... 

"They are hard towards us because they are so little.... And because ourfeet are heavy on the things that make their lives. But at any rate theyhate us now; they will have none of us--only if we could shrink back tothe common size of them would they begin to forgive.... 

"They are happy in houses that are prison cells to us; their cities aretoo small for us; we go in misery along their narrow ways; we cannotworship in their churches.... 

"We see over their walls and over their protections; we lookinadvertently into their upper windows; we look over their customs;their laws are no more than a net about our feet.... 

"Every time we stumble we hear them shouting; every time we blunderagainst their limits or stretch out to any spacious act.... 

"Our easy paces are wild flights to them, and all they deem great andwonderful no more than dolls' pyramids to us. Their pettiness of methodand appliance and imagination hampers and defeats our powers. There areno machines to the power of our hands, no helps to fit our needs. Theyhold our greatness in servitude by a thousand invisible bands. We arestronger, man for man, a hundred times, but we are disarmed; our verygreatness makes us debtors; they claim the land we stand upon; they taxour ampler need of food and shelter, and for all these things we musttoil with the tools these dwarfs can make us--and to satisfy theirdwarfish fancies ... 

"They pen us in, in every way. Even to live one must cross theirboundaries. Even to meet you here to-day I have passed a limit. All thatis reasonable and desirable in life they make out of bounds for us. Wemay not go into the towns; we may not cross the bridges; we may not stepon their ploughed fields or into the harbours of the game they kill. Iam cut off now from all our Brethren except the three sons of Cossar, and even that way the passage narrows day by day. One could think theysought occasion against us to do some more evil thing ... "

"But we are strong, " she said. 

"We should be strong--yes. We feel, all of us--you too I know mustfeel--that we have power, power to do great things, power insurgent inus. But before we can do anything--"

He flung out a hand that seemed to sweep away a world. 

"Though I thought I was alone in the world, " she said, after a pause, "Ihave thought of these things. They have taught me always that strengthwas almost a sin, that it was better to be little than great, that alltrue religion was to shelter the weak and little, encourage the weakand little, help them to multiply and multiply until at last theycrawled over one another, to sacrifice all our strength in their cause. But ... Always I have doubted the thing they taught. "

"This life, " he said, "these bodies of ours, are not for dying. "

"No. "

"Nor to live in futility. But if we would not do that, it is alreadyplain to all our Brethren a conflict must come. I know not whatbitterness of conflict must presently come, before the little folks willsuffer us to live as we need to live. All the Brethren have thought ofthat. Cossar, of whom I told you: he too has thought of that. "

"They are very little and weak. "

"In their way. But you know all the means of death are in their hands, and made for their hands. For hundreds of thousands of years theselittle people, whose world we invade, have been learning how to kill oneanother. They are very able at that. They are able in many ways. Andbesides, they can deceive and change suddenly.... I do not know.... There comes a conflict. You--you perhaps are different from us. For us, assuredly, the conflict comes.... The thing they call War. We know it. In a way we prepare for it. But you know--those little people!--we donot know how to kill, at least we do not want to kill--"

"Look, " she interrupted, and he heard a yelping horn. 

He turned at the direction of her eyes, and found a bright yellow motorcar, with dark goggled driver and fur-clad passengers, whooping, throbbing, and buzzing resentfully at his heel. He moved his foot, andthe mechanism, with three angry snorts, resumed its fussy way towardsthe town. "Filling up the roadway!" floated up to him. 

Then some one said, "Look! Did you see? There is the monster Princessover beyond the trees!" and all their goggled faces came round to stare. 

"I say, " said another. "_That_ won't do ... "

"All this, " she said, "is more amazing than I can tell. "

"That they should not have told you, " he said, and left his sentenceincomplete. 

"Until you came upon me, I had lived in a world where I wasgreat--alone. I had made myself a life--for that. I had thought I wasthe victim of some strange freak of nature. And now my world hascrumbled down, in half an hour, and I see another world, otherconditions, wider possibilities--fellowship--"

"Fellowship, " he answered. 

"I want you to tell me more yet, and much more, " she said. "You knowthis passes through my mind like a tale that is told. You even ... In aday perhaps, or after several days, I shall believe in you. Now--Now Iam dreaming.... Listen!"

The first stroke of a clock above the palace offices far away hadpenetrated to them. Each counted mechanically "Seven. "

"This, " she said, "should be the hour of my return. They will be takingthe bowl of my coffee into the hall where I sleep. The little officialsand servants--you cannot dream how grave they are--will be stirringabout their little duties. "

"They will wonder ... But I want to talk to you. "

She thought. "But I want to think too. I want now to think alone, andthink out this change in things, think away the old solitude, and thinkyou and those others into my world.... I shall go. I shall go backto-day to my place in the castle, and to-morrow, as the dawn comes, Ishall come again--here. "

"I shall be here waiting for you. "

"All day I shall dream and dream of this new world you have given me. Even now, I can scarcely believe--"

She took a step back and surveyed him from the feet to the face. Theireyes met and locked for a moment. 

"Yes, " she said, with a little laugh that was half a sob. "You are real. But it is very wonderful! Do you think--indeed--? Suppose to-morrow Icome and find you--a pigmy like the others... Yes, I must think. And sofor to-day--as the little people do--"

She held out her hand, and for the first time they touched one another. Their hands clasped firmly and their eyes met again. 

"Good-bye, " she said, "for to-day. Good-bye! Good-bye, Brother Giant!"

He hesitated with some unspoken thing, and at last he answered hersimply, "Good-bye. "

For a space they held each other's hands, studying each the other'sface. And many times after they had parted, she looked back halfdoubtfully at him, standing still in the place where they had met.... 

She walked into her apartments across the great yard of the Palace likeone who walks in a dream, with a vast branch of chestnut trailing fromher hand. 

III. 

These two met altogether fourteen times before the beginning of the end. They met in the Great Park or on the heights and among the gorges ofthe rusty-roaded, heathery moorland, set with dusky pine-woods, thatstretched to the south-west. Twice they met in the great avenue ofchestnuts, and five times near the broad ornamental water the king, hergreat-grandfather, had made. There was a place where a great trim lawn, set with tall conifers, sloped graciously to the water's edge, and thereshe would sit, and he would lie at her knees and look up in her face andtalk, telling of all the things that had been, and of the work hisfather had set before him, and of the great and spacious dream of whatthe giant people should one day be. Commonly they met in the early dawn, but once they met there in the afternoon, and found presently amultitude of peering eavesdroppers about them, cyclists, pedestrians, peeping from the bushes, rustling (as sparrows will rustle about one inthe London parks) amidst the dead leaves in the woods behind, glidingdown the lake in boats towards a point of view, trying to get nearer tothem and hear. 

It was the first hint that offered of the enormous interest thecountryside was taking in their meetings. And once--it was the seventhtime, and it precipitated the scandal--they met out upon the breezymoorland under a clear moonlight, and talked in whispers there, for thenight was warm and still. 

Very soon they had passed from the realisation that in them and throughthem a new world of giantry shaped itself in the earth, from thecontemplation of the great struggle between big and little, in whichthey were clearly destined to participate, to interests at once morepersonal and more spacious. Each time they met and talked and looked onone another, it crept a little more out of their subconscious beingtowards recognition, that something more dear and wonderful thanfriendship was between them, and walked between them and drew theirhands together. And in a little while they came to the word itself andfound themselves lovers, the Adam and Eve of a new race in the world. 

They set foot side by side into the wonderful valley of love, with itsdeep and quiet places. The world changed about them with their changingmood, until presently it had become, as it were, a tabernacular beautyabout their meetings, and the stars were no more than flowers of lightbeneath the feet of their love, and the dawn and sunset the colouredhangings by the way. They ceased to be beings of flesh and blood to oneanother and themselves; they passed into a bodily texture of tendernessand desire. They gave it first whispers and then silence, and drew closeand looked into one another's moonlit and shadowy faces under theinfinite arch of the sky. And the still black pine-trees stood aboutthem like sentinels. 

The beating steps of time were hushed into silence, and it seemed tothem the universe hung still. Only their hearts were audible, beating. They seemed to be living together in a world where there is no death, and indeed so it was with them then. It seemed to them that theysounded, and indeed they sounded, such hidden splendours in the veryheart of things as none have ever reached before. Even for mean andlittle souls, love is the revelation of splendours. And these were giantlovers who had eaten the Food of the Gods ... 

 * * * * *

You may imagine the spreading consternation in this ordered world whenit became known that the Princess who was affianced to the Prince, thePrincess, Her Serene Highness! with royal blood in her veins!met, --frequently met, --the hypertrophied offspring of a common professorof chemistry, a creature of no rank, no position, no wealth, and talkedto him as though there were no Kings and Princes, no order, noreverence--nothing but Giants and Pigmies in the world, talked to himand, it was only too certain, held him as her lover. 

"If those newspaper fellows get hold of it!" gasped Sir Arthur PoodleBootlick ... 

"I am told--" whispered the old Bishop of Frumps. 

"New story upstairs, " said the first footman, as he nibbled among thedessert things. "So far as I can make out this here giant Princess--"

"They say--" said the lady who kept the stationer's shop by the mainentrance to the Palace, where the little Americans get their tickets forthe State Apartments ... 

And then:

"We are authorised to deny--" said "Picaroon" in _Gossip_. 

And so the whole trouble came out. 

IV. 

"They say that we must part, " the Princess said to her lover. 

"But why?" he cried. "What new folly have these people got into theirheads?"

"Do you know, " she asked, "that to love me--is high treason?"

"My dear, " he cried; "but does it matter? What is their right--rightwithout a shadow of reason--and their treason and their loyalty to us?""You shall hear, " she said, and told him of the things that had beentold to her. 

"It was the queerest little man who came to me with a soft, beautifullymodulated voice, a softly moving little gentleman who sidled into theroom like a cat and put his pretty white hand up so, whenever he hadanything significant to say. He is bald, but not of course nakedly bald, and his nose and face are chubby rosy little things, and his beard istrimmed to a point in quite the loveliest way. He pretended to haveemotions several times and made his eyes shine. You know he is quite afriend of the real royal family here, and he called me his dear younglady and was perfectly sympathetic even from the beginning. 'My dearyoung lady, ' he said, 'you know--_you mustn't, '_ several times, andthen, 'You owe a duty. '"

"Where do they make such men?"

"He likes it, " she said. 

"But I don't see--"

"He told me serious things. "

"You don't think, " he said, turning on her abruptly, "that there'sanything in the sort of thing he said?"

"There's something in it quite certainly, " said she. 

"You mean--?"

"I mean that without knowing it we have been trampling on the mostsacred conceptions of the little folks. We who are royal are a classapart. We are worshipped prisoners, processional toys. We pay forworship by losing--our elementary freedom. And I was to have marriedthat Prince--You know nothing of him though. Well, a pigmy Prince. Hedoesn't matter.... It seems it would have strengthened the bonds betweenmy country and another. And this country also was to profit. Imagineit!--strengthening the bonds!"

"And now?"

"They want me to go on with it--as though there was nothing between ustwo. "

"Nothing!"

"Yes. But that isn't all. He said--"

"Your specialist in Tact?"

"Yes. He said it would be better for you, better for all the giants, ifwe two--abstained from conversation. That was how he put it. "

"But what can they do if we don't?"

"He said you might have your freedom. "

"_I!_"

"He said, with a stress, 'My dear young lady, it would be better, itwould be more dignified, if you parted, willingly. ' That was all hesaid. With a stress on willingly. "

"But--! What business is it of these little wretches, where we love, howwe love? What have they and their world to do with us?"

"They do not think that. "

"Of course, " he said, "you disregard all this. "

"It seems utterly foolish to me. "

"That their laws should fetter us! That we, at the first spring of life, should be tripped by their old engagements, their aimless institutions IOh--! We disregard it. "

"I am yours. So far--yes. "

"So far? Isn't that all?"

"But they--If they want to part us--"

"What can they do?"

"I don't know. What _can_ they do?" "Who cares what they can do, orwhat they will do? I am yours and you are mine. What is there more thanthat? I am yours and you are mine--for ever. Do you think I will stopfor their little rules, for their little prohibitions, their scarletboards indeed!--and keep from _you_?"

"Yes. But still, what can they do?"

"You mean, " he said, "what are we to do?"

"Yes. "

"We? We can go on. "

"But if they seek to prevent us?"

He clenched his hands. He looked round as if the little people werealready coming to prevent them. Then turned away from her and lookedabout the world. "Yes, " he said. "Your question was the right one. Whatcan they do?"

"Here la this little land, " she said, and stopped. 

He seemed to survey it all. "They are everywhere. "

"But we might--"

"Whither?"

"We could go. We could swim the seas together. Beyond the seas--"

"I have never been beyond the seas. "

"There are great and desolate mountains amidst which we should seem nomore than little people, there are remote and deserted valleys, thereare hidden lakes and snow-girdled uplands untrodden by the feet of men. _There_--"

"But to get there we must fight our way day after day through millionsand millions of mankind. "

"It is our only hope. In this crowded land there is no fastness, noshelter. What place is there for us among these multitudes? They who arelittle can hide from one another, but where are we to hide? There is noplace where we could eat, no place where we could sleep. If wefled--night and day they would pursue our footsteps. "

A thought came to him. 

"There is one place, " he said, "even in this island. "

"Where?"

"The place our Brothers have made over beyond there. They have madegreat banks about their house, north and south and east and west; theyhave made deep pits and hidden places, and even now--one came over to mequite recently. He said--I did not altogether heed what he said then. But he spoke of arms. It may be--there--we should find shelter.... 

"For many days, " he said, after a pause, "I have not seen ourBrothers... Dear! I have been dreaming, I have been forgetting! The dayshave passed, and I have done nothing but look to see you again ... Imust go to them and talk to them, and tell them of you and of all thethings that hang over us. If they will help us, they can help us. Thenindeed we might hope. I do not know how strong their place is, butcertainly Cossar will have made it strong. Before all this--before youcame to me, I remember now--there was trouble brewing. There was anelection--when all the little people settle things, by counting heads. It must be over now. There were threats against all our race--againstall our race, that is, but you. I must see our Brothers. I must tellthem all that has happened between us, and all that threatens now. "

V. 

He did not come to their next meeting until she had waited some time. They were to meet that day about midday in a great space of park thatfitted into a bend of the river, and as she waited, looking eversouthward under her hand, it came to her that the world was very still, that indeed it was broodingly still. And then she perceived that, spiteof the lateness of the hour, her customary retinue of voluntary spieshad failed her. Left and right, when she came to look, there was no onein sight, and there was never a boat upon the silver curve of theThames. She tried to find a reason for this strange stillness in theworld.... 

Then, a grateful sight for her, she saw young Redwood far away over agap in the tree masses that bounded her view. 

Immediately the trees hid him, and presently he was thrusting throughthem and in sight again. She could see there was something different, and then she saw that he was hurrying unusually and then that he limped. He gestured to her, and she walked towards him. His face became clearer, and she saw with infinite concern that he winced at every stride. 

She ran towards him, her mind full of questions and vague fear. He drewnear to her and spoke without a greeting. 

"Are we to part?" he panted. 

"No, " she answered. "Why? What is the matter?"

"But if we do not part--! It is _now_. "

"What is the matter?"

"I do not want to part, " he said. "Only--" He broke off abruptly toask, "You will not part from me?"

She met his eyes with a steadfast look. "What has happened?" shepressed. 

"Not for a time?"

"What time?"

"Years perhaps. "

"Part! No!"

"You have thought?" he insisted. 

"I will not part. " She took his hand. "If this meant death, _now_, Iwould not let you go. "

"If it meant death, " he said, and she felt his grip upon her fingers. 

He looked about him as if he feared to see the little people coming ashe spoke. And then: "It may mean death. "

"Now tell me, " she said. 

"They tried to stop my coming. "

"How?"

"And as I came out of my workshop where I make the Food of the Gods forthe Cossars to store in their camp, I found a little officer ofpolice--a man in blue with white clean gloves--who beckoned me to stop. 'This way is closed!' said he. I thought little of that; I went round myworkshop to where another road runs west, and there was another officer. 'This road is closed!' he said, and added: 'All the roads are closed!'"

"And then?"

"I argued with him a little. 'They are public roads!' I said. 

"'That's it, ' said he. 'You spoil them for the public. '

"'Very well, ' said I, 'I'll take the fields, ' and then, up leapt othersfrom behind a hedge and said, 'These fields are private. '

"'Curse your public and private, ' I said, 'I'm going to my Princess, 'and I stooped down and picked him up very gently--kicking andshouting--and put him out of my way. In a minute all the fields about meseemed alive with running men. I saw one on horseback galloping besideme and reading something as he rode--shouting it. He finished and turnedand galloped away from me--head down. I couldn't make it out. And thenbehind me I heard the crack of guns. "

"Guns!"

"Guns--just as they shoot at the rats. The bullets came through the airwith a sound like things tearing: one stung me in the leg. "

"And you?"

"Came on to you here and left them shouting and running and shootingbehind me. And now--"

"Now?"

"It is only the beginning. They mean that we shall part. Even now theyare coming after me. "

"We will not. "

"No. But if we will not part--then you must come with me to ourBrothers. "

"Which way?" she said. 

"To the east. Yonder is the way my pursuers will be coming. This then isthe way we must go. Along this avenue of trees. Let me go first, so thatif they are waiting--"

He made a stride, but she had seized his arm. 

"No, " cried she. "I come close to you, holding you. Perhaps I am royal, perhaps I am sacred. If I hold you--Would God we could fly with my armsabout you!--it may be, they will not shoot at you--"

She clasped his shoulder and seized his hand as she spoke; she pressedherself nearer to him. "It may be they will not shoot you, " sherepeated, and with a sudden passion of tenderness he took her into hisarms and kissed her cheek. For a space he held her. 

"Even if it is death, " she whispered. 

She put her hands about his neck and lifted her face to his. 

"Dearest, kiss me once more. "

He drew her to him. Silently they kissed one another on the lips, andfor another moment clung to one another. Then hand in hand, and shestriving always to keep her body near to his, they set forward if haplythey might reach the camp of refuge the sons of Cossar had made, beforethe pursuit of the little people overtook them. 

And as they crossed the great spaces of the park behind the castle therecame horsemen galloping out from among the trees and vainly seeking tokeep pace with their giant strides. And presently ahead of them werehouses, and men with guns running out of the houses. At the sight ofthat, though he sought to go on and was even disposed to fight and pushthrough, she made him turn aside towards the south. 

As they fled a bullet whipped by them overhead. 

CHAPTER THE THIRD. 

YOUNG CADDIES IN LONDON. 

I. 

All unaware of the trend of events, unaware of the laws that wereclosing in upon all the Brethren, unaware indeed that there lived aBrother for him on the earth, young Caddies chose this time to come outof his chalk pit and see the world. His brooding came at last to that. There was no answer to all his questions in Cheasing Eyebright; the newVicar was less luminous even than the old, and the riddle of hispointless labour grew at last to the dimensions of exasperation. "Whyshould I work in this pit day after day?" he asked. "Why should I walkwithin bounds and be refused all the wonders of the world beyond there?What have I done, to be condemned to this?"

And one day he stood up, straightened his back, and said in a loudvoice, "No!

"I won't, " he said, and then with great vigour cursed the pit. 

Then, having few words, he sought to express his thought in acts. Hetook a track half filled with chalk, lifted it, and flung it, smash, against another. Then he grasped a whole row of empty trucks and spunthem down a bank. He sent a huge boulder of chalk bursting among them, and then ripped up a dozen yards of rail with a mighty plunge of hisfoot. So he commenced the conscientious wrecking of the pit. 

"Work all my days, " he said, "at this!"

It was an astonishing five minutes for the little geologist he had, inhis preoccupation, overlooked. This poor little creature having dodgedtwo boulders by a hairbreadth, got out by the westward corner and fledathwart the hill, with flapping rucksack and twinkling knicker-bockeredlegs, leaving a trail of Cretaceous echinoderms behind him; while youngCaddies, satisfied with the destruction he had achieved, came stridingout to fulfil his purpose in the world. 

"Work in that old pit, until I die and rot and stink I ... What worm didthey think was living in my giant body? Dig chalk for God knows whatfoolish purpose I Not _I!_"

The trend of road and railway perhaps, or mere chance it was, turned hisface to London, and thither he came striding; over the Downs and athwartthe meadows through the hot afternoon, to the infinite amazement of theworld. It signified nothing to him that torn posters in red and whitebearing various names flapped from every wall and barn; he knew nothingof the electoral revolution that had flung Caterham, "Jack theGiant-killer, " into power. It signified nothing to him that every policestation along his route had what was known as Caterham's ukase upon itsnotice board that afternoon, proclaiming that no giant, no personwhatever over eight feet in height, should go more than five miles fromhis "place of location" without a special permission. It signifiednothing to him that on his wake belated police officers, not a littlerelieved to find themselves belated, shook warning handbills at hisretreating back. He was going to see what the world had to show him, poor incredulous blockhead, and he did not mean that occasional spiritedpersons shouting "Hi!" at him should stay his course. He came on down byRochester and Greenwich towards an ever-thickening aggregation ofhouses, walking rather slowly now, staring about him and swinging hishuge chopper. 

People in London had heard something of him before, how that he wasidiotic but gentle, and wonderfully managed by Lady Wondershoot's agentand the Vicar; how in his dull way he revered these authorities and wasgrateful to them for their care of him, and so forth. So that when theylearnt from the newspaper placards that afternoon that he also was "onstrike, " the thing appeared to many of them as a deliberate, concertedact. 

"They mean to try our strength, " said the men in the trains going homefrom business. 

"Lucky we have Caterham. "

"It's in answer to his proclamation. "

The men in the clubs were better informed. They clustered round the tapeor talked in groups in their smoking-rooms. 

"He has no weapons. He would have gone to Sevenoaks if he had been putup to it. "

"Caterham will handle him.... "

The shopmen told their customers. The waiters in restaurants snatched amoment for an evening paper between the courses. The cabmen read itimmediately after the betting news.... 

The placards of the chief government evening paper were conspicuous with"Grasping the Nettle. " Others relied for effect on: "Giant Redwoodcontinues to meet the Princess. " The _Echo_ struck a line of its ownwith: "Rumoured Revolt of Giants in the North of England. The SunderlandGiants start for Scotland. " The, _Westminster Gazette_ sounded its usualwarning note. "Giants Beware, " said the _Westminster Gazette_, and triedto make a point out of it that might perhaps serve towards uniting theLiberal party--at that time greatly torn between seven intenselyegotistical leaders. The later newspapers dropped into uniformity. "TheGiant in the New Kent Road, " they proclaimed. 

"What I want to know, " said the pale young man in the tea shop, "is whywe aren't getting any news of the young Cossars. You'd think they'd bein it most of all ... "

"They tell me there's another of them young giants got loose, " said thebarmaid, wiping out a glass. "I've always said they was dangerous thingsto 'ave about. Right away from the beginning ... It ought to be put astop to. Any'ow, I 'ope 'e won't come along 'ere. "

"I'd like to 'ave a look at 'im, " said the young man at the barrecklessly, and added, "I _seen_ the Princess. "

"D'you think they'll 'urt 'im?" said the barmaid. 

"May 'ave to, " said the young man at the bar, finishing his glass. 

Amidst a hum of ten million such sayings young Caddies came to London... 

II. 

I think of young Caddies always as he was seen in the New Kent Road, thesunset warm upon his perplexed and staring face. The Road was thick withits varied traffic, omnibuses, trams, vans, carts, trolleys, cyclists, motors, and a marvelling crowd--loafers, women, nurse-maids, shoppingwomen, children, venturesome hobble-dehoys--gathered behind hisgingerly moving feet. The hoardings were untidy everywhere with thetattered election paper. A babblement of voices surged about him. Onesees the customers and shopmen crowding in the doorways of the shops, the faces that came and went at the windows, the little street boysrunning and shouting, the policemen taking it all quite stiffly andcalmly, the workmen knocking off upon scaffoldings, the seethingmiscellany of the little folks. They shouted to him, vagueencouragement, vague insults, the imbecile catchwords of the day, and hestared down at them, at such a multitude of living creatures as he hadnever before imagined in the world. 

Now that he had fairly entered London he had had to slacken his pacemore and more, the little folks crowded so mightily upon him. The crowdgrew denser at every step, and at last, at a corner where two great waysconverged, he came to a stop, and the multitude flowed about him andclosed him in. 

There he stood, with his feet a little apart, his back to a big cornergin palace that towered twice his height and ended In a sky sign, staring down at the pigmies and wondering--trying, I doubt not, tocollate it all with the other things of his life, with the valley amongthe downlands, the nocturnal lovers, the singing in the church, thechalk he hammered daily, and with instinct and death and the sky, tryingto see it all together coherent and significant. His brows were knit. Heput up his huge paw to scratch his coarse hair, and groaned aloud. 

"I don't see It, " he said. 

His accent was unfamiliar. A great babblement went across the openspace--a babblement amidst which the gongs of the trams, ploughing theirobstinate way through the mass, rose like red poppies amidst corn. "Whatdid he say?" "Said he didn't see. " "Said, where is the sea?" "Said, where is a seat?" "He wants a seat. " "Can't the brasted fool sit on a'ouse or somethin'?"

"What are ye for, ye swarming little people? What are ye all doing, whatare ye all for?

"What are ye doing up here, ye swarming little people, while I'ma-cuttin' chalk for ye, down in the chalk pits there?"

His queer voice, the voice that had been so bad for school discipline atCheasing Eyebright, smote the multitude to silence while it sounded andsplashed them all to tumult at the end. Some wit was audible screaming"Speech, speech!" "What's he saying?" was the burthen of the publicmind, and an opinion was abroad that he was drunk. "Hi, hi, hi, " bawledthe omnibus-drivers, threading a dangerous way. A drunken Americansailor wandered about tearfully inquiring, "What's he want anyhow?" Aleathery-faced rag-dealer upon a little pony-drawn cart soared up overthe tumult by virtue of his voice. "Garn 'ome, you Brasted Giant!" hebrawled, "Garn 'Ome! You Brasted Great Dangerous Thing! Can't you seeyou're a-frightening the 'orses? Go _'ome_ with you! 'Asn't any one 'adthe sense to tell you the law?" And over all this uproar young Caddiesstared, perplexed, expectant, saying no more. 

Down a side road came a little string of solemn policemen, and threadeditself ingeniously into the traffic. "Stand back, " said the littlevoices; "keep moving, please. "

Young Caddles became aware of a little dark blue figure thumping at hisshin. He looked down, and perceived two white hands gesticulating. "_What_?" he said, bending forward. 

"Can't stand about here, " shouted the inspector. 

"No! You can't stand about here, " he repeated. 

"But where am I to go?"

"Back to your village. Place of location. Anyhow, now--you've got tomove on. You're obstructing the traffic. "

"What traffic?"

"Along the road. "

"But where is it going? Where does it come from? What does it mean?They're all round me. What do they want? What are they doin'? I want tounderstand. I'm tired of cuttin' chalk and bein' all alone. What arethey doin' for me while I'm a-cuttin' chalk? I may just as wellunderstand here and now as anywhere. "

"Sorry. But we aren't here to explain things of that sort. I must arstyou to move on. "

"Don't you know?"

"I must arst you to move on--_if_ you please ... I'd strongly advise youto get off 'ome. We've 'ad no special instructions yet--but it's againstthe law ... Clear away there. Clear away. "

The pavement to his left became invitingly bare, and young Caddles wentslowly on his way. But now his tongue was loosened. 

"I don't understand, " he muttered. "I don't understand. " He would appealbrokenly to the changing crowd that ever trailed beside him and behind. "I didn't know there were such places as this. What are all you peopledoing with yourselves? What's it Jail for? What is it all for, and wheredo I come in?"

He had already begotten a new catchword. Young men of wit and spiritaddressed each other in this manner, "Ullo 'Arry O'Cock. Wot's it all_for_? Eh? Wot's it all bloomin' well _for_?"

To which there sprang up a competing variety of repartees, for the mostpart impolite. The most popular and best adapted for general use appearsto have been "_Shut_ it, " or, in a voice of scornful detachment--"_GamI_"

There were others almost equally popular. 

III. 

What was he seeking? He wanted something the pigmy world did not give, some end which the pigmy world prevented his attaining, prevented evenhis seeing clearly, which he was never to see clearly. It was the wholegigantic social side of this lonely dumb monster crying out for hisrace, for the things akin to him, for something he might love andsomething he might serve, for a purpose he might comprehend and acommand he could obey. And, you know, all this was _dumb_, raged dumblywithin him, could not even, had he met a fellow giant, have found outletand expression in speech. All the life he knew was the dull round of thevillage, all the speech he knew was the talk of the cottage, that failedand collapsed at the bare outline of his least gigantic need. He knewnothing of money, this monstrous simpleton, nothing of trade, nothing ofthe complex pretences upon which the social fabric of the little folkswas built. He needed, he needed--Whatever he needed, he never found hisneed. 

A11 through the day and the summer night he wandered, growing hungry butas yet untired, marking the varied traffic of the different streets, theinexplicable businesses of all these infinitesimal beings. In theaggregate it had no other colour than confusion for him.... 

He is said to have plucked a lady from her carriage in Kensington, alady in evening dress of the smartest sort, to have scrutinised herclosely, train and shoulder blades, and to have replaced her--a littlecarelessly--with the profoundest sigh. For that I cannot vouch. For anhour or so he watched people fighting for places in the omnibuses at theend of Piccadilly. He was seen looming over Kennington Oval for somemoments in the afternoon, but when he saw these dense thousands wereengaged with the mystery of cricket and quite regardless of him he wenthis way with a groan. 

He came back to Piccadilly Circus between eleven and twelve at nightsand found a new sort of multitude. Clearly they were very intent: fullof things they, for inconceivable reasons, might do, and of others theymight not do. They stared at him and jeered at him and went their way. The cabmen, vulture-eyed, followed one another continually along theedge of the swarming pavement. People emerged from the restaurants orentered them, grave, intent, dignified, or gently and agreeably excitedor keen and vigilant--beyond the cheating of the sharpest waiter born. The great giant, standing at his corner, peered at them all. "What is itall for?" he murmured in a mournful vast undertone, "What is it allfor? They are all so earnest. What is it I do not understand?"

And none of them seemed to see, as he could do, the drink-soddenwretchedness of the painted women at the corner, the ragged misery thatsneaked along the gutters, the infinite futility of all this employment. The infinite futility! None of them seemed to feel the shadow of thatgiant's need, that shadow of the future, that lay athwart their paths... 

Across the road high up mysterious letters flamed and went, that might, could he have read them, have measured for him the dimensions of humaninterest, have told him of the fundamental needs and features of life asthe little folks conceived it. First would come a flaming

T;

Then U would follow, TU;

Then P, TUP;

Until at last there stood complete, across the sky, this cheerfulmessage to all who felt the burthen of life's earnestness:

TUPPER'S TONIC WINE FOR VIGOUR. 

Snap! and it had vanished into night, to be followed in the same slowdevelopment by a second universal solicitude:

BEAUTY SOAP. 

Not, you remark, mere cleansing chemicals, but something, as they say, "ideal;" and then, completing the tripod of the little life:

TANKER'S YELLOW PILLS. 

After that there was nothing for it but Tupper again, in naming crimsonletters, snap, snap, across the void. 

T U P P.... 

Early in the small hours it would seem that young Caddies came to theshadowy quiet of Regent's Park, stepped over the railings and lay downon a grassy slope near where the people skate in winter time, and therehe slept an hour or so. And about six o'clock in the morning, he wastalking to a draggled woman he had found sleeping in a ditch nearHampstead Heath, asking her very earnestly what she thought she wasfor.... 

IV. 

The wandering of Caddies about London came to a head on the second dayin the morning. For then his hunger overcame him. He hesitated where thehot-smelling loaves were being tossed into a cart, and then veryquietly knelt down and commenced robbery. He emptied the cart while thebaker's man fled for the police, and then his great hand came into theshop and cleared counter and cases. Then with an armful, still eating, he went his way looking for another shop to go on with his meal. Ithappened to be one of those seasons when work is scarce and food dear, and the crowd in that quarter was sympathetic even with a giant who tookthe food they all desired. They applauded the second phase of his meal, and laughed at his stupid grimace at the policeman. 

"I woff hungry, " he said, with his mouth full. 

"Brayvo!" cried the crowd. "Brayvo!"

Then when he was beginning his third baker's shop, he was stopped byhalf a dozen policemen hammering with truncheons at his shins. "Lookhere, my fine giant, you come along o' me, " said the officer in charge. "You ain't allowed away from home like this. You come off home with me. "They did their best to arrest him. There was a trolley, I am told, chasing up and down streets at that time, bearing rolls of chain andship's cable to play the part of handcuffs in that great arrest. Therewas no intention then of killing him. "He is no party to the plot, "Caterham had said. "I will not have innocent blood upon my hands. " Andadded: "--until everything else has been tried. "

At first Caddies did not understand the import of these attentions. Whenhe did, he told the policemen not to be fools, and set off in greatstrides that left them all behind. The bakers' shops had been in theHarrow Road, and he went through canal London to St. John's Wood, andsat down in a private garden there to pick his teeth and be speedilyassailed by another posse of constables. 

"You lea' me alone, " he growled, and slouched through thegardens--spoiling several lawns and kicking down a fence or so, whilethe energetic little policemen followed him up, some through thegardens, some along the road in front of the houses. Here there were oneor two with guns, but they made no use of them. When he came out intothe Edgware Road there was a new note and a new movement in the crowd, and a mounted policeman rode over his foot and got upset for his pains. 

"You lea' me alone, " said Caddies, facing the breathless crowd. "I ain'tdone anything to you. " At that time he was unarmed, for he had left hischalk chopper in Regent's Park. But now, poor wretch, he seems to havefelt the need of some weapon. He turned back towards the goods yard ofthe Great Western Railway, wrenched up the standard of a tall arc light, a formidable mace for him, and flung it over his shoulder. And findingthe police still turning up to pester him, he went back along theEdgware Road, towards Cricklewood, and struck off sullenly to the north. 

He wandered as far as Waltham, and then turned back westward and thenagain towards London, and came by the cemeteries and over the crest ofHighgate about midday into view of the greatness of the city again. Heturned aside and sat down in a garden, with his back to a house thatoverlooked all London. He was breathless, and his face was lowering, andnow the people no longer crowded upon him as they had done when first hecame to London, but lurked in the adjacent garden, and peeped fromcautious securities. They knew by now the thing was grimmer than theyhad thought. "Why can't they lea' me alone?" growled young Caddies. "I_mus'_ eat. Why can't they lea' me alone?"

He sat with a darkling face, gnawing at his knuckles and looking downover London. All the fatigue, worry, perplexity, and impotent wath ofhis wanderings was coming to a head in him. "They mean nothing, " hewhispered. "They mean nothing. And they _won't_ let me alone, and they_will_ get in my way. " And again, over and over to himself, "Meanin'nothing. 

"Ugh! the little people!"

He bit harder at his knuckles and his scowl deepened. "Cuttin' chalkfor 'em, " he whispered. "And all the world is theirs! _I_ don't comein--nowhere. "

Presently with a spasm of sick anger he saw the now familiar form of apoliceman astride the garden wall. 

"Lea' me alone, " grunted the giant. "Lea' me alone. "

"I got to do my duty, " said the little policeman, with a face that waswhite and resolute. 

"You lea' me alone. I got to live as well as you. I got to think. I gotto eat. You lea' me alone. "

"It's the Law, " said the little policeman, coming no further. "We nevermade the Law. "

"Nor me, " said young Caddies. "You little people made all that before Iwas born. You and your Law! What I must and what I mustn't! No food forme to eat unless I work a slave, no rest, no shelter, nothin', and youtell me--"

"I ain't got no business with that, " said the policeman. "I'm not one toargue. All I got to do is to carry out the Law. " And he brought hissecond leg over the wall and seemed disposed to get down. Otherpolicemen appeared behind him. 

"I got no quarrel with _you_--mind, " said young Caddies, with his griptight upon his huge mace of iron, his face pale, and a lank explanatorygreat finger to the policeman. "I got no quarrel with you. But--_Youlea' me alone. "_

The policeman tried to be calm and commonplace, with a monstrous tragedyclear before his eyes. "Give me the proclamation, " he said to someunseen follower, and a little white paper was handed to him. 

"Lea' me alone, " said Caddies, scowling, tense, and drawn together. 

"This means, " said the policeman before he read, "go 'ome. Go 'ome toyour chalk pit. If not, you'll be hurt. "

Caddies gave an inarticulate growl. 

Then when the proclamation had been read, the officer made a sign. Fourmen with rifles came into view and took up positions of affected easealong the wall. They wore the uniform of the rat police. At the sight ofthe guns, young Caddies blazed into anger. He remembered the sting ofthe Wreckstone farmers' shot guns. "You going to shoot off those at me?"he said, pointing, and it seemed to the officer he must be afraid. 

"If you don't march back to your pit--"

Then in an instant the officer had slung himself back over the wall, andsixty feet above him the great electric standard whirled down to hisdeath. Bang, bang, bang, went the heavy guns, and smash! the shatteredwall, the soil and subsoil of the garden flew. Something flew with it, that left red drops on one of the shooter's hands. The riflemen dodgedthis way and that and turned valiantly to fire again. But young Caddies, already shot twice through the body, had spun about to find who it washad hit him so heavily in the back. Bang! Bang! He had a vision ofhouses and greenhouses and gardens, of people dodging at windows, thewhole swaying fearfully and mysteriously. He seems to have made threestumbling strides, to have raised and dropped his huge mace, and to haveclutched his chest. He was stung and wrenched by pain. 

What was this, warm and wet, on his hand?

One man peering from a bedroom window saw his face, saw him staring, with a grimace of weeping dismay, at the blood upon his hand, and thenhis knees bent under him, and he came crashing to the earth, the firstof the giant nettles to fall to Caterham's resolute clutch, the verylast that he had reckoned would come into his hand. 

CHAPTER THE FOURTH. 

REDWOOD'S TWO DAYS. 

I. 

So soon as Caterham knew the moment for grasping his nettle had come, hetook the law into his own hands and sent to arrest Cossar and Redwood. 

Redwood was there for the taking. He had been undergoing an operation inthe side, and the doctors had kept all disturbing things from him untilhis convalescence was assured. Now they had released him. He was justout of bed, sitting in a fire-warmed room, with a heap of newspapersabout him, reading for the first time of the agitation that had sweptthe country into the hands of Caterham, and of the trouble that wasdarkening over the Princess and his son. It was in the morning of theday when young Caddies died, and when the policeman tried to stop youngRedwood on his way to the Princess. The latest newspapers Redwood haddid but vaguely prefigure these imminent things. He was re-reading thesefirst adumbrations of disaster with a sinking heart, reading the shadowof death more and more perceptibly into them, reading to occupy his minduntil further news should come. When the officers followed the servantinto his room, he looked up eagerly. 

"I thought it was an early evening paper, " he said. Then standing up, and with a swift change of manner: "What's this?"

After that Redwood had no news of anything for two days. 

They had come with a vehicle to take him away, but when it becameevident that he was ill, it was decided to leave him for a day or sountil he could be safely removed, and his house was taken over by thepolice and converted into a temporary prison. It was the same house inwinch Giant Redwood had been born and in which Herakleophorbia had forthe first time been given to a human being, and Redwood had now been awidower and had lived alone in it eight years. 

He had become an iron-grey man, with a little pointed grey beard andstill active brown eyes. He was slender and soft-voiced, as he had everbeen, but his features had now that indefinable quality that comes ofbrooding over mighty things. To the arresting officer his appearance wasin impressive contrast to the enormity of his offences. "Here's thisfeller, " said the officer in command, to his next subordinate, "has donehis level best to bust up everything, and 'e's got a face like a quietcountry gentleman; and here's Judge Hangbrow keepin' everything nice andin order for every one, and 'e's got a 'ead like a 'og. Then theirmanners! One all consideration and the other snort and grunt. Which justshows you, doesn't it, that appearances aren't to be gone upon, whateverelse you do. "

But his praise of Redwood's consideration was presently dashed. Theofficers found him troublesome at first until they had made it clearthat it was useless for him to ask questions or beg for papers. Theymade a sort of inspection of his study indeed, and cleared away eventhe papers he had. Redwood's voice was high and expostulatory. "Butdon't you see, " he said over and over again, it's my Son, my only Son, that is in this trouble. It isn't the Food I care for, but my Son. "

"I wish indeed I could tell you, Sir, " said the officer. "But our ordersare strict. "

"Who gave the orders?" cried Redwood. 

"Ah! _that_, Sir---" said the officer, and moved towards the door.... 

"'E's going up and down 'is room, " said the second officer, when hissuperior came down. "That's all right. He'll walk it off a bit. "

"I hope 'e will, " said the chief officer. "The fact is I didn't see itin that light before, but this here Giant what's been going on with thePrincess, you know, is this man's son. "

The two regarded one another and the third policeman for a space. 

"Then it is a bit rough on him, " the third policeman said. 

It became evident that Redwood had still imperfectly apprehended thefact that an iron curtain had dropped between him and the outer world. They heard him go to the door, try the handle and rattle the lock, andthen the voice of the officer who was stationed on the landing tellinghim it was no good to do that. Then afterwards they heard him at thewindows and saw the men outside looking up. "It's no good that way, "said the second officer. Then Redwood began upon the bell. The seniorofficer went up and explained very patiently that it could do no good toring the bell like that, and if it was rung for nothing now it mighthave to be disregarded presently when he had need of something. "Anyreasonable attendance, Sir, " the officer said. "But if you ring it justby way of protest we shall be obliged, Sir, to disconnect. "

The last word the officer heard was Redwood's high-pitched, "But atleast you might tell me if my Son--"

II. 

After that Redwood spent, most of his time at the windows. 

But the windows offered him little of the march of events outside. Itwas a quiet street at all times, and that day it was unusually quiet:scarcely a cab, scarcely a tradesman's cart passed all that morning. Nowand then men went by--without any distinctive air of events--now andthen a little group of children, a nursemaid and a woman going shopping, and so forth. They came on to the stage right or left, up or down thestreet, with an exasperating suggestion of indifference to any concernsmore spacious than their own; they would discover the police-guardedhouse with amazement and exit in the opposite direction, where the greattrusses of a giant hydrangea hung across the pavement, staring back orpointing. Now and then a man would come and ask one of the policemen aquestion and get a curt reply ... 

Opposite the houses seemed dead. A housemaid appeared once at a bedroomwindow and stared for a space, and it occurred to Redwood to signal toher. For a time she watched his gestures as if with interest and made avague response to them, then looked over her shoulder suddenly andturned and went away. An old man hobbled out of Number 37 and came downthe steps and went off to the right, altogether without looking up. Forten minutes the only occupant of the road was a cat.... 

With such events that interminable momentous morning lengthened out. 

About twelve there came a bawling of newsvendors from the adjacent road;but it passed. Contrary to their wont they left Redwood's street alone, and a suspicion dawned upon him that the police were guarding the end ofthe street. He tried to open the window, but this brought a policemaninto the room forthwith.... 

The clock of the parish church struck twelve, and after an abyss oftime--one. 

They mocked him with lunch. 

He ate a mouthful and tumbled the food about a little in order to get ittaken away, drank freely of whisky, and then took a chair and went backto the window. The minutes expanded into grey immensities, and for atime perhaps he slept.... 

He woke with a vague impression of remote concussions. He perceived arattling of the windows like the quiver of an earthquake, that lastedfor a minute or so and died away. Then after a silence it returned.... Then it died away again. He fancied it might be merely the passage ofsome heavy vehicle along the main road. What else could it be?

After a time he began to doubt whether he had heard this sound. 

He began to reason interminably with himself. Why, after all, was heseized? Caterham had been in office two days--just long enough--to grasphis Nettle! Grasp his Nettle! Grasp his Giant Nettle! The refrain oncestarted, sang through his mind, and would not be dismissed. 

What, after all, could Caterham do? He was a religious man. He wasbound in a sort of way by that not to do violence without a cause. 

Grasp his Nettle I Perhaps, for example, the Princess was to be seizedand sent abroad. There might be trouble with his son. In which case--!But why had he been arrested? Why was it necessary to keep him inignorance of a thing like that? The thing suggested--something moreextensive. 

Perhaps, for example--they meant to lay all the giants by the heels IThey were all to be arrested together. There had been hints of that Inthe election speeches. And then?

No doubt they had got Cossar also?

Caterham was a religious man. Redwood clung to that. The back of hismind was a black curtain, and on that curtain there came and went aword--a word written in letters of fixe. He struggled perpetuallyagainst that word. It was always as it were beginning to get written onthe curtain and never getting completed. 

He faced it at last. "Massacre!" There was the word in its fullbrutality. 

No! No! No! It was impossible! Caterham was a religious man, a civilisedman. And besides after all these years, after all these hopes!

Redwood sprang up; he paced the room. He spoke to himself; he shouted. 

"_No!_"

Mankind was surely not so mad as that--surely not! It was impossible, itwas incredible, it could not be. What good would it do to kill the gianthuman when the gigantic in all the lower things had now inevitably come?They could not be so mad as that! "I must dismiss such an idea, " hesaid aloud; "dismiss such an idea! Absolutely!"

He pulled up short. What was that?

Certainly the windows had rattled. He went to look out into the street. Opposite he saw the instant confirmation of his ears. At a bedroom atNumber 35 was a woman, towel in hand, and at the dining-room of Number37 a man was visible behind a great vase of hypertrophied maidenhairfern, both staring out and up, both disquieted and curious. He could seenow too, quite clearly, that the policeman on the pavement had heard italso. The thing was not his imagination. 

He turned to the darkling room. 

"Guns, " he said. 

He brooded. 

"Guns?"

They brought him in strong tea, such as he was accustomed to have. Itwas evident his housekeeper had been taken into consultation. Afterdrinking it, he was too restless to sit any longer at the window, and hepaced the room. His mind became more capable of consecutive thought. 

The room had been his study for four-and-twenty years. It had beenfurnished at his marriage, and all the essential equipment dated fromthen, the large complex writing-desk, the rotating chair, the easy chairat the fire, the rotating bookcase, the fixture of indexed pigeon-holesthat filled the further recess. The vivid Turkey carpet, the laterVictorian rugs and curtains had mellowed now to a rich dignity ofeffect, and copper and brass shone warm about the open fire. Electriclights had replaced the lamp of former days; that was the chiefalteration in the original equipment. But among these things hisconnection with the Food had left abundant traces. Along one wall, abovethe dado, ran a crowded array of black-framed photographs andphotogravures, showing his son and Cossar's sons and others of theBoom-children at various ages and amidst various surroundings. Evenyoung Caddles' vacant visage had its place in that collection. In thecorner stood a sheaf of the tassels of gigantic meadow grass fromCheasing Eyebright, and on the desk there lay three empty poppy heads asbig as hats. The curtain rods were grass stems. And the tremendous skullof the great hog of Oakham hung, a portentous ivory overmantel, with aChinese jar in either eye socket, snout down above the fire.... 

It was to the photographs that Redwood went, and in particular to thephotographs of his son. 

They brought back countless memories of things that had passed out ofhis mind, of the early days of the Food, of Bensington's timid presence, of his cousin Jane, of Cossar and the night work at the ExperimentalFarm. These things came to him now very little and bright and distinct, like things seen through a telescope on a sunny day. And then there wasthe giant nursery, the giant childhood, the young giant's first effortsto speak, his first clear signs of affection. 

Guns?

It flowed in on him, irresistibly, overwhelmingly, that outside there, outside this accursed silence and mystery, his son and Cossar's sons, and all these glorious first-fruits of a greater age were evennow--fighting. Fighting for life! Even now his son might be in somedismal quandary, cornered, wounded, overcome.... 

He swung away from the pictures and went up and down the roomgesticulating. "It cannot be, " he cried, "it cannot be. It cannot endlike that!"

"What was that?"

He stopped, stricken rigid. 

The trembling of the windows had begun again, and then had come athud--a vast concussion that shook the house. The concussion seemed tolast for an age. It must have been very near. For a moment it seemedthat something had struck the house above him--an enormous impact thatbroke into a tinkle of falling glass, and then a stillness that ended atlast with a minute clear sound of running feet in the street below. 

Those feet released him from his rigor. He turned towards the window, and saw it starred and broken. 

His heart beat high with a sense of crisis, of conclusive occurrence, ofrelease. And then again, his realisation of impotent confinement fellabout him like a curtain!

He could see nothing outside except that the small electric lampopposite was not lighted; he could hear nothing after the firstsuggestion of a wide alarm. He could add nothing to interpret or enlargethat mystery except that presently there came a reddish fluctuatingbrightness in the sky towards the south-east. 

This light waxed and waned. When it waned he doubted if it had everwaxed. It had crept upon him very gradually with the darkling. It becamethe predominant fact in his long night of suspense. Sometimes it seemedto him it had the quiver one associates with dancing flames, at othershe fancied it was no more than the normal reflection of the eveninglights. It waxed and waned through the long hours, and only vanished atlast when it was submerged altogether under the rising tide of dawn. Didit mean--? What could it mean? Almost certainly it was some sort offire, near or remote, but he could not even tell whether it was smoke orcloud drift that streamed across the sky. But about one o'clock therebegan a flickering of searchlights athwart that ruddy tumult, anickering that continued for the rest of the night. That too might meanmany things? What could it mean? What did it mean? Just this stainedunrestful sky he had and the suggestion of a huge explosion to occupyhis mind. There came no further sounds, no further running, nothing buta shouting that might have been only the distant efforts of drunkenmen... 

He did not turn up his lights; he stood at his draughty broken window, adistressful, slight black outline to the officer who looked ever andagain into the room and exhorted him to rest. 

All night Redwood remained at his window peering up at the ambiguousdrift of the sky, and only with the coming of the dawn did he obey hisfatigue and lie down upon the little bed they had prepared for himbetween his writing-desk and the sinking fire in the fireplace under thegreat hog's skull. 

III. 

For thirty-six long hours did Redwood remain imprisoned, closed in andshut off from the great drama of the Two Days, while the little peoplein the dawn of greatness fought against the Children of the Food. Thenabruptly the iron curtain rose again, and he found himself near the verycentre of the struggle. That curtain rose as unexpectedly as it fell. Inthe late afternoon he was called to the window by the clatter of a cab, that stopped without. A young man descended, and in another minute stoodbefore him in the room, a slightly built young man of thirty perhaps, clean shaven, well dressed, well mannered. 

"Mr. Redwood, Sir, " he began, "would you be willing to come to Mr. Caterham? He needs your presence very urgently. "

"Needs my presence!" There leapt a question into Redwood's mind, thatfor a moment he could not put. He hesitated. Then in a voice that brokehe asked: "What has he done to my Son?" and stood breathless for thereply. 

"Your Son, Sir? Your Son is doing well. So at least we gather. "

"Doing well?"

"He was wounded, Sir, yesterday. Have you not heard?"

Redwood smote these pretences aside. His voice was no longer coloured byfear, but by anger. "You know I have not heard. You know I have heardnothing. "

"Mr. Caterham feared, Sir--It was a time of upheaval. Every one--takenby surprise. He arrested you to save you, Sir, from any misadventure--"

"He arrested me to prevent my giving any warning or advice to my son. Goon. Tell me what has happened. Have you succeeded? Have you killed themall?"

The young man made a pace or so towards the window, and turned. 

"No, Sir, " he said concisely. 

"What have you to tell me?"

"It's our proof, Sir, that this fighting was not planned by us. Theyfound us ... Totally unprepared. " "You mean?"

"I mean, Sir, the Giants have--to a certain extent--held their own. "

The world changed, for Redwood. For a moment something like hysteria hadthe muscles of his face and throat. Then he gave vent to a profound"Ah!" His heart bounded towards exultation. "The Giants have held theirown!"

"There has been terrible fighting--terrible destruction. It is all amost hideous misunderstanding ... In the north and midlands Giants havebeen killed ... Everywhere. "

"They are fighting now?"

"No, Sir. There was a flag of truce. "

"From them?"

"No, Sir. Mr. Caterham sent a flag of truce. The whole thing is ahideous misunderstanding. That is why he wants to talk to you, and puthis case before you. They insist, Sir, that you should intervene--"

Redwood interrupted. "Do you know what happened to my Son?" he asked. 

"He was wounded. "

"Tell me! Tell me!"

"He and the Princess came--before the--the movement to surround theCossar camp was complete--the Cossar pit at Chislehurst. They camesuddenly, Sir, crashing through a dense thicket of giant oats, nearRiver, upon a column of infantry ... Soldiers had been very nervous allday, and this produced a panic. "

"They shot him?"

"No, Sir. They ran away. Some shot at him--wildly--against orders. "

Redwood gave a note of denial. "It's true, Sir. Not on account of yourson, I won't pretend, but on account of the Princess. "

"Yes. That's true. "

"The two Giants ran shouting towards the encampment. The soldiers ranthis way and that, and then some began firing. They say they saw himstagger--"

"Ugh!"

"Yes, Sir. But we know he is not badly hurt. "

"How?"

"He sent the message, Sir, that he was doing well!"

"To me?"

"Who else, Sir?"

Redwood stood for nearly a minute with his arms tightly folded, takingthis in. Then his indignation found a voice. 

"Because you were fools in doing the thing, because you miscalculatedand blundered, you would like me to think you are not murderers inintention. And besides--The rest?"

The young man looked interrogation. 

"The other Giants?"

The young man made no further pretence of misunderstanding. His tonefell. "Thirteen, Sir, are dead. "

"And others wounded?"

"Yes, Sir. "

"And Caterham, " he gasped, "wants to meet me! Where are the others?"

"Some got to the encampment during the fighting, Sir ... They seem tohave known--"

"Well, of course they did. If it hadn't been for Cossar--Cossar isthere?"

"Yes, Sir. And all the surviving Giants are there--the ones who didn'tget to the camp in the fighting have gone, or are going now under theflag of trace. "

"That means, " said Redwood, "that you are beaten. "

"We are not beaten. No, Sir. You cannot say we are beaten. But your sonshave broken the rules of war. Once last night, and now again. After ourattack had been withdrawn. This afternoon they began to bombardLondon--"

"That's legitimate!"

"They have been firing shells filled with--poison. "

"Poison?"

"Yes. Poison. The Food--"

"Herakleophorbia?"

"Yes, Sir. Mr. Caterham, Sir--"

"You are beaten! Of course that beats you. It's Cossar I What can youhope to do now? What good is it to do anything now? You will breathe itin the dust of every street. What is there to fight for more? Rules ofwar, indeed! And now Caterham wants to humbug me to help him bargain. Good heavens, man! Why should I come to your exploded windbag? He hasplayed his game ... Murdered and muddled. Why should I?"

The young man stood with an air of vigilant respect. 

"It is a fact, Sir, " he interrupted, "that the Giants insist that theyshall see you. They will have no ambassador but you. Unless you come tothem, I am afraid, Sir, there will be more bloodshed. "

"On _your_ side, perhaps. "

"No, Sir--on both sides. The world is resolved the thing must end. "

Redwood looked about the study. His eyes rested for a moment on thephotograph of his boy. He turned and met the expectation of the youngman. "Yes, " he said at last, "I will come. "

IV. 

His encounter with Caterham was entirely different from hisanticipation. He had seen the man only twice in his life, once at dinnerand once in the lobby of the House, and his imagination had been activenot with the man but with the creation of the newspapers andcaricaturists, the legendary Caterham, Jack the Giant-killer, Perseus, and all the rest of it. The element of a human personality came in todisorder all that. 

Here was not the face of the caricatures and portraits, but the face ofa worn and sleepless man, lined and drawn, yellow in the whites of theeyes, a little weakened about the mouth. Here, indeed, were thered-brown eyes, the black hair, the distinctive aquiline profile of thegreat demagogue, but here was also something else that smote anypremeditated scorn and rhetoric aside. This man was suffering; he wassuffering acutely; he was under enormous stress. From the beginning hehad an air of impersonating himself. Presently, with a single gesture, the slightest movement, he revealed to Redwood that he was keepinghimself up with drags. He moved a thumb to his waistcoat pocket, andthen, after a few sentences more, threw concealment aside, and slippedthe little tabloid to his lips. 

Moreover, in spite of the stresses upon him, in spite of the fact thathe was in the wrong, and Redwood's junior by a dozen years, that strangequality in him, the something--personal magnetism one may call it forwant of a better name--that had won his way for him to this eminence ofdisaster was with him still. On that also Redwood had failed to reckon. From the first, so far as the course and conduct of their speech went, Caterham prevailed over Redwood. All the quality of the first phase oftheir meeting was determined by him, all the tone and procedure werehis. That happened as if it was a matter of course. All Redwood'sexpectations vanished at his presence. He shook hands before Redwoodremembered that he meant to parry that familiarity; he pitched the noteof their conference from the outset, sure and clear, as a search forexpedients under a common catastrophe. 

If he made any mistake it was when ever and again his fatigue got thebetter of his immediate attention, and the habit of the public meetingcarried him away. Then he drew himself up--through all their interviewboth men stood--and looked away from Redwood, and began to fence andjustify. Once even he said "Gentlemen!"

Quietly, expandingly, he began to talk.... 

There were moments when Redwood ceased even to feel himself aninterlocutor, when he became the mere auditor of a monologue. He becamethe privileged spectator of an extraordinary phenomenon. He perceivedsomething almost like a specific difference between himself and thisbeing whose beautiful voice enveloped him, who was talking, talking. This mind before him was so powerful and so limited. From its drivingenergy, its personal weight, its invincible oblivion to certain things, there sprang up in Redwood's mind the most grotesque and strange ofimages. Instead of an antagonist who was a fellow-creature, a man onecould hold morally responsible, and to whom one could addressreasonable appeals, he saw Caterham as something, something like amonstrous rhinoceros, as it were, a civilised rhinoceros begotten of thejungle of democratic affairs, a monster of irresistible onset andinvincible resistance. In all the crashing conflicts of that tangle hewas supreme. And beyond? This man was a being supremely adapted to makehis way through multitudes of men. For him there was no fault soimportant as self-contradiction, no science so significant as thereconciliation of "interests. " Economic realities, topographicalnecessities, the barely touched mines of scientific expedients, existedfor him no more than railways or rifled guns or geographical literatureexist for his animal prototype. What did exist were gatherings, andcaucuses, and votes--above all, votes. He was votes incarnate--millionsof votes. 

And now in the great crisis, with the Giants broken but not beaten, thisvote-monster talked. 

It was so evident that even now he had everything to learn. He did notknow there were physical laws and economic laws, quantities andreactions that all humanity voting _nemine contradicente_ cannot voteaway, and that are disobeyed only at the price of destruction. He didnot know there are moral laws that cannot be bent by any force ofglamour, or are bent only to fly back with vindictive violence. In theface of shrapnel or the Judgment Day, it was evident to Redwood thatthis man would have sheltered behind some curiously dodged vote of theHouse of Commons. 

What most concerned his mind now was not the powers that held thefastness away there to the south, not defeat and death, but the effectof these things upon his Majority, the cardinal reality in his life. Hehad to defeat the Giants or go under. He was by no means absolutelydespairful. In this hour of his utmost failure, with blood and disasterupon his hands, and the rich promise of still more horrible disaster, with the gigantic destinies of the world towering and toppling over him, he was capable of a belief that by sheer exertion of his voice, byexplaining and qualifying and restating, he might yet reconstitute hispower. He was puzzled and distressed no doubt, fatigued and suffering, but if only he could keep up, if only he could keep talking--

As he talked he seemed to Redwood to advance and recede, to dilate andcontract. Redwood's share of the talk was of the most subsidiary sort, wedges as it were suddenly thrust in. "That's all nonsense. " "No. " "It'sno use suggesting that. " "Then why did you begin?"

It is doubtful if Caterham really heard him at all. Round suchinterpolations Caterham's speech flowed indeed like some swift streamabout a rock. There this incredible man stood, on his officialhearthrug, talking, talking with enormous power and skill, talking asthough a pause in his talk, his explanations, his presentation ofstandpoints and lights, of considerations and expedients, would permitsome antagonistic influence to leap into being--into vocal being, theonly being he could comprehend. There he stood amidst the slightly fadedsplendours of that official room in which one man after another hadsuccumbed to the belief that a certain power of intervention was thecreative control of an empire.... 

The more he talked the more certain Redwood's sense of stupendousfutility grew. Did this man realise that while he stood and talkedthere, the whole great world was moving, that the invincible tide ofgrowth flowed and flowed, that there were any hours but parliamentaryhours, or any weapons in the hands of the Avengers of Blood? Outside, darkling the whole room, a single leaf of giant Virginian creeper tappedunheeded on the pane. 

Redwood became anxious to end this amazing monologue, to escape tosanity and judgment, to that beleaguered camp, the fastness of thefuture, where, at the very nucleus of greatness, the Sons were gatheredtogether. For that this talking was endured. He had a curious impressionthat unless this monologue ended he would presently find himself carriedaway by it, that he must fight against Caterham's voice as one fightsagainst a drug. Facts had altered and were altering beneath that spell. 

What was the man saying?

Since Redwood had to report it to the Children of the Food, in a sort ofway he perceived it did matter. He would have to listen and guard hissense of realities as well as he could. 

Much about bloodguiltiness. That was eloquence. That didn't matter. Next?

He was suggesting a convention!

He was suggesting that the surviving Children of the Food shouldcapitulate and go apart and form a community of their own. There wereprecedents, he said, for this. "We would assign them territory--"

"Where?" interjected Redwood, stooping to argue. 

Caterham snatched at that concession. He turned his face to Redwood's, and his voice fell to a persuasive reasonableness. That could bedetermined. That, he contended, was a quite subsidiary question. Then hewent on to stipulate: "And except for them and where they are we musthave absolute control, the Food and all the Fruits of the Food must bestamped out--"

Redwood found himself bargaining: "The Princess?"

"She stands apart. "

"No, " said Redwood, struggling to get back to the old footing. "That'sabsurd. "

"That afterwards. At any rate we are agreed that the making of the Foodmust stop--"

"I have agreed to nothing. I have said nothing--"

"But on one planet, to have two races of men, one great, one small!Consider what has happened! Consider that is but a little foretaste ofwhat might presently happen if this Food has its way! Consider all youhave already brought upon this world! If there is to be a race ofGiants, increasing and multiplying--"

"It is not for me to argue, " said Redwood. "I must go to our sons. Iwant to go to my son. That is why I have come to you. Tell me exactlywhat you offer. "

Caterham made a speech upon his terms. 

The Children of the Food were to be given a great reservation--in NorthAmerica perhaps or Africa--in which they might live out their lives intheir own fashion. 

"But it's nonsense, " said Redwood. "There are other Giants now abroad. All over Europe--here and there!"

"There could be an international convention. It's _not_ impossible. Something of the sort indeed has already been spoken of ... But in thisreservation they can live out their own lives in their own way. They maydo what they like; they may make what they like. We shall be glad ifthey will make us things. They may be happy. Think!"

"Provided there are no more Children. " "Precisely. The Children are forus. And so, Sir, we shall save the world, we shall save it absolutelyfrom the fruits of your terrible discovery. It is not too late for us. Only we are eager to temper expediency with mercy. Even now we areburning and searing the places their shells hit yesterday. We can get itunder. Trust me we shall get it under. But in that way, without cruelty, without injustice--"

"And suppose the Children do not agree?"

For the first time Caterham looked Redwood fully in the face. 

"They must!"

"I don't think they will. "

"Why should they not agree?" he asked, in richly toned amazement. 

"Suppose they don't?"

"What can it be but war? We cannot have the thing go on. We cannot. Sir. Have you scientific men _no_ imagination? Have you no mercy? We cannothave our world trampled under a growing herd of such monsters andmonstrous growths as your Food has made. We cannot and we cannot! I askyou, Sir, what can it be but war? And remember--this that has happenedis only a beginning I _This_ was a skirmish. A mere affair of police. Believe me, a mere affair of police. Do not be cheated by perspective, by the immediate bigness of these newer things. Behind us is thenation--is humanity. Behind the thousands who have died there aremillions. Were it not for the fear of bloodshed, Sir, behind our firstattacks there would be forming other attacks, even now. Whether we cankill this Food or not, most assuredly we can kill your sons! You reckontoo much on the things of yesterday, on the happenings of a mere scoreof years, on one battle. You have no sense of the slow course ofhistory. I offer this convention for the sake of lives, not because itcan change the inevitable end. If you think that your poor two dozen ofGiants can resist all the forces of our people and of all the alienpeoples who will come to our aid; if you think you can change Humanityat a blow, in a single generation, and alter the nature and stature ofMan--"

He flung out an arm. "Go to them now, Sir. I see them, for all the evilthey have done, crouching among their wounded--"

He stopped, as though he had glanced at Redwood's son by chance. Therecame a pause. "Go to them, " he said. "That is what I want to do. " "Thengo now.... "

He turned and pressed the button of a bell; without, in immediateresponse, came a sound of opening doors and hastening feet. 

The talk was at an end. The display was over. Abruptly Caterham seemedto contract, to shrivel up into a yellow-faced, fagged-out, middle-sized, middle-aged man. He stepped forward, as if he werestepping out of a picture, and with a complete assumption of that, friendliness that lies behind all the public conflicts of our race, heheld out his hand to Redwood. 

As if it were a matter of course, Redwood shook hands with him for thesecond time. 

CHAPTER THE FIFTH. 

THE GIANT LEAGUER. 

I. 

Presently Redwood found himself in a train going south over the Thames. He had a brief vision of the river shining under its lights, and of thesmoke still going up from the place where the shell had fallen on thenorth bank, and where a vast multitude of men had been organised to burnthe Herakleophorbia out of the ground. The southern bank was dark, forsome reason even the streets were not lit, all that was clearly visiblewas the outlines of the tall alarm-towers and the dark bulks of flatsand schools, and after a minute of peering scrutiny he turned his backon the window and sank into thought. There was nothing more to see or dountil he saw the Sons.... 

He was fatigued by the stresses of the last two days; it seemed to himthat his emotions must needs be exhausted, but he had fortified himselfwith strong coffee before starting, and his thoughts ran thin and clear. His mind touched many things. He reviewed again, but now in theenlightenment of accomplished events, the manner in which the Food hadentered and unfolded itself in the world. 

"Bensington thought it might be an excellent food for infants, " hewhispered to himself, with a faint smile. Then there came into his mindas vivid as if they were still unsettled his own horrible doubts afterhe had committed himself by giving it to his own son. From that, with asteady unfaltering expansion, in spite of every effort of men to helpand hinder, the Food had spread through the whole world of man. And now?

"Even if they kill them all, " Redwood whispered, "the thing is done. "

The secret of its making was known far and wide. That had been his ownwork. Plants, animals, a multitude of distressful growing children wouldconspire irresistibly to force the world to revert again to the Food, whatever happened in the present struggle. "The thing is done, " he said, with his mind swinging round beyond all his controlling to rest upon thepresent fate of the Children and his son. Would he find them exhaustedby the efforts of the battle, wounded, starving, on the verge of defeat, or would he find them still stout and hopeful, ready for the stillgrimmer conflict of the morrow? His son was wounded! But he had sent amessage!

His mind came back to his interview with Caterham. 

He was roused from his thoughts by the stopping of his train inChislehurst station. He recognised the place by the huge rat alarm-towerthat crested Camden Hill, and the row of blossoming giant hemlocks thatlined the road.... 

Caterham's private secretary came to him from the other carriage andtold him that half a mile farther the line had been wrecked, and thatthe rest of the journey was to be made in a motor car. Redwood descendedupon a platform lit only by a hand lantern and swept by the cool nightbreeze. The quiet of that derelict, wood-set, weed-embedded suburb--forall the inhabitants had taken refuge in London at the outbreak ofyesterday's conflict--became instantly impressive. His conductor tookhim down the steps to where a motor car was waiting with blazinglights--the only lights to be seen--handed him over to the care of thedriver and bade him farewell. 

"You will do your best for us, " he said, with an imitation of hismaster's manner, as he held Redwood's hand. 

So soon as Redwood could be wrapped about they started out into thenight. At one moment they stood still, and then the motor car wasrushing softly and swiftly down the station incline. They turned onecorner and another, followed the windings of a lane of villas, and thenbefore them stretched the road. The motor droned up to its topmostspeed, and the black night swept past them. Everything was very darkunder the starlight, and the whole world crouched mysteriously and wasgone without a sound. Not a breath stirred the flying things by thewayside; the deserted, pallid white villas on either hand, with theirblack unlit windows, reminded him of a noiseless procession of skulls. The driver beside him was a silent man, or stricken into silence by theconditions of his journey. He answered Redwood's brief questions inmonosyllables, and gruffly. Athwart the southern sky the beams ofsearchlights waved noiseless passes; the sole strange evidences of lifethey seemed in all that derelict world about the hurrying machine. 

The road was presently bordered on either side by gigantic blackthornshoots that made it very dark, and by tail grass and big campions, hugegiant dead-nettles as high as trees, flickering past darkly insilhouette overhead. Beyond Keston they came to a rising hill, and thedriver went slow. At the crest he stopped. The engine throbbed andbecame still. "There, " he said, and his big gloved finger pointed, ablack misshapen thing before Redwood's eyes. 

Far away as it seemed, the great embankment, crested by the blaze fromwhich the searchlights sprang, rose up against the sky. Those beams wentand came among the clouds and the hilly land about them as if theytraced mysterious incantations. 

"I don't know, " said the driver at last, and it was clear he was afraidto go on. 

Presently a searchlight swept down the sky to them, stopped as it werewith a start, scrutinised them, a blinding stare confused rather thanmitigated by an intervening monstrous weed stem or so. They sat withtheir gloves held over their eyes, trying to look under them and meetthat light. 

"Go on, " said Redwood after a while. 

The driver still had his doubts; he tried to express them, and died downto "I don't know" again. 

At last he ventured on. "Here goes, " he said, and roused his machineryto motion again, followed intently by that great white eye. 

To Redwood it seemed for a long time they were no longer on earth, butin a state of palpitating hurry through a luminous cloud. Teuf, teuf, teuf, teuf, went the machine, and ever and again--obeying I know notwhat nervous impulse--the driver sounded his horn. 

They passed into the welcome darkness of a high-fenced lane, and downinto a hollow and past some houses into that blinding stare again. Thenfor a space the road ran naked across a down, and they seemed to hangthrobbing in immensity. Once more giant weeds rose about them andwhirled past. Then quite abruptly close upon them loomed the figure of agiant, shining brightly where the searchlight caught him below, andblack against the sky above. "Hullo there!" he cried, and "stop! There'sno more road beyond ... Is that Father Redwood?"

Redwood stood up and gave a vague shout by way of answer, and thenCossar was in the road beside him, gripping both hands with both of hisand pulling him out of the car. 

"What of my son?" asked Redwood. 

"He's all right, " said Cossar. "They've hurt nothing serious in _him_. "

"And your lads?"

"Well. All of them, well. But we've had to make a fight for it. "

The Giant was saying something to the motor driver. Redwood stood asideas the machine wheeled round, and then suddenly Cossar vanished, everything vanished, and he was in absolute darkness for a space. Theglare was following the motor back to the crest of the Keston hill. Hewatched the little conveyance receding in that white halo. It had acurious effect, as though it was not moving at all and the halo was. Agroup of war-blasted Giant elders flashed into gaunt scarredgesticulations and were swallowed again by the night ... Redwood turnedto Cossar's dim outline again and clasped his hand. "I have been shut upand kept in ignorance, " he said, "for two whole days. "

"We fired the Food at them, " said Cossar. "Obviously! Thirty shots. Eh!" "I come from Caterham. "

"I know you do. " He laughed with a note of bitterness. "I suppose he'swiping it up. "

II. 

"Where is my son?" said Redwood. 

"He is all right. The Giants are waiting for your message. "

"Yes, but my son--... "

He passed with Cossar down a long slanting tunnel that was lit red for amoment and then became dark again, and came out presently into the greatpit of shelter the Giants had made. 

Redwood's first impression was of an enormous arena bounded by very highcliffs and with its floor greatly encumbered. It was in darkness savefor the passing reflections of the watchman's searchlights that whirledperpetually high overhead, and for a red glow that came and went from adistant corner where two Giants worked together amidst a metallicclangour. Against the sky, as the glare came about, his eye caught thefamiliar outlines of the old worksheds and playsheds that were made forthe Cossar boys. They were hanging now, as it were, at a cliff brow, andstrangely twisted and distorted with the guns of Caterham's bombardment. There were suggestions of huge gun emplacements above there, and nearerwere piles of mighty cylinders that were perhaps ammunition. All aboutthe wide space below, the forms of great engines and incomprehensiblebulks were scattered in vague disorder. The Giants appeared and vanishedamong these masses and in the uncertain light; great shapes they were, not disproportionate to the things amidst which they moved. Some wereactively employed, some sitting and lying as if they courted sleep, andone near at hand, whose body was bandaged, lay on a rough litter of pineboughs and was certainly asleep. Redwood peered at these dim forms; hiseyes went from one stirring outline to another. 

"Where is my son, Cossar?"

Then he saw him. 

His son was sitting under the shadow of a great wall of steel. Hepresented himself as a black shape recognisable only by his pose, --hisfeatures were invisible. He sat chin upon hand, as though weary or lostin thought. Beside him Redwood discovered the figure of the Princess, the dark suggestion of her merely, and then, as the glow from thedistant iron returned, he saw for an instant, red lit and tender, theinfinite kindliness of her shadowed face. She stood looking down uponher lover with her hand resting against the steel. It seemed that shewhispered to him. 

Redwood would have gone towards them. 

"Presently, " said Cossar. "First there is your message. "

"Yes, " said Redwood, "but--"

He stopped. His son was now looking up and speaking to the Princess, butin too low a tone for them to hear. Young Redwood raised his face, andshe bent down towards him, and glanced aside before she spoke. 

"But if we are beaten, " they heard the whispered voice of young Redwood. 

She paused, and the red blaze showed her eyes bright with unshed tears. She bent nearer him and spoke still lower. There was something sointimate and private in their bearing, in their soft tones, thatRedwood--Redwood who had thought for two whole days of nothing but hisson--felt himself intrusive there. Abruptly he was checked. For thefirst time in his life perhaps he realised how much more a son may be tohis father than a father can ever be to a son; he realised the fullpredominance of the future over the past. Here between these two he hadno part. His part was played. He turned to Cossar, in the instantrealisation. Their eyes met. His voice was changed to the tone of a greyresolve. 

"I will deliver my message now, " he said. "Afterwards--... It will besoon enough then. "

The pit was so enormous and so encumbered that it was a long andtortuous route to the place from which Redwood could speak to them all. 

He and Cossar followed a steeply descending way that passed beneath anarch of interlocking machinery, and so came into a vast deep gangwaythat ran athwart the bottom of the pit. This gangway, wide and vacant, and yet relatively narrow, conspired with everything about it to enhanceRedwood's sense of his own littleness. It became, as it were, anexcavated gorge. High overhead, separated from him by cliffs ofdarkness, the searchlights wheeled and blazed, and the shining shapeswent to and fro. Giant voices called to one another above there, callingthe Giants together to the Council of War, to hear the terms thatCaterham had sent. The gangway still inclined downward towards blackvastnesses, towards shadows and mysteries and inconceivable things, intowhich Redwood went slowly with reluctant footsteps and Cossar with aconfident stride.... 

Redwood's thoughts were busy. The two men passed into the completestdarkness, and Cossar took his companion's wrist. They went now slowlyperforce. 

Redwood was moved to speak. "All this, " he said, "is strange. "

"Big, " said Cossar. 

"Strange. And strange that it should be strange to me--I, who am, in asense, the beginning of it all. It's--"

He stopped, wrestling with his elusive meaning, and threw an unseengesture at the cliff. 

"I have not thought of it before. I have been busy, and the years havepassed. But here I see--It is a new generation, Cossar, and new emotionsand new needs. All this, Cossar--"

Cossar saw now his dim gesture to the things about them. 

"All this is Youth. "

Cossar made no answers and his irregular footfalls went striding on. 

"It isn't _our_ youth, Cossar. They are taking things over. They arebeginning upon their own emotions, their own experiences, their own way. We have made a new world, and it isn't ours. It isn't even--sympathetic. This great place--"

"I planned it, " said Cossar, his face close. 

"But now?"

"Ah! I have given it to my sons. "

Redwood could feel the loose wave of the arm that he could not see. 

"That is it. We are over--or almost over. "

"Your message!"

"Yes. And then--" "We're over"

"Well--?"

"Of course we are out of it, we two old men, " said Cossar, with hisfamiliar note of sudden anger. "Of course we are. Obviously. Each manfor his own time. And now--it's _their_ time beginning. That's allright. Excavator's gang. We do our job and go. See? That is what deathis for. We work out all our little brains and all our little emotions, and then this lot begins afresh. Fresh and fresh! Perfectly simple. What's the trouble?"

He paused to guide Redwood to some steps. 

"Yes, " said Redwood. "but one feels--"

He left his sentence incomplete. 

"That is what Death is for. " He heard Cossar below him insisting, "Howelse could the thing be done? That is what Death is for. "

III. 

After devious windings and ascents they came out upon a projecting ledgefrom which it was possible to see over the greater extent of the Giants'pit, and from which Redwood might make himself heard by the whole oftheir assembly. The Giants were already gathered below and about him atdifferent levels, to hear the message he had to deliver. The eldest sonof Cossar stood on the bank overhead watching the revelations of thesearchlights, for they feared a breach of the truce. The workers at thegreat apparatus in the corner stood out clear in their own light; theywere near stripped; they turned their faces towards Redwood, but with awatchful reference ever and again to the castings that they could notleave. He saw these nearer figures with a fluctuating indistinctness, bylights that came and went, and the remoter ones still less distinctly. They came from and vanished again into the depths of great obscurities. For these Giants had no more light than they could help in the pit, thattheir eyes might be ready to see effectually any attacking force thatmight spring upon them out of the darknesses around. 

Ever and again some chance glare would pick out and display this groupor that of tall and powerful forms, the Giants from Sunderland clothedin overlapping metal plates, and the others clad in leather, in wovenrope or in woven metal, as their conditions had determined. They satamidst or rested their hands upon, or stood erect among machines andweapons as mighty as themselves, and all their faces, as they came andwent from visible to invisible, had steadfast eyes. 

He made an effort to begin and did not do so. Then for a moment hisson's face glowed out in a hot insurgence of the fire, his son's facelooking up to him, tender as well as strong; and at that he found avoice to reach them all, speaking across a gulf, as it were, to his son. 

"I come from Caterham, " he said. "He sent me to you, to tell you theterms he offers. "

He paused. "They are impossible terms, I know, now that I see you hereall together; they are impossible terms, but I brought them to you, because I wanted to see you all--and my son. Once more ... I wanted tosee my son.... "

"Tell them the terms, " said Cossar. 

"This is what Caterham offers. He wants you to go apart and leave hisworld!" "Where?"

"He does not know. Vaguely somewhere in the world a great region is tobe set apart.... And you are to make no more of the Food, to have nochildren of your own, to live in your own way for your own time, andthen to end for ever. "

He stopped. 

"And that is all?"

"That is all. "

There followed a great stillness. The darkness that veiled the Giantsseemed to look thoughtfully at him. 

He felt a touch at his elbow, and Cossar was holding a chair for him--aqueer fragment of doll's furniture amidst these piled immensities. Hesat down and crossed his legs, and then put one across the knee of theother, and clutched his boot nervously, and felt small andself-conscious and acutely visible and absurdly placed. 

Then at the sound of a voice he forgot himself again. 

"You have heard, Brothers, " said this voice out of the shadows. 

And another answered, "We have heard. "

"And the answer, Brothers?"

"To Caterham?"

"Is No!"

"And then?"

There was a silence for the space of some seconds. 

Then a voice said: "These people are right. After their lights, that is. They have been right in killing all that grew larger than itskind--beast and plant and all manner of great things that arose. Theywere right in trying to massacre us. They are right now in saying wemust not marry our kind. According to their lights they are right. Theyknow--it is time that we also knew--that you cannot have pigmies andgiants in one world together. Caterham has said that again andagain--clearly--their world or ours. "

"We are not half a hundred now, " said another, "and they are endlessmillions. "

"So it may be. But the thing is as I have said. "

Then another long silence. 

"And are we to die then?"

"God forbid!"

"Are they?"

"No. "

"But that is what Caterham says! He would have us live out our lives, die one by one, till only one remains, and that one at last would diealso, and they would cut down all the giant plants and weeds, kill allthe giant under-life, burn out the traces of the Food--make an end to usand to the Food for ever. Then the little pigmy world would be safe. They would go on--safe for ever, living their little pigmy lives, doingpigmy kindnesses and pigmy cruelties each to the other; they might evenperhaps attain a sort of pigmy millennium, make an end to war, make anend to over-population, sit down in a world-wide city to practise pigmyarts, worshipping one another till the world begins to freeze.... "

In the corner a sheet of iron fell in thunder to the ground. 

"Brothers, we know what we mean to do. "

In a spluttering of light from the searchlights Redwood saw earnestyouthful faces turning to his son. 

"It is easy now to make the Food. It would be easy for us to make Foodfor all the world. " "You mean, Brother Redwood, " said a voice out ofthe darkness, "that it is for the little people to eat the Food. "

"What else is there to do?"

"We are not half a hundred and they are many millions. "

"But we held our own. "

"So far. "

"If it is God's will, we may still hold our own. "

"Yes. But think of the dead!"

Another voice took up the strain. "The dead, " it said. "Think of theunborn.... "

"Brothers, " came the voice of young Redwood, "what can we do but fightthem, and if we beat them, make them take the Food? They cannot help buttake the Food now. Suppose we were to resign our heritage and do thisfolly that Caterham suggests! Suppose we could! Suppose we give up thisgreat thing that stirs within us, repudiate this thing our fathers didfor us--that _you_, Father, did for us--and pass, when our time hascome, into decay and nothingness! What then? Will this little world oftheirs be as it was before? They may fight against greatness in us whoare the children of men, but can they conquer? Even if they shoulddestroy us every one, what then? Would it save them? No! For greatnessis abroad, not only in us, not only in the Food, but in the purpose ofall things! It is in the nature of all things; it is part of space andtime. To grow and still to grow: from first to last that is Being--thatis the law of life. What other law can there be?"

"To help others?"

"To grow. It is still, to grow. Unless we help them to fail.... "

"They will fight hard to overcome us, " said a voice. 

And another, "What of that?"

"They will fight, " said young Redwood. "If we refuse these terms, Idoubt not they will fight. Indeed I hope they will be open and fight. Ifafter all they offer peace, it will be only the better to catch usunawares. Make no mistake, Brothers; in some way or other they willfight. The war has begun, and we must fight, to the end. Unless we arewise, we may find presently we have lived only to make them betterweapons against our children and our kind. This, so far, has been onlythe dawn of battle. All our lives will be a battle. Some of us will bekilled in battle, some of us will be waylaid. There is no easyvictory--no victory whatever that is not more than half defeat for us. Be sure of that. What of that? If only we keep a foothold, if only weleave behind us a growing host to fight when we are gone!"

"And to-morrow?"

"We will scatter the Food; we will saturate the world with the Food. "

"Suppose they come to terms?"

"Our terms are the Food. It is not as though little and great could livetogether in any perfection of compromise. It is one thing or the other. What right have parents to say, My child shall have no light but thelight I have had, shall grow no greater than the greatness to which Ihave grown? Do I speak for you, Brothers?"

Assenting murmurs answered him. 

"And to the children who will be women as well as to the children whowill be men, " said a voice from the darkness. 

"Even more so--to be mothers of a new race ... " "But for the nextgeneration there must be great and little, " said Redwood, with his eyeson his son's face. 

"For many generations. And the little will hamper the great and thegreat press upon the little. So it must needs be, father. "

"There will be conflict. "

"Endless conflict. Endless misunderstanding. All life is that. Great andlittle cannot understand one another. But in every child born of man, Father Redwood, lurks some seed of greatness--waiting for the Food. "

"Then I am to go to Caterham again and tell him--"

"You will stay with us, Father Redwood. Our answer goes to Caterham atdawn. "

"He says that he will fight.... "

"So be it, " said young Redwood, and his brethren murmured assent. 

"_The iron waits_, " cried a voice, and the two giants who were workingin the corner began a rhythmic hammering that made a mighty music to thescene. The metal glowed out far more brightly than it had done before, and gave Redwood a clearer view of the encampment than had yet come tohim. He saw the oblong space to its full extent, with the great enginesof warfare ranged ready to hand. Beyond, and at a higher level, thehouse of the Cossars stood. About him were the young giants, huge andbeautiful, glittering in their mail, amidst the preparations for themorrow. The sight of them lifted his heart. They were so easilypowerful! They were so tall and gracious! They were so steadfast intheir movements! There was his son amongst them, and the first of allgiant women, the Princess.... 

There leapt into his mind the oddest contrast, a memory of Bensington, very bright and little--Bensington with his hand amidst the soft breastfeathers of that first great chick, standing in that conventionallyfurnished room of his, peering over his spectacles dubiously as cousinJane banged the door.... 

It had all happened in a yesterday of one-and-twenty years. 

Then suddenly a strange doubt took hold of him: that this place andpresent greatness were but the texture of a dream; that he was dreaming, and would in an instant wake to find himself in his study again, theGiants slaughtered, the Food suppressed, and himself a prisoner lockedin. What else indeed was life but that--always to be a prisoner lockedin! This was the culmination and end of his dream. He would wake throughbloodshed and battle, to find his Food the most foolish of fancies, andhis hopes and faith of a greater world to come no more than the colouredfilm upon a pool of bottomless decay. Littleness invincible!

So strong and deep was this wave of despondency, this suggestion ofimpending disillusionment, that he started to his feet. He stood andpressed his clenched fists into his eyes, and so for a moment remained, fearing to open them again and see, lest the dream should already havepassed away.... 

The voice of the giant children spoke to one another, an undertone tothat clangorous melody of the smiths. His tide of doubt ebbed. He heardthe giant voices; he heard their movements about him still. It was real, surely it was real--as real as spiteful acts! More real, for these greatthings, it may be, are the coming things, and the littleness, bestiality, and infirmity of men are the things that go. He opened hiseyes. "Done, " cried one of the two ironworkers, and they flung theirhammers down. 

A voice sounded above. The son of Cossar, standing on the greatembankment, had turned and was now speaking to them all. 

"It is not that we would oust the little people from the world, " hesaid, "in order that we, who are no more than one step upwards fromtheir littleness, may hold their world for ever. It is the step we fightfor and not ourselves.... We are here, Brothers, to what end? To servethe spirit and the purpose that has been breathed into our lives. Wefight not for ourselves--for we are but the momentary hands and eyes ofthe Life of the World. So you, Father Redwood, taught us. Through us andthrough the little folk the Spirit looks and learns. From us by word andbirth and act it must pass--to still greater lives. This earth is noresting place; this earth is no playing place, else indeed we might putour throats to the little people's knife, having no greater right tolive than they. And they in their turn might yield to the ants andvermin. We fight not for ourselves but for growth--growth that goes onfor ever. To-morrow, whether we live or die, growth will conquer throughus. That is the law of the spirit for ever more. To grow according tothe will of God! To grow out of these cracks and crannies, out of theseshadows and darknesses, into greatness and the light! Greater, " he said, speaking with slow deliberation, "greater, my Brothers! And then--stillgreater. To grow, and again--to grow. To grow at last into thefellowship and understanding of God. Growing.... Till the earth is nomore than a footstool.... Till the spirit shall have driven fear intonothingness, and spread.... " He swung his arm heavenward:--"_There!"_His voice ceased. The white glare of one of tho searchlights wheeledabout, and for a moment fell upon him, standing out gigantic with handupraised against the sky. 

For one instant he shone, looking up fearlessly into the starry deeps, mail-clad, young and strong, resolute and still. Then the light hadpassed, and he was no more than a great black outline against the starrysky--a great black outline that threatened with one mighty gesture thefirmament of heaven and all its multitude of stars. 

THE END.