The Wonder (21 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mr. Challis?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“I won’t keep you now,” I said, “but perhaps you could let me know some time when I could see you.”

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

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

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

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

“It’s very good of you,” I protested, “I could come quite well at any other time.”

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

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

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

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

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

“You must forgive me; I can’t go into that,” he said.

“But it is so incomparably important,” I protested.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But you can’t make him speak,” said Challis.

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

“A good beginning,” laughed Challis.

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

“Quite,” said Challis. “I admit that, but … well, I don’t think I want to know.”

“Surely,” I said, “this key to all knowledge——”

“We are not ready for it,” replied Challis. “You can’t teach metaphysics to children.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes; I hope you will,” I said lamely.

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

CHAPTER XVI

THE PROGRESS AND RELAXATION OF MY SUBJECTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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