VII

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 fl.u.s.tered 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 a.s.sure 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 been patiently 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 ba.n.a.lity, 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

I

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 a.s.sociated with the picture is an image of myself grown to enormous dimensions, a Brocken spectre that threatened the world with t.i.tanic 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 s.p.a.ce 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 c.u.mbrous 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 p.r.o.nouncements 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 a.n.a.logy.