The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H. G. Wells
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
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, seed-time 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 power
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 Caddles.
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 Caddles under penalties put themdown. Whereupon young Caddles, 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. Caddles' 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 languag
"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 everything ... 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 Caddles.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 Caddleswas 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. Caddles' 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.