The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H. G. Wells
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 morn
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.
"Ge
"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 arm-chair 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 t
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 thea
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 d
* * * * *
_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?"
"How _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
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 halfway-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
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 to-day--?" 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.