Odd John

  "Well, when we were brought face to face, we just stood and looked at one another for so long that the attendant found it uncomfortable. Presently James Jones, keeping his eyes on mine, said one word, with quiet emphasis and some surprise, 'Friend!' I smiled and nodded. Then I felt him catch a glimpse of my mind, and his face suddenly lit up with intense delight and surprise. Very slowly, as if painfully searching for each word, he said, 'You—are—not—mad, NOT MAD! We two, NOT MAD! But these—' (slowly pointing at the attendant and smiling) 'All mad, quite, quite mad. But kind and clever. He cares for me. I cannot care for self. Too busy with—with—— ' The sentence trailed into silence. Smiling seraphically, he nodded slowly, again and again. Then he came forward and laid a hand for an instant on my head. That was the end. When I said yes, we were friends, and he and I saw things the same way, he nodded again; but when he tried to speak, an expression of almost comic perplexity came over his face. Looking into his mind, I saw that it was already a welter of confusion. He perceived, but he could not find any mundane significance in what he perceived. He saw the two human beings that confronted him, but he no longer connected my visible appearance with human personality, with the mind that he was still striving to communicate with. He didn't even see us as physical objects at all, but just as colour and shape, without any meaning. I asked him to play to me. He could not understand. The attendant put the pipe into his hand, closing the fingers over it. He looked blankly at it. Then with a sudden smile of enlightenment he put it to his ear, like a child listening to a shell. The attendant took it again, and played a few notes on it, but in vain, Then I took it and played a little air that I had heard him play before I found him. His attention was held. Perplexity cleared from his face. To our surprise he spoke, slowly but without difficulty. 'Yes, John Wainwright,' he said, 'you heard me play that the other day. I knew some person was listening. Give me my pipe.'

  "He took it, seated himself on the edge of the table, and played, with his eyes fixed on mine."

  John startled me with one sharp gasp of laughter. "God! it was music," he said. "If you could have heard it! I mean if you could have really heard it, and not merely as a cow might! It was lucid. It straightened out the tangles of my mind. It showed me just precisely the true, appropriate attitude of the adult human spirit to its world. Well, he played on, and I went on listening, hanging on to every note, to remember it. Then the attendant interrupted. He said this sort of noise always upset the other patients. It wasn't as if it was real music, but such crazy stuff. That was why J. J. was really only allowed to play out of doors.

  "The music stopped with a squawk. J. J. looked with a kindly but tortured smile at the attendant. Then he slid back into insanity. So complete was his disintegration that he actually tried to eat the mouthpiece."

  I believe I saw John shudder. He was now standing at the window once more, and he stood silent, while I wondered what to say. Then he exclaimed, "Where's your field-glass, quick! Damned if that's not a grey phalarope. Priceless little devil, isn't he!" In turn we watched the small silvery bird as it swam hither and thither in search of food, heedless of the buffeting wave-crests, Beside the gulls it was a yacht amongst the liners. "Yes," said John, answering my thought, "the way you feel when you watch that little blighter, just observant and delighted, and—well, curiously pious yet aloof,—yes, that's the starting-point, the very first moment, of what J. J. was working out in his music. If you could hold that always, and fill it out with a whole world of overtones, you'd be well on the way to 'us.'"

  In the tone of John's "us" there was something of the shy audacity with which a newly married couple first speak of "us." It began to dawn on me that the discovery of his own kind, even in a lunatic asylum, must have been for John a deeply moving experience. I began to realize that, having lived for nearly eighteen years with mere animals, he had at last discovered a human being.

  John sighed, and took up his narrative. "Well, of course James Jones was no good as a partner in the job of founding a new world. I've seen him several times since, and he always plays to me, and I come away a little clearer in my head, and a little more grown up. But he's incurably mad, all the same. So I started 'listening in' again; rather gloomily, for I was afraid they might all turn out to be mad, And really the next one almost cured me of looking any more. You see, I was trying to get in touch with the near ones first, because they were handier. I had already spotted a strain of French thinking that must be one of us, and also an Egyptian, and a Chinese or Tibetan. But for the present I left these alone. Well, my next was an infant more or less, the son of a crofter in South Uist (Outer Hebrides). He's a ghastly cripple; no legs, and arms like a newt's arms. And there's something wrong with his mouth, so that he can't talk. And he's always sick, because his digestion doesn't work properly. In fact he's the sort any decent society would drown at birth, But the mother loves him like a tigress; though she's scared stiff of him too, and loathes him. Neither parent has any idea he's—what he is. They think he's just an ordinary little cripple. And because he's a cripple, and because they treat him all wrong, he's brewing the most murderous hate imaginable. Within the first five minutes of my visit he spotted me as different from the others. He got me telepathically. I got him too, but he shut his mind up immediately. Now you'd think that finding a kindred spirit for the first time ever would be an occasion for thanksgiving. But he didn't take it that way at all. He evidently felt at once there wasn't room for him and me together on the same planet. But he didn't let on he was going to do anything about it. He kept his mind shut like an oyster, and his face as blank as a piece of paper. I began to think I had made a mistake, that he was not one of us after all. Yet all the circumstances corresponded with my earlier telepathic glimpses of him,—the minute room with a flagged floor, the peat fire, his mother's face, with one eye slightly bigger than the other, and traces of a moustache at the corners of her lips. By the way, his parents were quite old people, both grey. This made me curious, because the kid looked about a three-year-old. I asked how old the baby was, but they seemed unwilling to say. I tactfully said the child had a terribly wise face, not like a baby's. The father blurted out that he was eighteen years old, and the mother gave a high-pitched hysterical sort of laugh. Gradually I succeeded in making friends with his parents. (I had told them, by the way, that I was on a fishing holiday with a party on the neighbouring island.) I flattered them by telling them I had read in a book that deformed children sometimes turned out to be great geniuses. Meanwhile I was still trying to get behind the kid's defences to see what his mind was like inside. It's impossible to give you a clear idea of the murderous trick he played on me. He must have made up his mind as soon as he saw me that he'd do me in. He chose the only effective weapon he had, and it was a diabolic one. It happened this way, so far as I can tell you. I had turned from his parents and was talking to him, trying to make friends. He just stared at me blankly. I tried harder and harder to open the oyster, and was just about ready to give up in disgust when, my God, the oyster opened wide, and I—well, this is the indescribable thing. I can only carry on with the image. The mental oyster opened wide and tried to swallow me into itself. And itself was—just the bottomless black pit of Hell, Of course, that sounds silly and romantic to you. But that's what it was like, I felt myself dropping plumb into the most appalling gulf of darkness, of mental and spiritual darkness, in which there was nothing whatever but eternally unsatisfied black hate; a sort of dank atmosphere of poison, in which everything that I had ever cared for seemed to moulder away into nastiness. I can't explain, I can't explain."

  John had been sitting on the corner of my writing-table. He got up suddenly and walked to the window. "Thank God for light," he said, looking at the grey sky. "If there was some one who could understand, I could tell it all and be rid of it, perhaps. But half-telling it just makes it all come welling up again. And some say there's no Hell!"

  He remained silent for some time, looking out of the window. Then he said, "Look at th
at cormorant, He's got a conger fatter than his own neck." I came up beside him, and we watched the fish writhing and lashing. Sometimes bird and prey disappeared together under water. Once the conger got away, but was speedily recovered. After many failures, the cormorant caught it by the head, and swallowed it, slick, so that nothing was to be seen of it but its tail, and a huge swelling in the bird's neck.

  "And now," said John, "he'll be digested. That's what nearly happened to me. I felt my whole mind being disintegrated by the digestive juices of that Satanic young mollusc. I don't know what happened next, I remember seeing a perfectly diabolic expression on the kid's face; and then I must have saved myself somehow, for presently I found myself lying on the grass some way from the house, alone and in a cold sweat. The very sight of the house in the distance gave me the creeps. I couldn't think. I kept seeing that infantile grin of hate, and turning stupid again. After a while I realized I was cold, so I got up and walked toward the little bay where the boats were, Presently I began to ask myself what sort of a devil this baby Satan really was. Was he one of 'us,' or something quite different? But there was very little doubt in my mind, actually. Of course he was one of us, and probably a much mightier one than either J. J. or myself. But everything had gone wrong with him, from conception onwards. His body had failed him, and was tormenting him, and his mind was as crippled as his body, and his parents were quite unable to give him a fair chance. So the only self-expression possible to him was hate. And he had specialized in hate pretty thoroughly. But the oddest thing about it all was this. The further I got away from the experience, the more clearly it was borne in on me that his ecstasy of hate was really quite self-detached. He wasn't hating for himself. He hated himself as much as me. He hated everything, including hate. And he hated it all with a sort of sacred fervour. And why? Because, as I begin to discover, there's a sort of minute, blazing star of worship right down in the pit of his hell. He sees everything from the side of eternity just as clearly as I do, perhaps more clearly; but—how shall I put it?—he conceives his part in the picture to be the devil's part, and he's playing it with a combination of passion and detachment like a great artist, and for the glory of God, if you understand what I mean. And he's right. It's the only thing he can do, and he does it with style. I take off my hat to him, in spite of everything. But it's pretty ghastly, really. Think of the life he's living; just like an infant's, and with his powers! I dare say he'll manage to find some trick for blowing up the whole planet some day, if he lives much longer. And there's another thing. I've got to keep a sharp look out or he'll catch me again. He can reach me anywhere, in Australia or Patagonia. God! I can feel him now! Give me another apple, and let's talk about something else."

  Crunching his second Cox, John became calm again. Presently he went on with his narrative. "I haven't done much since that affair. It took me some time to get my mind straight, and then I felt depressed about the chances of ever finding any one anywhere that was really my sort and yet also sane. But after ten days or so I began the search again. I found an old gipsy woman who was a sort of half-baked one of 'us.' But she's always having fits. She tells fortunes, and perhaps has some sort of glimpses of the future. But she's as old as the hills, and cares for nothing but fortune-telling and rum. Yet she's quite definitely one of us, up to a point; not intellectually, though she has the reputation of being damnably cunning, but in insight. She sees things on their eternal side all right, though not very steadily. Then there are several others in asylums, quite hopeless. And a hermaphrodite adolescent in a sort of home for ineurables. And a man doing a life-sentence for murder. I fancy he might have been the real thing if he hadn't had a bit of his skull knocked in when he was a kid. Then there's a lightning calculator, but he doesn't seem to be anything else. He's not really one of us at all, but he's got just one of the essential factors in his make up. Well, that's all there is of Homo superior in these islands."

  John began pacing the room, quickly, methodically, like a polar bear in its cage. Suddenly he stopped, and clenched his fists and cried out, "Cattle! Cattle! A whole world of cattle! My God, how they stink!" He stared at the wall. Then he sighed, and turning to me he said, "Sorry, Fido, old man! That was a lapse. What do you say to a walk before lunch?"

  CHAPTER XIV

  ENGINEERING PROBLEMS

  NOT long after John told me of his efforts to make contact with other supernormals he took me into his confidence about his plans for the future. We were in the subterranean workshop. He was absorbed in a new invention, a sort of generator-accumulator, he said. His bench was covered with test-tubes, jars, bits of metal, bottles, insulated wires, voltmeters, lumps of stone. He was so intent on his work that I said, "I believe you're regressing to childhood. This sort to thing has got hold of you again and made you forget all about—Scotland."

  "No, you're wrong," he said. "This gadget is an important part of my plan. When I have finished this test I'll tell you." Silently he proceeded with the experiment. Presently, with a little shout of triumph, he said, "Got it this time!"

  Over a cup of coffee we discussed his plans. He was determined to search the whole world in the hope of discovering a few others of his kind, and of suitable age for joining with him in the founding of a little colony of supcrnormals in some remote part of the earth. In order to do this without loss of time, he said, he must have an ocean-going yacht and a small aeroplane, or flying machine of some kind, which could be stowed on the yacht. When I protested that he knew nothing about flying and less about designing planes, he replied, "Oh yes, I do. I learned to fly yesterday." It seems he had managed to persuade a certain brilliant young airman to give him not only a joy-ride but a long spell in control of the machine. "Once you get the feel of it," he said, "it's easy enough. I landed twice, and took off twice, and did a few stunts. But of course there's a good deal more to learn. As for designing, I'm on the job already, and on the yacht design too. But a lot depends on this new gadget. I can't explain it very well. At least, I can explain, in a way, but you just won't believe it. I've been looking into nuclear chemistry lately, and in the light of my Scotch experiences an idea struck me. Probably even you know (though you have a genius for keeping out of touch with science) that there's the hell of a lot of energy locked up in every atomic nucleus, and that the reason why you can't release it is that the unlocking would take a fantastically powerful electric current, to overcome the forces that hold the electrons and protons, and so on, together. Well, I've found a much handier key. But it's not a physical key at all but a psychical one. It's no use trying to overcome those terrific interlocking forces. You must just abolish them for the time being; send them to sleep, so to speak. The interlocking forces, and the disruptive forces too, are just the spontaneous urges of the basic physical units, call them electrons and protons, if you like. What I do, then, is to hypnotize the little devils so that they go limp for a moment and loosen their grip on one another. Then when they wake up they barge about in hilarious freedom, and all you have to do is to see that their barging drives your machinery."

  I laughed, and said I liked his parable. "Parable be damned," he said. "It's only a parable in the sense that the protons and electrons themselves are merely fictitious characters in a parable. They're not really independent entities at all, but determinations within a system—the cosmos. And they're not really just physical, but determinations within a psychophysical system. Of course if you take 'sapient' physics as God's truth, and not as an abstraction from a more profound truth, the whole idea seems crazy. But I thought it worth looking into, and I find it works. Of course there are difficulties. The main one is the psychological one. The 'sapient' mind could never do the trick; it's not awake enough. But the supernormal has the necessary influence, and practice makes the job reasonably safe and easy. The physical difficulties," he said, glancing at his apparatus, "are all connected with selecting the most favourable atoms to work on, and with tapping the flood of energy as it comes into action. I'm working on those problems
now. Ordinary mud from the estuary is pretty good for the job. There's a minute percentage of a very convenient element in it."

  With a pair of tweezers he took a pinch of mud from a test-tube and put it in a platinum bowl. He opened the trap-door of the workshop and placed the bowl outside, then returned, almost closing the trap-door. We both looked through the opening at the little bowl. Smiling, he said, "Now all you little electrons and protons go to sleep, and don't wake up till Mummy tells you." Turning to me, he added, "The patter, I may say, is for the audience, not for the rabbits in the conjurer's hat."