CHAPTER THE FIFTH.
THE MINIMIFICENCE OF MR. BENSINGTON.
I.
It was while the Royal Commission on Boomfood was preparing its reportthat Herakleophorbia really began to demonstrate its capacity forleakage. And the earliness of this second outbreak was the moreunfortunate, from the point of view of Cossar at any rate, since thedraft report still in existence shows that the Commission had, under thetutelage of that most able member, Doctor Stephen Winkles (F.R.S. M.D.F.R.C.P. D. Sc. J.P. D.L. etc.), already quite made up its mind thataccidental leakages were impossible, and was prepared to recommend thatto entrust the preparation of Boomfood to a qualified committee (Winkleschiefly), with an entire control over its sale, was quite enough tosatisfy all reasonable objections to its free diffusion. This committeewas to have an absolute monopoly. And it is, no doubt, to be consideredas a part of the irony of life that the first and most alarming of thissecond series of leakages occurred within fifty yards of a littlecottage at Keston occupied during the summer months by Doctor Winkles.
There can be little doubt now that Redwood's refusal to acquaint Winkleswith the composition of Herakleophorbia IV. had aroused in thatgentleman a novel and intense desire towards analytical chemistry. Hewas not a very expert manipulator, and for that reason probably he sawfit to do his work not in the excellently equipped laboratories thatwere at his disposal in London, but without consulting any one, andalmost with an air of secrecy, in a rough little garden laboratory atthe Keston establishment. He does not seem to have shown either verygreat energy or very great ability in this quest; indeed one gathers hedropped the inquiry after working at it intermittently for about amonth.
This garden laboratory, in which the work was done, was very roughlyequipped, supplied by a standpipe tap with water, and draining into apipe that ran down into a swampy rush-bordered pool under an alder treein a secluded corner of the common just outside the garden hedge. Thepipe was cracked, and the residuum of the Food of the Gods escapedthrough the crack into a little puddle amidst clumps of rushes, just intime for the spring awakening.
Everything was astir with life in that scummy little corner. There wasfrog spawn adrift, tremulous with tadpoles just bursting theirgelatinous envelopes; there were little pond snails creeping out intolife, and under the green skin of the rush stems the larvae of a bigWater Beetle were struggling out of their egg cases. I doubt if thereader knows the larva of the beetle called (I know not why) Dytiscus.It is a jointed, queer-looking thing, very muscular and sudden in itsmovements, and given to swimming head downward with its tail out ofwater; the length of a man's top thumb joint it is, and more--twoinches, that is for those who have not eaten the Food--and it has twosharp jaws that meet in front of its head--tubular jaws with sharppoints--through which its habit is to suck its victim's blood ...
The first things to get at the drifting grains of the Food were thelittle tadpoles and the little water snails; the little wrigglingtadpoles in particular, once they had the taste of it, took to it withzest. But scarcely did one of them begin to grow into a conspicuousposition in that little tadpole world and try a smaller brother or so asan aid to a vegetarian dietary, when nip! one of the Beetle larva hadits curved bloodsucking prongs gripping into his heart, and with thatred stream went Herakleophorbia IV, in a state of solution, into thebeing of a new client. The only thing that had a chance with thesemonsters to get any share of the Food were the rushes and slimy greenscum in the water and the seedling weeds in the mud at the bottom. Aclean up of the study presently washed a fresh spate of the Food intothe puddle, and overflowed it, and carried all this sinister expansionof the struggle for life into the adjacent pool under the roots of thealder...
The first person to discover what was going on was a Mr. LukeyCarrington, a special science teacher under the London Education Board,and, in his leisure, a specialist in fresh-water algae, and he iscertainly not to be envied his discovery. He had come down to KestonCommon for the day to fill a number of specimen tubes for subsequentexamination, and he came, with a dozen or so of corked tubes clankingfaintly in his pocket, over the sandy crest and down towards the pool,spiked walking stick in hand. A garden lad standing on the top of thekitchen steps clipping Doctor Winkles' hedge saw him in thisunfrequented corner, and found him and his occupation sufficientlyinexplicable and interesting to watch him pretty closely.
He saw Mr. Carrington stoop down by the side of the pool, with his handagainst the old alder stem, and peer into the water, but of course hecould not appreciate the surprise and pleasure with which Mr. Carringtonbeheld the big unfamiliar-looking blobs and threads of the algal scum atthe bottom. There were no tadpoles visible--they had all been killed bythat time--and it would seem Mr. Carrington saw nothing at all unusualexcept the excessive vegetation. He bared his arm to the elbow, leantforward, and dipped deep in pursuit of a specimen. His seeking hand wentdown. Instantly there flashed out of the cool shadow under the treeroots something--
Flash! It had buried its fangs deep into his arm--a bizarre shape itwas, a foot long and more, brown and jointed like a scorpion.
Its ugly apparition and the sharp amazing painfulness of its bite weretoo much for Mr. Carrington's equilibrium. He felt himself going, andyelled aloud. Over he toppled, face foremost, splash! into the pool.
The boy saw him vanish, and heard the splashing of his struggle in thewater. The unfortunate man emerged again into the boy's field of vision,hatless and streaming with water, and screaming!
Never before had the boy heard screams from a man.
This astonishing stranger appeared to be tearing at something on theside of his face. There appeared streaks of blood there. He flung outhis arms as if in despair, leapt in the air like a frantic creature, ranviolently ten or twelve yards, and then fell and rolled on the groundand over and out of sight of the boy. The lad was down the steps andthrough the hedge in a trice--happily with the garden shears still inhand. As he came crashing through the gorse bushes, he says he was halfminded to turn back, fearing he had to deal with a lunatic, but thepossession of the shears reassured him. "I could 'ave jabbed his eyes,"he explained, "anyhow." Directly Mr. Carrington caught sight of him, hisdemeanour became at once that of a sane but desperate man. He struggledto his feet, stumbled, stood up, and came to meet the boy.
"Look!" he cried, "I can't get 'em off!"
And with a qualm of horror the boy saw that, attached to Mr.Carrington's cheek, to his bare arm, and to his thigh, and lashingfuriously with their lithe brown muscular bodies, were three of thesehorrible larvae, their great jaws buried deep in his flesh and suckingfor dear life. They had the grip of bulldogs, and Mr. Carrington'sefforts to detach the monsters from his face had only served to laceratethe flesh to which it had attached itself, and streak face and neck andcoat with living scarlet.
"I'll cut 'im," cried the boy; "'old on, Sir."
And with the zest of his age in such proceedings, he severed one by onethe heads from the bodies of Mr. Carrington's assailants. "Yup," saidthe boy with a wincing face as each one fell before him. Even then, sotough and determined was their grip that the severed heads remained fora space, still fiercely biting home and still sucking, with the bloodstreaming out of their necks behind. But the boy stopped that with a fewmore slashes of his scissors--in one of which Mr. Carrington wasimplicated.
"I couldn't get 'em off!" repeated Carrington, and stood for a space,swaying and bleeding profusely. He dabbed feeble hands at his injuriesand examined the result upon his palms. Then he gave way at the kneesand fell headlong in a dead faint at the boy's feet, between the stillleaping bodies of his defeated foes. Very luckily it didn't occur to theboy to splash water on his face--for there were still more of thesehorrors under the alder roots--and instead he passed back by the pondand went into the garden with the intention of calling assistance. Andthere he met the gardener coachman and told him of the whole affair.
When they got back to Mr. Carrington he was sitting up, dazed and weak,but able to warn them against
the danger in the pool.
II.
Such were the circumstances by which the world had its firstnotification that the Food was loose again. In another week KestonCommon was in full operation as what naturalists call a centre ofdistribution. This time there were no wasps or rats, no earwigs and nonettles, but there were at least three water-spiders, several dragon-flylarvae which presently became dragon-flies, dazzling all Kent with theirhovering sapphire bodies, and a nasty gelatinous, scummy growth thatswelled over the pond margin, and sent its slimy green masses surginghalfway up the garden path to Doctor Winkles's house. And there began agrowth of rushes and equisetum and potamogeton that ended only with thedrying of the pond.
It speedily became evident to the public mind that this time there wasnot simply one centre of distribution, but quite a number of centres.There was one at Ealing--there can be no doubt now--and from that camethe plague of flies and red spider; there was one at Sunbury, productiveof ferocious great eels, that could come ashore and kill sheep; andthere was one in Bloomsbury that gave the world a new strain ofcockroaches of a quite terrible sort--an old house it was in Bloomsbury,and much inhabited by undesirable things. Abruptly the world founditself confronted with the Hickleybrow experiences all over again, withall sorts of queer exaggerations of familiar monsters in the place ofthe giant hens and rats and wasps. Each centre burst out with its owncharacteristic local fauna and flora....
We know now that every one of these centres corresponded to one of thepatients of Doctor Winkles, but that was by no means apparent at thetime. Doctor Winkles was the last person to incur any odium in thematter. There was a panic quite naturally, a passionate indignation, butit was indignation not against Doctor Winkles but against the Food, andnot so much against the Food as against the unfortunate Bensington, whomfrom the very first the popular imagination had insisted upon regardingas the sole and only person responsible for this new thing.
The attempt to lynch him that followed is just one of those explosiveevents that bulk largely in history and are in reality the leastsignificant of occurrences.
The history of the outbreak is a mystery. The nucleus of the crowdcertainly came from an Anti-Boomfood meeting in Hyde Park organised byextremists of the Caterham party, but there seems no one in the worldwho actually first proposed, no one who ever first hinted a suggestionof the outrage at which so many people assisted. It is a problem for M.Gustave le Bon--a mystery in the psychology of crowds. The fact emergesthat about three o'clock on Sunday afternoon a remarkably big and uglyLondon crowd, entirely out of hand, came rolling down Thursday Streetintent on Bensington's exemplary death as a warning to all scientificinvestigators, and that it came nearer accomplishing its object than anyLondon crowd has ever come since the Hyde Park railings came down inremote middle Victorian times. This crowd came so close to its objectindeed, that for the space of an hour or more a word would have settledthe unfortunate gentleman's fate.
The first intimation he had of the thing was the noise of the peopleoutside. He went to the window and peered, realising nothing of whatimpended. For a minute perhaps he watched them seething about theentrance, disposing of an ineffectual dozen of policemen who barredtheir way, before he fully realised his own importance in the affair. Itcame upon him in a flash--that that roaring, swaying multitude was afterhim. He was all alone in the flat--fortunately perhaps--his cousin Janehaving gone down to Ealing to have tea with a relation on her mother'sside, and he had no more idea of how to behave under such circumstancesthan he had of the etiquette of the Day of Judgment. He was stilldashing about the flat asking his furniture what he should do, turningkeys in locks and then unlocking them again, making darts at door andwindow and bedroom--when the floor clerk came to him.
"There isn't a moment, Sir," he said. "They've got your number from theboard in the hall! They're coming straight up!"
He ran Mr. Bensington out into the passage, already echoing with theapproaching tumult from the great staircase, locked the door behindthem, and led the way into the opposite flat by means of his duplicatekey.
"It's our only chance now," he said.
He flung up a window which opened on a ventilating shaft, and showedthat the wall was set with iron staples that made the rudest and mostperilous of wall ladders to serve as a fire escape from the upper flats.He shoved Mr. Bensington out of the window, showed him how to cling on,and pursued him up the ladder, goading and jabbing his legs with a bunchof keys whenever he desisted from climbing. It seemed to Bensington attimes that he must climb that vertical ladder for evermore. Above, theparapet was inaccessibly remote, a mile perhaps, below--He did not careto think of things below.
"Steady on!" cried the clerk, and gripped his ankle. It was quitehorrible having his ankle gripped like that, and Mr. Bensingtontightened his hold on the iron staple above to a drowning clutch, andgave a faint squeal of terror.
It became evident the clerk had broken a window, and then it seemed hehad leapt a vast distance sideways, and there came the noise of awindow-frame sliding in its sash. He was bawling things.
Mr. Bensington moved his head round cautiously until he could see theclerk. "Come down six steps," the clerk commanded.
All this moving about seemed very foolish, but very, very cautiously Mr.Bensington lowered a foot.
"Don't pull me!" he cried, as the clerk made to help him from the openwindow.
It seemed to him that to reach the window from the ladder would be avery respectable feat for a flying fox, and it was rather with the ideaof a decent suicide than in any hope of accomplishing it that he madethe step at last, and quite ruthlessly the clerk pulled him in. "You'llhave to stop here," said the clerk; "my keys are no good here. It's anAmerican lock. I'll get out and slam the door behind me and see if I canfind the man of this floor. You'll be locked in. Don't go to the window,that's all. It's the ugliest crowd I've ever seen. If only they thinkyou're out they'll probably content themselves by breaking up yourstuff--"
"The indicator said In," said Bensington.
"The devil it did! Well, anyhow, I'd better not be found--"
He vanished with a slam of the door.
Bensington was left to his own initiative again.
It took him under the bed.
There presently he was found by Cossar.
Bensington was almost comatose with terror when he was found, for Cossarhad burst the door in with his shoulder by jumping at it across thebreadth of the passage.
"Come out of it, Bensington," he said. "It's all right. It's me. We'vegot to get out of this. They're setting the place on fire. The portersare all clearing out. The servants are gone. It's lucky I caught the manwho knew.
"Look here!"
Bensington, peering from under the bed, became aware of someunaccountable garments on Cossar's arm, and, of all things, a blackbonnet in his hand!
"They're having a clear out," said Cossar, "If they don't set the placeon fire they'll come here. Troops may not be here for an hour yet. Fiftyper cent. Hooligans in the crowd, and the more furnished flats they gointo the better they'll like it. Obviously.... They mean a clear out.You put this skirt and bonnet on, Bensington, and clear out with me."
"D'you _mean_--?" began Bensington, protruding a head, tortoise fashion.
"I mean, put 'em on and come! Obviously," And with a sudden vehemence hedragged Bensington from under the bed, and began to dress him for hisnew impersonation of an elderly woman of the people.
He rolled up his trousers and made him kick off his slippers, took offhis collar and tie and coat and vest, slipped a black skirt over hishead, and put on a red flannel bodice and a body over the same. He madehim take off his all too characteristic spectacles, and clapped thebonnet on his head. "You might have been born an old woman," he said ashe tied the strings. Then came the spring-side boots--a terrible wrenchfor corns--and the shawl, and the disguise was complete. "Up and down,"said Cossar, and Bensington obeyed.
"You'll do," said Cossar.
And in this guise it was, stumb
ling awkwardly over his unaccustomedskirts, shouting womanly imprecations upon his own head in a weirdfalsetto to sustain his part, and to the roaring note of a crowd bentupon lynching him, that the original discoverer of Herakleophorbia IV.proceeded down the corridor of Chesterfield Mansions, mingled with thatinflamed disorderly multitude, and passed out altogether from the threadof events that constitutes our story.
Never once after that escape did he meddle again with the stupendousdevelopment of the Food of the Gods he of all men had done most tobegin.
III.
This little man who started the whole thing passes out of the story, andafter a time he passed altogether out of the world of things, visibleand tellable. But because he started the whole thing it is seemly togive his exit an intercalary page of attention. One may picture him inhis later days as Tunbridge Wells came to know him. For it was atTunbridge Wells he reappeared after a temporary obscurity, so soon as hefully realised how transitory, how quite exceptional and unmeaning thatfury of rioting was. He reappeared under the wing of Cousin Jane,treating himself for nervous shock to the exclusion of all otherinterests, and totally indifferent, as it seemed, to the battles thatwere raging then about those new centres of distribution, and about thebaby Children of the Food.
He took up his quarters at the Mount Glory Hydrotherapeutic Hotel, wherethere are quite extraordinary facilities for baths, Carbonated Baths,Creosote Baths, Galvanic and Faradic Treatment, Massage, Pine Baths,Starch and Hemlock Baths, Radium Baths, Light Baths, Heat Baths, Branand Needle Baths, Tar and Birdsdown Baths,--all sorts of baths; and hedevoted his mind to the development of that system of curative treatmentthat was still imperfect when he died. And sometimes he would go down ina hired vehicle and a sealskin trimmed coat, and sometimes, when hisfeet permitted, he would walk to the Pantiles, and there he would sipchalybeate water under the eye of his cousin Jane.
His stooping shoulders, his pink appearance, his beaming glasses, becamea "feature" of Tunbridge Wells. No one was the least bit unkind to him,and indeed the place and the Hotel seemed very glad to have thedistinction of his presence. Nothing could rob him of that distinctionnow. And though he preferred not to follow the development of his greatinvention in the daily papers, yet when he crossed the Lounge of theHotel or walked down the Pantiles and heard the whisper, "There he is!That's him!" it was not dissatisfaction that softened his mouth andgleamed for a moment in his eye.
This little figure, this minute little figure, launched the Food of theGods upon the world! One does not know which is the most amazing, thegreatness or the littleness of these scientific and philosophical men.You figure him there on the Pantiles, in the overcoat trimmed with fur.He stands under that chinaware window where the spring spouts, and holdsand sips the glass of chalybeate water in his hand. One bright eye overthe gilt rim is fixed, with an expression of inscrutable severity, onCousin Jane, "Mm," he says, and sips.
So we make our souvenir, so we focus and photograph this discoverer ofours for the last time, and leave him, a mere dot in our foreground, andpass to the greater picture that, has developed about him, to the storyof his Food, how the scattered Giant Children grew up day by day into aworld that was all too small for them, and how the net of Boomfood Lawsand Boomfood Conventions, which the Boomfood Commission was weaving eventhen, drew closer and closer upon them with every year of their growth,Until--