CHAPTER THE FIRST.
THE COMING OF THE FOOD.
I.
Our theme, which began so compactly in Mr. Bensington's study, hasalready spread and branched, until it points this way and that, andhenceforth our whole story is one of dissemination. To follow the Foodof the Gods further is to trace the ramifications of a perpetuallybranching tree; in a little while, in the quarter of a lifetime, theFood had trickled and increased from its first spring in the little farmnear Hickleybrow until it had spread,--it and the report and shadow ofits power,--throughout the world. It spread beyond England veryspeedily. Soon in America, all over the continent of Europe, in Japan,in Australia, at last all over the world, the thing was working towardsits appointed end. Always it worked slowly, by indirect courses andagainst resistance. It was bigness insurgent. In spite of prejudice, inspite of law and regulation, in spite of all that obstinate conservatismthat lies at the base of the formal order of mankind, the Food of theGods, once it had been set going, pursued its subtle and invincibleprogress.
The children of the Food grew steadily through all these years; that wasthe cardinal fact of the time. But it is the leakages make history. Thechildren who had eaten grew, and soon there were other children growing;and all the best intentions in the world could not stop further leakagesand still further leakages. The Food insisted on escaping with thepertinacity of a thing alive. Flour treated with the stuff crumbled indry weather almost as if by intention into an impalpable powder, andwould lift and travel before the lightest breeze. Now it would be somefresh insect won its way to a temporary fatal new development, now somefresh outbreak from the sewers of rats and such-like vermin. For somedays the village of Pangbourne in Berkshire fought with giant ants.Three men were bitten and died. There would be a panic, there would be astruggle, and the salient evil would be fought down again, leavingalways something behind, in the obscurer things of life--changed forever. Then again another acute and startling outbreak, a swift upgrowthof monstrous weedy thickets, a drifting dissemination about the world ofinhumanly growing thistles, of cockroaches men fought with shot guns, ora plague of mighty flies.
There were some strange and desperate struggles in obscure places. TheFood begot heroes in the cause of littleness ...
And men took such happenings into their lives, and met them by theexpedients of the moment, and told one another there was "no change inthe essential order of things." After the first great panic, Caterham,in spite of his power of eloquence, became a secondary figure in thepolitical world, remained in men's minds as the exponent of an extremeview.
Only slowly did he win a way towards a central position in affairs."There was no change in the essential order of things,"--that eminentleader of modern thought, Doctor Winkles, was very clear upon this,--andthe exponents of what was called in those days Progressive Liberalismgrew quite sentimental upon the essential insincerity of their progress.Their dreams, it would appear, ran wholly on little nations, littlelanguages, little households, each self-supported on its little farm. Afashion for the small and neat set in. To be big was to be "vulgar," anddainty, neat, mignon, miniature, "minutely perfect," became thekey-words of critical approval....
Meanwhile, quietly, taking their time as children must, the children ofthe Food, growing into a world that changed to receive them, gatheredstrength and stature and knowledge, became individual and purposeful,rose slowly towards the dimensions of their destiny. Presently theyseemed a natural part of the world; all these stirrings of bignessseemed a natural part of the world, and men wondered how things had beenbefore their time. There came to men's ears stories of things the giantboys could do, and they said "Wonderful!"--without a spark of wonder.The popular papers would tell of the three sons of Cossar, and how theseamazing children would lift great cannons, hurl masses of iron forhundreds of yards, and leap two hundred feet. They were said to bedigging a well, deeper than any well or mine that man had ever made,seeking, it was said, for treasures hidden in the earth since ever theearth began.
These Children, said the popular magazines, will level mountains, bridgeseas, tunnel your earth to a honeycomb. "Wonderful!" said the littlefolks, "isn't it? What a lot of conveniences we shall have!" and wentabout their business as though there was no such thing as the Food ofthe Gods on earth. And indeed these things were no more than the firsthints and promises of the powers of the Children of the Food. It wasstill no more than child's play with them, no more than the first use ofa strength in which no purpose had arisen. They did not know themselvesfor what they were. They were children--slow-growing children of a newrace. The giant strength grew day by day--the giant will had still togrow into purpose and an aim.
Looking at it in a shortened perspective of time, those years oftransition have the quality of a single consecutive occurrence; butindeed no one saw the coming of Bigness in the world, as no one in allthe world till centuries had passed saw, as one happening, the Declineand Fall of Rome. They who lived in those days were too much among thesedevelopments to see them together as a single thing. It seemed even towise men that the Food was giving the world nothing but a crop ofunmanageable, disconnected irrelevancies, that might shake and troubleindeed, but could do no more to the established order and fabric ofmankind.
To one observer at least the most wonderful thing throughout that periodof accumulating stress is the invincible inertia of the great mass ofpeople, their quiet persistence in all that ignored the enormouspresences, the promise of still more enormous things, that grew amongthem. Just as many a stream will be at its smoothest, will look mosttranquil, running deep and strong, at the very verge of a cataract, soall that is most conservative in man seemed settling quietly into aserene ascendency during these latter days. Reaction became popular:there was talk of the bankruptcy of science, of the dying of Progress,of the advent of the Mandarins,--talk of such things amidst the echoingfootsteps of the Children of the Food. The fussy pointless Revolutionsof the old time, a vast crowd of silly little people chasing some sillylittle monarch and the like, had indeed died out and passed away; butChange had not died out. It was only Change that had changed. The Newwas coming in its own fashion and beyond the common understanding of theworld.
To tell fully of its coming would be to write a great history, buteverywhere there was a parallel chain of happenings. To tell thereforeof the manner of its coming in one place is to tell something of thewhole. It chanced one stray seed of Immensity fell into the pretty,petty village of Cheasing Eyebright in Kent, and from the story of itsqueer germination there and of the tragic futility that ensued, one mayattempt--following one thread, as it were--to show the direction inwhich the whole great interwoven fabric of the thing rolled off the loomof Time.
II.
Cheasing Eyebright had of course a Vicar. There are vicars and vicars,and of all sorts I love an innovating vicar--a piebald progressiveprofessional reactionary--the least. But the Vicar of Cheasing Eyebrightwas one of the least innovating of vicars, a most worthy, plump, ripe,and conservative-minded little man. It is becoming to go back a littlein our story to tell of him. He matched his village, and one may figurethem best together as they used to be, on the sunset evening when Mrs.Skinner--you will remember her flight!--brought the Food with her allunsuspected into these rustic serenities.
The village was looking its very best just then, under that westernlight. It lay down along the valley beneath the beechwoods of theHanger, a beading of thatched and red-tiled cottages--cottages withtrellised porches and pyracanthus-lined faces, that clustered closer andcloser as the road dropped from the yew trees by the church towards thebridge. The vicarage peeped not too ostentatiously between the treesbeyond the inn, an early Georgian front ripened by time, and the spireof the church rose happily in the depression made by the valley in theoutline of the hills. A winding stream, a thin intermittency of sky blueand foam, glittered amidst a thick margin of reeds and loosestrife andoverhanging willows, along the centre of a sinuous pennant of meadow.The whole prospect had that curiously
English quality of ripenedcultivation--that look of still completeness--that apes perfection,under the sunset warmth.
And the Vicar too looked mellow. He looked habitually and essentiallymellow, as though he had been a mellow baby born into a mellow class, aripe and juicy little boy. One could see, even before he mentioned it,that he had gone to an ivy-clad public school in its anecdotage, withmagnificent traditions, aristocratic associations, and no chemicallaboratories, and proceeded thence to a venerable college in the veryripest Gothic. Few books he had younger than a thousand years; of these,Yarrow and Ellis and good pre-Methodist sermons made the bulk. He was aman of moderate height, a little shortened in appearance by hisequatorial dimensions, and a face that had been mellow from the firstwas now climacterically ripe. The beard of a David hid his redundancy ofchin; he wore no watch chain out of refinements and his modest clericalgarments were made by a West End tailor.... And he sat with a hand oneither shin, blinking at his village in beatific approval. He waved aplump palm towards it. His burthen sang out again. What more could anyone desire?
"We are fortunately situated," he said, putting the thing tamely.
"We are in a fastness of the hills," he expanded.
He explained himself at length. "We are out of it all."
For they had been talking, he and his friend, of the Horrors of the Age,of Democracy, and Secular Education, and Sky Scrapers, and Motor Cars,and the American Invasion, the Scrappy Reading of the Public, and thedisappearance of any Taste at all.
"We are out of it all," he repeated, and even as he spoke the footstepsof some one coming smote upon his ear, and he rolled over and regardedher.
You figure the old woman's steadfastly tremulous advance, the bundleclutched in her gnarled lank hand, her nose (which was her countenance)wrinkled with breathless resolution. You see the poppies noddingfatefully on her bonnet, and the dust-white spring-sided boots beneathher skimpy skirts, pointing with an irrevocable slow alternation eastand west. Beneath her arm, a restive captive, waggled and slipped ascarcely valuable umbrella. What was there to tell the Vicar that thisgrotesque old figure was--so far as his village was concerned at anyrate--no less than Fruitful Chance and the Unforeseen, the Hag weak mencall Fate. But for us, you understand, no more than Mrs. Skinner.
As she was too much encumbered for a curtsey, she pretended not to seehim and his friend at all, and so passed, flip-flop, within three yardsof them, onward down towards the village. The Vicar watched her slowtransit in silence, and ripened a remark the while....
The incident seemed to him of no importance whatever. Old womankind,_aere perennius_, has carried bundles since the world began. Whatdifference has it made?
"We are out of it all," said the Vicar. "We live in an atmosphere ofsimple and permanent things, Birth and Toil, simple seed-time and simpleharvest. The Uproar passes us by." He was always very great upon what hecalled the permanent things. "Things change," he would say, "butHumanity--_aere perennius_."
Thus the Vicar. He loved a classical quotation subtly misapplied. Below,Mrs. Skinner, inelegant but resolute, had involved herself curiouslywith Wilmerding's stile.