The Wonder (24 page)

He cried out with his horrible, inhuman cry, turned, and ran up the lane towards me. He fell on his face a few yards from me, scrambled wildly to his feet again and came on yelping and shrieking. He was wildly, horribly afraid. I caught sight of his face as he passed me, and his mouth was distorted into a square, his upper lip horribly drawn up over his ragged, yellow teeth. Suddenly he dashed at the hedge and clawed his way through. I heard him still yelping appallingly as he rushed away across the field. …

CHAPTER XVIII

IMPLICATIONS

THE JURY RETURNED A
verdict of “Accidental death.”

If there had been any traces of a struggle, I had not noticed them when I came to the edge of the pond. There may have been marks as if a foot had slipped. I was not thinking of evidence when I looked into the water.

There were marks enough when the police came to investigate, but they were the marks made by a twelve-stone man in hobnail boots, who had scrambled into, and out of, the pond. As the inspector said, it was not worth while wasting any time in looking for earlier traces of footsteps below those marks.

Nor were there any signs of violence on the body. It was in no way disfigured, save by the action of the water, in which it had lain for perhaps eighteen hours.

There was, indeed, only one point of any significance from the jury’s point of view, and that they put on one side, if they considered it at all; the body was pressed into the mud.

The Coroner asked a few questions about this fact.

Was the mud very soft? Yes, very soft, liquid on top.

How was the body lying? Face downwards.

What part of the body was deepest in the mud? The chest. The witness said he had hard work to get the upper part of the body released; the head was free, but the mud held the rest. “The mooad soocked like,” was the expressive phrase of the witness.

The Coroner passed on to other things. Had any one a spite against the child? and such futilities. Only once more did he revert to that solitary significant fact. “Would it be possible,” he asked of the abashed and self-conscious labourer, “would it be possible for the body to have worked its way down into the soft mud as you have described it to have been found?”

“We-el,” said the witness, “’twas in the stacky mooad, ’twas through the sarft stoof.”

“But this soft mud would suck any solid body down, would it not?” persisted the Coroner.

And the witness recalled the case of a duck that had been sucked into the same soft pond mud the summer before, and cited the instance. He forgot to add that on that occasion the mud had not been under water.

The Coroner accepted the instance. There can be no question that both he and the jury were anxious to accept the easier explanation.

But I know perfectly well that the Wonder did not fall into the pond by accident.

I should have known, even if that conclusive evidence with regard to his being pushed into the mud had never come to light.

He may have stood by the ash-tree and looked into the water, but he would never have fallen. He was too perfectly controlled; and, with all his apparent abstraction, no one was ever more alive to the detail of his surroundings. He and I have walked together perforce in many slippery places, but I have never known him to fall or even begin to lose his balance, whereas I have gone down many times.

Yes; I know that he was pushed into the pond, and I know that he was held down in the mud, most probably by the aid of that ash stick I had held. But it was not for me to throw suspicion on any one at that inquest, and I preferred to keep my thoughts and my inferences to myself. I should have done so, even if I had been in possession of stronger evidence.

I hope that it was the Harrison idiot who was to blame. He was not dangerous in the ordinary sense, but he might quite well have done the thing in play—as he understood it. Only I cannot quite understand his pushing the body down after it fell. That seems to argue vindictiveness—and a logic which I can hardly attribute to the idiot. Still, who can tell what went on in the distorted mind of that poor creature? He is reported to have rescued the dead body of a rabbit from the undergrowth on one occasion, and to have blubbered when he could not bring it back to life.

There is but one other person who could have been implicated, and I hesitate to name him in this place. Yet one remembers what terrific acts of misapplied courage and ferocious brutality the fanatics of history have been capable of performing when their creed and their authority have been set at naught.

Ellen Mary never recovered her sanity. She died a few weeks ago in the County Asylum. I hear that her husband attended the funeral. When she lost her belief in the supernal wisdom and power of her god, her world must have fallen about her. The thing she had imagined to be solid, real, everlasting, had proved to be friable and destructible like all other human building.

The Wonder is buried in Chilborough churchyard.

You may find the place by its proximity to the great marble mausoleum erected over the remains of Sir Edward Bigg, the well-known brewer and philanthropist.

The grave of Victor Stott is marked by a small stone, some six inches high, which is designed to catch the foot rather than the eye of the seeker.

The stone bears the initials “V. S.,” and a date—no more.

I saw the Wonder before he was buried.

I went up into the little bedroom and looked at him in his tiny coffin.

I was no longer afraid of him. His power over me was dissipated. He was no greater and no less than any other dead thing.

It was the same with every one. He had become that “poor little boy of Mrs. Stott’s.” No one spoke of him with respect now. No one seemed to remember that he had been in any way different from other “poor little fellows” who had died an untimely death.

One thing did strike me as curious. The idiot, the one person who had never feared him living, had feared him horribly when he was dead. …

CHAPTER XIX

EPILOGUE: THE USES OF MYSTERY

SOMETHING CHALLIS HAS TOLD
me; something I have learned for myself; and there is something which has come to me from an unknown source.

But here again we are confronted with the original difficulty—the difficulty that for some conceptions there is no verbal figure.

It is comprehensible, it is, indeed, obvious that the deeper abstract speculation of the Wonder’s thought cannot be set out by any metaphor that would be understood by a lesser intelligence.

We see that many philosophers, whose utterances have been recorded in human history—that record which floats like a drop of oil on the limitless ocean of eternity—have been confronted with this same difficulty, and have woven an intricate and tedious design of words in their attempt to convey some single conception—some conception which themselves could see but dimly when disguised in the masquerade of language; some figure that as it was limned grew ever more confused beneath the wrappings of metaphor, so that we who read can glimpse scarce a hint of its original shape and likeness. We see, also, that the very philosophers who caricatured their own eidolon, became intrigued with the logical abstraction of words and were led away into a wilderness of barren deduction—their one inspired vision of a stable premiss distorted and at last forgotten.

How then shall we hope to find words to adumbrate a philosophy which starts by the assumption that we can have no impression of reality until we have rid ourselves of the interposing and utterly false concepts of space and time, which delimit the whole world of human thought.

I admit that one cannot even begin to do this thing; within our present limitations our whole machinery of thought is built of these two original concepts. They are the only gauges wherewith we may measure every reality, every abstraction; wherewith we may give outline to any image or process of the mind. Only when we endeavour to grapple with that indeterminable mystery of consciousness can we conceive, however dimly, some idea of a pure abstraction uninfluenced by and independent of, those twin bases of our means of thought.

Here it is that Challis has paused. Here he says that we must wait, that no revelation can reveal what we are incapable of understanding, that only by the slow process of evolution can we attain to any understanding of the mystery we have sought to solve by our futile and primitive hypotheses.

“But then,” I have pressed him, “why do you hesitate to speak of what you heard on that afternoon?”

And once he answered me:

“I glimpsed a finality,” he said, “and that appalled me. Don’t you see that ignorance is the means of our intellectual pleasure? It is the solving of the problem that brings enjoyment—the solved problem has no further interest. So when all is known, the stimulus for action ceases; when all is known there is quiescence, nothingness. Perfect knowledge implies the peace of death, implies the state of being one—our pleasures are derived from action, from differences, from heterogeneity.

“Oh! pity the child,” said Challis, “for whom there could be no mystery. Is not mystery the first and greatest joy of life? Beyond the gate there is unexplored mystery for us in our childhood. When that is explored, there are new and wonderful possibilities beyond the hills, then beyond the seas, beyond the known world, in the everyday chances and movements of the unknown life in which we are circumstanced.

“Surely we should all perish through sheer inanity, or die desperately by suicide if no mystery remained in the world. Mystery takes a thousand beautiful shapes; it lurks even in the handiwork of man, in a stone god, or in some mighty, intricate machine, incomprehensibly deliberate and determined. The imagination endows the man-made thing with consciousness and powers, whether of reservation or aloofness; the similitude of meditation and profundity is wrought into stone. Is there not source for mystery to the uninstructed in the great machine registering the progress of its own achievement with each solemn, recurrent beat of its metal pulse?

“Behind all these things is the wonder of the imagination that never approaches more nearly to the creation of a hitherto unknown image than when it thus hesitates on the verge of mystery.

“There is yet so much, so very much cause for wondering speculation. Science gains ground so slowly. Slowly it has outlined, however vaguely, the uncertainties of our origin so far as this world is concerned, while the mystic has fought for his entrancing fairy tales one by one.

“The mystic still holds his enthralling belief in the succession of peoples who have risen and died—the succeeding world-races, red, black, yellow, and white, which have in turn dominated this planet. Science with its hammer and chisel may lay bare evidence, may collate material, date man’s appearance, call him the most recent of placental mammals, trace his superstitions and his first conceptions of a god from the elemental fears of the savage. But the mystic turns aside with an assumption of superior knowledge; he waves away objective evidence; he has a certainty impressed upon his mind.

“And the mystic is a power. He compels a multitude of followers, because he offers an attraction greater than the facts of science. He tells of a mystery profounder than any problem solved by patient investigation, because his mystery is incomprehensible even by himself; and in fear lest any should comprehend it, he disguises the approach with an array of lesser mysteries, man-made; with terminologies, symbologies and high talk of esotericism too fearful for any save the initiate.

“But we must preserve our mystic in some form against the awful time when science shall have determined a limit; when the long history of evolution shall be written in full, and every stage of world-building shall be made plain. When the cycle of atomic dust to atomic dust is demonstrated, and the detail of the life-process is taught and understood, we shall have a fierce need for the mystic to save us from the futility of a world we understand, to lie to us if need be, to inspirit our material and regular minds with some breath of delicious madness. We shall need the mystic then, or the completeness of our knowledge will drive us at last to complete the dusty circle in our eagerness to escape from a world we understand. …

“See how man clings to his old and useless traditions; see how he opposes at every step the awful force of progress. At each stage he protests that the thing that is, is good, or that the thing that was and has gone, was better. He despises new knowledge and fondly clings to the belief that once men were greater than they now are. He looks back to the more primitive, and endows it with that mystery he cannot find in his own times. So have men ever looked lingeringly behind them. It is an instinct, a great and wonderful inheritance that postpones the moment of disillusionment.

“We are still mercifully surrounded with the countless mysteries of everyday experience, all the evidences of the unimaginable stimulus we call life. Would you take them away? Would you resolve life into a disease of the ether—a disease of which you and I, all life and all matter, are symptoms? Would you teach that to the child, and explain to him that the wonder of life and growth is no wonder, but a demonstrable result of impeded force, to be evaluated by the application of an adequate formula?

“You and I,” said Challis, “are children in the infancy of the world. Let us to our play in the nursery of our own times. The day will come, perhaps, when humanity shall have grown and will have to take upon itself the heavy burden of knowledge. But you need not fear that that will be in our day, nor in a thousand years.

“Meanwhile leave us our childish fancies, our little imaginings, our hope—children that we are—of those impossible mysteries beyond the hills. …”

Originally published in 1911

Cover design by Andrea Worthington

ISBN: 978-1-4976-7930-6

This 2014 edition published by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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New York, NY 10014

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