The Wonder

"I have argued with this man," continued Challis, "and I have also seen another member of the Local Education Authority—a man of some note in the larger world—and it seems that you cannot be exempted unless you convince the Authority that your knowledge is such that to give you a Council school education would be the most absurd farce."

"Cannot you stand in loco parentis?" asked the Wonder suddenly, in his still, thin voice.

"You mean," said Challis, startled by this outburst, "that I am in a sense providing you with an education? Quite true; but there is Crashaw to deal with."

"Inform him," said the Wonder.

Challis sighed. "I have," he said, "but he can't understand." And then, feeling the urgent need to explain something of the motives that govern this little world of ours—the world into which this strangely logical exception had been born—Challis attempted an exposition.

"I know," he said, "that these things must seem to you utterly absurd, but you must try to realise that you are an exception to the world about you; that Crashaw or I, or, indeed, the greatest minds of the present day, are not ruled by the fine logic which you are able to exercise. We are children compared to you. We are swayed even in the making of our laws by little primitive emotions and passions, self-interests, desires. And at the best we are not capable of ordering our lives and our government to those just ends which we may see, some of us, are abstractly right and fine. We are at the mercy of that great mass of the people who have not yet won to an intellectual and discriminating judgment of how their own needs may best be served, and whose representatives consider the interests of a party, a constituency, and especially of their own personal ambitions and welfare, before the needs of humanity as a whole, or even the humanity of these little islands.

"Above all, we are divided man against man. We are split into parties and factions, by greed and jealousies, petty spites and self-seeking, by unintelligence, by education, and by our inability—a mental inability—'to see life steadily and see it whole,' and lastly, perhaps chiefly, by our intense egotisms, both physical and intellectual.

"Try to realise this. It is necessary, because whatever your wisdom, you have to live in a world of comparative ignorance, a world which cannot appreciate you, but which can and will fall back upon the compelling power of the savage—the resort to physical, brute force."

The Wonder nodded. "You suggest–?" he said.

"Merely that you should consent to answer certain elementary questions which the members of the Local Authority will put to you," replied Challis. "I can arrange that these questions be asked here—in the library. Will you consent?"

The Wonder nodded, and made his way into the hall, without another word. His mother rose and opened the front door for him.

As Challis watched the curious couple go down the drive, he sighed again, perhaps with relief, perhaps at the impotence of the world of men.

IV

There were four striking figures on the Education Committee selected by the Ailesworth County Council.

The first of these was Sir Deane Elmer, who was also chairman of the Council at this time. The second was the vice-chairman, Enoch Purvis, the ex-mayor, commonly, if incorrectly, known as "Mayor" Purvis.

The third was Richard Standing, J.P., who owned much property on the Quainton side of the town. He was a bluff, hearty man, devoted to sport and agriculture; a Conservative by birth and inclination, a staunch upholder of the Church and the Tariff Reform movement.

The fourth was the Rev. Philip Steven, a co-opted member of the Committee, head master of the Ailesworth Grammar School. Steven was a tall, thin man with bent shoulders, and he had a long, thin face, the length of which was exaggerated by his square brown beard. He wore gold-mounted spectacles which, owing to his habit of dropping his head, always needed adjustment whenever he looked up. The movement of lifting his head and raising his hand to his glasses had become so closely associated, that his hand went up even when there was no apparent need for the action. Steven spoke of himself as a Broad Churchman, and in his speech on prize-day he never omitted some allusion to the necessity for "marching" or "keeping step" with the times. But Elmer was inclined to laugh at this assumption of modernity. "Steven," he said, on one occasion, "marks time and thinks he is keeping step. And every now and then he runs a little to catch up." The point of Elmer's satire lay in the fact that Steven was usually to be seen either walking very slowly, head down, lost in abstraction; or—when aroused to a sense of present necessity—going with long-strides as if intent on catching up with the times without further delay. Very often, too, he might be seen running across the school playground, his hand up to those elusive glasses of his. "There goes Mr. Steven, catching up with the times," had become an accepted phrase.

There were other members of the Education Committee, notably Mrs. Philip Steven, but they were subordinate. If those four striking figures were unanimous, no other member would have dreamed of expressing a contrary opinion. But up to this time they had not yet been agreed upon any important line of action.

This four, Challis and Crashaw met in the morning-room of Challis Court one Thursday afternoon in November. Elmer had brought a stenographer with him for scientific purposes.

"Well," said Challis, when they were all assembled. "The—the subject—I mean, Victor Stott is in the library. Shall we adjourn?" Challis had not felt so nervous since the morning before he had sat for honours in the Cambridge Senate House.

In the library they found a small child, reading.

V

He did not look up when the procession entered, nor did he remove his cricket cap. He was in his usual place at the centre table.

Challis found chairs for the Committee, and the members ranged themselves round the opposite side of the table. Curiously, the effect produced was that of a class brought up for a viva voce examination, and when the Wonder raised his eyes and glanced deliberately down the line of his judges, this effect was heightened. There was an audible fidgeting, a creak of chairs, an indication of small embarrassments.

"Her—um!" Deane Elmer cleared his throat with noisy vigour; looked at the Wonder, met his eyes and looked hastily away again; "Hm!—her—rum!" he repeated, and then he turned to Challis. "So this little fellow has never been to school?" he said.

Challis frowned heavily. He looked exceedingly uncomfortable and unhappy. He was conscious that he could take neither side in this controversy—that he was in sympathy with no one of the seven other persons who were seated in his library.

He shook his head impatiently in answer to Sir Deane Elmer's question, and the chairman turned to the Rev. Philip Steven, who was gazing intently at the pattern of the carpet.

"I think, Steven," said Elmer, "that your large experience will probably prompt you to a more efficient examination than we could conduct. Will you initiate the inquiry?"

Steven raised his head slightly, put a readjusting hand up to his glasses, and then looked sternly at the Wonder over the top of them. Even the sixth form quailed when the head master assumed this expression, but the small child at the table was gazing out of the window.

Doubtless Steven was slightly embarrassed by the detachment of the examinee, and blundered. "What is the square root of 226?" he asked—he probably intended to say 225.

"15·03329—to five places," replied the Wonder.

Steven started. Neither he nor any other member of the Committee was capable of checking that answer without resort to pencil and paper.

"Dear me!" ejaculated Squire Standing.

Elmer scratched the superabundance of his purple jowl, and looked at Challis, who thrust his hands into his pockets and stared at the ceiling.

Crashaw leaned forward and clasped his hands together. He was biding his time.

"Mayor" Purvis alone seemed unmoved. "What's that book he's got open in front of him?" he asked.

"May I see?" interposed Challis hurriedly, and he rose from his chair, picked up the book in question, glanced at it for a moment, and then handed it to the grocer. The book was Van Vloten's Dutch text and Latin translation of Spinoza's Short Treatise.

The grocer turned to the title-page. "Ad—beany—dick—ti—de—Spy—nozer," he read aloud and then: "What's it all about, Mr. Challis?" he asked. "German or something, I take it?"

"In any case it has nothing to do with elementary arithmetic," replied Challis curtly, "Mr. Steven will set your mind at ease on that point."

"Certainly, certainly," murmured Steven.

Grocer Purvis closed the book carefully and replaced it on the desk. "What does half a stone o' loaf sugar at two-three-farthings come to?" he asked.

The Wonder shook his head. He did not understand the grocer's phraseology.

"What is seven times two and three quarters?" translated Challis.

"19·25," answered the Wonder.

"What's that in shillin's?" asked Purvis.

"1·60416."

"Wrong!" returned the grocer triumphantly.

"Er—excuse me, Mr. Purvis," interposed Steven, "I think not. The—the—er—examinee has given the correct mathematical answer to five places of decimals—that is, so far as I can check him mentally."

"Well, it seems to me," persisted the grocer, "as he's gone a long way round to answer a simple question what any fifth-standard child could do in his head. I'll give him another."

"Cast it in another form," put in the chairman. "Give it as a multiplication sum."

Purvis tucked his fingers carefully into his waistcoat pockets. "I put the question, Mr. Chairman," he said, "as it'll be put to the youngster when he has to tot up a bill. That seems to be a sound and practical form for such questions to be put in."

Challis sighed impatiently. "I thought Mr. Steven had been delegated to conduct the first part of the examination," he said. "It seems to me that we are wasting a lot of time."

Elmer nodded. "Will you go on, Mr. Steven?" he said.

Challis was ashamed for his compeers. "What children we are," he thought.

Steven got to work again with various arithmetical questions, which were answered instantly, and then he made a sudden leap and asked: "What is the binomial theorem?"

"A formula for writing down the coefficient of any stated term in the expansion of any stated power of a given binomial," replied the Wonder.

Elmer blew out his cheeks and looked at Challis, but met the gaze of Mr. Steven, who adjusted his glasses and said, "I am satisfied under this head."

"It's all beyond me," remarked Squire Standing frankly.

"I think, Mr. Chairman, that we've had enough theoretical arithmetic," said Purvis. "There's a few practical questions I'd like to put."

"No more arithmetic, then," assented Elmer, and Crashaw exchanged a glance of understanding with the grocer.

"Now, how old was our Lord when He began His ministry?" asked the grocer.

"Uncertain," replied the Wonder.

Mr. Purvis smiled. "Any Sunday-school child knows that!" he said.

"Of course, of course," murmured Crashaw.

But Steven looked uncomfortable. "Are you sure you understand the purport of the answer, Mr. Purvis?" he asked.

"Can there be any doubt about it?" replied the grocer. "I asked how old our Lord was when He began His ministry, and he"—he made an indicative gesture with one momentarily released hand towards the Wonder—"and he says he's 'uncertain.'"

"No, no," interposed Challis impatiently, "he meant that the answer to your question was uncertain."

"How's that?" returned the grocer. "I've always understood–"

"Quite, quite," interrupted Challis. "But what we have always understood does not always correspond to the actual fact."

"What did you intend by your answer?" put in Elmer quickly, addressing the Wonder.

"The evidence rests mainly on Luke's Gospel," answered the Wonder, "but the phrase 'ἀρχόμενος ὡσὲι ἐτῶν τριάκοντα' is vague—it allows latitude in either direction. According to the chronology of John's Gospel the age might have been about thirty-two."

"It says 'thirty' in the Bible, and that's good enough for me," said the grocer, and Crashaw muttered "Heresy, heresy," in an audible under tone.

"Sounds very like blarsphemy to me," said Purvis, "like doubtin' the word of God. I'm for sending him to school."

Deane Elmer had been regarding the face of the small abstracted child with considerable interest. He put aside for the moment the grocer's intimation of his voting tendency.

"How many elements are known to chemists?" asked Elmer of the examinee.

"Eighty-one well characterised; others have been described," replied the Wonder.

"Which has the greatest atomic weight?" asked Elmer.

"Uranium."

"And that weight is?"

"On the oxygen basis of 16—238·5."

"Extraordinary powers of memory," muttered Elmer, and there was silence for a moment, a silence broken by Squire Standing, who, in a loud voice, asked suddenly and most irrelevantly, "What's your opinion of Tariff Reform?"

"An empirical question that cannot be decided from a theoretical basis," replied the Wonder.

Elmer laughed out, a great shouting guffaw. "Quite right, quite right," he said, his cheeks shaking with mirth. "What have you to say to that, Standing?"

"I say that Tariff Reform's the only way to save the country," replied Squire Standing, looking very red and obstinate, "and if this Government–"

Challis rose to his feet. "Oh! aren't you all satisfied?" he said. "Is this Committee here to argue questions of present politics? What more evidence do you need?"

"I'm not satisfied," put in Purvis resolutely, "nor is the Rev. Mr. Crashaw, I fancy."

"He has no vote," said Challis. "Elmer, what do you say?"

"I think we may safely say that the child has been, and is being, provided with an education elsewhere, and that he need not therefore attend the elementary school," replied Elmer, still chuckling.

"On a point of order, Mr. Chairman, is that what you put to the meeting?" asked Purvis.

"This is quite informal," replied Elmer. "Unless we are all agreed, the question must be put to the full Committee."

"Shall we argue the point in the other room?" suggested Challis.

"Certainly, certainly," said Elmer. "We can return, if necessary."

And the four striking figures of the Education Committee filed out, followed by Crashaw and the stenographer.

Challis, coming last, paused at the door and looked back.

The Wonder had returned to his study of Spinoza.

Challis waved a hand to the unconscious figure. "I must join my fellow-children," he said grimly, "or they will be quarrelling."

VI

But when he joined his fellow-children, Challis stood at the window of the morning-room, attending little to the buzz of voices and the clatter of glasses which marked the relief from the restraint of the examination-room. Even the stenographer was talking; he had joined Crashaw and Purvis—a lemonade group; the other three were drinking whisky. The division, however, is arbitrary, and in no way significant.

Challis caught a fragment of the conversation here and there: a bull-roar from Elmer or Squire Standing; an occasional blatancy from Purvis; a vibrant protest from Crashaw; a hesitating tenor pronouncement from Steven.

"Extraordinary powers of memory.... It isn't facts, but what they stand for that I.... Don't know his Bible—that's good enough for me.... Heresy, heresy.... An astounding memory, of course, quite astounding, but–"

The simple exposition of each man's theme was dogmatically asserted, and through it all Challis, standing alone, hardly conscious of each individual utterance, was still conscious that the spirits of those six men were united in one thing, had they but known it. Each was endeavouring to circumscribe the powers of the child they had just left—each was insistent on some limitation he chose to regard as vital.

They came to no decision that afternoon. The question as to whether the Authority should prosecute or not had to be referred to the Committee.

At the last, Crashaw entered his protest and announced once more that he would fight the point to the bitter end.

Crashaw's religious hatred was not, perhaps, altogether free from a sense of affronted dignity, but it was nevertheless a force to be counted; and he had that obstinacy of the bigot which has in the past contributed much fire and food to the pyre of martyrdom. He had, too, a power of initiative within certain limits. It is true that the bird on a free wing could avoid him with contemptuous ease, but along his own path he was a terrifying juggernaut. Crashaw, thus circumscribed, was a power, a moving force.

But now he was seeking to crush, not some paralysed rabbit on the road, but an elusive spirit of swiftness which has no name, but may be figured as the genius of modernity. The thing he sought to obliterate ran ahead of him with a smiling facility and spat rearwards a vaporous jet of ridicule.

Crashaw might crush his clerical wideawake over his frowning eyebrows, arm himself with a slightly dilapidated umbrella, and seek with long, determined strides the members of the Local Education Authority, but far ahead of him had run an intelligence that represented the instructed common sense of modernity.

It was for Crashaw to realise—as he never could and never did realise—that he was no longer the dominant force of progress; that he had been outstripped, left toiling and shouting vain words on a road that had served its purpose, and though it still remained and was used as a means of travel, was becoming year by year more antiquated and despised.

Crashaw toiled to the end, and no one knows how far his personal purpose and spite were satisfied, but he could never impede any more that elusive spirit of swiftness; it had run past him.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER XII

HIS INTERVIEW WITH HERR GROSSMANN

I

Crashaw must have suffered greatly just at that time; and the anticipation of his defeat by the Committee was made still more bitter by the wonderful visit of Herr Grossmann. It is true that that visit feebly helped Crashaw's cause at the moment by further enlisting the sympathies and strenuous endeavour of the Nonconformist Purvis; but no effort of the ex-mayor could avail to upset the majority of the Local Education Authority and the grocer, himself, was not a person acceptable to Crashaw. The two men were so nearly allied by their manner of thought and social origin; and Crashaw instinctively flaunted the splendid throne of his holy office, whenever he and Purvis were together. Purvis was what the rector might have described as an ignorant man. It is a fact that, until Crashaw very fully and inaccurately informed him, he had never even heard of Hugo Grossmann.

In that conversation between Crashaw and Purvis, the celebrated German Professor figured as the veritable Anti-Christ, the Devil's personal representative on earth; but Crashaw was not a safe authority on Science and Philosophy.

Herr Grossmann's world-wide reputation was certainly not won in the field of religious controversy. He had not at that time reached the pinnacle of achievement which placed him so high above his brilliant contemporaries, and now presents him as the unique figure and representative of twentieth-century science. But his very considerable contributions to knowledge had drawn the attention of Europe for ten years, and he was already regarded by his fellow-scientists with that mixture of contempt and jealousy which inevitably precedes the world's acceptance of its greatest men.

Sir Deane Elmer, for example, was a generous and kindly man; he had never been involved in any controversy with the professional scientists whose ground he continually encroached upon, and yet he could not hear the name of Grossmann without frowning. Grossmann had the German vice of thoroughness. He took up a subject and exhausted it, as far as is possible within the limits of our present knowledge; and his monograph on Heredity had demonstrated with a detestable logic that much of Elmer's treatise on Eugenics was based on evidence that must be viewed with the gravest suspicion. Not that Grossmann had directly attacked that treatise; he had made no kind of reference to it in his own book; but his irrefutable statements had been quoted by every reviewer of "Eugenics" who chanced to have come across the English translation of "Heredity and Human Development," to the confounding of Elmer's somewhat too optimistic prophecies concerning the possibility of breeding a race that should approximate to a physical and intellectual perfection.

And it happened that Elmer met Grossmann at an informal gathering of members of the Royal Society a few days after the examination of the Wonder in the Challis Court Library. Herr Grossmann was delivering an impromptu lecture on the limits of variation from the normal type, when Elmer came in and joined the group of the great Professor's listeners, every one of whom was seeking some conclusive argument to confute their guest's overwhelmingly accurate collation of facts.

Elmer realised instantly that his opportunity had come at last. He listened patiently for a few minutes to the flow of the German's argument, and then broke in with a loud exclamation of dissent. All the learned members of the Society turned to him at once, with a movement of profound relief and expectation.

"You said what?" asked Grossmann with a frown of great annoyance.

Elmer thrust out his lower lip and looked at his antagonist with the expression of a man seeking a vital spot for the coup de grace.

"I said, Herr Professor," Elmer returned, "that there are exceptions which confound your argument."

"For example?" Grossmann said, putting his hands behind him and gently nodding his head like a tolerant schoolmaster awaiting the inevitable confusion of the too intrepid scholar.

"Christian Heinecken?" suggested Elmer.

"Ah! You have not then read my brochure on certain abnormalities reported in history?" Grossmann said, and continued, "Mr. Aylmer, is it not? To whom I am speaking? Yes? We have met, I believe, once in Leipzig. I thought so. But in my brochure, Mr. Aylmer, I have examined the Heinecken case and shown my reasons to regard it as not so departing from the normal."

Elmer shook his head. "Your reasons are not valid, Herr Professor," he said and held up a corpulent forefinger to enforce Grossmann's further attention. "They seemed convincing at the time, I admit, but this new prodigy completely upsets your case."

"Eh! What is that? What new prodigy?" sneered Grossmann; and two or three savants among the little ring of listeners, although they had not that perfect confidence in Elmer which would have put them at ease, nodded gravely as if they were aware of the validity of his instance.

Elmer blew out his cheeks and raised his eyebrows. "Ah! you haven't heard of him!" he remarked with a rather fleshy surprise. "Victor Stott, you know, son of a professional cricketer, protégé of Henry Challis, the anthropologist. Oh! you ought to investigate that case, Herr Professor. It is most remarkable, most remarkable."

"Ach! What form does the abnormality take?" asked Grossmann suspiciously, and his tone made it clear that he had little confidence in the value of any report made to him by such an observer as Sir Deane Elmer.

"I can't pretend to give you anything like a full account of it," Elmer returned. "I have only seen the child once. But, honestly, Herr Professor, you cannot use that brochure of yours in any future argument until you have investigated this case of young Stott. It confutes you."

"I can see him, then?" Grossmann asked, frowning. In that company he could not afford to decline the challenge that had been thrown down. There were, at least, five men present who would, he believed, immediately conduct the examination on their own account, should he refuse the opportunity; men who would not fail to use their material for the demolition of that pamphlet on the type of abnormality, more particularly represented by the amazing precocity of Christian Heinecken.

To the layman such an attack may seem a small matter, and likely to have little effect on such a reputation as that already won by Hugo Grossmann; and it should be explained that in the Professor's great work on "Heredity and Human Development," an essential argument was based on the absence of any considerable progressive variation from the normal. Indeed it was from this premise that he developed the celebrated "variation" theory which is, now, generally admitted to have compromised the whole principle of "Natural Selection" while it has given a wonderful impetus to all recent investigations and experiments on the lines first indicated by Mendel.