CHAPTER III
THE DISILLUSIONMENT OF GINGER STOTT
I
Stott maintained an obstinate silence as we walked together up to theCommon, a stretch of comparatively open ground on the plateau of thehill. He walked with his hands in his pockets and his head down, as hehad walked out from Ailesworth with me nearly three years before, buthis mood was changed. I was conscious that he was gloomy, depressed,perhaps a little unstrung. I was burning with curiosity. Now that I wasreleased from the thrall of the child's presence, I was eager to hearall there was to tell of its history.
Presently we sat down under an ash-tree, one of three that guarded ashallow, muddy pond skimmed with weed. Stott accepted my offer of acigarette, but seemed disinclined to break the silence.
I found nothing better to say than a repetition of the old phrase."That's a very remarkable baby of yours, Stott," I said.
"Ah!" he replied, his usual substitute for "yes," and he picked up apiece of dead wood and threw it into the little pond.
"How old is he?" I asked.
"Nearly two year."
"Can he ..." I paused; my imagination was reconstructing the scene ofthe railway carriage, and I felt a reflex of the hesitation shown by therubicund man when he had asked the same question. "Can he ... can hetalk?" It seemed so absurd a question to ask, yet it was essentially anatural question in the circumstances.
"He can, but he won't."
This was startling enough, and I pressed my enquiry.
"How do you know? Are you sure he can?"
"Ah!" Only that irritating, monosyllabic assent.
"Look here, Stott," I said, "don't you want to talk about the child?"
He shrugged his shoulders and threw more wood into the pond with astrained attentiveness as though he were peculiarly anxious to hit someparticular wafer of the vivid, floating weed. For a full five minutes wemaintained silence. I was trying to subdue my impatience and my temper.I knew Stott well enough to know that if I displayed signs of either, Ishould get no information from him. My self-control was rewarded atlast.
"I've 'eard 'im speak," he said, "speak proper, too, not like a baby."
He paused, and I grunted to show that I was listening, but as hevolunteered no further remark, I said: "What did you hear him say?"
"I dunno," replied Stott, "somethin' about learnin' and talkin'. Ididn't get the rights of it, but the missus near fainted--_she_ thinks'e's Gawd A'mighty or suthing."
"But why don't you make him speak?" I asked deliberately.
"Make 'im!" said Stott, with a curl of his lip, "_make_ 'im! You try iton!"
I knew I was acting a part, but I wanted to provoke more information."Well! Why not?" I said.
"'Cos 'e'd look at you--that's why not," replied Stott, "and you can'tno more face 'im than a dog can face a man. I shan't stand it muchlonger."
"Curious," I said, "very curious."
"Oh! he's a blarsted freak, that's what 'e is," said Stott, getting tohis feet and beginning to pace moodily up and down.
I did not interrupt him. I was thinking of this man who had drawn hugecrowds from every part of England, who had been a national hero, andwho, now, was unable to face his own child. Presently Stott broke outagain.
"To think of all the trouble I took when 'e was comin'," he said,stopping in front of me. "There was nothin' the missus fancied as Iwouldn't get. We was livin' in Stoke then." He made a movement of hishead in the direction of Ailesworth. "Not as she was difficult," he wenton thoughtfully. "She used to say 'I mussent get 'abits, George.' Caughtthat from me; I was always on about that--then. You know, thinkin' oflearnin' 'im bowlin'. Things was different then; afore _'e_ came." Hepaused again, evidently thinking of his troubles.
Sympathetically, I was wondering how far the child had separated husbandand wife. There was the making of a tragedy here, I thought; but whenStott, after another period of pacing up and down, began to speak againI found that his tragedy was of another kind.
"Learn _'im_ bowling!" he said, and laughed a mirthless laugh. "My Gawd!it 'ud take something. No fear; that little game's off. And I could a'done it if he'd been a decent or'nery child, 'stead of a blarsted freak.There won't never be another, neither. This one pretty near killed themissus. Doctor said it'd be 'er last.... With an 'ead like that, whacherexpect?"
"Can he walk?" I asked.
"Ah! Gets about easy enough for all 'is body and legs is so small. Whenthe missus tries to stop 'im--she's afraid 'e'll go over--'e just looksat 'er and she 'as to let 'im 'ave 'is own way."
II
Later, I reverted to that speech of the child's, that intelligent,illuminating speech that seemed to prove that there was indeed apowerful, thoughtful mind behind those profoundly speculative eyes.
"That time he spoke, Stott," I said, "was he alone?"
"Ah!" assented Stott. "In the garden, practisin' walkin' all by'imself."
"Was that the only time?"
"Only time _I've_ 'eard 'im."
"Was it lately?"
"'Bout six weeks ago."
"And he has never made a sound otherwise, cried, laughed?"
"'Ardly. 'E gives a sort o' grunt sometimes, when 'e wants anything--andpoints."
"He's very intelligent."
"Worse than that, 'e's a freak, I tell you."
With the repetition of this damning description, Stott fell back intohis moody pacing, and this time I failed to rouse him from his gloom."Oh! forget it," he broke out once, when I asked him another question,and I saw that he was not likely to give me any more information thatday.
We walked back together, and I said good-bye to him at the end of thelane which led up to his cottage.
"Not comin' up?" he asked, with a nod of his head towards his home.
"Well! I have to catch that train ..." I prevaricated, looking at mywatch. I did not wish to see that child again; my distaste was evenstronger than my curiosity.
Stott grinned. "We don't 'ave many visitors," he said. "Well, I'll comea bit farther with you."
He came to the bottom of the hill, and after he left me he took the roadthat goes over the hill to Wenderby. It would be about seven miles backto Pym by that road....
III
I spent the next afternoon in the Reading Room of the British Museum. Iwas searching for a precedent, and at last I found one in the story ofChristian Heinrich Heinecken,[2] who was born at Lubeck on February 6,1721. There were marked points of difference between the development ofHeinecken and that of Stott's child. Heinecken was physically feeble; atthe age of three he was still being fed at the breast. The Stottprecocity appeared to be physically strong; his body looked small andundeveloped, it is true, but this was partly an illusion produced by theabnormal size of the head. Again Heinecken learned to speak very early;at ten months old he was asking intelligent questions, at eighteenmonths he was studying history, geography, Latin and anatomy; whereasthe Stott child had only once been heard to speak at the age of twoyears, and had not, apparently, begun any study at all.
From this comparison it might seem at first that the balance ofprecocity lay in the Heinecken scale. I drew another inference. I arguedthat the genius of the Stott child far outweighed the genius ofChristian Heinecken.
Little Heinecken in his four years of life suffered the mentalexperience--with certain necessary limitations--of a developed brain. Hegathered knowledge as an ordinary child gathers knowledge, the onlydifference being that his rate of assimilation was as ten to one.
But little Stott had gathered no knowledge from books. He had been bornof ignorant parents, he was being brought up among uneducated people.Yet he had wonderful intellectual gifts; surely he must have one aboveall others--the gift of reason. His brain must be constructive, logical;he must have the power of deduction. He must even at an extraordinarilyearly age, say six months, have developed some theory of life. He mustbe withholding his energy, deliberately; declining to exhibit hispowers, holding his marvellous faculties in reserve. Here was surely acase of
genius which, comparable in some respects to the genius ofHeinecken, yet far exceeded it.
As I developed my theory, my eagerness grew. And then suddenly aninspiration came to me. In my excitement I spoke aloud and smacked thedesk in front of me with my open hand. "Why, of course!" I said. "Thatis the key."
An old man in the next seat scowled fiercely. The attendants in thecentral circular desk all looked up. Other readers turned round andstared at me. I had violated the sacred laws of the Reading Room. I sawone of the librarians make a sign to an attendant and point to me.
I gathered up my books quickly and returned them at the central desk. Myself-consciousness had returned, and I was anxious to be away from theobservation of the many dilettante readers who found my appearance moreengrossing than the books with which they were dallying on some pretextor another.
Yet, curiously, when I reached the street, the theory which had come tome in the Museum with the force and vividness of an illuminating dreamhad lost some of its glamour. Nevertheless, I set it out as it thenshaped itself in my mind.
The great restraining force in the evolution of man, so I thought, hasbeen the restriction imposed by habit. What we call instinct is ahereditary habit. This is the first guiding principle in the life of thehuman infant. Upon this instinct we immediately superimpose the habitsof reason, all the bodily and intellectual conventions that have beenhanded down from generation to generation. We learn everything we knowas children by the hereditary, simian habit of imitation. The child ofintellectual, cultured parents, born into savage surroundings, becomesthe slave of this inherited habit--call it tendency, if you will, theintention is the same. I elaborated the theory by instance andintrospection, and found no flaw in it....
And here, by some freak of nature, was a child born without thesehabits. During the period of gestation, one thought had dominated theminds of both parents--the desire to have a son born without habits. Itdoes not seriously affect the theory that the desire had a peculiar endin view; the wish, the urgent, controlling, omnipotent will had beenthere, and the result included far more than the specific intention.
Already some of my distaste for the Stott child had vanished. It wasaccountable, and therefore no longer fearful. The child was supernormal,a cause of fear to the normal man, as all truly supernormal things areto our primitive, animal instincts. This is the fear of the wild thing;when we can explain and give reasons, the horror vanishes. We are menagain.
I did not quite recover the glow of my first inspiration, but the theoryremained with me; I decided to make a study of the child, to submitknowledge to his reason. I would stand between him and the delimitingtraining of the pedagogue, I thought.
Then I reached home, and my life was changed.
This story is not of my own life, and I have no wish to enter into thecurious and saddening experiences which stood between me and the childof Ginger Stott for nearly six years. In that time my thoughts strayednow and again to that cottage in the little hamlet on those woodedhills. Often I thought "When I have time I will go and see that childagain if he is alive." But as the years passed, the memory of him grewdim, even the memory of his father was blurred over by a thousand newimpressions. So it chanced that for nearly six years I heard no word ofStott and his supernormal infant, and then chance again intervened. Mylong period of sorrow came to an end almost as suddenly as it had begun,and by a coincidence I was once more entangled in the strange web of theabnormal.
In this story of Victor Stott I have bridged these six years in thepages that follow. In doing this I have been compelled to draw to acertain extent on my imagination, but the main facts are true. They havebeen gathered from first-hand authority only, from Henry Challis, fromMrs. Stott, and from her husband; though none, I must confess, has beenchecked by that soundest of all authorities, Victor Stott himself, whomight have given me every particular in accurate detail, had it not beenfor those peculiarities of his which will be explained fully in theproper place.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] See the Teutsche Bibliothek and Schoneich's account of the child ofLubeck.