“I think I must give him a little theatre.
“Then there is music!”
Redwood thought that over, and decided that his son might best begin with a very pure-sounding harmonicon of one octave, to which afterwards there could be an extension. “He shall play with this first, sing to it and give names to the notes,” said Redwood, “and afterwards—?”
He stared up at the window-sill overhead and measured the size of the room with his eye.
“They’ll have to build his piano in here,” he said. “Bring it in in pieces.”
He hovered about amidst his preparations, a pensive, dark, little figure. If you could have seen him there he would have looked to you like a ten-inch man amidst common nursery things. A great rug— indeed it was a Turkey carpet— four hundred square feet of it, upon which young Redwood was soon to crawl— stretched to the grill-guarded electric radiator that was to warm the whole place. A man from Cossar’s hung amidst scaffolding overhead, fixing the great frame that was to hold the transitory pictures. A blotting-paper book for plant specimens as big as a house door leant against the wall, and from it projected a gigantic stalk, a leaf edge or so and one flower of chickweed, all of that gigantic size that was soon to make Urshot famous throughout the botanical world …
A sort of incredulity came to Redwood as he stood among these things.
“If it really is going on— ” said Redwood, staring up at the remote ceiling.
From far away came a sound like the bellowing of a Mafficking bull, almost as if in answer.
“It’s going on all right,” said Redwood. “Evidently.”
There followed resounding blows upon a table, followed by a vast crowing shout, “Gooloo! Boozoo! Bzz … ”
“The best thing I can do,” said Redwood, following out some divergent line of thought, “is to teach him myself.”
That beating became more insistent. For a moment it seemed to Redwood that it caught the rhythm of an engine’s throbbing— the engine he could have imagined of some great train of events that bore down upon him. Then a descendant flight of sharper beats broke up that effect, and were repeated.
“Come in,” he cried, perceiving that some one rapped, and the door that was big enough for a cathedral opened slowly a little way. The new winch ceased to creak, and Bensington appeared in the crack, gleaming benevolently under his protruded baldness and over his glasses.
“I’ve ventured round to see,” he whispered in a confidentially furtive manner.
“Come in,” said Redwood, and he did, shutting the door behind him.
He walked forward, hands behind his back, advanced a few steps, and peered up with a bird-like movement at the dimensions about him. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
“Every time I come in,” he said, with a subdued note in his voice, “it strikes me as— ’Big.’”
“Yes,” said Redwood, surveying it all again also, as if in an endeavour to keep hold of the visible impression. “Yes. They’re going to be big too, you know.”
“I know,” said Bensington, with a note that was nearly awe. “Very big.”
They looked at one another, almost, as it were, apprehensively.
“Very big indeed,” said Bensington, stroking the bridge of his nose, and with one eye that watched Redwood doubtfully for a confirmatory expression. “All of them, you know— fearfully big. I don’t seem able to imagine— even with this— just how big they’re all going to be.”
Chapter 5 The Minimificence of Mr. Bensington
1.
It was while the Royal Commission on Boomfood was preparing its report that Herakleophorbia really began to demonstrate its capacity for leakage. And the earliness of this second outbreak was the more unfortunate, from the point of view of Cossar at any rate, since the draft report still in existence shows that the Commission had, under the tutelage 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 that accidental leakages were impossible, and was prepared to recommend that to entrust the preparation of Boomfood to a qualified committee (Winkles chiefly), with an entire control over its sale, was quite enough to satisfy all reasonable objections to its free diffusion. This committee was to have an absolute monopoly. And it is, no doubt, to be considered as a part of the irony of life that the first and most alarming of this second series of leakages occurred within fifty yards of a little cottage at Keston occupied during the summer months by Doctor Winkles.
There can be little doubt now that Redwood’s refusal to acquaint Winkles with the composition of Herakleophorbia IV. had aroused in that gentleman a novel and intense desire towards analytical chemistry. He was not a very expert manipulator, and for that reason probably he saw fit to do his work not in the excellently equipped laboratories that were at his disposal in London, but without consulting any one, and almost with an air of secrecy, in a rough little garden laboratory at the Keston establishment. He does not seem to have shown either very great energy or very great ability in this quest; indeed one gathers he dropped the inquiry after working at it intermittently for about a month.
This garden laboratory, in which the work was done, was very roughly equipped, supplied by a standpipe tap with water, and draining into a pipe that ran down into a swampy rush-bordered pool under an alder tree in a secluded corner of the common just outside the garden hedge. The pipe was cracked, and the residuum of the Food of the Gods escaped through the crack into a little puddle amidst clumps of rushes, just in time for the spring awakening.
Everything was astir with life in that scummy little corner. There was frog spawn adrift, tremulous with tadpoles just bursting their gelatinous envelopes; there were little pond snails creeping out into life, and under the green skin of the rush stems the larvae of a big Water Beetle were struggling out of their egg cases. I doubt if the reader knows the larva of the beetle called (I know not why) Dytiscus. It is a jointed, queer-looking thing, very muscular and sudden in its movements, and given to swimming head downward with its tail out of water; the length of a man’s top thumb joint it is, and more— two inches, that is for those who have not eaten the Food— and it has two sharp jaws that meet in front of its head— tubular jaws with sharp points— through which its habit is to suck its victim’s blood …
The first things to get at the drifting grains of the Food were the little tadpoles and the little water snails; the little wriggling tadpoles in particular, once they had the taste of it, took to it with zest. But scarcely did one of them begin to grow into a conspicuous position in that little tadpole world and try a smaller brother or so as an aid to a vegetarian dietary, when nip! one of the Beetle larva had its curved bloodsucking prongs gripping into his heart, and with that red stream went Herakleophorbia IV, in a state of solution, into the being of a new client. The only thing that had a chance with these monsters to get any share of the Food were the rushes and slimy green scum in the water and the seedling weeds in the mud at the bottom. A clean up of the study presently washed a fresh spate