The Experimental Farm

: THE DAWN OF THE FOOD.
: The Food Of The Gods And How It Came To Earth

I.



Mr. Bensington proposed originally to try this stuff, so soon as he was

really able to prepare it, upon tadpoles. One always does try this sort

of thing upon tadpoles to begin with; this being what tadpoles are for.

And it was agreed that he should conduct the experiments and not

Redwood, because Redwood's laboratory was occupied with the ballistic

apparatus and animals necessary for an investigation i
to the Diurnal

Variation in the Butting Frequency of the Young Bull Calf, an

investigation that was yielding curves of an abnormal and very

perplexing sort, and the presence of glass globes of tadpoles was

extremely undesirable while this particular research was in progress.



But when Mr. Bensington conveyed to his cousin Jane something of what he

had in mind, she put a prompt veto upon the importation of any

considerable number of tadpoles, or any such experimental creatures,

into their flat. She had no objection whatever to his use of one of the

rooms of the flat for the purposes of a non-explosive chemistry that, so

far as she was concerned, came to nothing; she let him have a gas

furnace and a sink and a dust-tight cupboard of refuge from the weekly

storm of cleaning she would not forego. And having known people addicted

to drink, she regarded his solicitude for distinction in learned

societies as an excellent substitute for the coarser form of depravity.

But any sort of living things in quantity, "wriggly" as they were bound

to be alive and "smelly" dead, she could not and would not abide. She

said these things were certain to be unhealthy, and Bensington was

notoriously a delicate man--it was nonsense to say he wasn't. And when

Bensington tried to make the enormous importance of this possible

discovery clear, she said that it was all very well, but if she

consented to his making everything nasty and unwholesome in the place

(and that was what it all came to) then she was certain he would be the

first to complain.



And Mr. Bensington went up and down the room, regardless of his corns,

and spoke to her quite firmly and angrily without the slightest effect.

He said that nothing ought to stand in the way of the Advancement of

Science, and she said that the Advancement of Science was one thing and

having a lot of tadpoles in a flat was another; he said that in Germany

it was an ascertained fact that a man with an idea like his would at

once have twenty thousand properly-fitted cubic feet of laboratory

placed at his disposal, and she said she was glad and always had been

glad that she was not a German; he said that it would make him famous

for ever, and she said it was much more likely to make him ill to have a

lot of tadpoles in a flat like theirs; he said he was master in his own

house, and she said that rather than wait on a lot of tadpoles she'd go

as matron to a school; and then he asked her to be reasonable, and she

asked him to be reasonable then and give up all this about tadpoles;

and he said she might respect his ideas, and she said not if they were

smelly she wouldn't, and then he gave way completely and said--in spite

of the classical remarks of Huxley upon the subject--a bad word. Not a

very bad word it was, but bad enough.



And after that she was greatly offended and had to be apologised to, and

the prospect of ever trying the Food of the Gods upon tadpoles in their

flat at any rate vanished completely in the apology.



So Bensington had to consider some other way of carrying out these

experiments in feeding that would be necessary to demonstrate his

discovery, so soon as he had his substance isolated and prepared. For

some days he meditated upon the possibility of boarding out his tadpoles

with some trustworthy person, and then the chance sight of the phrase in

a newspaper turned his thoughts to an Experimental Farm.



And chicks. Directly he thought of it, he thought of it as a poultry

farm. He was suddenly taken with a vision of wildly growing chicks. He

conceived a picture of coops and runs, outsize and still more outsize

coops, and runs progressively larger. Chicks are so accessible, so

easily fed and observed, so much drier to handle and measure, that for

his purpose tadpoles seemed to him now, in comparison with them, quite

wild and uncontrollable beasts. He was quite puzzled to understand why

he had not thought of chicks instead of tadpoles from the beginning.

Among other things it would have saved all this trouble with his cousin

Jane. And when he suggested this to Redwood, Redwood quite agreed with

him.



Redwood said that in working so much upon needlessly small animals he

was convinced experimental physiologists made a great mistake. It is

exactly like making experiments in chemistry with an insufficient

quantity of material; errors of observation and manipulation become

disproportionately large. It was of extreme importance just at present

that scientific men should assert their right to have their material

big. That was why he was doing his present series of experiments at

the Bond Street College upon Bull Calves, in spite of a certain amount

of inconvenience to the students and professors of other subjects caused

by their incidental levity in the corridors. But the curves he was

getting were quite exceptionally interesting, and would, when published,

amply justify his choice. For his own part, were it not for the

inadequate endowment of science in this country, he would never, if he

could avoid it, work on anything smaller than a whale. But a Public

Vivarium on a sufficient scale to render this possible was, he feared,

at present, in this country at any rate, a Utopian demand. In

Germany--Etc.



As Redwood's Bull calves needed his daily attention, the selection and

equipment of the Experimental Farm fell largely on Bensington. The

entire cost also, was, it was understood, to be defrayed by Bensington,

at least until a grant could be obtained. Accordingly he alternated his

work in the laboratory of his flat with farm hunting up and down the

lines that run southward out of London, and his peering spectacles, his

simple baldness, and his lacerated cloth shoes filled the owners of

numerous undesirable properties with vain hopes. And he advertised in

several daily papers and Nature for a responsible couple (married),

punctual, active, and used to poultry, to take entire charge of an

Experimental Farm of three acres.



He found the place he seemed in need of at Hickleybrow, near Urshot, in

Kent. It was a little queer isolated place, in a dell surrounded by old

pine woods that were black and forbidding at night. A humped shoulder of

down cut it off from the sunset, and a gaunt well with a shattered

penthouse dwarfed the dwelling. The little house was creeperless,

several windows were broken, and the cart shed had a black shadow at

midday. It was a mile and a half from the end house of the village, and

its loneliness was very doubtfully relieved by an ambiguous family of

echoes.



The place impressed Bensington as being eminently adapted to the

requirements of scientific research. He walked over the premises

sketching out coops and runs with a sweeping arm, and he found the

kitchen capable of accommodating a series of incubators and foster

mothers with the very minimum of alteration. He took the place there and

then; on his way back to London he stopped at Dunton Green and closed

with an eligible couple that had answered his advertisements, and that

same evening he succeeded in isolating a sufficient quantity of

Herakleophorbia I. to more than justify these engagements.



The eligible couple who were destined under Mr. Bensington to be the

first almoners on earth of the Food of the Gods, were not only very

perceptibly aged, but also extremely dirty. This latter point Mr.

Bensington did not observe, because nothing destroys the powers of

general observation quite so much as a life of experimental science.

They were named Skinner, Mr. and Mrs. Skinner, and Mr. Bensington

interviewed them in a small room with hermetically sealed windows, a

spotted overmantel looking-glass, and some ailing calceolarias.



Mrs. Skinner was a very little old woman, capless, with dirty white hair

drawn back very very tightly from a face that had begun by being

chiefly, and was now, through the loss of teeth and chin, and the

wrinkling up of everything else, ending by being almost

exclusively--nose. She was dressed in slate colour (so far as her dress

had any colour) slashed in one place with red flannel. She let him in

and talked to him guardedly and peered at him round and over her nose,

while Mr. Skinner she alleged made some alteration in his toilette. She

had one tooth that got into her articulations and she held her two long

wrinkled hands nervously together. She told Mr. Bensington that she had

managed fowls for years; and knew all about incubators; in fact, they

themselves had run a Poultry Farm at one time, and it had only failed at

last through the want of pupils. "It's the pupils as pay," said Mrs.

Skinner.



Mr. Skinner, when he appeared, was a large-faced man, with a lisp and a

squint that made him look over the top of your head, slashed slippers

that appealed to Mr. Bensington's sympathies, and a manifest shortness

of buttons. He held his coat and shirt together with one hand and traced

patterns on the black-and-gold tablecloth with the index finger of the

other, while his disengaged eye watched Mr. Bensington's sword of

Damocles, so to speak, with an expression of sad detachment. "You don't

want to run thith Farm for profit. No, Thir. Ith all the thame, Thir.

Ekthperimenth! Prethithely."



He said they could go to the farm at once. He was doing nothing at

Dunton Green except a little tailoring. "It ithn't the thmart plathe I

thought it wath, and what I get ithent thkarthely worth having," he

said, "tho that if it ith any convenienth to you for uth to come...."



And in a week Mr. and Mrs. Skinner were installed in the farm, and the

jobbing carpenter from Hickleybrow was diversifying the task of erecting

runs and henhouses with a systematic discussion of Mr. Bensington.



"I haven't theen much of 'im yet," said Mr. Skinner. "But as far as I

can make 'im out 'e theems to be a thtewpid o' fool."



"I thought 'e seemed a bit Dotty," said the carpenter from

Hickleybrow.



"'E fanthieth 'imself about poultry," said Mr. Skinner. "O my goodneth!

You'd think nobody knew nothin' about poultry thept 'im."



"'E looks like a 'en," said the carpenter from Hickleybrow; "what with

them spectacles of 'is."



Mr. Skinner came closer to the carpenter from Hickleybrow, and spoke in

a confidential manner, and one sad eye regarded the distant village, and

one was bright and wicked. "Got to be meathured every blethed day--every

blethed 'en, 'e thays. Tho as to thee they grow properly. What oh ...

eh? Every blethed 'en--every blethed day."



And Mr. Skinner put up his hand to laugh behind it in a refined and

contagious manner, and humped his shoulders very much--and only the

other eye of him failed to participate in his laughter. Then doubting if

the carpenter had quite got the point of it, he repeated in a

penetrating whisper; "Meathured!"



"'E's worse than our old guvnor; I'm dratted if 'e ain't," said the

carpenter from Hickleybrow.





II.



Experimental work is the most tedious thing in the world (unless it be

the reports of it in the Philosophical Transactions), and it seemed a

long time to Mr. Bensington before his first dream of enormous

possibilities was replaced by a crumb of realisation. He had taken the

Experimental Farm in October, and it was May before the first inklings

of success began. Herakleophorbia I. and II. and III. had to be tried,

and failed; there was trouble with the rats of the Experimental Farm,

and there was trouble with the Skinners. The only way to get Skinner to

do anything he was told to do was to dismiss him. Then he would nib his

unshaven chin--he was always unshaven most miraculously and yet never

bearded--with a flattened hand, and look at Mr. Bensington with one eye,

and over him with the other, and say, "Oo, of courthe, Thir--if you're

theriouth!"



But at last success dawned. And its herald was a letter in the long

slender handwriting of Mr. Skinner.



"The new Brood are out," wrote Mr. Skinner, "and don't quite like the

look of them. Growing very rank--quite unlike what the similar lot was

before your last directions was given. The last, before the cat got

them, was a very nice, stocky chick, but these are Growing like

thistles. I never saw. They peck so hard, striking above boot top, that

am unable to give exact Measures as requested. They are regular Giants,

and eating as such. We shall want more com very soon, for you never saw

such chicks to eat. Bigger than Bantams. Going on at this rate, they

ought to be a bird for show, rank as they are. Plymouth Rocks won't be

in it. Had a scare last night thinking that cat was at them, and when I

looked out at the window could have sworn I see her getting in under the

wire. The chicks was all awake and pecking about hungry when I went out,

but could not see anything of the cat. So gave them a peck of corn, and

fastened up safe. Shall be glad to know if the Feeding to be continued

as directed. Food you mixed is pretty near all gone, and do not like to

mix any more myself on account of the accident with the pudding. With

best wishes from us both, and soliciting continuance of esteemed

favours,



"Respectfully yours,



"ALFRED NEWTON SKINNER."





The allusion towards the end referred to a milk pudding with which some

Herakleophorbia II. had got itself mixed with painful and very nearly

fatal results to the Skinners.



But Mr. Bensington, reading between the lines saw in this rankness of

growth the attainment of his long sought goal. The next morning he

alighted at Urshot station, and in the bag in his hand he carried,

sealed in three tins, a supply of the Food of the Gods sufficient for

all the chicks in Kent.



It was a bright and beautiful morning late in May, and his corns were so

much better that he resolved to walk through Hickleybrow to his farm. It

was three miles and a half altogether, through the park and villages and

then along the green glades of the Hickleybrow preserves. The trees were

all dusted with the green spangles of high spring, the hedges were full

of stitchwort and campion and the woods of blue hyacinths and purple

orchid; and everywhere there was a great noise of birds--thrushes,

blackbirds, robins, finches, and many more--and in one warm corner of

the park some bracken was unrolling, and there was a leaping and rushing

of fallow deer.



These things brought back to Mr. Bensington his early and forgotten

delight in life; before him the promise of his discovery grew bright and

joyful, and it seemed to him that indeed he must have come upon the

happiest day in his life. And when in the sunlit run by the sandy bank

under the shadow of the pine trees he saw the chicks that had eaten the

food he had mixed for them, gigantic and gawky, bigger already than many

a hen that is married and settleds and still growing, still in their

first soft yellow plumage (just faintly marked with brown along the

back), he knew indeed that his happiest day had come.



At Mr. Skinner's urgency he went into the runs but after he had been

pecked through the cracks in his shoes once or twice he got out again,

and watched these monsters through the wire netting. He peered close to

the netting, and followed their movements as though he had never seen a

chick before in his life.



"Whath they'll be when they're grown up ith impothible to think," said

Mr. Skinner.



"Big as a horse," said Mr. Bensington.



"Pretty near," said Mr. Skinner.



"Several people could dine off a wing!" said Mr. Bensington. "They'd cut

up into joints like butcher's meat."



"They won't go on growing at thith pathe though," said Mr. Skinner.



"No?" said Mr. Bensington.



"No," said Mr. Skinner. "I know thith thort. They begin rank, but they

don't go on, bleth you! No."



There was a pause.



"Itth management," said Mr. Skinner modestly.



Mr. Bensington turned his glasses on him suddenly.



"We got 'em almoth ath big at the other plathe," said Mr. Skinner, with

his better eye piously uplifted and letting himself go a little; "me and

the mithith."



Mr. Bensington made his usual general inspection of the premises, but he

speedily returned to the new run. It was, you know, in truth ever so

much more than he had dared to expect. The course of science is so

tortuous and so slow; after the clear promises and before the practical

realisation arrives there comes almost always year after year of

intricate contrivance, and here--here was the Foods of the Gods arriving

after less than a year of testing! It seemed too good--too good. That

Hope Deferred which is the daily food of the scientific imagination was

to be his no more! So at least it seemed to him then. He came back and

stared at these stupendous chicks of his, time after time.



"Let me see," he said. "They're ten days old. And by the side of an

ordinary chick I should fancy--about six or seven times as big...."



"Itth about time we artht for a rithe in thkrew," said Mr. Skinner to

his wife. "He'th ath pleathed ath Punth about the way we got thothe

chickth on in the further run--pleathed ath Punth he ith."



He bent confidentially towards her. "Thinkth it'th that old food of

hith," he said behind his hands and made a noise of suppressed laughter

in his pharyngeal cavity....



Mr. Bensington was indeed a happy man that day. He was in no mood to

find fault with details of management. The bright day certainly brought

out the accumulating slovenliness of the Skinner couple more vividly

than he had ever seen it before. But his comments were of the gentlest.

The fencing of many of the runs was out of order, but he seemed to

consider it quite satisfactory when Mr. Skinner explained that it was a

"fokth or a dog or thomething" did it. He pointed out that the incubator

had not been cleaned.



"That it asn't, Sir," said Mrs. Skinner with her arms folded, smiling

coyly behind her nose. "We don't seem to have had time to clean it not

since we been 'ere...."



He went upstairs to see some rat-holes that Skinner said would justify a

trap--they certainly were enormous--and discovered that the room in

which the Food of the Gods was mixed with meal and bran was in a quite

disgraceful order. The Skinners were the sort of people who find a use

for cracked saucers and old cans and pickle jars and mustard boxes, and

the place was littered with these. In one corner a great pile of apples

that Skinner had saved was decaying, and from a nail in the sloping part

of the ceiling hung several rabbit skins, upon which he proposed to test

his gift as a furrier. ("There ithn't mutth about furth and thingth that

I don't know," said Skinner.)



Mr. Bensington certainly sniffed critically at this disorder, but he

made no unnecessary fuss, and even when he found a wasp regaling itself

in a gallipot half full of Herakleophorbia IV, he simply remarked mildly

that his substance was better sealed from the damp than exposed to the

air in that manner.



And he turned from these things at once to remark--what had been for

some time in his mind--"I think, Skinner--you know, I shall kill one

of these chicks--as a specimen. I think we will kill it this afternoon,

and I will take it back with me to London."



He pretended to peer into another gallipot and then took off his

spectacles to wipe them.



"I should like," he said, "I should like very much, to have some

relic--some memento--of this particular brood at this particular day."



"By-the-bye," he said, "you don't give those little chicks meat?"



"Oh! no, Thir," said Skinner, "I can athure you, Thir, we know far too

much about the management of fowlth of all dethcriptionth to do anything

of that thort."



"Quite sure you don't throw your dinner refuse--I thought I noticed the

bones of a rabbit scattered about the far corner of the run--"



But when they came to look at them they found they were the larger bones

of a cat picked very clean and dry.





III.



"That's no chick," said Mr. Bensington's cousin Jane.



"Well, I should think I knew a chick when I saw it," said Mr.

Bensington's cousin Jane hotly.



"It's too big for a chick, for one thing, and besides you can see

perfectly well it isn't a chick.



"It's more like a bustard than a chick."



"For my part," said Redwood, reluctantly allowing Bensington to drag him

into the argument, "I must confess that, considering all the evidence--"



"Oh I if you do that," said Mr. Bensington's cousin Jane, "instead of

using your eyes like a sensible person--"



"Well, but really, Miss Bensington--!"



"Oh! Go on!" said Cousin Jane. "You men are all alike."



"Considering all the evidence, this certainly falls within the

definition--no doubt it's abnormal and hypertrophied, but

still--especially since it was hatched from the egg of a normal

hen--Yes, I think, Miss Bensington, I must admit--this, so far as one

can call it anything, is a sort of chick."



"You mean it's a chick?" said cousin Jane.



"I think it's a chick," said Redwood.



"What NONSENSE!" said Mr. Bensington's cousin Jane, and "Oh!" directed

at Redwood's head, "I haven't patience with you," and then suddenly she

turned about and went out of the room with a slam.



"And it's a very great relief for me to see it too, Bensington," said

Redwood, when the reverberation of the slam had died away. "In spite of

its being so big."



Without any urgency from Mr. Bensington he sat down in the low arm-chair

by the fire and confessed to proceedings that even in an unscientific

man would have been indiscreet. "You will think it very rash of me,

Bensington, I know," he said, "but the fact is I put a little--not very

much of it--but some--into Baby's bottle, very nearly a week ago!"



"But suppose--!" cried Mr. Bensington.



"I know," said Redwood, and glanced at the giant chick upon the plate on

the table.



"It's turned out all right, thank goodness," and he felt in his pocket

for his cigarettes.



He gave fragmentary details. "Poor little chap wasn't putting on

weight... desperately anxious.--Winkles, a frightful duffer ... former

pupil of mine ... no good.... Mrs. Redwood--unmitigated confidence in

Winkles.... You know, man with a manner like a cliff--towering.... No

confidence in me, of course.... Taught Winkles.... Scarcely allowed in

the nursery.... Something had to be done.... Slipped in while the nurse

was at breakfast ... got at the bottle."



"But he'll grow," said Mr. Bensington.



"He's growing. Twenty-seven ounces last week.... You should hear

Winkles. It's management, he said."



"Dear me! That's what Skinner says!"



Redwood looked at the chick again. "The bother is to keep it up," he

said. "They won't trust me in the nursery alone, because I tried to get

a growth curve out of Georgina Phyllis--you know--and how I'm to give

him a second dose--"



"Need you?"



"He's been crying two days--can't get on with his ordinary food again,

anyhow. He wants some more now."



"Tell Winkles."



"Hang Winkles!" said Redwood.



"You might get at Winkles and give him powders to give the child--"



"That's about what I shall have to do," said Redwood, resting his chin

on his fist and staring into the fire.



Bensington stood for a space smoothing the down on the breast of the

giant chick. "They will be monstrous fowls," he said.



"They will," said Redwood, still with his eyes on the glow.



"Big as horses," said Bensington.



"Bigger," said Redwood. "That's just it!"



Bensington turned away from the specimen. "Redwood," he said, "these

fowls are going to create a sensation."



Redwood nodded his head at the fire.



"And by Jove!" said Bensington, coming round suddenly with a flash in

his spectacles, "so will your little boy!"



"That's just what I'm thinking of," said Redwood.



He sat back, sighed, threw his unconsumed cigarette into the fire and

thrust his hands deep into his trousers pockets. "That's precisely what

I'm thinking of. This Herakleophorbia is going to be queer stuff to

handle. The pace that chick must have grown at--!"



"A little boy growing at that pace," said Mr. Bensington slowly, and

stared at the chick as he spoke.



"I Say!" said Bensington, "he'll be Big."



"I shall give him diminishing doses," said Redwood. "Or at any rate

Winkles will."



"It's rather too much of an experiment."



"Much."



"Yet still, you know, I must confess--... Some baby will sooner or later

have to try it."



"Oh, we'll try it on some baby--certainly."



"Exactly so," said Bensington, and came and stood on the hearthrug and

took off his spectacles to wipe them.



"Until I saw these chicks, Redwood, I don't think I began to

realise--anything--of the possibilities of what we were making. It's

only beginning to dawn upon me ... the possible consequences...."



And even then, you know, Mr. Bensington was far from any conception of

the mine that little train would fire.





IV.



That happened early in June. For some weeks Bensington was kept from

revisiting the Experimental Farm by a severe imaginary catarrh, and one

necessary flying visit was made by Redwood. He returned an even more

anxious-looking parent than he had gone. Altogether there were seven

weeks of steady, uninterrupted growth....



And then the Wasps began their career.



It was late in July and nearly a week before the hens escaped from

Hickleybrow that the first of the big wasps was killed. The report of it

appeared in several papers, but I do not know whether the news reached

Mr. Bensington, much less whether he connected it with the general

laxity of method that prevailed in the Experimental Farm.



There can be but little doubt now, that while Mr. Skinner was plying Mr.

Bensington's chicks with Herakleophorbia IV, a number of wasps were just

as industriously--perhaps more industriously--carrying quantities of the

same paste to their early summer broods in the sand-banks beyond the

adjacent pine-woods. And there can be no dispute whatever that these

early broods found just as much growth and benefit in the substance as

Mr. Bensington's hens. It is in the nature of the wasp to attain to

effective maturity before the domestic fowl--and in fact of all the

creatures that were--through the generous carelessness of the

Skinners--partaking of the benefits Mr. Bensington heaped upon his hens,

the wasps were the first to make any sort of figure in the world.



It was a keeper named Godfrey, on the estate of Lieutenant-Colonel

Rupert Hick, near Maidstone, who encountered and had the luck

to kill the first of these monsters of whom history has any

record. He was walking knee high in bracken across an open space in the

beechwoods that diversify Lieutenant-Colonel Hick's park, and he was

carrying his gun--very fortunately for him a double-barrelled gun--over

his shoulder, when he first caught sight of the thing. It was, he says,

coming down against the light, so that he could not see it very

distinctly, and as it came it made a drone "like a motor car." He admits

he was frightened. It was evidently as big or bigger than a barn owl,

and, to his practised eye, its flight and particularly the misty whirl

of its wings must have seemed weirdly unbirdlike. The instinct of

self-defence, I fancy, mingled with long habit, when, as he says, he

"let fly, right away."



The queerness of the experience probably affected his aim; at any rate

most of his shot missed, and the thing merely dropped for a moment with

an angry "Wuzzzz" that revealed the wasp at once, and then rose again,

with all its stripes shining against the light. He says it turned on

him. At any rate, he fired his second barrel at less than twenty yards

and threw down his gun, ran a pace or so, and ducked to avoid it.



It flew, he is convinced, within a yard of him, struck the ground, rose

again, came down again perhaps thirty yards away, and rolled over with

its body wriggling and its sting stabbing out and back in its last

agony. He emptied both barrels into it again before he ventured to go

near.



When he came to measure the thing, he found it was twenty-seven and a

half inches across its open wings, and its sting was three inches long.

The abdomen was blown clean off from its body, but he estimated the

length of the creature from head to sting as eighteen inches--which is

very nearly correct. Its compound eyes were the size of penny pieces.



That is the first authenticated appearance of these giant wasps. The day

after, a cyclist riding, feet up, down the hill between Sevenoaks and

Tonbridge, very narrowly missed running over a second of these giants

that was crawling across the roadway. His passage seemed to alarm it,

and it rose with a noise like a sawmill. His bicycle jumped the footpath

in the emotion of the moment, and when he could look back, the wasp was

soaring away above the woods towards Westerham.



After riding unsteadily for a little time, he put on his brake,

dismounted--he was trembling so violently that he fell over his machine

in doing so--and sat down by the roadside to recover. He had intended to

ride to Ashford, but he did not get beyond Tonbridge that day....



After that, curiously enough, there is no record of any big wasps being

seen for three days. I find on consulting the meteorological record of

those days that they were overcast and chilly with local showers, which

may perhaps account for this intermission. Then on the fourth day came

blue sky and brilliant sunshine and such an outburst of wasps as the

world had surely never seen before.



How many big wasps came out that day it is impossible to guess. There

are at least fifty accounts of their apparition. There was one victim, a

grocer, who discovered one of these monsters in a sugar-cask and very

rashly attacked it with a spade as it rose. He struck it to the ground

for a moment, and it stung him through the boot as he struck at it

again and cut its body in half. He was first dead of the two....



The most dramatic of the fifty appearances was certainly that of the

wasp that visited the British Museum about midday, dropping out of the

blue serene upon one of the innumerable pigeons that feed in the

courtyard of that building, and flying up to the cornice to devour its

victim at leisure. After that it crawled for a time over the museum

roof, entered the dome of the reading-room by a skylight, buzzed about

inside it for some little time--there was a stampede among the

readers--and at last found another window and vanished again with a

sudden silence from human observation.



Most of the other reports were of mere passings or descents. A picnic

party was dispersed at Aldington Knoll and all its sweets and jam

consumed, and a puppy was killed and torn to pieces near Whitstable

under the very eyes of its mistress....



The streets that evening resounded with the cry, the newspaper placards

gave themselves up exclusively in the biggest of letters to the

"Gigantic Wasps in Kent." Agitated editors and assistant editors ran up

and down tortuous staircases bawling things about "wasps." And Professor

Redwood, emerging from his college in Bond Street at five, flushed from

a heated discussion with his committee about the price of bull calves,

bought an evening paper, opened it, changed colour, forgot about bull

calves and committee forthwith, and took a hansom headlong for

Bensington's flat.





V.



The flat was occupied, it seemed to him--to the exclusion of all other

sensible objects--by Mr. Skinner and his voice, if indeed you can call

either him or it a sensible object!



The voice was up very high slopping about among the notes of anguish.

"Itth impothible for uth to thtop, Thir. We've thtopped on hoping

thingth would get better and they've only got worth, Thir. It ithn't

on'y the waptheth, Thir--thereth big earwigth, Thir--big ath that,

Thir." (He indicated all his hand and about three inches of fat dirty

wrist.) "They pretty near give Mithith Thkinner fitth, Thir. And the

thtinging nettleth by the runth, Thir, they're growing, Thir, and the

canary creeper, Thir, what we thowed near the think, Thir--it put itth

tendril through the window in the night, Thir, and very nearly caught

Mithith Thkinner by the legth, Thir. Itth that food of yourth, Thir.

Wherever we thplathed it about, Thir, a bit, it'th thet everything

growing ranker, Thir, than I ever thought anything could grow. Itth

impothible to thtop a month, Thir. Itth more than our liveth are worth,

Thir. Even if the waptheth don't thting uth, we thall be thuffocated by

the creeper, Thir. You can't imagine, Thir--unleth you come down to

thee, Thir--"



He turned his superior eye to the cornice above Redwood's head. "'Ow do

we know the ratth 'aven't got it, Thir! That 'th what I think of motht,

Thir. I 'aven't theen any big ratth, Thir, but 'ow do I know, Thir. We

been frightened for dayth becauth of the earwigth we've theen--like

lobthters they wath--two of 'em, Thir--and the frightful way the canary

creeper wath growing, and directly I heard the waptheth--directly I

'eard 'em, Thir, I underthood. I didn't wait for nothing exthept to thow

on a button I'd lortht, and then I came on up. Even now, Thir, I'm arf

wild with angthiety, Thir. 'Ow do I know watth happenin' to Mithith

Thkinner, Thir! Thereth the creeper growing all over the plathe like a

thnake, Thir--thwelp me but you 'ave to watch it, Thir, and jump out of

itth way!--and the earwigth gettin' bigger and bigger, and the

waptheth--. She 'athen't even got a Blue Bag, Thir--if anything thould

happen, Thir!"



"But the hens," said Mr. Bensington; "how are the hens?"



"We fed 'em up to yethterday, thwelp me," said Mr. Skinner, "But thith

morning we didn't dare, Thir. The noithe of the waptheth

wath--thomething awful, Thir. They wath coming ont--dothenth. Ath big

ath 'enth. I thayth, to 'er, I thayth you juth thow me on a button or

two, I thayth, for I can't go to London like thith, I thayth, and I'll

go up to Mithter Benthington, I thayth, and ekthplain thingth to 'im.

And you thtop in thith room till I come back to you, I thayth, and keep

the windowth thhut jutht ath tight ath ever you can, I thayth."



"If you hadn't been so confoundedly untidy--" began Redwood.



"Oh! don't thay that, Thir," said Skinner. "Not now, Thir. Not with me

tho diththrethed, Thir, about Mithith Thkinner, Thir! Oh, don't, Thir!

I 'aven't the 'eart to argue with you. Thwelp me, Thir, I 'aven't! Itth

the ratth I keep a thinking of--'Ow do I know they 'aven't got at

Mithith Thkinner while I been up 'ere?"



"And you haven't got a solitary measurement of all these beautiful

growth curves!" said Redwood.



"I been too upthet, Thir," said Mr. Skinner. "If you knew what we been

through--me and the mithith! All thith latht month. We 'aven't known

what to make of it, Thir. What with the henth gettin' tho rank, and the

earwigth, and the canary creeper. I dunno if I told you, Thir--the

canary creeper ..."



"You've told us all that," said Redwood. "The thing is, Bensington, what

are we to do?"



"What are we to do?" said Mr. Skinner.



"You'll have to go back to Mrs. Skinner," said Redwood. "You can't leave

her there alone all night."



"Not alone, Thir, I don't. Not if there wath a dothen Mithith

Thkinnerth. Itth Mithter Benthington--"



"Nonsense," said Redwood. "The wasps will be all right at night. And the

earwigs will get out of your way--"



"But about the ratth?"



"There aren't any rats," said Redwood.





VI.



Mr. Skinner might have foregone his chief anxiety. Mrs. Skinner did not

stop out her day.



About eleven the canary creeper, which had been quietly active all the

morning, began to clamber over the window and darken it very greatly,

and the darker it got the more and more clearly Mrs. Skinner perceived

that her position would speedily become untenable. And also that she had

lived many ages since Skinner went. She peered out of the darkling

window, through the stirring tendrils, for some time, and then went very

cautiously and opened the bedroom door and listened....



Everything seemed quiet, and so, tucking her skirts high about her, Mrs.

Skinner made a bolt for the bedroom, and having first looked under the

bed and locked herself in, proceeded with the methodical rapidity of an

experienced woman to pack for departure. The bed had not been made, and

the room was littered with pieces of the creeper that Skinner had hacked

off in order to close the window overnight, but these disorders she did

not heed. She packed in a decent sheet. She packed all her own wardrobe

and a velveteen jacket that Skinner wore in his finer moments, and she

packed a jar of pickles that had not been opened, and so far she was

justified in her packing. But she also packed two of the hermetically

closed tins containing Herakleophorbia IV. that Mr. Bensington had

brought on his last visit. (She was honest, good woman--but she was a

grandmother, and her heart had burned within her to see such good growth

lavished on a lot of dratted chicks.)



And having packed all these things, she put on her bonnet, took off her

apron, tied a new boot-lace round her umbrella, and after listening for

a long time at door and window, opened the door and sallied out into a

perilous world. The umbrella was under her arm and she clutched the

bundle with two gnarled and resolute hands. It was her best Sunday

bonnet, and the two poppies that reared their heads amidst its

splendours of band and bead seemed instinct with the same tremulous

courage that possessed her.



The features about the roots of her nose wrinkled with determination.

She had had enough of it! All alone there! Skinner might come back there

if he liked.



She went out by the front door, going that way not because she wanted to

go to Hickleybrow (her goal was Cheasing Eyebright, where her married

daughter resided), but because the back door was impassable on account

of the canary creeper that had been, growing so furiously ever since she

upset the can of food near its roots. She listened for a space and

closed the front door very carefully behind her.



At the corner of the house she paused and reconnoitred....



An extensive sandy scar upon the hillside beyond the pine-woods marked

the nest of the giant Wasps, and this she studied very earnestly. The

coming and going of the morning was over, not a wasp chanced to be in

sight then, and except for a sound scarcely more perceptible than a

steam wood-saw at work amidst the pines would have been, everything was

still. As for earwigs, she could see not one. Down among the cabbage

indeed something was stirring, but it might just as probably be a cat

stalking birds. She watched this for a time.



She went a few paces past the corner, came in sight of the run

containing the giant chicks and stopped again. "Ah!" she said, and shook

her head slowly at the sight of them. They were at that time about the

height of emus, but of course much thicker in the body--a larger thing

altogether. They were all hens and five all told, now that the two

cockerels had killed each other. She hesitated at their drooping

attitudes. "Poor dears!" she said, and put down her bundle; "they've got

no water. And they've 'ad no food these twenty-four hours! And such

appetites, too, as they 'ave!" She put a lean finger to her lips and

communed with herself.



Then this dirty old woman did what seems to me a quite heroic deed of

mercy. She left her bundle and umbrella in the middle of the brick path

and went to the well and drew no fewer than three pailfuls of water for

the chickens' empty trough, and then while they were all crowding about

that, she undid the door of the run very softly. After which she became

extremely active, resumed her package, got over the hedge at the bottom

of the garden, crossed the rank meadows (in order to avoid the wasps'

nest) and toiled up the winding path towards Cheasing Eyebright.



She panted up the hill, and as she went she paused ever and again, to

rest her bundle and get her breath and stare back at the little cottage

beside the pinewood below. And when at last, when she was near the crest

of the hill, she saw afar off three several wasps dropping heavily

westward, it helped her greatly on her way.



She soon got out of the open and in the high banked lane beyond (which

seemed a safer place to her), and so up by Hicklebrow Coombe to the

downs. There at the foot of the downs where a big tree gave an air of

shelter she rested for a space on a stile.



Then on again very resolutely....



You figure her, I hope, with her white bundle, a sort of erect black

ant, hurrying along the little white path-thread athwart the downland

slopes under the hot sun of the summer afternoon. On she struggled after

her resolute indefatigable nose, and the poppies in her bonnet quivered

perpetually and her spring-side boots grew whiter and whiter with the

downland dust. Flip-flap, flip-flap went her footfalls through the still

heat of the day, and persistently, incurably, her umbrella sought to

slip from under the elbow that retained it. The mouth wrinkle under her

nose was pursed to an extreme resolution, and ever and again she told

her umbrella to come up or gave her tightly clutched bundle a

vindictive jerk. And at times her lips mumbled with fragments of some

foreseen argument between herself and Skinner.



And far away, miles and miles away, a steeple and a hanger grew

insensibly out of the vague blue to mark more and more distinctly the

quiet corner where Cheasing Eyebright sheltered from the tumult of the

world, recking little or nothing of the Herakleophorbia concealed in

that white bundle that struggled so persistently towards its orderly

retirement.





VII.



So far as I can gather, the pullets came into Hickleybrow about three

o'clock in the afternoon. Their coming must have been a brisk affair,

though nobody was out in the street to see it. The violent bellowing of

little Skelmersdale seems to have been the first announcement of

anything out of the way. Miss Durgan of the Post Office was at the

window as usual, and saw the hen that had caught the unhappy child, in

violent flight up the street with its victim, closely pursued by two

others. You know that swinging stride of the emancipated athletic

latter-day pullet! You know the keen insistence of the hungry hen! There

was Plymouth Rock in these birds, I am told, and even without

Herakleophorbia that is a gaunt and striding strain.



Probably Miss Durgan was not altogether taken by surprise. In spite of

Mr. Bensington's insistence upon secrecy, rumours of the great chicken

Mr. Skinner was producing had been about the village for some weeks.

"Lor!" she cried, "it's what I expected."



She seems to have behaved with great presence of mind. She snatched up

the sealed bag of letters that was waiting to go on to Urshot, and

rushed out of the door at once. Almost simultaneously Mr. Skelmersdale

himself appeared down the village, gripping a watering-pot by the spout,

and very white in the face. And, of course, in a moment or so every one

in the village was rushing to the door or window.



The spectacle of Miss Durgan all across the road, with the entire day's

correspondence of Hickleybrow in her hand, gave pause to the pullet in

possession of Master Skelmersdale. She halted through one instant's

indecision and then turned for the open gates of Fulcher's yard. That

instant was fatal. The second pullet ran in neatly, got possession of

the child by a well-directed peck, and went over the wall into the

vicarage garden.



"Charawk, chawk, chawk, chawk, chawk, chawk!" shrieked the hindmost hen,

hit smartly by the watering-can Mr. Skelmersdale had thrown, and

fluttered wildly over Mrs. Glue's cottage and so into the doctor's

field, while the rest of those Gargantuan birds pursued the pullet, in

possession of the child across the vicarage lawn.



"Good heavens!" cried the Curate, or (as some say) something much more

manly, and ran, whirling his croquet mallet and shouting, to head off

the chase.



"Stop, you wretch!" cried the curate, as though giant hens were the

commonest facts in life.



And then, finding he could not possibly intercept her, he hurled his

mallet with all his might and main, and out it shot in a gracious curve

within a foot or so of Master Skelmersdale's head and through the glass

lantern of the conservatory. Smash! The new conservatory! The Vicar's

wife's beautiful new conservatory!



It frightened the hen. It might have frightened any one. She dropped her

victim into a Portugal laurel (from which he was presently extracted,

disordered but, save for his less delicate garments, uninjured), made a

flapping leap for the roof of Fulcher's stables, put her foot through a

weak place in the tiles, and descended, so to speak, out of the infinite

into the contemplative quiet of Mr. Bumps the paralytic--who, it is now

proved beyond all cavil, did, on this one occasion in his life, get down

the entire length of his garden and indoors without any assistance

whatever, bolt the door after him, and immediately relapse again into

Christian resignation and helpless dependence upon his wife....



The rest of the pullets were headed off by the other croquet players,

and went through the vicar's kitchen garden into the doctor's field, to

which rendezvous the fifth also came at last, clucking disconsolately

after an unsuccessful attempt to walk on the cucumber frames in Mr.

Witherspoon's place.



They seem to have stood about in a hen-like manner for a time, and

scratched a little and chirrawked meditatively, and then one pecked at

and pecked over a hive of the doctor's bees, and after that they set off

in a gawky, jerky, feathery, fitful sort of way across the fields

towards Urshot, and Hickleybrow Street saw them no more. Near Urshot

they really came upon commensurate food in a field of swedes; and pecked

for a space with gusto, until their fame overtook them.



The chief immediate reaction of this astonishing irruption of gigantic

poultry upon the human mind was to arouse an extraordinary passion to

whoop and run and throw things, and in quite a little time almost all

the available manhood of Hickleybrows and several ladies, were out with

a remarkable assortment of flappish and whangable articles in hand--to

commence the scooting of the giant hens. They drove them into Urshot,

where there was a Rural Fete, and Urshot took them as the crowning glory

of a happy day. They began to be shot at near Findon Beeches, but at

first only with a rook rifle. Of course birds of that size could absorb

an unlimited quantity of small shot without inconvenience. They

scattered somewhere near Sevenoaks, and near Tonbridge one of them fled

clucking for a time in excessive agitation, somewhat ahead of and

parallel with the afternoon boat express--to the great astonishment of

every one therein.



And about half-past five two of them were caught very cleverly by a

circus proprietor at Tunbridge Wells, who lured them into a cage,

rendered vacant through the death of a widowed dromedary, by scattering

cakes and bread....





VIII.



When the unfortunate Skinner got out of the South-Eastern train at

Urshot that evening it was already nearly dusk. The train was late, but

not inordinately late--and Mr. Skinner remarked as much to the

station-master. Perhaps he saw a certain pregnancy in the

station-master's eye. After the briefest hesitation and with a

confidential movement of his hand to the side of his mouth he asked if

"anything" had happened that day.



"How d'yer mean?" said the station-master, a man with a hard, emphatic

voice.



"Thethe 'ere waptheth and thingth."



"We 'aven't 'ad much time to think of waptheth," said the

station-master agreeably. "We've been too busy with your brasted 'ens,"

and he broke the news of the pullets to Mr. Skinner as one might break

the window of an adverse politician.



"You ain't 'eard anything of Mithith Thkinner?" asked Skinner, amidst

that missile shower of pithy information and comment.



"No fear!" said the station-master--as though even he drew the line

somewhere in the matter of knowledge.



"I mutht make inquireth bout thith," said Mr. Skinner, edging out of

reach of the station-master's concluding generalisations about the

responsibility attaching to the excessive nurture of hens....



Going through Urshot Mr. Skinner was hailed by a lime-burner from the

pits over by Hankey and asked if he was looking for his hens.



"You ain't 'eard anything of Mithith Thkinner?" he asked.



The lime-burner--his exact phrases need not concern us--expressed his

superior interest in hens....



It was already dark--as dark at least as a clear night in the English

June can be--when Skinner--or his head at any rate--came into the bar of

the Jolly Drovers and said: "Ello! You 'aven't 'eard anything of thith

'ere thtory bout my 'enth, 'ave you?"



"Oh, 'aven't we!" said Mr. Fulcher. "Why, part of the story's been and

bust into my stable roof and one chapter smashed a 'ole in Missis

Vicar's green 'ouse--I beg 'er pardon--Conservarratory."



Skinner came in. "I'd like thomething a little comforting," he said,

"'ot gin and water'th about my figure," and everybody began to tell him

things about the pullets.



"Grathuth me!" said Skinner.



"You 'aven't 'eard anything about Mithith Thkinner, 'ave you?" he asked

in a pause.



"That we 'aven't!" said Mr. Witherspoon. "We 'aven't thought of 'er. We

ain't thought nothing of either of you."



"Ain't you been 'ome to-day?" asked Fulcher over a tankard.



"If one of those brasted birds 'ave pecked 'er," began Mr. Witherspoons

and left the full horror to their unaided imaginations....



It appeared to the meeting at the time that it would be an interesting

end to an eventful day to go on with Skinner and see if anything had

happened to Mrs. Skinner. One never knows what luck one may have when

accidents are at large. But Skinner, standing at the bar and drinking

his hot gin and water, with one eye roving over the things at the back

of the bar and the other fixed on the Absolute, missed the psychological

moment.



"I thuppothe there 'athen't been any trouble with any of thethe big

waptheth to-day anywhere?" he asked, with an elaborate detachment of

manner.



"Been too busy with your 'ens," said Fulcher.



"I thuppothe they've all gone in now anyhow," said Skinner.



"What--the 'ens?"



"I wath thinking of the waptheth more particularly," said Skinner.



And then, with, an air of circumspection that would have awakened

suspicion in a week-old baby, and laying the accent heavily on most of

the words he chose, he asked, "I thuppothe nobody 'athn't 'eard of

any other big thingth, about, 'ave they? Big dogth or catth or

anything of that thort? Theemth to me if thereth big henth and big

waptheth comin' on--"



He laughed with a fine pretence of talking idly.



But a brooding expression came upon the faces of the Hickleybrow men.

Fulcher was the first to give their condensing thought the concrete

shape of words.



"A cat to match them 'ens--" said Fulcher.



"Ay!" said Witherspoon, "a cat to match they 'ens."



"'Twould be a tiger," said Fulcher.



"More'n a tiger," said Witherspoon....



When at last Skinner followed the lonely footpath over the swelling

field that separated Hickleybrow from the sombre pine-shaded hollow in

whose black shadows the gigantic canary-creeper grappled silently with

the Experimental Farm, he followed it alone.



He was distinctly seen to rise against the sky-line, against the warm

clear immensity of the northern sky--for so far public interest followed

him--and to descend again into the night, into an obscurity from which

it would seem he will nevermore emerge. He passed--into a mystery. No

one knows to this day what happened to him after he crossed the brow.

When later on the two Fulchers and Witherspoon, moved by their own

imaginations, came up the hill and stared after him, the flight had

swallowed him up altogether.



The three men stood close. There was not a sound out of the wooded

blackness that hid the Farm from their eyes.



"It's all right," said young Fulcher, ending a silence.



"Don't see any lights," said Witherspoon.



"You wouldn't from here."



"It's misty," said the elder Fulcher.



They meditated for a space.



"'E'd 'ave come back if anything was wrong," said young Fulcher, and

this seemed so obvious and conclusive that presently old Fulcher said,

"Well," and the three went home to bed--thoughtfully I will admit....



A shepherd out by Huckster's Farm heard a squealing in the night that he

thought was foxes, and in the morning one of his lambs had been killed,

dragged halfway towards Hickleybrow and partially devoured....



The inexplicable part of it all is the absence of any indisputable

remains of Skinner!



Many weeks after, amidst the charred ruins of the Experimental Farm,

there was found something which may or may not have been a human

shoulder-blade and in another part of the ruins a long bone greatly

gnawed and equally doubtful. Near the stile going up towards Eyebright

there was found a glass eye, and many people discovered thereupon that

Skinner owed much of his personal charm to such a possession. It stared

out upon the world with that same inevitable effect of detachment, that

same severe melancholy that had been the redemption of his else worldly

countenance.



And about the ruins industrious research discovered the metal rings and

charred coverings of two linen buttons, three shanked buttons entire,

and one of that metallic sort which is used in the less conspicuous

sutures of the human Oeconomy. These remains have been accepted by

persons in authority as conclusive of a destroyed and scattered Skinner,

but for my own entire conviction, and in view of his distinctive

idiosyncrasy, I must confess I should prefer fewer buttons and more

bones.



The glass eye of course has an air of extreme conviction, but if it

really is Skinner's--and even Mrs. Skinner did not certainly know if

that immobile eye of his was glass--something has changed it from a

liquid brown to a serene and confident blue. That shoulder-blade is an

extremely doubtful document, and I would like to put it side by side

with the gnawed scapulae of a few of the commoner domestic animals

before I admitted its humanity.



And where were Skinner's boots, for example? Perverted and strange as a

rat's appetite must be, is it conceivable that the same creatures that

could leave a lamb only half eaten, would finish up Skinner--hair,

bones, teeth, and boots?



I have closely questioned as many as I could of those who knew Skinner

at all intimately, and they one and all agree that they cannot imagine

anything eating him. He was the sort of man, as a retired seafaring

person living in one of Mr. W.W. Jacobs' cottages at Dunton Green told

me, with a guarded significance of manner not uncommon in those parts,

who would "get washed up anyhow," and as regards the devouring element

was "fit to put a fire out." He considered that Skinner would be as safe

on a raft as anywhere. The retired seafaring man added that he wished to

say nothing whatever against Skinner; facts were facts. And rather than

have his clothes made by Skinner, the retired seafaring man remarked he

would take his chance of being locked up. These observations certainly

do not present Skinner in the light of an appetising object.



To be perfectly frank with the reader, I do not believe he ever went

back to the Experimental Farm. I believe he hovered through long

hesitations about the fields of the Hickleybrow glebe, and finally,

when that squealing began, took the line of least resistance out of his

perplexities into the Incognito.



And in the Incognito, whether of this or of some other world unknown to

us, he obstinately and quite indisputably has remained to this day....



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