The Wonder (17 page)

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 hehas 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.”

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.

^*
Afterwards Lord Quainton.

CHAPTER XII

HIS INTERVIEW WITH HERR GROSSMANN

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.