The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H. G. Wells (rooftoppers TXT) 📗

“Mere obvious nothings. But as you see—-! Takes it up with perfect gravity. Treats the thing as an attack. Says there is already a sufficient waste of public money in elementary schools without this. Tells the old stories about piano lessons again—you know. No one; he says, wishes to prevent the children of the lower classes obtaining an education suited to their condition, but to give them a food of this sort will be to destroy their sense of proportion utterly. Expands the topic. What Good will it do, he asks, to make poor people six-and-thirty feet high? He really believes, you know, that they will be thirty-six feet high.”

“So they would be,” said Bensington, “if you gave them our food at all regularly. But nobody said anything—-”

“I said something.”

“But, my dear Winkles—!”

“They’ll be Bigger, of course,” interrupted Winkles, with an air of knowing all about it, and discouraging the crude ideas of Bensington. “Bigger indisputably. But listen to what he says! Will it make them happier? That’s his point. Curious, isn’t it? Will it make them better? Will they be more respectful to properly constituted authority? Is it fair to the children themselves?? Curious how anxious his sort are for justice—so far as any future arrangements go. Even nowadays, he says, the cost of feeding and clothing children is more than many of their parents can contrive, and if this sort of thing is to be permitted—! Eh?

“You see he makes my mere passing suggestion into a positive proposal. And then he calculates how much a pair of breeches for a growing lad of twenty feet high or so will cost. Just as though he really believed—Ten pounds, he reckons, for the merest decency. Curious this Caterham! So concrete! The honest, and struggling ratepayer will have to contribute to that, he says. He says we have to consider the Rights of the Parent. It’s all here. Two columns. Every Parent has a right to have his children brought up in his own Size....

“Then comes the question of school accommodation, cost of enlarged desks and forms for our already too greatly burthened National Schools. And to get what?—a proletariat of hungry giants. Winds up with a very serious passage, says even if this wild suggestion—mere passing fancy of mine, you know, and misinterpreted at that—this wild suggestion about the schools comes to nothing, that doesn’t end the matter. This is a strange food, so strange as to seem to him almost wicked. It has been scattered recklessly—so he says—and it may be scattered again. Once you’ve taken it, it’s poison unless you go on with it. ‘So it is,’ said Bensington. And in short he proposes the formation of a National Society for the Preservation of the Proper Proportions of Things. Odd? Eh? People are hanging on to the idea like anything.”

“But what do they propose to do?”

Winkles shrugged his shoulders and threw out his hands. “Form a Society,” he said, “and fuss. They want to make it illegal to manufacture this Herakleophorbia—or at any rate to circulate the knowledge of it. I’ve written about a bit to show that Caterham’s idea of the stuff is very much exaggerated—very much exaggerated indeed, but that doesn’t seem to check it. Curious how people are turning against it. And the National Temperance Association, by-the-bye, has founded a branch for Temperance in Growth.”

“Mm,” said Bensington and stroked his nose.

“After all that has happened there’s bound to be this uproar. On the face of it the thing’s—startling.”

Winkles walked about the room for a time, hesitated, and departed.

It became evident there was something at the back of his mind, some aspect of crucial importance to him, that he waited to display. One day, when Redwood and Bensington were at the flat together he gave them a glimpse of this something in reserve.

“How’s it all going?” he said; rubbing his hands together.

“We’re getting together a sort of report.”

“For the Royal Society?”

“Yes.”

“Hm,” said. Winkles, very profoundly, and walked to the hearth-rug. “Hm. But—Here’s the point. Ought you?”

“Ought we—what?”

“Ought you to publish?”

“We’re not in the Middle Ages,” said Redwood.

“I know.”

“As Cossar says, swapping wisdom—that’s the true scientific method.”

“In most cases, certainly. But—This is exceptional.”

“We shall put the whole thing before the Royal Society in the proper way,” said Redwood.

Winkles returned to that on a later occasion.

“It’s in many ways an Exceptional discovery.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Redwood.

“It’s the sort of knowledge that could easily be subject to grave abuse—grave dangers, as Caterham puts it.”

Redwood said nothing.

“Even carelessness, you know—”

“If we were to form a committee of trustworthy people to control the manufacture of Boomfood—Herakleophorbia, I should say—we might—”

He paused, and Redwood, with a certain private discomfort, pretended that he did not see any sort of interrogation....

Outside the apartments of Redwood and Bensington, Winkle, in spite of the incompleteness of his instructions, became a leading authority upon Boomfood. He wrote letters defending its use; he made notes and articles explaining its possibilities; he jumped up irrelevantly at the meetings of the scientific and medical associations to talk about it; he identified himself with it. He published a pamphlet called “The Truth about Boomfood,” in which he minimised the whole of the Hickleybrow affair almost to nothing. He said that it was absurd to say Boomfood would make people thirty-seven feet high. That was “obviously exaggerated.” It would make them Bigger, of course, but that was all....

Within that intimate circle of two it was chiefly evident that Winkles was extremely anxious to help in the making of Herakleophorbia, help in correcting any proofs there might be of any paper there might be in preparation upon the subject—do anything indeed that might lead up to his participation in the details of the making of Herakleophorbia. He was continually telling them both that he felt it was a Big Thing, that it had big possibilities. If only they were—“safeguarded in some way.” And at last one day he asked outright to be told just how it was made.

“I’ve been thinking over what you said,” said Redwood.

“Well?” said Winkles brightly.

“It’s the sort of knowledge that could easily be subject to grave abuse,” said Redwood.

“But I don’t see how that applies,” said Winkles.

“It does,” said Redwood.

Winkles thought it over for a day or so. Then he came to Redwood and said