Lady Wondershoot, when she heard that this amazing child had positively burst out of its beautiful charity clothes, decided that she must speak to Caddles herself. He appeared in her presence with his hair hastily wetted and smoothed by hand, breathless, and clinging to his hat brim as though it was a life-belt, and he stumbled at the carpet edge out of sheer distress of mind.
Lady Wondershoot liked bullying Caddles. Caddles was her ideal lower-class person, dishonest, faithful, abject, industrious, and inconceivably incapable of responsibility. She told him it was a serious matter, the way his child was going on. “It’s ’is appetite, my ladyship,” said Caddles, with a rising note.
“Check ’im, my ladyship, you can’t,” said Caddles. “There ’e lies, my ladyship, and kicks out ’e does, and ’owls, that distressin’. We ’aven’t the ’eart, my ladyship. If we ’ad—the neighbours would interfere. …”
Lady Wondershoot consulted the parish doctor.
“What I want to know,” said Lady Wondershoot, “is it right this child should have such an extraordinary quantity of milk?”
“The proper allowance for a child of that age,” said the parish doctor, “is a pint and a half to two pints in the twenty-four hours. I don’t see that you are called upon to provide more. If you do, it is your own generosity. Of course we might try the legitimate quantity for a few days. But the child, I must admit, seems for some reason to be physiologically different. Possibly what is called a sport. a case of general hypertrophy.”
“It isn’t fair to the other parish children,” said Lady Wondershoot. “I am certain we shall have complaints if this goes on.”
“I don’t see that anyone can be expected to give more than the recognised allowance. We might insist on its doing with that, or if it wouldn’t, send it as a case into the Infirmary.”
“I suppose,” said Lady Wondershoot, reflecting, “that apart from the size and the appetite, you don’t find anything else abnormal—nothing monstrous?”
“No. No, I don’t. But no doubt if this growth goes on, we shall find grave moral and intellectual deficiencies. One might almost prophesy that from Max Nordau’s law. A most gifted and celebrated philosopher, Lady Wondershoot. He discovered that the abnormal is—abnormal, a most valuable discovery, and well worth bearing in mind. I find it of the utmost help in practice. When I come upon anything abnormal, I say at once, This is abnormal.” His eyes became profound, his voice dropped, his manner verged upon the intimately confidential. He raised one hand stiffly. “And I treat it in that spirit,” he said.
V
“Tut, tut!” said the Vicar to his breakfast things—the day after the coming of Mrs. Skinner. “Tut, tut! what’s this?” and poised his glasses at his paper with a general air of remonstrance.
“Giant wasps! What’s the world coming to? American journalists, I suppose! Hang these novelties! Giant gooseberries are good enough for me.
“Nonsense!” said the Vicar, and drank off his coffee at a gulp, eyes steadfast on the paper, and smacked his lips incredulously.
“Bosh!” said the Vicar, rejecting the hint altogether.
But the next day there was more of it, and the light came.
Not all at once, however. When he went for his constitutional that day he was still chuckling at the absurd story his paper would have had him believe. Wasps indeed—killing a dog! Incidentally as he passed by the site of that first crop of puffballs he remarked that the grass was growing very rank there, but he did not connect that in any way with the matter of his amusement. “We should certainly have heard something of it,” he said; “Whitstable can’t be twenty miles from here.”
Beyond he found another puffball, one of the second crop, rising like a roc’s egg out of the abnormally coarsened turf.
The thing came upon him in a flash.
He did not take his usual round that morning. Instead he turned aside by the second stile and came round to the Caddles’ cottage. “Where’s that baby?” he demanded, and at the sight of it, “Goodness me!”
He went up the village blessing his heart, and met the doctor full tilt coming down. He grasped his arm. “What does this mean?” he said. “Have you seen the paper these last few days?”
The doctor said he had.
“Well, what’s the matter with that child? What’s the matter with everything—wasps, puffballs, babies, eh? What’s making them grow so big? This is most unexpected. In Kent too! If it was America now—”
“It’s a little difficult to say just what it is,” said the doctor. “So far as I can grasp the symptoms—”
“Yes?”
“It’s hypertrophy—General hypertrophy.”
“Hypertrophy?”
“Yes. General—affecting all the bodily structures—all the organism. I may say that in my own mind, between ourselves, I’m very nearly convinced it’s that. … But one has to be careful.”
“Ah,” said the Vicar, a good deal relieved to find the doctor equal to the situation. “But how is it it’s breaking out in this fashion, all over the place?”
“That again,” said the doctor, “is difficult to say.”
“Urshot. Here. It’s a pretty clear case of spreading.”
“Yes,” said the doctor. “Yes. I think so. It has a strong resemblance at any rate to some sort of epidemic. Probably epidemic hypertrophy will meet the case.”
“Epidemic!” said the Vicar. “You don’t mean it’s contagious?”
The doctor smiled gently and rubbed one hand against the other. “That I couldn’t say,” he said.
“But—!” cried the Vicar, round-eyed. “If it’s catching—it—it affects us!”
He made a stride up the road and turned about.
“I’ve just been there,” he cried. “Hadn’t I better—? I’ll go home at once and have a bath and fumigate my clothes.”
The doctor regarded his retreating back for a moment, and then turned about and went towards his own house. …
But on the way he reflected that one case had been in the village a month without anyone catching the disease, and after a pause of hesitation decided to
