There came a stir and interruption, and then the man from prison heard Caterham’s voice again, ringing clear and strong: “Learn about Boomfood from Boomfood itself and—” He paused—“Grasp your nettle before it is too late!”
He stopped and stood wiping his lips. “A crystal,” cried someone, “a crystal,” and then came that same strange swift growth to thunderous tumult, until the whole world seemed cheering. …
The man from prison came out of the hall at last, marvellously stirred, and with that in his face that marks those who have seen a vision. He knew, everyone knew; his ideas were no longer vague. He had come back to a world in crisis, to the immediate decision of a stupendous issue. He must play his part in the great conflict like a man—like a free, responsible man. The antagonism presented itself as a picture. On the one hand those easy gigantic mail-clad figures of the morning—one saw them now in a different light—on the other this little black-clad gesticulating creature under the limelight, that pygmy thing with its ordered flow of melodious persuasion, its little, marvellously penetrating voice, John Caterham—“Jack the Giant-killer.” They must all unite to “grasp the nettle” before it was “too late.”
III
The tallest and strongest and most regarded of all the children of the Food were the three sons of Cossar. The mile or so of land near Sevenoaks in which their boyhood passed became so trenched, so dug out and twisted about, so covered with sheds and huge working models and all the play of their developing powers, it was like no other place on earth. And long since it had become too little for the things they sought to do. The eldest son was a mighty schemer of wheeled engines; he had made himself a sort of giant bicycle that no road in the world had room for, no bridge could bear. There it stood, a great thing of wheels and engines, capable of two hundred and fifty miles an hour, useless save that now and then he would mount it and fling himself backwards and forwards across that cumbered work-yard. He had meant to go around the little world with it; he had made it with that intention, while he was still no more than a dreaming boy. Now its spokes were rusted deep red like wounds, wherever the enamel had been chipped away.
“You must make a road for it first, Sonnie,” Cossar had said, “before you can do that.”
So one morning about dawn the young giant and his brothers had set to work to make a road about the world. They seem to have had an inkling of opposition impending, and they had worked with remarkable vigour. The world had discovered them soon enough, driving that road as straight as a flight of a bullet towards the English Channel, already some miles of it levelled and made and stamped hard. They had been stopped before midday by a vast crowd of excited people, owners of land, land agents, local authorities, lawyers, policemen, soldiers even.
“We’re making a road,” the biggest boy had explained.
“Make a road by all means,” said the leading lawyer on the ground, “but please respect the rights of other people. You have already infringed the private rights of twenty-seven private proprietors; let alone the special privileges and property of an urban district board, nine parish councils, a county council, two gasworks, and a railway company. …”
“Goodney!” said the elder boy Cossar.
“You will have to stop it.”
“But don’t you want a nice straight road in the place of all these rotten rutty little lanes?”
“I won’t say it wouldn’t be advantageous, but—”
“It isn’t to be done,” said the eldest Cossar boy, picking up his tools.
“Not in this way,” said the lawyer, “certainly.”
“How is it to be done?”
The leading lawyer’s answer had been complicated and vague.
Cossar had come down to see the mischief his children had done, and reproved them severely and laughed enormously and seemed to be extremely happy over the affair. “You boys must wait a bit,” he shouted up to them, “before you can do things like that.”
“The lawyer told us we must begin by preparing a scheme, and getting special powers and all sorts of rot. Said it would take us years.”
“We’ll have a scheme before long, little boy,” cried Cossar, hands to his mouth as he shouted, “never fear. For a bit you’d better play about and make models of the things you want to do.”
They did as he told them like obedient sons.
But for all that the Cossar lads brooded a little.
“It’s all very well,” said the second to the first, “but I don’t always want just to play about and plan, I want to do something real, you know. We didn’t come into this world so strong as we are, just to play about in this messy little bit of ground, you know, and take little walks and keep out of the towns”—for by that time they were forbidden all boroughs and urban districts. “Doing nothing’s just wicked. Can’t we find out something the little people want done and do it for them—just for the fun of doing it?
“Lots of them haven’t houses fit to live in,” said the second boy, “Let’s go and build ’em a house close up to London, that will hold heaps and heaps of them and be ever so comfortable and nice, and let’s make ’em a nice little road to where they all go and do business—nice straight little road, and make it all as nice as nice. We’ll make it all so clean and pretty that they won’t any of them be able to live grubby and beastly like most of them do now. Water enough for them to wash with, we’ll have—you know they’re so dirty now that nine
