“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![22]” 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[23].”
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 Tunbridge, 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.