by John Wyndham
‘It sounds the queerest set-up I ever heard of,’ I said.
Bernard smiled.
‘Well, if you’ll throw your mind back you’ll recall that it had a somewhat queer beginning,’ he reminded me.
‘What do they do at The Grange?’ I asked.
‘Primarily it is a school, as it says. They have teaching and welfare staff, as well as social psychologists, and so on. They also have quite eminent teachers visiting and giving short courses in various subjects. At first they used to hold classes like an ordinary school, until it occurred to somebody that that wasn’t necessary. So now any lesson is attended by one boy and one girl, and all the rest know what those two have been taught. And it doesn’t have to be one lesson at a time, either. Teach six couples different subjects simultaneously, and they somehow sort it out so that it works the same way.’
‘But, good heavens, they must be mopping up knowledge like blotting-paper, at that rate.’
‘They are indeed. It seems to give some of the teachers a touch of jitters.’
‘And yet you still manage to keep their existence quiet?’
‘On the popular level, yes. There is still an understanding with the Press – and, anyway, the story hasn’t nearly the possibilities now that it would have had in the early stages, from their point of view. As for the surrounding district, that has involved a certain amount of undercover work. The local reputation of Midwich was never very high – an ingenuous neighbourhood is perhaps the kindest way of putting it. Well, with a little helping-on, we’ve got it still lower. It is now regarded by the neighbouring villages, so Zellaby assures me, as a kind of mental home without bars. Everybody there, it is known, was affected by the Dayout; particularly the Children, who are spoken of as “daytouched” – an almost exact synonym of “moonstruck” – and are retarded to such an extent that a humane government has found it necessary to provide a special school for them. Oh, yes, we’ve got it pretty well established as a local deficiency area. It is in the same class of toleration as a dotty relative. There is occasional gossip; but it is accepted as an unfortunate affliction, and not a matter to be advertised to the outside world. Even protestations occasionally made by some of the Midwich people are not taken seriously, for, after all, the whole village had the same experience, so that all must be, in greater or lesser degree, “daytouched”.’
‘It must,’ I said, ‘have involved quite a deal of engineering and maintenance. What I never understood, and still don’t understand, is why you were, and apparently are, so concerned to keep the matter quiet. Security at the time of the Dayout is understandable – something made an unauthorized landing; that was a Service concern. But now… ? All this trouble to keep the Children hidden away still. This queer arrangenent at The Grange. A special school like that couldn’t be run for a few pounds a year.’
‘You don’t think that the Welfare State should show so much concern for its responsibilities?’ he suggested.
‘Come off it, Bernard,’ I told him.
But he did not. Though he went on talking of the Children, and the state of affairs in Midwich, he continued to avoid any answer to the question I had raised.
We lunched early at Trayne, and ran into Midwich a little after two. I found the place looking utterly unchanged. It might have been a week that had passed instead of eight years since I last saw it. Already there was quite a crowd waiting on the Green, outside the Hall where the inquest was to be held.
‘It looks,’ Bernard said as he parked the car, ‘it looks as if you had better postpone your calls until later. Practically the whole place seems to be here.’
‘Will it take long, do you think?’ I inquired.
‘Should be purely formal – I hope. Probably all over in half an hour.’
‘Are you giving evidence?’ I asked, wondering why, if it were to be so formal, he should bother to come all the way from London for it.
‘No. Just keeping an eye on things,’ he said.
I decided that he had been right about postponing my calls, and followed him into the hall. As the place filled up, and I watched familiar figures trooping in and finding seats, there could be no doubt that almost every mobile person in the place had chosen to attend. I did not quite understand why. Young Jim Pawle, the casualty, would be known to them all, of course, but that did not seem quite to account for it, and certainly did not account for the feeling of tension which inescapably pervaded the hall. I could not, after a few minutes, believe that the proceedings were going to be as formal as Bernard had predicted. I had a sense of waiting for an outburst of some kind from someone in the crowd.
But none came. The proceedings were formal, and brief, too. It was all over inside half an hour.
I noticed Zellaby slip out quickly as the meeting closed. We found him standing by the steps outside watching us emerge. He greeted me as if we had last met a couple of days ago, and then said:
‘How do you come into this ? I thought you were in India.’
‘Canada,’ I said. ‘It’s accidental.’ And explained that Bernard had brought me down.
Zellaby turned to look at Bernard.
‘Satisfied?’ he asked.
Bernard shrugged slightly. ‘What else?’ he asked.
At that moment a boy and a girl passed us, and walked up the road among the dispersing crowd. I had only time for a glimpse of their faces, and stared after them in astonishment.
‘Surely, they can’t be – ?’ I began.
‘They are,’ Zellaby said. ‘Didn’t you see their eyes?’
‘But it’s preposterous! Why, they’re only nine years old!’
‘By the calendar,’ Zellaby agreed.
I gazed after them as they strode along.
‘But it’s – it’s unbelievable!’
‘The unbelievable is, as you will recall, rather more prone to realization in Midwich than in some other places,’ Zellaby observed. ‘The improbable we can now assimilate at once; the incredible takes a little longer, but we have learnt to achieve it. Didn’t the Colonel warn you?’
‘In a way,’ I admitted. ‘But those two! They look fully sixteen or seventeen.’
‘Physically, I am assured, they are.’
I kept my eyes on them, still unwilling to accept it.
‘If you are in no hurry, come up to the house and have tea,’ Zellaby suggested.
Bernard, after a glance at me, offered the use of his car.
‘All right,’ said Zellaby, ‘but take it carefully, after what you’ve just heard.’
‘I’m not a dangerous driver,’ said Bernard.
‘Nor was young Pawle – he was a good driver, too,’ replied Zellaby.
A little way up the drive we came in sight of Kyle Manor at rest in the afternoon sun. I said:
‘The first time I saw it it was looking just like this. I remember thinking that when I got a little closer I should hear it purring, and that’s been the way I’ve seen it ever since.’
Zellaby nodded.
‘When I saw it first it seemed to me a good place to end one’s days in tranquillity – but now the tranquillity is, I think, questionable.’
I let that go. We ran past the front of the house, and parked round the side by the stables. Zellaby led the way to the veranda, and waved us to cushioned cane chairs.
‘Angela’s out at the moment, but she promised to be back for tea,’ he said.
He leant back, gazing across the lawn for some moments. The nine years since the Midwich Dayout had treated him not unkindly. The fine silver hair was still as thick, and still as lucent in the August sunshine. The wrinkles about his eyes were just a little more numerous, perhaps; the face very slightly thinner, the lines on it faintly deeper, but if his lanky figure had become any sparser, it could not have been by a matter of more than four or five pounds.
Presently he turned to Bernard.
‘So you’re satisfied. You think it will end there?’
‘I hope so. Nothing could be undone. The wise co
urse was to accept the verdict, and they did,’ Bernard told him.
‘H’m,’ said Zellaby. He turned to me. ‘What, as a detached observer, did you think of our little charade this afternoon?’
‘I don’t – oh, the inquest, you mean. There seemed to be a bit of an atmosphere, but the proceedings appeared to me to be in good enough order. The boy was driving carelessly. He hit a pedestrian. Then, very foolishly, he got the wind up, and tried to make a getaway. He was accelerating too fast to take the corner by the church, and as a result he piled up against the wall. Are you suggesting that “accidental death” doesn’t cover it – one might call it misadventure, but it comes to the same thing.’
‘There was misadventure all right,’ Zellaby said, ‘but it scarcely comes to the same thing, and it occurred slightly before the fact. Let me tell you what happened – I’ve only been able to give the Colonel a brief account yet.…’
∗
Zellaby had been returning, by way of the Oppley road, from his usual afternoon stroll. As he neared the turn to Hickham Lane four of the Children emerged from it, and turned towards the village, walking strung out in a line ahead of him.
They were three of the boys, and a girl. Zellaby studied them with an interest that had never lessened. The boys were so closely alike that he could not have identified them if he had tried, but he did not try; for some time he had regarded it as a waste of effort. Most of the village – except for a few of the women who seemed genuinely to be seldom in doubt – shared his inability to distinguish between them, and the Children were accustomed to it.
As always, he marvelled that they could have crammed so much development into so short a time. That alone set them right apart as a different species – it was not simply a matter of maturing early; it was development at almost twice normal speed. Perhaps they were a little light in structure compared with normal children of the same apparent age and height, but it was lightness of type, without the least suggestion of weediness, or overgrowth.
As always, too, he found himself wishing he could know them better, and learn more of them. It was not for lack of trying that he had made so little headway. He had tried, patiently and persistently, ever since they were small. They accepted him as much as they accepted anyone, and he, for his part, probably understood them quite as well as, if not better than, any of their mentors at The Grange. Superficially they were friendly with him – which they were not with many – they were willing to talk with him, and to listen, to be amused, and to learn; but it never went further than the superficial, and he had a feeling that it never would. Always, quite close under the surface, there was a barrier. What he saw and heard from them was their adaptation to their circumstances; their true selves and real nature lay beneath the barrier. Such understanding as passed between himself and them was curiously partial and impersonal; it lacked the dimension of feeling and sympathy. Their real lives seemed to be lived in a world of their own, as shut off from the main current as those of any Amazonian tribe with its utterly different standards and ethics. They were interested, they learnt, but one had the feeling that they were simply collecting knowledge – somewhat, perhaps, as a juggler acquires a useful skill which, however he may excel with it, has no influence whatever upon him, as a person. Zellaby wondered if anyone would get closer to them. The people up at The Grange were an unforthcoming lot, but, from what he had been able to discover, even the most assiduous had been held back by the same barrier.
Watching the Children walking ahead, talking between themselves, he suddenly found himself thinking of Ferrelyn. She did not come home as much as he could have wished, nowadays; the sight of the Children still disturbed her, so he did not try to persuade her; he made the best he could of the knowledge that she was happy at home with her own two boys.
It was odd to think that if Ferrelyn’s Dayout boy had survived he would probably be no more able now to distinguish him from those walking ahead, than he was to distinguish them from one another – rather humiliating, too, for it seemed to bracket one with Miss Ogle, only she got round the difficulty by taking it for granted that any of the boys she chanced to meet was her son – and, curiously, none of them ever disillusioned her.
Presently, the quartet in front rounded a corner and passed out of his sight. He had just reached the corner himself when a car overtook him, and he had, therefore, a clear view of all that followed.
The car, a small, open two-seater, was not travelling fast, but it happened that just round the corner, and shielded from sight by it, the Children had stopped. They appeared, still strung out across the road, to be debating which way they should go.
The car’s driver did his best. He pulled hard over to the right in an attempt to avoid them, and all but succeeded. Another two inches, and he would have missed them entirely. But he could not make the extra inches. The tip of his left wing caught the outermost boy on the tip of his left wing caught the outermost boy on the hip, and flung him across the road against the fence of a cottage garden.
There was a moment of tableau which remained quite static in Zellaby’s mind. The boy against the fence, the three other Children frozen where they stood, the young man in the car in the act of straightening his wheels again, still braking.
Whether the car actually came to a stop Zellaby could never be sure; if it did it was for the barest instant, then the engine roared.
The car sprang forward. The driver changed up, and put his foot down again, keeping straight ahead. He made no attempt whatever to take the corner to the left. The car was still accelerating when it hit the churchyard wall. It smashed to smithereens, and hurled the driver headlong against the wall.
People shouted, and the few who were near started running towards the wreckage. Zellaby did not move. He stood half-stunned as he watched the yellow flames leap out, and the black smoke start upwards. Then, with a stiff-seeming movement, he turned to look at the Children. They, too, were starting at the wreck, a similar tense expression on each face. He had only a glimpse of it before it passed off, and the three of them turned to the boy who lay by the fence, groaning.
Zellaby became aware that he was trembling. He walked on a few yards, unsteadily, until he reached a seat by the edge of the Green. There he sat down and leant back, pale in the face, feeling ill.
The rest of this incident reached me not from Zellaby himself, but from Mrs Williams, of The Scythe and Stone, somewhat later on:
‘I heard the car go tearing by, then a loud bang, and I looked out of the window and saw people running,’ she said. ‘Then I noticed Mr Zellaby go to the bench on the Green, walking very unsteadily. He sat down, and leaned back, but then his head fell forward, like he might be passing out. So I ran across the road to him, and when I got to him I found he was passed out, very near. Not quite, though. He managed to say something about “pills” and “pocket” in a sort of funny whisper. I found them in his pocket. It said two, on the bottle, but he was looking that bad I gave him four.
‘Nobody else was taking any notice. They’d all gone up where the accident was. Well, the pills did him good, and after about five minutes I helped him into the house, and let him lay on the couch in the bar-parlour. He said he’d be all right there, just resting a bit, so I went to ask about the car.
‘When I came back, his face wasn’t so grey any more, but he was still lying like he was tired right out.
‘ “Sorry to be a nuisance, Mrs Williams. Rather a shock,” he said.
‘ “I’d better get the doctor to you, Mr Zellaby,” I said. But he shook his head.
‘ “No. Don’t do that. I’ll be all right in a few minutes,” he told me.
‘ “I think you’d better see him,” I said. “Fair put the wind up me, you did.”
‘ “I’m sorry about that,” he said. And then after a bit of a pause he went on: “Mrs Williams, I’m sure you can keep a secret?”
‘ “As well as the next, I reckon,” I told him.
‘ “Well, I’d be very grateful if you�
��d not mention this – lapse of mine to anyone.”
‘ “I don’t know,” I said. “To my way of thinking you ought to see the doctor.”
‘He shook his head at that.
‘ “I’ve seen a number of doctors, Mrs Williams, expensive and important ones. But one just can’t help growing old, you see, and as one does, the machinery begins to wear out, that’s all.”
‘ “Oh, Mr Zellaby, sir –” I began.
‘ “Don’t distress yourself, Mrs Williams. I’m still quite tough in a lot of ways, so it may not come for some little time yet. But, in the meantime, I think it is rather important that one should not trouble the people one loves any more than one should not trouble the people one loves any more than can be helped, don’t you think? It is an unkindness to cause them useless distress, I’m sure you’ll agree ?”
‘ “Well, yes, sir, if you’re sure that there’s nothing – ?”
‘ “I am. Quite sure. I am already in your debt, Mrs Williams, but you will have done me no service unless I can rely on you not to mention it. Can I ?”
‘ “Very well. If that’s the way you want it, Mr Zellaby,” I told him.
‘ “Thank you, Mrs Williams. Thank you very much,” he said.
‘Then, after a bit, I asked him:
‘ “You saw it all happen, then, sir ? Enough to give anyone a shock, it must’ve been.”
‘ “Yes,” he said. “I saw it – but I didn’t see who it was in the car.”
‘ “Young Jim Pawle,” I told him, “from Dacre Farm.”
‘He shook his head.
‘ “I remember him – nice lad.”