by John Wyndham
Nobody said anything to that.
'Very well — I understand. I'll go now,' she told them in a dead voice.
My father was not a man to leave his attitude in doubt.
'I do not understand how you dared to come here, to a God-fearing house, with such a suggestion,' he said. 'Worse still, you don't show an atom of shame or remorse.'
Aunt Harriet's voice was steadier as she answered:
'Why should I? I've done nothing to be ashamed of. I am not ashamed — I am only beaten.'
'Not ashamed!' repeated my father. 'Not ashamed of producing a mockery of your Maker — not ashamed of trying to tempt your own sister into criminal conspiracy!' He drew a breath and launched off in pulpit style. 'The enemies of God besiege us. They seek to strike at Him through us. Unendingly they work to distort the true image; through our weaker vessels they attempt to defile the race. You have sinned, woman, search your heart, and you will know that you have sinned. Your sin has weakened our defences, and the enemy has struck through you. You wear the cross on your dress to protect you. but you have not worn it always in your heart. You have not kept constant vigilance for impurity. So there has been a Deviation; and deviation, any deviation from the true image is blasphemy — no less. You have produced a defilement.'
'One poor little baby!'
'A baby which, if you were to have your way, would grow up to breed, and, breeding, spread pollution until all around us there would be mutants and abominations. That is what has happened in places where the will and faith were weak: here it shall never happen. Our ancestors were of the true stock: they have handed on a trust. Are you to be permitted to betray us all? To cause our ancestors to have lived in vain? Shame on you, woman! Now go! Go home in humility, not defiance. Notify your child, according to law. Then do your penances that you may be cleansed. And pray. You have much to pray for. Not only have you blasphemed by producing a false image, but in your arrogance you have set yourself against the law, and sinned in intent. I am a merciful man; I shall make no charge of that. It will be for you to clean it from your conscience; to go down on your knees and pray — pray that your sin of intention, as well as your other sins, may be forgiven you.'
There were two light footsteps. The baby gave a little whimper as Aunt Harriet picked it up. She came towards the door and lifted the latch, then she paused.
'I shall pray,' she said. 'Yes, I shall pray.' She paused, then she went on, her voice steady and harder: 'I shall pray God to send charity into this hideous world, and sympathy for the weak, and love for the unhappy and unfortunate. I shall ask Him if it is indeed His will that a child should suffer and its soul be damned for a little blemish of the body. . . . And I shall pray Him, too, that the hearts of the self-righteous may be broken....'
Then the door closed and I heard her pass slowly along the passage.
I moved cautiously back to the window, and watched her come out and lay the white bundle gently in the trap. She stood looking down on it for a few seconds, then she unhitched the horse, climbed up on the seat, and took the bundle on to her lap, with one arm guarding it in her cloak.
She turned, and left a picture that is fixed in my mind. The baby cradled in her arm, her cloak half open, showing the upper part of the brown, braid-edged cross on her fawn dress; eyes that seemed to see nothing as they looked towards the house from a face set hard as granite. ... Then she shook the reins, and drove off. Behind me, in the next room, my father was saying:
'Heresy, too! The attempt at substitution could be overlooked; women sometimes get strange ideas at such times. I was prepared to overlook it, provided the child is notified. But heresy is a different matter. She is a dangerous as well as a shameless woman; I could never have believed such wickedness in a sister of yours. And for her to think that you might abet her, when she knows that you yourself have had to make your own penances twice! To speak heresy in my house, too. That cannot be allowed to pass.'
'Perhaps, she did not realize what she was saying,' my mother's voice said, uncertainly.
'Then it is time she did. It is our duty to see that she does.'
My mother started to answer, but her voice cracked. She began to cry: I had never heard her cry before. My father's voice went on explaining about the need for Purity in thought as well as in heart and conduct, and its very particular importance to women. He was still talking when I tiptoed away.
I could not help feeling a great curiosity to know what was the 'little thing' that had been wrong with the baby — wondering if, perhaps, it were just an extra toe, like Sophie's. But I never found out what it was.
When they broke the news to me next day that my Aunt Harriet's body had been found in the river, no one mentioned a baby....
8
My father included Aunt Harriet's name in our prayers on the evening of the day the news came, but after that she was never referred to again. It was as though she had been wiped out of every memory but mine. There, however, she remained very clearly, given form at a time when I had only heard her, as an upright figure with a face drained of hope, and a voice saying clearly: 'I am not ashamed — I am only beaten.' And, too, as I had last seen her, looking up at the house.
Nobody told me how she came to die, but somehow I knew that it had not been by accident. There was a great deal that I did not understand in what I had overheard, and yet, in spite of that, it was quite the most disturbing occurrence I had known yet — it alarmed me with a sense of insecurity far greater, for some unperceived reason, than I had suffered over Sophie. For several nights I dreamed of Aunt Harriet lying in the river, still clasping the white bundle to her while the water swirled her hair round her pale face, and her wide-open eyes saw nothing. And I was frightened. ...
This had happened simply because the baby was just a bit different in some way from other babies. It had something, or lacked something, so that it did not exactly accord with the Definition. There was the 'little thing' that made it not quite right, not quite like other people....
A mutant, my father had called it.... A mutant!... I thought of some of the poker-work texts. I recalled the address of a visiting preacher; the detestation there had been in his voice when he thundered from the pulpit: 'Accursed is the Mutant!'
Accursed is the mutant. ... The mutant, the enemy, not only of the human race, but of all the species God had decreed; the seed of the Devil within, trying unflaggingly, eternally to come to fruition in order that it might destroy the divine order and turn our land, the stronghold of God's will upon Earth, into a lewd chaos like the Fringes; trying to make it a place without the law, like the lands in the South that Uncle Axel had spoken of, where the plants and the animals and the almost-human beings, too, brought forth travesties; where true stock had given place to unnameable creatures, abominable growths flourished, and the spirits of evil mocked the Lord with obscene fantasies.
Just a small difference, the 'little thing,' was the first step. . . .
I prayed very earnestly those nights.
'Oh, God,' I said, 'please, please, God, let me be like other people. I don't want to be different. Won't you make it so that when I wake up in the morning I'll be just like everyone else, please, God, please!'
But in the morning, when I tested myself I'd soon pick up Rosalind or one of the others, and know that the prayer hadn't altered anything. I had to get up still just the same person who had gone to bed the night before, and I had to go into the big kitchen and eat my breakfast facing the panel which had somehow stopped being just part of the furniture and seemed to stare back at me with the words: ACCURSED IS THE MUTANT IN THE SIGHT OF GOD AND MAN!
And I went on being very frightened.
After about the fifth night that praying hadn't done any good, Uncle Axel caught me leaving the breakfast-table and said I'd better come along and help him mend a plough. After we'd worked on that for a couple of hours he declared a rest, so we went out of the forge to sit in the sun, with our backs against a wall. He gave me a chunk of oatcake, and
we munched for a minute or two. Then he said:
'Well, now, Davie, let's have it,'
'Have what?' I said, stupidly.
'Whatever it is that's been making you look as if you were sickening for something the last day or two,' he told me. 'What's your trouble? Has somebody found out?'
'No,' I said. He looked greatly relieved.
'Well, what is it, then?'
So I told him about Aunt Harriet and the baby. Before I had finished I was talking through tears — it was such a relief to be able to share it with someone.
'It was her face as she drove away.' I explained. 'I've never seen anyone look like that before. I keep on seeing it in the water.'
I looked up at him as I finished. His face was as grim as I'd ever seen it, with the corners of his mouth pulled down.
'So that was it —' he said, nodding once or twice.
'It was all because the baby was different,' I repeated. 'And there was Sophie, too ... I didn't understand properly before ... I — I'm frightened, Uncle Axel. What'll they do when they find out I'm different...?'
He put his hand on my shoulder.
'No one else is ever going to know about it,' he told me again. 'No one but me — and I'm safe.'
It did not seem as reassuring now as it had been when he said it before.
'There was that one who stopped,' I reminded him, 'perhaps they found out about him . . . ?'
He shook his head. 'I reckon you can rest easy on that, Davie. I found out there was a boy killed just about the time you said. Walter Brent his name was, about nine years old. He was fooling around when they were felling timber, and a tree got him, poor lad.'
'Where?' I asked.
'About nine or ten miles away, on a farm over by Chipping,' he said.
I thought back. The Chipping direction certainly fitted, and it was just the kind of accident that would account for a sudden unexplained stop.... Without any ill-will to the unknown Walter I hoped and thought that was the explanation.
Uncle Axel backtracked a bit.
'There's no reason at all why anyone should find out. There's nothing to show — they can only know if you let them. Learn to watch yourself, Davie, and they'll never find out.'
'What did they do to Sophie?' I asked once more. But again he refused to be drawn on that. He went on:
'Remember what I told you. They think they are the true image — but they can't know for sure. And even if the Old People were the same kind as I am and they are, what of it? Oh, I know people tell tales about how wonderful they were and how wonderful their world was, and how one day we'll get back again all the things they had. There's a lot of nonsense mixed up in what they say about them, but even if there's a lot of truth, too, what's the good of trying so hard to keep in their tracks? Where are they and their wonderful world now?'
'"God sent Tribulation upon them,"' I quoted.
'Sure, sure. You certainly have taken in the preacher-words, haven't you? It's easy enough to say — but not so easy to understand, specially when you've seen a bit of the world, and what it has meant. Tribulation wasn't just tempests, hurricanes, floods and fires like the things they had in the Bible. It was like all of them together — and something a lot worse, too. It made the Black Coasts, and the ruins that glow there at night, and the Badlands. Maybe there's a precedent for that in Sodom and Gomorrah, only this'd be kind of bigger — but what I don't understand is the queer things it did to what was left.'
'Except in Labrador,' I suggested.
'Not except in Labrador — but less in Labrador and Newf than any other place,' he corrected me. 'What can it have been — this terrible thing that must have happened? And why? I can almost understand that God, made angry, might destroy all living things, or the world itself; but I don't understand this instability, this mess of deviations — it makes no sense.'
I did not see his real difficulty. After all, God, being omnipotent, could cause anything He liked. I tried to explain this to Uncle Axel, but he shook his head.
'We've got to believe that God is sane, Davie boy. We'd be lost indeed if we didn't do that. But whatever happened out there' — he waved his hand round the horizon at large — 'what happened there was not sane — not sane at all. It was something vast, yet something beneath the wisdom of God. So what was it? What can it have been?'
'But Tribulation —' I began.
Uncle Axel moved impatiently. 'A word,' he said, 'a rusted mirror, reflecting nothing. It'd do the preachers good to see it for themselves. They'd not understand, but they might begin to think. They might begin to ask themselves: "What are we doing? What are we preaching? What were the Old People really like? What was it they did to bring this frightful disaster down upon themselves and all the world?" And after a bit they might begin to say: "Are we right? Tribulation has made the world a different place; can we, therefore, ever hope to build in it the kind of world the Old People lost? Should we try to? What would be gained if we were to build it up again so exactly that it culminated in another Tribulation?" For it is clear, boy, that however wonderful the Old People were, they were not too wonderful to make mistakes — and nobody knows, or is ever likely to know, where they were wise and where they were mistaken.'
Much of what he was saying went right over my head, but I thought I caught its gist. I said:
'But, Uncle, if we don't try to be like the Old People and rebuild the things that have been lost, what can we do?'
'Well, we might try being ourselves, and build for the world that is, instead of for one that's gone,' he suggested.
'I don't think I understand,' I told him. 'You mean not bother about the True Line or the True Image? Not mind about Deviations?'
'Not quite that,' he said, and then looked sidelong at me. 'You heard some heresy from your aunt; well, here's a bit more, from your uncle. What do you think it is that makes a man a man?'
I started on the Definition. He cut me off after five words.
'It is not!' he said. 'A wax figure could have all that, and he'd still be a wax figure, wouldn't he?'
'I suppose he would.'
'Well, then, what makes a man a man is something inside him.'
'A soul?' I suggested.
'No,' he said, 'souls are just counters for churches to collect, all the same value, like nails. No, what makes man man is mind; it's not a thing, it's a quality, and minds aren't all the same value; they're better or worse, and the better they are, the more they mean. See where we're going?'
'No,' I admitted.
'It's this way, Davie, I reckon the church people are more or less right about most deviations - only not for the reasons they say. They're right because most deviations aren't any good. Say they did allow a deviation to live like us, what'd be the good of it? Would a dozen arms and legs, or a couple of heads, or eyes like telescopes give him any more of the quality that makes him a man? They would not. Man got his physical shape — the true image, they call it — before he even knew he was man at all. It's what happened inside, after that, that made him human. He discovered he had what nothing else had, mind. That put him on a different level. Like a lot of the animals he was physically pretty nearly as good as he needed to be; but he had this new quality, mind, which was only in its early stages, and he developed that. That was the only thing he could usefully develop; it's the only way open to him — to develop new qualities of mind.' Uncle Axel paused reflectively. 'There was a doctor on my second ship who talked that way, and the more I got to thinking it over, the more I reckoned it was the way that made sense. Now, as I see it, some way or another you and Rosalind and the others have got a new quality of mind. To pray God to take it away is wrong; it's like asking Him to strike you blind, or make you deaf. I know what you're up against, Davie, but funking it isn't the way out. There isn't an easy way out. You have to come to terms with it. You'll have to face it and decide that, since that's the way things are with you, what is the best use you can make of it and still keep yourselves safe?'
I did not, o
f course, follow him clearly through that the first time. Some of it stayed in my mind, the rest of it I reconstructed in half-memory from later talks. I began to understand better later on, particularly after Michael had gone to school.
That evening I told the others about Walter. We were sorry about his accident — nevertheless, it was a relief to all of them to know that it had been simply an accident. One odd thing I discovered was that he was probably some kind of distant relation; my grandmother's name had been Brent.
After that, it seemed wiser for us to find out one another's names in order to prevent such an uncertainty occurring again.
There were now eight of us in all — well, when I say that, I mean that there were eight who could talk in thought-shapes; there were some others who sometimes sent traces, but so weak and so limited that they did not count. They were like someone who is not quite blind, but is scarcely able to see more than to know whether it is day or night. The occasional thought-shapes we caught from them were involuntary and too fuzzy and damped to make sense.
The other six were Michael who lived about three miles to the north, Sally and Katherine whose homes were on neighbouring farms two miles farther on, and therefore across the border of the adjoining district, Mark, almost nine miles to the north-west, and Anne and Rachel, a pair of sisters living on a big farm only a mile and a half to the west. Anne, then something over thirteen, was the eldest; Walter Brent had been the youngest by six months.
Knowing who we were was our second stage in gaining confidence. It somehow increased a comforting feeling of mutual support. Gradually I found that the texts and warnings against mutants on the walls stood out at me less vividly. They toned down and merged once more into the general background. It was not that memories of Aunt Harriet and of Sophie were dulled; it was rather that they did not jump so frighteningly and so often into my mind.